Thursday, 22 July 2010 15:03
The Phnom Penh Post
Irwin Loy
THE government has approved a revamped compensation scheme for civil servants, though observers say it remains unclear how quickly authorities and NGOs will be able to implement it.
The Priority Operating Costs scheme was approved July 12 as a replacement for a previous salary supplement programme that was abruptly cancelled last year.
Paul Pidou, deputy secretary general of the Council for Administrative Reform, confirmed that Prime Minister Hun Sen approved the sub-decree, which will be implemented retroactive to July 1. CAR officials were not available for comment yesterday.
A copy of the sub-decree obtained by the Post yesterday shows the new scheme will be more complex than the programme it is replacing. Under the POC scheme, development groups will be required to obtain permission to supplement civil servant salaries for each individual programme.
The sub-decree also outlines two broad levels of pay scales: “national” and “sub-national/public service delivery” .
Jeroen Stol, country director for Handicap International Belgium, said the new definitions could help equalise payments offered by NGOs under the old scheme.
“In the past, different organisations paid different incentives for the same types of jobs, which caused ... jealousy in some cases,” he said.
However, many details are still unclear, he added, including the payment levels in which civil servants will be grouped.
Authorities will need to add a new management layer to administer the scheme, according to its implementation guidelines. Each POC scheme will require its own director and must be approved by the relevan ministry, the development partner, the CAR and the Ministry of Economy and Finance.
Sharon Wilkinson, country director for Care Cambodia, said her NGO still has not received any official word about the new scheme. “I still do not feel there’s sufficient information available for us to implement this within the timeframe designated,” she said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY CHHAY CHANNYDA
Friday, July 23, 2010
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Fresh census targets RCAF’s ‘ghost soldiers’
The Phnom Penh Post
By Sam Rith
Tuesday, 13 July 2010 15:03
DEFENCE Ministry officials say a more “thorough” census of the military currently under way will reduce the number of “ghost soldiers” on the government payroll.
Ministry spokesman Chhum Socheat said yesterday that officials were confident this year’s census would be more accurate than those carried out in previous years, in large part because of a new computerised storage system that includes information on each soldier.
“It is the annual census to find out the real number of soldiers ... by cutting the number of soldiers who have retired, died or did not appear,” he said.
As part of the census, which began last week, every soldier in the military will be required to show up in person at regional offices to verify their identities and salary claims.
Those who failed to do so by the end of the month would forfeit their salaries, Chhum Socheat said.
The problem of ghost soldiers – those who are on the military payroll yet serve no function – has plagued the country for years, sparked by the aftermath of the peace process in the early 1990s that saw fighters from various factions amalgamated into the national military.
But it remains unclear how many such soldiers there are. A 1999 survey eliminated more than 15,000 ghost soldiers and 160,000 nonexistent dependents from the records and declared a total force of 131,227, according to a 2008 World Bank report on a donor-funded demobilisation scheme. Yet those results were “widely discredited”, the report stated. By September 2002, Ministry of Economy and Finance statistics showed the defence payroll had been reduced to 112,359.
A security assessment on Cambodia released this year by defence publisher IHS Jane’s suggested that the military has an on-paper strength of 110,000, but a field strength of 70,000 troops.
Cheam Yeap, a senior parliamentarian with the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, said the new census procedure was implemented after Prime Minister Hun Sen urged all institutions, including the military, to reduce “the number of people who do not have names”.
“We are doing this more thoroughly than before. No one can fake,” he said.
Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights, described the problem of ghost soldiers as “critical”. “Many soldiers ... are not active and they’re not trained. Who are these people? I don’t think the government itself even knows,” he said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY IRWIN LOY
By Sam Rith
Tuesday, 13 July 2010 15:03
DEFENCE Ministry officials say a more “thorough” census of the military currently under way will reduce the number of “ghost soldiers” on the government payroll.
Ministry spokesman Chhum Socheat said yesterday that officials were confident this year’s census would be more accurate than those carried out in previous years, in large part because of a new computerised storage system that includes information on each soldier.
“It is the annual census to find out the real number of soldiers ... by cutting the number of soldiers who have retired, died or did not appear,” he said.
As part of the census, which began last week, every soldier in the military will be required to show up in person at regional offices to verify their identities and salary claims.
