Sebastian Strangio's Blog, page 5

Aung San Suu Kyi faces dilemma over controversial dam project

MYITKYINA — Since its suspension five years ago, the $3.6 billion Myitsone hydropower project has come to symbolize the bad old days in Myanmar.

Signed into existence by the military government and the state-owned China Power Investment Corp. in 2006, the project proceeded with little public consultation, and even fewer discussions of its social and environmental costs. All this despite the fact that the 6,000-megawatt dam was expected to displace 10,000 people and flood 766 sq. km of forest — an area larger than Singapore. The project eventually galvanized such strong opposition that President Thein Sein, in his first year in office, decided to put the project on hold, a move that in hindsight kicked off a period of far-reaching economic and political reform.

Now, with the bad old days supposedly over, the new government led by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy is faced with the difficult decision of whether to resume the project in some form, or cancel it altogether.

From the Myitsone confluence, the picturesque point where the waters of the Mali and N’Mai tumble together to form the Irrawaddy River, there is little to see of the dam’s construction, which never got very far. Across the water, trees that were cleared have begun to grow back and the site remains still and peaceful. But if the Chinese government gets its way, this quiet spot could again become a focus of frenzied activity.

Beijing’s relations with Naypyidaw soured after the cancellation of work on the dam, which the government used as a pretext to distance itself from China and open a new era in relations with the U.S. and other Western countries. But China has since been wooing the new NLD government.

In June 2015, before the party’s stunning electoral victory in November, Suu Kyi was invited for talks with President Xi Jinping in Beijing. Then, when the NLD government finally took office under President Htin Kyaw, the first high-level diplomatic caller was Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who pledged renewed support, including backing for large-scale infrastructure development.

Yun Sun, a fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington, DC, said it all amounted to an attempt to regain influence. “Beijing’s agenda is to repair relations and show the world that China has not ‘lost’ Myanmar,” she said.

So far, the Chinese charm offensive seems to be producing results. Committed investments from China are on the rebound, spiking to $3.3 billion in the fiscal year to April 2016 from just $56 million in 2014. In December 2015, two consortia led by state-owned CITIC Group Corp. won bids to construct a strategic deepwater port and special economic zone at Kyaukphyu in western Rakhine State. China has already built oil and gas pipelines running from Kyaukphyu across Myanmar to Yunnan province in the country’s south, and has ambitions to eventually connect the two regions by rail.

In early May, Naypyidaw approved the resumption of production at Letpadaung copper mine in north-western Myanmar, not long after China’s Wanbao Mining, the mine’s joint operator, released a 10-minute film promising more public consultation.

Public relations push

Chinese officials and the State Power Investment Corp., as China Power Investment Corp. is now known, are pursuing a similar strategy with Myitsone.

In June, they sent a delegation to Myitkyina to lobby local officials and have set up a website debunking “myths” about the Myitsone project and touting its benefits to Myanmar. Yun said that Beijing was currently “very hopeful” of getting the dam project back on track in some form. “The hope is to revise the original plan but proceed with alternatives with equivalent outcomes,” she said.

SPIC could not be reached for comment, and the Nikkei Asian Review was refused access to the Myitsone dam construction site. But Hong Pang, China’s ambassador to Myanmar, recently told local media that he expected the project to go ahead, since the alternative — financially compensating China for its cancellation — would be too expensive.

The Myitsone project, however, is likely to be a tough sell in any form. Local opposition to the project remains almost universal. To start with, the Myitsone confluence has deep-rooted cultural significance for the Kachin people: The Mali River, according to Kachin mythology, was measured out by the Creator with a golden spoon, and the N’Mai with one of silver. “It is like our lifeblood,” said Mung Ra, 55, a Kachin Baptist pastor from a village near the confluence.

There are also worries that the dam will disrupt the flow of sediment in the country’s main waterway, while reportedly exporting 90% of the power to China. “We had to sacrifice a lot for China. Why should we do this? It should be cancelled,” said Steven Nwot, general secretary of the Kachin Development Network Group, a local civil society organization. When the Chinese delegation visited Myitkyina in June, it was met by protests. On its website, SPIC denies that 90% figure, arguing that the agreement has been misinterpreted.

So far, the NLD has said little about Myitsone. Hantha Myint, a member of the NLD’s economic committee, said he was unaware of the current status of discussions. “The party’s position is that we should review the contract, and then we should take proper environmental and social impact assessments if we decide to go further,” he said

That could be a risky gamble, said Tu Ja, the founder of the Kachin State Democratic Party. “If they do against the will of the people, they will suffer, they will be opposed by the people,” he said. After years of being dictated to by the central government, he added, the dam was “a major problem” for the Kachin people.

“We had to sacrifice a lot for China. Why should we do this? It should be cancelled.”

Most locals seem to agree, and are growing anxious at the government’s silence. “[The people] voted for Aung San Suu Kyi because the people believed that she would stand for the people,” said Daw Kam, 32, a Kachin shop owner in Aungmyintha, the main relocation site for the 2,500 people displaced by the project in 2009 and 2010. If the government decides to resume the project, she promised that locals would “fight against Aung San Suu Kyi.”

Hkyet La Awng, the state minister for natural resources and environmental conservation, and an NLD member, said that the dam project represented a true dilemma for Htin Kyaw’s government. On the one hand, approving the dam could alienate the Kachin people, complicating Suu Kyi’s bid to end the fighting that has been raging on and off in the state between the Myanmar military and the Kachin Independence Army since 2011.

On the other hand, canceling it risks snubbing an important and powerful neighbor. “We wish to cancel the project,” he said in an interview at his home in Myitkyina, “but she has a problem. Firstly, she chose peace.”

Nwot of the KDNG said the dam was a symbol of the longstanding political inequities that have allowed the military and rich businesspeople to cart off local resources like jade, timber, and gold, fueling conflict while doing little to improve the lives of people. “If they continue with China these kinds of same mistakes as the former military government, there will never be an end to conflict in ethnic areas,” he said.

Yan Myo Thein, a Yangon-based political analyst, said that whatever decision is made on the Myitsone project, the Chinese government will have to accept that there is no going back to the way things were before. “They need to initiate reforms on doing business in Myanmar and engaging with the new government,” he said. “They have to consider new strategies, new methods.”

Whether those efforts are directed at convincing the public, or simply those in power, remains to be seen. Kaw Bu, 64, a resident at the Aungmyintha relocation site, said that regardless of the change of government, people still feel they have little say in the decisions that impact their lives.

“Even though the dam isn’t good for us, we can’t say anything,” she said, sitting in her backyard amid strings of sun-dried laundry. “If the government tells us to stay here we have to stay here, and if the government says, ‘move!,’ we have to move.”

Published by the Nikkei Asian Review, June 20, 2016.

Suu Kyi faces dilemma over controversial dam project

MYITKYINA, Kachin State — Since its suspension five years ago, the $3.6 billion Myitsone hydropower project has come to symbolize the bad old days in Myanmar.

Signed into existence by the military government and the state-owned China Power Investment Corp. in 2006, the project proceeded with little public consultation, and even fewer discussions of its social and environmental costs. All this despite the fact that the 6,000-megawatt dam was expected to displace 10,000 people and flood 766 sq. km of forest — an area larger than Singapore. The project eventually galvanized such strong opposition that President Thein Sein, in his first year in office, decided to put the project on hold, a move that in hindsight kicked off a period of far-reaching economic and political reform.

Now, with the bad old days supposedly over, the new government led by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy is faced with the difficult decision of whether to resume the project in some form, or cancel it altogether.

From the Myitsone confluence, the picturesque point where the waters of the Mali and N’Mai tumble together to form the Irrawaddy River, there is little to see of the dam’s construction, which never got very far. Across the water, trees that were cleared have begun to grow back and the site remains still and peaceful. But if the Chinese government gets its way, this quiet spot could again become a focus of frenzied activity.

Beijing’s relations with Naypyidaw soured after the cancellation of work on the dam, which the government used as a pretext to distance itself from China and open a new era in relations with the U.S. and other Western countries. But China has since been wooing the new NLD government.

In June 2015, before the party’s stunning electoral victory in November, Suu Kyi was invited for talks with President Xi Jinping in Beijing. Then, when the NLD government finally took office under President Htin Kyaw, the first high-level diplomatic caller was Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who pledged renewed support, including backing for large-scale infrastructure development.

Yun Sun, a fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington, DC, said it all amounted to an attempt to regain influence. “Beijing’s agenda is to repair relations and show the world that China has not ‘lost’ Myanmar,” she said.

