Cambodia: Up by the Bootstraps

DON-2

Bungalow 10 Hotel le Royal Phnom Penh, Cambodia

November 29, 1966

 

Mr. Noel is an Alicia Patterson Fund fellowship award winner on leave from the Hartford (Conn.) Times. Permission to publish these articles may be sought from the Managing Editor, The Hartford Times.

Kompong Cham — “Have you seen the new university?”

The visitor to this smallish provincial capital upriver on the Mekong could hardly miss the Université Royale. No one would let him. It is a focal point of local pride.

With good reason: the people built it themselves.

First publicly proposed by Prince Norodom Sihanouk three years ago, the university already has 500 enrolled as freshmen and sophomores. The campus is not, in fact, completed yet: the library shelves are half-empty; technical laboratories are still being outfitted (1); only 19 of the eventual 53 classroom and administrative buildings are up.

But every one of those 19 was built with local funds. A well-organized campaign appears to have tapped successfully the rich, the poor, and the middle-class civil servants. (Two of those civil servants, showing me around, insisted that there was no compulsion to give, and not even a “voluntary quota” such as most U.S. community chests use. Both had contributed, but both knew colleagues who had not.)

Each building, as with American schools seeking money, is named for its donor. Two are gifts of wealthy individuals; two are gifts of the Chinese and Vietnamese minority ethnic communities (2); two were given by neighboring provinces. The rest bear the names of the subdivisions of the province of Kompong Cham.

Operating costs are borne by the national government, which supports all education. (All education is free, so long as the student can pass the entrance exams to the next level and find a place.)

But government operation of the Université Royale de Kompong Cham does not detract from the strong local pride, even among working men, that it is their achievement.

This fierce pride in Cambodia’s independent accomplishments is one of the most striking characteristics of the country. Since its rejection of U.S. economic aid in November 1963 (about the same time, coincidentally, that the college at Kompong Cham was conceived), Cambodia has maintained a killing pace in improvement of education, public health, agriculture and its basic economy. The American dollars are sorely missed, and the nation is under heavy strain, worsened by two years’ bad rice weather. But the pace of development has hardly slackened.

Cambodians therefore share their Prince’s tender sensibility to any remarks in the Western press, no matter how unintentional, which slight the country’s achievement. (3)

They are right. One cannot spend a few weeks visiting provinces without appreciating the growth of a country, which won its independence from France only 13 years ago.

Education is one of the more impressive strides. At the end of World War II, there were fewer than 80,000 students in school in the entire country, only 350 above sixth grade. Today there are 800,000 in primary schools alone, another 93,000 in secondary schools, 7,500 in college and 7,000 in technical and trade schools. (4)

There are still difficulties. Popular education for girls, which dates only from passage of a women’s rights law in 1955, is not yet complete, although this year the number of girls starting first grade reached almost 80 per cent of boys.

The dropout rate, moreover, is enormous, starting at second grade’. Last year more than a quarter of all children left school after a year. Despite a “mandatory” six years’ education, there are only a fifth as many sixth graders in school this year as first graders. (5)

Both problems relate to the inevitable shortage of teachers and classrooms. In the city of Kompong Cham, primary-school teachers handle two sessions daily. In an afternoon first-grade I visited, there were 66 students. Learning obviously depended heavily on rote (6), but the children were well disciplined, neat, attentive, and recited well. In fourth grade, an experimental class was making impressive progress in a new oral method of learning French. (7)

Almost 10 per cent of primary school children are still in makeshift schools in Buddhist pagodas. (But although children in some remote regions are so scattered that the government must give them room and board, only 1.6 per cent of the population is without some kind of primary school.)

In many school districts, physical plants are built or expanded by the same kind of voluntary effort, which built the Université Royale; parent-teacher associations are being formed to encourage this.

Encouragement of local initiative implies no lack of government spending. Almost 20 per cent of the strained austerity budget (only a fraction less than for defense) is committed to education.

There is, moreover, a conscious and effective bias in the public pay scale favoring teachers. In a country where the government itself absorbs a large proportion of trained personnel, teachers at all levels earn more than their counterparts in other agencies. Almost half the students in the central Université Royale in Phnom Penh are in pedagogy. This year alone 1,500 new teachers started work, a third more than in 1964.

Cambodia thus recognizes that the need for teachers will continue for many years, and must be met. By steering young men and women toward this urgent need, the country may avoid creating an “intellectual elite” developing more glamorous talents that the national economy cannot employ. (8)

It is typical of Cambodia that despite its socialist approach to many problems, this one is met by frequent exhortations by Prince Sihanouk, coupled with a dollars-and-cents incentive.

