Home » Politics & Society » East Asian Politics » The Cambodia Coup (Part 2 of 2)

The Cambodia Coup (Part 2 of 2)

© Jason Gottlieb

(This is the second of a two-part series on the elections in Cambodia. Part one focused on the history behind the elections. This article is an interview with an American lawyer who was in Cambodia during the July 1997 coup.)

Matthew Fisk, 36, is an American lawyer who was teaching law at Cambodia's Royal University of Phnom Penh at the time of Hun Sen's coup d'etat in July 1997. Fisk, educated at Middlebury College, Pepperdine Law School, and the London School of Economics, has experience working in large corporate law firms, and doing pro bono work for the United Nations and various other international organizations. He was teaching in Cambodia through a program sponsored by USAID (the United States Agency for International Development) and the University of San Francisco. The following excerpts are from an interview recorded in March 1998.

Tell me a bit about the Royal University of Phnom Penh.

I was teaching in the University's Faculty of Business, which is a public institution, under the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport. Prior to that, it was a French lycee, during the French golden era of the '50s and '60s, when it was a school for privileged Khmer.

Under the USAID grant, the University of San Francisco taught business and law courses. If it weren't for USAID support, it would have been very difficult for it to be self-sufficient. The Faculty of Business is underdeveloped. The school had no windows. When it rained, the water would just come into the classroom. We had birds in the classrooms. Fans and electricity would sometimes work, sometimes not. Shots every now and then. That was rare.

The faculty was made up mostly of Soviet or Vietnamese-trained academics, so their knowledge of business is, well, almost retarded. These folks were tutored by the Vietnamese, during the Vietnamese Occupation.

The students had different stories to tell that you wouldn't believe. Most of the educated elite was tossed out, so most of the people living in Phnom Penh are peasants. They don't even know whose property they're living on. They had gone through all the masters - the French masters, the Soviet and Vietnamese masters, when they were sent off to Moscow, and now the marketplace demands that they learn English. That is the colonial experience par excellence, being handed from one master to another.

You're talking about a society that was so disrupted by the Khmer Rouge, you had people coming back to school at all different stages of their lives. You had impoverished people with no family at all anymore, who live in temples. You had former government ministers, driving in their Mercedes Benzes, barely literate, also taking classes.