So far, the Chinese charm offensive seems to be producing results. Committed investments from China are on the rebound, spiking to $3.3 billion in the fiscal year to April 2016 from just $56 million in 2014. In December 2015, two consortia led by state-owned CITIC Group Corp. won bids to construct a strategic deepwater port and special economic zone at Kyaukphyu in western Rakhine State. China has already built oil and gas pipelines running from Kyaukphyu across Myanmar to Yunnan province in the country’s south, and has ambitions to eventually connect the two regions by rail.

In early May, Naypyidaw approved the resumption of production at Letpadaung copper mine in north-western Myanmar, not long after China’s Wanbao Mining, the mine’s joint operator, released a 10-minute film promising more public consultation.

Public relations push

Chinese officials and the State Power Investment Corp., as China Power Investment Corp. is now known, are pursuing a similar strategy with Myitsone.

In June, they sent a delegation to Myitkyina to lobby local officials and have set up a website debunking “myths” about the Myitsone project and touting its benefits to Myanmar. Yun said that Beijing was currently “very hopeful” of getting the dam project back on track in some form. “The hope is to revise the original plan but proceed with alternatives with equivalent outcomes,” she said.

SPIC could not be reached for comment, and the Nikkei Asian Review was refused access to the Myitsone dam construction site. But Hong Pang, China’s ambassador to Myanmar, recently told local media that he expected the project to go ahead, since the alternative — financially compensating China for its cancellation — would be too expensive.

The Myitsone project, however, is likely to be a tough sell in any form. Local opposition to the project remains almost universal. To start with, the Myitsone confluence has deep-rooted cultural significance for the Kachin people: The Mali River, according to Kachin mythology, was measured out by the Creator with a golden spoon, and the N’Mai with one of silver. “It is like our lifeblood,” said Mung Ra, 55, a Kachin Baptist pastor from a village near the confluence.

There are also worries that the dam will disrupt the flow of sediment in the country’s main waterway, while reportedly exporting 90% of the power to China. “We had to sacrifice a lot for China. Why should we do this? It should be cancelled,” said Steven Nwot, general secretary of the Kachin Development Network Group, a local civil society organization. When the Chinese delegation visited Myitkyina in June, it was met by protests. On its website, SPIC denies that 90% figure, arguing that the agreement has been misinterpreted.

So far, the NLD has said little about Myitsone. Hantha Myint, a member of the NLD’s economic committee, said he was unaware of the current status of discussions. “The party’s position is that we should review the contract, and then we should take proper environmental and social impact assessments if we decide to go further,” he said

That could be a risky gamble, said Tu Ja, the founder of the Kachin State Democratic Party. “If they do against the will of the people, they will suffer, they will be opposed by the people,” he said. After years of being dictated to by the central government, he added, the dam was “a major problem” for the Kachin people.

“We had to sacrifice a lot for China. Why should we do this? It should be cancelled.”

Most locals seem to agree, and are growing anxious at the government’s silence. “[The people] voted for Aung San Suu Kyi because the people believed that she would stand for the people,” said Daw Kam, 32, a Kachin shop owner in Aungmyintha, the main relocation site for the 2,500 people displaced by the project in 2009 and 2010. If the government decides to resume the project, she promised that locals would “fight against Aung San Suu Kyi.”

Hkyet La Awng, the state minister for natural resources and environmental conservation, and an NLD member, said that the dam project represented a true dilemma for Htin Kyaw’s government. On the one hand, approving the dam could alienate the Kachin people, complicating Suu Kyi’s bid to end the fighting that has been raging on and off in the state between the Myanmar military and the Kachin Independence Army since 2011.

On the other hand, canceling it risks snubbing an important and powerful neighbor. “We wish to cancel the project,” he said in an interview at his home in Myitkyina, “but she has a problem. Firstly, she chose peace.”

Nwot of the KDNG said the dam was a symbol of the longstanding political inequities that have allowed the military and rich businesspeople to cart off local resources like jade, timber, and gold, fueling conflict while doing little to improve the lives of people. “If they continue with China these kinds of same mistakes as the former military government, there will never be an end to conflict in ethnic areas,” he said.

Yan Myo Thein, a Yangon-based political analyst, said that whatever decision is made on the Myitsone project, the Chinese government will have to accept that there is no going back to the way things were before. “They need to initiate reforms on doing business in Myanmar and engaging with the new government,” he said. “They have to consider new strategies, new methods.”

Whether those efforts are directed at convincing the public, or simply those in power, remains to be seen. Kaw Bu, 64, a resident at the Aungmyintha relocation site, said that regardless of the change of government, people still feel they have little say in the decisions that impact their lives.

“Even though the dam isn’t good for us, we can’t say anything,” she said, sitting in her backyard amid strings of sun-dried laundry. “If the government tells us to stay here we have to stay here, and if the government says, ‘move!,’ we have to move.”

Published by the Nikkei Asian Review, June 20, 2016.

The fading mirage of the CPP

Cambodia’s political crackdown reached a new low on May 9, when eight human rights defenders were detained for the unauthorised wearing of black T-shirts.

Though the group was later released, the arrests on “Black Monday” were a typical example of what Richard Hofstadter might have termed “the paranoid style in Cambodian politics”: the tendency to see any stirring of opposition, however small, as a threat to social cohesion and national survival.

The crackdown that has unfolded over the past year, anchored by an alleged affair between Kem Sokha, deputy president of the Cambodia National Rescue Party, and a hairdresser named Khom Chandaraty, is new only in its specifics.

Similar tightenings occurred in 2005-06, and again in 2009-10, both containing the usual mix of ingredients: flimsy lawsuits, blustery threats from Prime Minister Hun Sen, a lengthening cast of sued and imprisoned.

More than 20 people have been jailed this electoral season.

Last week, police arrested four members of the local human rights group Adhoc and a member of the National Election Committee, all of whom are accused of bribing Chandaraty to deny her “affair” with Sokha.

Five CNRP officials, including two elected lawmakers, are also behind bars on various pretexts, while the party’s president, Sam Rainsy, enjoys yet another enforced Parisian sojourn, as he has during the past two mid-election crackdowns.

In recent comments to Radio Free Asia, Ou Virak, the head of the Future Forum policy institute, pointed out what should surely be obvious: that the Kem Sokha “sex scandal” is a towering political confection. In response, he was sued for defamation.

Past experience suggests that the ruling Cambodian People’s Party will loosen the shackles, sooner or later. For more than two decades, Hun Sen has deftly alternated periods of pressure with periods of calm in just the right balance to cripple his opponents and maintain the grudging support of foreign donor governments. But while the frequency remains the same, the amplitude is slowly rising.

The targeting of foreign NGO staff during the Black Monday protests was an unprecedented tactic, as arguably are the legal charges against Virak, one of the country’s few truly nonpartisan political commentators.

It’s unclear how much further things will go, but after nearly losing the 2013 election to a resurgent CNRP, the ruling party has every incentive to make the current tightening more permanent. Backed strongly by a rising China, it also has less fear of a significant Western backlash.

Beneath the institutions and language imported by UNTAC, political life continued to operate in line with a culture of perpetual struggle with no tradition of individual rights or democratic power-sharing.

Is Cambodia’s mirage finally fading? In my 2014 book, Hun Sen’s Cambodia, I employed this metaphor to describe the façade of democratic institutions that overlay Cambodia’s patronage-based political system.

The mirage was a legacy of the Paris Peace Agreements of October 1991 and the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) that was dispatched to the country to implement its terms.

UNTAC arrived at a crucial point in the intellectual history of the West: With the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was felt – felt because wished – that human civilisation had reached its final terminus. With the world now at the “end of history”, as the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama profitably termed it, liberal democracy and free markets would henceforth become the world’s political and economic defaults.

From a distance – particularly an American distance – Cambodia seemed to fit this pattern well. After falling victim to the Cold War, the war-torn country would finally be ushered towards peace and democracy by a unified “international community” working in tandem with networks of local NGOs.

Hun Sen, part of a government that had ruled Cambodia since the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, instinctively recognised that the “end of history” was a revolution of words, not realities – what the Australian cultural critic Clive James would later describe as “a thirty-second seduction by language”.

But as the leader of a weak nation, picked over for centuries by powerful outsiders, Hun Sen also appreciated the tactical virtues of the seduction. Unable to resist foreign intervention, he adapted: ie, he learned to tell foreign governments what they wanted to hear.

