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NY Times, Mar. 23 2017
They Smashed Banks for Pol Pot. Now They’re Founding Them.
By JULIA WALLACE
MALAI, Cambodia — For years, Tep Khunnal was the devoted personal
secretary of Pol Pot, staying loyal to the charismatic ultracommunist
leader even as the Khmer Rouge movement collapsed around them in the
late 1990s.
Forced to reinvent himself after Pol Pot’s death, he fled to this
outpost on the Thai border and began following a different sort of guru:
the Austrian-American management theorist and business consultant Peter
Drucker.
“I realized that some other countries, in South America, in Japan, they
studied Drucker, and they used Drucker’s ideas and made the countries
prosperous,” he said.
The residents of this dusty but bustling town are almost all former
Khmer Rouge soldiers or cadres and their families, but they have come to
embrace capitalism with almost as much vigor as they once fought to
destroy class distinctions, free trade and even money itself.
Mr. Tep Khunnal helped lead the way, as a founder of an agricultural
export company and a small microfinance bank for farmers before rising
to become the district governor. From that position, he encouraged his
constituents to follow suit.
The local market, fronted by a bright green sign featuring flying United
States dollar bills — an advertisement for a telecommunications firm —
is run by a joint-stock company owned by a group of ex-Khmer Rouge
officials. Inspired by Mr. Tep Khunnal’s original farmer’s bank, there
are now six such organizations in Malai.
The success of his agricultural venture has spawned about a dozen
cassava export firms, most headed by former Khmer Rouge soldiers or
followers. Every weekday afternoon, the town’s main road is choked by a
queue of brightly painted trucks carrying cassava to the border.
“We joined the communists, and now we have joined the capitalists, which
is much better,” said Dim Sok, a local official.
Mr. Dim Sok, 65, was a nearly illiterate farmer when he became a
revolutionary in 1970, fighting in the jungles with the Khmer Rouge for
five years before they seized power. In an effort to remake the country
into an agrarian utopia, the Khmer Rouge government swept the urban
population into the countryside to live like peasants and smashed up
banks and schools. At least 1.7 million people died under their nearly
four-year rule.
When they were ousted in 1979, they retreated to strongholds like Malai
on the western fringes of Cambodia along with thousands of soldiers and
supporters. While Pol Pot continued to restrict free enterprise in areas
under his control, residents of Malai were allowed to conduct some trade
and amass personal property starting in the 1990s.
The area broke away from the Khmer Rouge in 1996, in part to avoid Pol
Pot’s attempts to recollectivize property, and soon after a few thousand
ex-communists raised capital to build the market by issuing shares in a
joint-stock company.
Each shareholder is entitled to quarterly dividends based on rents paid
by vendors. The rate of return is high: Mr. Dim Sok said he reaps $10
every three months from an initial investment of around $50.
“It is like a stock market,” he said, beaming.
Mr. Dim Sok said he saw no contradiction between his current life and
the years he spent enforcing an unstinting brand of communism.
“In communist ideology they accuse capitalism of exploiting people,” he
said. “But now we are in capitalist society, and there are actually two
things that can happen: You can be exploited, but you can also prevent
others from exploiting you.”
Many here seem to have managed that nimbly.
Nget Saroeun, 62, spent over two decades as a soldier, much of it waging
guerrilla war in the hills around Malai. Today, he is a prosperous
farmer who hobbles around his fields vigorously despite having lost a
leg to a land mine. He is a fan of the English soccer team Arsenal and
likes to check commodity prices and read about new agricultural
techniques on his smartphone.
“Previously, it was very difficult here,” he said. “It was full of
forest. Now it is full of concrete houses.”
He praised Mr. Tep Khunnal for teaching farmers “to meet the demands of
the market” by growing new crops like cassava, a tuber that can be
processed into starch or animal feed.
Malai was still a malaria-infested jungle stronghold when Mr. Tep
Khunnal moved here in 1998, bringing with him Pol Pot’s widow, whom he
married shortly after his boss’s death.
Along with a barely educated but savvy ex-soldier, Soom Yin, he took out
a bank loan to test some of his ideas. Their company bought the area’s
first corn-drying machine, imported a new breed of sun-resistant corn
from Thailand and set up a quality-control system for the corn and
cassava that moved through their warehouse.
Today, Mr. Soom Yin owns the largest export firm in the area and can
talk for hours about the minutiae of the cassava trade, from moisture
levels to price fluctuations. In his spare time, he said, he reads books
on management.
The Khmer Rouge ways are “very old now,” he said. “Even me, I don’t even
dream about that anymore. We just do business.”
Mr. Tep Khunnal, 67, retired from government and business a few years
ago and now devotes his time to spreading Drucker’s ideas across the
country. He teaches at a university in a neighboring province and is
translating the theorist’s work into Khmer. He has even compiled his
favorite bits of Drucker’s wisdom into a small handbook.
“I’m sure that if Cambodia embraces this idea, Cambodia will walk in the
right way,” he said.
He declined to discuss his finances, but he lives in a large gated
compound surrounded by lush gardens. When his stepdaughter, Pol Pot’s
only child, got married in 2014, he threw her a lavish reception
featuring French liqueur and glass chandeliers hanging from
pink-and-white tents.
He said he began reading about economics while serving as a Khmer Rouge
envoy to the United Nations in the 1980s. Although he liked Milton
Friedman, the free-market economist, and Frederick Taylor, who pioneered
scientific management, he was most drawn to Drucker’s insistence that
employees were central to an enterprise’s success.
“What I find interesting for me is that he talks about individuals, he
gives power to individuals, not to collectivism,” he said of Drucker.
“Frederick Taylor in the early 20th century, he talked about efficiency,
but Drucker talked about effectiveness.”
During a recent lecture, Mr. Tep Khunnal exhorted his students to
remember that good management was just as important as good ideas.
“In-no-vation,” he said, using the English word, “means a new idea, but
to be successful you need strategy.”
Some of his talking points might have been useful for the Khmer Rouge in
its final days, when the movement disintegrated into multiple warring
factions.
Asked whether Pol Pot had been a good manager, his former aide demurred.
“I don’t want to make any judgment on that,” he said. “Let history do
it. I think about the future.”
Neou Vannarin contributed reporting.
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