Imperialism Of The Ngos

INDO-CHINA is refreshingly civilised after the politically and environmentally polluted confines of New Delhi. After a month in that city, it was with a sense of pleasant anticipation that I stepped off my flight at Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia.

I was extremely conscious of the fact that Cambodia had been through ravages that no country or people should ever have to see. Had these ravages been repaired? What mark had they left? I was unprepared for, and shocked by, what I saw.

Cambodians are courteous, cosmopolitan and extremely literate in their dealings; there is none of the parochialism of India or Malaysia or the low-level consumerism that besets the "tigers". Yet, I got a distinct feeling of an overshadowing past, marked with the constant interf e rence of outsiders in the daily life and legitimate business of the local population. The ravages of the French, the Americans, the Vietnamese and the Chinese were very evident. Cambodia is blessed with a lovely climate; it is abundant in water and hydro-electric potential and has a long tradition of education. Yet, today, Cambodia has the highest per capita population of amputees in the world; much of the country is an unexploded minefield. Beautiful lakes and pools turn out, upon closer inspection, to be bomb craters.

This was history, albeit recent history. With the coming of peace in the 1990s, and with promises of international support, surely, reconstruction would be the prime task. The only constraint, I had been told, was local instability.

However, I saw little evidence of instability. Levels of violence and attrition around Phnom Penh are limited, and much of the talk is exaggerated. Phnom Penh is certainly safer than Lagos or Johannesburg and no more unsafe than New York or London in the wrong place at the wrong time. The violent Khmer Rouge is more demonised than active in the capital.

What shocked me was not local instability but a new form of colonisation being perpetrated by external forces. Phnom Penh is controlled by, and at the mercy of, foreign non-government organisations (N G Os) and bilateral agencies. About half of   government expenditure is financed by a multilateral consortium. In addition, this consortium runs bilateral programmes in a variety of areas whose magnitude equals that of total government expenditure. The consequence: the bulk of developmental activity in Cambodia is financed by foreign agencies whose in fluence exceeds that of the State.

Now he who pays the piper calls the tune. There are more and less civilised ways of doing this, but the behaviour of these new princes of Cambodia is depraved and barbaric. The monthly salary of the commissioner of police of Phnom Penh is $90, all told. The salary of a junior foreign (normally white) employee on an NGO project in Cambodia is at least $500. Typical managerial packages are in the $1,500-2,500 range plus perks. Given the low cost of living in Cambodia, this turns a bunch of typically mediocre, often oafish, expatriates into an exclusive elite, lording it over the local population. These people maintain a standard of living, and exercise levels of power, that they could not even dream of doing in Europe or the US. Whatever their initial intentions, they become petty despots treating local people with condescension at best and contempt at their typical worst.

The major expatriate hangout in Phnom Penh is the Foreign Correspondents Club (FCC), a salubrious spot overlooking the Mekong, where you may sip a cocktail at European prices and watch the poor, the wretched and the amputated of Phnom Penh trying to gain a living by begging downstairs. I was discouraged by the denizens from giving any money to these beggars as it might "encourage inflation". On my first visit, I noticed the complete absence of Cambodians there (except the waiters). On my second (and last) visit, a Cambodian woman entered with a white man, and I was told by the expatriates I had gone there with that this sort of behaviour was "intolerable". The couple were having a drink and a quiet conversation just like everybody else. I asked why this was intolerable. "Don’t you see," the reply came, "the prostitutes have begun invading this place as well." I excused myself and left, feeling sick and angry at this rank racism; my companions did not, of course, see what was wrong.

Of course, there is prostitution in Cambodia. But there is no justification for this sort of racist assumption anywhere in the world, and even less so in that ravaged country. Most of the demand comes from the expatriates. It is not as crude and open as it is in Manila or Bangkok or London. Twenty years of war have meant that 20 per cent of households have no adult males and 18 per cent of women are widowed or separated.

The depravity of the new N G O imperialism was sharply contrasted, for me, with the difficulties of the local population when I dined one evening (my birthday as it happened) with a Vietnamese economist employed in Cambodia. She earned $50 a month; at the end of dinner ($25) she insisted on paying, and I managed to dissuade her only by explaining that it was inauspicious for an Indian to accept hospitality on his birt h d a y. She told me that she could never hope to go back to Vietnam as the airf a re was over $200. So she had not seen her family for four years and could not hope to do so. She said, smiling: "I don’t think about it except at night when I cry a lot, so I try not to sleep too much." I live away from home too, and I felt tears, right there .

As night fell over Phnom Penh the local population were in their hovels and beds. Some, like my friend, tried to keep the tears away. The only sounds were those of four-wheel drive Land Rovers roaring to, or from, the expatriate-filled discos and night-clubs. A State subordinated, a people re-colonised, and a new civilising mission afoot, with the semi-skilled of the West, again, the major beneficiaries. What a cruel joke.

(The author is a political economist atSOAS, University of London.)