Kampot Update

The old market, a fine bit of architecture, was built in the late sixties but was gutted by fire just a couple years after it was completed and lay abandoned until recently. The above was published in my March Bayon Pearnik article. I caught some heavy flack because my history of the old market was way off. I was first told the market was built in 1904. That sounded way too early and considering where the info came from that date seemed suspect. It came  from a Brit and his wife, who were both in their sixties. They owned a bar called Bonkers; it wasn’t all that successful and they both in succession drank themselves to death, so you see what I mean. Later when I read that it was built in the early sixties, I ran with it. However, our amateur historian kinda snarled at me as he searched out the net and found a aerial picture of Kampot from the thirties which clearly shows the market. Still, hard as he tried, he couldn’t find a definitive date for its opening or a time or reason for its abandonment. I expect/hope it’ll all be clear when our new museum is open. There must be some locals who know about it. Will keep you posted.

Cambodia’s troubles kept it derelict for a long time until rehabilitation began about a year ago. It is now filling up, though mostly on the outside, none of the inner stalls have been rented yet. And in a curious juxtaposition, it’s bringing Khmer owned and oriented businesses to the riverfront. Until the market opened nearly all the businesses on the river were western owned or catered to westerners. In contrast, most of the new shops are clothing stores typical of everywhere in the city, but there’s also a tailor, a fancy “Mans Hairdresser” shop, tour/travel agents and a mini-mart. I expected more of the souvenir, specialty traveler clothing type to inhabit the market, but no, at least not yet.

At the front of the market facing the river are two restaurants that provide a study in contrasts. One is western styled with a thatched roof covering part of the large space, very nice plantings and a pleasant ambiance. The other is a Khmer style fast food place specializing in deep fried snacks, including chicken feet and meatballs and assorted other foods on a stick. The atmosphere is strictly bare-bones, cheap-plastic-chairs and -stools. It’s open only for late afternoon and early evening snacks and does a booming business though rent is high and margins are low so it remains to be seen how successful it will be.

There are lots of people around, the place is hopping, with new guest houses, restaurants and bars opening up regularly. I don’t mind having all those tourists around, especially knowing it’ll quiet down considerably in a couple months. There’s also been some very fine restorations of historic buildings. Kampot is a very old town, the country’s first port, and it’s old district is relatively well preserved.

The former governor’s mansion at the south end of the river promenade is being converted to a museum which they plan to make free. They’ve removed the air-conditioners to save in maintenance costs. Doing that has allowed them to open up and aerate the building: it’s looking good. Just a bit further south the riverfront park has been extended another 200 meters almost to the Aquatic Sports Center. I wouldn’t be surprised if they intend to extend it even further. That area is largely undeveloped but the way things are going, I expect it won’t stay that way long, especially with a new park on the river.

 The government has been going all out laying asphalt on nearly all the city’s thoroughfares. They evidently think westerners will be impressed by lots of nice pavement. They’ve improved all the park strips and traffic circles, so what else is there? There’s no real park the way we think of them in the west, but Cambodians don’t seem to grasp the concept of large natural green spaces with miniforests, ponds, grassy areas, picnic tables, and sports fields and courts. As a result, all they know about improving the city is to lay more pavement. In my neighborhood, just north of new bridge road, they’re going all out paving in concrete. I guess since it requires no special equipment – as asphalt does - only lots of labor which is cheap, it’s easier to do it that way.

As a measure of where Kampot is going, as well as Cambodia as a whole, I’ll recount my land experience. I purchased a 3000 meter plot 3 kilometers from town in 2008 in the last throes of the late property boom for $4.60 per square meter - $14,000. In between the time the contract was signed, but before the hard title was ready about 6 weeks later, the owners were offered $20,000.

Within a year or so, I decided the country gentleman/farmer life was not for me. At the age of 67 I couldn’t stand having my mind constantly boggled by house construction and maintenance, working the land and hiring local help; it was more than I could bear. However, by then the market had crashed and the land was barely worth $2/meter - $6000, so I was forced to wait to try to sell it. In the beginning of 2011, I offered it at $9000 and found a buyer, who as it turned out, couldn’t finish the payments. Last year I had two different people who really wanted it at $12,000 but didn’t have the money.

This year I offered it at $5/meter and still no buyer: everybody agreed that it was a nice piece of land and the price was fair but buying land is not like buying a cheap cellphone, it has to be the right person. About a month ago a real estate guy who I’d talked to 2 years before called and asked if the land was still available and what I wanted for it: I said $15,000 - $5/meter. He showed it to friends (who didn’t know I had land for sale) and said I wanted $6/meter! The longer I wait the more it’s worth, pretty soon it’ll be $50/meter. Well, probably not. Anyway, I’d just as soon sell it now at its current price before the next crash. It might not happen for a couple years, but I’d rather not take the chance. Meanwhile, it’s looking up for Kampot and Cambo.

On a sad and disturbing note, a naked young French tourist washed up on the river about a kilometer from the guest house she was staying in. By various accounts the police have a suspect or suspects, but we all hope the got the real culprit(s) and not just fingered the first bad guy who came along in order to have a quick resolution to the case. While that type of thing can happen anywhere and Cambo is far safer for us than a lot of other places in the world, it’s no less heart-rending and a cause for concern.  

Overload and Disconnect: About three years ago Highway 3 between Kampot and Sre Ambel, where it connects to Highway 4, was an excellent road, but once the reconstruction of route 3 between Phnom Penh and Kampot was finished, it became an alternate route for big trucks heading from the capital to Sihanoukville. As a consequence, until recent patching was done, it had become a shambles. It’s 20 kilometers farther going via Kampot, but evidently, considering the tolls on Highway 4, it must still be cheaper.

The reconstruction of route 3, as all the national roads that I’m aware of, was done with a layer of bitumen tar between two layers of gravel. The lower layer of gravel is rolled and packed down, the tar is added on top then a second layer of gravel is just tossed on top with the action of vehicles running over it creating a road surface. That works fine for a road used by light vehicles, though even there, potholes will develop quickly. As long as they are patched as soon as they appear the road can last quite a long time. That type of surface is used because it’s a lot cheaper than higher-quality asphalt pavement. If you’re driving on route 3 you’ll notice that the pavement on the bridges is asphalt, making a much smoother ride than the rest of the roadway which is bitumen. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s standard practice.

It’s a completely different story when overloaded trucks, especially giant ones, use the road. In that case, within a few months large sections of the surface are trashed. Cambodian truck drivers have an obsession with getting as much as they can on their rig, regularly loading 10 tons of material on a truck designed for 2 tons. Just recently in my neighborhood one such truck packed high with 50 kilo sacks of salt backed over a newly installed concrete drainage pipe buried under 10 or 15 cm of dirt and caved it right in. To tell you the truth I didn’t feel all that sorry for the trucker as I watched him as he was emptying most of the load so he could get the truck back on the road, and then, of course, having to reload the whole thing. I also wouldn’t sympathize all that much with him when his rig breaks down from overloading… though I guess even stupid and/or inconsiderate people deserve sympathy sometimes.

Overloading trucks actually doesn’t save all that much money when you factor in expensive repairs, highway breakdowns - which cost a lot more to fix - and the extra fuel needed to carry an excessive load. Probably the worst offenders are the rock trucks used in construction. The owners regularly raise up the sides 20 or 30 cm and then pile the rock as high as they can. They are so heavy they can barely do 40 kph at full throttle with the engine screaming. What’s more, some of the trucks that ply our roads are so large to begin with, even before their capacity has been expanded, that they would be too heavy to be allowed on American roads, so obviously pure disaster for roads here made of a thin layer of bitumen. However, even the new roads constructed of more durable asphalt are breaking up after only a year or so.

With no firm regulations and no enforcement of weight limits, the authorities will probably spend as much money repairing roads as building them. The only completely legitimate way to enforce weight limits would be by installing truck scales, not very likely here in the near future. On the other hand, it isn’t that hard to determine the weight of some materials, like a cubic meter of rock, and then measure the truck’s capacity to determine how much weight it’s carrying. The biggest trucks aren’t necessarily the worst offenders since it’s weight per axle that counts. Some of those, which are never seen in America, have triple rear axles and double  front steering axles. Along with the rock trucks, there are lots of giant stake bed trucks, with only single rear axles, loaded to the top with heavy materials.

The big truck problem is compounded in Kampot by the location of the access road to the new bridge - finished in 2010 - passing by the main entry to the public market. Public markets are notoriously congested so having lots of miscellaneous, extraneous traffic including giant trucks with their belching fumes, noisy engines and driver’s tendency to excessive horn blowing, doesn’t do much for the neighborhood’s ambiance or safety and is really not the way you design a city.

