Saturday, June 14, 2003
WHERE MONEY TALKS
Cambodian conundrum
Venality strikes like a harsh blow amidst this country's peaceful landscape, says Sunanda K Datta Ray
Published : June 14, 2003
The immigration officer at Phnom Penh airport took his time clearing us. He pored over all the passport pages and stamps, slid them into a groove, scrutinised our photographs and personal details as they loomed up on his computer screen, dawdled over punching the keys, fussed with rubber stamp and pad, then, at last, looked up to demand $ 5.
At first I thought it was a fee. Then I remembered I had just paid $40 - American naturally - as service charge for my wife and me, and that this must be an illegal gratuity.
I suggested that the police might be interested and the official laughed and waved us on. He knew - as I had forgotten in the swell of anger - that the police would gladly compound offence and complaint for a cut.
That's Cambodia, where the men speak softly and smile shyly, where women are pretty and modest and children gurgle with happy laughter. A landscape of verdant fields lost in distant jungle, over which presides the stunning majesty of ancient Hindu and Buddhist temples, matches that mood of tranquillity.
Venality strikes like a harsh blow amidst peaceful slumber. It is a grim reminder of how events can force nature into unnatural courses, and how the lust for power debases humanity.
With Cambodians now gearing up for their third Assembly election on July 27, somebody is shot and killed almost every day. Many of the murders are dismissed as personal, not political, but who is to say where village feuds end and commune rivalry begins?
The musicians who serenade visitors to Cambodia's architectural ruins are disabled victims of the civil war; so are the beggars who cluster round tourist sites. When the Vietnamese army left, there were more than 40,000 landmine victims.
According to the IMF, the average government salary is $28 a month. Yet, apart from war cripples, there is little stark poverty of the kind we are used to.
The boats on Tonle Sap lake, Southeast Asia's largest, look squalid but the thousands of fisherfolk who live in them send their children to school (naturally another boat) and, peering inside a floating home, one can see rows of scrubbed and gleaming pots and pans.
I was not surprised to learn that after visiting Calcutta in the eighties, Hun Sen, now prime minister, had expressed himself touched that a poor country like India could still help Cambodia.
Sam Rainsy, the opposition leader, has promised $100 wage to every government servant which would add at least 30 per cent to the budget. Not to be outdone, the royalist Funcinpec party, a member of the ruling coalition, says wages will go up by "at least $100."
Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party whose blue and white office signs are prominent in every village promises only to raise the average wage to $52 by 2006. The IMF says that official wages have gone up by just eight dollars in eight years.
It sounds niggardly but no one complains because of the parallel economy. A junior functionary in Siem Reap, the town for the fabled early 9th century ruins of Angkor Wat, whizzes around on a motorbike and cultivates a substantial farm on a monthly salary of $12.
Rainsy accuses the government of paying salaries to thousands of ghost soldiers and ghost civil servants. "Then there are the 'zombies', people who really exist but only turn up to work to collect their pay."
He claims that when he was finance minister in the early nineties, Cambodia had 18,000 cars and imported 140,000 tonnes of petroleum.
"Now we have 80,000 cars but, according to the government, we only import 83,000 tonnes." No wonder we saw so many cars without number plates in both Siem Reap and Phnom Peng. They are ghost cars; officially, they don't exist. When the government earned $12.8 million from forestry, illegal operations generated $184.2 million. I was told that if you multiply the number of tourists that the government claims by the entrance fee for Angkor Wat, you have about $18 million.
Yet, officials admit to earning only $ 2 million or $ 3 million from Angkor. Some say that 30 per cent of the $630 million received in annual aid sticks to the fingers through which the money passes.
A young schoolteacher of mixed Chinese and Khmer descent told me that while King Norodom Sihanouk is above blame and Funcinpec is powerless, he holds three things against the CPP.
First, the government indulges illegal Vietnamese settlers. Second, many ministerial families have cornered all business opportunities. And third, the pervasive and deep-seated corruption.
With such a heavy burden, I could not blame too much the little newspaper boy who took my money to buy current editions of the Cambodia Daily and Phnom Penh Post and vanished without trace. Its what war does to young innocence.
TAILPIECE: The American dollar is Cambodia's preferred currency. Apparently, Hun Sen also declared recently that if enough Chinese tourists come, he would give the remimbi similar status.
Such dependence on a foreign currency reminds me of the time when Liberia was reduced to near bankruptcy because - admittedly among other reasons - some enterprising Lebanese businessmen turned up with tin trunks that they packed with all the greenbacks they could lay hands on.
The garishly coloured notes that Liberia had to print were hardly acceptable. Paper money may be unavoidable but it must still carry the imprimatur of the state where it circulates.
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