Those who failed to do so by the end of the month would forfeit their salaries, Chhum Socheat said.
The problem of ghost soldiers – those who are on the military payroll yet serve no function – has plagued the country for years, sparked by the aftermath of the peace process in the early 1990s that saw fighters from various factions amalgamated into the national military.
But it remains unclear how many such soldiers there are. A 1999 survey eliminated more than 15,000 ghost soldiers and 160,000 nonexistent dependents from the records and declared a total force of 131,227, according to a 2008 World Bank report on a donor-funded demobilisation scheme. Yet those results were “widely discredited”, the report stated. By September 2002, Ministry of Economy and Finance statistics showed the defence payroll had been reduced to 112,359.
A security assessment on Cambodia released this year by defence publisher IHS Jane’s suggested that the military has an on-paper strength of 110,000, but a field strength of 70,000 troops.
Cheam Yeap, a senior parliamentarian with the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, said the new census procedure was implemented after Prime Minister Hun Sen urged all institutions, including the military, to reduce “the number of people who do not have names”.
“We are doing this more thoroughly than before. No one can fake,” he said.
Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights, described the problem of ghost soldiers as “critical”. “Many soldiers ... are not active and they’re not trained. Who are these people? I don’t think the government itself even knows,” he said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY IRWIN LOY
Friday, July 9, 2010
Canadia Bank agrees to manage pensions
The Phnom Penh Post
Friday, 09 July 2010 15:01 Soeun Say
THE National Social Security Fund for Civil Servants agreed yesterday to cooperate with Canadia Bank in offering a pension and social security fund to civil servants.
The agreement was signed in Phnom Penh.
The new NSSFCS fund aims to manage and insure a social security fund for when a civil servant retires or becomes handicapped, pregnant, or is involved in an accident at work resulting in disability or death, according to Chou Ratanak, the director for the Fund, speaking at Canadia Tower.
“We will be offering the social security fund to them in order to reduce their difficulties while living with certain conditions,” he said.
The fund is to be tested initially in Phnom Penh, and will be available through the bank as a standalone bank account with its own ATM card, he said, and added that having the account accessible through the bank would allow the correct funds to get to the end-user in a timely manner.
“Moreover, they can save their money through the fund, which will also have an interest rate with Canadia Bank,” Chou Ratanak said.
The NSSFCS is also looking for a way to make it easier to provide health insurance, possibly in conjunction with a bank, in a partnership similar to the agreement signed with Canadia.
“NSSFCS is looking at issuing a sub-decree on health insurance social security for civil servants,” he said.
Friday, 09 July 2010 15:01 Soeun Say
THE National Social Security Fund for Civil Servants agreed yesterday to cooperate with Canadia Bank in offering a pension and social security fund to civil servants.
The agreement was signed in Phnom Penh.
The new NSSFCS fund aims to manage and insure a social security fund for when a civil servant retires or becomes handicapped, pregnant, or is involved in an accident at work resulting in disability or death, according to Chou Ratanak, the director for the Fund, speaking at Canadia Tower.
“We will be offering the social security fund to them in order to reduce their difficulties while living with certain conditions,” he said.
The fund is to be tested initially in Phnom Penh, and will be available through the bank as a standalone bank account with its own ATM card, he said, and added that having the account accessible through the bank would allow the correct funds to get to the end-user in a timely manner.
“Moreover, they can save their money through the fund, which will also have an interest rate with Canadia Bank,” Chou Ratanak said.
The NSSFCS is also looking for a way to make it easier to provide health insurance, possibly in conjunction with a bank, in a partnership similar to the agreement signed with Canadia.
“NSSFCS is looking at issuing a sub-decree on health insurance social security for civil servants,” he said.
Bombs away! Remember Cambodia
Jul 9, 2010
By Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen
Asia Times Online
The United States war in Afghanistan is "going badly", according to the New York Times. Nine years after American forces invaded to oust the repressive Taliban regime and its al-Qaeda ally, "the deteriorating situation demands a serious assessment now of the military and civilian strategies".
Aerial bombardment, a centerpiece of the US military effort in Afghanistan, has had a devastating impact on civilians there. Along with Taliban and al-Qaeda insurgents and suicide bombers, who have recently escalated their slaughter of the Afghan population, US and North Atlantic Treaty (NATO) aircraft have for years inflicted a horrific toll on innocent villagers.