I have a degree in urban studies and have spent extensive mental energy mulling over planning concepts all my life so the problem was obvious to me from the start, but in this case the disconnect is so clear that several people with no such background have mentioned that problem to me. The planners faced a serious, though not intractable, dilemma since there was no easy alternative; that is, there was no other street they could’ve used that didn’t require purchasing expensive urban land. Except for the need to purchase almost 200 meters of right-of-way the street one block north would’ve been perfect since it’s largely fronted by industrial uses, which since they already tend to be noisy and polluting, mesh perfectly with highways. When developing greenfields, essentially blank slates, planners are free to design at will, but when dealing with the city ‘as built’, they are seriously constrained. In this case neither the bridge nor the market are going to be moved to accommodate good planning.

Ultimately, the only answer in this situation would be a bypass road or in the distant future a freeway. You never want through traffic, especially when that includes large trucks, going through a town or congested area. Until recently there was so little traffic in Cambodia that that didn’t matter much. Besides, the country was lucky to have any decent roads let alone modern limited-access highways.

One change likely to make a difference soon is the completion of the Phnom Penh – Sihanoukville rail line. Toll Holdings, an Australian company that has the concession to run the operation, has run a test train over the track and for some time has run a train to the Kampot Cement plant which is about halfway from the capital to Kampot. Bulk cargo is always cheaper and less damaging to the environment to transport via rail compared to road, so hopefully most heavy freight now busting up our highways will switch to rail. Also hopefully, they won’t wait long to start passenger service. The tracks are built for 80 kph trains and it’s only 150 kilometers from PP to KP so even with several stops it shouldn’t take more than 2/12 or 3 hours to make the run. Won’t that be great.

Also, bus services have improved immensely since I first started making the trip 6 years ago. Back then the trip took six hours or more, considering the condition of the roads, the extra distance of going through Kep (at the time the southern leg of highway 3 was almost impossible for large buses to negotiate) the road from the highway to Kep was a 15 kph dirt road, and the bridge 10 k’s east of Kampot was under construction. Now there are two big-bus lines going direct which cuts the trip down to 3 1/2 hours, and two ‘luxury’ minibus lines offering a very fast and comfortable ride. Still, nothing compares with a train ride where you can easily get out of your seat and walk around. Trains are also far superior scenically since the tracks go through the countryside as opposed to buses passing by lots of trashy roadside buildings, not to mention, here in Cambodia, honest-to-goodness roadside trash.

Blackjack Scams in Phnom Penh

There’s been a long running thread on a popular Cambodia forum about Filipino blackjack scammers. Well, it isn’t just Filipinos and it’s been happening for a long time. The following is the write-up of my experience with blackjack scams back in 1992 during my first overseas trip, with updates and background added. I covered 8 Asian countries in one year and started in Thailand.

My first day in Chiang Mai, Thailand's second city, I stopped to rest and peruse on one of my exploratory walks and Rudy approaches. When traveling, one of the things I most like to do to get the feel of a new place is pound the pavement: I walk endlessly. This makes you available for a lot of potential happenings. Rudy starts with, You Italian? ...America, what a coincidence, I was born in Hawaii. He’s 63, was raised in Indonesia, but his story, background, is confusing and hard to figure. After a few minutes of light conversation he asks if I have any important engagements otherwise he’ll take me to meet his nephew, have a few drinks. He also has a young niece I’d like to meet. The way he sweet-talked the young girl in the shared taxi on the way to the nephew’s, I thought his story of having nineteen kids with six wives might actually be true.

The sweet young thing I’d like to meet makes a cameo appearance, says hello and disappears. Rico, his nephew, who looks to be in his mid-thirties, has a nice house in a residential part of the city. He's conversant in English and we spend maybe 20 minutes talking about recycling, the work I’d just left, amongst other general topics. Then after our perfunctory bit of small talking he explains he’s a pit boss for a chain of casinos, but to make a little side money he’s looking for a partner to learn his program for winning at blackjack. If I can do it he’ll stake me and I’ll get a 25% cut. He says there are lots of Japanese and Chinese high rollers who practically enjoy losing their money. He assures me I can make $25,000 in one sitting and he’s persistent about showing me how it works, in spite of my repeated attempts to decline the invite.

Rico’s dealing; in the real game that I’m training for, the guy that likes to lose his money bankrolls the dealer. I’m sitting across from Rico playing against the house. Rico gives me hand signals or shows me the cards… if you don’t get it on the first show, touch your eyebrow. He likes the way I shuffle, I talk about playing blackjack as a teenager (I almost always lost). Yes, he thinks I can learn his program and explains that he can’t use an oriental, they would be suspect, whereas I would make a perfect cover. He says he tried a black American guy once but he got greedy and demanded an unfair 50%. I don’t know Rico, this is kind of sudden, I’ll have to get back to you.

Meanwhile I’m visualizing my throat being cut by one of those Japanese or Chinese patsies who love to lose their money should they become apprised of what’s happening. Rico then repeats a story about his wife being in the hospital and he’s in dire need of $3000 to get her out. He goes on to say that there’s a guy in town who has $5000 to lose, he can set up a game for that afternoon and we can make it a practice run. Rico, I’ll have to think about it.

Rudy tried mightily, but unsuccessfully, to get me to go with Rico’s scam, meanwhile there is somewhere else he really wants to take me and it turns out to be a working class brothel. He says the girls are between 15 and 19 and while Asians do tend to look young in European eyes a couple of them looked decidedly younger. At one point in our conversation over beers at the knocking shop he kisses his cross, explaining he’s a Catholic, and a short time later he’s telling me that the owner gives him first crack at the virgins, but says he’s not interested and jokes about them being too small. (Fascinating, isn’t it, how people can profess their faith one minute and then almost instantly become the antithesis of piety?)

It was my first brothel experience - being very drunk it was hard to resist - but set the tone, with very few succeeding ones, of it clearly and definitely not being my bag. He made the whole brothel thing sound so commonplace – with me being totally new to prevailing attitudes towards the Asian sex scene – I asked him if he thought it would be okay for his own daughters to be prostitutes. Oh no, they don’t have to, he replied. As I was leaving he asked me for 100 baht ($4), said he was broke… big talker, small time beggar.

Eight months later I was in the Philippines in Bagio, a sweet little town in the mountains north of Manila. When I arrived it was overcast and rainy, and being at 5000 feet - 1700 meters - I got chilled and that, compounded by my trying to travel too far too fast, thus stressing my system out, got me a serious cold and I spent several days recovering.

As I began to perk up I took a little walk and Robert pulls up to begin a conversation. He seems like a decent guy and I haven’t had the opportunity to relate much so I agree to sit down for a cup of coffee. He’s traveled some around Southeast Asia and says one of his sisters is about to go to the US to study. She and his mother would both like to meet me, talk and ask questions about America. On the way we meet up with a cousin and head for his house. He offers me a cup of tea and I spot some medicine - a bottle of J & B - and offer myself a shot. No sign of sister or mother.

After a few minutes of small talk he tells me that he works in a casino and he’s looking for a partner to win some money in a private blackjack game. Seems like there are lots of Japanese and other gamblers who like to lose their money and I can make $2000 in an afternoon. Haven’t I heard this one before? I try to head him off but he insists on seeing if I can learn his method. His hand signals for showing me the cards were almost identical to the ones used by Rico back in Thailand. He had the same rap about me being a good cover, that he couldn’t use an Oriental, the sucker would suspect, and even the same story about working with a black American guy who got greedy and demanded 50% instead of 25%.

He too had a female relative - this time a sister - who needed medical attention that very day and a loser who could be called over to part with his money in two hours. He was persistent in spite of my refusals so I told him about Rico back in Thailand, that he offered me $25,000 in a sitting, that I still wasn’t interested, that I didn’t feel well and had to go. But you haven’t met my sister. Maybe another time, I responded. He then asked me for 100 pesos ($4) to help towards the sister’s (20,000 peso) operation. Fortunately I only had 50 pesos showing (I usually kept most bigger bills in a secret pocket I had sewn into my pants) and figured that wasn’t an unreasonable price to pay for a cup of tea and a shot of J & B. The cousin accompanied me out and offered to sell me a $2 fake gold ring for $200 - to raise money for the operation, of course. Sorry pal, but I only have barely enough money to travel with. Then he tried for an $80 loan with the ring as collateral. Sorry.

The similarity of the two scams was uncanny. I mentioned my experience to a traveler friend who then related a story of an Australian guy he’d met who’d actually gone for a similar scam only to discover there was more collusion working against him than with him. Besides, knowing the cards doesn’t stop them from sometimes going against you; assuming that is, that they were dealt honestly. He narrowly escaped being taken for a bundle of money – they’d escorted him to an ATM, but he’d successfully made a run for it - and had to leave town quick. I kept wondering if there was a book in print with a chapter that described in utmost detail how to bilk an unsuspecting tourist in a blackjack money scam. Did my ‘friends’, 1500 miles apart, in two different countries, read it and study it to the point where they could repeat it almost verbatim? A year later back in Manila while hanging out watching the passing throng, a young guy came by. He introduced himself, started small talk and soon seemed eager, too eager, to have me meet his family. This isn’t one of those blackjack scams is it? I asked him. He left without a goodbye.

