The Phnom Penh Report: National Landscape, Current Challenges and Opportunities for Growth

• Main Authors: Institute for Societal Leadership, ELLINGTON, John W.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2014
• Subjects: War; Cambodia; Politics; Asian Studies; History; Political Science
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/isl_research/9; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=isl_research
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Once a relatively sleepy agrarian kingdom, Cambodia has experienced some of the most horrific violence since the close of the Second World War. Between 1970 and 1999, the country was the victim of both a brutal civil war as well wider regional conflicts. The Khmer Rouge seizure of power in 1975 brought four years of forced collectivisation and mass killings that have haunted the Cambodian psyche ever since. The decade of Vietnamese occupation that followed only further exacerbated the country’s massive humanitarian problems. When the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) exited after elections in 1993, it left behind a country with less than-stable political institutions, an unresolved history of mass violence and a chronic dependence on large infusions of foreign aid.