1.  Most of the shop equipment is a gift of the North Korean government. The role of foreign aid will be explored later.
2. The role of the Chinese is particularly striking, since most of the nation’s 165,000 Chinese nationals (3 per cent of the population) educate their children in Chinese-language schools and, if they go on, overseas universities. But the Chinese seem to respond to these funds appeals in measure appropriate to their wealthy domination of the nation’s commerce. Most Vietnamese send their children to public schools.
3. A case in point was an article in the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald, which described Cambodia as “largely underdeveloped, with an economy based on agriculture, fishing and forestry.” The description, although it did in fact overlook some important industrial growth, was largely accurate. But it went on to mention that in Laos “there are few industries.” Sihanouk took umbrage that Laos should be credited with even a few, while Cambodia’s went unmentioned. The article was discussed at a high-level official meeting, was berated in a speech by the Prince some few days later, and was formally protested to the newspaper.
4. Prince Sihanouk prefers to draw comparisons with 1954, just before formation of the unity party, which has ruled the party, -under his leadership, ever since. Either comparison is equally impressive: primary-school enrollment more than tripled in the first nine post-war years, has almost tripled again since. Secondary and higher education enrollment climbed 18-fold up to 1954, has grown 16fold since.
5. The early dropout problem creates some statistical distortions. Half of all students completing sixth grade, for instance, go on to secondary school, a remarkably high rate for a developing country. It is illustrative of Cambodian frankness that the minister of education, in an interview, took pains to point out that this is so only because so many have dropped out earlier. He also noted candidly that secondary-school enrollment is inflated by 8 per cent by students who repeat their 10^th, 12^th and 13^th years after failing to pass the examinations to the next level.
6. It has only been recently, with the help of a UNESCO-gift printing press, that students could buy their own textbooks through scholastic cooperatives. Most teaching is still done with only one textbook — the teacher’s — in the room.
7. French becomes the principal language of instruction in the 21 full (7-year) lycees, or junior-senior high schools.
8. This leads to some grumbling. A young U.S.-trained engineer, for instance, told me he earns more in part-time teaching than in his full-time, and quite responsible, job in a technical ministry. But it probably reflects a sound judgment of the country’s needs. On the same score, it is worth noting that the government this year trimmed back its program at the central university in law, letters and sciences.

Battambang — The French-colonial administration of Cambodia was staffed by Vietnamese.

For more than half a century, Indochinese education, such as it was, was centered in Hanoi. The French favored Vietnamese, and particularly North Vietnamese, for civil-service positions throughout the colonial empire.

Partly because of this legacy, and partly because of cultural differences, the nation’s small business, too, was and still is dominated by the Chinese and Vietnamese ethnic minorities. (1)

Cambodia thus starts with a multiple handicap. It must create not only a body of administrative leadership for the task of nation building, but must at the same time develop a corps of craftsmen, artisans, and shopkeepers. And it had to start virtually from scratch in building the schools themselves.

The “Center for Formation of Technicians” in Battambang, a half-million-dollar gift of the West German government, is one of the latest among some 55 trade schools built in Cambodia during the last decade.

Just opened, it will ultimately have 100 students in each of three years of study to become electricians, auto mechanics, general mechanics, bricklayers and carpenters. Six German instructors, paid by their government, work with a dozen Cambodians trained in Germany but now part of their own country’s share of the program.

The German-backed school represents only one of several levels of higher education in Cambodia.

At the highest level, the Université Royale in Phnom Penh, 4,300 students are working toward full academic degrees (including some doctoral candidates) in law, letters, sciences, medicine, pharmacy, commercial science and — almost half the students –pedagogy.

The new Royal University of Fine Arts illustrates the characteristic Cambodian determination that austerity and progress shall not eliminate the traditional “joie de vivre.” There, 500 students are working toward either degrees, or a foreshortened “technician” diploma, in art and archeology, architecture and urbanism, plastic arts, drama and choreography, and music. Most of them will become public school teachers; but two with whom I talked said they and their classmates also hope to continue performing and creative careers, too.

At the Royal Technical University in Phnom Penh, the branch at Kompong Cham, and two others being built in Battambang and Takeo, the emphasis is on civil and agricultural engineering, applied chemistry, electricity, mining, mechanics, and textiles. About half the students are working toward a degree equivalent to a B.S., while the rest will complete a technician’s diploma in a three-year program,

(Partly because of the rejection of U.S. aid, but in large part as conscious policy, Cambodia this year has only 87 students doing advanced work abroad, (2) compared with 204 in the U.S. alone just before the break.)

Attached to several of the technical, “universities” are junior divisions, which are, in effect, trade schools, accepting students as early as eighth grade.

Finally, there are the “centers for formation of technicians.” of which the German school is the most recent, theoretically taking students who have completed 10 years’ education in public schools.

The difference between theory and practice, however, represents a potential problem for Cambodia and illustrates the enormous complexity of the task faced by developing nations:

In an informal conversation with several of the German instructors, I asked how they found the level of ability of their students. The answers were uniformly laudatory. Several, who had taught in similar German-aid schools in the Middle East, marked their Cambodian students well above their former pupils, both in apparent native ability and in the quality of their prior education. They had, in the first few days’ classes, skimmed through material they had been prepared to spend several weeks on.

But most of their students held the preliminary baccalaureate degree, equivalent to a U.S. high school diploma, a higher education than that of most trade-school students in the U.S., in Germany, or in the other German-aid schools.

Despite its remarkable educational progress, Cambodia last year produced only 1,300 such diplomats, and perhaps a third as many with the final baccalaureate leading to university degree work.

In a country where opportunities for higher education are still limited (3), it is inevitable that many of these young graduates should seek whatever is available, even if it is labeled “trade school.”

But this poses the risk that the school will turn out graduates whose education and ability will carry them to administrative and supervisory Posts. Much though such personnel are needed, there is an equal need for craftsmen — shop foremen, skilled workers, and even small private artisans.

As so often, this is probably an instance where a developing country needs to do everything at once, and simply cannot. It illustrates the complexity of the task, and the need to handle every program pragmatically, making changes as their need becomes apparent.

No summary of Cambodian educational progress would be complete without mention of literacy.

The government estimated that in 1964, there were 1.3 million adult illiterates, almost a third of the population between the ages 20-50.

