9 posts tagged “phnom penh”

There are certain questions I have never expected to be asked. One of them is: 

"Would you like to go to a cockfight Friday?"

It was the specificity of the question that surprised me last week, when Fong, a mototaxi driver who drives me around Phnom Penh sometimes, asked me. This was not an abstract proposition; if I wished, I could actually attend a cockfight and no one would throw me in jail for my morbid curiosity.

And so, of course, I hopped on Fong's motorbike and went across the Tonle Bassac to an island stuck between that river and the Mekong river. With the city behind us, I prepared myself for a debauched scene. I was not disappointed.

I learned a few things almost immediately after sitting on a wooden bench a few feet from the ring, a padded cement circle underneath a galvanized steel roof propped up by wooden posts. (All with only two walls to shield the scene from the tiny dirt road running alongside it. As if anyone in the neighborhood didn't know why dozens of motorbikes are parked there everyday and men can be heard breathlessly shouting for 2-3 minutes only twice every hour.)

Cockfighting is illegal in many parts of the world for very good reasons. To witness men priming roosters into anger by holding their faces inches from each other, and then to watch them carefully tape spurs to the roosters'legs, is to watch something deeply twisted. The fighters are weighed and hefted and showed to the crowd. The ring's owner steps up and announces the fight, the cocks' "trainers" mist water all over them to cool them off for the action, and then: within three minutes the cruel duel is complete, and one of the roosters is either dead or twitching severely in the dusty dirt ring.

I'll admit the two fights I saw were exciting: What's more viscerally exciting than a fight for survival? But why anyone, save the most inveterate gamblers, would return to the scene day after day is beyond me. (Fong knew most people there, and they knew him.)

It is one thing to choose to eat chicken (or any other animal) and accept the suffering that meat-eating almost necessarily entails. It is another to entertain oneself with, for example, elephants in a circus, when it is very clear that elephants do not like being in circuses. But it's a whole order of magnitude worse to essentially force an animal to kill another in order to take pleasure in and profit from the spectacle.   

But Fong told me cockfighting is more sophisticated than simply sizing up two birds and picking one. The birds are imported from countries' around the world, he said, and each rooster's origin can be surmised from the size and shape of its head. Each national breed, apparently, has different strengths. (American roosters are particularly ferocious and victorious and are occasionally imported, he told me.)

The sport has been around in Cambodia for at least a millenium, probably a Chinese cultural import. Roosters can be seen battling each other, surrounded and egged on by men, in certain bas-reliefs on Angkorean temples. The sport's old age is probably the central reason efforts to outlaw the practice appear futile.

I can't resist one paragraph on the legal status of cockfighting in Cambodia. Conversations with Fong yielded the following bewildering information, which offers a perfect window into Cambodia's "the rule of law."

-Cockfighting is illegal in Cambodia.
-If specific information about the cockfighting ring became public knowledge, the owner of and enthusiasts at
the ring would be very, very unhappy. I learned this after taking out my camera; Fong was sure
to tell the crowd that no photos would appear in The Cambodia Daily. We all had a good laugh.
-Cockfighting is filmed and televised in Cambodia once a week.
-Nearly every bettor/spectator at the ring was a soldier or a policeman. (In civilian clothes -- except
for one soldier who walked into the hut with his rifle during the second duel and began cheering
on the action.)

The lesson here: Cockfighting in Cambodia will not be ending any time soon.

On the first Friday night of each month hundreds of expats (i.e., white people) assemble in a bar named "Elsewhere" to drink and carouse and be seen. In any western city, the scene would be completely unremarkable, a typical gathering of 20- and 30-somethings looking for escape/entertainment/sex/love via the usual social lubricant: alcohol.

But the party is very remarkable, because Elsewhere is not in New York. It is in Phnom Penh -- which must be the NGO capital of Southeast Asia. Nearly everyone at the party is, in some way or another, probably living in Cambodia to try and do good. Watching do-gooders flirt and drink and then jump into and couple in a bar-side pool is odd, to say the least. But when it's all happening in a swank French colonial-style house with a plush yard protected by high walls, and when virtually all the Cambodians in sight are moto-taxi drivers standing just outside the property's gates, the scene grows surreal, even shocking.

