Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Diplomats and other officials based in Phnom Penh were far from ignorant of the prob-
lems. Privately they often expressed frustration at the lack of meaningful reform, but had
no real power to alter the dynamic of engagement. Far from being an “international com-
munity” united in vision and purpose—perhaps the crowning cliché of the post-Cold War
world—donor countries resembled a pack of absent parents trying to impose discipline on
a misbehaving child. Aid was highly fragmented among the big multilateral lenders—the
World Bank, the IMF, and the Asian Development Bank (ADB)—the big international
NGOs, and national governments. Decisions about aid were made not in Phnom Penh, but
in far-off capitals, each pursuing its own institutional and foreign policy agenda. The res-
ult on the ground was developmental chaos. By 2007 Cambodia had 35 different “devel-
opment partners” supporting more than 700 projects over a wide range of sectors. These
were in turn monitored by around 1,000 “project implementation units,” steering commit-
tees, and working groups set up by NGOs and development agencies.
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Efforts to coordinate this tangle of disbursements have proven as fruitless as more spe-
cific reforms. The Council for the Development of Cambodia (CDC), a body set up in
1994 to help coordinate development efforts, quickly went the way of most Cambodian
government institutions. One foreign consultant who assisted in setting up the body said
that instead of helping harmonize aid disbursals, CDC officials “opted for plain brown
paper bags full of cash” siphoned off from development loans. The lack of coordination
allowed Hun Sen to do to donors what he did to his political opponents: play them off
against one another, while slowly redefining the terms of engagement.
Whatever the views of their representatives in Phnom Penh, foreign governments were
mostly happy with Cambodia's progress. To the extent that Cambodia registered at all
in foreign capitals, it was as a troubled nation finally at peace and on the path toward
economic development. Early on, key donors like France, Japan, and Australia came
to accept the stabilizing power of the CPP. For the first time in generations, they saw
that Cambodia was no longer exporting instability to the region. Fifteen years after the
UN peacekeeping operation, Cambodians were wearing the light-blue helmets for them-
selves: starting in 2006, Cambodian soldiers and demining teams took part in several UN
operations in Sudan, Chad, and Lebanon. In the meantime, Cambodia had emerged as a
player on the regional and global stage. Hun Sen proudly chaired ASEAN for the first
time in 2002; two years later Cambodia joined the World Trade Organization.
There was also money to be made. Australian and Japanese mining firms jostled for
mineral exploration rights to large swathes of eastern Cambodia, while global oil corpor-
ations—including the US giant Chevron and its French counterpart Total—made plays
for access to Cambodia's offshore oil reserves. The possibility of investment opportunit-
ies gave foreign governments a new and lucrative reason to work with Hun Sen.
