"YOU HAVE TO LEAVE IT TO THEM"

"We don't make these societies. We have to deal with them as they are. They live their own realities. They have their own way of taking decisions and preparing their people for them. You have to leave it to them to find their own way of doing it. You have to leave it to them."

-- UN head honcho Kofi Annan, on negotiating with
Libya's Gaddafi (or 'wacky Gaddafi' according to those old Garbage Pail Kids bubble-gum
cards from the mid-eighties)

The above quote is taken from a book I'm reading right now called Deliver Us From Evil, by Wiliam Shawcross. It's basically a collection of his reportings from around the world in the nineties, from Somalia to Libya to Cambodia to Serbia (amongst others). The subscript to the book is 'Peacekeepers, Warlords, and a World of Endless Conflict.'

Living in Cambodia has cemented for me the fact that the world is, indeed, a place of 'endless conflict.' A lot of this book is concerned with Cambodia, especially in the 'UNTAC' years, which is when the United Nations came in and basically ran the country for a period of time before they held their first 'free' elections.

Oh, and what a time it was. Cambodia has changed a lot in ten years (or so I'm told), but it's still, how shall I put it, not exactly 'free'. Not quite a democracy. Not exactly diplomatic and equitable in the way that wealth is spread. There's a great line in the book where Shawcross quotes somebody saying: "Cambodia has become a nation of two hundred very rich families and nine million poor people."

Seems to ring true for me. I was thinking about all the nice cars I see in Phnom Penh, Mercedes Benzes and the like. If you're a rich family here (or anywhere, probably) you will have a car for yourself, one for the wife, maybe one for the kids. So let's three cars per rich family. You multiply that by two hundred families, you get six hundred cars. Which might account for pretty much all of the cars booting around Phnom Penh. (Or maybe not. Maybe there's many more rich people than that. Hard to say here. If you're a head honcho in the government, you're rich -- and Cambodia has one of the biggest cabinets in the whole freakin' world, so that makes for a lotta rich people buying a lotta nice cars and doing a lotta driving.)

Recently there have been a lot of reports here from donor agencies, all of them reiterating the basic common points -- billions have been pumped into this land, and, um, guys and gals, uh, what is there to show for it? A lot of Mercedes Benzes, that's what.

Maybe I was naive about the world before. Maybe I didn't get it. I still don't, not really, but I'm learning. I'm learning that the people in power in poor countries like Cambodia are not all that concerned about the people not in power. They are more concerned with wielding power than distributing it.

Basic, common knowledge, I suppose, but I'm a slow learner.

And, with all of that aid money that keeps pouring on in, I think about the quote at the top of this post. About how countries work according to their own rules and regulations and customs and traditions, whether the outside world cares or not. The mysterious alchemy that makes up a people, a nation, a lanuage, a culture, is just that -- a mixture, a concoction, a potion that can be viewed from the outside, but can't be replicated. It is what it is.

So maybe Cambodia will always be poor. Maybe Cambodia's leaders will always be corrupt. When all is said and done, it is, after all, their country, the Khmer people's, to govern and develop. Perhaps the money from abroad and from here will never trickle through the rice fields of this beautiful land and find a place in the hands of the poor, desperate people that need it the most. Perhaps Cambodia is, in the end, doomed to decades of blunt, unremitting poverty.

The thing is, though, a few weeks ago I visited the ancient temples of Angkor Wat, 'Cambodia's Pyramids', for lack of a better term, and they are massive, and they are many, and they were pieced together with painstaking patience and precision thousands and thousands of years ago, when Cambodia was, in fact, the jewel of Southeast Asia, an advanced civilization second to none.

I think of those temples, and the intricacy and care that went into crafting them. The nobility and ambition of those descendants of my young, good-natured former students, inheriting a country fundamentally wrecked by their own government and others. I think of the basic goodness and openness of the Cambodian people, still there in spite of the horr. I think of what poverty and war and despotism can do to a race.

And I haven't given up hope. Not yet.

Time and history are long; a century is just handful of years, really. The temples of Angkor have sat through century after century, civilization after civilization, war after. They're testaments to what the Khmer people could do and still can do.

And there's still time left to turn things (a little bit) around, still hope, and the final chapter in the history of Cambodia, the one that will first chart and then judge the progress that was made in the hundred years after the Pol Pot decimation, has yet to be conceived, let alone written.

Because if you give up hope, what else is left?