When US bombs hit a civilian warehouse in Afghanistan in late 2001, then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld responded, "We're not running out of targets, Afghanistan is." There was laughter in the press gallery.
But the bombing continued and spread to Iraq in 2003, with the United States determined to use "the force necessary to prevail, plus some", and asserting that no promises would be made to avoid "collateral damage".
Afghan and Iraqi civilian casualties, in other words, were predictable if not inevitable. The show of strength aside, didn't the US underestimate the strategic cost of collateral damage? If "shock and awe" appeared to work at least in 2001 against the Taliban regular army, the continued use of aerial bombardment has also nourished civilian support for the Taliban and al-Qaeda anti-US insurgency.
In March 2010, the New York Times reported that "civilian deaths caused by American troops and American bombs have outraged the local population and made the case for the insurgency." Beyond the moral meaning of inflicting predictable civilian casualties, and contravention of international laws of war, it is also clear that the political repercussions of air strikes outweigh their military benefits.
This is not news. The extension of the Vietnam War to Cambodia, which the US Air Force bombed from 1965 to 1973, was a troubling precedent. First, Cambodia became in 1969-1973 one of the most heavily-bombarded countries in history (along with North Korea, South Vietnam, and Laos). Then, in 1975-79, it suffered genocide at the hands of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge communists, who had been military targets of the US bombing but also became its political beneficiaries.
Despite key differences, an important similarity links the current conflict in Afghanistan to the 1970-1975 Cambodian war: increasing US reliance on air power against a heterogeneous insurgency. Moreover, in the past few years, as fighting has continued in Afghanistan supported by US air power, Taliban forces have benefited politically, recruiting among an anti-US Afghan constituency that appears to have grown even as the insurgents suffer military casualties.
In Cambodia, it was precisely the harshest, most extreme elements of the insurgency who survived the US bombing, expanded in numbers, and then won the war. The Khmer Rouge grew from a small force of fewer than 10,000 in 1969 to over 200,000 troops and militia in 1973.
During that period, their recruitment propaganda successfully highlighted the casualties and damage caused by US bombing. Within a broader Cambodian insurgency, the radical Khmer Rouge leaders eclipsed their royalist, reformist, and pro-Hanoi allies as well as defeating their enemy, the pro-US Cambodian government of Lon Nol, in 1975.
The Nixon Doctrine had proposed that the United States could supply an allied Asian regime with the materiel to withstand internal or external challenge while the US withdrew its own ground troops or remained at arm's length.
"Vietnamization" built up the air and ground fighting capability of South Vietnamese government forces while American units slowly disengaged. In Cambodia from 1970, Washington gave military aid to General Lon Nol's new regime, tolerating its rampant corruption, while the US Air Force (and the large South Vietnamese Air Force) conducted massive aerial bombardment of its Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge communist opponents and their heterogeneous united front, across rural Cambodia.
United States policy in Afghanistan has shown a similar reliance on air strikes in fighting the motley insurgency there. These strikes, while far more precisely targeted than the earlier bombing campaigns in Indochina, inflicted substantial civilian casualties in the first year of the Afghan war in 2001-02.
The Project on Defense Alternatives estimated that in a three-month period between October 7, 2001 and January 1, 2002, between 1,000 and 1,300 civilians were killed by aerial bombing, and The Los Angeles Times found that in a five-month period from October 7, 2001 to February 28, 2002, between 1,067 and 1,201 civilian deaths were reported in the media.
Deaths reported in newspapers should be treated with caution, but not all are reported, and the total was undoubtedly high. And the toll has continued long after the initial US invasion. According to Human Rights Watch, air strikes by the US Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and its NATO-led coalition, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), killed 116 Afghan civilians in 2006, and 321 civilians in 2007.
And the number rose again in 2008: according to a United Nations study on the humanitarian costs of the conflict, air strikes accounted for 530 of the 828 civilians killed that year by US or Afghan government forces. The same study found that between January and June 2009, 200 of the 310 recorded civilian deaths were caused by air strikes. Overall in 2009, the UN reported that 2,400 civilians were killed in Afghanistan, though the number killed by foreign and Afghan troops was down 25%.
