I'll be eager to know what the UNDP identifies as the five areas for development projects in Cambodia for 2011 to 2015.
PHNOM PENH, Jan 22 (Bernama) -- The Cambodian government has said that its development partner, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), is planning to prioritise five areas for development projects in the country from 2011 to 2015, China's Xinhua news agency reported.
A statement released by the Council for the Development of Cambodia (CDC) on Friday, said government officials from various institutions had held a meeting with their development partner UNDP to review the implementation of projects assisted by the UNDP in 2009 and the ongoing projects for years ahead.
The statement said the meeting was chaired by Keat Chhon, deputy prime minister and minister of the economy and finance, and also the first vice chairman of the CDC.
From 2006 through 2010, the UNDP were focusing on governance; promotion of human rights protection, agriculture and poverty in rural area; capacity building and human resource development; and national development plan.
UNDP has assisted Cambodia between 80 million and US$120 million a year.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
CNN to air "World's Untold Stories: Innocence for Sale"
Unfortunately, nearly everyone who hears of Cambodia automatically associate it with either the Killing Fields or child trafficking. There's so much more to Cambodia than this, but it's still an important issue that needs to be addressed at numerous levels.
January 22nd, 2010
Swati Arya
TVnext.in
Seen through the eyes of Aaron Cohen, CNN goes undercover into the karaoke brothels where sex with a child costs the same as a round of drinks. We witness the destitution and deprivation that keeps the young girls in the brothels and we're there when Cohen pays his final respects to the teenage girl he'd rescued, but couldn't save from the heartless grip of prostitution, in the face of her family's poverty.
What's uncovered in this half-hour will shed new light into the dark corners of the human trafficking problem in Cambodia, where we discover in many cases, the blame for the children's exploitation lies not solely with the pimps and madams.
The documentary will enlighten and inspire new conversation about e challenges currently preventing aid workers and authorities from declaring battle in the struggle to free children from this most despicable form of modern-day slavery.
Airtimes: Indian Standard Time (IST)
Tuesday, January 26th: 1900hrs, 2300hrs
Saturday, January 30th: 2300hrs
Sunday, January 31st: 1730hrs
Monday, February 1st: 0830hrs
Cambodian garment workers threaten week-long strike
This article highlights the continued struggle over workers' rights in Cambodia, particular in the garment industry which is one of the hardest hit industries from the 2008 economic downturn worldwide. I particularly like the audacity of the little girl walking in front of the police and other security officers.
Police officers watch over a march held to mark the anniversary of the death of Chea Vichea, former president of the Free Trade Union of the Workers of Cambodia, in Phnom Penh, yesterday. The union, Cambodia's largest, said yesterday it would launch a nationwide strike unless authorities arrest those responsible for shooting dead Vichea at a news stand in the capital in January 2004. Two men were convicted of the deaths and sentenced to 20-year prison terms, but many people believed they were framed and the Supreme Court has ordered a retrial.
Police officers watch over a march held to mark the anniversary of the death of Chea Vichea, former president of the Free Trade Union of the Workers of Cambodia, in Phnom Penh, yesterday. The union, Cambodia's largest, said yesterday it would launch a nationwide strike unless authorities arrest those responsible for shooting dead Vichea at a news stand in the capital in January 2004. Two men were convicted of the deaths and sentenced to 20-year prison terms, but many people believed they were framed and the Supreme Court has ordered a retrial.
PHNOM PENH, Jan 22 (Reuters) - Two of Cambodia's biggest workers' unions on Friday threatened to hold a nationwide garmet-industry strike to protest over low pay and the unsolved murder of the country's most respected union leader.
Two unions said thousands of garment factory workers would halt production for a week to press the government to arrest the killers of top unionist Chea Vichea, as hundreds marched in Phnom Penh to mark the sixth anniversary of his killing.
A workers' strike would represent a rare test for the government of long-serving Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has used a parliament dominated by his Cambodia People's Party (CPP) to push through tough laws to stifle dissent.
It comes at a tricky time for Cambodia as it tries to recover from a sharp economic decline that followed an unprecedented four-year boom before the global financial crisis took its toll.
Garment factories employ 330,000 workers in Cambodia and are vital to the impoverished country's nascent economy. Garments are Cambodia's third-biggest earner behind agriculture and tourism.
It exported $1.95 billion worth of garments in 2008 to its biggest market, the United States, up from $1.27 billion in 2004, according to the Commerce Ministry. Last year's figures are not yet available.
The workers are supporters of Chea Vichea, a vocal critic of Cambodia's business and political elite who was shot dead in January 2004. Two men were sentenced to 20 years in prison for his murder.
'GRAVE INJUSTICE'
The United Nations said their conviction was a "grave injustice" and rights groups said the pair were framed.
The Supreme Court in December 2008 ordered their release on bail pending a review of the case. There have since been no new arrests.
The two unions threatening action were the Free Trade Union (FTU), which represents 78,000 garment workers and the Cambodian Labour Federation (CLF) with 50,000 members from the same sector.
"We send this message to the government that it's time to find the killers, for the family, to make us calm," said Chea Mony, brother of Chea Vichea and president of the FTA.
CLF president Ath Thon said the outspoken Chea Vihea was a "hero" among garment workers because he fought for an increase in their minimum monthly wage from $30 to $45 during the 1990s.
He said workers were having difficulty making ends meet and they would also use the strike to demand a pay increase.
"Our workers don't have enough to spend, their health is getting weaker, they eat less, live in bad places and work hard," Ath Thon added. The unions did not say whether they would stage a protest alongside the strike. Cambodia's parliament approved a law in October banning demonstrations of more than 200 people and requiring five days notice for smaller protests.
That, and a tightening of defamation laws, sparked criticism from opposition lawmakers and rights groups, which said the government was trying to intimidate its critics and crack down on freedom of expression.
Cambodian national police spokesman Kirth Chantharith declined to comment on Chea Vichea's murder investigation but said there would be no attempt to block the strike as long as workers sought permission from the authorities.
"We have laws on demonstrations and police are ready to respect them," he said.
Two unions said thousands of garment factory workers would halt production for a week to press the government to arrest the killers of top unionist Chea Vichea, as hundreds marched in Phnom Penh to mark the sixth anniversary of his killing.
A workers' strike would represent a rare test for the government of long-serving Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has used a parliament dominated by his Cambodia People's Party (CPP) to push through tough laws to stifle dissent.
It comes at a tricky time for Cambodia as it tries to recover from a sharp economic decline that followed an unprecedented four-year boom before the global financial crisis took its toll.
Garment factories employ 330,000 workers in Cambodia and are vital to the impoverished country's nascent economy. Garments are Cambodia's third-biggest earner behind agriculture and tourism.
It exported $1.95 billion worth of garments in 2008 to its biggest market, the United States, up from $1.27 billion in 2004, according to the Commerce Ministry. Last year's figures are not yet available.
The workers are supporters of Chea Vichea, a vocal critic of Cambodia's business and political elite who was shot dead in January 2004. Two men were sentenced to 20 years in prison for his murder.
'GRAVE INJUSTICE'
The United Nations said their conviction was a "grave injustice" and rights groups said the pair were framed.
The Supreme Court in December 2008 ordered their release on bail pending a review of the case. There have since been no new arrests.
The two unions threatening action were the Free Trade Union (FTU), which represents 78,000 garment workers and the Cambodian Labour Federation (CLF) with 50,000 members from the same sector.
"We send this message to the government that it's time to find the killers, for the family, to make us calm," said Chea Mony, brother of Chea Vichea and president of the FTA.
CLF president Ath Thon said the outspoken Chea Vihea was a "hero" among garment workers because he fought for an increase in their minimum monthly wage from $30 to $45 during the 1990s.
He said workers were having difficulty making ends meet and they would also use the strike to demand a pay increase.
"Our workers don't have enough to spend, their health is getting weaker, they eat less, live in bad places and work hard," Ath Thon added. The unions did not say whether they would stage a protest alongside the strike. Cambodia's parliament approved a law in October banning demonstrations of more than 200 people and requiring five days notice for smaller protests.
That, and a tightening of defamation laws, sparked criticism from opposition lawmakers and rights groups, which said the government was trying to intimidate its critics and crack down on freedom of expression.
Cambodian national police spokesman Kirth Chantharith declined to comment on Chea Vichea's murder investigation but said there would be no attempt to block the strike as long as workers sought permission from the authorities.
"We have laws on demonstrations and police are ready to respect them," he said.
New Cambodia Economic Watch predicts slow economic recovery
I've got to get my hands on this data! It would come in handy for the current research I am doing on youth employment issues in Cambodia.
By Sam Campbell
Economics Today
Economics Today's new Cambodia Economic Watch hits the newsstand this week, offering the most comprehensive analysis of the past year's economic and business trends of any Cambodian institution, as well as informed predictions about the years to come. The full color graphs and clear explanations that made the publication both accessible and uniquely informative.
A collaborative effort between the Economic Institute of Cambodia (EIC) and Economics Today, the Cambodia Economic Watch offers readers an unmatched analysis of Cambodia's economy.
Report Highlights
By Sam Campbell
Economics Today
Economics Today's new Cambodia Economic Watch hits the newsstand this week, offering the most comprehensive analysis of the past year's economic and business trends of any Cambodian institution, as well as informed predictions about the years to come. The full color graphs and clear explanations that made the publication both accessible and uniquely informative.
A collaborative effort between the Economic Institute of Cambodia (EIC) and Economics Today, the Cambodia Economic Watch offers readers an unmatched analysis of Cambodia's economy.
Report Highlights
By Economic Institute of Cambodia
Edited by Economics Today
After years of galloping growth, 2009 has been a very tough year for Cambodia. The global economic crisis of 2008 and the ensuing downturn continue to impact several of Cambodia's primary economic growth engines. Cambodia experienced its first negative growth since the early 1990s, with a GDP contraction of 1 percent.
