Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
nom Penh to attend the East Asia Summit—the first ever visit to Cambodia by a sitting
US president. Hun Sen, determined to milk the occasion for maximum legitimacy, smiled
for the cameras as he shook the President's hand. But Obama was standoffish. During
a closed-door meeting he berated Hun Sen for human rights violations and the arrest of
anti-eviction activists. Just hours earlier in Burma, he had congratulated President Thein
Sein and offered him a “hand of friendship” as his country embraced “democratic” re-
forms. Now, to mollify Congress, he was lecturing Hun Sen about human rights. The
Cambodians were enraged at being compared to Burma, the Southeast Asian pariah state
par excellence. Adding insult to injury, Obama also declined to pay a visit to Sihanouk's
sarcophagus, then lying in state at the Royal Palace, following his death the month be-
fore.
But the greatest indictment of Obama's trip, perhaps, was that it achieved nothing. The
world had changed since the early 1990s. The US was no longer the “indispensable na-
tion” of Madeleine Albright's democratic daydreams. With Chinese backing, countries
like Cambodia could now push back against US and Western demands for human rights
and democratic reform. Strategic realignments in the region meant that America now
needed Hun Sen more than Hun Sen needed America—a reality that was symbolized by
the sight that met Obama's motorcade when it arrived at the Peace Palace for the summit
meetings. Here the Cambodians had pointedly hung two large banners that read “Long
Live the People's Republic of China.”
The decision was ultimately pragmatic. Western governments accepted Hun Sen be-
cause they realized they couldn't get anything done without him, either for Cambodia
or for themselves. But working with Hun Sen meant accepting his terms of engagement.
It meant jettisoning the democratic project of the early 1990s in favor of a narrative of
development quarantined from politics and untethered from the structures of power that
were the root cause of so many of Cambodia's problems. This is where history had ended
up: not with democracy and universal rights, but with “partnership”—and paralysis.
There must have been moments during the Third Cambodia Development Cooperation
Forum—somewhere between Hun Sen's keynote performance and the aid pledges that
closed the event—when diplomats and donor representatives looked up from their tables
of Joint Monitoring Indicators and asked themselves: what had 20 years and billions in
aid achieved in Cambodia?
In theory, foreign aid is a temporary measure, tapering off as a country becomes more
able to fund development for itself. If mapped on a graph, the ideal trajectory would re-
semble a flat “X”, in which the first line, representing foreign aid and international NGO
activities, declines, while a second, representing the capability of government and loc-
al NGOs, moves upward. The goal of international NGOs and donor agencies, then, is
essentially their own obsolescence—the shifting of the graph to the point where govern-