While their large-scale killing of civilians presented a moral challenge to the US-led coalition forces, there has also been increasing acknowledgment of strategic costs accompanying these casualties.
In mid-2007, the London Guardian reported that "a senior UK military officer said he had asked the US to withdraw its special forces from a volatile area that was crucial in the battle against the Taliban" after the US forces were "criticized for relying on air strikes for cover when they believed they were confronted by large groups of Taliban fighters".
The paper added: "British and NATO officials have consistently expressed concern about US tactics, notably air strikes, which kill civilians, sabotaging the battle for ‘hearts and minds'."
NATO's secretary general added that NATO commanders "had changed the rules of engagement, ordering their troops to hold their fire in situations where civilians appeared to be at risk". More recently Command Sergeant Major Michael Hall, the senior NATO soldier in Afghanistan, has argued that many of the insurgents being held at Bagram air base had joined the insurgency due to deaths of people they knew.
He told the troops, "There are stories after stories about how these people are turned into insurgents. Every time there is an escalation of force we are finding that innocents are being killed." The same report cited a village elder from Hodkail corroborating this argument: "The people are tired of all these cruel actions by the foreigners, and we can't suffer it anymore. The people do not have any other choice, they will rise against the government and fight them and the foreigners. There are a lot of cases of killing of innocent people."
Yet the bombings have continued and the civilian death toll has mounted. In 2008, after US aircraft killed more than 30 Afghan civilians in each of two bombardments of rural wedding parties, the top US commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, "ordered a tightening of procedures for launching air strikes" and proclaimed that "minimizing civilian casualties is crucial". In December 2008, McKiernan issued another directive, ordering that "all responses must be proportionate".
Again new procedures failed to stop the slaughter from the air. Following an investigation into a 2009 air strike in Farah province that killed at least 26 civilians (the Afghan government reported a much higher toll of 140 dead), McKiernan's replacement, General Stanley McChrystal, issued new guidelines meant to minimize civilian casualties.
In earlier testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, McChrystal had stressed the strategic importance of civilian protection. "A willingness to operate in ways minimizing causalities or damage ... is critical," he argued. "Although I expect stiff fighting ahead, the measure of success will not be enemy killed. It will be shielding the Afghan population from violence." So far the cost of failure, for instance by inflicting more civilian casualties, has included a political windfall for Taliban insurgents, who by 2009 posed a much stronger threat than they had in 2005.
Since the issuing of McChrystal's 2009 directive, however, air strikes have continued to kill civilians, the toll increasing with the escalation of the US ground war in response to the greater Taliban threat.
In February 2010 alone, 46 Afghan civilians were killed in just three strikes. An errant rocket attack on February 14 killed 12 civilians. Four days later, a NATO air strike mistakenly killed seven Afghan police officers. Another NATO strike on February 20 killed 27 civilians.
In comparison to the previous year, the three-month period from March to June 2010 saw a 44% drop in civilian casualties caused by the coalition. Yet, nine years after the US went to war in Afghanistan, bombing remains part of US strategy and the death toll in aerial strikes continues. In a March incident, a US air strike killed 13 civilians and in June, 10 more civilians, including at least five women and children, were killed in a NATO air strike.
One reaction to the McChrystal directive has been an increased US use of unmanned aerial drones to deliver air strikes. While proponents of targeted drone strikes argue that they offer greater precision, and therefore minimize civilian casualties, it is also possible that the greater ease with which they can be deployed could instead increase the number of raids and thus the civilian casualty rates.
By Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen
Asia Times Online
The United States war in Afghanistan is "going badly", according to the New York Times. Nine years after American forces invaded to oust the repressive Taliban regime and its al-Qaeda ally, "the deteriorating situation demands a serious assessment now of the military and civilian strategies".
Aerial bombardment, a centerpiece of the US military effort in Afghanistan, has had a devastating impact on civilians there. Along with Taliban and al-Qaeda insurgents and suicide bombers, who have recently escalated their slaughter of the Afghan population, US and North Atlantic Treaty (NATO) aircraft have for years inflicted a horrific toll on innocent villagers.
When US bombs hit a civilian warehouse in Afghanistan in late 2001, then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld responded, "We're not running out of targets, Afghanistan is." There was laughter in the press gallery.
