Following the Paris Peace Accords signed in October 1991 the UN oversaw the formal ending of Cambodia’s civil war and its international isolation under an ambitious peacebuilding process known as UNTAC which lasted February 1992 to September 1993. UNTAC with its blue-helmeted forces assumed direct responsibility for the security and administration of the country and successfully conducted general elections in May 1993. Voter turn-out was almost 90 percent. A coalition government was installed in September, with two prime ministers, Hun Sen and Prince Ranariddh, who headed the two main parties that had contested the election. Actually, the royalist party FUNCINPEC had won more seats in the Constituent Assembly but Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), in charge for over a decade, would not cede power so this arrangement was agreed by UNTAC. It lasted four years until Hun Sen carried out a military coup in 1997 and became sole PM.
In November 1993 the Bank sent a mission headed by Jeffrey Gutman to Phnom Penh to discuss rehabilitation priorities with the government and coordinate with other donors. I covered agriculture, forestry and rural development and managed to get out to visit the regions and make useful contacts with people already working in the sector. The mission’s output was an Economic Rehabilitation Credit (ERC) to fund critical infrastructure repairs mainly in the transport, water and power sectors, mostly in the Phnom Penh area, but there was a small component for the agriculture ministry. The ERC had a hard time getting under way because of government red tape and lack of qualified contractors.
The country presented enormous post-conflict challenges. It was still politically divided; territorial integrity was not yet assured – many areas were still partly controlled by the KR and military operations continued; internal communications were extremely difficult because of infrastructural degradation; and a sense of insecurity prevailed both inside the capital city, where a nightly curfew remained in force, and outside with numerous unofficial road blocks. Unescorted travel was generally discouraged and landmines were still widespread.
Secondly, national finances were in a parlous state, due to absence of tax revenue other than import duties and pressure to pay a quarter of a million public servants (civil plus military), whom the CPP side of government were unwilling to let go. (A prominent leader of the other party, Mr Sam Rainsy, urged sacking up to half and doubling the meager salary of the remainder).
Thirdly, the population, now back up to about 10 million, remained traumatized and displaced: they needed to relaunch lives and families on a sounder footing. The government was only too aware of these challenges but the two sides took very different views on how to approach them. Maintaining a cohesive assistance strategy under these conditions was difficult.
The following years involved me in intensive discussions of an assistance program in the ag-RD sector. We agreed to support a project with the CPP-controlled Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry & Fisheries (MAFF) to help regenerate its capacity and include components introducing new technologies for productivity improvement among smallholder farmers. Since agriculture was economically so important it had to be a comprehensive project, with multiple components involving intensive preparation work as well as discussion with potential co-financiers and TA sources. After hold-ups connected with discussions over MAFF’s ill-conceived forest concessions program an Agricultural Productivity Improvement Project (APIP) was finally approved in February 1997. It took 8 years to complete, with good results in some components (livestock health improvement and seed multiplication) and poor in others (problems in selection of candidates for overseas training). Security was still an important concern for hiring international TA but not generally for locally-based technical specialists, who already knew the country and spoke the Khmer language.
Meanwhile, following UNTAC’s legacy, we had to satisfy both sides of the political house and started to identify an area-based rural development project to support the program of the FUNCINPEC-led Ministry of Rural Development (MRD). We explored working with donors like the EU and ADB that were preparing projects in central areas of Cambodia but for various reasons that avenue did not work out. So we entered virgin territory in the North East that included some of the poorest and most inaccessible areas of Cambodia, bordering the central Vietnam highlands. The proposed project aimed to rehabilitate rural roads, drainage and water storage using economic and sustainable methods of community-based construction. The Northeast Village Project approved May 1999 had positive results but these were not widely replicated, perhaps reflecting the MRD’s lack of experience and ‘top-down’ modus operandi. (In retrospect, the new Mekong bridge built near Kratie to connect the area to the rest of Cambodia and funded under an IDA highways project, was probably more important).
Our post-conflict re-engagement in Cambodia was timely and substantial but had to be implemented under extremely difficult conditions. Perhaps it could have been more effective if based on a better informed assessment of the country political situation and of the UNTAC experience, and if more closely coordinated with other donors. We could have learned more from the UN agencies and donors like Swedish SIDA who had been working in Cambodia for several years before we entered in 1993/94 but we then had no in-country representative. In any case, the complexities of re-engaging in a country emerging from two decades of internal conflict were huge and ruled out operating under the Bank’s normal planning and assistance procedures.
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* Chris Redfern is a former Senior Economist in the Bank and worked on Cambodia in EASRD from 1993 to 2000.
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KEYWORDS agriculture, Cambodia, post-conflict, re-engagement, UNTAC
