Original report from Washington
27 October 2009
[Editor’s note: VOA Khmer recently spoke with specialists in the field of natural resource management in developing countries and learned that Cambodia is not alone in struggling to use natural resources to benefit its citizens. The resource curse, where natural riches fail to help the poor, is a worldwide scourge, the global experts told VOA Khmer in numerous interviews. Below is Part Eight of the original VOA Khmer weekly series, airing Sundays in Cambodia.]
In Cambodia, natural resource transactions and revenues remain hidden from the public, a product of nepotism and patronage systems that have been practiced for generations, experts told VOA Khmer in recent interviews. The public should be the benefactors of national resources like oil and timber, experts said.
Cambodia practices only a façade of democracy, but transparent management, an important part of true democracy, does not exist, Lao Monghay, a researcher at the Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission, said.
The government has a habit of keeping its work obscured to the public, with questionable deals serving the personal interests of officials, their associates and the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, he said.
“It’s a tradition,” he said. “It’s a heritage of the communist regime. The deals benefit their group, their party, and they don’t want the opposition party to know about them. Actually, through the National Assembly, members of parliament must know a lot, except on national security issues.”
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