Canadian Ambassador Donica Pottie remembers her amazement at seeing, shortly after her arrival in August 2004, the street in front of the Royal Palace flooded during a storm and a man walking with difficulty, the water up to his hips. Her previous posts in China and Jordan had not prepared her for Cambodia’s rainy season, she said.
Three years later, the streets of Phnom Penh still flood and traffic is brought to a halt during heavy rains, but the country has seen a great deal of change.
The result, however, is a “mixed picture” of improvement and delays, Pottie said in an interview as she was wrapping up work prior to returning to Canada’s capital, Ottawa and its Department of Foreign l’Affairs and International Trade on Friday.
“There has been progress in terms of the government setting [agricultural] policy and appearing to be implementing that policy,” Pottie said. While the tremendous agricultural production growth of 45 percent in 2005 was due in part to rain that benefited crops, efforts made to improve seed quality and add value to agricultural products also played a role, she added.
The 13.4 percent GDP explosion of 2005, ranking Cambodia’s economy as the world’s fastest growing that year, was made all the more remarkable because most of the growth benefited the country’s poor, Pottie said.
Land grabbing, however, continues to affect people’s living conditions in the countryside as well as in cities, and this problem has yet to be addressed, she added.
When development projects threaten to evict people from their homes, Pottie suggested following the model of Group 78, a community in Phnom Penh’s Tonle Bassac commune that is trying to negotiate with City Hall to find ways to continue living in their neighborhood without blocking development. Group 78’s 116 families have submitted housing development plans for the area prepared by Norton University’s architecture students in the hope of avoiding eviction.
Among other problems not yet addressed, Pottie said, “we don’t appear any closer on the issue of anti-corruption law, let alone [adopting and implementing anti-corruption] regulations…. The lack of access to justice for the poor is an issue and, in some ways, the path may be becoming even more difficult.”
Still, she added, the adoption of domestic violence legislation was an accomplishment. Cambodia also made progress by joining the World Trade Organization in 2004 and sending its first military contingent to take part in UN Peacekeeping efforts, Cambodian deminers deployed in Sudan last year, Pottie said.
The image of Cambodia as “war-torn” is also changing abroad as more tourists visit and return home to tell of a country rebuilding, she said.
Over the last three years, Cambodia has become a tourist destination that no longer only means Angkor and Phnom Penh, Pottie said. Today, the government and tourism professionals promote various locations and activities in the country, from dolphin sighting in Kratie province and daytrips in Ratanakkiri province to the beaches of Sihanoukville, she said.
And tourists are responding. In the case of Canadian visitors, Cambodia’s international airport statistics show that 12,000 Canadians came in 2006, while 15,000 had already entered the country in the first half of 2007, she said.
Pottie also said she was glad that after watching the slow process leading up to the establishment of the Khmer Rouge tribunal, she was able to be here for announcement that five suspects’ names were finally sent to the co-investigating judges on July 18.
“At least I’ve been here long enough to see the first dossiers passed from the co-prosecutors to the co-investigative judges, which has been quite a step forward,” she said.