It is expected Cambodia will recover in 2010, posting growth of about 3 percent in line with the recovery of other countries. However, this figure has been downgraded from the 4 percent growth expected earlier in the year, a result of the more-serious-than-expected fallout from the global downturn. 2010 could be a difficult year for Cambodia.
Cambodia's main economic growth-supporting industries over the last decade—garments, construction and tourism, all of which are exposed to international markets—contracted sharply or saw feeble growth in 2009.
Industry suffered the biggest contraction, down 8.5 percent in 2009. The reign of Cambodia's garment industry as the driver of the economy could be over, as the sector contracted by a massive 14.7 percent. The industrial sector as a whole is projected to grow just 1.5 percent in 2010, and the garment sector predicted to grow even less, at 0.6 percent. A declining market share in the most valuable markets, especially the US, suggests Cambodia is less competitive than other producers such as Bangladesh.
Real estate prices—which have increased rapidly in recent years—tumbled by as much as 40 percent in 2009, with a knock-on effect for residential real estate and construction activities: these are now in decline. There are few signs of a recovery in real estate, so prices are likely to remain stagnant or decline further in 2010. There are some signs of nonperforming loans linked to the decline in the sector, though data are not comprehensive.
Services have also suffered in the wake of the downturn, posting only 1.2 percent growth in 2009, down from 9 percent the year before.
Tourism still showed growth in 2009, but only 0.6 percent, a large fall from the 9.8 percent growth seen in 2008. Air tourist arrivals fell sharply in 2009. While there was growth in arrivals by land and by water, these visitors tend to spend less than tourists arriving by air. The total number of foreign visitors to Cambodia did continue to increase up to October 2009, but the increase, just 0.3 percent, was tiny compared to previous years.
The agricultural sector was the main bright spot in the Cambodian economy, showing 3.5 percent growth on the back of good weather and strong international demand. Farming, the primary occupation for the majority of Cambodians, has acted as a sponge for laid-off workers in other sectors, though underemployment in the sector is high. The agricultural sector is still natural resource-based and depends largely on rainfall, meaning growth prospects are modest, with a predicted 4 percent growth for the sector in 2010. The growth in paddy has remained stable compared to other commodities, posting 3.6 percent growth in 2008, a predicted 3.4 percent growth in 2009 and a predicted 3.7 percent growth in 2010.
The financial sector seems to be stable despite increasing nonperforming loans, mostly related to real estate speculation, though available data is far from comprehensive.
In short, Cambodia's economy has in 2009 been pulled down by a sharp decline in the industry sector that solid positive growth in agriculture and anemic growth in services could not offset. This contraction is in stark contrast to the brisk 6.7 percent positive growth seen in 2008.
In short, Cambodia is more exposed to the economies most affected by the GEC—such as the US and South Korea—than other regional economies that have remained in the black in 2009. 
To live and die with Hun Sen
This article contains some great historical background to Cambodia's current political and economic situation. I am fascinated with H.E. Prime Minister Hun Sen's ascension from a farmer to Cambodia's leader, considering his unique leadership and management capabilities. It an amazing style to note.
Jan 22, 2010
By Paul Vrieze Asia Times Online
PHNOM PENH - Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen recently marked his 25th anniversary as the Southeast Asian nation's leader. First appointed by the Cambodian National Assembly on January 14, 1985, he became at 33 years old the youngest prime minister in the world.
Hun Sen's journey from a communist leader to an elected head of government spans a quarter of a century of civil war, domestic and international upheaval, a negotiated peace and transition to democracy through which he and his Cambodia's People's Party (CPP) have imposed themselves as the country's deliverers of stability and order.
By retaining the helm in Cambodia's fractious politics for 25 years, he now stands among a unique category of leaders, ranking as the 11th-longest ruling leader in the world. In Southeast Asia, only the Sultan of Brunei, the number one longest-serving government leader since assuming office in 1967, has been in power longer than Hun Sen. Of the other nine longer-serving leaders, five are heads of governments in Africa and four are from the Middle East.
Hun Sen reflected on his long political career and humble beginnings in a speech at the National Institute for Education in Phnom Penh on January 12. "I became [foreign] minister when I was 27 years old, deputy prime minister when I was 29 years old and prime minister at 33 years old," Hun Sen said of his appointments in the People's Republic of Kampuchea - the communist state set up by Vietnam in 1979 after it toppled the Khmer Rouge, whose bloody regime caused the death of about 1.7 million Cambodians.
He recalled how he joined the anti-republican maquis, a movement which consisted of several resistance groups including the Khmer Rouge, in April 1970, explaining his move was "based on an appeal from King [Norodom] Sihanouk", Cambodia's monarch who had been ousted in a coup d'etat earlier that year. "Throughout 40 years, I have known all kinds of tastes. I knew how my commander commanded the troops and I knew how to make tea for him. I knew how to wash clothes for him," Hun Sen said in his now trademark plain-speaking public-address style.
The prime minister went on to talk about his political future, confirming his intention to run in the next election in 2013. "The party conference announced my candidacy for the future prime minister and ... last week Chea Sim [president of the CPP] also reconfirmed my nomination for the premiership," Hun Sen said before taking aim at opposition parties.
"Please do not try to limit the mandate of the premiership. You want the mandate limited because you are worrying you will lose to me," he said, while also reminding the audience he still had another three-and-a-half years in office under the mandate of the 2008 election, which his party, the CPP, won with a two-thirds legislative majority.
Hun Sen started on his political path in 1978, when he became a founding member of the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation after fleeing to Vietnam in 1977 to avoid Khmer Rouge purges in the Eastern Zone, where he had been a Khmer Rouge regimental commander. The Front consisted of former Khmer Rouge cadres who were prepared by Vietnamese officials to become Cambodia's new leadership after the removal of the Khmer Rouge government.
The Vietnamese army and the Front brought down the Democratic Kampuchea regime on January 7, 1979, in reaction to bloody raids by Khmer Rouge forces into Vietnamese territory in 1978. As the Front's leaders assumed their positions in the new PRK government after the Khmer Rouge regime was toppled, Hun Sen became foreign minister.
The early years
Current and former government officials and people who knew Hun Sen in his youth or as a budding young communist leader said his rhetorical talents and ability to lead, learn, adapt and survive the changing political and ideological terrain in Cambodia were apparent from the start in his personality.
Hun Sen was born as Hun Bunnal on August 5, 1952, in Peam Koh Snar in Kompong Cham province, a village of tobacco farmers located on the banks of the Mekong River. Local villager Chhe Noeun, 61, who claimed to be a childhood friend of the premier, said during a visit to the village that he spent much time listening to his younger friend talk. "He was one of the kids who was smarter than the others. His speaking, his rhetoric, was very good. During farm work, he liked to chat a lot, he made a lot of jokes," he said.
Noeun said Hun Sen left the village to stay in a Buddhist pagoda in the capital when he was about 16 years old. The Hun family, he said, had left the village in about 1963 to move to Memot district, located on the Vietnamese border, but they returned in 1969 after the start of the American bombing campaign in east Cambodia.
After Hun Sen left the village, Noeun said, he did not see him again until 1974 when he showed up on a motorbike at a local primary school as a Khmer Rouge cadre carrying an AK-47 rifle. Hun Sen told his friend, "I just came again today and I don't know when I will come back or if I will die."
Veteran CPP lawmaker Cheam Yeap said during an interview last week that he remembered Hun Sen exhibited leadership qualities and a capacity to learn quickly early in his career. These skills, Yeap said, allowed Hun Sen to gain loyalty from his staff, to impress officials from Vietnam, whose military remained in Cambodia from 1979 to 1989, and to sway members of the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party - the previous name of the CPP.
"I met him in 1979 ... He was the youngest foreign minister in the world," Yeap recounted. "Even though he was five years younger than me, I saw he was hard working," he said. "[Hun Sen] only finished grade 3 or 4, before joining the resistance movement. Even though he studied a little bit, he learned very fast," Yeap said. "He liked to communicate with people, especially with those with more experience."
One man who takes a darker view of the young Hun Sen and his rise to power is Pen Sovann, the first prime minister of the PRK, who served as premier for only a few months in 1981 before being arrested and held under house arrest in Hanoi for nine years by the Vietnamese government. "Vietnam ordered me to be arrested by 12 armed soldiers. Hun Sen was there to read the charges against me," Sovann said during an interview at his Takeo province home. Sovann said he was purged by the Vietnamese authorities because of his independent political leadership and his opposition to a number of government policies proposed by Vietnam.
He claimed Hun Sen was appointed prime minister in 1985 because "[Vietnamese authorities] believed and depended on Hun Sen as they believed he would do everything for Vietnam." The former prime minister, who knew Hun Sen from the time he joined the Front in Vietnam, characterized him as smart and a talented public speaker, but also as an authoritarian with few scruples.
"He learns very fast and then he can lecture [on a topic] later on," he said. "Hun Sen has outstanding capacities. His intellect is strong, but he has no morals to go along with it." Sovann said he was "not surprised" by Hun Sen's world-beating political longevity. "Hun Sen likes power; he wants to increase his power. He doesn't listen to anyone ... If anyone criticizes him, he will do anything to defend his power."
Following the Paris Peace Agreements in the early 1990s and the subsequent United Nations-supervised transition from a Vietnamese-backed communist government to a fledgling democracy, Hun Sen quickly showed he was a clever politician who could woo Cambodia's largely rural and uneducated electorate. By the end of the decade, he had also managed to disband the Khmer Rouge step by step by offering amnesty to defectors.
Despite his political skills, Hun Sen did not shy away from using violence against political opposition. In 1997, he took over the government by force and the ensuing fighting killed about 100 people, mostly from the rival Funcinpec Party, according to a 2008 US Congressional Research Service (CRS) report, which referred to the takeover as an "unlawful seizure of power".
