Global Witness, a London, England-based non-profit whose stated purpose is to discover and expose the links between environmental exploitation and human rights abuses, released a report on February 5 called Country for Sale.
The 72-page report details corruption at the highest levels of the Cambodian government, where officials have, over the last 15 years, relinquished almost half of the country's land and natural resources to family, friends, or foreign entities without engaging in the customary bidding process. More important, at least from the average Cambodian's perspective, the monies received for these concessions have, for the most part, disappeared - presumably into the pockets of these ruling elite and their henchmen.
The list of those implicated in this rape of an entire country is too long to go into here, but includes Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF) Commander-in-Chief General Pol Saroeun (left), RCAF Commander General Ouk Koasa, Senator Oknha Ly Yong Phat, and General Meas Sophea, as well as top government officials like Deputy Prime Minister Sok An.
According to Global Witness, or GW, RCAF forces were deployed in resource-rich areas like Stung Treng, Pursat and Preah Vihear, ostensibly to protect said resources. Instead, RCAF leaders, in cooperation with certain resource ministers and members of government, co-opted the land from its rightful owners using a combination of intimidation, threats and coercion.
According to GW, they were aided in their efforts by the Cambodian National Petroleum Authority, a government-controlled regulatory agency administered by Deputy Prime Minister (and Cabinet Minister) Sok An.
Predictably, many of the country's top officials had no comment. Of those few who consented to interviews, some are challenging Global Witness's veracity, with one stating that the organization has "distorted information abut Cambodia for many years".
According to The Guardian, this wholesale sell-off of the country is the result of Westerners fleeing financial markets at the beginning of the current economic meltdown and transferring liquid assets to the East. In Cambodia, these wealth refugees hit a vein of pure gold when the Cambodian ruling party, or CPP, allowed them to form companies and either buy land outright or buy the rights to it on perpetually renewable 99-year leases.
This situation is unheard of even in booming Thailand and Vietnam, where foreigners are limited to minority shareholder status. This situation is improved, at least for rich foreigners, by the fact that the Cambodian government doesn't concern itself with any kind of financial legislation, including taxes on foreign profits, or requiring investors to hold their money in Cambodian currency within the country's banking system.
Money and investing - the buying of entire islands, for example - is one issue. Resource exploitation is quite another. The leases, granted under dubious terms, with no transparency, will ultimately deplete Cambodia's oil, gas, timber and minerals without returning any benefit to Cambodia's people, extending the rule of tyranny in a country that only recently showed signs of emerging from its third-world status as a human rights tragedy.
Global Witness, a non-governmental organization, was forced to close their Phnom Penh office in September 2005 in response to the Cambodian government's pressure tactics. This newest report, on institutionalized corruption and nepotism over resource extraction, extends GW's earlier report of illegal logging, which has netted Cambodia's ruling elite more than $13 million up to 2007. On publication of this latest report, relations between this Cambodian elite and GW staff have never been lower.
In Cambodia, where more than 35 percent of the people live on less than $1 a day - and where one third of the children are on starvation diets and the average life expectancy is less than 60 - a cadre of political, military and economic elite live like royalty on the ill-gotten gains of resource exploitation.
Transparency International, in its report called Corruption Perceptions Index 2006, ranked Cambodia at 152 among 163 countries surveyed for corruption. This puts it 11th from the bottom in corruption reports and statistics, and doesn't even do justice to the real level of corruption, since Cambodian officials no longer talk to outsiders. In spite of this, the government continues to accept foreign aid, which funds nearly half the country's budget.
A typical example of this ongoing graft was covered by GW's October 2008 letter to both U.S. energy conglomerate Chevron and BHP Billiton, the world's largest primary resources company, asking them to reveal how much they paid the Cambodian government for offshore drilling rights. Chevron holds the rights to Block A, from which the IMF predicts annual oil revenues of between $174 million (in 2011) to $1.7 billion (in 2021), after which production will fall off.
Chevron has yet to respond. BHP replied by saying that it, Mitsubishi, and the Cambodian government have established a ‘joint social development fund' to the tune of $2.5 million, but that they had "never made a payment to a Cambodian government official or representative". This, in spite of the fact that BHP admits paying $1 million upfront to the Cambodian government in September of 2006 for its bauxite exploration permit.
According to GW, this and other ‘financial bonuses' - amounting to several million dollars a year - do not appear in either the 2006 or 2007 annual revenue reports from the Cambodian Ministry of Economy and Finance. In addition, every single mine site investigated by GW in 2008 revealed ownership or controlling interest in the names of Cambodia's ruling elite. These sites include at least six of the country's protected areas, established in 1993 via royal decree - a protected status quietly voided in August 2006 to facilitate precisely the kinds of activities currently taking place in Cambodia. In the thickly forested province of Mondulkiri, one of the formerly protected areas, almost one quarter of the area has been surrendered to mining concessions since 2006.
The situation is the same all over the country. In 1995, there were no mining projects in Cambodia. In 2006, the Cambodian Development Council approved $403 million dollars worth of investment aimed at minerals extraction, and approved more than 100 licenses for exploration and extraction, though almost no information is publicly available as to the companies participating and their economic contribution to the Cambodian government.
Oil and gas exploration are even more mired in obfuscation. The Cambodian National Petroleum Authority, or CNPA - created in January of 1998 by another royal decree exempting it from parliamentary oversight - operates at the whim of Prime Minister Hun Sen (left) and his deputy, Sok An. After the 1998 decree, Sen and An quietly removed petroleum regulation safeguards which provided for the equitable and unambiguous allocation of petroleum concessions, creating what GW describes as "a blanket of secrecy" which allows the government to negotiate deals behind closed doors with little accountability. Companies who have bought these concessions may also lack the technical expertise to operate safely, GW notes, creating risks not only to the environment but to any people in the vicinity of such operations.
The bottom line is evident. Once the resources are gone, the wealth pocketed by the ruling Cambodian elite and multinational corporations, the Cambodian people face a future of endless poverty and sickness from residual pollution; a stew which will overtax the country's inadequate medical facilities and condemn many Cambodians to death.
To make matters worse, donor countries (Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Sweden, the UK and the U.S.) and agencies like the EU, the UN, the Asian Development Bank, the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank Group have not used their concerted influence to change the situation.
Donors, for their part, argue that attempting to implement reforms would put the country at risk for even greater dominance by China, its biggest supporter.
While ambassadors nitpick, and the government solidifies its regime of egregious corruption, the Cambodian people watch their land, sea, islands, beaches and resources disappear. As GW observes, the Cambodian government apparently intends to create an unbridgeable gap between the one percent wealthy and 99 percent poor, creating the sort of kleptocratic aristocracy that, in former times, led to the French Revolution and the American Revolutionary War. Cambodia has already suffered from a nightmare civil war in the 1970's and 80's in which an estimated 3 million people were systematically exterminated. With such a violent chapter in recent history, it is concerning to think where any further social conflict might lead.
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