Connections and Courage at Center of Cambodian Tale

Um Luonn wants his job back.

Three days after Second Prime Minister Hun Sen seized sole power in Cambodia, Um Luonn, the ferry master of Neak Luong, a vital crossing point over the Mekong River, was summoned to the capital and summarily fired.

In Phnom Penh, Um Luonn was informed that he was being replaced by his predecessor, a man who spent time in prison on charges that he helped smuggle about 360 Toyota Land Cruisers stolen from the United Nations and other organizations over the river to be sold in Vietnam.

“They want to steal my job,” the ferry master said Monday. “I am very angry. They say it’s not a coup d’etat. So why did they make a coup d’etat in Neak Luong?”

No doubt Um Luonn’s chief offense was his longtime membership in FUNCINPEC, the royalist party headed by Hun Sen’s archenemy, ousted First Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh. But the 50-year-old Western-trained mechanical engineer said his failure to pay the customary financial homage to key officials in Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party, or CPP, contributed to his dismissal.

“For Cambodian people, to respect the high boss you have to give big presents,” Um Luonn explained. “Since I did not do it, they said, ‘You are a FUNCINPEC man.’ But I am not a CPP man; I am not a FUNCINPEC man. I helped everybody to cross the river.”

In an act of defiance unthinkable to the many Cambodians cowed by the bloody crackdown, Um Luonn has refused to accept his dismissal. His courage, fortified by his Dutch passport and assurances from Dutch diplomats that they would help him leave the country if necessary, led Um Luonn to enlist the support of a local member of the National Assembly and then write a letter to Hun Sen requesting reinstatement.

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To Um Luonn’s amazement, an aide to Hun Sen produced a letter signed by the second prime minister asking the Ministry of Public Works and Transportation, which runs the ferries, to let the ferry master keep his job. On Monday, Um Luonn was awaiting word from the ministry on his fate.

“I think I will get my job back, but the problem is revenge” by the well-connected CPP man who covets his lucrative post, Um Luonn said.

The ferry master’s tale is a primer on Cambodia’s gritty patronage politics. This country is brutal to the powerless: Connections often determine whether people get rich, jailed or killed.

But Um Luonn’s story also illustrates the mastery of government minutiae shown by Hun Sen’s political apparatus, which was built to run his Vietnamese-backed Communist government in the 1980s. It is this political machine that allowed Hun Sen to fight back from defeat in the 1993 U.N.-sponsored election and then systematically wrest power from Ranariddh during their troubled coalition government that ruled following the election.

One analyst termed the power struggle that ended in tank fire on July 5 a “creeping coup.”

Another longtime Cambodia watcher, Raoul M. Jennar, said numerous visitors to Hun Sen have described a man with nothing on his desk but with a perfect memory of the facts at issue, while those who met Ranariddh reported him “ill-informed” and “vague.”

“Hun Sen is a real professional in politics, despite his brutal side,” Jennar said. “Ranariddh is like a tourist in politics. He spends an hour or two in his office after a reception and before going to play golf.”

Both men have been accused of presiding over a government riddled with corruption. Rooting out the rot will be a major challenge for Hun Sen’s new regime.

The corruption extends from the senior officials who are allowing Cambodia’s timber to be sold at a fraction of the world price in exchange for a cut of the profits, to a CPP-controlled judicial system that fails to convict criminals with CPP patrons, all the way down to Um Luonn’s ferry stop.

Presiding over the ferries that ply the muddy Mekong is a lucrative job. The Neak Luong ferries, which on Monday carried everything from pigs and bicycles to vendors of litchi fruit and overloaded Russian-built cargo trucks, are the only way for traffic from Phnom Penh to cross the river and continue along vital Highway 1 to Vietnam.

But a law apparently aimed at curbing smuggling allows the ferries, about 30 miles southeast of the capital, to run only between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m.--creating a huge incentive for bribing ferry officials to offer nighttime transport to travelers in a hurry or to take illicit shipments such as the stolen U.N. Land Cruisers.

Rumors that Um Luonn’s predecessor, Phat Sareth, was profiting handsomely from such transactions were given credence by the discovery of one of the Land Cruisers in his backyard.

Phat Sareth was jailed but freed within a year, and was then named deputy director of public works and transportation in Svay Rieng province, a Public Works and Transportation Ministry source confirmed. A Swiss doctor, Beat Richner, wrote about the incident and referred to the former ferry master as one of the Cambodian “untouchables” whose powerful connections afford impunity. Ferry workers said Phat Sareth was visiting Svay Rieng on Monday, and he could not be reached for comment.

Um Luonn returned to Cambodia from exile in the Netherlands in 1991 and was appointed to replace Phat Sareth in 1994 by the FUNCINPEC minister of public works and transportation. The man is now in France receiving medical treatment and said after Hun Sen’s takeover that he was too ill to return.

Um Luonn said he delighted his new masters by handing over ferry proceeds.

“I make money--600 million riels [$215,000] a year to the government,” he said, adding that his predecessor delivered only a third that sum. “He bought two villas in three years.”

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Um Luonn does not, however, pretend to live solely on his government salary, which is worth $20 a month. “I steal a little, just for living,” he said.

Um Luonn and his friends interpreted Hun Sen’s intervention as a sign that the second prime minister did not wish to be seen as purging FUNCINPEC officials at the very moment he is courting a more cooperative FUNCINPEC leader to replace Ranariddh.

“It’s politics,” Um Luonn concluded. “If you sack somebody, that’s dictatorship.”