Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CPP's makeover was never more than cosmetic. Privately, Hun Sen compared the reforms
the party still controlled an administrative network stretching down to the village level.
The military and police were tied closely to the CPP's civilian leadership in Phnom Penh,
united under the control of a political organization that retained its Leninist system of dis-
cipline.
All this put the party in a position to profit handsomely from the rapid transition to the
free market. This proceeded in a similar fashion to what the Russians would later term
“grabitization.” In great haste, state-owned land and enterprises were sold off to govern-
ment officials, foreign investors, and an emerging caste of oligarchs with close ties to
the CPP. All pre-1975 land claims were annulled, reassuring investors that they would be
safe from eviction if the old owners of their land returned. The aim was to put the com-
manding heights of the economy into friendly hands before the UN arrived to take over
key government ministries. As the specter of political competition loomed, preferential
access to this economic free-for-all—a sort of licensed graft—became a crucial means of
buttressing the regime's strength.
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Phnom Penh became a boomtown. Wild speculation drove land values up to dizzying
heights. Dilapidated villas that had lain vacant since the Pol Pot years were snapped up
by government officials, who sold them off to Thai and Singaporean businessmen or
leased them to international relief agencies scrambling for a foothold in the Cambodian
bleached cityscape of splayed power cabling and grimy apartment blocks. The most jar-
ring sight, one visitor wrote in 1991, was “the abundance of new Mercedes-Benzes and
BMWs” that shared the pot-holed roads with the jerry-rigged motorbikes, ox-carts, and
rattling
cyclo-pousses
of the prewar years.
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But Phnom Penh's patina of wealth concealed a desperate economic situation. Soviet
and Eastern bloc aid, which previously supplied four-fifths of the government's budget,
had come to an end in 1990, and virtually the entire Cambodian economy remained “off
the topics,” yielding few revenues of any sort. As officials feathered their nests, infra-
structure crumbled, the salaries of civil servants went unpaid, and thousands were cast
out of work as state enterprises closed their doors. At first, brewing unrest was channeled
by the authorities at approved targets like Khieu Samphan and Son Sen. But by the end
of 1991, the protests had escaped the government's control, and began taking aim at the
corruption of the SOC itself.
In December, emboldened by the arrival of a small advance team of UN civilian and
military officials, thousands of students, civil servants, and laid-off factory workers took
to the streets to protest against corruption. An angry mob sacked a villa appropriated by