Exhibit A: the UN-organised 1993 election, which the CPP lost to Prince Norodom Ranariddh’s Funcinpec party. Rather than admitting defeat and accepting a role as a junior coalition partner, the CPP cried fraud and strong-armed itself into an equal share of power, eventually ousting Ranariddh from power during fierce factional fighting in July 1997.

Foreign donor governments balked at the violence, but acquiesced when a new election, in mid-1998, laundered the victory of arms into one sanctified by electoral process.

Beneath the institutions and language imported by UNTAC, political life continued to operate in line with a culture of perpetual struggle with no tradition of individual rights or democratic power-sharing. Ultimately, this was anchored in a karmic understanding of power.

Its main currency was bon, Buddhist “merit”, its main institution ksae, the “strings” of patron-client ties that radiated outwards to the extremities of the body politic, holding competing interests and loyalties in a delicate, ever-shifting balance.

At the same time, Hun Sen learned that talk was cheap. Not only that – it was lucrative. In exchange for adopting the international bureaucratese of “transparency” and “good governance”, Cambodia received hundreds of millions in foreign development aid each year. These infusions of cash could then be transmuted, via the alchemy of patronage and personality, into further political gains for the CPP.

And so post-UNTAC Cambodia came to retain all the outward forms of democracy – parliaments, courts, elections, a constitution with full guarantees of individual rights – with nearly none of the substance. As current events show, Cambodia’s prevailing political culture continues to anathematise the very concept of opposition.

There is Hun Sen’s consensus, flush with karmic alignments; everything else is rebellion against the “natural” order. For the CPP, a black shirt is not simply a black shirt.

In recent weeks, foreign embassies and UN officials have expressed perennial “concerns” about the erosion of Cambodian democracy.

There is much to be concerned about, of course, but there has never been much to erode. Such freedoms that exist in Cambodia exist not as a matter of right, but as a temporary indulgence of those in power.

Recent events suggest that these indulgences could soon be withdrawn. The ruling party shows no intention of giving up power at the next election. Democratic language is beginning to fall away.

The mirage is fading. Crucially, the CPP understands its own admitted shortcomings in Cambodian terms: as an abdication of responsibility by patrons towards clients (ie CPP voters).

Thus it has made changes – wage hikes, land redistribution schemes – designed to bring the system of patronage relations back into “balance”. More fundamental reform remains outside its mental and moral vocabulary.

All this sets the stage for a potentially tumultuous showdown at commune elections next June, and national polls scheduled for mid-2018.

These will pit a rigid system against the rising expectations of an electorate that is younger, more educated, more connected and, as a result, more able to distinguish the language of democracy from its substance. Things could get messy.

Published by the Phnom Penh Post, May 12, 2016.

In Cambodia, a political crackdown deepens

PHNOM PENH — Pity the opponents of Cambodia’s prime minister. Three years after nearly toppling the long-serving Hun Sen in national elections, the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party finds itself besieged by an intensifying legal assault that has landed more than 20 critics of the government in jail in the past year.

The crackdown slipped into high gear on May 2 with the arrest of four staff members from Adhoc, a local human rights group, and a senior member of the National Election Committee. The five have been accused of bribing a 25-year-old hairdresser to deny an alleged affair with Kem Sokha, the CNRP’s deputy president. Another “accomplice” — a worker from the United Nations human rights office in Phnom Penh — has been charged in absentia.

The arrests are just the latest twist in a complex sex scandal that has unfurled since recordings of alleged phone conversations between Sokha and the young woman were leaked two months ago. This, in turn, has broadened the ruling party’s legal-political offensive aimed at crippling the CNRP and its civil society allies ahead of local elections in 2017 and crucial national polls the following year. In response to the arrests, 59 non-governmental organizations released a statement denouncing the crackdown as “a farcical use of both the criminal justice system and state institutions as tools to intimidate, criminalize and punish the legitimate activities of human rights defenders and civil society.”

Familiar territory

None of this is new in Cambodian politics. Like the monsoons, political repression is a seasonal phenomenon, usually descending at the mid-point of the five-year electoral cycle. Similar high-pressure fronts were present in 2005-06, and again in 2009-10, when government critics were hauled into court on a range of pretexts. The difference this time, analysts say, is that the government is casting its net wider than ever as it prepares to face a resurgent CNRP at commune elections scheduled for June 2017. “The scope and breadth are unprecedented. It’s open season on Cambodia’s human rights defenders,” said Sophal Ear, an associate professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles and author of “Aid dependence in Cambodia: How foreign assistance undermines democracy.”

Among those in prison are two opposition lawmakers arrested for claiming alleged border incursions by Vietnam, and three other CNRP officials who appeared in court on May 5 charged with fomenting an “uprising” when they clashed with security forces in mid-2014. In March, a court sentenced a 25-year-old student to 18 months jail after he called on Facebook for a “color revolution” to overthrow the government.

“It’s now crystal clear that Hun Sen is trying to derail or seriously pervert the electoral process because he knows that his [Cambodian People’s Party] would lose any real elections in 2017 and 2018,” Sam Rainsy, CNRP president, told local media on May 5. Rainsy was commenting from exile in Paris, where he says was forced to go, as in the past two election seasons, by threats of his own arrest on defamation charges.

Suos Yara, a CPP spokesman, said he could not comment on the recent arrests, denying that the party was influencing the Cambodian judiciary. “This is a duty for the legal branch, and we have nothing to do with that,” he said. But in remarks made during a May 4 meeting with European Union representatives, Ouch Borith, a secretary of state in the foreign ministry, said the government had “no choice” but to make the arrests, due to the CNRP’s “unethical and provocative behaviors and incitements”.

The CPP has good reason to be concerned. At the last national election in 2013, Rainsy’s party scored large gains by tapping into a deep reservoir of discontent about corruption, land grabs, and a lack of job opportunities for the young. (Some two-thirds of the population are under the age of 30, according to the UN.) Since then, Hun Sen has adopted a dual-track strategy of trying to win back support through populist reforms — wage hikes for teachers and soldiers, promises of land for poor farmers — while slamming shut any prospect of an opposition alternative.

Leader’s two faces

This strategy can be seen on Hun Sen’s busy Facebook page, in which photos of the leader playing with his grandchildren — strongman as family man — alternate with official ribbon-cuttings and warnings of legal action against any commentators who “twist” the truth or besmirch the honor of the CPP. “All of you have rights, but please do not forget that we also have rights like you,” he wrote in an April 25 post.

In his 31 years at the apex of Cambodia’s turbulent politics, Hun Sen has developed a feather touch for political manipulation, alternating periods of pressure with periods of calm in just the right balance to keep his opponents off balance and overseas development aid flowing in. In tightening, he plants the seed; in slackening, he reaps the grain.

Ou Virak, the head of the Future Forum policy institute, who is also facing defamation charges for publicly criticizing the legal campaign against Sokha, said the current blitz, as in past, is likely to lead to negotiations in which Hun Sen will try to wring concessions from his opponents and assuage the concerns of foreign governments. “I think there will be a period of cooling down, and that’s when the opposition will be weakened,” he said. Sophal employed a different metaphor for Hun Sen’s strategy: “It’s like a knob on your stove,” he said. “Sometimes the gas is off, and other times, it’s at full blast.” Whatever the setting, his opponents have generally been well cooked.

But some warn that while old tactics may sideline the opposition, they are doing little to win back popular support. Political sentiment is notoriously hard to gauge in Cambodia; the country has no official opinion polls. Even so, Kem Ley, the head of Khmer For Khmer, a political advocacy group, said that on recent trips to the countryside, he found few people who supported the ruling party. With increasing access to information via the internet, and a growing sense of shared grievance, people’s expectations are rising. “Almost all of them I met, they did not support the ruling government — they want change,” he said. “The CPP always claims about 6% annual growth in gross domestic product, but if we look at the ground reality and the poverty rate, it’s very bad.”

Others said that whether or not the CPP actually wins the elections in 2017 and 2018 is a separate question from whether the party would ever give up power. Sophal said, “Only the karmic wheel of life will take care of that, and we know how this ends. All phenomena are impermanent.”

The issue of permanence, and its opposite, seem to be on Hun Sen’s mind. The prime minister remains relatively youthful — he turns 64 in August — but he has clearly started sizing up his place in the Cambodian pantheon. In February, work began on a lavish memorial on Phnom Penh’s Chruoy Changva peninsula, commemorating the CPP’s role in the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, and the success of Hun Sen’s “win-win” policy, which is credited with ending the country’s civil war in the late 1990s.