One reason I nearly always lost playing blackjack with friends as a teenager was that some were adept at cheating. That experience permanently soured me from a taste for gambling. After that discovery I ceased to gamble my cigarette money (25 cents a pack in the mid-fifties – same as Cambo today) and let the losers bum fags off me. Even if there was no cheating involved, I wasn’t happy about being broke and having to beg smokes from the others. Five or six years later, in 1961, I stopped at a casino in Las Vegas on a cross country trip and lost a dollar, maybe two in a one-arm bandit. It was a full 43 years later, while visiting mom in the fogey home, that I next entered a casino. Twice a month they’d fill up the minibus with anyone who wanted to go to the Indian casino and gave us all a $10 credit to start us off. I’d quickly lose that and maybe another ten of my own money before I stopped.

Unlike in 1960 when you had to drop your coin in the slot and then pull down a large lever to get the lemons to roll, which at least took several seconds, now you have your prepaid card inserted and press a button and presto, in a matter of 2 seconds you’ve lost your money. Well, it is possible to win, but the longer you play, the less likely winning becomes since the house has to have its cut, else how could they pay for those grand palaces they build? All the above is just to say that I’m not a gambler and absolutely not a scammer and wouldn’t go for the blackjack scam under any circumstances, even if I believed it was a money-maker.

However, it was fascinating to watch the casino scene for an hour or so, since, on my own accord, casinos are the last place you’ll ever find me: my interest is less than nil. I was amazed watching a woman playing two slot machines at the same time, I guess she didn’t want to wait one second for the play to finish so needed two machines to keep her occupied.

We were there in the daytime and I appreciated the fact that casinos in Minnesota aren’t allowed to serve alcoholic beverages. Alcohol is the grease that helps losers part with their money. They start drinking to relax and ease tension, then when they start losing bad, it gives them the courage to go-for-broke to try to win back their losses. My brother, who spent a few years in Reno, told me an anecdote about ultimate losers who, after maxing out their credit or debit cards would go to an appliance store – some are open all night – and purchase a TV or whatever (you can still use a card for purchases after you can no longer get cash out of it) and then take it nearby to a pawn shop and off it for 25 or 50 cents on the dollar. You know, last chance to win it all back, except by then the guy is already desperate, which means he takes excessive chances, which then makes winning almost impossible.

I did something very unkind while wheeling mom around (she could walk but not too far). We stopped to watch the action at a high-stakes blackjack table – minimum bet $25 – off the walkway behind a waist high partition. The table was full, the dealer had a 5 showing. For those of you unfamiliar with blackjack, that means he has to take a hit and since most cards are high numbers chances are good he has a high card underneath and will go over 21 and lose. All the players on the table had stayed in after seeing the dealer’s dicey card. One had an ace showing, another, a young gal, had doubled down with two picture cards. She had a big stack of chips on the bet; at least several hundred if not thousands of dollars at stake. When it came to the dealer showing his cards, he had a very small number underneath. He then started turning cards up and when he’d gotten to five, the maximum, he had 21 points, meaning everybody had lost. When I saw the sad look on his face, indicating he actually felt sorry for the table of big losers, I broke out into one of my 90 decibel guffaws, I couldn’t help myself. You could’ve heard me halfway across the casino. The gal who’d lost bad gave me the evil eye, but hell, easy come easy go, right? You don’t gamble unless you don’t mind losing, right?

They call it gaming now, not gambling. You know, it’s a game, just for fun, same as playing Monopoly or Scrabble. I could see it as entertainment if it didn’t cost so much and wreck so many lives and families. In fact, I love a friendly poker game with a maximum 25 or 50 cent bet. Drink and smoke, laugh and joke for half the night and watch the cards unfold. Can’t lose enough to make a difference, can’t win enough to care, just a lot of fun.

 Cambostan

Cambodia Under Fire

Cambodia, which held the rotating chair of Asean in 2012, hosted international fora in November which President Obama attended, but even though he and Hun Sen held a one-on-one meeting and stood next to each other for group photos, no picture of the PM was posted on the White House web site and there were no smiles between the two, Obama maintaining a cool distance. This was meant to show America’s displeasure at many of the things happening in Cambodia. The Asean meetings also came after both the European Parliament and Australian Senate called Cambodia to account for the direction it’s been taking regarding human rights and fair elections.

The PM’s response was that they were misinformed and the media was exaggerating. That, of course, is what a lot of politicians would say under fire, and while there has clearly been some serious backsliding on Cambodia’s part, I agree that some of the complaints do seem to be out of proportion to reality. Nonetheless, since Cambodia gets a substantial part – 10%/$300 million - of its annual budget from the international community, it would behoove the PM to take the complaints more seriously.

The complainants are asking that the country hold free and fair elections, that an independent election commission be appointed, that political prisoners be released, that Sam Rainsy, now in self-imposed exile to avoid a long prison term, be allowed to take part in the upcoming national election and that the country put an end to land grabbing and displacement.

Independent election commissions are an obvious starting-point for honest elections. It’s too bad that’s not the way things are done in the US. In 2000, Republican Katherine Harris of Florida was both Secretary of State, the office that runs elections, and GW Bush’s campaign manager. She did everything in her power to skew the vote in Bush’s favor. An clean election would have easily made Gore the winner. Similarly, four years later Ohio Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell simultaneously ran the Ohio election and Bush’s campaign there. He used every dirty trick in the book to throw the election to Bush. So yes it’d be great if Cambodia had an independent electoral commission, but the US is hardly one to complain until it gets its own house in order.

Independence of the electoral commission is far preferred but what’s important is the outcome; that is, a free and fair election. I’ve now lived in Cambodia for 11 years and been around for four, maybe five national elections. I don’t remember one declared not free and fair by international observers, so I’m not sure where that complaint is coming from. There have been minor problems but nothing that would’ve countered the wide lead the PM’s Cambodian People’s Party had in every election, at least in the last 11 years. The CPP has consistently received a minimum 55% of the vote.

Elections in Cambodia are held on two levels. The national parliament and the communes, of which there are about 1700 that cover the entire country, both urban and rural. Phnom Penh, for instance, has about 90 communes. Almost all of the communes are run by the CPP as a result of efficient gerrymandering. In case you’re not aware of the genesis of that term, the word is a combination of Gerry, the name of a governor of Massachusetts in the early 19^th century and a salamander, since the electoral districts Gerry designed to favor his own party looked like salamanders.

The CPP also has overwhelming control of the parliament for that reason and a divided opposition – for a long time there were two opposition parties - which makes it easier for the ruling party to keep control. A similar situation exists in the UK: The party with the most seats in parliament almost never has a majority of the vote… Margaret Thatcher never got past about 40% of the vote. Still, even with some level of intimidation, a partisan electoral commission and control of most of the media by the ruling party, the opposition received about 45% of the vote in the last election and, at least as far as I remember, it was deemed free and fair by international observers.

The government’s case against Sam Rainsy revolves around two factors. As part of a campaign ploy he pulled up temporary border posts which the government and Vietnam were using to try to demarcate the border between the two; thus destroying public property. As part of that action he accused the PM of selling out Cambodia, essentially treason. For that he received an 11 year sentence. That was way out of line in a Western perspective, but accusing the PM of treason was beyond the pale in a Cambodian context. In fact, the PM and his party are regularly criticized by the opposition.

Sam Rainsy has never come close to challenging the PM in the polls and personally I’m happy about that. In general he’s a bit more conservative on social issues and rails against corruption. On the latter, he might be better than the CPP on tackling that issue, but that’s hard to say since Cambodia is hopelessly corrupt, scoring 157 out of 174 countries on Transparency International’s corruption perception index, and so probably everybody is in the game. On the former, I’m personally not fond of conservatism in any form. The real problem I have with him is that his strongest campaign rhetoric involves stoking antagonism against the one million or so ethnic Vietnamese living here, regularly using a derogatory term for them. Pulling up the border posts was part of that push against the Viets.

After all the terrible changes that Cambodia has gone through the last thing it needs is ethnic strife. In general terms, the Khmer are largely distrustful and disdainful of the Vietnamese in spite of them driving Pol Pot out of power and saving possibly hundreds of thousands of lives in the process. At the same time, on a personal level they have no problem getting along with the Vietnamese, making friends and just being the pleasant, easy going people that they are.

While ethnic tension and violence and even insurrection can be found in many of the surrounding countries, there is absolutely none of that in Cambodia. The country has about 500,000 Muslims, but there isn’t the barest hint that they are the least bit dissatisfied with their lives here.