In a massive campaign staffed entirely by civil servants volunteering their time in evening classes, the government estimates it has already taught 800,000 to read and write, and predicts virtual elimination of illiteracy by the end of 1967.

A literacy campaign is one of the hardest of all development programs for the outsider to assess, particularly in a country where a dearth of newspapers and magazines offers no statistical measure of the circulation of the printed word. But it is not uncommon to see day laborers, cyclopousse drivers and domestic servants with newspapers (sometimes day-old), often sounding the words aloud. I have stumbled, quite unguided, across several night schools, well attended and deep in their studies.

If one had to hazard a guess, it would be that the government’s claims are close to reality.

1. The 1962 general census recorded 163,115 Chinese nationals, and 217,774 Vietnamese, in a population of 5,740,000. There was no tabulation of citizens of foreign origin, so it is impossible to estimate the number of citizens who belong to these ethnic minorities. But their number is probably small. To be eligible for citizenship, one must be born in Cambodia of parents both of whom were born here; and it appears that a substantial number of second-generation residents choose not to apply for citizenship. There is a naturalization process for immigrants, but it is cumbersome and apparently not used extensively. Children of a Khmer-noncitizen marriage are, of course, citizens. Intermarriage is said to be more common by Chinese than by Vietnamese, many of whom are Catholic, but there seem to be no figures to corroborate this.
2. 31 in France, 15 each in China and East Germany, 13 in Russia, and a few each in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, North Korea, Australia and Canada. As with the pay-scale differential, the tight policy on foreign study inevitably leads to some grumbling, particularly among those who have already done some degree work abroad and would like to complete a doctorate. But in view of the difficulty so many countries have in persuading their foreign students to come home, to work in frustrating and sometimes remote areas where all their new talents cannot be used, and to re-accept their own country’s standard of living, Cambodia’s “educate them at home” policy, despite some academic shortcomings at first, may well be foresighted.
3. Even the proliferation of technical schools does not assure an equal increase in opportunities. A trade school in Phnom Penh, after ten years’ existence, still has only 40 students. In an interview in the weekly “Réalités Cambodgiennes,” the director of the school said the number remains so small because there are no funds to buy additional lathes, sewing machines, and similar equipment to give more students something to learn on. He has a standing request for more budget, but the money simply isn’t there; the school relies on sale of small crafts for part of its operating costs.

It is legitimate, therefore, to question whether fewer new schools, and improvement of those existing, might be better policy. But there is at least some validity to the argument that the schools, once built -often with local initiative — will stimulate new local interest in expanding and improving them outside the strained national budget.

Chamcar Krauch — An English entrepreneur, putting together a joint public-private enterprise which could give Cambodia a major new export in frozen beef, went recently for advice to Australian cattlemen, whose monsoonal climate is similar to Cambodia’s.

“They gave me, he said, “a list of 15 major experiments on forage crops, beef types and other things, which ought to be carried out before we would know if the project would be viable.

“I came back and started asking around, and found that 11 of the 15 had already been done, by Cambodians, just because they thought some day the information would be useful.”

That epitomizes the best of Cambodia today.

The average Cambodian farmer is, to be sure, a very backward peasant, using inferior seed, little or no fertilizer, and archaic irrigation systems, producing a half or even a third of the crop he could.

But that is changing in many areas. It is changing because of a solid corps of Cambodians who have for almost a generation been preparing for change, working with few resources and little money.

They have had help: from the French, even before independence in 1953; from the United States, until the end of 1963; and recently, from the Japanese. Nonetheless, it is the indigenous Cambodian effort, which is most impressive.

Among other things, it refutes one of the West’s popular myths about this country: that it is the one-man show of the former king, now chief of state, Norodom Sihanouk. After only two months, the visitor is impressed by the many bright young men who are working with him, often anticipating him, to build their country.

This ran through my mind as I wandered through the 675-acre agricultural experiment station at Chamcar Krauch, near Kompong Cham. A former French plantation, it was converted to an experimental farm in 1953. Its four technicians come close to earning their own budget with a small commercial banana plantation, and meantime try their hands at everything.

We walked through fields of cotton, being grown with various combinations of fertilizers, pesticides, and crop rotations; of Chinese soybeans, producing yields 50 per cent greater than local varieties; an experimental plot of 48 different soybean strains from East Germany; coconuts from Mal4ya with a high copra-oil yield; sisal for fiber; Guatemala grass, an unusually hardy forage crop; Brazilian jute of superior quality. (1)

Two Japanese-backed experiment stations — one specializing in livestock, east of Kompong Cham, and another in rice culture in the western province of Battambang—are more sophisticated. Built with handsome, orderly barns and sheds, modern laboratories, and staffed harmoniously by Japanese and Khmer (Cambodian) technicians, they are doing work of great long-range value.

But nearby each is a small Cambodian station, like the one at Chamcar Krauch. Doing parallel work at a somewhat less advanced level, cooperating with their more sophisticated colleagues, they are already making substantial progress in extension work, getting the new breeds and the new information out to the common man.

The work in rice culture in Battambang is a good illustration. Rice is the mainstay of Cambodia, both in the average diet and as the major export. Battambang, at the head of the central plain of Cambodia, which surrounds the Great Lake, is the most important rice region in the country.

The average farmer gets a scant half a ton of rice per acre. He could, with proper water control alone, get four-fifths of a ton; with better seed, moderate use of fertilizers, and double -cropping, two tons.

But from here to there is a long, frustrating road. New strains of rice must be matched to improved irrigation, a realistic level of chemical fertilizers, even to the average size of farm holdings. (1) In time, the Khmero-Japanese center will develop the right combination for each of the country’s varied agricultural regions, coupled with dam and irrigation projects now on the drawing boards.

