Cambodia's 50th independence day finds its king in low spirits, given to calling his country a "beggar state" and a "jungle ... populated more and more by wild beasts."
Trampled by foreigners for centuries, dragged into the Vietnam War and turned into a vast killing field by the genocidal Khmer Rouge, the Southeast Asian nation is still wracked by poverty, corruption and lawlessness as it marks Sunday's anniversary of the end of French rule.
From his mustard-colored palace in Phnom Penh, the capital, 81-year-old King Norodom Sihanouk has been sending out a stream of online "open letters," deploring what has become of Cambodia.
Criminal violence is a plague. Just last month, radio journalist Chuor Chetharith was gunned down on a street by two men on a motorbike, and in a separate attack, pop singer Touch Sonic was seriously wounded and her mother killed.
The reason for the attacks is not known, but both the journalist and the singer were linked to Funcinpec, the royalist opposition party founded by Sihanouk but no longer connected to him. It was these shootings that provoked Sihanouk's "jungle" outburst.
In one letter on his French-language Web site, Sihanouk described Cambodia as "a beggar state, having lost its financial and economic independence ... and, consequently, its political independence."
Limited audience
Cambodia's cyber culture is in its infancy, so the king's online audience is limited. Excerpts, however, have appeared in the Khmer-language press and have run on the US-sponsored radio stations, Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.
Sok Chhoeun, a 74-year-old retired factory worker, agreed with Sihanouk's gloomy assessment. He likened Cambodia to "a toddler learning to stand up but relying on help to keep its balance."
As it spruces up its parks and decorates street corners with Sihanouk's portrait for the anniversary, Cambodia can point to two bright spots -- a thriving garment industry and a democracy that in its messy way is slowly overcoming the horrors of the four-year Khmer Rouge rampage.
In the past decade, Cambodia has held three elections, and in the last, in July, Funcinpec and another opposition party got enough votes to deny Prime Minister Hun Sen a majority, forcing him to negotiate with them for a coalition.
A regional power centuries ago, then a French colonial territory from 1864 to 1953, Cambodia is today one of the world's poorest countries. More than one-third of its 12 million people survive on less than US$1 a day. Thousands of Cambodians sneak illegally into Thailand every year to find work or beg on the streets.
Weak law enforcement has allowed corruption to grow, from traffic cops extorting petty bribes to the illegal logging that continues almost unhindered. Trafficking in women and children for prostitution is rampant. Drug abuse is rising. An army general was arrested but later released in connection with a record heroin seizure in October.
Still, Cambodia is enjoying stability it never had until 1999, when the Khmer Rouge movement finally collapsed.
Now that banditry has waned, the temples of Angkor Wat, Cambodia's greatest historical treasure, are thronged with foreign tourists -- 400,000 last year.
Dependent on aid
Heavily dependent on foreign aid, Cambodia's lone success story is its garment industry, which has followed the example set by other emerging Asian economies in supplying cheap labor to manufacturers of international brand-name goods.
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