Cambodia is the easily the most welcoming of foreigners in the region and maybe the world. Anybody from anywhere in the world who can make their way to Cambodia can stay as long as they like and if they wish, open a business with no interference from the government (baksheesh excluded) or need of a local partner. Moreover, in a poll last year, 78% said they thought their country was going in the right direction: By any standard that is an amazing number.

The 400,000 people who’ve been displaced over the past 10 years by urban development, dam building and rural land concessions probably aren’t so happy about the country’s direction, but overall Cambodia is growing economically at a good clip, with new construction everywhere including impressive infrastructure improvements and a lot of people’s lives are being enhanced.

A lot of urban development in Phnom Penh has been happening on filled-in lakes and wetlands and on formerly public park spaces, all of which I consider a terrible mistake, almost a crime against the people. Nevertheless, I don’t doubt that the government honestly sees that development as a plus for the city. There’s unfortunately very little transparency in how those projects are planned or who the land is sold off to, and precious little citizen input. For a country that’s relatively new to democracy, that’s discouraging but not surprising.

There are a lot of dams being built to supply electricity that is currently sorely inadequate, with blackouts now happening on a daily basis in the capital. A large majority of power now consumed in Cambodia comes from neighbors Vietnam and Thailand. Hydropower has a great many advantages over burning fossil fuels, which the country is also pursuing in the form of new coal plants in Sihanoukville. Hydropower does have a great drawback here in that little can be produced in dry season when it’s hottest and thus when it’s needed most. It also is displacing large numbers of people and in some cases is or will be causing serious damage to the country’s fisheries – Cambodians get 80% of their protein from fish.

Most of those drawbacks could be ameliorated by building dams mostly in the mountains and possibly making them smaller. Most river fish are found in slow moving flatland rivers, very few in fast moving mountain streams, so, for instance, the Kamchey dam in the mountains near Kampot will have little impact on local fisheries. There also are few people who need to be relocated from mountainous areas. Nonetheless, a lot of countries have in the past and/or are still in the present making the same (what I consider to be) mistakes, so, once again, it’s difficult to fault the government in that regard.

Some 10% of Cambodia’s total land mass has been leased to local and foreign companies for industrial agro-plantations and giant tourist projects. Concessions have been granted in national parks and wildlife preserves as well as degraded forest land. In many if not most cases that has involved displacement of local villagers. While most people being displaced receive some type of compensation, much of it is inadequate. Considering how endemic corruption is here, it seems likely many public officials involved in the granting of concessions are filling their pockets, still, as in the above, I don’t doubt they also believe it’s good for the country. In a few years time Cambodia will be producing a lot of rubber, sugar cane, acacia and palm oil from the many plantations now under development. I would have done it differently, distributing land to thousands of villagers instead of a few large corporations, as better for the country in the long run. And for sure, I would never trash national parks and wildlife refuges with plantations.

In almost all of the above cases, people affected have demonstrated and protested to varying degrees of success. The government is not keen on the above stemming in part from a protest that went violent back in 2002 with disastrous consequences for the country. In that event a rumor, that was later learned to be unfounded, circulated that a popular young Thai soap actress had claimed Angkor Wat belonged to Thailand and made other disparaging remarks about Khmer people. What started as a protest mostly involving college students resulted in the torching of several Thai owned businesses as well as the Thai embassy. In the latter case the Thai ambassador had to flee over a wall to save himself. The government was forced to pay damages of about $30 million and offer profuse apologies. While many Thai companies have important stakes in the economy, and Thailand was funding Cambodian roads near the border at the time of the riots, it’s true that many Thais look down on the Khmer.

After that embarrassing event the government has tried to put a lid on protests and demonstrations with varying degrees of success. In spite of their efforts at suppression, protests are a regular occurrence as are work actions by unionized garment workers. It is not that different in America where people wishing to demonstrate at political party conventions or international meetings are shunted off to ‘free speech zones’ which often wind up to be paved areas surrounded by chain-link fences under freeways and far from the venues, thus far from where anybody can see them or hear of their grievances. In other cases, peaceful protesters have been pepper sprayed just for the fun of it.

 Finally, one of the international community’s demands is the freeing of political prisoners. Last October Mam Sonando, 72-year-old owner of one of the few independent radio stations and frequent government critic was given a 20 year sentence on fabricated charges: supposedly he tried to organize 400 village families, who were protesting the loss of their land to a concession, to secede from Cambodia and form their own nation. Fortunately the local foreign language press – we have two English language dailies here - and international broadcasters like the BBC, which has an FM outlet in Phnom Penh, have been left to do their work unhindered. Also last fall about 20 people protesting the loss of their land in an urban development were given 2 year sentences, but then were released a month or so later. Locking up dissident voices is a very worrying trend; maybe they are trying to emulate China, their great friend and benefactor where lots of people are routinely put away for simple political advocacy. Still, the most political prisoners anybody can come up with in Cambodia is 13. Even one is too much, but compare that with Burma where even after all the thousands of prisoners who’ve been released, there are still, by various estimates between 125 and 1000 political prisoners who remain behind bars.

The Western media usually categorize the PM as a strongman, sometimes a dictator. A dictator he is not as they maintain control through violence, incarceration and murder of opponents. The strongman appellation is fair. Some years ago he decided that betting on sports was bad for the country and literally within two days, hundreds of legal betting parlors were shut down and thousands lost their jobs. Also a while ago, a property owner wanted to develop a large lot in a valuable and central location that was occupied by an NGO serving homeless kids. Though not part of any legal requirement, he offered to build a new facility for the NGO outside the city’s central core, but the facility, which has a lot of powerful friends, objected saying they needed to be where the kids were. The PM intervened on the NGOs side and the property owner had to eat his development plans.

Cambodia is hardly a model democracy, but in spite of some serious backsliding and worrying developments, it’s still in pretty good shape. The country’s development plans, which are causing much displacement and misery, and which I personally find very troubling, are well within conventional development models; in other words, heartily approved by the business/financial community. While the international political community needs to keep up the human rights pressure, Cambodia’s situation needs to be kept in perspective.

Bokor Update and Chugging Away

Cambodians have a bad habit of leaving their vehicle engines running for no apparent or valid reason….

But first a Bokor update.

Rumors have been swirling around Kampot that the casino at Bokor is about to close. It wouldn’t make much sense to do that now with high season nearly upon us, but a cursory observation would indicate that closing might well be in the offing, or at least that it wouldn’t be hard to understand why. I went up with a couple of friends at the beginning of November; one wanted to stop in the casino. It was a Wednesday afternoon at 2 pm and there were about ten cars in the 300 car parking lot. Inside, staff outnumbered gamblers about 10 to 1. Out of 6 fancy automated roulette tables my friend was the only player. When we passed by on our way home at about 4 pm there were three tour buses and a few more cars, but still nowhere near enough to sustain such a big operation.

One of the guys was up at Bokor last April at New Year’s just after the casino was opened for business. The popular parts of the plateau were crowded with people but the casino was deserted. Khmers are not allowed to gamble - though simple bribes to doormen or pretending to be Philippino will often get them in - so it’s technically dependent on expats or tourists.

Their disappointment with casino traffic is probably why they instituted a fee for entering the park; 10,000r for a passenger car. What’s more they are vigilant about checking whether you’ve paid once to get up top. When they first opened it was free, now they’re scrounging for whatever nickels and dimes they can scare up. One of the guys spent some time talking to a land salesman at the scale model. They’re asking $227,000 for a 600 square meter building lot, $454,000 for 1300 square meters – nearly $400 per meter. We’re talking real money here. Of course they say sales are good, but I have my doubts. Nonetheless, new access roads are being carved into the scrub trees all over the plateau.

The giant restaurant building seating at least 300 people that sits almost right on top of the waterfall has been outfitted with tables and chairs, but wasn’t open yet. Wouldn’t have mattered much, on that Wednesday afternoon in November there weren’t 100 visitors, maybe not even 50, roaming around the whole plateau.

One other curious note is that while a lot of work has taken place on rebuilding the old hotel - almost all the walls had been replastered, for instance - there was no work taking place when we were there, though it was a weekday and no holiday that I could think of. Another indicator that things aren’t going as well as expected?

I can’t say I wish them luck, because I’d rather they go broke, but that’s just my take on what a national park should be. With all the millions being spent, there’s not been anything spent on building trails through the mostly intact beautiful old forests or maintaining and signing the ones that already exist.

Once again – fourth time now – the ocean was obscured from view by the nasty weather up there. Maybe it’s just my bad luck. One friend had seen the ocean and he’d only been there once before. At home that evening, there was a string of lightning strikes in town, one of which took out the power and then caused it to go on and off for about three hours. The darkness was convenient for seeing the lightning up on the hill. For about 30 minutes it was nearly continuous, for another hour it was flashing several times a minute. Another not very great selling point for buying land up there.

*****

Chugging Away. As I was out and about in Phnom Penh some time ago I walked by a big SUV idling away at a noodle shop while its owner was having a leisurely bowl. I am making an assumption there, maybe he had popped in for a minute just as I was walking by, but leaving vehicles running, sometimes for relatively long times is very common in Cambodia.

