Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Cambodian government's “performance”—the use of the word revealed more than it in-
tended—on this dizzying array of reform indicators.
Even after the jolt of July 1997, many donor and UN officials still took it for granted
that the world had reached a final consensus about how development should proceed. As
UN resident coordinator Dominique McAdams put it in 2003, “The role of the develop-
ment partners is certainly not to make the choice for [Cambodia]. The role of the devel-
opment partners is to empower the country so the country can make the right choice.”
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McAdams's statement made clear that the idea of “country-owned” development, like the
idea of a final international “consensus” around liberal democracy and free markets, was
a pleasant fiction. From this perspective, it didn't really matter what Cambodian leaders
wanted—a fact Hun Sen recognized, if only for self-serving reasons, when he denounced
the “neocolonial” demands of the West. The fundamental fact, however, is that he needed
the aid—and donors needed a pretext for giving it.
The result was mirage politics in its purest form: a convergence of interests between a
government increasingly willing to offer symbolic gestures of reform, and a donor “com-
munity” increasingly willing to accept them. Laws were easy enough to pass and elec-
tions were easy enough to stage. Statistics could be massaged to give an impression of
progress. For Hun Sen, putting on the right “performance” was all too easy.
A great deal of effort went into maintaining the illusion of reform. Cambodian officials
assembled turgid progress reports and attended TWG meetings, which, according to one
former government consultant, quickly devolved into a “smokescreen” for inaction. The
TWG on land, perhaps the most important, was chaired by an official from the Ministry
of Land Management, which had nothing to do with the granting of economic land con-
cessions to big business—one of the main issues the TWG sought to address. For all
their plans and recommendations, the TWGs were “technical” bodies that did little to ad-
dress the issue of political incentives. “Nobody believed in them,” the consultant told me.
“After a while nobody high-ranking attended those meetings.”
Soon enough the CG/CDCF summits had devolved into a ritual of scripted hypocrisy.
From the donors there were diplomatic complaints about benchmarks missed and pledges
unfulfilled. (“It was like being beaten with a feather cushion,” said Bullen.) From the
government there were speeches stuffed with promises. From both sides there were calls
for more “coordination,” more “capacity building”, more consultants to write more re-
ports that would end up collecting dust on a shelf in an NGO office somewhere. And
there was always more aid, averaging around half a billion dollars per year. Looming over
everything was the legacy of the Khmer Rouge, which gave both sides a handy pretext
(“weak capacity”) for the slow pace of reform. For the watchdog group Global Witness,
the whole process amounted to a “mass exercise in intellectual dishonesty.”
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