🇰🇭 Locked down and starving in Cambodia

Hello friends!

Another devastating one in our COVID-19 update series. Today, Cambodia.

This series is free for all far and wide, so please share and forward. Cambodian authorities have gone to great lengths to control the media narrative there and the sources we have relied on here have worked very hard and in impossible conditions to get it out. Well done and thank you to them. 

On that note: finding English-language reporting from Cambodia, not from a US or Chinese state media outlet is almost impossible now! The fortnightly Campuccino newsletter is a brilliant remedy to this, an absolute must for inboxes. 

My piece below is aimed at bringing readers up to date on the status of Cambodia’s outbreak and lockdown. It’s almost entirely written to back this up: go and read Campuccino’s most recent newsletter, Can’t Calm Down, with its brilliant analysis and positive endnote. 

There’s something especially unfair for the Mekong states. A year of successfully dodging disaster only to cop it full force now. Just a few months ago we read that Cambodia had its first COVID-19 fatality, a number which continues to rise and is 146 deaths as of Thursday. Cases have exploded past 21,000 a sharp climb on the 500 Cambodia ended the year with. 

The three week Phnom Penh lockdown ended last week, prompting criticisms from public health experts that the suspension was too soon. But, like much of the region, juggling the economy and the pandemic is a tough act. Instead, local officials called for caution. "I request that people should not be negligent, because we are living under a new way of life in the context of COVID-19," Phnom Penh's deputy governor Mean Chanyada said, as reported by Reuters. 

Specific neighbourhoods in the capital had been designated ‘red zones’ and residents there were forced to stay at home at all times bar medical emergencies. In a terrible echo of pleas we heard from Indonesia and the Philippines this time last year, many in those zones said they are more frightened of starving to death than dying of COVID-19. 

This piece from Al Jazeera at the height of the lockdown shows how desperate things have become. In some neighbourhoods, the government provided food aid, but others were left languishing. “We are not rich. We live hand to mouth. If we were rich like others, it would be OK for us to be in quarantine for a year,” 39-year-old mother Iv Sovann told the outlet. She explained that in her neighbourhood some residents had been given tinned fish and rice, but only until her family complained did they get help. 

Stories like Iv Sovann’s have shamed Hun Sen’s government and prompted a ban on media visiting red zones in the capital. Media has been accused of ‘chasing ambulances’ and causing unrest and confusion at hospitals and medical sites. Humanitarian organisations have also been barred from distributing food aid, according to France 24. 

The end of the lockdown won’t fix Cambodia’s inequality issues. The pandemic is spiralling out of control creating twin ‘government-created’ crises. Something needs to be done either by Hun Sen’s government or by the government stepping aside and letting civil society and NGOs fill the wide gap it has left behind.