CamboNews: Economic Development and Civil War

Yikes. Check this out from a recent Phnom Penh Post. Here’s an excerpt:

Last month, one of Cambodia’s donors in the “Quadripartite Group” (the United Nations Development Program, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and DFID) asked me to give a presentation on the problems of governance in Cambodia and the impact of the Seila (“Foundation Stone”) rural investment planning and Millennium Development Goal/Poverty Reduction agendas on Cambodian governance, corruption, and sustainability.

I told them in simple terms: current approaches are contributing to destabilizing the country, to creating conditions for civil war, to impoverishing the country (in terms of per-capita ownership of national ASSETS), and to promoting corruption.

I don’t think they heard me because they just kept asking what they could do to introduce more foreign capital and technology into Cambodia to make it more “productive.”

I told them that Cambodia is like Humpty Dumpty – the royal egg that fell off a wall, 700 years ago and left scrambled eggs. What it needs to be put back together is for the pieces of governance and society to fit into an overall plan; for there to be some kind of national social glue that holds it together, and for there to be a direction that the country is able to choose to go. These three things are missing, largely because of the foreign agenda and foreign presence, and not really because of the Khmer.