In a similar vein, many observers believe he is also starting to prepare the way for a successor. Most predictions settle on his eldest son Hun Manet, 38, a lieutenant general in the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces who was recently dispatched on a hearts-and-minds tour through Cambodian diaspora communities in the United States. (He met mainly angry protests.) The other possible candidate is his youngest son Many, 34, who was elected to the National Assembly in 2013 and heads a prominent CPP youth organization.

While a stable succession plan will be necessary to secure his legacy, Hun Sen will face challenges finding someone skillful enough to continue the delicate balancing act that has secured his survival through five election seasons. “It depends on his children, whether they’re up to par to take over the leadership,” said Virak. In the meantime, there are new elections to navigate. And with Hun Sen still firmly in the driver’s seat, it may be some time before Cambodia experiences a permanent change in its increasingly turbulent political climate.

Published by Nikkei Asian Review, May 7, 2006.

Tourist hordes put strain on Luang Prabang’s heritage

The enthusiasm of tourists for Luang Prabang’s heady charms has brought prosperity to the Lao town, but is the visitor influx damaging its cultural treasures?

The monks emerge shortly after six in the morning, smudges of flame in the predawn gloom. Alms bowls in hand, they walk silently through the town past Western-style cafés and restaurants. They pass boutique hotels with frangipani trees and soft white curtains covering the windows. Eventually, they turn onto Sisavangvong Road, Luang Prabang’s main drag, where a throng of tourists eagerly awaits.

As the monks begin taking offerings from a line of Buddhist devotees, cameras are primed and the pack converges. One European man lights up the pavement with a huge flash on a tripod, filming monks as they step off a curb. Another walks up and down the line with a huge camera, pointing its black snout into the stream of saffron-clad novices and firing off machine-gun shutter-bursts.

For centuries, Luang Prabang’s monks have filed through these streets at dawn to collect alms from the local community. In more recent times, however, the morning ritual known as tak bat has ceded ground to another, noisier ritual – one of shutters and flashes and frenzied jostling for position along the crowded streets.

Each morning, tourism operators set up signs and tables, hawking coffee and overpriced sticky rice for tourists to ‘donate’ during the procession. Signs in six languages ask visitors to “respect the alms giving” and keep their distance from the monks, many of whom are novices, but these are routinely ignored.

For many, the tourist circus surrounding the tak bat encapsulates the negative side of a boom in visitors that has transformed the character of this Unesco-listed former royal capital. “It’s like a monkey troupe, it’s like a Disneyland,” says one prominent Laotian involved in cultural preservation efforts, who requested anonymity due to recent controversies over mass tourism and heritage issues. “We have [taken] action, we have made brochures, but I think it’s not enough.”

Luang Prabang’s old town, a temple-filled peninsula embraced by the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers, was once the capital of the Lan Xang kingdom, the fabled “Land of a Million Elephants”, and has remained the spiritual and religious centre of Laos in the centuries since.

Since being listed as a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1995, the town has gone from an impoverished settlement with a stuttering electricity supply to one of Southeast Asia’s prized boutique travel destinations. In 2015, this town of 50,000 attracted more than 445,000 international visitors, according to provincial tourism authorities, an increase of more than 10% on the previous year.

That figure may soon rise further following the opening up of new international air routes to the city. In March, the cut-price carrier AirAsia commenced regular flights from Bangkok, and HK Express has announced that it will add a flight from Hong Kong. Two additional airlines are awaiting approval for direct flights, according to recent media reports.

Now, two decades on from Luang Prabang’s Unesco listing, a milestone the city marked with a lavish street parade in December, many wonder whether it can maintain its traditions under the intensifying pressures of mass tourism.

As early as 2004, Unesco noted in a report that tourism development had already put a “critical stress” on the town’s environmental and cultural resources. Without proper management, it warned, Luang Prabang could well become “another tourist town where soft-drink billboards dominate the landscape, where the sound of tour buses drowns out the soft temple prayers and where the town’s residents are reduced to the roles of bit-players in a cultural theme park.”

This dystopian vision has yet to come to pass, but there’s no denying the transformative effects of the tourist dollar. Gabriel Kuperman, the founder and director of the Luang Prabang Film Festival, now into its seventh year, says one effect of the boom has been families selling their houses in the old town to be converted into guesthouses and hotels.

“On one hand, it’s a positive thing that those families benefitted from a major injection of funds into their households,” says Kuperman. “On the other hand, now that there are fewer and fewer Lao families living in the heart of Luang Prabang, a certain amount of charm has been lost.”

Indeed, pockets of Luang Prabang are akin to portals into a sort of transnational Asian tourist space – a generic zone of souvenir shops, cheap travellers’ cafés, and the sort of gimmicky exotica encapsulated by the sight, on one recent evening, of an orchestra entertaining a crowd of foreigners with a rendition of “Auld Lang Syne” played on traditional Lao instruments. “There’s a point where it sort of kills the local life,” says Andrea Vinsonneau, the director of EXO Travel in Laos.

Locals express satisfaction at the influx of cash that tourism has brought, but also worry that the character of the city and its people have changed. “Some is good, some is bad,” says Chanthanom Soulatda, the owner of Villa Ban Lakkam, a guesthouse on the banks of the Nam Khan river. “Luang Prabang people are very calm, but now they run to make business,” the 71-year-old adds, standing on the street outside the guesthouse, which stands on the site of her childhood home. “Before they walked slowly, but now they run.”

“Now that there are fewer and fewer Lao families living in the heart of Luang Prabang, a certain amount of charm has been lost.”

Despite the accretions of global tourist culture, Luang Prabang has generally adhered to Unesco’s regulations, which include bans on demolitions within the heritage zone and the use of pane glass on buildings. The town remains low-slung and quiet, characterised by a delicate blend of Lao urban architecture and French colonial forms.

The difficulty, says Montira Horayangura Unakul, a national programme officer at Unesco in Bangkok, is that Luang Prabang’s most valuable heritage extends beyond the physical buildings to include “intangible” cultural practices and traditions – like the tak bat ceremony – which are not officially listed by Unesco. “The living aspects of the site are the really indispensable part of what makes Luang Prabang so distinctive,” she says.

This explains local anger at the touristification of the alms-giving ceremony – the central part of a living Buddhist culture. Phonesavan Bilavarn, 70, a retired English teacher whose childhood home still stands just off Sisavangvong Road, is livid: “They use the flash,” she says, miming the ‘chk, chk, chk’ of the shutterbugs, “and very close to the monks.”

Of course, some argue that Unesco is itself to blame for the changes that happen to World Heritage Sites such as Luang Prabang. The Italian writer Marco d’Eramo has argued that whenever a city is listed by Unesco, it “dies out, becoming the stuff of taxidermy, a mausoleum with dormitory suburbs attached”. Has World Heritage status saved Luang Prabang, only to rob it of its soul?

Rik Ponne, a former Unesco staffer and advisor to the Lao Ministry of Information, Culture and Tourism, says that such views oversimplify the complex challenge of balancing economic growth with cultural preservation. Taking a fundamentalist view on heritage issues, he argues, runs the risk of romanticising the poverty that allowed Luang Prabang to remain so “untouched” for so many decades.

On the whole, Unakul says that in response to past criticisms from the World Heritage Committee, the Lao authorities have been “very proactive” in taking action to address its concerns and extending the development buffer zone around the old town. One of the current strategies for handling rising visitor numbers is to draw visitors away from the old town by promoting attractions further afield. “It’s definitely an issue that’s on a lot of people’s minds, and an issue that’s getting attention,” she says.

Vinsonneau, who has been living and working in Luang Prabang since 2000, says tourism operators also have a duty to educate their clients. EXO Travel provides each of its visitors with a handbook instructing them how to dress appropriately, how to interact with monks and how to behave during cultural events.

But she says that despite all the negative effects of mass tourism, the death of Luang Prabang’s soul has been greatly exaggerated, at least when compared with some of the other tourist hotspots of Southeast Asia.

“There’s still an incredible ambience,” Vinsonneau says of the town. “It’s good to remind people it could be much worse than this. It could be better, but it could be much worse.”

Published by the Southeast Asia Globe, May 2016

The new ‘explorers’

In June 1866, six Frenchmen departed from Ho Chi Minh City on a dangerous mission up the mighty Mekong River. Travelling in two “minuscule steam-driven gunboats” along with an “inordinate quantity of liquor, flour, guns and trade goods,” as historian John Keay put it, the Mekong Exploration Commission cast off from the waterfront and steamed off into the wilds of Indochina.

