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Things Can Only Get Better
by James Michener
Exactly what is the point of writing negative stories? About Cambodia. All the time. At the end of December, a non-Cambodian reader with much experience watching Southeast Asia wrote to the editor of a booming Phnom Penh newspaper, "Is it so hard to write something positive? Look at the real multinationals that have invested here. Telstra, Shell, Caltex, Enterprise Oil, Asia Pacific Breweries and British American Tobacco, just to name a few." Many "Cambodia hands" agree. Essentially because positive thoughts have dominated people's minds ever since King Norodom Sihanouk returned in 1991.
What is seen in the Khmer- and English-language press is a ceaseless reportage of real and imagined mudslinging. A virtual kaleidoscope of balderdash. Right; that's politics. Deserved or not, somebody is supposed to get a tomato in the face. But what of the larger story about long-suffering Cambodia? By what means is Cambodia going to be rehabilitated? By its bootstraps, with the help of far-sighted investors from ASEAN and beyond. That's how. As the hit tune of the 1970s proclaimed, "That's all there is."
"[A Thammasat University political scientist] said people in the provinces have been told for the last 30 years that things would get better but they never did." This statement appeared in January on the front page of the Bangkok Post. Actually a lot of things are better in the Thai provinces than they were 30 years ago. Roads, public health, education and telecommunications, for example. Of course you have to ask the political scientist what he meant when he said "things would get better." What things?
Presumably, he is talking about the creation of individual economic surplus, i.e., private wealth. As a sort of road map for where Thailand has been, the Post printed a year-end 1996 economic review. During the seven years from 1988 through 1994 alone, poverty decreased from 29.9% of the population to 14.3. (Thai writers, incidentally, wrote the income distribution section of the review. They hint that a fair amount of credit goes to Chuan Leekpai and his party's philosophy of "spreading prosperity from the center to the countryside.")
So why does the patient--Cambodia--appear ill? Is the patient ill? Look at the patient's medical history. Look where the patient has been, even since 1988. Those (largely foreign) writers who keep generating negative news fall into the trap that many writers did at the end of the Vietnam War. The trap was called Cultural Arrogance. What makes this disease so bad is that it is hard to throw off unless you spend years in meditation or remain a foreign guest forever. The quickest way, however, is throwing up your hands and saying, "OK, I give up; it's their country anyway." In other words, take the medicine called acceptance.
Many Cambodian headlines would have you believe that there isn't a good Cambodian, both prime ministers included, anywhere in the kingdom. "Why is it," a staffer in the ministry of tourism stated last year, "that the whole time I was in Paris the news I got my hands on about home was bad? Because all editors were stalking negative stories that could be sensationalized with reams of paper and gallons of ink. Besides, well-behaved stories did not sell newspapers." Quite a perceptive observation for a young man who was studying English in France!
It's a cliché but many take the long view that Rome wasn't built in a day, that rivers don't change their courses overnight. More than a century ago American writer Mark Twain wrote that the Mississippi, a river of countless horseshoe bends, was shortening itself by many kilometers each year. Tongue in cheek, Twain estimated that the Mississippi would be mere kilometers long within a few centuries. Of course it's still there, all 3,780 kilometers of it. But it's easier to navigate today with modern piloting aids.
Figuratively speaking, it's only natural that the prince and the second prime minister recurrently point toes--it's in their job descriptions. Assessing navigation-by-saber-rattling, a political minuet perfected by the balancing, bowing Cambodians ages ago, it's wise to recall the didactic observation by Vang Pao, the Hmong general long-supported by Washington but ultimately outmaneuvered by the Pathet Lao in 1975. "War is difficult, peace is hell," he said, exhausted but convincingly, as the curtain fell on the conflict.
In any form, foreign investment itself is bound to attract the sharpest and most wily souls. Can investment be managed some other way, bringing out the best rather than the least worst in Cambodia? (In his infinite understanding of the Khmer mind, Sihanouk, during Supreme National Council days, astutely--and humbly--remarked that he was the "least worst" of the political alternatives.) Probably not, unless the risk can be taken that a Cambodian Allende might come to power.
Change being the only permanent feature of growth and development, the road to tomorrow is like crossing an uncharted sea. But change need not be detrimental. Besides, the mise-en-scene is set for ASEAN to carry Cambodia into its stabilizing embrace, meaning modern navigation aids are coming. Things can only get better.