BOOK
REVIEW Curse of the
donor Aid Dependence in
Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines
Democracy by Sophal
Ear
Reviewed by Sebastian Strangio
PHNOM PENH - On November 22, 2011, at
Cambodia's United Nations-backed war crimes court,
one of the former leaders of the Khmer Rouge rose
to address the chamber. In his booming voice,
85-year-old Nuon Chea, the chief ideologue of the
murderous regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975-79,
delivered a speech on the government's early days
in power and its infamous evacuation of the
capital, Phnom Penh.
In particular, he
spoke about the importance placed on
disseminating the party
line around the country, or, as it was translated
into English, the "mainstreaming" of central
directives. The translator's choice of words was
unintentionally comic, making Nuon Chea sound more
like a non-government organization (NGO)
bureaucrat delivering an anodyne address on
"capacity building" than a hardened revolutionary
and alleged mass murderer.
In its own
small way, the translator's lapse into
"development" language symbolized the extent to
which modern Cambodia has been shaped by
international aid, and the flourishing
NGO-industrial complex that has been enabled by
it.
The country today remains one of the
world's most aid-dependent states. Over the past
two decades, it has received billions of dollars
in "development assistance" from foreign
governments, international agencies, and the
hundreds of NGOs spawned by the UN mission of the
early 1990s. The associated jargon of this
enterprise - the "mainstreaming" and
"workshopping" that take place daily in a dozen
plush hotel conference halls - has become a
ubiquitous part of Cambodian civic life.
Cambodia's dependence on foreign aid is
taken for granted by many observers but few have
set out to examine it systematically and in
detail. In a new book, Sophal Ear, an assistant
professor at the US Naval Postgraduate School in
Monterey, California, goes a long way in filling
that gap. In Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How
Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy, based
on extensive field interviews and a handful of
focused case studies, Ear concludes that billions
of aid have done little to improve governance,
promote democracy, or lift the country out of
poverty. As a survivor of the Khmer Rouge who
fled with his family to France and then to the
United States, Ear has watched from a distance as
a ballooning aid influx has undermined Cambodian
democracy and empowered a corrupt and predatory
ruling elite. "Modern Cambodia is a kleptocracy
cum thugocracy," he writes, "and the international
community, led by the UN, is its enabler."
On the surface, the past decade has been a
successful one for Cambodia. Under Hun Sen and the
ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP), the country
has made considerable economic progress. Between
2004 and 2007, Cambodia's gross domestic product
(GDP) grew by more than 10% annually and last year
it expanded nearly 6%. The capital, Phnom Penh,
has been transformed from a sleepy Indochinese
city to a modern capital where cranes and
skyscrapers dot the horizon.
Many
Cambodians have undoubtedly benefited from the
recent growth. But these gains, Ear argues, have
been built on shaky foundations. Impressive GDP
figures have papered over widening income
inequalities. Health indicators continue to
languish. Cambodians still have to bear all the
costs of medical treatment. Remarkably, maternal
mortality has actually worsened since 2000.
Then there is the country's root scourge -
corruption - which encompasses everything from the
bribes extracted from the poor to the systematic
plundering of the country's natural resources by a
ruling elite in cahoots with Asian capital. In the
annual Corruption Perceptions Index issued by
Transparency International, an independent
corruption monitoring organization, Cambodia
perennially flounders in the ranking's bottom
reaches. The country, Ear argues, has seen plenty
of "growth" in recent years, but little
"development".
To prove his point, the
author examines three key Cambodian sectors -
garments, rice, and livestock - that have achieved
varying degrees of success. Governance in Cambodia
has been sufficient for the creation of an
export-geared garment industry, he argues, but it
has inhibited the growth of potentially lucrative
rice and livestock export industries. Cambodia's
economic successes have been attained in spite of
government policies rather than because of them.
More broadly, Ear shows how foreign aid
has distorted Cambodia's economy. He argues aid
has reduced the need for the Cambodian government
to collect taxes, and thereby reduced the
accountability of the state to its citizens and
fostered corruption. In the words of one
expatriate manager, one of several dozen surveyed
by the author, "donors have no real incentive to
curb corruption because they are not held
accountable, nor are their activities very
transparent. Donors are parts of the problem of
corruption in Cambodia."
