I headed out of Phnom Penh towards Bangkok on a road backed up by a noisy convoy of cars, buses and flat-back trucks crammed with cheering, flag-waving Cambodians dressed in yellow. The country’s third ever democratic election was about to get underway.
I headed out of Phnom Penh towards Bangkok on a road backed up by a noisy convoy of cars, buses and flat-back trucks crammed with cheering, flag-waving Cambodians dressed in yellow. The country’s third ever democratic election was about to get underway. The flag-wavers were supporters of the in-power CPP – the party of former Khmer Rouge cadre and current prime minister Hun Sen – and they were feeling justifiably confident.
The Cambodian economy has been rapidly expanding over the past five years with GDP rates that have regularly clipped the 10 per cent mark. Rice production and the manufacture of clothing have been drawing dollars, but the impressive figures are driven mostly by a massive influx of foreign capital being ploughed into Cambodian real estate.
Cambodia’s laws on land ownership are somewhat unique in that when the Khmer Rouge came into power in 1975 they banned private ownership and destroyed all previous records of what belonged to whom. When the war ended and the dust began to settle, survivors returned home to find their land occupied by refugees from elsewhere in the country. No one had any way of staking a legal claim on land they either owned or occupied, so Hun Sen, who was then in power under a puppet regime largely run from Vietnam, declared that the country should ‘start from scratch’.
A law was introduced stating that if an individual lived on a piece of land for 10 years they were entitled to ownership of it. However, when peace caused tourism figures to spiral upwards and the value of the land being given to the poor became apparent, he had something of a change of heart.
Foreign investors moved in and bought up chunks of real estate from which the previous owner/inhabitants were evicted. By 2006, some 40,000 Khmers had been made homeless in Phnom Penh alone. Hun Sen hails the surge in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) as a turning point for the country and claims Cambodia’s economy will soon catch up those of its wealthier neighbours. Unfortunately, precious little of the billions arriving into the hands of the CPP is doing the poor any favours; the frenzied land grab is very much a gold rush they could do without.
It’s not the first time Cambodians have been cheated out of what is theirs by their own government. A wave of international sympathy for the Khmer people led western governments to pump development aid into the country in the years after the civil war.. Unfortunately most of that aid disappeared into private accounts. Beyond ranking the country as the 162nd most corrupt out of a list of 179 there wasn’t a lot else the international community did in response.
Take a stroll around the capital on any given day and you’ll see canary yellow Hummers and blacked out Range Rovers with police escorts driving like lunatics through scattering swarms of mopeds. Nightclubs in Phnom Penh come with an unusual health warning – the spoiled teenage children of wealthy senior army officers and CPP officials have a tendency to pick fights with foreigners, which their armed body guards help end.
Right now almost exactly half of Cambodia has been sold to foreigners by the country’s government. Virtually all of its prime coastal land, real estate in the capital Phnom Penh and a ring around the World Heritage site of Angkor Wat are now gone, and the government just popped the funds into its back pocket. What’s worse is that most of the buyers have no intention of building anything on the land they bought, which would at least create jobs for the Cambodian people – the plots will largely remain walled off and unused until the bubble created by artificial demand makes it profitable for owners to sell them on.
The election, although crooked as an s-hook by western standards, was on the level by what Cambodians were used to and the entrenched presence of the CPP meant they were easily able to shrug off the challenge of opposition parties. Hun Sen has another term for himself.
Cambodia’s development aid could have eased the hardships of its people and the land sale the Khmer Rouge presented the Hun Sen government with could have meant real progress in education, infrastructure and social welfare. In 2005, oil and natural gas deposits were found in Cambodia’s territorial waters and the revenues from commercial extraction, set to start flowing in 2011, could totally eradicate poverty. I very much doubt, however, that the poor will be holding their breath.
Robert Carry is a former staff journalist at Metro Éireann where he served as chief sports reporter and headed the paper’s Northern Ireland news section. He is currently working in Thailand as the news editor of an English-language magazine
