Global Policy Forum

By Barbara Crossette*

When the U.S. State Department's voluminous global human rights report appears each year, as it did last week, the temptation is to dive into the sections on hot-topic nations such as China, Iraq or, lately, Pakistan. Not a lot of readers would turn first to Cambodia. Yet this poor and psychologically wounded country is a prime object lesson in the perilous, unending business of nation-building. With a national election coming in July, Cambodia needs some attention well in advance.

In 1992-1993, the United Nations led a multimillion dollar effort to remake this Southeast Asian nation, which in barely two decades had been whipsawed into the American war in Indochina, brutalized by the Khmer Rouge and ground down and isolated by a Vietnamese occupation. Fifteen years later, the country is among the world's most badly governed and politically corrupt. The State Department's report summarized it concisely: "Corruption was considered endemic and extended throughout all segments of society, including the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government." It is made all the worse, the report added, by a "culture of impunity."

Corruption is not just money; it is a corrosive mentality that debases national life in a country still not sure of itself. It deters aid and investment except by people from predictable (mostly Asian) nations who don't care - or who benefit from pervasive graft. But in a broader sense, what corruption has done to Cambodia is create a culture of easy wealth and casual lawlessness, a sad example to young people born into a broken society that was stripped of its intellectual middle class and Buddhist leadership under the Khmer Rouge. Even the quality of architecture, scholarship, literature and the Khmer language has eroded. A measure of success nowadays is a garage full of late model Lexus SUVs and Toyota Land Cruisers, most of them acquired by government officials or their cronies at public expense.

Life in the graceful capital, Phnom Penh, is good. There are French restaurants and fine hotels that cosset tourists. But the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, a crafty and uncompromising leader who was able to corner political and military power in the 1990s, abetted by misguided UN decisions, has no coherent social policies. People in the countryside live perennially on the edge of hunger. The World Food Program is still feeding about 1.8 million of the country's 14 million people. Health services in rural areas are all but non-existent; unqualified midwives cause the maternal mortality rate to rank among the worst in Asia.

Corruption also threatens the credibility and indeed the future of a UN-backed tribunal designed to bring to trial, finally, some of the remaining Khmer Rouge leaders who terrorized the country and reduced it to human and physical ruin from April 1975 to January 1979. In tribunal custody are four top former Khmer Rouge officials: Nuon Chea, Brother Number 2 to Pol Pot, who died in 1998; Khieu Samphan, the former head of state; Ieng Sary, the foreign minister, and his wife, Ieng Thirith, who held, bizarrely, the portfolio of social affairs. Also in jail is the Khmer Rouge chief torturer, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, the commandant of the notorious Tuol Sleng interrogation center, which is now a tourist attraction.

The tribunal, at the insistence of Hun Sen and against the wishes of UN legal officials, was designed not to be independent but a hybrid called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. That has brought a corrupt judiciary and political patronage practices into a judicial process that distinguished and experienced international lawyers, prosecutors and judges struggle to keep on track. The Cambodian government, reacting to outside reports detailing corrupt or questionable tribunal staffing, has refused to open an investigation of its own. Donors - most of all the United States, which pressed Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, to agree to a flawed tribunal - are withholding money needed to carry cases to their conclusion. Trials are expected to begin this year.

Many Cambodians distrust the tribunal, not only because they do not understand why any of those in custody deserve a day in court, but also because they suspect that political chicanery by the Hun Sen government, with its share of former Khmer Rouge figures, will see to it that the process is carefully controlled, or thwarted. Mindful of its own history, the government abjures the terms Khmer Rouge or Communist and labels the disaster that overtook the country simply the "Pol Pot regime" absolving itself of guilt.

The State Department noted in its current report that there do not appear to be any politically motivated killings or political prisoners in Cambodia. But the report does acknowledge, citing work by courageous Cambodian human rights groups, that abuses by the military and police, often in league with governing party officials, occur widely around the country. Journalists can attest to that. There is also vigilante justice in the absence of a judicial system that Cambodians can trust. The UN human rights office in Phnom Penh has documented brutal land seizures by the well connected that drive out thousands of poor farmers with no means of recourse. This is a major deterrent to rural development.

The corruption and violence in the countryside should be a warning. During the Khmer Rouge years, as discussion around the tribunal is making ever more evident, Cambodians suffered most at the hands of local zealots and barely thought about a national movement or knew its name. The level of horrors that killed about 1.7 million Cambodians - through slave labor, dislocation, disease, starvation and execution - varied from place to place. In the eyes of most Cambodians there was no central government then. There is little more now.

As the July election approaches, the governing Cambodian People's Party knows how to stage a vote that monitors will likely find reasonably fair. What visitors will not see is the maneuvering already under way to buy off potential opposition figures with government jobs or bring bogus charges against others, to sow dissent within and among what few independent political groups that survive, and to use the party's ubiquitous neighborhood committees to bring voters into line. This is not the democracy the world thought it had installed. Cambodia's nightmare is not over.

About the Author: Barbara Crossette, a former bureau chief of The New York Times in Southeast Asia, was in Cambodia in January and February helping local journalists prepare to report on the Khmer Rouge trials.