The country's
five-yearly national elections therefore operate
on the basis of handouts; the CPP, with its deep
pockets and close links to business interests, has
consistently and overwhelmingly won the polls.
Complex aid According to Ear,
Cambodia's aid complex dates back to the early
1990s, when the US$2 billion UN Transitional
Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) presided over the
country's transition from a one-party socialist
state to a pluralist political system. This was
followed by a windfall of international aid, which
implanted a vibrant media and civil society.
Though Cambodia came to be seen as a poster-child
for UN interventions, the author argues that the
UN mission "sowed the seeds of failure for
democracy in Cambodia".
In the volatile
decade that followed, Ear argues that donors made
a fateful trade-off: they pursued political
stability in the hope it would safeguard their
democratic investment. The opposite happened. The
one party most able to ensure stability - the CPP,
under Hun Sen - was thus given a free hand to
vanquish its enemies, benefiting all the while
from the flow of aid.
Despite political
repression and the deterioration of human rights,
Hun Sen remains the donors' "go-to man" in
Cambodia. The country continues to receive an
average of around half a billion dollars annually.
For donors and international agencies, working
through the CPP is often the only way to
effectively implement development projects. The
dependency, in many ways, is mutual. The book
also looks at the local and international
responses to the feared outbreak of avian
influenza in Cambodia in the mid-2000s. According
to Ear, this was a textbook example of the
"pervasive weakness" of Cambodian policy-making -
in particular, the reluctance of the government to
compensate poor poultry farmers for the culling of
their flocks.
The author also indicts
donors who poured in millions to promote bird flu
preparedness, arguing that they were more
interested in preventing a regional outbreak of
the disease than in protecting or educating the
Cambodian poor, who suffered as a result.
The final section of Aid dependence in
Cambodia looks at Cambodian civil society - an
example of the "shallow democracy" implanted by
the UNTAC mission. He argues that Cambodian civil
society remains weak and heavily reliant on
foreign funding. Even its successes, such as the
campaign that forced the release of a handful of
high-profile activists in 2006, rely on pressure
from the outside and do little to alter prevailing
power structures.
"Just as the human
rights activists were arrested with impunity," he
writes of the 2006 case, "they were also released
with impunity." To the extent that it exists,
accountability flows from the prime minister - a
system that has only been strengthened and
legitimized by foreign aid.
Given his
personal history, Ear possesses a close
familiarity with Cambodia's political system and
the distance necessary to analyze it
dispassionately. Indeed, his intimate
understanding of his country underlines one of his
overarching conclusions: namely, that technical
donor solutions, particularly those imposed like
templates from outside, "often fail in the face of
political reality".
Sections of the book
may be overly technical for general readers, and
the author could have further explored the roots
of dependency in Cambodia, which, he notes in
passing, may stretch back to the colonial era.
Nonetheless, Aid dependence in Cambodia
offers valuable lessons not just for
policy-makers working on Cambodia but also for
other countries emerging from conflict or
upheaval.
In the final analysis, Ear
blames Cambodia's rulers for the parlous state of
the country. But he argues convincingly that
donors bear much of the responsibility for letting
this situation arise, having made a strong
commitment to Cambodian institutions. So what is
to be done? Ear offers no easy answers, in large
part because there probably aren't any.
The rise of Chinese influence in Cambodia,
spearheaded by hundreds of millions of dollars
worth of loans, investment and economic aid that
come with no governance "strings" attached, has
only made it more difficult for donors to
encourage reforms.
He concludes that
donors should get tougher on corrupt behavior and
build up civil society as a counterweight to
government cronyism. But without the political
will for a thorough structural reform of the
Cambodian system, any victories will likely be
confined to the margins.
"As long as
Western powers arrive with wads of money to pay,"
he concludes, "Cambodian authorities will be more
than happy to play."
Aid dependence in
Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines
Democracy by Sophal Ear. Columbia University
Press (2012). ISBN-10: 0231161123. US$50, 208
pages.
Sebastian Strangio is a
journalist based in Phnom Penh who covers the
Asia-Pacific and is currently working on a book
about modern Cambodia. He may be reached at
sebastian.strangio@gmail.com.
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