US Congress warms to Cambodia

Reports of a top al-Qaeda operative in the Southeast Asian country have prompted a thaw in relations.

from the March 14, 2007 edition

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PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA - When the USS Gary arrived at the touristy port city of Sihanoukville, Cambodia, last month, it became the first US military vessel to dock in this Southeast Asian nation in over 30 years. US and Cambodian military personnel played soccer, and military doctors fixed the teeth of poor Cambodian villagers.

It's a different picture from the last time the Navy came to Cambodia in 1975, after the infamous Khmer Rouge regime had seized the US merchant ship SS Mayaguez and the military launched a full-scale rescue mission in response.

The USS Gary is just one sign of warming relations between the two nations. Two days after the ship left Sihanoukville, President Bush signed into law a budget resolution for 2007 that for the first time in nearly a decade lifts the congressional ban on direct US funding to Cambodia.

This change in US policy comes as the international community calls attention to Cambodia's shortcomings on corruption and human rights. US officials say that it is a shift of strategy driven, in part, by the exigencies of the US-led war on terror.

"Our hope is to have more normal relations and draw Cambodia closer to the community of nations," says Joseph Mussomeli, the US ambassador to Cambodia.

The appearance in Cambodia in 2002 and 2003 of Riduan Isamuddin – an Indonesian better known as Hambali, who was believed to be Al Qaeda's top operative in Southeast Asia – was a wake-up call to Washington, one Cambodia-watcher and US congressional aide said on condition of anonymity. "Washington bureaucrats finally realized what Cambodia-watchers knew all along: Cambodia matters, and it is indeed a swamp in need of draining."

Sam Rainsy, the leader of the eponymous Sam Rainsy Party, which is the closest thing Cambodia has to an opposition party, praises the policy change, saying it will give the US more leverage to promote human rights and democracy in a region increasingly dominated by China. "China does not pay any attention to human rights," he says. "We cannot leave our country to Chinese influence alone. The world must be more balanced."

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