The expedition, led by Captain Ernest Doudart de Lagree, was tasked with finding a navigable trade route up the Mekong. This, it was hoped, would link the new French colony of Cochinchina to China, giving traders access to the untold bounties of the Qing dynasty.

French officials saw this “river road” as a vital means of checking the advance of the British, who had recently seized Lower Myanmar. Admiral Paul Reveillere, one of the mission’s great proponents in Paris, described it loftily as “a task worthy of raising the passions of our century, with its love for great undertakings.”

Despite such encomiums, the expedition quickly encountered disappointment. It traversed nearly 9,000km, hastening the extension of French colonial rule over modern-day Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, but significant stretches of the Mekong proved impassable to commercial steamships. The mission’s deputy, Francis Garnier, who took over command from Lagree after the captain succumbed to amoebic dysentery, wrote frustratedly of a river that “would simply not cooperate.”

A century and a half on, the French dream of a “back door to China” has been achieved, albeit not as romantically as first envisioned. Under the aegis of the Asian Development Bank’s Greater Mekong Subregion program, the past decade has seen the construction of an ambitious road network linking China with its southern neighbors. By revitalizing the old caravan routes that once snaked southward from Yunnan, these highways have largely achieved what the French intended, only in reverse: Instead of being the world’s back door to China, this new transport network has become China’s back door to the world.

Technical Muscle

As a result of this economic integration, large swathes of Southeast Asia are now economically oriented northward, rather than toward the oceans and port cities to the south. Across northern Myanmar, from Lashio to Kyaing Tong, shops are packed with Chinese goods. Since the completion in December 2013 of the Kunming-Bangkok Expressway, linking China and Thailand via northern Laos, Chinese cars have created traffic snarls on the streets of Chiang Rai.

The Chinese orientation is especially noticeable in landlocked Laos. For years an isolated backwater, the country has in a single decade become a primary conduit for the Chinese penetration of Southeast Asia. During a recent trip through the north of the country, I saw Chinese communities in just about every town I visited — small parcels of Yunnan transplanted into the tropical hills.

In Luang Prabang, the picturesque former royal capital, hotel signs and menus have been translated into Mandarin to accommodate what one travel agent referred to as a “boom” in Chinese tourists. By some counts, the country is now home to more than 300,000 Chinese migrants — many of them recent arrivals. “China is very close,” a Taiwanese taxi driver named Huang Zhitang told me in Vientiane. “They come here very easily.”

This road network could soon be exceeded by a project that Garnier and Lagree could barely have imagined: a new $7 billion high-speed railway linking Kunming and Vientiane. Where the French encountered mountains and rivers that refused to “cooperate,” Chinese technical muscle is simply punching its way through 420km of rugged terrain, waving aside every objection from nature and geography. Once the project is finished, China’s integration with Southeast Asia will be complete — it will be possible to travel almost nonstop by train from Beijing to Singapore.

The new “back door” to China is an example of how gleaming new infrastructure can fast-track the goals that 19th century explorers sought to achieve through grueling feats of exploration and colonial derring-do.

The impact on Southeast Asia is likely to be momentous. For countries like Laos, isolated for so long by its rugged terrain, the opportunities brought by an influx of Chinese money will sit in precarious balance with fears that the country might become the doorstep to a new Chinese empire — an outlying province of a new “Greater Yunnan.” As the French experience showed, it is only a matter of time before economic projects become political ones, too.

Published by Nikkei Asian Review, April 21, 2016

China’s footprint kicks up concerns in tiny Laos

TON PHEUNG, Laos — The Kings Romans Casino stands out in this remote corner of northwestern Laos, its giant illuminated neon crown towering over a landscape of banana plantations and jungle-clad mountains. Inside, a statue of King Neptune presides over a glitzy lobby, while gamblers sit hunched over nearby tables, throwing down bundles of Thai baht and Chinese yuan on each flip of the cards.

Situated on the Laotian side of the Golden Triangle area, the point where the borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar converge, Kings Romans is the centerpiece of the 10,000-hectare Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, established in 2007 as a joint venture between the Laotian government and the Hong Kong-registered Kings Romans Group.

Kings Romans has since spent tens of millions of dollars transforming this remote corner of Bokeo province into a pleasure town for Chinese tourists, a zone of extravagance sprawling along the broad, brown ribbon of the Mekong River. Behind the casino is a special Chinatown district filled with restaurants and so-called “massage parlors.” Boutiques sell trinkets carved from jade, ivory and rare types of wood. Further afield there is a zoo and golf driving range, its parking lot filled with four-wheel drive vehicles.

Kings Romans has plans to add an industrial park and international airport, and  expects the area will eventually house more than 200,000 people.

Despite being in sleepy Laos, however, the area does not much feel like it. Most of the workers in the GTSEZ are from China or Myanmar, and clocks are turned to Beijing time, an hour ahead of Laos. Most shops refuse to accept payment in local currency, the Laotian kip, and many buildings have been assembled in a kitschy, transplanted style that can only be described as “Forbidden City Lite”.

Not far from the casino I met Moe Kyaw, 41, a laborer from Mandalay in central Myanmar who has worked for five years in the SEZ. “Chinese hotels, Chinese money, Chinese construction,” he said, grinning and waving a hand in the direction of the Chinatown. “A small China country!”

Little China

Kings Romans’ activities are opaque, as are the activities of its president Zhao Wei, an entrepreneur from Heilongjiang province in China’s frigid northeast. But Zhao clearly enjoys high-level patronage within the Laotian government. Former President Choummaly Sayasone and former Prime Minister Thongsing Thammavong — who have just been replaced after the expiry of their five-year terms — head a long list of top officials to pay official visits to the GTSEZ, and several former government officials sit on its management committee.

The zone is entirely outside the control of provincial authorities, according to locals and expatriates such as Stuart Ling, a Lao-speaking agricultural consultant based in Bokeo’s provincial capital, Huay Xai. “Even on paper it’s not really part of Laos. It exists as a special zone, a special entity,” he said. Despite being jointly managed by the government and Kings Romans, he added, “it’s not transparent about how much money is paid, about how they divide profits.”

In its overweening ambition and opacity, the GTSEZ encapsulates Beijing’s rapidly-expanding influence in Laos, a landlocked nation which remains one of Southeast Asia’s poorest.

Chinese investment has been on the rise here since the early 21st century, when Beijing introduced its “Going Out” policy, encouraging domestic enterprises to invest overseas. Since then, as new highways have breached Laos’s rugged northern mountains, Chinese money has poured into mining, construction, agriculture and hydropower, as well as into 13 SEZs located in strategic parts of the country. By the end of 2013, the cumulative value of these investments had topped $5 billion, making China the largest foreign investor in Laos, along with Vietnam.

Laos has also drawn in thousands of migrants who have created an archipelago of Chinese enclaves across the country’s north. Statistics are hard to come by, but some estimates put the Chinese population in Laos at more than 300,000. Paul Chambers, director of research at the Institute of South East Asian Affairs in Chiang Mai, Thailand, said the combination of Chinese migration, investment and aggressive diplomacy amounted to a “new form of neo-colonialism” in Laos. “Northern Laos is sort of becoming a neo-China — there are so many Chinese coming in,” he told the Nikkei Asian Review.

Booming capital

The mainland presence can also be seen and felt in Vientiane, home to a large Chinese community centered around the Chinese-funded Sanjiang Market, which opened in the western part of the city in 2007. “When they came to invest, here was a backwater,” said Huang Zhitang, 70, a Taiwanese cab driver who works the Sanjiang area. “Now in Sanjiang almost every shop makes money.”

Entering the area is like slipping imperceptibly into a large town in Yunnan, the southern Chinese province that borders Laos. Mandarin is the lingua franca. The market is packed to bursting with Chinese goods, from karaoke machines to baijiu firewater, while travel agents hawk cheap flights and bus tickets back to China.

This rising influence has not been without controversy. Critics say many Chinese investments, especially dams and large infrastructure projects, have proceeded with little concern for their social or environmental costs. In 2014, Laotian villagers living within the GTSEZ held protests against land seizures and blocked Chinese developers from surveying land earmarked for an airport. Representatives of Kings Romans Group were unavailable for interviews, but a casino manager who spoke on condition of anonymity said the airport project had since been postponed. Similar stumbles have accompanied a $1.6 billion property development in the That Luang Marsh area in Vientiane and the long-delayed $7 billion railway link between Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, and Vientiane.