Before the military takeover, a grenade attack hit a peaceful opposition rally in Phnom Penh, which killed 16 children, men and women and wounded more than 100 others. Recent disclosures of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) probe into the attack, which was conducted because an American citizen was injured in the blast, were made under a Freedom of Information Act request filed by The Cambodia Daily, a local English-language newspaper.
The investigation, which was cut short due to intensifying threats to the FBI agent, found evidence that directly implicated Hun Sen's bodyguard unit and the CPP, while highly placed witnesses declined to cooperate with the FBI, according to the records disclosed to the newspaper. The US government reacted to the violent events of 1997 by banning direct aid to Cambodia for a decade. As the US Congressional Research Service noted, "The autocratic tendencies of Prime Minister Hun Sen have discouraged foreign investment and strained US-Cambodian relations."
Mixed reviews
Although opinions vary among researchers and observers on Hun Sen's accomplishments during his 25-year reign, most acknowledged the transformation of war-torn Cambodia into a stable, peaceful country with an open and growing economy as his principal achievement. Before economic growth came to a halt last year due to the global economic crisis, Cambodia's economy grew an average 9.5% per year from 2002 to 2008, according to a recent World Bank report.
However, human-rights abuses, land evictions, rampant corruption among government officials, a lack of an independent judiciary and intimidation of political opponents have also been part of life in Cambodia under Hun Sen, local and international human-rights groups have said. Last year saw a rise in court cases against political opponents and other critics of Hun Sen.
Opposition leader Sam Rainsy, of the eponymous political party, is currently in France but facing criminal charges in Cambodia over the removal of boundary posts along the border with Vietnam. Rainsy said Hun Sen had shown during his long premiership that his objectives were personal and did not serve ordinary Cambodians. "It is obvious that Hun Sen's only or predominant goal is to remain in power, to survive politically ... Power is everything for him. But above all, power means impunity for him and his clan," Rainsy wrote in an e-mail.
"But when survival is your life goal you cannot have any vision. This is why Cambodia under Hun Sen is going nowhere, if not down the drain, [through] corruption, poverty, human-rights abuses, in spite of competent civil servants, dedicated civil society and abundant natural resources," he wrote. "Hun Sen has had only two ways in dealing with his political opponents: Buy them or eliminate them either physically, [through] grenade attack, military coup [...] or politically, [through] sham lawsuits ... There is no example in the whole world of any country being a democratic and prosperous one with the same top leader for decades," Rainsy added.
According to historian Evan Gottesman, author of the 2003 book Cambodia After the Khmer Rouge, Hun Sen's durability is in itself exceptional. "The fact that the same man who led Cambodia in 1985 could also run the Cambodia of 2010 is remarkable," Gottesman said via e-mail. "Hun Sen's most impressive achievement was his ability to lead Cambodia from being an isolated communist country to economic and political integration with the non-communist countries of the region," he said.
"Hun Sen's greatest failure is his failure to promote, in fact, his willingness to undermine democratic institutions such as an independent judiciary, accountable security forces and a professional civil service," he added. According to Gottesman, three qualities are central to Hun Sen's hold on power: The first is ideological flexibility, which he said became apparent when Hun Sen decided to quickly abandon communist orthodox ideas in the late 1980s when it suited the situation.
"The second is a willingness to be absolutely ruthless with his opponents when he feels it necessary. The third is his cultivation of a patronage system that supports him," Gottesman wrote. "[A] lack of an independent judiciary or accountability for human-rights abuses persist because these hallmarks of modern democracies do not serve the interests of leaders who intend to remain in power indefinitely," he added. Reflecting on how the character of the 1980s communist PRK regime, many of whose officials are still in the government, influences Cambodia today, Gottesman said, "Cambodia's government is still built on patronage systems that support top officials, with Hun Sen at the top."
Rights and wrongs
International environmental watchdog Global Witness said in a February 2009 report entitled "Country for Sale" that its research indicated revenues from Cambodia's growing oil and mining industries were being siphoned off by a network of corrupt officials. "Rather than using these millions to lift its people out of poverty, Cambodia's government could instead continue to follow the example of neighboring Burma [Myanmar], where an autocratic elite uses money generated from the country's natural resource wealth to rule over an impoverished majority," the report warned.
Janice Beanland from rights group Amnesty International's Southeast Asia Team said in an e-mail that the protection of human rights in Cambodia under Hun Sen had come "a very long way" since the 1985 communist regime. However, she added that his government had often failed to undertake serious attempts to further improve the country's human-rights record, which remains poor. "[T]he lack of accountability and the culture of impunity that held sway [in the 1980s] remains in place to quite a degree. Judicial reform remains a plan, rule of law is not yet in place and for most Cambodians, there is very limited protection for human rights," Beanland said.
"[I]f the prime minister had wanted to institutionalize human-rights protection - through the legal system, the government administrative structures and independent institutions - he would have had the power to do so," she said. "The continued lack of integrity and independence within the court system, for instance, testifies to the limited human-rights commitment of the government."
Chea Vannath, a local independent political analyst, said Hun Sen's most important accomplishment was restoring peace in Cambodia, while adding that his premiership had lacked in economic management and improving child and maternal health. "His achievement is that he was able to bring peace to Cambodia, a very valuable achievement. His shortcoming is the economy, it moves but it stumbles ... It seems the economy could have done better, maternal and child health should also be better," she said.
Vannath said Hun Sen's strengths included his ability to cope and navigate a changing political climate and system, his ability to equitably share political power with others and his vigilance to not rest on his laurels."So far, another blessing is [his] good health," she added.
According to historian Henri Locard, who has taught at the Royal University of Phnom Penh since the early 1990s, one of Hun Sen's primary skills is his ability to fascinate the Cambodian public. "Hun Sen is a past-master in the control of rhetoric ... He is sure to hold the majority of the population by the invisible thread and the fascination of his words," Locard said. After the dark days of the Khmer Rouge and the communist government, Cambodians now "relish all their newly-acquired freedoms", he said, adding, "With one major exception: the freedom to challenge his all-embracing power ... there is a great deal of self-censorship exerted in this country."
Indeed, many civil society members and researchers consulted for this article, foreign and local, declined to comment directly on Hun Sen's premiership. CPP lawmaker Cheam Yeap contested Hun Sen's record of human-rights abuses, tolerance of corruption and intimidation of political opponents. "Fighting corruption is not easy. Europe and the US have these problems too," he said. "Sam Rainsy breaks the law and then he says his rights are violated when he gets charged."
Yeap contended that Hun Sen and other CPP members had built up the country after its near-complete destruction by the Khmer Rouge. "I would like to ask you who could do it? [Opposition leaders] Sam Rainsy, Ranariddh, Kem Sokha couldn't do it ... They came later on, then they demanded this, they demanded that. They want freedom to attack everyone, everything. The CPP cannot allow them to do that."
On December 27, the 25th anniversary of his appointment as acting prime minister, Hun Sen met with members of his family at a hotel in Phnom Penh and contemplated a time when he no longer ruled Cambodia. Should that day come, according to Hun Sen, members of his powerful extended family could find the tables turned against them if they alienated ordinary Cambodians.
"If Hun Sen loses power, you will become a target for attacks if you do not follow my advice," he said during his televised remarks, advising his family that they should show charity and concern for the less fortunate. It was a rare reflection by the strongman leader on the eventual limits of his rule.
Paul Vrieze is a reporter with the Phnom Penh-based The Cambodia Daily.
Phann Ana, also a reporter at the newspaper, contributed to the reporting.
Jan 22, 2010
By Paul Vrieze Asia Times Online
PHNOM PENH - Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen recently marked his 25th anniversary as the Southeast Asian nation's leader. First appointed by the Cambodian National Assembly on January 14, 1985, he became at 33 years old the youngest prime minister in the world.
Hun Sen's journey from a communist leader to an elected head of government spans a quarter of a century of civil war, domestic and international upheaval, a negotiated peace and transition to democracy through which he and his Cambodia's People's Party (CPP) have imposed themselves as the country's deliverers of stability and order.
By retaining the helm in Cambodia's fractious politics for 25 years, he now stands among a unique category of leaders, ranking as the 11th-longest ruling leader in the world. In Southeast Asia, only the Sultan of Brunei, the number one longest-serving government leader since assuming office in 1967, has been in power longer than Hun Sen. Of the other nine longer-serving leaders, five are heads of governments in Africa and four are from the Middle East.
Hun Sen reflected on his long political career and humble beginnings in a speech at the National Institute for Education in Phnom Penh on January 12. "I became [foreign] minister when I was 27 years old, deputy prime minister when I was 29 years old and prime minister at 33 years old," Hun Sen said of his appointments in the People's Republic of Kampuchea - the communist state set up by Vietnam in 1979 after it toppled the Khmer Rouge, whose bloody regime caused the death of about 1.7 million Cambodians.
He recalled how he joined the anti-republican maquis, a movement which consisted of several resistance groups including the Khmer Rouge, in April 1970, explaining his move was "based on an appeal from King [Norodom] Sihanouk", Cambodia's monarch who had been ousted in a coup d'etat earlier that year. "Throughout 40 years, I have known all kinds of tastes. I knew how my commander commanded the troops and I knew how to make tea for him. I knew how to wash clothes for him," Hun Sen said in his now trademark plain-speaking public-address style.
The prime minister went on to talk about his political future, confirming his intention to run in the next election in 2013. "The party conference announced my candidacy for the future prime minister and ... last week Chea Sim [president of the CPP] also reconfirmed my nomination for the premiership," Hun Sen said before taking aim at opposition parties.
"Please do not try to limit the mandate of the premiership. You want the mandate limited because you are worrying you will lose to me," he said, while also reminding the audience he still had another three-and-a-half years in office under the mandate of the 2008 election, which his party, the CPP, won with a two-thirds legislative majority.