That bad habit is not just unnecessary but positively harmful for the environment. There’s only one legitimate reason to keep a vehicle running for more than 20 or 30 seconds when it’s not going somewhere: that is, if its electrical system has a problem and it won’t start next time you turn the key. If the battery is weak or the starter isn’t functioning properly then it makes sense to keep it chugging away until you need to be moving again. If all relevant systems are in good shape then starting an already warm vehicle results in virtually no wear on the machinery. In a frigid place the engine will get more wear in the first few seconds after starting, until the oil warms up and gets distributed, then it would in hours of use. In the tropics even that type of wear is negligible. In the above mentioned case, it was a nearly new luxury car so it’s very unlikely to have had a starting problem.

Meanwhile, it’s a total waste of fuel and results in air and sound pollution. It also adds to global warming and even warming of the immediate surroundings. Walk by a car with its engine running and even on the hottest day it’ll feel even hotter to be near.  

As I remember it was owned by someone connected to the government. Many of those people get free petrol: 50 liters a month for the higher mucky-mucks; 20 for lesser factotums. That would have made it easier to discount the cost of fuel, though anyone who can afford $100,000+ for a new Lexus or Land Rover wouldn’t be worried about the cost of running it. At any rate lots of owners of old jalopy trucks who obviously don’t have money to burn do the same and they, unfortunately, make a lot more pollution.

Evidently the cost of petrol here is so low, even at $1.25 per liter – about $4.70 per US gallon – that the expense of running the engine needlessly does not enter the equation. This ‘cheap’ gas is headed the way of the dodo bird, what with car ownership and other fossil fuel uses growing very fast in a context of the world’s finite resources. In the two behemoth developing nations, China and India, which together house 40% of world population, and a lot of other countries - even including Cambodia - fossil energy consumption is expanding at a torrid rate. No matter how many new sources are found, we are going to run out. When the crunch comes and prices skyrocket – visualize $5 per liter – those giant vehicles that crowd Phnom Penh’s streets will be nearly useless.

Vietnam and Thailand and quite a few other countries in the region and around the world, heavily subsidize petrol as a benefit to their people. It makes their industry more competitive and many citizen’s lives a bit easier but it’s a very dangerous practice since it’s nearly impossible to take that benefit away once people have gotten used to it. When gas prices rise substantially those governments find themselves in untenable situations. Indonesia, for instance, now spends 20% of its budget on fuel subsidies instead of that money being available for the country’s many pressing problems. In Jordan, as I’m penning this, there are riots over the government’s plan to end fuel subsidies. A few months ago it was Nigeria which was going through turmoil over the end of cheap fuel.

Besides, a large part of the subsidies go to the middle class and rich who really don’t need help with fuel costs. Many people in that situation drive more – using more fuel, making more pollution, etc. - than they would otherwise because it’s so cheap. Governments have fallen after trying to increase prices to world levels. Cambodia also spends a lot on fuel subsidies but since they only go to the favored few in the government, that cost may be sustainable for a while longer. It makes sense for governments to subsidize food, for instance, since people aren’t going to eat more just because it’s cheaper, unless they’ve been hungry in the past, and that’s not a problem. Health care, education; of course, no better way to spend money than on a healthy, educated population. But fuel, a big mistake.

In a similar vein, last hot season, during one of our regular power outages, a friend spotted the family next door pouring out of their apartment and into their black SUV to take advantage of the air-conditioner. Some spendy chillin’ that; running a 6-liter V-8 to keep a handful of people cool. The patriarch was a military man so he too probably was on the free-fuel dole. (I know a guy back in the states who does something similar though on a much smaller scale. He won’t get into his car on a hot day until he’s had it running long enough to let the air-con chill it down. How long could it take for the air-conditioner in a new mid-level car to get the temperature down to a comfortable level? 20 seconds? There isn’t a lot of fuel, pollution or cost involved, but still waste is waste.)

It’s important to note that the car was black. A couple issues back this mag had an aerial picture of the parking lot at the PM’s office building on Russian Boulevard. It looked like a sea of big black SUVs. There’s a movement afoot in America to ban black cars (freaky, extremist, eco-radicals, no doubt) which sounds at first to be a bit wacky, but consider; it costs more to air-con a black car than a white one. It’s no secret that black absorbs heat: put your hand on a white car in the sun and it feels hot; try to do same on a black car and you’ll burn your hand. Luxury cars are well insulated but that doesn’t change the fact that some of that heat gets through and so it still costs more to air-con than a white car. Just going from white to black adds 2% to fuel cost.

There are many variables in calculating the cost of vehicle air con so it’s hard to pinpoint a firm number. Among the variables is car speed, outside temperature and color. If you’ve got the windows open at highway speeds, wind drag cancels out some of the savings from not using the air-con. At slow in-town speeds there’s not much air drag.

 Here are few factoids: Air-con adds on average 10 to 15% to the cost of operating the vehicle. It costs the same to air-condition an average size car as it does to keep it going at 35mph – about 55kph. Using air-con in very small vehicles, like a 1300cc Tico for instance, increases cost by about 50%. A study of German cars showed they used between 2.75 liters and 4.25 liters more fuel per 100 kilometers of travel.   

I try to avoid air-conditioning because I simply don’t like it but there are times when it is important. When I first started teaching in Phnom Penh in 2001 I worked at Norton U. where the classrooms were not yet air-conditioned. It was hell trying to talk over street noise – car horns, screaming kids, weddings, etc. - and several large fans blasting away at high speed. Air-con is the only reasonable alternative in that situation. I also get tired of keeping the windows open when I’m driving down the highway with all the noise and wind, so I turn it on here and there.

I understand that some people can’t deal with the heat, but with the planet hotting up it’d be good to try to get used to it. On the other hand, the planet’s gonna fry anyway, so why bother, just turn up the air-con.

Pull Tabs and Alcohol Advertising

Just before Cambodia beer made its recent debut, the government declared that all alcohol advertising should be banned, to improve road safety among other things. They quickly realized that that would be impractical and amount to a drastic change since beer posters and banners are ubiquitous and seemingly are just about the only decoration the typical local Khmer restaurant or bar has available.

But at least they figured they could prohibit those pull tab beer promotions, except that Cambodia beer had just come online with one and, well, since they had no warning of the change it didn’t seem right to stop them. So okay, that’ll be the last pull tab promotion. Now several months later the pull tab ban has been forgotten and all three major beer brands are competing with those same promotions. I personally have a strong distaste for them for two reasons; they’re not likely to be recycled and they’re a bloody nuisance.

As to the former, while it’s true that they are very small, when you’re talking about hundreds of millions of them, it starts to add up. Regarding the nuisance part, while thinking about this month’s topic I saw a bar girl cut her finger on one. Okay, a good point to make but hostesses can be ditzy so not necessarily a strong argument against pull tabs. Then a few days later as I was formulating this article in my mind, I cut my own finger. Yes, I am approaching geezerhood and I have been getting clumsy of late – reaching for things which fly out in all directions instead of being held in my normally firm grip – but still, is it really a good idea to have millions of sharp little objects floating around the environment? The tab which bit me was being crunched up so I could put it back into a can and recycle it. I used to put them back in while there was still beer in the can – otherwise they often don’t get recycled – but they would sometimes come back out into my mug, so I gave up on that one.

Pull tabs were banned in Oregon in the early seventies so the nasty little buggers are deep in my consciousness. Digression: I realize I mention Oregon a lot in these articles, but it is a special place: Oregon is to the US as Cambodia is to southeast Asia; a small, friendly, easy going, low key place to live or visit. Now I understand that few readers of this article have any interest at all in going to America, but if you do, skip New York, Florida and California, the big three tourist magnets, and head to Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, you’ll be very pleasantly surprised. If you have to do the big three, at least make a little time to get off the beaten path.

One of the great things about Oregon is its 100% public coastline; there are no private beaches and no private land within the riparian zone; it’s the only state that I’m aware of where that is true. One of things people most like to do on the coast is walk the beaches. Before the ban people were getting their feet cut up by pull tabs strewn around the sand and that was the impetus behind their prohibition.

Personally, I find it hard to imagine how pull tab prizes would encourage people to drink, only possibly change their brand. It’s also debatable exactly how much advertising of alcohol affects the total amount consumed. Alcohol has been around as long as Western civilization: I never tire of pointing out that Jesus’ first miracle involved changing water into wine. Supplies were depleted at the wedding at Cana at least partly because of  Jesus’ presence, since a lot of extra guests came to see Him… He figured it was important to let the celebration continue. To let the good times keep rolling.

