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NY Review, FEBRUARY 21, 2019 ISSUE
Cambodia: A Country for Rent
Richard Bernstein
Not that it should have been a surprise, but China was the only major
country that declined to join the international criticism of Cambodia’s
prime minister, Hun Sen, as he ensured that he would run effectively
unopposed in the parliamentary elections on July 29, 2018, turning them
into a sham and largely dismantling what remained of Cambodia’s
democratic structures. Among Hun Sen’s actions was the arrest and
imprisonment on transparently ridiculous charges of Kem Sokha, the
leader of the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP), the only
opposition party capable of challenging his rule. That occurred just
after midnight on September 3, 2017, when some one hundred armed police
descended on Kem’s Phnom Penh home and hauled him off to a rural prison
near the Vietnamese border, where he remained for a year before being
released on bail to await trial. With the only other Cambodian
opposition figure of national stature, Sam Rainsy, living in enforced
exile, Hun Sen had no credible challenger in the elections. His party
won all 125 seats in the National Assembly.
There were other acts of brazen and undisguised repression that provoked
the disapproval of much of the world apart from China. Cambodia’s main
English-language newspaper, The Cambodian Daily, which had done good
professional reporting on the country for twenty-four years, training a
generation of Cambodian journalists in the process, was closed down on
dubious charges of tax evasion. NGOs, including the National Democratic
Institute, which is affiliated with the Democratic Party in the US, were
expelled from the country. Most important, perhaps, Hun Sen’s compliant
Supreme Court, two months after Kem’s arrest, dissolved the CNRP and
banned 118 of its senior figures from politics for five years.
The purpose of this repression is obvious. Kem and his party had
performed well in parliamentary elections six years ago despite the
ruling party’s efforts to manipulate them, including the occasional
unsolved murder and attacks on opposition rallies. In 2017 the CNRP
received 44 percent of the vote in local elections, compared to 49
percent for Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party. Given the widespread
disaffection with Hun Sen and his corrupt cohort, especially among
younger voters, many Cambodian and foreign observers believed that if
the July 29 vote had been free and fair, Kem might well have won,
thereby unseating Hun Sen after thirty-three years in power.
Among the problems of Cambodian democracy is that the country is not
strategically important enough for the United States and the
international community to take effective measures against Hun Sen’s
violations of Cambodia’s laws. Still, as in the past, there has been
plenty of international condemnation, especially from the countries that
over the years have been Cambodia’s most important providers of aid and
investment. The US announced a ban on visas for officials “involved in
undermining democracy in Cambodia,” and Congress made its annual aid
package—worth about $75 million a year—conditional on Kem Sokha’s
release and the reinstatement of the CNRP. Japan and Australia
criticized Hun Sen’s turn toward dictatorship, though Japan, maintaining
a policy of “engagement” with Cambodia, did not withdraw aid or impose
sanctions. The EU complained about the “further effort to restrict the
democratic space in Cambodia.”
Of potentially greater impact, the EU created a commission of inquiry to
determine whether Cambodia should continue to receive the preferential
tariff arrangement that it enjoys as a Least Developed Country, which,
if withdrawn, would do great harm to the country’s economy, given the
importance of its growing export industries, which send some $6 billion
worth of goods, mostly clothing and footwear, to the EU annually.
China, however, not only demurred but explicitly backed Hun Sen’s
consolidation of power. As a Foreign Ministry spokesman in Beijing said
hours after Kem Sokha’s arrest, China “supports the Cambodian
government’s efforts to protect national security and stability.” It’s
noteworthy that the formal charge against Kem and the CNRP was
complicity with the United States in an effort to overthrow the
Cambodian government, in what Hun Sen has long referred to as a “color
revolution.” By supporting what was effectively a coup by Hun Sen, China
was at least indirectly approving his tendency to accuse the United
States of undermining “national security and stability,” which is how it
characterizes American criticism of China’s human rights record.
In January 2018, two months after the CNRP was dissolved, China’s
premier, Li Keqiang, came to Phnom Penh and signed nineteen new
bilateral agreements, including several showy new infrastructure
projects. In June China’s defense minister, Wei Fenghe, made an official
five-day trip to Cambodia, praising Hun Sen as a “loyal friend” and,
according to Cambodian officials, pledging $100 million in aid to
Cambodia’s military. These protective measures by China took on an
especially Orwellian cast when the US and Europe withdrew the combined
$13 million they had pledged to enable Cambodia’s election commission
for the July 29 vote, on the grounds that it “cannot be seen as
legitimate.” In response, China, which doesn’t have elections, stepped
in with a promise of computers, printers, ballot boxes, voting booths,
and monitors to ensure that the elections would “run smoothly, fairly,
transparently, and with accountability,” thereby announcing its support
for Hun Sen’s efforts to make them look like a genuinely democratic
exercise.