When they do, the “local” stations will have developed a clientele: a farm population, which believes in modern methods. Chamcar Krauch recently drew more than 100 farmers to a field demonstration of cotton sprays, relying almost entirely on radio announcements of the event. The local Battambang team, which has developed two improved strains of Cambodian rice, now has several hundred “model farmers” using these strains, following extension workers’ advice on irrigation and fertilizer, and making it pay.

I visited one such model farmer. He has 75 acres (2) of superbly diked Daddy land, planted to the station’s two hybrids, and will this year harvest more than 1.6 tons per acre. He has a new motorbike, a second-hand car, a new house, and by Cambodian standards, a prosperous and comfortable life.

The Cambodian peasant, goes the “standard wisdom” of the foreign community in Phnom Penh, is content with life as it comes to him. Cambodia has never, in its 14-century recorded history, had a famine. Even in bad years, there is always enough rice to eat. Fish are so plentiful, so generously strewn about by the annual floods, that you can catch dinner in any mud hole. Bananas grow in back yards, and other fruits are hardly less responsive.

It is not luxurious, but it is enough. What does the peasant care if the government wants to double its foreign currency earnings by doubling the rice crop? He wouldn’t know what to do with the extra money, runs the standard wisdom, and wouldn’t think it worth the effort.

Like most standard wisdom, this pessimistic view has some truth in it. But it may be out of date.

(1)Foreign aid, including the major programs, which are of course needed by all developing countries, will be considered in a later report. But I couldn’t help reflecting, at Chamcar Krauch, on the comfortable character of this form of aid. The handful of beans sent by East Germany, and the sack or two from China, were of no significant money value. Nor did they in any sense “buy” Cambodian friendship. They were accepted in the spirit of a neighborly exchange, the kind of “person-to-person” contact Americans talk of.

I kept wishing, as we walked about, that I might stumble across a pilot plot of American soybeans (or peanuts, which the station manager wished he had) to be pointed out in the same offhand, casual way, as “some seed sent us from America.” These tests plots were Cambodian projects, and the gift of seed was the kind of foreign aid, which can be welcomed without resentment. It’s the kind of thing an individual state experiment station could initiate simply by writing “blind” to counterparts in areas of the world where climates might match, and suggesting an exchange.

(2) To illustrate the complexity:

• • Japanese rice, half the height of Cambodian strains matures more quickly, responds better to fertilizer, might make double cropping easier.
  • But because so short, Japanese varieties are easily overtopped and killed in heavy floods. The cruder Cambodian strains are often spared this fate.

But the long, tough stubble of Cambodian rice is too much for oxen to plow under, so most Cambodian farmers burn the straw off, robbing the soil of vital organic regeneration.

(3) A large farm, five or six times the average. Ironically, he bought the land inexpensively because it was high and hard to irrigate; agricultural experts showed him how to turn this to advantage by draining off rainy-season excess, which stunts most paddy growth.

Cambodia has plenty of land, despite overcrowding in some areas, and is encouraging farmers to resettle. It is also experimenting gingerly with tractor cultivation; there are now 500 tractors in Battambang province. This model farmer, however, works his fields with from 6 to 30 hired hands, depending on season, and 10 working oxen.

Stung Kranhoung — The land Rover crawled over the last of ten miles of rugged forest track, and emerged in the bright, hot sunshine of a verdant 200-acre cotton plantation.

At the cluster of makeshift buildings in the center, a neat military platoon of young men was drawn up smartly to attention. Except for their shiny rubber farm boots, they looked for all the world like Explorer Scouts.

They were, in a sense, which could give a lesson to our Scouts.

Eighteen months ago, the cotton plantation at Stung Kranhoung was part of the forest. The 60 young men drawn up before me had cleared it, with a few heavy machines and a lot of hard work, and brought it into production.

In February, having learned how to grow cotton, they will each take a new piece of virgin land to homestead, and will turn their bamboo barracks over to a new generation of “students” to run and expand the communal farm.

This is one of several virgin-land projects being sponsored around the country by the Cambodian government. It illustrates two important aspects — one physical, one psychological — of the task the nation has set itself.

Apart from simply improving the lot of the average farmer, the minister of agriculture told me in an interview, Cambodia has two major physical tasks in farm development:

• To increase production of export crops (rice, rubber, corn, pepper, timber) to earn urgently needed foreign exchange. (1)
•  To develop new crops (jute, cotton, tea, coffee), which can be coupled with new domestic industries to reduce reliance on imported goods.

Both require substantial additions to the land now in cultivation. The land is there, and often the water is even there; only farmers are needed.

Stung Kranhoung is only one of many new lands being brought into cultivation.

In Ratanikiri, in the mountainous northeast, a new state-owned plantation has already planted 5,500 acres, of new rubber trees under French contract management. Some 1,200 new families are settled in: retired soldiers (as young as 40) who helped clear the land initially as members of the agriculture-minded army, and resettlers from crowded southern provinces.

South of the Great Lake in central Cambodia, several hundred families, again including retired soldiers, and almost 80 refugee families from South Vietnam (2) are each given a generous 12-acre section of rice paddy. The settlement is part of a huge 7,000-acre mechanized farm developed by the army. Small parcels are given individuals (with some mechanized services like plowing available at low cost) while the army opens new lands to tractor cultivation.

