… with the help of a few friends
The Cambodian people suffered terribly at the hands of the genocidal Pol Pot (Khmer Rouge) regime from 1975 until 1979. It has been calculated that around 1.7 million Cambodians died as a result of political executions, starvation, and forced labour. Neighbouring Vietnam eventually invaded the country and brought down the regime, occupying the country for a decade. Power eventually fell to the Cambodian People's Party, the CPP (a split from the old Communist Party of Kampuchea), which is still in power today.
This is what the Cambodian People's Party has to say about itself on its official website:
"Since it came into existence, the Cambodian People's Party has maintained its patriotic ideal, performed all kinds of sacrifice for the sake of the supreme interests of the nation and people in order to build up a Cambodia of independence, peace, freedom, democracy, neutrality and social progress. The path chosen for the Cambodian People's Party activities is always being with the side of the interests of the people, taking part in all circumstances both in the case of joyful and those of sadness of the people. During a long period of its history, the Cambodian People's Party had realized its numerous great historical achievements for the nation and people."
And how is this idyll to be achieved? We read further down:
"The main Policies of the Party on the socio-economic fields had been implemented such as the creation of favorable conditions for the reform of the Cambodian economy to the correct economy of markets and having the qualifications to be successively integrated in the economic frame of the world."
That is the gloss. But what is really happening in the country? The new clique that is running the country is enriching itself and its French, British and Swiss speculator friends.
And how does this free market operate? An example was provided recently by an article that appeared in The Guardian (April 26, 2008) under the title, "Country for sale". The introductory blurb to the article reads:
"Almost half of Cambodia has been sold to foreign speculators in the past 18 months ‑ and hundreds of thousands who fled the Khmer Rouge are homeless once more."
The article describes how under the Pol Pot regime hundreds of thousands of people were displaced, many leaving the interior to go and live on the coast, building shacks and making a living from fishing and other activities. While these desperate people were eking out an existence in these conditions, the new elite (in reality recycled Stalinists who had discovered the niceties of the market economy) grabbed everything they could lay their hands on.
As the article explains:
"Shortly after Hun Sen, Cambodia's prime minister, came to power in 1985, frenzied landgrabbing began: influential political allies and wealthy business associates raced to claim land that the Khmer Rouge had seized, gobbling up such large chunks of the cities, forests and paddy fields that Cambodians used to say the rich were eating the country. By 2006, the World Bank estimated that 40,000 had been made homeless in Phnom Penh alone. But, until now, no one had bothered with the coast."
The article gives the stories of several poor individuals. One of them is Sang Run, who lost all his family in Mondulkiri, a place hundreds of miles from the beach he was living on until recently. At the end of 2006 one morning Sang Run was out on his boat fishing. The article explains what happened next:
"He arrived back at 11am to find bulldozers had flattened his home and those of the 229 families who lived beside him. He heard from neighbours that it had happened in an instant. Uniformed men, sent in by governor Say Hak, used electric batons to chase terrified residents from the burning ruins; three of Sang Run's neighbours were knocked unconscious. Village Number One – a mundane name that failed to capture the beauty of its uninterrupted sea views and vegetable gardens that ran to the beach – had been erased. Sang Run heard that a hotel was planned, although no information was given to the people evicted from their homes for a further 18 months."
By the beginning of 2007 rumours started spreading that practically every island in the area was up for grabs. Suddenly a whole series of speculative operations were set in motion. And these operations were directly linked to the credit crunch in the West. Speculators who have been pulling out of New York and London started looking for more lucrative investments. Why settle for a paltry 6% return when you can make 30% or even 100% in places like Cambodia?
Why Cambodia? It is the only country in the world that allows 100% foreign-owned companies to buy land and real estate outright. In the 1990s the CPP introduced a whole series of laws that simply made the country an open playing field for foreign investors. Thanks to all this by March of this year, practically the whole of Cambodia's coasts were in private hands. Throughout the year 2007 one billion pounds sterling found its way into the country, a 1500% increase over the previous four years!
And the poor wretches who had fled the Pol Pot terror, setting up home on these beaches? They were thrown out, some imprisoned, some beaten, and now a further 150,000 people face eviction. Where once stood their rudimentary huts, "home" to them, now we have private beaches, hotels, golf course, or simply land being held by speculators as its value rockets upwards. Some of the new properties are being snatched up by top CPP officials and their friends in the army.
As a result of this frenzy of property speculation and land grabbing, over the past one and a half years the Cambodian economy has grown by an incredible 24%, surely making it the highest growth rate in the world! Meanwhile average annual per capita incomes stand at less than £150 (around $300), i.e. less than one dollar a day.
There you have it! Capitalism definitely works… for some.