Hun Sen started on his political path in 1978, when he became a founding member of the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation after fleeing to Vietnam in 1977 to avoid Khmer Rouge purges in the Eastern Zone, where he had been a Khmer Rouge regimental commander. The Front consisted of former Khmer Rouge cadres who were prepared by Vietnamese officials to become Cambodia's new leadership after the removal of the Khmer Rouge government.
The Vietnamese army and the Front brought down the Democratic Kampuchea regime on January 7, 1979, in reaction to bloody raids by Khmer Rouge forces into Vietnamese territory in 1978. As the Front's leaders assumed their positions in the new PRK government after the Khmer Rouge regime was toppled, Hun Sen became foreign minister.
The early years
Current and former government officials and people who knew Hun Sen in his youth or as a budding young communist leader said his rhetorical talents and ability to lead, learn, adapt and survive the changing political and ideological terrain in Cambodia were apparent from the start in his personality.
Hun Sen was born as Hun Bunnal on August 5, 1952, in Peam Koh Snar in Kompong Cham province, a village of tobacco farmers located on the banks of the Mekong River. Local villager Chhe Noeun, 61, who claimed to be a childhood friend of the premier, said during a visit to the village that he spent much time listening to his younger friend talk. "He was one of the kids who was smarter than the others. His speaking, his rhetoric, was very good. During farm work, he liked to chat a lot, he made a lot of jokes," he said.
Noeun said Hun Sen left the village to stay in a Buddhist pagoda in the capital when he was about 16 years old. The Hun family, he said, had left the village in about 1963 to move to Memot district, located on the Vietnamese border, but they returned in 1969 after the start of the American bombing campaign in east Cambodia.
After Hun Sen left the village, Noeun said, he did not see him again until 1974 when he showed up on a motorbike at a local primary school as a Khmer Rouge cadre carrying an AK-47 rifle. Hun Sen told his friend, "I just came again today and I don't know when I will come back or if I will die."
Veteran CPP lawmaker Cheam Yeap said during an interview last week that he remembered Hun Sen exhibited leadership qualities and a capacity to learn quickly early in his career. These skills, Yeap said, allowed Hun Sen to gain loyalty from his staff, to impress officials from Vietnam, whose military remained in Cambodia from 1979 to 1989, and to sway members of the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party - the previous name of the CPP.
"I met him in 1979 ... He was the youngest foreign minister in the world," Yeap recounted. "Even though he was five years younger than me, I saw he was hard working," he said. "[Hun Sen] only finished grade 3 or 4, before joining the resistance movement. Even though he studied a little bit, he learned very fast," Yeap said. "He liked to communicate with people, especially with those with more experience."
One man who takes a darker view of the young Hun Sen and his rise to power is Pen Sovann, the first prime minister of the PRK, who served as premier for only a few months in 1981 before being arrested and held under house arrest in Hanoi for nine years by the Vietnamese government. "Vietnam ordered me to be arrested by 12 armed soldiers. Hun Sen was there to read the charges against me," Sovann said during an interview at his Takeo province home. Sovann said he was purged by the Vietnamese authorities because of his independent political leadership and his opposition to a number of government policies proposed by Vietnam.
He claimed Hun Sen was appointed prime minister in 1985 because "[Vietnamese authorities] believed and depended on Hun Sen as they believed he would do everything for Vietnam." The former prime minister, who knew Hun Sen from the time he joined the Front in Vietnam, characterized him as smart and a talented public speaker, but also as an authoritarian with few scruples.
"He learns very fast and then he can lecture [on a topic] later on," he said. "Hun Sen has outstanding capacities. His intellect is strong, but he has no morals to go along with it." Sovann said he was "not surprised" by Hun Sen's world-beating political longevity. "Hun Sen likes power; he wants to increase his power. He doesn't listen to anyone ... If anyone criticizes him, he will do anything to defend his power."
Following the Paris Peace Agreements in the early 1990s and the subsequent United Nations-supervised transition from a Vietnamese-backed communist government to a fledgling democracy, Hun Sen quickly showed he was a clever politician who could woo Cambodia's largely rural and uneducated electorate. By the end of the decade, he had also managed to disband the Khmer Rouge step by step by offering amnesty to defectors.
Despite his political skills, Hun Sen did not shy away from using violence against political opposition. In 1997, he took over the government by force and the ensuing fighting killed about 100 people, mostly from the rival Funcinpec Party, according to a 2008 US Congressional Research Service (CRS) report, which referred to the takeover as an "unlawful seizure of power".
Before the military takeover, a grenade attack hit a peaceful opposition rally in Phnom Penh, which killed 16 children, men and women and wounded more than 100 others. Recent disclosures of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) probe into the attack, which was conducted because an American citizen was injured in the blast, were made under a Freedom of Information Act request filed by The Cambodia Daily, a local English-language newspaper.
The investigation, which was cut short due to intensifying threats to the FBI agent, found evidence that directly implicated Hun Sen's bodyguard unit and the CPP, while highly placed witnesses declined to cooperate with the FBI, according to the records disclosed to the newspaper. The US government reacted to the violent events of 1997 by banning direct aid to Cambodia for a decade. As the US Congressional Research Service noted, "The autocratic tendencies of Prime Minister Hun Sen have discouraged foreign investment and strained US-Cambodian relations."
Mixed reviews
Although opinions vary among researchers and observers on Hun Sen's accomplishments during his 25-year reign, most acknowledged the transformation of war-torn Cambodia into a stable, peaceful country with an open and growing economy as his principal achievement. Before economic growth came to a halt last year due to the global economic crisis, Cambodia's economy grew an average 9.5% per year from 2002 to 2008, according to a recent World Bank report.
However, human-rights abuses, land evictions, rampant corruption among government officials, a lack of an independent judiciary and intimidation of political opponents have also been part of life in Cambodia under Hun Sen, local and international human-rights groups have said. Last year saw a rise in court cases against political opponents and other critics of Hun Sen.
Opposition leader Sam Rainsy, of the eponymous political party, is currently in France but facing criminal charges in Cambodia over the removal of boundary posts along the border with Vietnam. Rainsy said Hun Sen had shown during his long premiership that his objectives were personal and did not serve ordinary Cambodians. "It is obvious that Hun Sen's only or predominant goal is to remain in power, to survive politically ... Power is everything for him. But above all, power means impunity for him and his clan," Rainsy wrote in an e-mail.
"But when survival is your life goal you cannot have any vision. This is why Cambodia under Hun Sen is going nowhere, if not down the drain, [through] corruption, poverty, human-rights abuses, in spite of competent civil servants, dedicated civil society and abundant natural resources," he wrote. "Hun Sen has had only two ways in dealing with his political opponents: Buy them or eliminate them either physically, [through] grenade attack, military coup [...] or politically, [through] sham lawsuits ... There is no example in the whole world of any country being a democratic and prosperous one with the same top leader for decades," Rainsy added.
According to historian Evan Gottesman, author of the 2003 book Cambodia After the Khmer Rouge, Hun Sen's durability is in itself exceptional. "The fact that the same man who led Cambodia in 1985 could also run the Cambodia of 2010 is remarkable," Gottesman said via e-mail. "Hun Sen's most impressive achievement was his ability to lead Cambodia from being an isolated communist country to economic and political integration with the non-communist countries of the region," he said.
"Hun Sen's greatest failure is his failure to promote, in fact, his willingness to undermine democratic institutions such as an independent judiciary, accountable security forces and a professional civil service," he added. According to Gottesman, three qualities are central to Hun Sen's hold on power: The first is ideological flexibility, which he said became apparent when Hun Sen decided to quickly abandon communist orthodox ideas in the late 1980s when it suited the situation.
"The second is a willingness to be absolutely ruthless with his opponents when he feels it necessary. The third is his cultivation of a patronage system that supports him," Gottesman wrote. "[A] lack of an independent judiciary or accountability for human-rights abuses persist because these hallmarks of modern democracies do not serve the interests of leaders who intend to remain in power indefinitely," he added. Reflecting on how the character of the 1980s communist PRK regime, many of whose officials are still in the government, influences Cambodia today, Gottesman said, "Cambodia's government is still built on patronage systems that support top officials, with Hun Sen at the top."
Rights and wrongs
International environmental watchdog Global Witness said in a February 2009 report entitled "Country for Sale" that its research indicated revenues from Cambodia's growing oil and mining industries were being siphoned off by a network of corrupt officials. "Rather than using these millions to lift its people out of poverty, Cambodia's government could instead continue to follow the example of neighboring Burma [Myanmar], where an autocratic elite uses money generated from the country's natural resource wealth to rule over an impoverished majority," the report warned.
Janice Beanland from rights group Amnesty International's Southeast Asia Team said in an e-mail that the protection of human rights in Cambodia under Hun Sen had come "a very long way" since the 1985 communist regime. However, she added that his government had often failed to undertake serious attempts to further improve the country's human-rights record, which remains poor. "[T]he lack of accountability and the culture of impunity that held sway [in the 1980s] remains in place to quite a degree. Judicial reform remains a plan, rule of law is not yet in place and for most Cambodians, there is very limited protection for human rights," Beanland said.
"[I]f the prime minister had wanted to institutionalize human-rights protection - through the legal system, the government administrative structures and independent institutions - he would have had the power to do so," she said. "The continued lack of integrity and independence within the court system, for instance, testifies to the limited human-rights commitment of the government."
Chea Vannath, a local independent political analyst, said Hun Sen's most important accomplishment was restoring peace in Cambodia, while adding that his premiership had lacked in economic management and improving child and maternal health. "His achievement is that he was able to bring peace to Cambodia, a very valuable achievement. His shortcoming is the economy, it moves but it stumbles ... It seems the economy could have done better, maternal and child health should also be better," she said.
Vannath said Hun Sen's strengths included his ability to cope and navigate a changing political climate and system, his ability to equitably share political power with others and his vigilance to not rest on his laurels."So far, another blessing is [his] good health," she added.