But the bombing continued and spread to Iraq in 2003, with the United States determined to use "the force necessary to prevail, plus some", and asserting that no promises would be made to avoid "collateral damage".
Afghan and Iraqi civilian casualties, in other words, were predictable if not inevitable. The show of strength aside, didn't the US underestimate the strategic cost of collateral damage? If "shock and awe" appeared to work at least in 2001 against the Taliban regular army, the continued use of aerial bombardment has also nourished civilian support for the Taliban and al-Qaeda anti-US insurgency.
In March 2010, the New York Times reported that "civilian deaths caused by American troops and American bombs have outraged the local population and made the case for the insurgency." Beyond the moral meaning of inflicting predictable civilian casualties, and contravention of international laws of war, it is also clear that the political repercussions of air strikes outweigh their military benefits.
This is not news. The extension of the Vietnam War to Cambodia, which the US Air Force bombed from 1965 to 1973, was a troubling precedent. First, Cambodia became in 1969-1973 one of the most heavily-bombarded countries in history (along with North Korea, South Vietnam, and Laos). Then, in 1975-79, it suffered genocide at the hands of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge communists, who had been military targets of the US bombing but also became its political beneficiaries.
Despite key differences, an important similarity links the current conflict in Afghanistan to the 1970-1975 Cambodian war: increasing US reliance on air power against a heterogeneous insurgency. Moreover, in the past few years, as fighting has continued in Afghanistan supported by US air power, Taliban forces have benefited politically, recruiting among an anti-US Afghan constituency that appears to have grown even as the insurgents suffer military casualties.
In Cambodia, it was precisely the harshest, most extreme elements of the insurgency who survived the US bombing, expanded in numbers, and then won the war. The Khmer Rouge grew from a small force of fewer than 10,000 in 1969 to over 200,000 troops and militia in 1973.
During that period, their recruitment propaganda successfully highlighted the casualties and damage caused by US bombing. Within a broader Cambodian insurgency, the radical Khmer Rouge leaders eclipsed their royalist, reformist, and pro-Hanoi allies as well as defeating their enemy, the pro-US Cambodian government of Lon Nol, in 1975.
The Nixon Doctrine had proposed that the United States could supply an allied Asian regime with the materiel to withstand internal or external challenge while the US withdrew its own ground troops or remained at arm's length.
"Vietnamization" built up the air and ground fighting capability of South Vietnamese government forces while American units slowly disengaged. In Cambodia from 1970, Washington gave military aid to General Lon Nol's new regime, tolerating its rampant corruption, while the US Air Force (and the large South Vietnamese Air Force) conducted massive aerial bombardment of its Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge communist opponents and their heterogeneous united front, across rural Cambodia.
United States policy in Afghanistan has shown a similar reliance on air strikes in fighting the motley insurgency there. These strikes, while far more precisely targeted than the earlier bombing campaigns in Indochina, inflicted substantial civilian casualties in the first year of the Afghan war in 2001-02.
The Project on Defense Alternatives estimated that in a three-month period between October 7, 2001 and January 1, 2002, between 1,000 and 1,300 civilians were killed by aerial bombing, and The Los Angeles Times found that in a five-month period from October 7, 2001 to February 28, 2002, between 1,067 and 1,201 civilian deaths were reported in the media.
Deaths reported in newspapers should be treated with caution, but not all are reported, and the total was undoubtedly high. And the toll has continued long after the initial US invasion. According to Human Rights Watch, air strikes by the US Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and its NATO-led coalition, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), killed 116 Afghan civilians in 2006, and 321 civilians in 2007.
And the number rose again in 2008: according to a United Nations study on the humanitarian costs of the conflict, air strikes accounted for 530 of the 828 civilians killed that year by US or Afghan government forces. The same study found that between January and June 2009, 200 of the 310 recorded civilian deaths were caused by air strikes. Overall in 2009, the UN reported that 2,400 civilians were killed in Afghanistan, though the number killed by foreign and Afghan troops was down 25%.
While their large-scale killing of civilians presented a moral challenge to the US-led coalition forces, there has also been increasing acknowledgment of strategic costs accompanying these casualties.