In Battambang, farmers are offered attractive loan terms to put new land into jute; close to 15,000 acres have been planted. Next year they will start supplying a new factory, built under contract by a British firm, with raw material for six million jute bags a year, all but eliminating Cambodian dependence on imported bags in which to export its rice.

Near Pailin, hundreds of settlers from crowded southern areas are being helped to develop tea, coffee, and especially cotton. On the road to Pailin we passed a whole new town, built around a cotton ginning plant, where my 1953 (U.S.) photoreconnaissance map showed unbroken forest.

The work at Stung Kranhoung is part of this physical expansion; but it is equally part of the psychological drive to bring Cambodian young people back to the soil,

All the young men are members of the JSRK (Jeunesse Socialiste Royale Khmere). (3) They moved here in June 1965, with a budget of $5 a month a piece for such food as they couldn’t grow, and $3.50 a month for pocket money, to begin clearing the jungle. They work five days a week, in permanent competitive teams, and spend weekends in classes with their three agriculturalist adult leaders.

Twenty of the first “pioneers” have dropped out. But of the 60 remaining, a surprising one-third are city-bred, children of civil servants, who have been inspired to turn back to the land. Most seemed to have firm plans to marry and take up the homesteads offered them. Two were already settled in simple cottages down the road from the main camp.

Between the gradual expansion of the communal “teaching farm,” and the several hundred who will subsequently settle on homesteads in the next few years, the government has ambitious hopes to have 5,000 acres in cotton within a decade. At the same time, the JSRK camp serves as an informal agricultural extension service for individual families also homesteading in the area.

The “return to the soil” theme is vital to almost every developing country in Asia, to offset a generations-old tradition that the educated man does not work with his hands.

The JSRK’s pioneer community at Stung Kranhoung is only a small part of an organized effort to change this tradition. Virtually every secondary-school student, as a member of JSRK, spends a day or two a month doing some sort of simple physical work toward the nation’s betterment.

They are joined, in theory at least, by every civil servant in the area.

I joined such a one-day work project one Sunday in Battambang. (4) We worked at clearing and leveling a 300-yard stretch of swampy, hummocky land where the city plans soon to extend a street. An earlier workday had already made a considerable dent; we left it nearly ready for the public works department to bring in crushed rock and a surface coat of macadam.

The numbers who came (500 boys and girls, and 150 civil servants) were enough, and proper tools few enough, that the work was not too hard, despite a ferocious sun. We worked from 8 to 11 a.m., spelling one another often.

It was voluntary only in the sense that the obligation (like a two-week camp which civil servants must join) was accepted in good spirit. For some, undoubtedly, it was work only in the sense that they got a little dirty and a little sweaty. I felt there was room for improvement if the goal is to establish a genuine respect for hard work.

But it was far more effective work than a similar project I visited a decade ago in India. And in terms of breaking down prejudice, establishing a sense of common purpose, even this much was an important step. The college graduate who spends a morning helping his clerk dig out a stump goes back to the office with a different relationship.

Cambodia may — just may — succeed in “keeping tem down on the farm.”

1. The agricultural achievements are already impressive. Rice production rose from 1.5 million tons in 1955 to a peak of 2.7 million in 1963. It has slumped somewhat the last two years, partly because of economic management problems, partly because of bad weather. Nonetheless, this year’s crop will be 2.4 million tons.

From 1955 to 1966 the corn crop has doubled, to 135,000 tons; cotton has risen from 300 tons to 5,100; rubber from 30,000 tons to almost 48,000; timber from 182,000 cubic meters to 330,000. Substantial gains have also been made in sugar, peppers, tobacco, castor beans, and all livestock, notably poultry.

2. In the month of October alone, 491 men, women and children sought asylum in Cambodia. In an interview in a refugee settlement, all said they had no idea of the generous reception awaiting them. Although sometimes referred to by the Cambodian government as fleeing “government repression,” my interviews made it clear they were fleeing persecution by both sides in the war, notably the “corvee” or labor tax. Some had been forced by the Viet Cong to destroy the main roads at night, and by government forces to rebuild them by day. One man saw a neighbor blown up by a mine planted the night before. Several said the Viet Cong was taking half their rice crop, and the government a third of the remainder.

Most are ethnic Cambodians, a substantial minority population in the Delta of South Viet Nam. There is also a smaller exodus of refugees, mostly tribesmen, from Laos.

3. Created in the fall of 1957, the JSRK supplanted Boy Scouting and, in theory at least, all other youth organizations. It couples typical Scouting activities with a program exhorting young people to constructive, and if necessary self-sacrificing, patriotism. Membership this year topped 400,000 students, almost half the nation’s school population, and 15,000 teachers. Like Scouting in the U.S., the quality of JSRK programs depends on leadership. Limited observation suggests that regular small-unit activities are less successful than one-shot, mass-membership meetings or work projects.
4. The work project I joined was moved up from its regular date for my benefit. But the regular date was genuine: I inadvertently saw a copy of the inter-office memorandum substituting my Sunday for the regular 15^th-of-the-month date, and advising that the 30^th-of-the-month project would proceed on schedule.

Battembang — “That building, for surgical patients, is new. That one, for general illnesses, is new. The maternity ward is new. That ward for monks, who are cared for separately except in serious cases, is new.”

Dr. Ping Kim Sea looked around the hospital grounds — a quiet, almost campus-like compound of simple one-story masonry buildings — with obvious pride.

Started by the French, the facility has been more than doubled since independence 13 years ago. All but one of the old French buildings have been torn down and rebuilt; the remaining one, dilapidated and outmoded even by Cambodian standards, is slated for reconstruction soon.

