Not that any of the hopeless bureaucrats and politicians of the west will listen....
In some parts of your book, you’ve been very negative about Cambodian future. At the fourth Khmer Studies Forum at Ohio University recently, you mentioned two positive solutions.
I would call them strategies, not solutions. One is that, every year since 1992, donors have given between half a billion and a billion dollars to Cambodians. The prime minister every time promises to clean things up. He never does, but they give the money every year anyway. So the donor nations from all over the world have become facilitators for the government, and I believe that the donor community needs to stand up and tell the government in Cambodia that they are going to withhold anything but humanitarian aid unless the government takes steps to stop seizing homes, requiring bribes paid by school children and hospital patients, and the panoply of issues that Cambodians and foreigners have with the Cambodian government. That’s one possibility.
Second is that the democracy-promotion institutions like the [US-based] National Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute have had strategy in Cambodia of trying to support the political opposition, Sam Rainsy. Well, I think it’s time to acknowledge that Cambodia is not a democracy. And spending your time trying to prop up an opposition politician in a one-party state—the opposition politician now living in Paris in exile—is a wasted strategy. These democracy promotion groups need to stop pretending that Cambodia is a democracy and instead use some of the strategies they used in authoritarian states.
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