There was a time when Western sanctions and criticism would have been at
least of some concern to Hun Sen, given his country’s long-term
dependence on foreign aid. But China’s replacement of the West as
Cambodia’s most important foreign partner, financier, chief investor,
and friend have effectively made him immune from that pressure and,
indeed, insultingly defiant of it. “Hun Sen…welcomes and encourages the
US to cut off aid,” a pro-government newspaper reported after Washington
withdrew its support for the Cambodian election commission. “Cutting US
aid won’t kill the government but will only kill a group of people who
serve American policies.”
China has had a similar effect in other countries in Southeast Asia.
Following the military coup in Bangkok five years ago, which was
denounced by the US and Europe, China strengthened its relationship with
Thailand. And China has grown closer to the Philippines, in part because
of its silence on the extralegal executions carried out by the
government of President Rodrigo Duterte. But even compared to these
countries, Cambodia represents a signal success for China in two ways:
one is its competition with the United States for power and influence
throughout Asia, the other its promotion of authoritarian practices over
liberal-democratic ones.
A turning point, according to the Cambodian economist Chan Sophal, came
after the donors’ conference in 2006. Since the UN-sponsored political
reconstitution of the country in 1992–1993, the main Western countries
and Japan, plus representatives of the numerous NGOs that operate in
Cambodia, have held an annual meeting in Phnom Penh to determine the
amount to pledge to the country for the following year. With Hun Sen in
attendance, the donors would complain about corruption, Hun Sen would
promise to do something about it, and then the pledges would be made,
generally around $500 million or more, which would make up about half of
the government’s budget.
In 2006, Chan told me, “the pledges came to $600 million. The next day,
China, which did not attend the donors’ conference, announced that it
would give $601 million”—the added million an indication of China’s move
to occupy the paramount position among the country’s foreign supporters.
China’s decision to back Hun Sen’s government reflected a major shift in
international alliances. Hun Sen was a commander in the army of the
Khmer Rouge, the radical Maoists whose four years in power, from 1975 to
1979, resulted in the death by starvation, disease, or execution of an
estimated one fifth to one quarter of the Cambodian population. Hun Sen,
probably afraid of a Khmer Rouge purge, defected to Vietnam in 1977.
When the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in 1979 and established a puppet
government in Phnom Penh, he was named foreign minister, and in 1985, at
the age of thirty-two, became prime minister. Vietnam and the Soviet
Union backed his government. China, the United States, and the other
countries of Southeast Asia continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge as
Cambodia’s legitimate government, despite its responsibility for the
deaths of millions. China provided arms and money to the Khmer Rouge
forces concentrated along the Thailand–Cambodia border, essentially
assuring the group’s survival, which led Hun Sen famously to call China
“the root of everything that is evil.”
In 1993 came UN-sponsored elections, won by a royalist figure, Norodom
Ranariddh. But as recounted by Sebastian Strangio in his excellent book
Hun Sen’s Cambodia (2014), Hun Sen refused to accept the election
results. His supporters formed a secessionist state in seven of the
country’s provinces, leading Ranariddh, in what seems now to have been a
historic mistake, to agree to a power-sharing arrangement. Theoretically
the two men were co–prime ministers in a coalition government, but the
very intelligent and ruthless Hun Sen, who controlled the largest armed
force in the country and much of the bureaucracy, which had been
installed by Vietnam, held effective power.
In 1996 Hun Sen went to China, and the special relationship that has
existed between him and a succession of Chinese leaders began. He was
deeply tainted by his previous collaboration with Vietnam, historically
Cambodia’s main enemy, and his alliance with China enabled him to reduce
that taint. It also gave him leverage back home. A year after his trip
to China, the power-sharing arrangement broke down entirely. Hun Sen’s
forces went on the attack, seizing the airport and sending tanks into
the streets of Phnom Penh. Ranariddh, recognizing defeat in what was
essentially a military coup, fled the country for two years, leaving Hun
Sen alone in power. The West responded by suspending all but
humanitarian aid, at a time when that aid was crucial to the day-to-day
operations of the Cambodian government. China stepped into the breach,
offering aid, interest-free loans, military equipment and training, and
high-level visits with Beijing officials. In 2000, Hun Sen, in exchange,
broke off relations with Taiwan, accepting Beijing’s claim on the island
as a province of China.
