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Cambodian Royal Army - Demobilization

The Paris Peace Accord of 1991 entrusted the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) with supervising the unification of the four fighting factions (the State of Cambodia, FUNCINPEC, the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, and the National Arny of Democratic Kampuchea, (NADK)) and the subsequent demobilization of the warring factions. As agreed on in the Paris agreement, parties had to demobilize 70 percent of the rival armies. But as of December 1991, the UN had so far failed to approve a budget or decide on the strength of the force it would send to Cambodia to monitor the ceasefire and demobilization of 70 percent of the rival armies and help run the country before the UN-supervised elections.

The process was expected to disarm and demobilize 70% of the country’s estimated 200,000 soldiers. As of July 10, of the estimated 200,000 troops, the numbers of cantoned troops were as follows: CPAF, 9,003; ANKI, 3,187; KPNLAF, 1,322. However, reflecting the PDK's position of non-cooperation, no NADK troops were cantoned. The cantonment process had begun in June with the declaration of phase II. Some 55,000 troops of the three participating factions, or approximately a quarter of the estimated total number of troops, entered the cantonment sites and handed over their weapons. This process, however, had to be suspended, due to the non-compliance by PDK and the deterioration of the military situation. Some 40,000 cantoned troops were subsequently released on agricultural leave, subject to recall by UNTAC.

In 1993 the demobilization and disarmament process was suspended. With the Khmer Rouge's refusal to respect the terms of "Phase Two," the other factions stopped disarming and, in most cases, called their demobilized men back into service. When the demobilization program was completed in May 1993, about 36,000 soldiers had officially been demobilized, but only from the cooperating factions. However, each faction started recruiting soldiers again, a situation which led to an increase in the number of soldiers overall.

An unintentional consequence of the Paris peace agreement and the following political deals for the establishment of the coalition governments was to encourage all factions to integrate as many of their respective combatants as possible within the RCAF to preserve their respective military power and to leverage their respective political power within the coalition royal government. Demobilization could potentially have been used to manipulate power bases by strengthening some at the cost of others. Whatever the substance behind these concerns, the lack of transparent process to address them satisfactorily, lead to the alienation of these stakeholders and a loss of credibility and confidence.

The commanders, receiving insufficient and irregular funds from the center, used other means to run their bases including inflating the number of soldiers in their unit in order to obtain a higher salary budget, and so had vested interests in maintaining the system as it was. Many soldiers who for various reasons were no longer drawing their salaries were not removed from the payroll and were known as "ghost soldiers". A process of registering military personnel was carried out in 1998/9. There were several reports and written complaints documenting irregularities in the process, including eye-witness accounts of irregularities. The Bank and government responded by defending the numbers of personnel recorded in the database, which lead to a deepening of the crisis of confidence.

Formal recruitment was halted in the early 1990's, moreover, there was no natural attrition through retirement as old soldiers lacking in alternatives or safetynets were staying in the military. Soldiers had aged but not left, and had been promoted with no replacement of young and junior troops. This had lead to distortion in the shape of the military with many in senior ranks and few in junior ranks. With many aging and sick soldiers the military played an important safety net role to vulnerable groups.

The coup in 1997, added a further dimension immediately prior to the project design. Opposition parties and civil society were deeply concerned that consolidating military power in the hands of one political party would impede progress towards democracy. A counter argument to this was in the deeply-held need for peace and security that was widely felt at the time, and which limited the space and tolerance for debate of different opinions. Suspicion between the different parties was high, particularly with regard to discussion on demobilization.

A Post Conflict Fund Grant was used to establish a MIS Military Personnel Record Management System between May 1998 to December 1999. More than 150,000 soldiers were registered, and data cleaning and checking led to the elimination of 15,551 "ghost soldiers" from the military payroll and 163,346 "ghost children" of soldiers from the benefit allowance budget. This census declared a total force of 131,227 [but these results were “widely discredited” according to a 2008 World Bank report on donor-funded demobilisation schemes].

The majority of individual soldiers had two to three names, either for his/her personal security reasons, or because he/she was given the name of a former dead or lost soldier to reduce administration. This reality made the creation a definitive database of military personnel extremely difficult. There was a strong likelihood that many of the soldiers recorded in the census had been soldiers in the past, but did not now receive salaries. The database, however, was supposed to form the basis of a computerised payroll so should have recorded only those soldiers that received regular salaries.

On January 15, 1999, “the Royal Government of Cambodia announced that it would demobilize 79,000 troops - 55,000 soldiers in the Cambodian Royal Armed Forces and 24,000 policemen - over a five-year period. On February 25, 1999, Sok An, senior minister in charge of the office of the council of ministers disclosed a timetable for downsizing the army, saying 11,500 soldiers would be cut in 2000, 11,000 in 2001, 20,500 in 2002 and the remaining 12,000 in 2003.” The government estimated there were 148,000 soldiers. However, this figure was widely disputed.