According to historian Henri Locard, who has taught at the Royal University of Phnom Penh since the early 1990s, one of Hun Sen's primary skills is his ability to fascinate the Cambodian public. "Hun Sen is a past-master in the control of rhetoric ... He is sure to hold the majority of the population by the invisible thread and the fascination of his words," Locard said. After the dark days of the Khmer Rouge and the communist government, Cambodians now "relish all their newly-acquired freedoms", he said, adding, "With one major exception: the freedom to challenge his all-embracing power ... there is a great deal of self-censorship exerted in this country."
Indeed, many civil society members and researchers consulted for this article, foreign and local, declined to comment directly on Hun Sen's premiership. CPP lawmaker Cheam Yeap contested Hun Sen's record of human-rights abuses, tolerance of corruption and intimidation of political opponents. "Fighting corruption is not easy. Europe and the US have these problems too," he said. "Sam Rainsy breaks the law and then he says his rights are violated when he gets charged."
Yeap contended that Hun Sen and other CPP members had built up the country after its near-complete destruction by the Khmer Rouge. "I would like to ask you who could do it? [Opposition leaders] Sam Rainsy, Ranariddh, Kem Sokha couldn't do it ... They came later on, then they demanded this, they demanded that. They want freedom to attack everyone, everything. The CPP cannot allow them to do that."
On December 27, the 25th anniversary of his appointment as acting prime minister, Hun Sen met with members of his family at a hotel in Phnom Penh and contemplated a time when he no longer ruled Cambodia. Should that day come, according to Hun Sen, members of his powerful extended family could find the tables turned against them if they alienated ordinary Cambodians.
"If Hun Sen loses power, you will become a target for attacks if you do not follow my advice," he said during his televised remarks, advising his family that they should show charity and concern for the less fortunate. It was a rare reflection by the strongman leader on the eventual limits of his rule.
Paul Vrieze is a reporter with the Phnom Penh-based The Cambodia Daily.
Phann Ana, also a reporter at the newspaper, contributed to the reporting.
Healing a fractured nation: Cambodians seek justice
I selected this article mostly because of the political science background of the people mentioned in the article. It also gives me some ideas for what I can or should be doing with my background.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
By Kate Fechter
WashburnReview.org
Washburn University and the Topeka Center for Peace and Justice came together to hold the fifth forum in the series Resolving Conflict in a Fractured World Thursday, Jan. 14 at the Washburn School of Law.
Co-sponsored by Phi Alpha Theta, the presentation, “Seeking Justice After Genocide: International Courts and Cambodia,” featured Washburn alumna Samantha Gassie who shared her knowledge of the Cambodian hybrid judicial system. The system includes the Extraordinary Chambers and Courts of Cambodia, which is currently trying to provide justice for the people of Cambodia over the war crimes committed during the reign of the Khmer Rouge.
Gassie, who has a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in liberal studies from Washburn, studied in Cambodia when writing her thesis. Bob Beatty, Gassie’s mentor, who told her about the opportunity in Cambodia also spoke at the event, along with Thomas Prasch.
During her time in Cambodia in the fall of 2008, Gassie conducted 17 interviews in fall of 2008. Her interviews ranged from people from the U.S. and Canada who were involved in the legalities, to Cambodian citizens who shared with her their personal accounts of surviving the Khmer Rouge. Everyone above a certain age is either a victim or a perpetrator.
The Khmer Rouge was in total power from 1975-1979. During that time period, an estimated 1.3 to 3.3 million were massacred in the killing fields, amounting to almost 50 percent of the country’s population.
People were brought into S-21 or Tuol Sleng, a school turned into an interrogation center, for questioning. They were tortured until they named five names of usually innocent friends or neighbors and then killed. The people named were then brought in for the same treatment, creating a deadly cycle of violence. Of the 17,000 people that went in, only 12 people total walked out. There are four survivors of S-21 alive today.
The ECCC was established in 2001 by negotiations between the United Nations and Cambodian officials. Gassie said it is a unique war crimes tribunal because it is inside Cambodia, meaning there is a lot of victim involvement. The ECCC and the Cambodian national government are working to set up education to strengthen and improve the credibility of the justice system in the country.
However, the tribunal does have its problems. The process has suffered from a lack of impartiality, because most judges and lawyers are from the victim community. Beyond that, the process itself has been slowed by issues reaching a consensus between the Cambodian judges and the U.N., and finding a balance for victim involvement in the process.
Translation has also been a problem for the tribunal because the court works in three languages: French, Khmer and English. There has been an issue with possible corruption in the translations because Cambodians translate.
Problems aside, there are five people from the Khmer Rouge leaders waiting to stand trial. Gassie spoke about one trial that was already conducted by the ECCC. Comrade Duch, the commander of S-21 was tried in 2009. During his trial, the defense wanted to have him released because they said the court was not credible.
The ECCC cannot hand down death sentences, only life in prison. Most defendants are 80 or older now meaning the trials are more of a healing process for the Cambodians than powerful punishments for the perpetrators. The hope is that the process will help Cambodians to move forward.
“The most hopeful thing is that Cambodians can build a sense of law and order,” Gassie said. “Cambodians can use the ECCC as a stepping stone to move forward and collectively face the atrocities as a nation.”
Gassie is currently working on her doctorate at Arizona State for political science with a major in comparative politics and a minor in international relations. Her capstone project featuring the interviews from her time in Cambodia can be found in the Mabee Library.
“I think ECCC is something everyone should be aware of,” said Dan Locey, a Washburn alumnus who went to Cambodia with Beatty in May 2008. “People my age and younger can’t remember the Khmer Rouge. Any attempt to bring ECCC to light is helpful.”
The Topeka Center for Peace and Justice will be working with Washburn to bring more forums on international justice to campus in the coming months.
Kate Fechter is a junior mass media major. Reach her at kate.fechter-stamper@washburn.edu
Co-sponsored by Phi Alpha Theta, the presentation, “Seeking Justice After Genocide: International Courts and Cambodia,” featured Washburn alumna Samantha Gassie who shared her knowledge of the Cambodian hybrid judicial system. The system includes the Extraordinary Chambers and Courts of Cambodia, which is currently trying to provide justice for the people of Cambodia over the war crimes committed during the reign of the Khmer Rouge.
Gassie, who has a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in liberal studies from Washburn, studied in Cambodia when writing her thesis. Bob Beatty, Gassie’s mentor, who told her about the opportunity in Cambodia also spoke at the event, along with Thomas Prasch.
During her time in Cambodia in the fall of 2008, Gassie conducted 17 interviews in fall of 2008. Her interviews ranged from people from the U.S. and Canada who were involved in the legalities, to Cambodian citizens who shared with her their personal accounts of surviving the Khmer Rouge. Everyone above a certain age is either a victim or a perpetrator.
The Khmer Rouge was in total power from 1975-1979. During that time period, an estimated 1.3 to 3.3 million were massacred in the killing fields, amounting to almost 50 percent of the country’s population.
People were brought into S-21 or Tuol Sleng, a school turned into an interrogation center, for questioning. They were tortured until they named five names of usually innocent friends or neighbors and then killed. The people named were then brought in for the same treatment, creating a deadly cycle of violence. Of the 17,000 people that went in, only 12 people total walked out. There are four survivors of S-21 alive today.
The ECCC was established in 2001 by negotiations between the United Nations and Cambodian officials. Gassie said it is a unique war crimes tribunal because it is inside Cambodia, meaning there is a lot of victim involvement. The ECCC and the Cambodian national government are working to set up education to strengthen and improve the credibility of the justice system in the country.
However, the tribunal does have its problems. The process has suffered from a lack of impartiality, because most judges and lawyers are from the victim community. Beyond that, the process itself has been slowed by issues reaching a consensus between the Cambodian judges and the U.N., and finding a balance for victim involvement in the process.
Translation has also been a problem for the tribunal because the court works in three languages: French, Khmer and English. There has been an issue with possible corruption in the translations because Cambodians translate.
Problems aside, there are five people from the Khmer Rouge leaders waiting to stand trial. Gassie spoke about one trial that was already conducted by the ECCC. Comrade Duch, the commander of S-21 was tried in 2009. During his trial, the defense wanted to have him released because they said the court was not credible.
The ECCC cannot hand down death sentences, only life in prison. Most defendants are 80 or older now meaning the trials are more of a healing process for the Cambodians than powerful punishments for the perpetrators. The hope is that the process will help Cambodians to move forward.
“The most hopeful thing is that Cambodians can build a sense of law and order,” Gassie said. “Cambodians can use the ECCC as a stepping stone to move forward and collectively face the atrocities as a nation.”
Gassie is currently working on her doctorate at Arizona State for political science with a major in comparative politics and a minor in international relations. Her capstone project featuring the interviews from her time in Cambodia can be found in the Mabee Library.
“I think ECCC is something everyone should be aware of,” said Dan Locey, a Washburn alumnus who went to Cambodia with Beatty in May 2008. “People my age and younger can’t remember the Khmer Rouge. Any attempt to bring ECCC to light is helpful.”
The Topeka Center for Peace and Justice will be working with Washburn to bring more forums on international justice to campus in the coming months.
Kate Fechter is a junior mass media major. Reach her at kate.fechter-stamper@washburn.edu
Fishermen drowning under threats to livelihood
This article features a friend from Scotland, David Thomson, whom I met while I was living and working in Siem Reap until 2007. The premise of this article emphasizes the struggle over growth which Cambodia is experiencing due to its push for development. A lot of this struggle is at the hands of the increasing number of foreigners descending on Cambodia like a "gold rush", therefore increasing the demands for infrastructure that cannot be readily supplied in Cambodia without great costs to its natural and cultural resources. It is the very real dilemma of development that many nations have faced, are currently facing or will be facing. And none seem to take a look at history beforehand.
