Cambodia June 25-2000

The New York Times
Sunday, June 25, 2000

INTERNATIONAL
Pages 1 & 6

Fragile Stability Slowly Emerges in Cambodia
by SETH MYDANS

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- After three decades of conflict, a new era of peace
and political stability is taking root here in one of the world's most
tormented nations.

The major rivalries and bloodshed spawned by the Indochina war in the
1970's have sputtered out over the last two years and Cambodia has settled
back into the everyday misery of a land of poverty, injustice and
continuing brutality.

But many people here see glimmers of hope as the government -- both aided
and pressured by foreign donors -- begins to lay the groundwork for change.
An active and liberal civil society has begun to take root, a functioning
government administration is being mapped out and the traumas of the past
are beginning to be tentatively addressed.

"What we are doing now is clearing the fog out of the way so people can see
the real problems," said Bill Herod, coordinator of The N.G.O. Forum on
Cambodia, a consortium of private aid groups. "Because now we have one
government under one set of leaders. We don't have to worry about the
political strife and tensions that dominated our lives for so long."

The key question is political will, said Kek Galabru, who heads Licadho, a
prominent local human rights monitoring group. "We have more political
stability but we still have social and economic problems," she said. "All
of us hope to rebuild the country now, but what we get from the government
is mostly promises."

An unexpected detail illustrates the new atmosphere: human rights groups
have not documented a single political killing during the last year.

In another signal that a new Cambodia may be emerging, one foreign aid
official noted with astonishment that, for the first time in 30 or 40
years, itis possible to travel safely -- at least in daytime and avoiding
mine fields -- to every corner of the country.

With the death of its head man, Pol Pot, and the surrender of other top
leaders, the Khmer Rouge insurgency collapsed in 1998. Cambodia is still
devastated by their reign of terror from 1975 to 1979, when more than a
million people died, but they are no longer in a position to harm their
countrymen.

And the armed political rivalry between Cambodia's two dominant parties --
the royalists and the former Communists -- was decided by a coup in 1997
that left the country under the control of Prime Minister Hun Sen -- a
former Communist leader who revels in the epithet "strongman."

Almost shamefacedly, a number of local and foreign analysts here say it may
be true for the moment that a strong hand is what Cambodia needs, that the
country simply was not ready to handle the competitive democracy that the
United Nations sought to implant with a $2 billion intervention a decade
ago.

That is not to say that government abuses have ended or that the people of
Cambodia are being served rather than bullied by those in power.

Despite its democratic forms, this is still in many ways a feudal nation,
ruled by corrupt officials who use violence to get their way and remain
mostly above the law.

The current scourge is land grabbing: powerful men -- many of them military
officers -- drive farmers from their fields as they rush to seize the
nation's wealth in Cambodia's unregulated, grab-what-you-can economy.

The economy grew by 5 percent last year, but the gap between rich and poor
appears to be widening and the poverty of the poorest appears to be growing
deeper. Cambodia, with a population now of 12 million, has one of the
world's highest rates of population growth, 2.5 percent in 1999.

"We are turning toward a society close to what it was before the Khmer
Rouge, in the sense that you have rich people getting rich and poor people
getting poorer," said Sebastien Marot, coordinator of Mith Samlanh, a
private aid group that works with the poor.

But this is a very different time from the pre-Khmer Rouge days. The war
and the international rivalries that fueled their insurgency ended long
ago. Following the United Nations mission, Cambodia has retained a huge
foreign presence, but it is focused on nation-building, not warfare.

Today, much of the international focus on Cambodia involves an emerging
campaign around the world to put mass killers on trial.

More than 20 years since the Khmer Rouge were driven from power, no one has
been brought to trial for their atrocities. And although many Cambodians
remain ambivalent, outside pressure has built for an international
tribunal.

In April, Mr. Hun Sen agreed to an American formula for a United
Nations-sponsored court that would include both Cambodian and foreign
judges. The formula attempts to uphold international standards of justice
while maintaining Cambodia's sense of national sovereignty.

The prime minister has changed tack many times, but if the current plan
holds, the National Assembly -- which his party controls -- is scheduled to
vote on the plan in the coming weeks. Hans Corell, the chief legal counsel
of the United Nations, is due to visit in early July.

The trial is more than historical housecleaning; it is part of today's
politics, riven as they are with the feuds and rivalries of the past.

Several key Khmer Rouge figures now live freely in Cambodia, hoping to be
allowed to enjoy old age in obscurity. Two of the worst killers have been
arrested. One difficult issue is how many people might face trial -- 2 or
6, or 20 or many more. As the potential circle widens, the threat it poses
to the country's new-found stability increases.

Mr. Hun Sen's ruling party is an extension of the Communist leadership that
supplanted the Khmer Rouge and was backed by the Vietnamese, who invaded in
1979. Throughout the 1980's it fought a civil war against an alliance that
included Khmer Rouge guerrillas and non-Communist royalists, supported by
an equally ill-matched coupling of Western nations and China.