In mid-2007, the London Guardian reported that "a senior UK military officer said he had asked the US to withdraw its special forces from a volatile area that was crucial in the battle against the Taliban" after the US forces were "criticized for relying on air strikes for cover when they believed they were confronted by large groups of Taliban fighters".
The paper added: "British and NATO officials have consistently expressed concern about US tactics, notably air strikes, which kill civilians, sabotaging the battle for ‘hearts and minds'."
NATO's secretary general added that NATO commanders "had changed the rules of engagement, ordering their troops to hold their fire in situations where civilians appeared to be at risk". More recently Command Sergeant Major Michael Hall, the senior NATO soldier in Afghanistan, has argued that many of the insurgents being held at Bagram air base had joined the insurgency due to deaths of people they knew.
He told the troops, "There are stories after stories about how these people are turned into insurgents. Every time there is an escalation of force we are finding that innocents are being killed." The same report cited a village elder from Hodkail corroborating this argument: "The people are tired of all these cruel actions by the foreigners, and we can't suffer it anymore. The people do not have any other choice, they will rise against the government and fight them and the foreigners. There are a lot of cases of killing of innocent people."
Yet the bombings have continued and the civilian death toll has mounted. In 2008, after US aircraft killed more than 30 Afghan civilians in each of two bombardments of rural wedding parties, the top US commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, "ordered a tightening of procedures for launching air strikes" and proclaimed that "minimizing civilian casualties is crucial". In December 2008, McKiernan issued another directive, ordering that "all responses must be proportionate".
Again new procedures failed to stop the slaughter from the air. Following an investigation into a 2009 air strike in Farah province that killed at least 26 civilians (the Afghan government reported a much higher toll of 140 dead), McKiernan's replacement, General Stanley McChrystal, issued new guidelines meant to minimize civilian casualties.
In earlier testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, McChrystal had stressed the strategic importance of civilian protection. "A willingness to operate in ways minimizing causalities or damage ... is critical," he argued. "Although I expect stiff fighting ahead, the measure of success will not be enemy killed. It will be shielding the Afghan population from violence." So far the cost of failure, for instance by inflicting more civilian casualties, has included a political windfall for Taliban insurgents, who by 2009 posed a much stronger threat than they had in 2005.
Since the issuing of McChrystal's 2009 directive, however, air strikes have continued to kill civilians, the toll increasing with the escalation of the US ground war in response to the greater Taliban threat.
In February 2010 alone, 46 Afghan civilians were killed in just three strikes. An errant rocket attack on February 14 killed 12 civilians. Four days later, a NATO air strike mistakenly killed seven Afghan police officers. Another NATO strike on February 20 killed 27 civilians.
In comparison to the previous year, the three-month period from March to June 2010 saw a 44% drop in civilian casualties caused by the coalition. Yet, nine years after the US went to war in Afghanistan, bombing remains part of US strategy and the death toll in aerial strikes continues. In a March incident, a US air strike killed 13 civilians and in June, 10 more civilians, including at least five women and children, were killed in a NATO air strike.
One reaction to the McChrystal directive has been an increased US use of unmanned aerial drones to deliver air strikes. While proponents of targeted drone strikes argue that they offer greater precision, and therefore minimize civilian casualties, it is also possible that the greater ease with which they can be deployed could instead increase the number of raids and thus the civilian casualty rates.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
An Alternative for Cambodian NGOs: Democracy or Poverty Reduction?
Cambodia is well-known to the outside world for its human right violation, crime, corruption and poverty. There are hundreds of local NGOs working on human right protection and promotion of the rule of law. Bingo! they are dealing with one of the pressing issues in Cambodia. They produce good reports for international donors and Western media and convene public forums every month to disseminate and educate people about their civic and political rights and freedom. Every year, they spend hundreds of million USD to support their activities.
In return, they spread the knowledge of democracy to Cambodians, who are hungry for both Western values and lifestyle, and unfriendly behavior of the Cambodian government towards Western values. More and more Khmer rural people are aware of their unspeakable rights and freedom. They are no longer patient with suppression and exploitation by the ruling elites and powerful. Everyday, you can see they protest and gathering in public places to demand justice for illegal eviction and unfair judgement by the corrupt judicial system. Moreover, garment workers are on strike almost everyday both in the capital and provinces to ask for better pay and working condition. More importantly, in the Western media like AFP, AP, CNN or BBC everything about Cambodia is corruption, illegal eviction and poverty. They often quote or refer to reports produced by local and international NGOs or personalities that are not happy with the government actions. It is understandable that usually Cambodian government under Prime Minister Hun Sen is not so friendly with Western media (Sic!)