Of more concern for some is the growing view that China is prising Laos away from its traditional communist ally Vietnam, which has intimate ties to the ruling Lao People’s Revolutionary Party dating back to its long struggle to overthrow the U.S.-backed monarchy in the 1960s and 1970s. Where once Vietnam was the “older brother,” a Vientiane-based Asian diplomat said, “now things have changed. China is the older brother, and Vietnam is maybe the second brother.”

According to some analysts, worries about China’s rising influence were behind the leadership changes enacted at the LPRP’s 10th National Congress in January. Emerging from the conclave as the new secretary-general was 78-year-old Boungnang Vorachit, who, like his predecessor Choummaly Sayasone, is a veteran of the revolutionary struggle with close ties to Vietnam.

The congress also promoted the offspring of several notable comrades into the LPRP’s 11-member Politburo, and cast out Deputy Prime Minister Somsavat Lengsavad, an ethnic Chinese party grandee who is said to have played a key role in brokering key Chinese investments, including the GTSEZ. Boungnang was further elevated on April 20 when the unicameral  National Assembly elected him the country’s new president and named foreign minister Thongloun Sisoulith as prime minister.

In early September, U.S. President Barack Obama will visit Laos for the annual summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, becoming the first U.S. leader to visit the country. Many U.S. officials believe that with a new leadership in charge in Vientiane, the time is ripe for an expansion of ties with Laos. In November, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes told an audience in Washington that “there is a sense of potential” in the relationship with Laos “for the first time in a long time.”

Chinese influence

But one specialist with close knowledge of the Laotian leadership said the recent changes were unlikely to result in a strong backlash against the Chinese presence. Having jettisoned most of its ideological baggage and embraced a sort of commodity-based crony capitalism, the party continues to favor Chinese investment, which was strongly encouraged by Thongsing during his premiership. The party’s main concern is about the appearance  of corruption that has dogged some recent Chinese investments, which the Asian diplomat in Vientiane alleged have served as cover for the transfer of “black money” out of mainland China.

“The Party leaders in Laos are mostly interested in getting cash without strings, be it in the form of grants or zero interest loans or big brown paper bags,” the specialist said. “They don’t really care about the provenance as long as they can pocket a large sum for their families and another large chunk for the party coffers.”

While Vietnam’s economic and political influence will remain strong, the coming years are likely to see the continuing expansion of China’s footprint in Laos through a combination of entrenched personal relationships, geographic proximity, and the sheer gravitational weight of China’s economy, which is some 862 times bigger than that of Laos. “They’ll build up their connections, and it’ll probably be a bit like the Tibetanization of Laos,” said Ling, the Bokeo-based consultant. “I don’t think [the country] will be able to resist it.”

Published by Nikkei Asian Review, April 21, 2016

As a frontier economy booms, Cambodia’s capital rises

PHNOM PENH — For most of its history, the sleepy Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh was best known for its charming, tree-lined boulevards and Buddhist pagodas. But over the past few years, a construction boom, fueled by a river of foreign cash, has turned this city of 2 million into one of Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing urban centers. Its low skyline, once dominated by the golden eaves of the Royal Palace, is now bisected by skyscrapers, office towers and high-rise apartment blocks.

The boom shows few signs of slowing. In 2015, the government authorized 2,305 new construction projects worth $3.34 billion, according to official figures, an increase of a third on the previous year. Chris Hobden, a manager at the local branch of U.S. real estate company CB Richard Ellis, said the strong growth was being driven by investment from within the region — particularly from China, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan — which he predicted would continue over the coming year.

“With sustained gross domestic product growth, attractive returns and the widespread adoption of the U.S. dollar, Cambodia is well placed to attract continued real estate investment from the wider region over the course of 2016,” he said.

Phnom Penh has come a long way from the mid-1970s, when the communist Khmer Rouge seized power and emptied the city of its inhabitants –part of its attempt to transform Cambodia into a hyper-communist agrarian state. Now, nearly four decades on, strong economic growth and a long spell of political stability have transformed Phnom Penh into a boom-town.

In the decade to 2010, Cambodia experienced the fastest rates of urbanization in Southeast Asia, behind Laos, according to the World Bank. Long Dimanche, a spokesman for Phnom Penh Municipality, said that the city continues to grow at more than 1% per year. “This rate, coupled with rural-urban migration — one of the outcomes of the rising urban economy and job markets — results in a high call for housing in the city,” he said.

New horizon

As investment has risen, so has the skyline. In every direction, construction cranes dot the horizon. Billboards and supermarket flyers advertise luxury condo developments. In the leafy southern suburb of Boeung Keng Kang, the traditional home of Cambodia’s large nongovernment organization sector, elegant 1960s-era villas are steadily making way for high-rise apartment blocks.

“Everything is moving upwards,” said Johnny Chan, head of sales and marketing for Bodaiju, a $134 million Japanese condo development across from Phnom Penh International Airport. The city is “moving towards something like Bangkok.”

Between 2005 and 2014, the Cambodian economy grew by an annual average of 7.5%, according to the World Bank, spawning a small middle-class with a taste for modern-style property and developments. The newfound wealth can be seen at the $200 million Japanese-built Aeon Mall, the country’s largest, which opened its doors in 2014. Here middle-class families stroll in the air-conditioned surrounds, past restaurants, cinemas and high-end fashion boutiques.

Like Aeon Mall, Bodaiju, a joint venture between a local developer and Japan’s Creed Group, is squarely targeting this new Cambodian middle-class. When completed, the development will feature 928 units set in leafy grounds including amenities such as rooftop pools, a gym, clubhouse, mini-marts and cafes.

Chan said the company has already sold 90% of the units in its first phase, mostly to local buyers — a testament to the increased buying power in the local market. “The GDP of Cambodia has increased, and the incomes of Cambodians have also increased,” he said. “Everything’s moving very, very fast. They are really catching up.”

According to a report released by CBRE in March, the city’s condo supply is expected to increase by 19,018 units by the end of 2018, an increase of 794%. Meanwhile, total office space has tripled since 2008. Three additional malls — another by Aeon, and two more by Malaysia’s Parkson group — are currently under construction.

The epicenter of Phnom Penh’s construction boom is Koh Pich, a small island sitting at the confluence of the Mekong and Bassac rivers. In 2006, the island was handed over to the Overseas Cambodia Investment Corp., a local conglomerate with links to the country’s prime minister, Hun Sen. The group has since sold several plots on the island to high-end luxury housing developments. These include Elite Town, a gated community with streets named after Ivy League universities, and Diamond Island Riviera, a $700 million joint venture between OCIC and China’s Jixiang Development.

Billing itself as “the future of Phnom Penh,” the Diamond Island Riviera project will feature three 38-story condominium towers supporting a boat-shaped rooftop, seemingly modelled on Singapore’s iconic Marina Bay Sands Hotel. It will also feature a hospital, a shopping mall, an international school, and extensive retail space, plus two additional 33-story condominium towers. Diamond Island Riviera representatives declined an interview request, but a sales officer at the lavish project showroom on Koh Pich said the company had sold some 60% of the condos off-plan, mostly to Chinese buyers.

In February, the city unveiled its most ambitious project yet: the $1 billion, 133-storey Thai Boon Roong Twin Trade Center, which will be built on the banks of the Tonle Sap River close to Koh Pich. According to city officials, the project, supposedly slated for completion by 2019, will feature hotels, condominiums and office space. Long Dimanche said that the new towers would create hundreds of jobs and become “one of the most iconic buildings in Phnom Penh.” At 500 meters, this new mega-skyscraper would be more than twice the height of the city’s next tallest building, the 188-meter Vattanac Capital Tower, completed in 2014.

Unsurprisingly, not everyone is convinced the project will ever eventuate. Stephen Higgins, a principal at Mekong Strategic Partners, an investment and corporate advisory firm, said the project was “economically not feasible — it’s as simple as that.” He said the project symbolized the government’s tendency to green-light large “vanity projects” for which there was little demand. “I think it’s fair to say that there isn’t a lot of market research that goes into a lot of these projects,” Higgins noted.

No legal framework

Part of the problem is the lack of regulation in the sector. In its 2015 annual report released in March, Cambodia’s Ministry of Land Management, Urban Planning and Construction stated that many building projects were initiated without ministry authorization and did not conform to safety codes.

One result has been a looming mismatch between supply and demand. “There are too many projects being launched, and it brings a serious question of who’s going to buy them,” said David Van, a senior adviser for Bower Group Asia. Van pointed to the many generic apartment towers which remain half-empty, their construction driven not by demand but by a “copycat mentality” among wealthy Cambodian businesspeople eager to park their money in real estate.

