Cambodia: Miracle or mirage?

Cambodia

Miracle or mirage?

A biography of a singular strongman

The Economist | 15 November 2014

Hun Sen’s Cambodia. By Sebastian Strangio. Yale University Press; 322 pages; $37.50 and £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

IN A speech he gave in 2006, Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen, told his enemies about a particular talent of his. “Even if you farted, I would still know. You cannot hide from me.” What to make of such a boast? For one thing, as Sebastian Strangio, a journalist based in Phnom Penh, recounts in his book “Hun Sen’s Cambodia”, it hints at the mindset of a deeply insecure “peasant king” who, after almost 30 years on the political throne, still needs to remind people that he is in charge [but isn't this characteristic of all puppets?].

Mr Hun Sen’s reign has coincided with the country’s post-war recovery. He credits himself and the ruling Cambodian People’s Party with transforming the nation from the nightmare of the Khmers Rouges to the stable and business friendly economy it is today. This spin is part of a “mirage on the Mekong”, Mr Strangio writes, a jab at the naive “miracle on the Mekong” phrase that was bandied about during the elections in 1998. In Cambodia “accountability and change always lay on the horizon. But what seemed tangible from a distance, on closer inspection very often melted into thin air.”

Most books about this country tend to dwell on the Khmer Rouge years between 1975 and 1979, when nearly 2m people were killed in South-East Asia’s Great Leap Forward. Mr Strangio, who moved to Cambodia in 2008, devotes more attention to the recent past. As such, this is a dual biography: a portrait of the man alongside portraits of his people. Mr Strangio has done much original reporting, peeling away the miracle narrative to reveal the bruised fruit beneath. Although Mr Hun Sen presents himself as a saviour, he has met the demands of the international community on his own terms when they suited his interests; it is “democracy with Khmer characteristics”. The elections that were sponsored by the United Nations (UN) in 1993 were endured rather than embraced. Soon, the old “patterns” of factionalism and patronage came to the fore. Mr Hun Sen spent the next three elections consolidating, not sharing, power.

But, as the book shows, Mr Hun Sen’s ascent from country bumpkin to virtual deity, with little formal education, is remarkable. The former Khmer Rouge cadre was a somewhat unpromising 30-something with one eye—he lost the other in battle—when the Vietnamese installed him as prime minister in 1985. Mr Hun Sen was prime minister for roughly half of the ten-year Vietnamese occupation. In the UN-sponsored elections, Mr Hun Sen failed to win a majority, yet the chain-smoking strongman forced a power-sharing agreement with the winning party. Then, in 1997, he did away with its leadership as quickly as he flicked away the ash from his 555 brand of cigarettes. As Mr Hun Sen grew stronger, non-governmental organisations proliferated, and the mirage of progress really took hold. Mr Strangio accepts that poverty rates dropped, the economy grew and successful businesses abounded, such as Brown, a popular locally owned coffee chain, but he tends to see these as sideshows. The real business was being done by politically connected tycoons intent on exploiting Cambodia’s natural resources.

Everything, he says, is part of the “mirage”, a word that crops up repeatedly. Just as the government could not resist meddling with the UN mission, so too with the Khmer Rouge tribunal. Although two senior Khmer Rouge leaders were convicted in August, this followed years of interference and a fractious relationship between national and international staff at the hybrid court. In last year’s elections the ruling party lost a large number of seats to a young and re-energised opposition, but Mr Strangio has little to say about whether this really will prove to be a game-changer. Is this the real thing, or another mirage?