“In the old days,” Dr. Sea said, “people used to give money only to the temples. Now” –“he waved a hand around the compound – “they give for nation-building, too.

“I raised almost all the money for that big ward in a half-morning, in a meeting with leaders of the city.”

Here, as with so many other schools and public buildings, the pattern is familiar: popular subscription, which makes each improvement a source of local pride. Often, for a major project, Prince Norodom Sihanouk kicks off the campaign with a local appearance, usually with an initial gift of his own. But even without his personal intervention, the building goes on.

Dr. Sea, in his early 30’s, is director of the hospital, and also chief of medicine for Battambang province. A gynecologist and surgeon with a degree from France, he is under no illusions about the quality of medicine in Cambodia.

His tiny 120-bed hospital is the only one (apart from a small rural health center with a few beds) for a population of 600,000. He is one of two physicians in the hospital, four in the province.

The hospital wards are clean, but of almost rustic simplicity. Ward beds have no mattresses. Many patients are accompanied by a relative (“Even if we had enough nurses.” a doctor in another hospital told me, “the tradition would continue. People feel they must assure that their ill are cared for.”) The shiny stainless steel trays on which meals were served seemed almost out of place. The single small operating theater had a simple surgical light, a sink, a few tanks of anesthetic gas, and an air-conditioner, the only one in the hospital.

But it is unrealistic to judge medicine here by U.S. standards. One must go back a few years to achieve a perspective, to see how far Cambodia has come.

At the end of World War Two, I have been told; there was only one medical doctor in this nation of 5 million. By 1955 there were 77; today there are 337 doctors, and another 377 “health officers” with a new four-year shortened medical training. (1)

But the burden of public health is carried on by 460 nurses (usually male) in small infirmaries scattered around the country, and 518 “rural midwives” working essentially out of their homes. (The numbers of these two basic facilities have grown five-fold and nine-fold respectively in the decade.

The infirmary attendant treats small wounds and ills, and works with roving medical teams on a continuing inoculation program. Vaccination against smallpox is all but universal; it is widespread against cholera, and gradually catching up on tuberculosis and polio.

These rural nurses also line up appointments for the doctors who visit on regular rounds, and will in emergencies send patients to more advanced facilities nearby.

Mother-and-child care rests on the rural midwives, who last year delivered almost half the nation’s newborn, saw most of their mothers for at least one pre-natal visit, and carried on a rudimentary well-child-clinic program. Deaths in childbirth, and fatal infections of the newborn, have been cut to one-third the 1960 figure.

From the rural posts, nurses or midwives may send patients to one of a dozen “dispensaries” with a doctor in attendance, or 10 “health centers’, with a dozen or more beds; or to one of the three dozen hospitals in the country. (3)

But there are fewer than 5,900 hospital beds for the entire country, a ratio of one bed per 1,000, compared with 1:50 or better in some U.S. metropolitan areas. The emphasis must obviously continue to be on decentralized, preventative public health.

It is. Despite the limited facilities, the only serious public health problem today is malaria. Although deaths have dropped to about 75 the last two years (after a peak of 132 four years ago) the number of new infections reached 30,000 last year. In Battambang, one of the problem areas, Dr. Sea has 23 men assigned to the anti-malaria program.

In a country, which is a swamp half the year, mosquito control is astronomically expensive, and the best short-term remedy is to keep infected people from transmitting the disease to carrier mosquitoes. A UN team is working with Cambodians, and feels progress is being made. (4)

One of the most remarkable things about medicine in Cambodia is the large number of young doctors who accept government service, despite dismally low salaries. A doctor in his first hospital post earns 4,800 riels a month, plus a family allowance of 1,500 if he has a wife and two children: $100 to $200 a month, depending on which exchange rate one uses for calculation. (5)

In private practice, at 150 riels a visit, an established doctor can almost earn that much a day. (All clinic visits are free, and hospitalization in government facilities may cost as little as 20-100 riels a day. Medicines 2 save for emergency drugs, are at the patient’s expense. (6) But many well-to-do Cambodians, like well-to-do Britons, prefer to pay for private care.)

Many doctors, particularly those in government hospitals in urban areas, may and do augment their earnings with a small private practice. But the fact remains that only 10 per cent of all doctors are in full-time private practice.

That is a far prouder record than many of Cambodia’s neighbors can boast.

1. A full comparison of 1966 medical personnel with 1955 figures (in parentheses) includes 337 health officers (0); 53 pharmacists (4); 27 dentists (3) 2,214 nurses (630); 224 professional midwives (52) and 644 rural midwives (73). In addition, there were 479 medical students of all kinds enrolled at the Universite Royale.
2. There is an ambulance service at in-patient facilities, but its use must be limited: virtually none of the rural posts have telephones. There are, in fact, only 2,200 phones in the country, only 350 outside Phnom Penh. That number will soon jump to 4,200, reaching many new rural areas. One is constantly struck by the staggering number of things, which must be done all at once!
3. There are four private hospitals, including the French-run Hôpital Calmette, whose charges approach those of U.S. hospitals.
4. UN personnel give Cambodians high marks for their ability to organize this kind of vaccination campaign. In 1961-62, an outbreak of rinderpest threatened the cattle population. In the following year Cambodia, with UN assistance, vaccinated 620,000 animals, and kept up that pace for two years more, wiping out the disease. The UN people say that despite their help, the credit goes to Cambodians.
5. The pay-scale bias favoring education applies even in medicine. A young cardiologist, chief of a section of the big Khmero-Soviet Friendship Hospital, told me he augments his earnings almost 10,000 riels a month by teaching six hours a week. Except that he hires some part-time assistants out of his own pocket that would nearly equal his regular salary.
6. With so few pharmacists, most prescriptions are for patent medicines, almost all imported, and available in wide variety in small ”pharmacies” scattered profusely throughout the country.

