Country Information

The population is 11.4 million.  Over 90% of the Cambodian population is ethnic Khmer. Minority populations include Chinese and Vietnamese in cities and lowland areas, and highland tribal peoples in the upland areas of the northeast.  Over 90% of the Cambodian population is Theravada Buddist.  Cambodia’s government is officially called the Royal Government of Cambodia and combines hereditary monarchy with parliamentary democracy. The Prime Minister, Hun Sen, is the most powerful political figure in the country.

Political and Economic Environment
Cambodia is still struggling to recover politically and economically from the 21-year catastrophe that started in 1969 and included illegal U.S. bombing, civil war, Khmer Rouge rule, and Vietnamese occupation. The United Nations intervention in Cambodia in 1991 after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords succeeded in establishing an internationally recognized government, though one that has been plagued by in-fighting and instability. Cambodia’s political culture, while nominally democratic, is still characterized by violence and the weakness of institutions --- such as the judiciary, the media, parliament, the Buddhist clergy --- that might provide peaceful avenues and perspectives to solve political problems. The greatest progress in transforming Cambodian politics has been at the local level, where elected councils now govern units of ten villages known as communes.

Cambodia’s economy is weak and dependent on foreign assistance, which amounts to more than $500 million per year, an amount completely out of proportion to Cambodia’s population or geopolitical importance. Most of Cambodia’s population still depends on subsistence agriculture, eking out one crop of rain-fed rice per year. Foreign investment soared after the establishment of the Royal Government in 1993, but political instability and the lack of rule of law has made investors more cautious recently. Foreign investment was concentrated in the textiles and garment sector, taking advantage of favorable tax treatment and the expansion of U.S. import quotas for Cambodian goods. This type of investment is notoriously unproductive, and provides few benefits to Cambodian workers or to the Cambodian economy as a whole.
 
Humanitarian Situation
The long-running civil war in Cambodia is finally over. Thus, although the food situation remains precarious, with recurring shortages if the weather is unfavorable during the main rice-growing season from May until October, these shortages do not result in large-scale food crises or famines. The most vulnerable people in Cambodia are peasant farmers and landless rural dwellers, many from provinces affected by the war, of whom a portion are refugees who returned from the Thai border camps in the 1990s and have never been able to establish a viable economic life for themselves and their families. Refugees International has been involved with providing direct assistance to the Phnong, highland people who returned to their home in Mondulkiri province in 1999 after two decades in exile.

The humanitarian issue that has arisen in the past two years is the movement of highland peoples from Vietnam, the Montagnards, into northeastern Cambodia. They are fleeing political and economic oppression in Vietnam. A first group of close to 1,000 was able to find asylum on Cambodian soil in 2001. Most of this group was resettled in the United States after an effort by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to negotiate a repatriation program with the Vietnamese government ended in failure. The Cambodian government is now refusing to allow Montagnards entry into Cambodia, a refusal that violates Cambodia’s obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention, to which it is a signatory.


Updated January 2004