After a peace agreement in 1991, the United Nations brokered an election
that produced a new coalition of enemies, a system of co-prime ministers
that yoked together Mr. Hun Sen and the royalist leader, Prince Norodom
Ranariddh.

Their rivalry, along with the continuing Khmer Rouge insurgency, kept
Cambodia unstable until Mr. Hun Sen ousted Prince Ranariddh by force in
1997. After losing an election the following year, the prince accepted a
place as speaker of the National Assembly and his humiliated royalist party
accommodated itself to a partnership with Mr. Hun Sen's former Communists.

Despite the potential threat to this precarious balance, advocates of a
trial say it is necessary to establish the rule of law and combat a
"culture of impunity" that allows abuses by powerful people to continue
unpunished.

Opponents question its relevance to society, two decades after the
killings, calling it a new foreign imposition on a still-fragile nation, a
"new kind of imperialism" that seeks to mold Cambodia to a Western
template.

One Western diplomat, who nonetheless supports a trial, said foreigners
"have had a pretty big hand" in creating Cambodia's current chaos. "So we
should be careful about whatever we do in the future and, despite good
motives, not do anything that will bring more harm," he said. "We should be
careful about feeling we know what is best for Cambodia."

For most Cambodians, exhausted by their country's recent history, a Khmer
Rouge trial is far from their minds. "What people want is to be left alone
and make money and maybe buy a motorbike," said Chhay Narin, a
schoolteacher. "They want to feed their families and educate their
children. That sounds like a simple thing, but it really is not,
unfortunately."

Part of Cambodia's move toward a functioning government has been the
gathering of numbers, and they tell a story of hardship.

For the 80 percent of Cambodians who live in the countryside, only 43
percent of households have electricity and 23 percent have access to clean
water, according to the Ministry of Planning. Only 14 percent of villages
have marketplaces, 16 percent have clinics and just one-third have toilets.

The level of education is one of the lowest in Asia, with an adult literacy
rate of just 65 percent. Government spending on education has been falling
and as many as half of school-age children do not attend classes.

According to one independent survey, 49 percent of children under the age
of 5 are malnourished. Life expectancy is less than 60 years of age.

And while the population has nearly doubled since the 1960's, the amount of
land available for cultivation has shrunk by 25 percent.

The government's most persistent critic, Sam Rainsy, says that the economy
is in the hands of criminal syndicates and that "Cambodia's biggest
industries," apart from garment manufacturing, are illegal logging,
prostitution, drug trafficking and money laundering.

Even the finance minister, Keat Chhon, is a critic, telling a recent
conference, "Cambodia lives in the casino economy where investors come
quickly and leave quickly." Few foreign investors have decided to commit
themselves to the country's long-term future.

Nearly a decade after Cambodia's first post-Communist election, there is a
broad sense here that the expensive effort by the United Nations to create
a democratic state was a failure. Mr. Hun Sen's coup was a final
readjustment, nullifying the election's outcome and reinstating much of the
political power structure that preceded it.

Critics note that, as in other new democracies, an election is only an
initial step. The United Nations failed to go farther in breaking down the
grip of Mr. Hun Sen's party on government administration and the armed
forces.

But it is becoming clear that the influx of foreign aid groups did produce
a lasting legacy, one that is already changing the character of the
country: a nascent civil society and a culture of human rights.

"There is a strong recognition now not only by the government but by the
military that a civil society is an actor on the scene and that the state
will have to accept this reality," said Kao Kim Hourn, director of a
private
rights group called the Cambodian Institute for Cooperation and Peace.
"Because of this, we can work better now in terms of mobilizing pressure
and public opinion and exposing wrongdoing."

At the start of the last decade there were just 12 local non-governmental
organizations. Today there are 360, a sort of shadow government that
provides services ranging from the protection of women to the digging of
wells to the provision of legal aid. Many of those involved are young
Cambodians who received their first education in political and civil rights
during the period of United Nations control.

The greatest challenge to the old power structure is the growth of local
groups that protect human rights. Whether it is a strike by garment
workers, a political demonstration or forced eviction of slum dwellers,
local human rights workers will be there, sometimes harassed, but
increasingly heard.

A remarkable degree of political opposition is permitted. Three years after
a grenade attack that killed 16 people and wounded more than 100 at a
demonstration headed by Mr. Sam Rainsy, he has become a sort of permanent
gadfly, free to travel the country with his anti-government campaign.

These are still tentative changes, however, subject to the dictates of the
strongmen at the top. "It's better," said Lao Mong Hay, who heads the
Cambodian Center for Democracy, a human rights advocacy group. "But it's
fragile, very fragile. They can close us down at any time."[End]