I don’t think my own intake is affected by advertising, though it’s hard to say what deep, deep subliminal messages were planted in my brain from an early age. I certainly find it difficult to go a day without at least a couple of beers; the only exception being if I’ve got a raging hangover from the night before. Alcohol is a great mellower, relaxer, easer of tension and obliterator of inhibitions. It’s also been shown to be benign healthwise when done in moderation. Studies have shown that people who have two drinks a day live longer than total teetotalers. No need to mention that serious souses don’t live all that long.

This brings up another ‘big’ question. Does the moderate imbiber live longer in spite of drink or because of it? Is that moderate amount of alcohol still a negative for your body but its evils counterweighted by the good it does to your mental attitude? In a perfect world where everybody is high and happy on life, would there no longer be a market for alcohol? Would people no longer need an escape? Would drinking become history?

Clearly, no need to worry about that now, the insanity and inanity of life demands palliative care – at least it does for me and most of you out there reading this. What would be good to know is the impact of advertising on individual consumption and the total number of imbibers.

The subject of banning alcohol advertising in Cambodia was brought up again at the beginning of October in a conference organized by the Ministry of Information, National Road Safety Committee and World Health Organization. An official from the Ministry of Public Works and Transport who attended was quoted as saying that “…traffic accidents, injuries and fatalities can be prevented through… control over alcohol advertisements promoting drinking.” They no longer seek to ban all advertising but want to include ‘don’t drive drunk’ messages on labels and prohibit all audio and text on TV beer ads. Another person interviewed for the article said reducing drunk driving is more a changing of attitudes towards it and better enforcement, which I tend to agree with.

Nevertheless, advertising has to have an effect: when a young malleable mind sees posters or TV ads showing happy smiling beer drinkers with beautiful girls (or boys) at their elbows, it has to make an impression. When my son was a teenager he referred to drinking as ‘romantic’. That’s exactly the image that alcohol purveyors seek to implant.

On the topic of the impact of advertising, let me refer again to a study done on young children a few years back. Three- to five-year-old kids were given a MacDonald’s hamburger in a Mac wrapper and an identical one in a plain wrapper. They did the same for fries and baby carrots, which MacDonald’s doesn’t sell. In every case, by a wide margin, the kids said the food in the Mac wrapper tasted better.

So the next time you have a hankering for a Big Mac, think about it, are you craving it because you’re hungry and it tastes good, or because you subconsciously expect it to make you happy? Or help you find the girl or boy of your dreams? Contentment? Enlightenment? Considering what goes into them – lettuce soaked in a chemical bath to keep it looking fresh far longer than it ought to – and how they’re made, taste is probably not your true motivator.

I’m quite certain ads have no effect on my alcohol habit, or whether I drive under the influence, but there are a lot of impressionable people out there and it’s not hard to imagine that a lot of them are encouraged to drink through advertising; we’re all looking for a good time, no? What’s more, though a couple of beers a day may be perfectly okay, we all know how easy it is to go overboard. Even many of us who don’t get flat out, laying-in-the-gutter drunk, still have a tendency to find it hard to stop at the benign 2-drink level. Let’s face it, every time you wake up weak, woozy, headachy from an over-the-top bout with alcohol the night before, you have tortured your body, put it through the ringer. Sure it was great for your head - you had a jolly old time - but it was equally bad for your body.

There are many aspects that have given alcohol its well-deserved bad rep. The accidents, the slobbering, puking, drunkenness, the craziness, the violence, the diseases, the addiction are all undeniably points of negativity and danger. Americans thought it was so evil back in the early 20^th century they banned it. Conservative Christians, Hindus and Muslims are all down on boozin’. (I’m convinced the reason why Arabs in particular and Muslims in general are so contentious, quick to anger and prone to indulge in fundamentalism is the prohibition of alcohol, sex and drugs along with the heavy consumption of strong coffee. Under that regimen, I’d be freaking mad too.)

On the above basis, I think all adverts should be banned. People could easily find it without marketing if they’re into it, but there’s no good reason for encouraging people to drink more than they otherwise would. There’s also no good reason to allow advertising to romanticize it by drawing alluring but ultimately false impressions of drinking that makes it seem so acceptable and benign without also insuring that people understand the reality, the dark side.

My other major complaint with alcohol ads in Cambodia simply has to do with esthetics. It totally uglifies the country to have ubiquitous beer posters marring the countryside and city entertainment districts. At one point I thought of taking a nighttime picture of Street 136, but then when I looked I realized all you would see was lighted beer signs. Tacky, trashy, ugly as sin is what comes to mind.

Instead of interesting, artistic, catchy logos individually designed and created for each bar, you have a line of beer signs all in similar colors since all three main brews are very close in the impression they give. And what do the bar owners get for trashing the visual scene? They get a free sign in which the top half is beer ad and in the other half the Khmer name is much larger than the English; by law the Khmer is supposed to be three times the size of the English. When making your own sign you can fudge on that requirement. The part that means anything to the bar’s promotion comes down to about a third of the sign’s area. For that they save a big $50; the cost of a sign without the beer ad top. They pay tens of thousands of dollars to create a really nice looking bar and then allow it to be totally tackified to save a lousy fifty bucks. But maybe people don’t realize how cheap they are; well now you know.

I can see, for instance, a bar having a small lighted sign saying which beer it has on tap, but coasters, bar mats, umbrellas, posters, banners, large lighted signs and more? I can understand why local funky Khmer establishments would think a free sign is a great thing because they work on a really small margin and besides have no idea how hideous their beer-poster décor looks. They have no clue of how tasteless it is to cover the surface of all your walls with beer ads. But a westerner? C’mon man, ambiance, style, individuality and taste are important.

All that ranting aside, if you’re one of the many bar-owner friends of mine who’ve succumbed to the lure of a free sign, forgive me for being so indelicate. I realize it’s not always that easy to be different, to buck the trend since most people are doing it. Please don’t take it personally, it’s just part of venting my loathing of advertising in general. Money isn’t the root of all evil, advertising is.

While I can’t imagine that beer advertising will ever be completely banned in Cambodia, esthetically it would be a wonderful gift for Phnom Penh and the whole country.

China Says Jump; Cambodia Asks, How High?

Two months after the last Asean – Association of Southeast Asian Nations – meeting, Cambodia is still catching flak for torpedoing a joint statement that would have referenced the territorial dispute in the South China Sea between China and the Philippines and Vietnam; Malaysia and Brunei also have competing claims but they’ve maintained a lower profile. Vietnam and the Philippines wanted the closing statement to ask all parties to adhere to a code of conduct and abide by basic rules of the sea. It was the first time in the Association’s 45 year history that no closing communiqué was agreed upon.

Since Cambodia holds the rotating chair this year it did its damnedest to prevent any language not approved by Beijing. At one point it went so far as to cut off the microphone of the Philippine representative to prevent him from speaking. In response to Philippine complaints which were still being voiced long after the meeting, the Cambodian ambassador to that country wrote a scathing article accusing the Philippines of ‘dirty politics’ and saying it was trying to sabotage the meeting by injecting outside matters into it. That prompted the Philippine government to summon the ambassador for a dressing down – to register its own complaint at the Cambodian ambassador’s decidedly undiplomatic tone. The ambassador never showed up. With great surprise and raised eyebrows all around, Cambodia declared a few days later that he didn’t show because he’d already been reassigned. In typical Cambodian fashion the easiest way to deal with the situation was to avoid it with a tall tale nobody would ever believe. At least, in Cambodian reality, the confrontation was avoided by a little diplomatic sleight-of-hand.

It’s not hard to understand Cambodia’s extreme deference to China’s political needs as it’s the country’s foremost donor and financier. Think roads, railroads, bridges, dams, irrigation; the money keeps poring in. The dams are generally BOT, or build, operate for a long period and then transfer to the government. The rest are concessionary loans; that is, loans at lower than market interest, though considering how flush China is, the interest rates are higher than they need to be or should be. Nonetheless, there’s a lot of money flowing in and it’s made a clear difference in Cambodia’s development. The latest tranche, announced September 4, amounted to $523 million, five hundred of which is loans for unspecified infrastructure projects, a cool $23 mil grant for the PM to use at his discretion.

Sin Serey, Cambodia’s ambassador to Singapore, in response to an opinion piece in Thai newspaper The Nation accusing Cambo of being too closely aligned with China is quoted as saying, “Cambodia, a country with great civilization and culture for thousands of years, is not a Banana Republic. Cambodia has not been and will never be kowtowing to any country.” Of course not! However, according to Prime Minister Wen Jaibao, China will ‘closely coordinate’ with Cambo on the upcoming Asean meeting in November. But hey, that’s not kowtowing, only coordinating. He also thanked Cambodia for helping China maintain friendly relations with the Asean countries. Cambodia insists (paraphrasing from the same article) it’s not taking sides but actually taking a principled stand in urging members to settle their differences with China bilaterally, exactly China’s position. Well, now, if you were a 900 pound gorilla would you want to take on a pack of hungry hyenas one at a time or all together?