It is an informal NGO industry party, a collective release (both therapeutic and indulgent) by a small army of people who must be very frustrated by their line of work. I know I would be.

Name an NGO, it's here: from World Vision International to the World Health Organization to the World Wildlife Federation, from Norwegian People's Aid to Kampuchea for Christ International. Every member of the "UN Family" is represented here, all part of the world's biggest bureaucracy. Hundreds of local and international NGOs you've never heard of compete with missionary zeal (some literally) to remake this broken land, "building capacity" by empowering "local stakeholders." Hundreds of young, educated and unattached westerners move to Cambodia to donate their time to help this country shed its awful recent history.

The only silver lining to thirty years of war is an endless stream of donations flowing into a country that, thanks to the Khmer Rouge and the film "The Killing Fields," has nearly become synonymous with genocide, poverty and "a good cause." Cambodia is full of the world's do-gooders.

It was odd to realize - in Sri Lanka, just after the December 2004 tsunami - that charitable development is an organized industry like any other. Competition for funding is intense and the services provided to the needy must be packaged and sold to donors -- who effectively act as customers buying a product (new primary schools, AIDS prevention, cleft lip operations) they can trust.

To borrow corporate language to describe NGOs is not to denigrate their value. It's only to recognize how NGOs halfway around the world from Americans - who will probably never visit Cambodia - bridge the distance to ensure their survival. Without stable income, how can any organization complete its mission?

But often I wish all of Cambodia's foreign NGOs would lower their overhead costs by pooling their budgets and programs together. Centralized, coordinated infrastructure building! No redundant programs, needless competition and unseemly flag waving! But wait a second - that would essentially turn the NGOs into...a government. And Cambodia already has one of those, and it barely functions.  

The Cambodian government can't stand on its own. Wandering Phnom Penh's quiet streets south of Sihanouk Boulevard, which are lined with the signage of NGO headquarters, it's easy to remember that 50% of the Kingdom of Cambodia's annual budget is provided by foreign governments and international donors such as the World Bank. And it's easy to think that Cambodia has not one government, but hundreds - that each NGO functions as a tiny fiefdom offering piecemeal salves to a people who rarely feel the presence of their country's official government.

Americans are often accused of being geographically ignorant, culturally insensitive and politically naïve. And often, they are guilty of those charges.

But here in Cambodia, where U.S. dollars are accepted everywhere, if not preferred, it’s hard not to feel a bit self-centered as an American.  I can buy, for example, meals, toothpaste and mototaxi rides with greenbacks. Cambodia’s official currency, the riel, functions as coins, although it is only issued as paper notes. 4,000 riel equals $1, so 1,000 riel is a quarter.

Today I exchanged a $100 travelers cheque for $98 in U.S. dollars (less the 2% commission). It’s great: I feel more at home than I should considering I’m almost exactly halfway around the world from home. There is no currency conversion acclimation period, that aggravating time after entering a new country during which you overspend because you don’t know how much you’re spending. So, as an American, I can’t help but like having a wallet full of dollars.

But it’s also very depressing for what it tells me about Cambodia: This country’s economy is, in classic UN parlance, a “Least Developed Country.” What does that mean? It means it’s extremely poor: the 2006 per capita income is $380, according to the World Bank.

This is not quite as bad as it seems, when you convert those dollars for purchasing power parity (i.e., what your money can buy you here). Then per capita income is $2,200, putting Cambodia at 178 out of 233 countries, according to a 2006 CIA report. Well, I guess it is about as bad as it seems. (Interestingly, the U.S. ranks #9, with $44,000 per capita.)

Even more depressing, last year the corruption monitoring group Transparency International said in its 2006 annual report that only 12 countries in the world are more corrupt than Cambodia, ranking the country 151st out of 163 country contestants.

Still, there’s room for hope: Cambodia’s GDP has grown over 10% for the last three years, and the percentage of those officially living in poverty dropped from 47% to 35% between 1994 and 2004. This is nearly miraculous considering the country was essentially in a state of war from 1970 to 1991. (I still cannot get my head around the endless and multifaceted violence that tore this country to shreds during those years.) And although there are no stock or bond markets here, the government is planning to open those in 2009 – and “de-dollarize” the economy soon.

