Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
decades he had played many roles: apparatchik and reformer, strongman and statesman,
demagogue and freewheeling free-marketeer.
Beneath these various guises Hun Sen ruled in the traditional Cambodian way, through
a system of personal patronage in which money was passed upward in exchange for pro-
tection. This he married to a fierce ambition, a serrated political instinct, and a genuine
ability to channel the hopes and fears of rural Cambodians. Hun Sen could be violent
and unpredictable. He had little tolerance for dissent. But he and his party could also
credibly claim to have ushered Cambodia into a rare era of peace and economic growth.
In mid-2008, despite the abuses and corruption of its rule, the CPP won a third straight
election by a landslide. Seeing the failure of democracy to take root in Cambodian soil,
many foreign observers decided that Khmer culture, steeped in Buddhist fatalism, was
inherently passive and deferential. “Most [people] expect nothing more than they have,”
the American journalist Joel Brinkley wrote in his 2011 topic
Cambodia's Curse
. “They
carry no ambitions. They hold no dreams. All they want is to be left alone.”
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But at the same time Cambodia clearly
was
changing. Hun Sen's rule had unleashed
economic forces that were slowly transforming society. When young women like Bun
Chenda went to work in the garment factories, they often became the first members of
their families to work outside rice-farming villages like Prek Pdav. In Cambodia there
were now more mobile phones than people. The kingdom's population of 15 million was
young, and with every passing year the number who had experienced Pol Pot's horrors
diminished. And as the past receded, the CPP's proven system of patronage and controls,
effective for so many years, began to break down. Ordinary people began standing up to
demand higher wages and social justice from their government. Something was happen-
ing in Cambodia, though we weren't yet sure quite what.
By 2008, Cambodia had faded from the international headlines. When the Khmer Rouge
finally collapsed in the late 1990s, it had reverted to what it had been for centuries—a
small, mostly unimportant country, wedged between two more prosperous and news-
worthy neighbors: the economic dynamo of Thailand, the soaring dragon of Vietnam.
Aside from the sclerotic trials of former Khmer Rouge leaders, about to get underway at
a UN-backed court in Phnom Penh, Cambodia's travails attracted only glancing interest.
But the story of this beautiful country deserved to be told. It had experienced some of
the greatest horrors of the twentieth century and then became the focus of one of its great
saving ideas—the idea that democracy could be molded and implanted in a land ravaged
by war. The country that emerged from this collision of opposites was unique. Few other
governments had so fully absorbed the symbols and narratives of global humanism to so
little apparent effect. To put in another way, few were so open, and yet so closed. The
