Phnom Penh The “Cincinnati” of Cambodia

by Rick Bales of June Drive

A bit north of the equator, Cambodia is an inviting place to visit when Shawnee days are short and cold. I visited Phnom Penh for a week in early December to provide training for the Cambodia Arbitration Center, which resolves labor disputes between garment workers and the factories that made the clothes that you gave and received at Christmas.

From a map, Phnom Penh looks a lot like Cincinnati. It’s an inland river city, with a downtown that hugs the Tonle Sap where it meets the Mekong. The Mekong flows from the Tibetan Plateau through seven different countries before it empties into the ocean in Saigon, Vietnam.

Phnom Penh had roughly the same population as presentday Cincinnati when, in 1975, the communist Khmer Rouge marched into the city. Initially welcomed as an alternative to a dysfunctional government destabilized by a U.S. bombing campaign, the Khmer Rouge had a utopian vision of an entirely agrarian society. Within 72 hours, Phnom Penh became a ghost town, its million-plus residents killed, imprisoned, or relocated to the countryside to farm rice.

The Khmer Rouge turned a local high school into a torture facility where the regime’s perceived enemies – anyone with more than a middleschool education – were held until they could be transported to a local “Killing Field.” The killing was brutal – to save the cost of bullets, the executioners used hoes, metal rods, and knives to kill people before burying them in mass graves. Nearly 2 million people died throughout Cambodia in the two years the Khmer Rouge were in power. Whole families – including children and babies – were slaughtered.

Today, the countryside of Cambodia is heavily agricultural, with an emphasis on rice and various kinds of fruit. One of the great joys of visiting is eating fresh mangoes, bananas (which have far more flavor that anything we can get in the U.S.), avocados bigger than a grapefruit, and – my favorite – durian (which smells like a cross between sewage and a rotten corpse but has the taste and texture of a sweet, delicate custard).

Khmer cuisine is not as well-known as its Thai or Vietnamese cousins, but the world’s best peppercorns are grown here. The black ones we’re familiar with have an extra kick when grown in the Kampot region, and the white and red varieties offer subtle variations when used on fish, beef, and even ice cream.

Once you get here, living is cheap! My (very nice, on the river) Airbnb cost about $40/night, meals ranged from $1-5, and a week’s worth of fruit less than $3. You can get anywhere in the city via tuk-tuk for $3, and a bus ride to the beach or to the Angkor Wat temples costs about $20.

Fringing Phnom Penh are hundreds of clothing, shoe, luggage, and handbag factories. These factories are typically owned by Taiwanese and Korean companies, and they make items for sale in the U.S. and Europe by brands such as Gucci, Adidas, Ralph Lauren, and the like. Local Cambodians – the vast majority of whom are women – work in these factories for $200 per month. The working conditions in most of the factories here, though far from ideal, are much better than in neighboring Laos, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. One medium-sized factory alone can produce a million articles of clothing per month!

Neither the factory owners nor the workers have much faith in the courts, which is why past labor disputes often ended in bloodshed. Today, thanks to the International Labour Organization, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and several other organizations, the Arbitration Center can resolve these disputes early and safely. My visit, organized by the National Academy of Arbitrators, was to help provide training and support to the Center. I hope to return many times in the coming years to continue the relationship.