So the fact that I can have a dinner of channa masala with rice and papadam delivered to my newsroom by a Pakistani man and pay a total of $4 is incredible. The same meal, which was top-shelf, would cost about $20 with tip in an American restaurant. People are moving to Phnom Penh from other parts of Asia to open businesses and make a bit of money. This never happened when the Khmer Rouge were in charge in the 70s, and when the Vietnamese occupied the country throughout the 80s.

When the same dinner in this city costs 32,000 riel, I’ll be annoyed that the price has doubled. But I’ll be happy that Cambodia has a currency of its own, and that its economy is a little closer to those of rich countries.

Great glimpse of Buddhism in action today, as I ambled my way around Wat Phnom, the monumental temple which caps Phnom Penh's only hill.

A saffron-robed monk, maybe 25, opening a pack of cigarettes. I spotted the non-attachment infraction through a vihara window, and as I made my way along the temple's outer walkway I had to ask myself: Does he know I know he smokes? We made slightly uncomfortable eye contact after he saw me looking at his hands.

But a more interesting question is: Where does he keep his cigarettes? The robes that color this city so well must have furtive inner pockets...

Reminds me of a restaurant in Himachal Pradesh, the Himalayan Indian state. I was having lunch there last fall when a group of very young Tibetan monks walked in, sat below a TV and switched on a cricket match. Just like most young men in India, they were passionate cricket fans, yelling and cheering at the TV as the match continued.

And then the power went out. The monks were deeply annoyed. Thankfully, power returned in 5 minutes and they could resume their athletic addiction.

Both of the monks' addictions came to mind when I read this messages, spelled out with small stones beneath four bronze Buddha statues, in Cambodia's National Museum this afternoon:

YOU SHOULD ATTAIN CESSATION

But these are better:

YOU SHOULD ABANDON ALL DREAMS
YOU SHOULD KNOW SUFFERINGS
L'IGNORANCE EST L'ENNEMIE DE LA VIE

Clues you are living in a sham democracy:

    -Party headquarters are fortresses, not offices. The ruling Cambodia People's Party's headquarter is about 1/4 a mile from my house. Its wrought-iron walls are 15 feet high. It is a compound. It is also orders of magnitude larger than other parties' headquarters, which are pathetically small. The size of each party's headquarter seems to correspond to how many of its leaders have been convicted of crimes in abstentia or attacked while assembling in protest. (There is an inverse relationship.)

    -One of the two legislative branches is also a veritable fortress and is suspiciously close to the ruling party's headquarters. The Cambodian Senate, founded just 8 years ago, features - I am not joking - a driving range. You can barely see the top of the net behind the walls of the Senate's compound, which are 20 feet tall.

     -Identical signs for the ruling party pop up everywhere, in the oddest of places. It may be that the CPP inspires such extreme popularity that Cambodians feel the need to post the baby blue signs with white lettering everywhere - next to shop signs on busy commercial streets, above the entrances to random side streets in and around the capital, and just about anywhere else they might fit.
      But I'm guessing it has more to do with fear and coercion. Maybe I'm cynical, but when the ruler of a party destroys the forces of his rival with tanks and guns, elections just might not matter. That was exactly ten years ago, and Prime Minister Hun Sen hasn't looked back.

    Cambodia is a parliamentary democracy in name only. My editor calls it a "one-party democracy," which is counter-intuitive at best, a contradiction in terms at worst. How about a "democratic dictatorship"? That captures the country's political mood well, I think: All the trappings of democracy are here - two legislative branches, a judiciary, plenty of media sources, a handful of political parties. But none of them actually matter, and all of them (even the few dessicated opposition parties, which the CPP probably keeps alive for their token value to the "international community") are subservient to the ruling party. The trappings really exist to keep the foreign aid flowing. And it is very, very substantial.
    My favorite factoid about one-eyed Hun Sen, the CPP's leader who eliminated a rival party in a 1997 coup d'etat: He received honorary doctorates from two American institutions of higher learning: the Southern California University for Professional Studies and IOWA Wesleyan College. He is an educated man, all evidence to the contrary. 