That has been the pattern ever since. A detailed report commissioned by
the State Department last year concluded that China’s “financial
diplomacy” amounted to $9.1 billion in aid and investment in Cambodia
between 2000 and 2016. Another $3 billion or so has been added since.
China has built or is building eight “Cambodia–China Friendship” bridges
across the Mekong River, plus more than 1,200 miles of new roads. The
agreements signed in January 2018 during the highly publicized visit of
Chinese prime minister Li Keqiang included a financial commitment to
build a new airport in Phnom Penh, a highway between it and the coastal
resort city of Sihanoukville, and the construction of Cambodia’s first
communications satellite. China has also built hydroelectric power
stations on the Mekong, which are highly controversial because of their
environmental impact but have helped provide a reliable source of power
for Cambodia.
No doubt China’s aid and investment have helped Cambodia’s rapidly
growing economy, which has undergone 7 percent annual growth between
1995 and 2017. Cambodia is no longer the devastated, death-stricken
wasteland created by American bombing and Khmer Rouge rule. Phnom Penh
is now like other Southeast Asian capitals, a buzzing city choked with
traffic and crowded with tourists, restaurants, nightclubs, luxury
hotels, condominiums, and office buildings. Across the country, more
than 800,000 workers are employed in the country’s clothing- and
footwear-manufacturing industries. Six million tourists visit every
year, a seventh of them from China, bringing in nearly $4 billion in
revenue. Even critics of Hun Sen acknowledge that during his years in
power Cambodia has enjoyed enough stability to make this development
possible.
China has reaped political benefits from its investments. In 2012, the
year of Clinton’s visit, Cambodia blocked the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations from opposing China’s claims to the South China Sea. It
did so again in 2016, after an international tribunal ruled that China’s
claims were invalid and its construction of artificial islands there
illegal. In turn, China’s protection of Hun Sen has given him impunity
for his increasingly blatant violations of human rights. One feature of
Hun Sen’s rule has been a scorching rhetorical animosity against the
United States—a mirror image of his regular expressions of praise and
gratitude toward China. China matches every American criticism of
Cambodia with a compensating gesture of support. In 2011, for example,
Cambodia deported to China twenty members of the Muslim Uighur minority
whose asylum applications were being reviewed by the UN high
commissioner for refugees, ignoring American and European entreaties not
to do so. In protest, the United States canceled a delivery of 200
trucks that it had promised to the Cambodian army. Within a few weeks,
China sent 257 trucks, as well as 50,000 military uniforms.
There have been other such tit-for-tat incidents. In mid-2018 the US
Treasury Department announced that it was freezing the assets of General
Hing Bun Heang, the vice-chairman of the armed forces and commander of
Hun Sen’s personal bodyguard, charging him with directing “multiple
attacks on unarmed Cambodians over the span of many years.” After the
announcement, The Phnom Penh Post, the main English-language paper in
Cambodia still in business, printed a photograph illustrating Hing Bun
Heang’s handiwork: a former legislator in the newly dissolved CNRP badly
bloodied by his elite unit. The paper also published the text of a
letter in which Hing Bun Heang threatened to “hit back at any American
who does not respect the sovereignty of an independent country and has
ambitions to invade my country and even supports and incites the
traitors who exist in Cambodia.” The reference was to the imprisoned Kem
and his alleged conspiracy with the US to launch a revolution.
The American sanctions against Hing Bun Heang were announced on June 12.
On June 19, China’s defense minister, Wei Fenghe, who was on his
five-day visit to Cambodia, announced China’s grant of $100 million to
the Cambodian military, including Hun Sen’s bodyguard. A few days after
that, Human Rights Watch issued a 213-page report, “Cambodia’s Dirty
Dozen: A Long History of Rights Abuses by Hun Sen’s Generals,” which
listed twelve other leaders of the armed forces who have acted to
“protect the continued rule of Hun Sen” even as they have “amassed large
amounts of unexplained wealth.” These are the men on whom China has
bestowed its $100 million in military aid.