Phnom Penh — “You must understand that there are differences in the way we use certain words. When we speak of foreign aid, we mean gifts. We do not consider loans as foreign aid.”

Chau Sau, former minister of planning and now president of the State Bank of Cambodia, leaned forward to be sure the visitor had followed his careful French. The difference might seem subtle; but to Cambodians, it is important.

This proudly independent country rejected all U.S. aid in November 1963, convinced that conditions on its use were unacceptable infringements on Khmer sovereignty.

Since then, it has increasingly sought long-term, low-interest loans for its major development projects (1), and has insisted that outright gifts will be accepted only without conditions.

Even before the break with the U.S., Cambodia had been widely pictured as the past master of aid manipulation, playing East against West to win huge amounts of aid.

It has since been pictured as a country slipping into the communist — and specifically Chinese communist — bloc.

Neither picture fits the facts.

Important though foreign gifts and loans are to this former French colony, they should not be exaggerated. In 1964 (the last year for which full figures are available) direct aid totaled less than 3 per cent of the nation’s GNP (gross national product). (2)

Foreign loans at present, including some of 20 years’ duration and many on which the first payment is not yet due, have a value less than 10 per cent of a single year’s GNP.

Cambodians make no pretense that the loss of U.S. dollars was painless. To the contrary, the decision has become a tallying-point for consumer and governmental austerity.

Almost simultaneously with rejection of U.S. aid, the government took a series of coordinated steps:

• All foreign banks were given seven months, to close up, putting all banking in the hands of two government banks to allow tighter control of credit and investment.
• All rice purchases — theoretically, at least — were put into government hands, to capture the profits, which historically stayed in the hands of the (mostly Chinese) commerçant middlemen.
• Rice exports, and all import-export trade, were put in government hands, to control the delicate balance of trade and to channel imports into the most productive public and private capital investments. (3)
• New emphasis was put on state ownership or domination of new industry aimed at replacing imported consumer goods.

It was an ambitious program, and its success has inevitably been less than perfect: the state-inspired farm co-ops do not yet control the rice harvest; consumer austerity is easy-going, and there is an open black market in some items; the government is not satisfied with its success in curbing use of foreign exchange for non-essential capital goods. (4)

But in each of these areas, progress is being made.

Meantime, the government has put renewed effort into the industrial base. Five years ago, this might well have been predominantly free enterprise. Indeed, the first Five-Year Plan estimates, in December 1958, listed in the “private sector” several large industries since built as state enterprises. Private enterprise simply didn’t do the job.

Although the government is still open to private investment, it is inclined toward “mixed” companies now, in which the government or at least Cambodian interests will have a controlling share, if not toward full state ownership of key enterprises. (5)

Foreign gifts and loans have played a major role in this development, particularly those of China, Czechoslovakia and France. (6)

China’s contributions — all outright gifts — are impressive: plywood, cement, paper, glass and bottle factories, and two cotton mills. (Only one, the completed cotton-textile factory, so far shows a clear and unequivocal profit, But the Chinese are working to correct shortcomir4s in planning or equipment in some others (7); and even those losing money may be worth while in foreign-exchange savings.)

But in evaluating China’s factories, it must be remembered that their value is less than France’s gifts, let alone France’s more recent major loans.

Few Western diplomats here believe China has “bought” Cambodia. Prince Norodom Sihanouk has several times gone out of his way to warn the nation’s leftists against putting too much confidence in China (8) and has hammered home again and again the pride Cambodians should feel in their own achievement.

In a mid-November speech, he scoffed at articles in the Western press. They assert, he said, “that the Phnom Penh of today and Sihanoukville are French achievements, our industries are due solely to China, our public health achievements may all be imputed to Russia…. and as for the Khmers, they put nothing on our side of the ledger except poking around in the ground a little!”

“We have never been guilty of ingratitude 0 he said. “But if we give unto Caesar the (glory that is) Caesar’s, we also like to have people give us credit for what is strictly our own.”

1. Even in 1962, the last full year of U.S. aid, foreign aid was less than 5 per cent of GNP. The impact on the national budget was greater, although difficult to measure. The value of U.S. aid in 1962 (including non-cash gifts) may have approached 10 per cent of the Cambodian’s government’s cash revenue.
2. It may be significant that Cambodia, although obviously sharing misgivings about Western domination that kept Burma away, as well as Iran and Mongolia, joined the inaugural meeting of the Asian Development Bank in Tokyo this month. But at that meeting, as well as at an earlier preparatory meeting, the Cambodians made themselves conspicuous by insisting that the bank develop its own doctrine suited to this region’s needs: i.e., to underwrite with long-term, low-interest loans the most fundamental projects to bring small nations’ resources into utilization. They warned their Asian neighbors against letting the Asian Bank be corrupted, “as have some other world bodies,” by essentially Western interests.
3. The import curbs, it was known in advance, would hurt government revenues, 30 per cent of which came from import duties in 1962. The curbs have also cut excise taxes on such imported luxuries as liquor, beer, sugar and tobacco, despite ad valorem tax increases. The long-range effect of t1le curbs is of obvious value, but the short-range side effects add to heavy budget deficits.
4. The rice harvest was hit last year by dry weather, and still harder this year by floods, so that an objective assessment of the co-ops’ marketing success is difficult. But they have clearly suffered from lack of experienced management. Equally important, they have not had the money to provide agricultural credit, thus supplanting the historical money-lending or futures-buying role of the commerçants.

