HIGHBROW

Bangkok Post SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2015

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HUN SENS CAMBODIA: By Sebastian

Strangio. Yale University Press. 344 pages.
725 baht at Asia Books.
DICTATORIAL: Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has run a country thats grown reliant on foreign aid and ruled it with a iron fist.

THE MIRAGE THAT IS CAMBODIA

Sebastian Strangios new book takes a close look at the regions longest-serving
leader, and examines how little hes done for his own people By Chris Taylor

PHOTOS: EPA AND AP

s Cambodia mobilises to track

down and deporta dozen Christian minorities in hiding from
Vietnam in its jungles, questions
are again surfacing in Australia
about a deal struck with the
Cambodian government to take the Lucky
Countrys unwanted asylum seekers for cash.
The A$35 million (about 888 million baht)
deal has been controversial from the get-go.
In late September, former chief justice of Australias Family Court, Alastair Nicholson, called
the agreement reprehensible, pointing out
that Australias unwanted arrivals were being
dispatched to one of the poorest and worst
governed states in Asia.
If you doubt that, and hope for fair treatment
of Australias refugees, Hun Sens Cambodia by
Sebastian Strangio is essential reading. Strangios
compelling, often disturbing, book chronicles
the long ascent of the eponymous strongman to
the apex of power in a country that has leveraged
international guilt and horror over the genocide
that took place in the 1970s, receiving billions of
dollars in aid as a result.
For two decades, Australia was the worlds
No3 donor nation to Cambodia. Not all that
money has gone where it was intended; very
little has trickled down to where it is needed.
Speaking to Radio Australia in June last year,
Maree Nutt, chief executive of Results International Australia, admitted that despite 20 years
of solid economic growth around 7% for the
last 10 years the people of Cambodia are as
under-nourished as ever.
This, if not an outrage, should at least be a
mystery, particularly given that probably no
other country in the world has seen as many
well-intentioned foreign feet on the ground
per capita as tiny Cambodia, with a population of only 15 million. But Strangio though

LOOK AFTER US FIRST: A Cambodian protester holds up fake US currency during a protest over asylum
seekers outside the Australian Embassy in Phnom Penh late last year.
clearly and cool-headedly outraged prefers
to describe the problem confounding outsiders
perceptions of the country and its politics as
what might be called the mirage effect.
In other words, Hun Sens achievement if
it can be described as such has been to maintain the faucets of foreign aid at gush capacity while offering little more than an illusion of
carrying out the change that was a condition of
the handouts.
In fact, in Strangios reading of the past two
decades since the United Nations brokered Cambodias historic first elections in 1993, despite
billions of dollars in aid, the country has shown
more or less complete lack of progress on the
various reform benchmarks formulated by its

Western partners . Strangio adds: Land grabs,

forestry crimes, and high-level corruption the
oxygen of the [Hun Sen governments] patronage
state all remained widespread.
The results can be clearly seen on the streets
of Phnom Penh today. This is a city where Lexus,
Mercedes and BMWs jostle with tuk-tuks and
second-hand Honda Dreams for potholed road
space. Newly constructed office blocks and malls
cast their shadows over petitioning evictees and
garment workers striking for a living wage. It is,
in short, simultaneously a staggering success
and an aid-mission failure.
It could be argued that the reality of contemporary Phnom Penh cuts to the quick of Strangios thesis. Hun Sen may have played along with

the Wests dream of reconstructing Cambodia

in its own image, but the truth is his government has always chosen hard infrastructure
development over the soft development
human rights, democratic reform and transparent governance demanded by aid donors.
This has been achieved through a combination
of ruthless suppression of internal opposition
and a learned mastery of the bromides of international-donor newspeak.
In Hun Sens Cambodia, writes Strangio,
accountability and change always lay on the
horizon, but what seemed tangible from a distance, on closer inspection often melted into
thin air.
Strangios Hun Sens Cambodia is an eloquent
account of a chapter in Cambodias history that
has for too long been neglected: what happened
after Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took the
country back to Year Zero. If it has an academic
axe to grind aid agencies have created the very
opposite of what they set out to it is, nevertheless, written with a light touch, peppered with
tragic human interest stories and solid journalism based on two years of research and many
years in the country.
Meanwhile, although Strangio appears determined to wake the world to the fact that change
in Cambodia has largely been a mirage he
uses the word 67 times much of his narrative
also touches on brave, diehard, grassroots struggle, even though the outcome is almost always
murder, serious injury or imprisonment.
That fight is continuing. It is the struggle of the
disenfranchised Cambodian people to reclaim
their dignity and often quite literally their land.
The first print run of Strangios book sold out
and the publishers are doing a second print run.
Nobody in Cambodia thinks the AustralianCambodian refugee deal has been made based
on the old misconceptions about Hun Sen and
his patronage agenda. Quite the contrary: most
Cambodians see the deal as cynical. It is.
And until Cambodians have made progress
on basic inclusive reforms and have a place in
their own country, it is difficult not to conclude,
after reading Strangios modern history of an
unnecessarily failed state, that Cambodia is no
place for refugees. n
Chris Taylor (www.christaylorwriter.com) is the author of
Harvest Season, available in both print and digital versions
on Amazon.