January 21, 2010
By Nicholas Dynan (Tufts University)
Student Correspondent Corps
Global Post
January 21, 2010By Nicholas Dynan (Tufts University)
Student Correspondent Corps
Global Post
CHONG KHNEAS, Cambodia — The crowd waits on the muddy banks of the lake in a throng of motorbikes, trucks, bicycles and people. When the colorful fishing boats slide onto shore, the fish buyers clamber onto the decks of the boast and scramble to unpack the fish within the hulls.
The importance of the Tonle Sap Lake in the Mekong Basin cannot be overstated. It provides a major source of protein for Cambodians, including the more than 1 million people who live around the lake.
Fishing is also the sole source of income for most lake residents, though a number of small business enterprises have also sprouted up — including vegetable gardens, fruit and flower tree plantations and hydroponic farming. For most, fishing is all they have, and it keeps them poor.
In recent years, things have gotten even worse. A multitude of issues currently affects the Tonle Sap Lake — among them dams upstream, deforestation, pesticides and overfishing.
Dams
An economic boom in Cambodia has increased the country's need for electricity, which in turn is bringing foreign investment in dams. Electricity is projected to grow at a rate of 20 percent per year over the next several years. China, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand have planned and already begun construction on hydroelectric dams along the Mekong and its tributaries. Many of these dams are being supported by funds from the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
The dams will begin to have an impact in one to two years, threatening the lake's ecology. Since China is responsible for many of the dams and is the largest international investor in the country in general, Cambodia is reluctant to challenge its neighbor to the north.
Access to power will likely improve as a result of the dams, but marine life will perish: Eighty-seven percent of fish species in the Mekong migrate annually to feed and breed. Upstream dams are expected to raise water levels that would widen the lake and destroy up to one-third of the flooded forests where fish spawn.
Deforestation
While deforestation has abated in Cambodia, it continues around the lake. People seeking to develop areas of the flooded forests around the lake clear trees en masse and without thought to the environment. David Thomson, director of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Cambodia repeats an old Khmer proverb: “No forests, no fish, no Cambodia.”
Pesticides
Chong Kneas is located in Siem Reap province, which is home to famed Angkor Wat and draws millions of tourists every year. According to Thomson, there is a demand for local produce among the growing number of foreign tourists in the area, but he says the tourists don't want food grown with pesticides, which most of the farmers use. Local farmers and fishermen have resisted farming without pesticides, mainly due the fact that many think they will suffer a loss in profit.
Illegal fishing
Illegal fishing — often for family consumption rather than commercial profit — is particularly destructive to the lake's ecosystem since it circumvents fishing limits. Illegal techniques include poison and electric fishing gear, which is used to electrocute fish. Some fishermen bribe their way into restricted areas, and encroach upon fishing sanctuaries.
Government efforts
In 2001, the government made radical changes in fishing policies. More than half of the sections, or “lots” of the lake — about 239,000 square miles of fishing grounds — previously controlled by commercial fisheries were released to lakeside communities.
Thomson calls this an exceptional improvement in fishing management.
“It is almost unique in the world” to take domain from commercial entities and relinquish it to local fishermen. “It is tremendously commendable.”
At the same time, “it is also fraught with great difficulties,” such as management and implementation of a new sustainable fishing policy.
“It is not that easy, but it is a tremendous step forward because all over the world ... fishing rights and fishing access are being taken away from small-scale fishers.”
The trend toward consolidating large-scale fishing has been seen in many African nations, such as Senegal, Angola and Mozambique.
Community fisheries
In Cambodia, community fisheries have been established by the FAO with funds from the ADB (Ironically, the community fisheries are under threat from upstream dams which, are also supported by the ADB). The system of community fisheries works against clearing the flooded forest and pesticides. It also supports community input as well as transparency in the fishing village. The FAO hopes that empowerment will help to reduce corruption and illegal fishing.
A report on this 10-year project of community fisheries is expected to be released within the next few weeks. Local fishermen say they hope progress is notable, but it hasn't been easy to include everyone in the system of community fisheries.
Obstacles to outreach
On his rickety houseboat in the floating village of Chong Khneas, Tan Van Minh, a Vietnamese national living in this Cambodian village, picks at his calloused hands, rough from hours tending his set nets in the Tonle Sap. Tan is one of 2,070 Vietnamese fishermen living in the 6,100-member village.
While he is a resident fisherman, he cannot participate or attend community fisheries meetings because the 2002 Fisheries Sub-Decree includes only Cambodian nationals. Excluding him from the system means he learns less about sustainable fishing. Only the Vietnamese village chief serves as the voice of the Vietnamese during community fishery meetings.
However, many Vietnamese fishers, including Tan, say they know nothing about community fisheries.
Conflict erupts between the Vietnamese and Cambodian fishers at times because of difference in fish catches. Some Vietnamese fishermen are known for staying out on the lake longer and catching more fish as a result. Many also have more money to buy larger nets. The discrepancy in catch between a Cambodian fisherman and a Vietnamese fisherman can fuel ethnic conflict.
In addition, Cambodian inspection officials have been known to target the Vietnamese fishermen. Each year, Tan must put much of his $1-a-day profit toward payment to the fishery inspectors and district inspector. There isn't much left to care for his family.
It is an open secret among fishing villagers in Chong Khneas that rising prices and lack of alternative income has increased illegal fishing. While many of these villagers understand the drawbacks of illegal fishing, daily survival wins out.
As Thomson says, “the problem with the project in early stages is ... it doesn’t put any more rice on the table.”
With the list of threats mounting, the future of the Tonle Sap remains unsure.
Back on shore, the racket of bargaining persists. Crates are filled tight with fish, and men strain under their heavy loads as they carry the boxes to awaiting vehicles. As the last fish is purchased, the noise dies away, and only the carcasses of gutted fish float gently on the surface of the water.
This report comes from a journalist in our Student Correspondent Corps, a GlobalPost project training the next generation of foreign correspondents while they study abroad.
The importance of the Tonle Sap Lake in the Mekong Basin cannot be overstated. It provides a major source of protein for Cambodians, including the more than 1 million people who live around the lake.
Fishing is also the sole source of income for most lake residents, though a number of small business enterprises have also sprouted up — including vegetable gardens, fruit and flower tree plantations and hydroponic farming. For most, fishing is all they have, and it keeps them poor.
In recent years, things have gotten even worse. A multitude of issues currently affects the Tonle Sap Lake — among them dams upstream, deforestation, pesticides and overfishing.
Dams
An economic boom in Cambodia has increased the country's need for electricity, which in turn is bringing foreign investment in dams. Electricity is projected to grow at a rate of 20 percent per year over the next several years. China, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand have planned and already begun construction on hydroelectric dams along the Mekong and its tributaries. Many of these dams are being supported by funds from the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
The dams will begin to have an impact in one to two years, threatening the lake's ecology. Since China is responsible for many of the dams and is the largest international investor in the country in general, Cambodia is reluctant to challenge its neighbor to the north.
Access to power will likely improve as a result of the dams, but marine life will perish: Eighty-seven percent of fish species in the Mekong migrate annually to feed and breed. Upstream dams are expected to raise water levels that would widen the lake and destroy up to one-third of the flooded forests where fish spawn.
Deforestation
While deforestation has abated in Cambodia, it continues around the lake. People seeking to develop areas of the flooded forests around the lake clear trees en masse and without thought to the environment. David Thomson, director of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Cambodia repeats an old Khmer proverb: “No forests, no fish, no Cambodia.”
Pesticides
Chong Kneas is located in Siem Reap province, which is home to famed Angkor Wat and draws millions of tourists every year. According to Thomson, there is a demand for local produce among the growing number of foreign tourists in the area, but he says the tourists don't want food grown with pesticides, which most of the farmers use. Local farmers and fishermen have resisted farming without pesticides, mainly due the fact that many think they will suffer a loss in profit.
Illegal fishing
Illegal fishing — often for family consumption rather than commercial profit — is particularly destructive to the lake's ecosystem since it circumvents fishing limits. Illegal techniques include poison and electric fishing gear, which is used to electrocute fish. Some fishermen bribe their way into restricted areas, and encroach upon fishing sanctuaries.
Government efforts
In 2001, the government made radical changes in fishing policies. More than half of the sections, or “lots” of the lake — about 239,000 square miles of fishing grounds — previously controlled by commercial fisheries were released to lakeside communities.
Thomson calls this an exceptional improvement in fishing management.
“It is almost unique in the world” to take domain from commercial entities and relinquish it to local fishermen. “It is tremendously commendable.”
At the same time, “it is also fraught with great difficulties,” such as management and implementation of a new sustainable fishing policy.
“It is not that easy, but it is a tremendous step forward because all over the world ... fishing rights and fishing access are being taken away from small-scale fishers.”
The trend toward consolidating large-scale fishing has been seen in many African nations, such as Senegal, Angola and Mozambique.
Community fisheries
In Cambodia, community fisheries have been established by the FAO with funds from the ADB (Ironically, the community fisheries are under threat from upstream dams which, are also supported by the ADB). The system of community fisheries works against clearing the flooded forest and pesticides. It also supports community input as well as transparency in the fishing village. The FAO hopes that empowerment will help to reduce corruption and illegal fishing.
A report on this 10-year project of community fisheries is expected to be released within the next few weeks. Local fishermen say they hope progress is notable, but it hasn't been easy to include everyone in the system of community fisheries.
Obstacles to outreach
On his rickety houseboat in the floating village of Chong Khneas, Tan Van Minh, a Vietnamese national living in this Cambodian village, picks at his calloused hands, rough from hours tending his set nets in the Tonle Sap. Tan is one of 2,070 Vietnamese fishermen living in the 6,100-member village.
While he is a resident fisherman, he cannot participate or attend community fisheries meetings because the 2002 Fisheries Sub-Decree includes only Cambodian nationals. Excluding him from the system means he learns less about sustainable fishing. Only the Vietnamese village chief serves as the voice of the Vietnamese during community fishery meetings.