In the event of a major economic downturn, or a loss of liquidity in Chinese financial markets, the source of much of the “hot money” which has fueled the boom, the Cambodian property market could find itself exposed, Van warned.

Higgins agreed with that prognosis. “There has been a bubble in the construction sector for a while,” he said. “It does not appear to be deflating yet, but deflate it will.”

Published by Nikkei Asian Review, March 22, 2016

Death or Freedom

The nation of Myanmar was born under a dark star. It emerged into independence on January 4, 1948, at an exact time — four o’clock in the  morning — divined by Burmese astrologers. But almost immediately the country fell apart. In its first year, the new Republic of the Union of Burma came close to collapse as civil war erupted between the central government and breakaway ethnic rebels. The state survived, but ethnic conflict would leave a deep imprint on the psyche of the new nation. In 1962, arguing that the country’s squabbling politicians were unable to prevent the Union’s dissolution, the military, or Tatmadaw, seized power, terminating Myanmar’s early interregnum of parliamentary rule.

The effects were long-lasting. As regional neighbours like Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore shot to prosperity in the 1960s and 1970s, Myanmar slumbered under the rule of General Ne Win, architect of what came to be known as the “Burmese Way to Socialism”. As a writer for the Far Eastern Economic Review was to note in 1974, this fatidic doctrine had little to do with socialism per se; its ethnic Burman chauvinism and economic irrationalism were rather an exaggerated jerk against the humiliations of British colonial rule, the reflex of a people who “remain victims of their history and ideological prisoners of their past reactions.”

The ideological cell would remain sealed until the early part of the next century. When this writer first visited the former capital Yangon in 2009, the city seemed locked in an aspic of neglect. Everywhere one went there was the same peculiar smell: a mix of wet-season damp, car exhaust, and betel quid. Indeed, the city was probably little different to that encountered by the writer Paul Theroux in 1973, at the sclerotic height of Ne Winism. The country’s “notorious bureaucracy”—that was certainly unchanged. So too the crowds outside along Sule Pagoda Road and elsewhere in the dilapidated downtown, the “men and women alike puffing thick green cheroots … like a royal breed, strikingly handsome in this collapsing city, a race of dispossessed princes.”

And then of course, there were the country’s martial rulers, somehow clinging to power despite waves of mass protests in 1988 and 2007, and the fierce opprobrium of the world community. As Richard Cockett’s new book shows, a lot has changed since 2009, and a lot has remained the same.

The changes are clear enough: in March 2011, President Thein Sein, a former general, entered office and launched an unprecedented program of political and economic reforms. Within two years, the government had released political prisoners, opened the country to foreign investment, and abolished its antique press censorship regime. The visit of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Myanmar in late 2012 was “a defining moment for Burma”, the author writes, after which “it seemed, new freedoms came thick and fast”. Another milestone came on November 8 last year, when Myanmar went to the polls for a national election — the first freely contested poll for a quarter century.

Despite some expectations that the military’s political proxy, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), might find a way to preserve its governing majority, the people returned an unambiguous verdict for change. The National League for Democracy, led by the Nobel-Bodhisattva figure Aung San Suu Kyi, won most of the seats in the Union Parliament and is set to control the country’s next government, which takes office at the end of March. Even the most cynical Myanmar-watcher is hardpressed to deny that the NLD’s victory represents a significant step forward.

As always, however, there is the challenge of sifting hope from reality, continuity from change. Can a new government realign the stars that still hang over a troubled nation? Cockett’s Blood, Dreams and Gold: The Changing Face of Burma, written during the author’s time as Southeast Asia correspondent for The Economist, offers a bracing reminder of the challenges still facing the country. Myanmar’s greatest problem, Cockett argues, is that it has failed, again and again, to reconcile mono-ethnic aspirations with multi-ethnic realities — to make of Myanmar a true “plural society”.

This phrase is central to the author’s discussion of Myanmar’s recent history.  It originated with the British colonial administrator-turned-scholar J.S. Furnivall, whose Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India (1948) remains foundational for scholars of contemporary Myanmar. Furnivall, who lived in the country from 1902 until 1931 and was one of its first serious Western chroniclers, defined the plural society as one with a wide range of ethnic and religious groups “living side by side, but separately, within the same political unit.” As he wrote, “the plural society arises where economic forces are exempt from control by social will.”

This accurately described the situation in freewheeling colonial port-cities like Yangon, inhabited by a rich diversity of creeds and ethnicities, a “physical embodiment of the doctrine of free trade” brought by the British. Fittingly, it is here that Cockett chooses to open Blood, Dreams and Gold, navigating the reader down from the towering Shwedagon Pagoda into the intermingling stream of cultures which still occupy Yangon’s downtown to the south. (The somewhat enigmatic title of the book comes from the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s description  of the city during a visit in 1927). Particularly enlivening  are his descriptions of the city’s tiny Jewish and Armenian communities, shrunk now to handfuls of families, a tincture of the cosmopolitan brew created by colonial rule.

This once represented, to again quote Cockett quoting Neruda, “a world at its zenith”. As Cockett points out, Furnivall didn’t exactly mean the “plural society” as a compliment. He argued that the “bustling, ambitious migrants” — Nepalese, Armenian, Chinese, and Gujarati — who flooded into ports like Yangon, Mawlamyine, and Sittwe often disrupted the structures of traditional societies, be they Burman, Mon, or Rakhine. And colonial Myanmar’s plural society had a fatal flaw: it embraced pretty much everyone except the country’s ethnic Burman majority. As Cockett writes, “the Burmans found themselves forced to the margins of their own towns, physically and culturally… At best they were passive onlookers, at worst resentful victims.”

Thus the fierce inverse reaction that followed independence, and the fiercer one which followed the coup of 1962. In his recent path-breaking political biography of Ne Win, the scholar Robert H. Taylor argues that his subject deserves credit for keeping Myanmar out of the Cold War maelstrom which consumed the former colonies of French Indochina. But this came with costs. Leaving aside his management of Myanmar’s economy, with its string of disastrous demonetisations, Ne Win adopted a mono-cultural vision of Myanmar identity, placing its formerly repressed Burman majority squarely at the centre.

The result was a politically incoherent identity which excluded, implicitly or explicitly, a full third of the country’s population. For Cockett, this monoculture is best symbolised by the country’s showcase capital Naypyidaw, where the national government relocated in 2005. The new city, with its empty highways and towering statues of long-dead Burmese heroes, stands as a conscious repudiation of Yangon’s pluralistic mash, with its disturbing tendency to incubate rebels and dissidents.

It is also symbolised by the military junta’s 1989 decision to change the country’s English-language name from “Burma” to “Myanmar”, and to Burmanise dozens of ethnic minority place names. (It is for this reason that Cockett has chosen to use the former over the latter). After Yangon and Naypyidaw, Cockett turns to the outlying parts of the country — the shards of Myanmar’s broken ethnic mosaic. He offers sketches of the Kachin, Shan, and Kayin peoples and their struggles for self-determination against the central authorities.

He visits Myitkyina, in Kachin State, and finds the capital of a militarised internal colony. He sojourns through the bizarre landlocked entrepôt of Mong La, part of an old Shan principality now controlled by an ethnic rebel army, which presides over a seedy Chinese tourist colony of brothels, casinos, and endangered wildlife boutiques. With due allowance for its problematic colonial origins, Cockett argues that Furnivall’s “plural society” — or something like it — remains Myanmar’s best hope for ending these deeply-rooted conflicts.

The second half of Blood, Dreams and Gold examines the political developments which have precipitated the present reforms. Cockett argues rightly that they were driven not by the generals finally “seeing the light” and bowing to the inevitable appeal of Western-style democracy — he has enough experience in the region to know that this is unrealistic — but rather by shame and fear: shame at how far the country had fallen behind its neighbours during the decades of military rule; and fear of the smothering embrace of China, Myanmar’s looming northern neighbour, one of its few fast friends during the years of sanction and stagnation.

Cockett offers some fascinating profiles of those who have helped nudge the country in the direction of democracy. There is Nay Chi Win, a young NLD activist who foregoes his share in the family inheritance in order to support the fledgling democracy movement, writing secret political messages on kyat banknotes. Then there are figures like Win Htein and Tin Oo, military officers who later joined the NLD and became two of Aung San Suu Kyi’s most loyal lieutenants.

