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direct investors have gradually become essential partners in establishing
and maintaining systems of exchange. This suggests that single-leader
rule characterized by “sultanism” needs to be replaced by the rule of
law that encourages economic activity, as well as profits, and that
allows the repatriation of income without reference to citizens’ rights.
Rule by law bears little relationship to the rule of law that is based on
citizen’s rights, and rule by law exists for investors, while the rule of
law is for citizens. Under the personal rule system (e.g. sultanism),
nothing is known and arbitrariness rules. On the contrary, under the rule
of law no aspect of the law needs to be hidden. In the system of rule
by law, the law is dedicated to defending the investors’ interests, to
the detriment of the rights of citizens. Although we know very little
about the specific agreements between parties to the contracts—i.e.,
between Hun Sen and the “developers” of the zones–, many tax
incentives and wage agreements included in them are in fact in the
public domain because they are part of national decisions. The
respective obligations of the parties to these contracts concerning
infrastructure and equipment are also public. This is the domain in which
the “rule of law” inevitably wins out over the arbitrariness of personal
authority in exchanges with foreigners, without significantly altering the
basic character of the administration. This bears no similarity whatever
to a Weberian bureaucracy, as defined by service to and application of
the law by independent, qualified, competitively recruited civil servants
who are appropriately remunerated. Instead, the vast, unwieldy
Cambodian bureaucracy resembles a “patrimonial bureaucracy,” in which
hiring practices are uniformly based on personal relationships and under-
the-table payments. Rampant corruption among civil servants is indeed
often cited to explain investor dissatisfaction with public offices in the
zones. Corruption also accounts for the casinos and the high tolerance
of “foreign” clients engaged in or funding suspicious trade in their
shadows, and finally for the endemic violence in the zones’ immediate
surroundings that in turn fuel alliances between the various political,
economic, and police organizations.

การอภิปรายรวมระหวางผูแทนจากตางประเทศ