Why does Australia
provide $100 million in foreign aid to a dictatorship, posing as a democracy,
that uses Riot Police and private security thugs armed with electric cattle
prods to disperse peaceful demonstrators?
The Hon Julie Bishop
Minister for Foreign
Affairs
House of Representatives, Parliament
House
Canberra ACT 2600 30th
Jan 2014
Dear Minister
Imagine
this:
Your neighbours are very poor.
The mother and father cannot feed, clothe, educate or provide medical care to
their many children. The roof to the family home leaks and they have no money
to repair it. Their lives have been
marred by tragedy and trauma. You feel
for them. You want to help. What do you do? You are comparatively rich and in a
position to pay to have the roof repaired, buy decent clothes for the children,
put them in school and provide the family with healthy food and other basic
necessities of life. You are a good person, so you open your wallet put your
money where your heart is. Your actions are to be applauded. Everyone in the
family is appreciative, thankful for the help you are providing to keep their
heads above water.
Having committed yourself to
helping this family you discover that the father regularly beats, intimidates and
mistreats his children. You are shocked to learn that a substantial part of the
money you have provided to help the family is being spent by the father to indulge
in his own pleasures – drinking and gambling in particular. What do you
do?
Concerned, but not wishing to be
judgmental, (this father has suffered a great deal in his life) you take him
aside and tell him, politely, that you cannot provide financial assistance to
the family if he continues to mistreat his children; to drink and gamble away
the money you give him. You suggest also that he put some effort into finding a
job so that he, too, can help support his family. Contrite, hand on heart, the
father promises to mend his ways and look for a job. You are relieved.
It soon becomes apparent that the
father has no intention of keeping his promises. The gambling, drinking and abuse
of his children continues and you see no evidence that he is trying to get a
job. You feel a little uneasy about how your effort to help is turning out. You
wonder if, in providing his family with generous financial assistance, the
father now has no pressing need to earn a living. He knows that you, out of the
goodness of your year, will feed, clothe and educate his children.
You speak with the father again. More
forcefully this time! Again, he is contrite and makes the same promise to
reform in his behaviour. Yes, this time he will be true to his word, stop
gambling, drinking and mistreating his children. He makes a solemn promise. And
he will put a great deal of effort into finding a job. His promises are made with
such sincerity that you give him the benefit of the doubt; one more chance.
After all, this father has suffered so much, has been so traumatized by past
experiences beyond his control, that it is unrealistic to expect him to mend
his ways immediately. It will take time. This is what you tell yourself. This
is what you need to tell yourself. This what you need to believe.
This round robin of promises made
and promises broken goes on for some time until, in exasperation, you say to
him, “I will provide no more support for your family for as long as you spend
the money on yourself – drinking and gambling - and not on your family; until
you get a job and stop intimidating and mistreating your children.” The father
responds, with a sorrowful expression, “But my children must eat! If you do not
provide us with money, how will my children eat? I am a poor man. Our family
has been through so much trauma. Please, you must continue to help us. Think of
the children.”
This works. You feel both guilty
and trapped. How can you possibly withdraw financial aid to your neighbours,
knowing full well that if you do, it is the children who will suffer the most?
Do you want to take on that responsibility? Do you want to be seen as uncaring?
No. So you keep on giving. You come to accept as a fact of that the father
skims a good deal off the top of what you provide for the family - to spend on his
own drinking, gambling and other selfish pastimes. You accept that he is not going to even try to
get a job so that he can support his family himself. This is the price, you tell
yourself, that you must pay for helping his children. Surely it is better, you
ask yourself, that some money trickles through the father’s fingers to help the
children than none at all? You answer in the affirmative because the
alternative is too distressing to contemplate – namely that you have become an
accessory in the father’s mistreatment of his children by relieving him of his
responsibility to support them in an atmosphere free of intimidation and fear.
You are now, despite your good
intentions, complicit in his mistreatment of his children. Your support for the
family, well-meaning though it was at the outset, is actually damaging the
family further since the father controls the purse strings and his purse is
mostly filled with your money! That you are an accessory to a the crime of the
father’s human rights abuses within his
own family is something you must do all you can to hide from yourself. You are
a good person, after all!
One day you discover that the
father has so badly beaten one of his children that she has been hospitalized
and may die. What do you do? Withdraw your aid to the entire family? Punish the
children for the father’s bad behavior?
