By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Dec 8 2004 (IPS)

While the international donor community still has Cambodia’s well-being at heart, it is showing little sympathy for the rampant corruption in that battle-scarred country. For graft, according to reports, has robbed the poor of basic services.

On the eve of International Anti-Corruption Day, which falls on Dec. 9, this mood was demonstrated during the just-ended meeting of international donors when they turned the heat on the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen with calls that all levels of the social malaise had to be stamped out.

During the two-day donor meeting, which ran from Dec. 6-7 in Phnom Penh, the 18 countries aiding Cambodia secured commitments from Hun Sen to implement a raft of initiatives to staunch the flow of aid money going into the pockets of government officials in order to ensure that it reaches the people that need it most – namely the poor.

Phnom Penh has pledged to pass an anti-corruption law based on international guidelines, conduct trials on major corruption cases that have been reported and strengthen the legal framework to ensure that the law prevails.

For their part, the donors agreed to pour in 504 million U.S dollars to support Cambodia’s development programmes in 2005, an amount lower than the 635 million U.S. dollars per year that this South-east Asian country received in assistance from the donors when they last met in 2002.

The Hun Sen administration had been hoping to receive a pledge of 1.8 billion dollars for a three-year period, beginning in 2005.

A measure of how steeped in poverty Cambodia is stems from the fact that international aid from donors – such as Japan, France, the United States, South Korea, Australia and Singapore – account for nearly 50 percent of the country’s national budget.

Two years ago, nearly 36 percent of Cambodia’s 13.1 million population were living on less that one dollar a day, the standard used by the U.N. to measure abject poverty.

By this year, those living on less than a dollar a day had risen to 40 percent. In addition, the World Bank points out in a report released this year that ”50 percent of all children under the age of five are underweight.”

The year ahead could be dire, the Bank warns in a series of alarming predictions. Notably, that Cambodia’s economic growth could slide to 2.4 percent in 2005 as against the robust growth of six percent it had enjoyed over the past three years.

The pledges made by the donors to help Cambodia came after a U.N. brokered peace accord in 1991. That ceasefire brought to an end nearly two decades of war and internal strife, including the savagery of the genocidal Khmer Rouge that ruled Cambodia from 1975-79.

During the Khmer Rouge years, over 1.7 million people died due to torture, starvation and illness.

Some of Cambodia’s achievements since then should give comfort to the donors that their aid has helped get the country on its feet. Most significant is Cambodia’s success at combating the spread of HIV/AIDS and also the three parliamentary elections held since 1993 to help restore democracy.

That Phnom Penh would face some heat over corruption was in the air following a report released recently by the U.S. Agency for International Development. It charged that close to 500 million U.S. dollars is lost annually to corruption in Cambodia each year.

”Corruption is across the board and the more poor you are, the more you are affected by corruption,” Chea Vanath, head of the Centre for Social Development, a Phnom Penh-based think tank, told IPS. ”The poor who depend on the health sector, the education sector and rural administration are among those (worse) hit.”

Aid money set aside to build Cambodia’s ailing health system, for instance, is often lost, she said. ”The lack of transparency and sound financial accountability has resulted in the people being deprived of services in hospitals.”

Ending graft will be a challenge for the Hun Sen administration since members of his ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) are involved. ”Corruption is there up and down the chain of command, from the top to the bottom,” Michael Hayes, editor-in-chief of the ‘Phnom Penh Post’ English language newspaper, said in an interview.

”Hun Sen has to deal with his own party members for a start,” he added. ”It is a way of life because salaries are so low. And no one has a long-term collective vision to deal with corruption.”

The clamour by international donors to stamp out poverty comes as the world marks the first year since a U.N. global convention against graft was launched in the Mexican city of Merida. To raise the profile of this drive against corruption, Dec. 9 was identified as International Anti-Corruption Day.

This U.N. convention has been hailed by corruption monitors, such as Transparency International (TI), since it set new standards to fight corruption globally. The convention also ”establishes the right of people who have suffered damage from corruption to initiate legal proceedings against responsible parties,” states TI.

And to ensure that Cambodia conforms to this new global language against corruption, the Berlin-based TI is backing a drive by Chea’s Centre for Social Development to ensure that the anti-graft law will include provisions on ”political corruption, procurement and contracting, civil society participation, access to information and whistleblower protection.”

Excerpt: