Cambodia dreams of itself as a rich country, with a heavy price to pay for the poorest

LETTER FROM PHNOM PENH Koh Pich, also known as Diamond Island, is located at the intersection of the Mekong and Bassac rivers. In Phnom Penh, October 14, 2024. JITTRAPON KAICOME FOR “THE WORLD” The gleaming ministries, new skyscrapers and housing estates for the rich that are springing up on Koh Pich, Diamond Island, along the Mekong River, have transformed Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. A huge airport designed by the architectural firm of Briton Norman Foster is under construction to the south of the city. Powered by major Chinese infrastructure projects, textile exports, the return of tourists after the Covid-19 pandemic and not always clean money from casinos, this country of nearly 17 million inhabitants, soon a half -century after the tragedy of the Khmer Rouge (1975-1979), sees himself as a little Asian “tiger”. Read also (2023): Article reserved for our subscribers Hun Sen, strong man of Cambodia for thirty-eight years, leaves his place to his son, General Hun Manet Read later His new government, more enlightened on technological issues and rejuvenated – Hun Manet, 47, replaced his father, Hun Sen, thirty-eight years in power, as prime minister in September 2023 – sends his ministers to major Western capitals to sell Phnom Penh to foreign investors. Thanks to 6% growth per year, Cambodia should graduate from least developed country status in 2029. The poverty rate as defined by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), at less than 2 .15 dollars (2.04 euros) per day, must go from 16.6% of the population today to less than 10% by then. For 2050, “Hun junior”, supported by a clique of oligarchs in the pay of the Hun family, wants to make Cambodia a “high income” country. The ambition is great, but the bar is high. An additional 20% of the population are actually classified as “vulnerable to the risk of falling into poverty”. In the outskirts of Phnom Penh, the working-class neighborhoods are constantly being reconfigured. In the textile industry, the majority of workers are women. Their husbands are drivers, masons, guards. Frenchman Yann Defond, 45, author of A Life with the Workers of Cambodia (The Implicated, 2022), rubs shoulders with this proletariat: he has lived immersed in working-class neighborhoods for fifteen years. He first moved, in 2009, to the “workers’ city of blue roofs”, then the largest workers’ city in the country: 4,000 inhabitants in an industrial park. One fine day, in 2023, he is kicked out: his street is transformed to accommodate businesses. This is urbanization from below, anarchic. When he arrived, the rice fields were 300 meters from his home. Today they are 3 kilometers away. You have 64.96% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.



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