After nearly a week of government censure, the US Embassy is still mum on the fallout from Ambassador Carol Rodley’s May 30 speech addressing corruption in Cambodia.
The government has reacted severely to Ms Rodley’s assertion, made at an anti-corruption concert, that the Cambodian government loses $500 million in public funds every year to corruption.
Two ministries and the Cambodian ambassador to London have now issued statements condemning the ambassador’s remarks, while Phnom Penh municipality on Thursday questioned organizers of the Clean Hands anti-corruption concert.
Embassy spokesman John Johnson said Monday that he still had no comment on the reaction to Ms Rodley’s speech or the apparent consequences for the Clean Hands organizers.
Most of the concert’s organizers were equally silent on Monday.
Pact Cambodia Country Director Paul Mason and People’s Center for Development and Peace President Yang Kim Eng both declined to comment. Cambodian Defenders Project Executive Director Sok Sam Oeun said that the government’s response to Ms Rodley’s speech was unfortunate.
CDP helped organize the Clean Hands concert, but Mr Sam Oeun was not personally involved.
“I think that the government reacts too fast…. What she said, it is opinion,” Mr Sam Oeun said of the ambassador’s comments that put a dollar sum on the amount of money lost to the exchequer and the uses to which such money could have been put, including building schools.
Although he would not comment on whether organization working on anti-corruption issues would be intimidated into silence by the government’s strong response to perceived critics, Mr Sam Oeun said that education and public awareness were key to fighting graft.
“We must do campaigns to encourage people to hate corruption,” he said. “If we are too afraid, we cannot fight corruption.”
In the most recent official rebuke, Cambodia’s Ambassador to Britain Hor Nambora, a son of Foreign Minister Hor Namhong who also has another son who is ambassador to Japan, wrote to Ms Rodley on Thursday, stating that, “I am both surprised and disappointed that you should choose to make such inflammatory comments.”
He acknowledged that the position in Cambodia is Ms Rodley’s first as ambassador. “However,” he added, “I am sure you will be familiar with the overriding principle to which diplomats of all countries normally adhere…namely that we seek to maintain neutrality at all costs and refrain from commenting on the internal affairs of the nation to which we have been appointed envoy.”