However, many Vietnamese fishers, including Tan, say they know nothing about community fisheries.
Conflict erupts between the Vietnamese and Cambodian fishers at times because of difference in fish catches. Some Vietnamese fishermen are known for staying out on the lake longer and catching more fish as a result. Many also have more money to buy larger nets. The discrepancy in catch between a Cambodian fisherman and a Vietnamese fisherman can fuel ethnic conflict.
In addition, Cambodian inspection officials have been known to target the Vietnamese fishermen. Each year, Tan must put much of his $1-a-day profit toward payment to the fishery inspectors and district inspector. There isn't much left to care for his family.
It is an open secret among fishing villagers in Chong Khneas that rising prices and lack of alternative income has increased illegal fishing. While many of these villagers understand the drawbacks of illegal fishing, daily survival wins out.
As Thomson says, “the problem with the project in early stages is ... it doesn’t put any more rice on the table.”
With the list of threats mounting, the future of the Tonle Sap remains unsure.
Back on shore, the racket of bargaining persists. Crates are filled tight with fish, and men strain under their heavy loads as they carry the boxes to awaiting vehicles. As the last fish is purchased, the noise dies away, and only the carcasses of gutted fish float gently on the surface of the water.
This report comes from a journalist in our Student Correspondent Corps, a GlobalPost project training the next generation of foreign correspondents while they study abroad.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Cambodia seeks to end child labour
While I'm not specifically researching child labor, it is definitely relevant to the desired outcomes of the research analysis: a better prepared and more capable human resource capacity.
By Sok Khemara, VOA Khmer
Washington
20 January 2010
By Sok Khemara, VOA Khmer
Washington
20 January 2010
Poor families in poor health, the loss of land and the legacy of war are all contributing to a child labor problem in Cambodia, the country’s national International Labor Organization coordinator said Monday.
“The latest studies we have show that in many countries, if there exists child labor, that country is in heavy poverty,” said the coordinator, Chhorvirith Theng, as a guest on “Hello VOA.” “In a country where educational development exists, that country has no child labor. So on both these tendencies, the government of Cambodia is paying attention. For instance, we take education as a core sector.”
The government and private sector are working to jointly eliminate child labor in Cambodia by 2015, Chhorvirith Theng said, through plans to educate people at the grassroots level, as well as vocational and skills training and microfinance.
A national survey in 2001 found 1.5 million children aged 5 to 17 who were economically active in Cambodia. Around 250,000 were working in risky occupations.
Child labor is not only a problem in Cambodia, but around the world, Chhorvirith Theng said. The ILO estimates as many as 250 million children involved in labor, with the majority involved in dangerous jobs that can be damaging physically, mentally and spiritually.
“The latest studies we have show that in many countries, if there exists child labor, that country is in heavy poverty,” said the coordinator, Chhorvirith Theng, as a guest on “Hello VOA.” “In a country where educational development exists, that country has no child labor. So on both these tendencies, the government of Cambodia is paying attention. For instance, we take education as a core sector.”
The government and private sector are working to jointly eliminate child labor in Cambodia by 2015, Chhorvirith Theng said, through plans to educate people at the grassroots level, as well as vocational and skills training and microfinance.
A national survey in 2001 found 1.5 million children aged 5 to 17 who were economically active in Cambodia. Around 250,000 were working in risky occupations.
Child labor is not only a problem in Cambodia, but around the world, Chhorvirith Theng said. The ILO estimates as many as 250 million children involved in labor, with the majority involved in dangerous jobs that can be damaging physically, mentally and spiritually.
Going places in Phnom Penh
A Cambodian man transports goods by motorbike as he heads to a main market in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010. Traffic injuries are a major problem in Cambodia, where about 4 people per day are killed in accidents, according to a government report. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)
Nobel Laureate: Human Resource is the Major Problem Facing Cambodia
This article emphasizes what I'm in the middle of analyzing in my public policy research concerning what affects the employment status of Cambodian youth.
As other developing countries in the world, the major problem facing Cambodia is the serious lack of human resources for the country’s development, according to Professor David Jonathan Gross, a Nobel Laureate for Physics.
Prof. Gross said through his lecture and dialogue with some participants and people he met, he observes that there are quite a lot of brilliant young people in Cambodia, which will be important for Cambodia’s future development, but the most important thing is whether they are given opportunity to develop their skills.
“It’s a major problem - human resources,” Gross said in a phone interview with VOA Khmer during his visit to Cambodia’s Siem Reap province. “I’ve met a lot of very hopeful people. You know that’s the most important thing. People are very optimistic about the future. Cambodia has a lot of great resources. I have a lot of faith in young people, very brilliant young minds that could do great things just given the opportunity. I have tried to tell them that they should dream big. I have talked to people about giving young people opportunity.”
Prof. Gross is a Nobel Laureate for Physics in 2004. He has discovered and explored the force that binds particles inside an atomic nucleus. This phenomenon led to a whole new physical theory and enabled scientists to complete the standard model of particle physics, which describes the fundamental particles in nature, and how they interact with one another.
Gross said there are two kinds of human resources. While the majority of people are just working forces, others have special talents and great minds, who make great contributions to the country’s development. This kind of people should be given special opportunity.
"And then, very gifted people, whose minds you really don’t want to waste and who will contribute very important contributions to the society,’’ Prof. Gross said. ‘’And it’s important to make sure you don’t lose those really special people, and you give them opportunities. You will have to enable them to go abroad. It’s also important to identify very brilliant people and give them special opportunities because those people can make important contributions.”
Chek Chan Oeun, a physics lecturer at Royal University of Phnom Penh, who participated in the Professor Gross’s lecture, said the lecture paves the way for participants, especially for students to a broader scientific research and open their minds to how science can help social development.
“Through this lecture, we have acquired some knowledge related to universe, dark energy, dark materials, and the evolution of the universe,” Chek Chan Oeun said. “In addition, it encourages students to find out what has been discovered by scientists, what is still unknown, and what they are doing to help the world.”
“In the future I want to be like him and discover new things to meet the needs of the world,” said Sun Limhour, a 4th year student in physics department of Royal University of Phnom Penh. “I have loved electronics since I was young. It is a true science.”
The visit by Prof. David Jonathan Gross intends to strengthen the relationship among nations in Southeast Asia and ASEAN with the rest of the world, according to the organizer.
“It’s our aim really to build these bridges not only with Nobel laureates from the United States or Europe and the societies here in Southeast Asia, but between the societies in ASEAN to reach more cooperation on the level of education because education as we think is basic for peace and that’s why we are doing this program at the universities and at schools here in Cambodia and also in other countries in the region,” said Morawetz, director of International Peace Foundation.
Born in Washington, D.C., Professor David Jonathan Gross, received his undergraduate degree from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1962 and then continued his education at University of California, Berkley, from where he received his Ph.D. in physics in 1966. He then served as a junior fellow at Harvard University. Professor Gross is now a director and holder of the Frederick W. Gluck Chair in Theoretical Physics at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of California in Santa Barbara and a member of the Advisory Board of the Intentional Peace Foundation.
As part of the “Bridges” program by the International Peace Foundation, the next Nobel Laureate who will pay a visit to Cambodia on January 20 is Professor Eric Stark Maskin, a 2007 Nobel Laureate for Economics.
By Im Sothearith, VOA Khmer
Original report from Washington
19 January 2010
As other developing countries in the world, the major problem facing Cambodia is the serious lack of human resources for the country’s development, according to Professor David Jonathan Gross, a Nobel Laureate for Physics.
Prof. Gross said through his lecture and dialogue with some participants and people he met, he observes that there are quite a lot of brilliant young people in Cambodia, which will be important for Cambodia’s future development, but the most important thing is whether they are given opportunity to develop their skills.
“It’s a major problem - human resources,” Gross said in a phone interview with VOA Khmer during his visit to Cambodia’s Siem Reap province. “I’ve met a lot of very hopeful people. You know that’s the most important thing. People are very optimistic about the future. Cambodia has a lot of great resources. I have a lot of faith in young people, very brilliant young minds that could do great things just given the opportunity. I have tried to tell them that they should dream big. I have talked to people about giving young people opportunity.”
Prof. Gross is a Nobel Laureate for Physics in 2004. He has discovered and explored the force that binds particles inside an atomic nucleus. This phenomenon led to a whole new physical theory and enabled scientists to complete the standard model of particle physics, which describes the fundamental particles in nature, and how they interact with one another.
Gross said there are two kinds of human resources. While the majority of people are just working forces, others have special talents and great minds, who make great contributions to the country’s development. This kind of people should be given special opportunity.
"And then, very gifted people, whose minds you really don’t want to waste and who will contribute very important contributions to the society,’’ Prof. Gross said. ‘’And it’s important to make sure you don’t lose those really special people, and you give them opportunities. You will have to enable them to go abroad. It’s also important to identify very brilliant people and give them special opportunities because those people can make important contributions.”
Chek Chan Oeun, a physics lecturer at Royal University of Phnom Penh, who participated in the Professor Gross’s lecture, said the lecture paves the way for participants, especially for students to a broader scientific research and open their minds to how science can help social development.
“Through this lecture, we have acquired some knowledge related to universe, dark energy, dark materials, and the evolution of the universe,” Chek Chan Oeun said. “In addition, it encourages students to find out what has been discovered by scientists, what is still unknown, and what they are doing to help the world.”
“In the future I want to be like him and discover new things to meet the needs of the world,” said Sun Limhour, a 4th year student in physics department of Royal University of Phnom Penh. “I have loved electronics since I was young. It is a true science.”
The visit by Prof. David Jonathan Gross intends to strengthen the relationship among nations in Southeast Asia and ASEAN with the rest of the world, according to the organizer.