When Cambodians talk about China’s presence in their country, they
inevitably invoke Sihanoukville, the coastal city on the Gulf of
Thailand about one hundred miles southwest of Phnom Penh. Once a sleepy
place with pretty coves, sandy beaches, restaurants, and guesthouses
catering to local people and European backpackers, Sihanoukville is
being transformed into a kind of Chinese Miami Beach. Cambodians call it
Macau II because of the proliferation of splashy luxury hotels, each
with a casino.
The number of construction projects in Sihanoukville seems
disproportionate to the size of the city, whose population is about
150,000—though perhaps not disproportionate to the vast number of
potential visitors from China. The road from the center of town toward
the coast is lined with bulldozed terrain covered with luxury high
rises, casinos, and resorts at various stages of completion. Large signs
in front of these sites identify the Chinese companies constructing
them. Much of the work is being done by imported Chinese laborers.
According to the The Phnom Penh Post, citing government figures,
fifty-two casino licenses were granted in Sihanoukville in 2018,
bringing the total to 152. By contrast, Las Vegas has 104 operating casinos.
The development is still in its early stages, but the center of
Sihanoukville already has a neon glimmer to it. There are a dozen or so
casinos in operation, with names like the Holiday Palace, the Fortuna,
and the Golden Sand. On a night in early July, the typical customer at
the baccarat table in the Golden Sand seemed to be a young Chinese man
wearing a T-shirt and shorts, rough-looking, smoking, and cradling
stacks of $100 bills in his palm, betting upwards of $1,500 per hand.
Who are these men, and where does their money come from? The Phnom Penh
Post recently published quotations from a memo to the central government
written by the governor of Sihanoukville province, complaining that the
city is becoming a playground for the Chinese mafia. In an earlier
report, the paper cited the Cambodian director of the local tourist
board to the effect that everything—the charter flights bringing group
tours from China, the buses that take the visitors from the airport to
their hotels, the restaurants where they eat and the casinos where they
gamble—is owned and run by Chinese businessmen.
“They bring the money in,” a tuktuk driver in the center of town told
me, speaking of the Chinese, “but then they take it out.” Liberal
intellectuals warn that Cambodia is becoming what Sophal Ear, a
Cambodian-born economist who teaches at Occidental College, describes as
“a wholly owned subsidiary of…China”—a semi-colony. “For too long
Cambodia has been viewed as a country not for sale, but for rent,” he
wrote in a recent article. “And right now, the renter is China.”
North of Sihanoukville is the coastal province of Koh Kong, where in
2008 the Chinese-owned Tianjin Union Development Group was awarded a
ninety-nine-year lease to create a huge tourism center, with an initial
investment reported at nearly $4 billion. As in Sihanoukville, the aim
is to give tourists another major destination besides the temple complex
at Ankor Wat, which draws more than two million visitors a year and has
turned the nearby town of Siem Reap into one of Asia’s great attractions.
There are undoubtedly advantages to this influx of money and tourists,
which is expected to grow exponentially. But it is axiomatic in Cambodia
that where there is money there are payoffs, kickbacks, and bribes. A
study of Koh Kong by the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS) in
Washington, D.C., found that the Chinese company developing the project
paid essentially nothing to Cambodia for the 89,000-acre concession,
other than a $1 million deposit made in 2008—little more than $10 an
acre. The concession is more than three times the size allowed by
Cambodian law and includes 20 percent of Cambodia’s entire coastline.
The project, the report said, also “exemplified the secrecy that shrouds
many of China’s infrastructure projects throughout the Indo-Pacific
region,” which, in plain English, means that nobody really knows where
the money comes from, exactly how much of it there is, and who is
getting it.
What is known is that the concept has expanded and become part of
China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s plan to build a vast
transportation network throughout Asia, with China at its center. The
Koh Kong project now includes plans not only for hotels but also an
international airport and a deep-water port. The C4ADS report notes
that, though there has been no indication that China is seeking to use
the new port for its navy, it would certainly fit with the country’s
rapid naval expansion. “Maritime infrastructure investment is inherently
dual-use and is capable of furthering both legitimate business
activities and military operations,” the report concluded.
Moreover, Chinese investment generally brings with it pressure to agree
with China on important issues and to deflect attention from its human
rights abuses. In 2016 a Chinese company acquired a 67 percent stake in
the Greek port of Piraeus, providing a needed infusion of cash into the
Greek economy. A year later, Greece blocked a statement from the EU
criticizing China for its harsh crackdown on dissidents. Even if China
never develops plans to put Cambodia to military use, the two countries
have a mutual interest in promoting authoritarian values and suppressing
liberal-democratic ones.
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