The program of demobilization updated for the Tokyo Consultative Group (CG) in 1999 was never implemented because of lack of financing and lack of consensus on a number of important issues such as the wider context of the reform of the armed forces within which demobilization should be placed, the need to update the needs and profiles of the soldiers, land ownership issues, program design and the management of its different components.

The emphasis on security and stability suggests among other actions, military demobilization in the context of a clear and adopted national defense strategy and policy. This policy and the role of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF) were defined in a document entitle "Defending the Kingdom of Cambodia: Security and Development, 2000". "The RCAF's reform plan requires the demobilization of 55,000 soldiers over five years in accordance with direction from the Royal Government of Cambodia."

The 2001 Demobilization and Reintegration Project objectives were (i) to assist the Government in its effort to demobilize 30,000 soldiers and to promote their successful adaptation to civilian life; and (ii) to contribute to a reallocation of budgetary resources to the social sectors in order to build human, social and economic assets. By the completion date, 15,000 soldiers had been successfully demobilized and received reinsertion and reintegration packages according to project design. No evaluation was carried out as to the degree with which they could be said to have successfully adapted to civilian life.

The project was implemented by the Council for Demobilization of the Armed Forces (CDAF). CDAF is responsible for "the demobilization and reintegration of soldiers and for providing policy coordination, guidance and supervision of all ministries and institutions (Ministry of Woman and Veterans Affairs (MOWVA), Ministry of Interior (MoI), Ministry of Land Management Urban Planning and Construction (MLMUC), Ministry of Health (MoH), Ministry of Social Affairs, Veterans and Youth Rehabilitation (MSALVY) and the provincial authorities) involved in the implementation of the demobilization program". The CDAF General Secretariat assisted by its provincial Executive Secretariats is responsible for implementing CDAF's decision including with respect to administration of the Project.

The Demobilisation and reinsertion component aimed to reduce the number of people in the armed forces. It was composed of four sub-components:

1. Assembly and disarmament of soldiers;
2. Discharge operations to mark the formal departure of a soldier from his/her military life into civilian life by the withdrawal of his/her military ID Card and the provision of a discharge certificate;
3. Provision for a transitional safety net (TSN) for soldiers being demobilised;
4. Transportation of veterans to the villages where they would settle with their families.

The reintegration component aimed to reintegrate the veterans in the local communities. Lessons learned from the pilot phase and needs and vulnerability assessment were used to inform the provision of the reintegration package. This package included (i) health screening; (ii) provision of information and counselling for the veterans and sensitization of the host communities about the problems that veterans may encounter; (iii) the provision of package of assistance according to the choice of option made by the veterans; (iv) the design and implementation of skills/vocational training programs and job counselling.

The project was designed to include two phases of discharge and demobilization, with 15,000 soldiers in each. Soldiers are categorized according to their ability to serve. Category I soldiers are healthy and below retirement age, Category II soldiers are either above retirement age, chronically ill, or disabled. The first phase of demobilization would include 80% Category II soldiers. The remaining Category II soldiers, and a higher percentage of Category I soldiers would be demobilized in the second phase.

The top needs and priority for soldiers was to receive cash, land, or cows on demobilization. Land was not eligible for funding from the IDA Credit and was eliminated. The pilot project demonstrated that procurement of cows was too complicated so these were also eliminated, and concerns about corruption and misuse of cash eliminated the possibility of cash payments. Hence the design was limited as to how it could respond effectively to soldiers needs. The option of cash payments was actually the first preference of the Bank's team at the time, but this created major controversy when rumours leaked out of proposals to pay soldiers more than $1,000 each - a huge sum in Cambodia at the time. Rumors spread rapidly about the list of soldiers increasing rapidly so that more could benefit from this windfall, leading to even greater suspicion about the actual numbers of military personnel.

The run-up to the 2003 election coincided with the hand-out of the reintegration packages at high profile ceremonies lead by local officials. Both international donors and opposition politicians were concerned about the lack of separation between political parties and delivery of public services and, in the case of donors, the separation between donor assistance and politics.

Had the project continued to the second phase as planned, this announcement would have drawn considerable criticism. It was unlikely that ghost soldiers would be promoted and therefore likely that most of the ghost soldiers were in the lower ranks. Soldiers to be demobilized were mostly drawn from these lower ranks. Later field visits confirmed that demobilized soldiers did exist and were not ghosts. As the ghost soldiers were not demobilized, they must have stayed on the payroll, this would have increased the percentage of ghosts in the reduced lower ranks. Demobilization may therefore have further accentuated the distortions in the profile of the army.

The Royal Government of Cambodia [RGC] no longer wanted the World Bank to be involved with future demobilization projects and the future of demobilization was in question. In late June 2010 Prime Minister Hun Sen effectively ended the programme of cutbacks "due to a lack of donor funding and the high level of tension along the border with Thailand", he said.

The government found 10,000 ghost soldiers and 10,000 ghost police in a study in 2008. In July 2010 the Ministry of Defense began a countrywide census of military personnel in an attempt to cut out the number of ‘ghost soldiers’ from the salary lists of the Cambodian government. All soldiers of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces were required to show up at their command posts.