Word: hun
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...decade, international donors have pledged huge sums to prop up the impoverished Southeast Asian nation. The donors unveil a goody bag of financial aid contingent on the country tackling endemic problems like corruption, human-rights violations and environmental degradation. And each year, like ritual, longtime Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen dutifully pledges to clean up the government's act. Alas, also like ritual, little or nothing happens. Yet somehow the entire ceremony repeats itself year after year...
...foreign donors - a collection of foreign governments, multinational banks and various U.N. agencies - promised to funnel $689 million of aid to Cambodia, a 15% increase from last year and an amount roughly equivalent to half the nation's annual budget. This year, they did issue statements chastising the Hun Sen government for failing to adequately battle widespread graft. Cambodia ranks No. 151 out of 163 nations surveyed in Transparency International's 2006 government corruption index. Addressing donor representatives gathered in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh this month, Hun Sen promised that long-delayed anti-corruption legislation would be passed...
...political tool, with varying levels of success. Rich economies get to feel good about sharing their wealth with the less fortunate. At the same time, Western nations dole out cash to poorer economies in hopes of encouraging budding democratization efforts. But if anything, Cambodia has continued to backslide. A Hun Sen-backed coup in 1997 removed Co-Prime Minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh. Opposition party members are regularly harassed. And a July 2006 deadline imposed by Hun Sen himself for introducing a draft of anti-corruption legislation passed with no evidence of any such document...
...grown (more than 10% last year, due in part to tourism and the textile industry). But wealth appears to be concentrated in the hands of the few. Earlier this month, the international watchdog organization Global Witness released the findings of a three-year investigation that accuses a network of Hun Sen's relatives and friends of having made tens of millions of dollars from illegal logging. (Several of those implicated by Global Witness have denied the allegations, and the watchdog's report itself has been banned from domestic distribution by the Cambodian government.) In the report, Global Witness castigates...
...Cambodia certainly suffers from rampant corruption. Furthermore, there has been little transparency in the awarding of exploration contracts to foreign oil companies. Longtime Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has dismissed concerns that oil will be anything other than a huge boon for his country. But for the poor farmers watching the oxen decline to feast at the Royal Plowing Ceremony, the promise of oil revenues must feel completely irrelevant to their hand-to-mouth lives. What will they do if a drought does indeed strike this year, and their rice shoots wilt in the tropical sun? If the sacred cows...