The dispute centers around China’s claim to the entire South China Sea encompassing about 2 million square kilometers, including areas that are very close, within figurative spitting distance, to the other countries but far from China, more than 2000 kilometers from the nearest mainland Chinese territory. Proximity doesn’t always infer right of ownership, but it’s a strong determining factor nonetheless. China’s claim goes back to the fifties when it drew a line around the South China Sea and said this is ours based on historical precedents. This would be akin to Mexico claiming California based on historical ownership while ignoring current US possession of more than 150 years. Or Spain claiming the same because they were there first, or why not go all the way back to Native Americans making the same claim?

There are three areas of concern regarding potential Chinese ownership of the whole South China Sea: first is possession of natural resources, supposedly there’s a lot of oil under the sea; two is fishing rights, in a very densely populated part of the world, of utmost importance; three, and most worrying for the international community is sea transport; about half of all oil shipments in the world and a commensurate amount of other trade passes through the South China Sea. It wasn’t till the seventies during China’s Cultural Revolution that serious claims were made in the area.

The current dispute with Japan over the Senkaku Islands – Daioyu in Chinese - in the East China sea is also instructive. Japan took over control of the uninhabited islands in 1895 when nobody was there and no other claims of sovereignty existed. It wasn’t until 1971, 76 years after Japan first took over, that China made its first claim or mentioned them at all. What is Japan supposed to do? take a deep bow and say, We’re sorry we’ve occupied your islands for more than a century, if it hurts your feelings we’ll pack up tomorrow.

Recent Chinese aggressiveness stems from three factors; a longtime inferiority complex and resulting quest for revenge regarding perceived past wrongs done to them, a desire on the part of the government to stoke the fires of nationalism to help it maintain control and divert people’s attention from the deficiencies of autocratic government, and a heady power that comes from their newfound economic prowess and wealth.

Chinese are still furious about the way they were humiliated by the British more than 160 years ago in the Opium Wars. They are rightly proud of their long history and rich culture but still don’t grasp how their xenophobia, feeling of superiority and aloofness back then kept them from changing and adapting to the modern world and thus made them vulnerable to relatively very small forces from the outside. Japan too made them feel small and inadequate in its easy takeover of parts of the country and the ruthless way Chinese people were treated. Now that they are borderline rich and powerful, they feel the need for revenge.

Still Japan is an important trading partner, to the tune of $350 billion annually, and investor and employer of many Chinese so it would seem to behoove China to minimize conflict with Japan. Recent news articles have implicated China in organizing the anti-Japan protests, which have turned violent and caused many Japanese to reconsider their commitment to China, all the while the state media counsel calm and non-violence. In Qingdao on September 15, rioters/looters spent more than four hours causing $30 million damage to a Japanese-Chinese joint venture supermarket. If they were Tibetans, Uighers or Falun Gong practitioners peacefully demonstrating they’d have their heads bashed in and taken to jail in a wink and a nod, but somehow the police in one of China’s largest cities stood helpless for 4 hours while a large supermarket was being ransacked.

Do they expect to humiliate Japan by forcing them to abandon the islands and still expect that country to maintain its massive industrial presence there? Maybe they feel so rich and powerful they can forego that economic relationship in spite of the great loss to both economies.

Let me relate an incident from my own experience while living in China in the mid-nineties. For three days Chinese TV news headlined a story about a few shipping containers from a recycler in New York that were sold as recycled scrap paper but actually were garbage. The question, continually repeated by news anchors in an insulted and angry tone was, Why is America sending us its garbage?

Having spent quite a few years in a cooperative recycling business in Portland I can offer a little background. Scrap paper is almost worthless. We received a token $5 per ton for it and the brokers received their shipping costs but not much more. We recycled it in spite of the loss because we believed in the cause. It all went to China where their low cost of labor allowed them to pick through it to pull out the more valuable stuff before recycling the rest for low quality uses. Because it was mixed paper people often mistook it for garbage, or would carelessly toss garbage in with it. Knowing the waste paper business and the probable lackadaisical attitude towards recycling in New York at the time, it wouldn’t be surprising if some or even a lot of garbage got mixed with the paper. It also wouldn’t be surprising if an unscrupulous outfit purposely misrepresenting their garbage as paper to save the cost of disposal and receive money for their ‘paper’. So a few containers worth a few hundred dollars sent by a private company became America Sending China its Garbage as an outrage and humiliation.

My Chinese wife, who I brought to America a year or so later, was amazed to see Made in China everywhere. So at the same time the Chinese media was casting America in the most derogatory terms as a means of stoking nationalism, it was making bundles of money while taking over the American market. I haven’t been back to China in 16 years but everything I hear tells me nothing really has changed.

For 16 years and more the US has been complaining about China’s manipulation of its currency to make their goods artificially cost less and for the same length of time China has promised to change and proceeded with very small adjustments just barely enough to temporarily appease the US and its other trading partners but not enough to change the reality on the ground. During that time it has amassed $3 trillion worth of foreign reserves, mostly in US dollars. This all came about because of capitalism’s love of doing business with a state which maintains firm control of its workers; forbidding unions or protests or any kind of dissention from the party line.

China for its part has taken the ball and run with it. With a combination of smarts and hard work in addition to currency and market manipulation and repression of workers, it has become too powerful not to want to flex its muscles and take what it considers its rightful place in the world, with threats of force if necessary.

China is now a communist country in name only. When I lived there my wife was a teacher in a minority kids’ boarding school. The teachers, administrators, students and maintenance staff all lived at the school in a gated complex. Health care and all social benefits were enjoyed by all. The maintenance staff lived in quite mean circumstances compared to the headmaster, but nothing like the gulf between the two levels today. At one point I met an important fellow who I was told had a lot of money. He rode a bicycle like everyone else because he didn’t want to flaunt his wealth. That’s communism. All that is finished, people are now on their own; the grave to cradle safety net - the Iron Rice Bowl - has been shredded.

Today, China much more closely fits the description of fascism. Quoting from my dictionary. “Fascism is a set of right-wing political beliefs that includes strong control of society and the economy by the state, a powerful role for the armed forces, and the stopping of political opposition.”

China has perfected the philosophy: The state controls everything important, all opposition is repressed, leaders live like royalty while the peasantry are exploited and oppressed for the benefit of the nation. Nationalism fits perfectly into the fascist mindset..

Consider the plight of China’s hundreds of millions of migrant workers. They work excessive hours for low wages, are segregated from and looked down upon by their fellow urbanites, they receive no benefits in the cities they live in, including not having the right to send their children to school, let alone healthcare or any other social services. They’ve worked hard to make China rich without receiving any of the benefits that are their due and certainly would be forthcoming in a true communist state. Illegal immigrants in America have more rights and receive more benefits than Chinese migrant workers in their own country. 

The question is why act the bully and turn your whole neighborhood into a conflict zone using a flimsy, if not specious, historical argument for a bunch of small uninhabited islands? China is a great country: Even if there are natural resources there, why play the ruffian and antagonize everyone around you? The answer is twofold: autocratic leaders need to feed the fires of nationalism to maintain their power, and they are basically clueless. Just as most Chinese people blindly follow the party line, the leadership is prone to take stands which almost everyone else in the world considers ridiculous. Their vendetta against the Dalai Lama is a case in point. He is very widely, if not universally, recognized outside of China as a wise and great spirit, an advocate for peace, yet to China he’s pure evil and every time he goes to visit another country China lodges a protest and threatens vague repercussions. To the rest of the world their attitude towards the Dalai Lama makes them a laughingstock. They are either so far out of touch they are oblivious or maybe they do understand the absurdity of their positions but don’t care because they cravenly feel the need to use him as a nationalistic focus, a foil to help maintain their power.

China has money to burn and knows how to use it to make friends with countries like Cambodia. Recognizing how important China is to Cambodia’s development plans, Cambodia will do all in its power to protect China’s interests, even against the wishes and interests of its neighbors.

Kampot Chronicles August 2012

Kampot Chronicles - August 2012

A friend, who I’ve known practically since I first came to Cambodia almost ten years ago, stopped by in Kampot, first time for him in several years: his observation; This town is really boutiquey. Being as he’d just spent several months in Koh Kong, just about anything would seem boutiquey… but still… the little Pot has definitely become a destination for travelers and expats, indicated by the number of shops selling trinkets, tourist clothes and Kampot pepper that’ve cropped up in the past year or so. Kampot pepper now has a geographic designation, which means the name cannot be used elsewhere and has considerably raised demand for it. We’re also Cambodia’s center of sea salt production, so salt and pepper town.

Kampot is nothing compared to the tourist/expat Mecca’s of Phnom Penh, Siem Reap and Sihanoukville, but it’s also far from the foreigner deserts of all the other small towns in Cambo. A friend, who’s lived in Battambang - Cambodia’s second largest city - for quite a long time came to visit last year; he was amazed at the number of white faces ambling around town.