   The government has recently begun cracking down on such smuggled luxury items as foreign cigarettes (now estimated at 25,000 packs a month and no longer covertly sold), and shows signs of more rigorous enforcement in other, more important areas.

   There have also been discussions of limiting licenses given private businessmen to import raw materials and equipment. Part of the problem is manipulation of licenses to get foreign exchange for non-essential, forbidden imports. There is also concern that proliferating capital investment by private enterprise includes too many things that are profitable, but which the nation could do without. In the last decade, for instance, pickling-works increased from 24 to 102.

5. Prince Sihanouk, in a recent speech, noted that industrial growth was the only section of the five-year plan which did not make or exceed its target; it reached only 40 per cent.

   “There was a time,” Chau Sau told me, “when we would have welcomed private investment. But at that time all our own entrepreneurs were much more interested in building new apartment buildings to house the American experts, or in developing import-export businesses to capture American counterpart aid funds.” An American diplomat, he said, told him frankly that the U.S. considered Vietnam a much more important place than Cambodia into which private American investment should be coaxed.

   “That was a strategic mistake,” said Sau, “and like all mistakes in basic strategy, a catastrophe — for you.”

6. See table next page.
7. It is hard to judge the non-technical role of Chinese technicians. They seem unobtrusive, though one hears they are numerous. Phnom Penh is flooded with Chinese propaganda magazines (most of them unread) but this seems in no way a “string” tied to Chinese aid.

   In fact, at the (profitable) cotton mill in Kompong Cham, replacement parts for the more sophisticated machinery are purchased by the Cambodians either in Hong Kong in Japan!

8. “I would like now to call the attention of our youth, of our young intellectuals, to the danger that one courts in according his trust to any foreign nation.” Sihanouk said later in the same speech quoted above.

   “There are no better defenders of our interests than ourselves, and it is on ourselves that we must count to preserve the future of our country.”

FOREIGN AID AND LOANS TO CAMBODIA 1962-65

Donor Country Gifts in cash and kind (000,000 riels*)

(by volume)	1962	1963	1964	1965	Detail
United States	1,133.2	888.4	—	—	776, military aid, mostly equipment, in1962; 528 in1963
France	197.9	218.9	656.2	N. A.	105 military aid mostly 260 officer advisors, in 1962; 104 in1963; 400+ in1964, mostly planes, equipment
China	115.5	117.5	33.3	131.4	Figures on Chinese military aid not available.
International (UN, Colombo-Plan)	61.9	21.0	69.1	N.A.	Figures in an arbitrary division part of long-term aid; and for the Mekong River planning, of Cambodia’s share.
Japan	34.7	41.4	18.6	11.0	Three technical assistance projects (rice culture, live- stock, public health.
Soviet Union	—	36.7	9.3	1.0	Technical education institute building
West Germany school instruction				23.1	Technical school and instruction

Lending Country                  Cumulative Total to July 1966

France	1,600.0	800 for railroad improvement and extension400 for expansion of -. port of Hydro-electric dam
Soviet Union	427.0
Yugoslavia	283.0	Hydro-electric dam
West Germany	177.0	78 for rail- roads; 97 new abattoir
Czechoslovakia	148.0	40 tractor ass. plant 47 sugar re finery 97 tire factories

*1,000,000 = just under US $30,000 at pegged rate. Relation to other currencies believed consistent.

Detail (continued)

Technical aid projects, expert assistants, grants for Cambodian study in U.S., construction materials, etc.

Cultural aid, mostly teachers, runs 50-60 million a year, and technical assistance in 1964 was at the same level.

Most Chinese aid has been in building, equipping, and training staff for new factories, some of which precedes these figures.

Other costs are technical experts in health, agriculture, finance and planning, and resource studies, and special education-improvement programs.

Voluntary “reparations,” but financed in part with Japanese earnings on a commercial bridge contract. Extent of “aid” not agreed upon.

Earlier projects included a short highway and a major hospital. Current aid includes continuing expert assistance to school, hospital.

Sihanoukville; 400, for oil refinery.

Total U.S. aid (excluding military program) 1955-63 was $309 million or 10,800,000,000, largest single non-military project (but with military significance was $30 million highway, plus $12 million repairs under way at time of break. France earlier made a major gift of port facilities at Sihanoukville. Later figures appear to include some late port costs, and lesser aide to post-telegraph services, a hospital, and Mekong studies.

Major installations are a pear factory, two cotton spinning and weaving, mills, a cement factory, and a plywood factory.

Details must be taken as approximations only. The Cambodian government has been cooperative for the most part; but a change of government and the imminent presentation of a new five-year plan have made it difficult to cross check material drawn from printed reports.

Terms variously 10 to 20 years at 2.5 to 3 per cent. Date of loan agreement July 1964.

Terms 12 years at 2.5 per cent, agreement of April 1963 modified June 1965.

Terms part 5 years, part 15, at 3 per cent, April 1963.

25 years at 3 per cent         Details still being negotiated

20 years at 3 per cent

5 years at 2.5 per cent

6 years at 2.5 per cent        Agreement of February 1961

7 years at 2.5 per cent

Received in New York December 6, 1966.