Do they have anything to do with ECONOMY or BASIC SERVICES? In short, RARELY! Why? Cambodia is a very poor country why economic growth and necessary services are not prioritized by the civic groups? Well, to be honest, I dont know as I never work with any NGOs. However, what I strongly agree is economic development and basic services should be pursued first. When people are better off their children will better education and they will have higher demands from the government for better service delivery and performance from the public officials. What is the effect from hundreds of million USD spent by those NGOs if they turn them into economic development? Why don't we nurture rural Cambodians about entrepreneurship and small business knowledge? How important it is to educate poor family about the importance of health and education! How useful it is to spend some portions of their funds to build roads, schools and health centers for rural Cambodians!
Experiences of East Asia Miracle (Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong) and later some new industrialized countries such as Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, show that democracy is not the definitive reason behind these economic successes. On the contrary, when countries become more develop there is an emerging class of the society called MIDDLE CLASS who always press their governments for better performance and efficiency in handling public affairs. Poor economic performance or low revenue are no longer an excuse by the government as it is obvious that the countries develop.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Balancing out development
The Phnom Penh Post
Thursday, 01 July 2010 15:00
By Nicola Crosta
Cambodia has made strides in sustainable development, but progress will hinge on bridging existing disparities that separate the rural and urban populations
Over the last decade, Cambodia has been successful in achieving sustained economic growth, but this has been narrowly based and continues to be challenged by stark social and territorial disparities. Alongside these challenges, there is enormous unexploited potential for sustainable economic development and diversification across both rural and urban Cambodia. Clearly, many of the key factors influencing the country’s development dynamics – both positive and negative – are localised, and are thus best understood and addressed at the sub-national level. This is one of the main conclusions we reached in the Local Development Outlook: Cambodia, launched on Wednesday by the UN Capital Development Fund in Phnom Penh at the UNCDF/UNDP Local Development Forum.
On the one hand, modest progress towards some of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is concentrated in specific regions and dependent on local circumstances. On the other, Cambodia possesses significant unexploited potential. Notably, some of its strongest assets are localised just where poverty and exclusion is the greatest. For example, despite its strong tourism and construction industries, Siem Reap remains one of the country’s poorest provinces.
In this context, a strong consensus is emerging across both developed and developing countries that a new policy approach is needed – one that builds on local knowledge to tailor public policy to locally specific circumstances. This should allow the provision of public goods when they are needed and where they are needed, in an integrated fashion. This logic is behind recent efforts to use more disaggregated data, such as that gathered in Cambodia through the already existing commune database, to localise the MDGs and attack poverty traps via deliberate, place-based strategies. For instance, in many countries, local MDG “scorecards” are being developed to track progress at the local level and provide input to national and sub-national planning processes. This approach also guides local development strategies that seek to harness endogenous potential and capitalise on opportunities for economic diversification and development. Additionally, this localised approach is increasingly being adopted to drive policy responses to climate change that has significant – and territorially asymmetric – impacts across developing countries.
What does this mean, in practice, for Cambodia? As argued in the Outlook, action is needed on at least two fronts. First and foremost, decentralisation reforms must advance. This will provide the necessary governance infrastructure to empower local actors as agents of change and development. Decentralisation is not just about promoting local democracy and participation; it is also a key tool to promote economic development. Second, policy that clearly outlines a localised approach to development is needed at the national level. This doesn’t mean top-down planning. It means adopting a strategic approach that is sensitive to the different characteristics of different parts of the country. This includes – for instance – developing the government’s capacity to tailor its sectoral policies to the specific context of rural areas, urban areas and cross-border or coastal provinces.
But realising local development potential is not just the responsibility of government. Private sector and financial institutions have a critical role to play to ensure local economic development opportunities are harnessed. Development partners can also do more to make sure their support is strategically targeted where it is needed and in ways that maximise synergies and integration, rather than duplication.
