A year ago next month, the first public cracks appeared in the carefully crafted
fiction of the professionalism and institutional integrity of the Cambodian Mine
Action Center (CMAC).
Press reports about a fraudulent salary scheme in
Demining Unit 4 marked the first drip in what would become a flood of evidence
of sleaze and dishonesty that put the lie to the mantra of CMAC management and
its donors that the demining agency was "the best in the world."
After
eleven months of audits, investigations, resignations and firings, any faint
hopes that the worst might have been over for CMAC were effectively dashed on
Feb 14 when CMAC's Canadian demining experts left the field claiming that
demining platoons had put lives at risk by falsely claiming that mined areas had
been demined.
What has been overlooked as one scandal has followed
another is the role that other agencies have had in the fiasco.
Questions
have been raised about the quality of leadership provided by the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP) which administers the trust fund through which
donor funds are channeled to CMAC.
Doubts about UNDP's competence, sown
early on by former UNDP Resident Representative Paul Mathews' May 1999
insistence that the CMAC salary scandal was "irregular" rather than
"fraudulent," were heightened in August 1999 when CMAC UNDP Programme
Coordinator Richard Warren was accused by three senior UN personnel of
managerial incompetence and a willful obstruction of CMAC reform
efforts.
In a gesture of personal and professional integrity rarely seen
within UN agencies in Cambodia, the three personnel later resigned en masse to
protest UNDP's failure to heed their warning of Warren's
failings.
Instead, UNDP not only allowed Warren to complete his contract
at the end of September, but according to reliable CMAC sources rewarded him for
his service with a "golden handshake" of six-months salary ($12,000 per month)
in addition to associated UN in-country benefits. CMAC deminers, the men and
women in the field who literally risk their lives each day to demine this
country, receive a monthly salary of $160.
Hopes that the arrival of
current UNDP Resident Representative Dominique McAdams would lead to both a
long-overdue investigation into allegations about Warren's role in CMAC's
problems and an easing of the UNDP blackout on substantive comment on CMAC
issues were quickly dashed.
Diplomatic sources said that Bill Van Ree, an
Australian demining expert who was brought in following Warren's departure,
initially made good progress in overseeing financial and managerial reform at
CMAC but was "driven from the job by McAdams."
Instead of addressing
UNDP's role in CMAC's failings, McAdams has devoted her energies to seeking new
revenue sources to alleviate the shortfall in funds usually generated by the 13%
UNDP takes off the top of grants to CMAC for administrative costs.
After
a bitter losing battle with the Canadian government over its decision to bypass
UNDP and directly fund the upcoming Level One Mine Contamination Survey, sources
within the new National Cambodian Demining Regulatory Authority (NCDRA) report
that McAdams is now lobbying furiously to abort a similar direct-funding deal
between the EU and NCDRA.
And though embassy representatives of donors
have consistently blustered with righteous indignation as each successive
scandal has broken, donor claims of ignorance at the extent of CMAC's rot are
disingenuous at best.
Whisperings of the chronic fraud, dishonesty,
nepotism and incompetence within the agency have filtered into the expatriate
community for years through the approximately 500 foreign technical advisors
cycled through the agency since 1992.
The braying of embassy personnel
over CMAC's failings was more of an embarrassed reaction to proof that they
didn't get out in the field much or hadn't been listening to what their own
people had been trying to tell them rather than the moral and legal implications
of the scandal.
Worse, the latest revelation of incompetence and fraud at
the field level of CMAC operations has raised serious doubts about the utility
and quality of seven years of intensive and expensive technical training of CMAC
personnel by foreign military technical advisors, who are paid a minimum of
$2,000 per month in addition to in-country housing, travel and per-diem
costs.
As Royal Advisor on CMAC Affairs Sam Sotha has pointed out,
foreign technical advisors who shared in the praise of CMAC's pre-scandal
operations era equally deserve a portion of the blame for instances in which
deminers they trained and supervised have performed improperly or
illegally.
Rather than address this and other potentially embarrassing
issues, however, donors have effectively abandoned CMAC to twist in the
wind.
Months into a largely successful management reform program
spearheaded by CMAC Director General Khem Sophoan, donors have damned the agency
with a trickle of donor funding that condemns CMAC and its employees to a
constant crisis footing.
"I don't understand why donors won't give us the
money we need," sighed a weary Sophoan on Feb 17 as he anticipated yet another
temporary shutdown of demining operations due to a lack of donor funding. "What
else do donors want us to do?"
Sophoan's confusion is understandable,
since for the last seven months donors have themselves appeared uncertain about
their intentions for CMAC after making a spectacularly ignominious climb down
from a list of demands tendered to the agency's management on August 4,
1999.
The "Draft Donor Framework Towards Normalization of Relations With
CMAC" listed an excruciatingly specific list of 32 demands for CMAC reform
within an immediate, short and medium time frame.
Resumption of "normal"
funding for the agency, the document cautioned, was linked directly to
fulfillment of those demands.
Despite some initial success - notably the
dismissal of then-Director General Sam Sotha - within weeks of its issue both
CMAC management and donors were behaving as if the document never
existed.
"The donors blinked," explained one frustrated CMAC staffer.
"When it became clear that existing CMAC management was quite willing to let
CMAC be closed down rather than comply with a timetable for specific reform
targets, donors calculated that the potential political fallout in their own
countries that a shutdown would create wasn't worth it, so specific reform
targets were abandoned."
Proof of the short-lived duration of donor
bluster on CMAC reform is easy to chronicle.
Months of repeated public
assurances by UNDP and donors beginning in April 1999 that the results of a
intensive KPMG audit into CMAC finances would determine the future of donor
relations with CMAC were proven false on Sept 29 when donors and UNDP refused to
release the report to the public, referring only to KPMG's findings as
"positive."
"KPMG concluded that CMAC suffered from 'serious managerial
deficiencies," former CMAC UNDP Programme Coordinator Bill Van Ree told the Post
before departing CMAC in December 1999. "That was the key message of the audit,
and instead of being up-front about it, that message was
buried."
Likewise, don't ask donors about the results of the
investigation into the Demining Unit 3 fiasco - a demand donors classified as
"immediate" on Aug 4, 1999 - in which CMAC platoons contract-demined land in
area controlled by former KR commander Chhouk Rin.
If you do, the best
you'll get is embarrassed shrugs, or worse, from Australian representatives,
admonishments to "not get fixated on Chhouk Rin."
While the trinity of
accountability, transparency and capacity-building has long been the avowed
benchmark of donor efforts in Cambodia, the mystery of donors' intentions for
CMAC reeks of a confusion as unseemly as it is hypocritical.
There is
hope that CMAC's slow strangulation at the hands of its donor patrons might be
nearing an end. According to Australian Ambassador Malcolm Leader, the
Australian government has recognized that the bulk of CMAC reforms "have been
implemented or enunciated," and will be considering a return to normal funding
levels as early as April.
The Australian recognition that CMAC's
viability is threatened by continuation of the current drip-feed funding program
will hopefully prompt other donors to similarly review their
commitments.
If not, as Sam Sotha has warned, the bimonthly threat of a
CMAC shutdown will make "mistakes" in the field such as those discovered by
Canadian technical advisors ever more likely, and prompt Khem Sophoan to
implement his plans to prevent the mass looting of CMAC equipment as hundreds of
deminers react to the strain created by a muddled and capricious donor policy
that has taken hostage of their futures