There are advantages of a little boutiqueiness. While I’m perfectly comfortable in local restaurants and bars outfitted with plastic chairs, fold-up metal tables, glaring bright white florescent lights and décor consisting exclusively of beer posters and pennants, there is some comfort in surroundings created with the Westerner in mind. For one, in place of a TV blasting out Khmer karaoke songs or cartoons or soap-opera-dramas dubbed in Khmer, you get to hear those old familiar songs and musical styles. While I’m capable of handling an el cheapo cup of bitter, low quality coffee embellished with a super-sweet, pseudo-milk dairy creamer, a real cup of quality java is a positive treat. Kampot now has two, soon-to-be three, coffee shops in the western tradition.

It takes a minimum of expat/travelers to support those types of venues. I don’t have any problem seeing lots of backpackers around as do some of my friends who get nervous and tetchy in their presence (actually, seeing people wheeling suitcases around rough third world streets and sidewalks looks a lot stranger to me) and I do appreciate that there’re enough of them around to enable a variety of businesses to sprout.

It wasn’t that long ago that I had a couple or three bars to go to and had some days off in between. I’d get my entertainment kicks in the capital and return for an R and R in Kampot. Now, what with all that’s happening around town, I have to force myself to take a night or two off.

For one there’s the Tuesday night trivia quiz at Blissful Guest House. The quiz consists of a picture round where you need to name people or places - one time it was boobs - followed by two general questions rounds - quick, What’s the coldest capital city in the world? Ulan Bator, Mongolia. How many languages does BBC broadcast in? 27. What century was the main temple at Angkor Wat built? 12th. Finally there’s a music round where you have to identify both song and artist from the first five or ten seconds of the track. Since my team is a bunch of geriatrics, we pretty much fall down on almost anything recorded past the seventies and eighties, so we have to do very good on the general questions before the music round or we’re sunk. After bringing up the rear for a couple of weeks, and not winning for about two months, we’ve won twice in a row as of this writing. Prize is a 3-liter tower of beer.

Then there’s live music. It’s the August mini-high season and there are 5 nights a week of scheduled music. A lot of the same guys are involved but there’s a different mix on almost every occasion. Since I play conga drums I can sit in almost any night. There are also special events; the Greenhouse had a Saturday night 2 band party with more than 50 people attending. One friend, being too drunk to drive home, rented a room at 2am, another found himself crashed out on the tiny sand beach in the morning. A great time was had by all.

The Greenhouse is the reincarnation of the former Snow’s bar which sat on the river in Phnom Penh for quite a long time. It was carefully dismantled, hauled down here and reassembled in a beautiful spot on Kampot’s river about 7 kilometers from town. About 15% of the building had to be replaced. Now the floor is actually level. The building was improved by removing the low ceiling on the front one third of the structure thus opening it up to the high vaulted ceiling. It’s a special place. 

While I tremendously appreciate the live music and have become addicted to quiz night, the greatest improvement for me personally is Ecran, our new movie theater. There are quite a few things I can say I miss about living in the states; Portland, Oregon in particular. My kids and grandkids and lifelong friends, mountains and forests and seashore crisscrossed with well maintained and marked trails, beautifully preserved architecture and respect for the past, but what I’ve really been missing is intelligent, artistic, brain-teaser flicks. Real movies, not car chase, crash and explode, shoot-em’-ups designed to appeal to teenage boys. Those kind of movies are slick and crafty and the special effects are spectacular, all right, but after 3 or 5 minutes of brilliantly choreographed car chases (or if it’s a Chinese movie, flying-through-the-air kung-fu-fighting) I’m bored silly.

Well, in this case, in terms of my own preferences, we’ve got it all. I’ve been going about twice a week since it opened a month ago, but almost every movie is one I want to see. The Artist, the silent movie that won lots of awards, started it off. Then there was Mr. Nice and Blow, two big-time-drug-dealer movies. 127 hours, the flick about the guy who gets his arm wedged in between two rocks while out hiking and, after more than five days stuck there, has to cut it off to survive. The new Woody Allen; Dangerous Method, the film about the relationship between Jung and Freud; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; three music-hero movies; Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd and The Doors: What more could you ask for? And the set up is perfect: 4-meter screen with an excellent sound system and comfortable seating including two platforms with cushions and pillows.

For most of you out there, probably 95%, having a legitimate cinema is not such a big deal because you’re probably in the habit of watching the latest flicks on your TV or computer. But since I don’t do TV - I’ve only cohabited with one for a total of four years since 1965 - a real theater is my only option. Besides, at 71 my eyes aren’t the greatest so I miss a lot watching on a small screen. Add the interruptions and casualness of watching at home and I’m just not interested. I want to be immersed, I want it to be an experience rather than time-killing entertainment. To sum up; I’m thrilled, my prayers have been answered, I couldn’t have done it better.

Then there’s the grass hut/karaoke bars, the small town equivalent of big city hostess venues, which I’ve only recently discovered after nearly five years in Kampot. They’re usually out on the edge of town in a outdoor setting. There’ll be a row of karaoke rooms rentable for $3 per hour and tables under thatch roofs for just drinking. Beers range from 3000 riel to a dollar; usually served warm with ice. Similar to the typical low-cost local restaurant, all the décor is beer posters with an occasional mobile phone poster thrown in for good measure. Strangely enough they often display posters for beers they don’t sell. One has posters for a locally brewed wheat beer! Who ever heard of such a thing? Of course they don’t carry it.

They’re fine just for drinking but if you want female companionship there’s a $3 charge for her to sit at your table, but no extra cost for lady drinks or bar fines for her to leave the premises. Hardly any speak English, so it’s a bit of a challenge communicating. Some of the girls are staff, most are floaters. If a venue is busy they make a few calls and like magic, they’re flooded with staff.

All in all a big challenge for me to stay home a couple nights a week.

There’s been a rush of work restoring or rebuilding riverfront properties. I mentioned that to a friend who told me the authorities told property owners to get it together or else. Of course, I have no idea what the ‘or else’ might entail, but we know how it works here in our adopted home. In some ways the old derelict buildings gave the town some character. Boutiquey is okay but not when it completely takes over the vibe. In any case the renovation is happening and is taking place at the start of a new property bubble. I’ve heard one riverfront owner asking $250,000 for a single shophouse. That price might be justifiable on Phnom Penh’s river, but for Kampot somewhere in the stratosphere in terms of true value. The only way that property could be worth that much is if you think someone else will pay even more for it in the future.

For a simple rule of thumb, figure a property costing $250 grand needs to be able to garner 1% a month of that, or $2500, in rent to justify that price. In Kampot, that’s beyond absurd. The little burg is a special place and growing rapidly, but the most profitable business in town couldn’t afford half that in rent without it eating up almost all of its profits. Still, people with money seem to be starry eyed about the town’s potential and so ridiculous prices are being asked and outsize rents are being paid.

For instance, the owner of the town’s new 8 story hotel set up his kid with a bar on the river. It’s cool, modern, nicely decorated but at a rent of $550 per month for a space that doesn’t extent very far back, a pure cash sink. With utilities and two staff, they’d have to sell close to 60 beers a night to break even, yet in the two months it’s been open I haven’t seen a total of 50 customers the whole time. Sure it’s low season, but still it’s quite unimaginable how they’ll make the rent even in high season, especially with new bars opening regularly and with all the renovating being done, even more new spaces are being created for competitors.

Competition will also come from the renovation of the old market which is nearing completion. In addition to about 80 market stalls which are going for $125 month there’ll be room for several restaurant stalls. Once again, I don’t see where the business is going to come from, but I’ve been wrong about these things many times in the past, so who knows?

With all the push for tourism and expats it came as a great surprise when new directional signs - you know the ones with the giant billboard on top - turned out to be only in Khmer. Even the one on the way up to Bokor has no English. Those are the only ones in the country I’ve seen that don’t include English. What could they have been thinking?

The riverfront walkway renovation is almost complete with a public toilet, of all things, at the north end near the new bridge. The only public space yet to be improved is the pond at the south end of town. It’s 4 or 5 hectares and big enough for boating and other water fun. Technically it’s no longer a pond: it’s gotten so overgrown lately it’s more like a wetland. I sure hope the city has sensitive, green recreational plans for the space but I fear the worst.

Finally, next to the governor’s mansion at the southern end of town, which I understand is slated to become a museum, a new elections office has been constructed. It’s been very nicely done in traditional Cambodian architecture except for two garish semi-circular, three story columns of ultra modern blue glass. Who would do such a thing? That’s like putting flashing electric lights on Angkor Wat… Hey, wait… a few years ago the government did want to brighten up the temples with colored lights, only (thankfully) to be shot down by the Angkor Authority… Oh, well.

My friend, mentioned in the first paragraph, who only planned to stay for a few days, stayed for more than ten. It happens a lot, people come expecting to pass quickly through, but then don’t want to leave.