Despite 25 years’ experience with Cambodia, Huw Watkin begins his report by confusing the Tonle Sap river with the Mekong (“ From Khmer Rouge to Khmer Riche : is Hun Sen losing his decades-long grip on Cambodia’s corrupt politics?”, March 28). Clearly determined to prove that nearly everything is rotten in the state of Cambodia, Watkin advances assertions rather than evidence. He dismisses the country’s remarkable economic growth as favouring the “small middle class” and the elite, but cites no figures. The World Bank in 2013 assessed Cambodian growth from 2004 to 2011 as “pro-poor – not only reducing inequality, but also proportionally boosting poor people’s consumption further and faster than that of the non-poor”. Furthermore, Watkin simply ignores objective measures of inequality, such as the World Bank’s calculation of wealth inequality. Its 2018 calculations for seven of the 10 Association of Southeast Asian Nations countries showed Cambodia to have the lowest level of inequality of the group. Furthermore, it was the only Asean member where inequality decreased over 2008-2018. Its inequality is also less than that of most developed Western countries. Watkin notes the UN Development Programme ranking of Cambodia’s Human Development Index as 146th out of 189 countries, but ignores the following from the report : “Between 1990 and 2018, Cambodia’s HDI value increased … 51.4 per cent … life expectancy at birth increased by 16 years, mean years of schooling increased by 2.2 years and expected years of schooling increased by 4.6 years.” He also cites a 2016 Global Witness “exposé” that he says “calculated the wealth of Hun Sen’s family at US$500 million to US$1 billion”. The Global Witness press release at the time claimed to have calculated more than US$200 million, and that turned out to be even more overstated: it was based on a confusion between listed capital and registered capital, on treating part ownership of a company as total ownership, and on treating former in-laws of Hun Sen’s nieces and nephews as part of his “family”. As I calculated in the July 19, 2016 edition of Khmer Times , Global Witness actually documented Hun Sen family wealth of less than US$16 million. Most grotesque and most revealing is Watkin’s approving quotation of a diplomat saying Cambodia’s “people were childlike, both in their apparent innocence and their capacity for cruelty”. The same chauvinist belittling is evident in his view that Cambodians can’t possibly adopt “Western values”, in his calling female sex workers “girls”, and in his characterisation of opposing civil war armies as “squabbling factions”. Allen Myers, Phnom Penh
