Foreign Aid-Corruption Nexus in Cambodia: Its Consequences on the Propensity of Civil War

6 CHAPTER I Introduction 1. Background, Rationale, and Objectives From the outside world, Cambodia is best known, in both national and world history, for two totally opposite things—the glorious past of Angkor (12th-15th century), the brightest page of Cambodian history, and the brutally genocidal Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979), the darkest page. It has been true and continues to be true in present-day Cambodia even among the Cambodians themselves, but there are two more things that contemporary Cambodia is also most likely well- known. They are aid-dependency and corruption. Cambodia’s history has had many notable events. It has survived being trampled by foreigners for centuries. More recently, it was dragged into the Vietnam War and fell into bloody civil war that turned into a vast killing field by the genocidal Khmer Rouge. Then, it fell into the Vietnamese occupation that turned again into an unwinnable war between the Vietnamese troops and the Khmer Rouge. Ultimately, it descended into a so-called peace full existence with the signing of Paris Peace Accords of 23 October 1991. This led to a state of negative peace around 1998 when the Khmer Rouge was finally extinguished. Cambodia nowadays, though relatively stable, has seen slow economic growth. These conditions are, arguably, the byproducts of the peace agreement and the shift from a centralized planned economy to a more decentralized and open market economy. However, Cambodia depends heavily on foreign aid to survive, and is a nation racked by rampant corruption. Approximately half of Cambodia’s national revenue is shared by foreign aid (Ek & Sok, 2008), and Cambodia was ranked 166 out of 180 countries surveyed in 2008-Corruption Perceptions Index of the Transparency International, making it the 14th most corrupt country in the world, and the second most corrupt country in Asia behind Myanmar (Transparency International, 2008). This current condition and unusual political and economic dynamics constitute the focus of this thesis. The thesis initially seeks to examine the nexus between foreign aid and corruption in Cambodia since 1993, the time when a huge influx of foreign aid injected into the country following the withdrawal of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC). Drawing from the analysis of the two, the thesis then explores if the correlation of the two encourages the propensity of civil war, and ultimately analyzes if the onset of civil war is attainable in the case that