He also offers an illuminating discussion of the active “third force” in Myanmar politics — groups like the research institute Myanmar Egress — which have charted a path, sometimes controversially, between the military and the NLD, and helped bring the two sides together in 2011. The lingering impression, as in many similar accounts, is of the remarkable resilience of the Myanmar people, both their well-honed suspicion and scepticism, and their determination to thrust wedges into the tiny cracks of freedom.

Cockett is good on the United States’ rapprochement with Myanmar initiated by the Obama administration— the crucial international dimension to the country’s opening. As he observes, the reengagement was driven by a crucial dovetailing of circumstance on both sides: “The Burmese regime was anxious to bring in the United States to break its dependence on China; America had become frustrated with the apparent failure of sanctions … In the end, Obama got a sweaty palm to clasp in Burma.”

One problem now facing the US and other Western governments, Cockett recognises, is that the process of reform is running up against its built-in limits. The seven-step roadmap to “disciplined flourishing democracy” announced by the military in 2003 was always intended to involve “more discipline than democracy”, producing a rough analogue to the sort of hybrid, captured democracy that exists in Cambodia under Hun Sen.

In any case, the outcome of the reforms has been decidedly ambiguous. The democratic transition, as many observers are fond of saying, has “stalled”. (More likely, it has simply reached its destination). New freedoms have produced new challenges to the plural society. The greatest stain on the reform period, perhaps, is the desperate situation facing the Rohingya, a mostly Muslim minority from Rakhine State, on Myanmar’s west coast.

It was here, in 2012, that clashes broke out between Rohingya and Buddhist Rakhines, driving many of the former into squalid internal displacement camps. It is here that the legacy of the “plural society” is today being most bitterly contested. More worrying still were the conscious attempts, by elements in the USDP-military complex, to leverage dormant anti-Muslim sentiment to politically discredit the NLD. Though these attempts did nothing to dissuade people from voting for Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD (the irrational appeal of the Lady’s quasi-divine aura evidently besting the irrational appeals of ethno-nationalism) it is a reminder that the plural society still has its enemies.

What has emerged from reforms is not a renaissance of enlightened discourse, Cockett writes, but rather “the politics of fear — or democratic politics, Burmese-style”. Blood, Dreams and Gold was published too early to encompass last November’s election, and the massive victory of the NLD. But it remains hard to disagree with Cockett’s conclusion that despite the material benefits of the reforms, Myanmar is yet to “come to terms with its very difficult and bitterly contested history”.

Published in the Mekong Review, February 2016

 

North Korea’s multimillion-dollar museum in Cambodia

North Korea hopes to reap large profits from its new Angkor Panorama Museum in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Siem Reap, Cambodia – Visitors to the Angkor Panorama Museum are greeted by a huge painting of a smiling Buddha – a life-sized reproduction of one of the stone faces that adorns the Bayon temple, near Cambodia’s famous Angkor Wat.

But this massive image, stretching 11 metres from floor to ceiling, pales in comparison to the museum’s main attraction – a gigantic panorama which immerses visitors in the glories of the 12th-century Angkorian Empire.

In one section of this 123m-long painting, swarms of workers haul rocks to build the Bayon temple. Nearby an idyllic landscape of forests and lakes gives way to a frenzied battle scene complete with gory disembowelments. In total, the painting includes more than 45,000 human figures.

“You stand here like you are on a mountain,” said Yit Chandaroat, the museum’s director, gazing out towards a distant blue “horizon” where the five towers of Angkor Wat rise from the plain.

Chandaroat said 63 artists toiled for more than a year to complete the panorama, which he claims is the largest painting in East Asia. But the painters weren’t Cambodian; rather, they came from North Korea, which designed, built and bankrolled the $24m project.

Size matters

The Angkor Panorama Museum, which opened its doors in December, is just the latest international project to be completed by Pyongyang’s Mansudae Art Studio – one of the largest art production centres in the world.

Founded in 1959, Mansudae is mostly responsible for producing state propaganda and official statues of the country’s reclusive leaders, including current “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong-un.

Pier Luigi Cecioni, Mansudae’s representative in Europe and the United States, said that the studio employs some 4,000 people – including around 900 artists – at its Pyongyang headquarters, a sprawling campus filled with workshops, studios and foundries.

“They are the best in the country,” he said. “It’s a great, great honour to work with Mansudae.”

In recent years Mansudae has started taking its gargantuan socialist-style monuments abroad. The studio’s “export” wing, known as the Mansudae Overseas Project Group, has completed dozens of overseas projects, including statues of Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, a war memorial in Namibia and a huge embroidered map for the fashion designer Luciano Benetton.

Perhaps its most famous project is the African Renaissance Monument in Senegal, a bronze structure that stands taller than the Statue of Liberty. “Size is important,” said Cecioni. “They are proud that they can do such gigantic things.”

Money maker

Michael Madden, an analyst who edits the North Korea Leadership Watch blog, described Mansudae’s overseas projects as one of Pyongyang’s few competitive exports, and an important source of revenue for the isolated regime. “They are the only ones that are still doing these kinds of things. They’ve sort of cornered the market,” he said.

But the Angkor Panorama Museum, which sits on a dusty road a few kilometres from the Angkor temple complex, may be unique: unlike Mansudae’s other overseas commissions, the museum was conceived of and funded by the North Koreans, who have stayed on to manage the project.

“Normally they build the project and then go home, but this time they’ve kept their staff here,” said a Phnom Penh-based official who is familiar with the project.

Yit Chandaroat said the museum was being jointly run by Mansudae and Apsara, the Cambodian body which manages the Angkor temples. For its first 10 years of operations, the profits will go to the North Koreans. For the next 10 years they will be split 50-50 with Apsara, before the museum reverts to Cambodian government ownership.

“The role of this museum is to preserve our culture,” he said. “Not many countries are investors in culture, but North Korea was interested in that.”

In addition to the panorama, the museum includes a 204-seat movie theatre, a VIP reception room, and scale models of the sprawling Angkor temple complex. A cafe sells Korean-made Insam tea. Nearby, paintings by North Korean artists are on sale.

Chandaroat said 20 North Koreans were currently employed at the museum, including five artists to help to maintain the panorama. He insisted that the project was not intended as a political statement. “The role of this museum is to preserve our culture,” he said. “Not many countries are investors in culture, but North Korea was interested in that.”

This unique joint-venture hints at the historically close ties between Cambodia and North Korea – an outgrowth of the personal friendship between North Korean President Kim Il-Sung and Cambodia’s Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who met at an international summit in 1965.

As a gesture of friendship, Sihanouk broke off relations with South Korea. In 1970, when the prince was overthrown in a coup, Kim built him a palatial residence north of Pyongyang. Between 1991 and 2004 Sihanouk was also protected by a squad of granite-faced North Korean bodyguards – another gift from Kim.

The relationship has faded since the death of Kim in 1994 and Sihanouk in 2012, but an echo remains. The North Korean embassy still occupies a prime plot in Phnom Penh next door to a mansion belonging to Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen.

North Korea also operates a chain of restaurants – two in Siem Reap, four in the capital – which generate hard currency for the government in Pyongyang.

Given the unique relationship of the two countries, Madden said it was unsurprising that North Korea would choose Cambodia as a testing ground for a new type of business venture. “It might be a legacy thing for the North Koreans to do this, and make them some money,” he said.

The unprecedented nature of the museum project also suggests that it enjoys backing at the highest echelons of the North Korean government.

“You would have to be within the personal apparatus of the Supreme Leader in order to make something like this actually happen, and have it be effective,” Madden said.

Who benefits?

It remains unclear where the revenue from the museum will go, with human rights groups raising concerns that it will help circumvent international sanctions and prop up one of the world’s most repressive governments.

The official with knowledge of the project said that when it was being negotiated, the North Koreans wanted to incorporate the museum’s $15 admission price into the day-passes tourists buy to access the Angkor temples, but Cambodia declined.

“If that happened they would’ve got huge amounts of money,” the official said. Around 2.1 million people visited Angkor last year, according to Apsara.

But for now, the museum seems to be struggling to attract tourists. On a recent visit, lights were switched off to conserve power, while bored staff padded across the marble floors. Outside, a poster advertised half-price admission for Cambodian visitors.

In the empty cafe, a young North Korean woman manned the cash register. When asked if the museum could turn a profit, she responded in fluent, American-accented English. “There are not so many visitors because we’ve just opened,” she said, “but soon people will learn about us.”

Published by Al Jazeera English, February 22, 2016