This simple cautionary tale
ignores the fact that others in the neighbourhood are also providing the father
with financial assistance on the presumption that it is being used to help the
entire family. If you withdraw your aid the others will step in to fill the
gap. You have, in reality, no leverage. The father is playing you for a sucker.
The only way that your threat to withdraw your aid to the family can or will
carry any weight if it is made in conjunction with all the others in the
neighbourhood that are providing financial assistance to it.
What would happen if you, and all
your all your neighbours, speaking with one voice, were to say to the father, “We
will provide no more aid until you stop mistreating your family and spending
our aid money on yourself?” With nowhere
to turn for financial aid it may well be that the father is not in a position
to play the neighbours off against each other and has no choice but to not only
agree to change his ways, but to actually change them.
Analogies of the kind I am making
here are, of course, simplistic. However, they do point to a truth so glaring
that it cannot be ignored: The international donor community has, though its
billions of dollars of aid this past 20 years ($18 billion) absolved the Hun
Sen government (the ‘father’) of the responsibility to feed, clothe, house and
otherwise take care of the Cambodian people. The international donor community
has stepped in to do what the Cambodian government should be doing in terms of
providing social services. If this
community, and the gaggle of NGOs it supports, were to withdraw aid, Hun Sen
could accuse them of heartlessness, of abandoning the poor who are, after all,
poor because they are victims (albeit 2nd and 3rd
generation victims) of the Khmer Rouge! Blackmail!
If the International donor
community speaking with one voice, were to cut all aid to Cambodia until Prime
Minister Hun Sen acts in accordance with the Cambodian constitution, until his
government obeys the Land Laws that make it illegal to steal the land and homes
of Cambodians, and until he stops sending armed soldiers and black-helmeted
thugs armed with electric cattle prods to beat up and sometimes kill peaceful
protestors, his government would be broke within weeks. His Ministers, members
of his family and the corrupt businessman who make up the kleptocracy that
controls Cambodia – its people and resources – would be unable to survive in
the absence of the bribes that are the lifeblood of their dealings with the
international community. Something would have to change.
What would happen if the flow of
money that keeps Hun Sen and his regime in power were to come to a sudden end?
There are many possibilities. Backed into a corner, Hun Sen may respond
violently and much blood may be spilt by
innocent Cambodians who want nothing other than a genuine democracy and not to
be ruled, for yet another five years, by a dictator.
On the other hand, Hun Sen’s own
party may realize that his autocratic ways have rendered him a liability and
get rid of him. Or, Hun Sen may realize that the tide of history is against him
and that it is time for him to retire and live in comfort on the many millions
of dollars he has acquired in his Prime Ministers’ salary! In the south of
France, perhaps! No-one can be sure what the outcome would be but it is hard to
imagine that it could be worse than the situation that prevails.
Do you, as Australia’s Minister
for Foreign Affairs, do the Foreign Minister’s of other countries propping up
the Hun Sen government want to be a party to the political turmoil that is
racking the country now, in five years?
When Hun Sen arranges, through his manipulation of the National Election
Committee and the Constitutional Council to win yet another election in 2018,
how will you and the international community respond? Express your concern? Yet
again? Expressions of concern are meaningless unles backed up with action.
No doubt, later this year, when
Australia promises another $100 million in aid to Cambodia, Hun Sen will make
the same kinds of solemn promises of reform as he has been making this past 20
years. Will you buy it, Minister? Is there any point at which you and your
fellow Foreign Ministers will say, “Enough”? When the international donor
community will stop expressing its ‘concern’ and actually act in a way that has
the best interests of the Cambodian people at heart?
Australia could play a leading
role here in coordinating an international coalition of donor countries to put
pressure on Hun Sen to (a) allow for an independent investigation to take place
into the ‘flawed’ July 2013 elections, (b) to implement an independent
investigation into the murder of striking garment factory workers earlier this
month such that the killers, along with those who gave the orders to shoot to
kill, are identified and punished in accordance with Cambodian law.
You do not need, Minister, to
await the arrival of more reports into what is taking place in Cambodia. Just
go online and see for yourself. You could start with this one – footage of the
Deputy Governor of Phnom Penh beating up a moto dop driver:
http://truth2power-media.blogspot.com/2014/01/phnom-penh-post-video-deputy-gov-caught.html?showComment=1391053517494#c3339757106368361075
If the Deputy Governor of Phnom
Penh can perpetrate violence of this kind with impunity it should come as no
surprise that members of the armed forces can and will follow suit. Is this the
form of government that Australia wants to support with an annual injection of
$100 million in foreign aid?
best wishes
James Ricketson
