When a handful of U.S. lawmakers gathered in Washington on Tuesday to talk of cutting America’s aid to Cambodia after this month’s national election should it prove not to be “credible and competitive,” they were right to wonder what good it would do.
Of the more than $1 billion in aid the international community showers on Cambodia every year, less than $80 million comes from the U.S. Of that, lawmakers are thinking of cutting only the small fraction that goes straight to the Cambodian government and its military.
–News Analysis
A country report from the Congressional Research Service just last month spoke of a growing consensus that Washington was finding it ever harder to turn cash into democracy here in the face of a growing flood of easy money from Beijing.
But observers are not counting the U.S. out just yet.
Analysts say that the real damage to Cambodia would not come from the cut in aid money, but from the stigma of being sanctioned by the world’s main superpower.
“The money is small, but how would you feel if a big country decided to sanction you?” asked political analyst Lao Mong Hay.
Government officials have met the talk of aid cuts with studied indifference. But Mr. Mong Hay believes it’s only for show.
“I think the regime would lose credibility and legitimacy around the world, and for a small country that counts,” he said.
At Tuesday’s hearing in Washington, before the U.S. House of Representative’s Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Human Rights Watch Asia advocacy director John Sifton said Prime Minister Hun Sen would listen to a cut in U.S. aid, especially if fellow democracies and multinational donors joined in.
“If Tokyo and Brussels and Paris and London and all the rest of them together make demands about what needs to happen going forward towards the next democratic exercise, if they make credible warning to Hun Sen about the price of not meeting those standards, he will cave,” he said.
“He has shown himself again and again of a psychological profile where, when pushed against the wall, he will deal. He’s not a particularly stable leader, but when pushed he does go back on rationality and doesn’t act crazy to the end of the line.”
Mr. Mong Hay said Boeng Kak lake was the perfect example.
When Senator Lao Meng Khin started filling in the lake in 2008 to lay the ground for a high-end real estate project in central Phnom Penh, the thousands of families slated for forced eviction became the cause celebre among many rights groups. As the evictions progressed, police often met the peaceful protests with boots and batons. The story grabbed regular headlines both here and abroad.
Through it all Mr. Hun Sen remained silent, even when the World Bank—a major investor in land reform projects—quietly decided to freeze all new lending to Cambodian in early 2011. But when news of the freeze finally broke that August, Mr. Hun Sen personally stepped in with a plan that let most of the 700 or so families left keep their homes. Most of them had their long-awaited land titles in hand within months.
And for all the complaints of the undue sway Mr. Hun Sen’s ruling CPP is having over the coming elections, Mr. Mong Hay said U.S. calls for a free and fair poll are already making a difference.
Opposition leader Sam Rainsy remains in self-imposed exile avoiding convictions on charges widely considered politically motivated. Fears of mass voter fraud persist over a registry drawn up by an unreformed National Election Committee packed with former CPP members. And the CPP continues to play on fears of a return to civil war should its nearly three-decade grip on power come to an end on July 28.
But Mr. Mong Hay said there was also less pressure on opposition rallies across the country now than in 2008. And when the Information Ministry recently ordered all radio stations not to broadcast any foreign programming for the full one-month campaign period leading up to election day, it stepped back after swift and severe rebuke from the U.S.
“I think they have taken that pressure into account,” he said.
Kem Ley, a research consultant at the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, also agreed with Human Rights Watch’s Mr. Sifton that big things can have small beginnings in the aid community. “One country can start, but other countries will support,” he said.
In 1998, the year after Mr. Hun Sen used his private army to combat co-Prime Minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh in factional fighting, the U.S. cut all military and direct aid to Cambodia for the next nine years.
Though humanitarian and development assistance kept flowing to non-government groups, recalled Mr. Ley, who was working on some of those very projects at the time, donors like the World Bank and Asian Development Bank also started holding back.
“Many other projects were stopped at the time and the government paid some money back; it was a very hard situation,” he recalled. “Cambodia lost a lot of money and a lot of appropriations at that time, so I think it was not a small thing for Cambodia.”
Within months of the cut, Prince Ranariddh, who had fled Cambodia after the coup, was back in the country and running in the 1998 national election.
Thanks to the sanctions, Mr. Mong Hay said, “Cambodia was put back on the democratic track.”
Though the elections remained flawed, he said it at least saved Cambodia from slipping into pariah status like regional neighbor Burma.
Chan Sophal, former president of the Cambodian Economic Association, said Mr. Hun Sen could again feel pressured into making concessions if the U.S. goes through with the cuts.
Still, he added, “the situation is a little bit different now because of China.”
It’s what the U.S. lawmakers threatening the cuts are afraid of—that Mr. Hun Sen knows China would simply step up to fill the breach.
Carlyle Thayer, a Southeast Asia expert at the Australian Defense Force Academy in Canberra, Australia, said the lawmakers may have good cause for concern—to a point.
“China would likely come on board,” he said. “While China is unlikely to fill all gaps in aid cuts in response to unfair elections, China will act to ensure that the Hun Sen regime is not destabilized.”
And even though the country’s military sits at the center of many of the regime’s alleged rights abuses, he was not convinced the cuts would do much good, either.
“If the U.S. cuts its aid in a blunt fashion, it would only be shooting itself in the foot,” he said. “Cutting aid to the military achieves no immediate purpose towards improving the quality of democracy or human rights. It would also undermine the ability of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces to contribute to U.N. peacekeeping in Africa and the Middle East. The professionalism of the Cambodian armed forces would deteriorate.”
Even so, he said that Mr. Hun Sen would prefer not to take that chance and takes threats of sanctions seriously.
Ever the geopolitical chess player, he said, “Hun Sen does not want to be isolated.”