Yesterday I visited the most notorious Khmer Rouge prison -- Tuol Sleng, operated in a former Phnom Penh high school  -- and then headed 15km southwest of the city to wander through dozens of "killing fields" collectively called Choeung Ek. It was my first direct contact with the remains of the Khmer Rouge, the regime which can claim the terrible honor of being the world's only ultimate communist revolution. Fortunately for Cambodians, the regime's revolutionary fervor proved its undoing, and the weakened and hallucinatory government was toppled by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979 before the death toll exceeded two million.

The Khmer Rouge, like the Nazis before them, kept detailed, meticulous records of their victims, which were tortured and executed for crimes that most of the time they couldn't even conceive until forced into false confessions. The paper trail - including thousands of black and white photos of the accused - to me indicates the irony of true evil: those engaged in it do not believe they are doing anything wrong. That is the only way my disbelieving mind can comprehend terror and violence enacted on such a vast scale.   

I hated feeling like a tourist as I slowly walked through Tuol Sleng's partitioned classrooms, glancing into brutally small makeshift cells and interrogation rooms that contained torture methods I'd rather not recall here. Technically, I'm not a tourist (I'm here on a business visa with a full-time job), but really, what else can you call a white guy with a camera in Asia shuffling through a museum?

Of course I hated taking pictures, but part of me wanted to remember in clear photographs what I was seeing. I know my natural tendency, perhaps the natural human tendency, is to forget what evil looks like. So I want to randomly encounter the photos to jog my memory, to make myself admit that my life has essentially been a walk in the park. 

As I explored the two sites with other foreigners (and a few Cambodians), I realized that in making these sites so available to the public Cambodians risk typecasting their country as a perpetual victim of both itself and the rest of the world. Obviously, it's better to shine a light on the worst atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. But such public expiation must be painful for the many Cambodians still living who have their own memories of the late 1970s or lost loved ones during that time. Yesterday afternoon, my waitress at a noodle shop saw me reading the Tuol Sleng pamhplet that came with admission. She politely took it from me, saw the reproduced b & w photos of victims and said: "My father went there." No need to ask if he survived: only 7 of 20,000 prisoners did. She walked away after depositing my soup. I ate my lunch.

Americans generally know two things about Cambodia: 1) The Nixon administration bombed the hell out of it, at first secretly, from 1969 to 1973 and 2) The Khmer Rouge regime was really, really bad. And by bad, I mean genocidal. What they don't tend to realize is that the communist victory was in part caused by the U.S. military campaign, although its aim was nearly the exact opposite.

I was thinking about that, how the U.S. is directly (although not completely) responsible for creating the despairing conditions that the Khmer Rouge exploited for political gain, by the time I left the killing fields. Make no mistake, the Khmer Rouge created the soul-less society that allowed and encouraged indiscrimiate murdering. But indirect blame must be apportioned beyond Cambodia for those bloody years, to the Thailand and the UN and the US for doing nothing, and for Vietnam for waiting so long to intervene.

Worst of all, the Khmer Rouge era still hasn't truly ended. Cambodia's current and longtime prime minister was a Khmer Rouge cadre for years. And many of the regime's leaders are still alive here, working in the current government, although some are under house arrest. I don't expect much justice from the joint UN-Cambodian court which will begin trying Khmer Rouge officials later this year, supposedly. It's been delayed for years, likely because those running the country today are so afraid whoever is accused will testify against them. Today, 28 years after the Khmer Rouge collapsed, not one of the regime's leaders has been held accountable in a court of law.   

How does a country come to terms with such an evil recent history when it is only partially buried in the past? All I know is it won't be pretty, no matter how many millions of dollars the UN throws at the problem.

Five days into Cambodia, the method of the country's roads has begun to rise out of their madness. Either that or I'm lulling myself into a false sense of security, my brain's pleasure center getting the best of my supposedly strong survival instincts.

I enjoyed the motorcycle taxi rides immediately, and felt far less guilty for them (no helmet, few traffic rules, and never a working speedometer) when I realized no other viable mode of transport is available to me. If I were a diplomat, I would have an armored black four-door Mercedes sedan with its own dutiful driver. But I am a lowly newspaper reporter (and an intern, at that), so I will settle for the strange pleasures of constant vulnerability.

Finally bought travel insurance yesterday. A better idea than relying on Phnom Penh's generally low traffic speeds (15-35 mph), which are apparently this country's only free form of auto insurance.