This local perspective may not be the solution to Cambodia’s economic, social and environmental challenges. But it is certainly part of the solution. Anyone who has travelled across Cambodia knows that this is a land of immense opportunities. A future is possible where rural areas thrive and where Cambodian cities act as hubs for development. But for this to happen, efforts need to be localised: Economic growth in Phnom Penh does not automatically translate into development in Ban Lung. In other words, growth is necessary, but it doesn’t necessarily imply balanced, sustainable development. If sustainable development is the objective, key actors need to act collectively, strategically and deliberately towards it.
This will allow all Cambodian regions, and their populations, to participate in national growth and development.
Nicola Crosta is chief technical advisor to the UN Capital Development Fund, the UN’s investment agency for least developed countries.
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2010070140195/National-news/balancing-out-development.html
Thursday, 01 July 2010 15:00
By Nicola Crosta
Cambodia has made strides in sustainable development, but progress will hinge on bridging existing disparities that separate the rural and urban populations
Over the last decade, Cambodia has been successful in achieving sustained economic growth, but this has been narrowly based and continues to be challenged by stark social and territorial disparities. Alongside these challenges, there is enormous unexploited potential for sustainable economic development and diversification across both rural and urban Cambodia. Clearly, many of the key factors influencing the country’s development dynamics – both positive and negative – are localised, and are thus best understood and addressed at the sub-national level. This is one of the main conclusions we reached in the Local Development Outlook: Cambodia, launched on Wednesday by the UN Capital Development Fund in Phnom Penh at the UNCDF/UNDP Local Development Forum.
On the one hand, modest progress towards some of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is concentrated in specific regions and dependent on local circumstances. On the other, Cambodia possesses significant unexploited potential. Notably, some of its strongest assets are localised just where poverty and exclusion is the greatest. For example, despite its strong tourism and construction industries, Siem Reap remains one of the country’s poorest provinces.
In this context, a strong consensus is emerging across both developed and developing countries that a new policy approach is needed – one that builds on local knowledge to tailor public policy to locally specific circumstances. This should allow the provision of public goods when they are needed and where they are needed, in an integrated fashion. This logic is behind recent efforts to use more disaggregated data, such as that gathered in Cambodia through the already existing commune database, to localise the MDGs and attack poverty traps via deliberate, place-based strategies. For instance, in many countries, local MDG “scorecards” are being developed to track progress at the local level and provide input to national and sub-national planning processes. This approach also guides local development strategies that seek to harness endogenous potential and capitalise on opportunities for economic diversification and development. Additionally, this localised approach is increasingly being adopted to drive policy responses to climate change that has significant – and territorially asymmetric – impacts across developing countries.
What does this mean, in practice, for Cambodia? As argued in the Outlook, action is needed on at least two fronts. First and foremost, decentralisation reforms must advance. This will provide the necessary governance infrastructure to empower local actors as agents of change and development. Decentralisation is not just about promoting local democracy and participation; it is also a key tool to promote economic development. Second, policy that clearly outlines a localised approach to development is needed at the national level. This doesn’t mean top-down planning. It means adopting a strategic approach that is sensitive to the different characteristics of different parts of the country. This includes – for instance – developing the government’s capacity to tailor its sectoral policies to the specific context of rural areas, urban areas and cross-border or coastal provinces.
But realising local development potential is not just the responsibility of government. Private sector and financial institutions have a critical role to play to ensure local economic development opportunities are harnessed. Development partners can also do more to make sure their support is strategically targeted where it is needed and in ways that maximise synergies and integration, rather than duplication.
This local perspective may not be the solution to Cambodia’s economic, social and environmental challenges. But it is certainly part of the solution. Anyone who has travelled across Cambodia knows that this is a land of immense opportunities. A future is possible where rural areas thrive and where Cambodian cities act as hubs for development. But for this to happen, efforts need to be localised: Economic growth in Phnom Penh does not automatically translate into development in Ban Lung. In other words, growth is necessary, but it doesn’t necessarily imply balanced, sustainable development. If sustainable development is the objective, key actors need to act collectively, strategically and deliberately towards it.
This will allow all Cambodian regions, and their populations, to participate in national growth and development.
Nicola Crosta is chief technical advisor to the UN Capital Development Fund, the UN’s investment agency for least developed countries.
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2010070140195/National-news/balancing-out-development.html
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