“It’s our aim really to build these bridges not only with Nobel laureates from the United States or Europe and the societies here in Southeast Asia, but between the societies in ASEAN to reach more cooperation on the level of education because education as we think is basic for peace and that’s why we are doing this program at the universities and at schools here in Cambodia and also in other countries in the region,” said Morawetz, director of International Peace Foundation.
Born in Washington, D.C., Professor David Jonathan Gross, received his undergraduate degree from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1962 and then continued his education at University of California, Berkley, from where he received his Ph.D. in physics in 1966. He then served as a junior fellow at Harvard University. Professor Gross is now a director and holder of the Frederick W. Gluck Chair in Theoretical Physics at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of California in Santa Barbara and a member of the Advisory Board of the Intentional Peace Foundation.
As part of the “Bridges” program by the International Peace Foundation, the next Nobel Laureate who will pay a visit to Cambodia on January 20 is Professor Eric Stark Maskin, a 2007 Nobel Laureate for Economics.
By Im Sothearith, VOA Khmer
Original report from Washington
19 January 2010
Paving Over Cambodia's Violent Past
Infrastructure is just one of the many areas of Cambodia's development where progress brings numerous benefits to the masses: economics, health, education and more!
This article highlights some of the pro's and con's of building, or re-building, Cambodia's road system.
With financing from several foreign governments and the Asian Development Bank, hundreds of miles of roads are being completed and many more hundreds are under construction in Cambodia.
SIEM REAP, CAMBODIA — Bullet by bullet, workers removed the detritus of Cambodia’s past. They pulled 300 land mines and 30,000 rounds of ammunition from the red dirt and then laid down a thick layer of asphalt. Today, what would pass for a very ordinary road in wealthier parts of the world is precious pavement for a country motoring toward prosperity and trying to leave its bloody past behind.
Last month, the government inaugurated the newly refurbished Routes 5 and 6, both built during the French colonial era to connect the capital, Phnom Penh, with the Thai border.
Western Cambodia was the last holdout of the Khmer Rouge, the brutal regime toppled three decades ago. Rebel units held onto remote areas into the 1990s, skirmishing periodically with government forces and leaving the roads in total disrepair, a moonscape of potholes and mud that gave travelers sore backs and made for a crater-dodging, head-bumping ride.
Now enjoying the dividends of peace, Cambodia is halfway through a road-building spree with 10 projects totaling 1,173 kilometers, or 730 miles, of pavement still under way, said Prime Minister Hun Sen, who presided over the ceremony on Dec. 28. A further 11 major roads are under negotiation, he said.
The new roads make the storied temples of Angkor Wat a comfortable drive from the Thai border — and a short day’s drive from Bangkok. The roads also put more remote historic sites — in a country filled with them — within easy reach for tourists.
Roads are a big deal in Cambodia, and more than 5,000 villagers were summoned to attend the road’s official inauguration — farmers who arrived by bicycle, monks with freshly shaved heads, children in school uniforms. Organizers stenciled messages onto large banners strung across the canopy that gave shade from the searing sun: “Where there are bridges and roads there is hope.”
Cambodia’s road-building program is now taking “elephant steps, not mouse steps,” Mr. Hun Sen told the crowd.
Like the North-South Expressway in peninsular Malaysia, the American-built Friendship Road across Thailand’s northeast and the vast network of roads built by China over the past decade, roads are a key milestone of development in Asia.
For Cambodia, in particular, good roads help bring together a country fractured by civil war.
“This section was a very heavy battlefield,” said Pheng Sovicheano, the project manager of the road to the Thai border.
Mr. Pheng Sovicheano, who is also Cambodia’s deputy director general for public works, knows firsthand how bad the road was. During construction his driver drove into what looked like a large muddy pothole but turned out to be a small pond, flooding the car up to his chest.
Now, as a measure of Cambodia’s national reconciliation, some of the 360 workers Mr. Pheng Sovicheano hired to build the road were former Khmer Rouge soldiers.
Roads are expensive — $350,000 per kilometer for the road to the Thai border. But with many countries jockeying for influence in Cambodia the government appears to have no trouble finding financing. China is building a number of roads here, including one that passes through the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Pailin.
Route 5 and Route 6 were financed with a low-interest, 32-year loan by the Asian Development Bank in Manila, an institution whose largest shareholders are Japan and the United States. South Korea is financing other road projects.
Mr. Hun Sen seems to enjoy playing these donors off each other. In his speech he chided the Asian Development Bank for its sluggish and bureaucratic two-year bidding process and praised the speed of Chinese projects.
“I compliment the way the Chinese companies work — very fast,” Mr. Hun Sen said, pointedly glancing over at the representative from the Asian Development Bank.
Political ties between Thailand and Cambodia have been strained by a territorial dispute near a 900-year-old mountaintop temple, Preah Vihear, but officials made no mention of the troubles.
Economic ties endure: By the end of this year western Cambodia will have three good roads leading to Thailand, connections that the government hopes will increase trade and investment. Western Cambodia gets most of its electricity from Thailand, and the company that built the road to the border, S.P.T. Civil Group, is based in Thailand. (The company has ties to Thaksin Shinawatra, the Thai prime minister deposed in the military coup of 2006 who last year was named Mr. Hun Sen’s economic adviser.)
The new roads will make it easier for Thai companies to sell more cement, instant noodles and other products across the border. For Japanese companies, the roads will link the supply chains of factories in Bangkok and in Ho Chi Minh City.
And for villagers in western Cambodia, it may help lift rock-bottom incomes.
Yong Da, a 39-year-old deliveryman in the town of Kralanh, has more than doubled his income because of the new road. “The road was bumpy, and I could not take much stuff on my motorcycle,” he said. He now makes $2.50 a day, up from a dollar a day.
The sheets of dust that enveloped the roadside are also gone, and villagers say their children no longer have trouble breathing.
Good roads and the end of the civil war have allowed villagers to take back the night. Travel after dark was discouraged two decades ago because of poor security and the perils of bad pavement.
But with modernity comes another type of danger. Mr. Pheng Sovicheano says he was driving to Phnom Penh one night recently when he came upon a road accident.
A young man had been killed on his motorcycle when he rammed into the back of a poorly lighted truck. The boy’s distraught mother blamed the good road, Mr. Pheng Sovicheano remembers.
“She said, ‘Before, when there were bad roads, he never drove this fast.”’
January 18, 2010
THOMAS FULLER
The New York Times
This article highlights some of the pro's and con's of building, or re-building, Cambodia's road system.
With financing from several foreign governments and the Asian Development Bank, hundreds of miles of roads are being completed and many more hundreds are under construction in Cambodia.
SIEM REAP, CAMBODIA — Bullet by bullet, workers removed the detritus of Cambodia’s past. They pulled 300 land mines and 30,000 rounds of ammunition from the red dirt and then laid down a thick layer of asphalt. Today, what would pass for a very ordinary road in wealthier parts of the world is precious pavement for a country motoring toward prosperity and trying to leave its bloody past behind.
Last month, the government inaugurated the newly refurbished Routes 5 and 6, both built during the French colonial era to connect the capital, Phnom Penh, with the Thai border.
Western Cambodia was the last holdout of the Khmer Rouge, the brutal regime toppled three decades ago. Rebel units held onto remote areas into the 1990s, skirmishing periodically with government forces and leaving the roads in total disrepair, a moonscape of potholes and mud that gave travelers sore backs and made for a crater-dodging, head-bumping ride.
Now enjoying the dividends of peace, Cambodia is halfway through a road-building spree with 10 projects totaling 1,173 kilometers, or 730 miles, of pavement still under way, said Prime Minister Hun Sen, who presided over the ceremony on Dec. 28. A further 11 major roads are under negotiation, he said.
The new roads make the storied temples of Angkor Wat a comfortable drive from the Thai border — and a short day’s drive from Bangkok. The roads also put more remote historic sites — in a country filled with them — within easy reach for tourists.
Roads are a big deal in Cambodia, and more than 5,000 villagers were summoned to attend the road’s official inauguration — farmers who arrived by bicycle, monks with freshly shaved heads, children in school uniforms. Organizers stenciled messages onto large banners strung across the canopy that gave shade from the searing sun: “Where there are bridges and roads there is hope.”
Cambodia’s road-building program is now taking “elephant steps, not mouse steps,” Mr. Hun Sen told the crowd.
Like the North-South Expressway in peninsular Malaysia, the American-built Friendship Road across Thailand’s northeast and the vast network of roads built by China over the past decade, roads are a key milestone of development in Asia.
For Cambodia, in particular, good roads help bring together a country fractured by civil war.
“This section was a very heavy battlefield,” said Pheng Sovicheano, the project manager of the road to the Thai border.
Mr. Pheng Sovicheano, who is also Cambodia’s deputy director general for public works, knows firsthand how bad the road was. During construction his driver drove into what looked like a large muddy pothole but turned out to be a small pond, flooding the car up to his chest.
Now, as a measure of Cambodia’s national reconciliation, some of the 360 workers Mr. Pheng Sovicheano hired to build the road were former Khmer Rouge soldiers.
Roads are expensive — $350,000 per kilometer for the road to the Thai border. But with many countries jockeying for influence in Cambodia the government appears to have no trouble finding financing. China is building a number of roads here, including one that passes through the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Pailin.
Route 5 and Route 6 were financed with a low-interest, 32-year loan by the Asian Development Bank in Manila, an institution whose largest shareholders are Japan and the United States. South Korea is financing other road projects.
Mr. Hun Sen seems to enjoy playing these donors off each other. In his speech he chided the Asian Development Bank for its sluggish and bureaucratic two-year bidding process and praised the speed of Chinese projects.
“I compliment the way the Chinese companies work — very fast,” Mr. Hun Sen said, pointedly glancing over at the representative from the Asian Development Bank.
Political ties between Thailand and Cambodia have been strained by a territorial dispute near a 900-year-old mountaintop temple, Preah Vihear, but officials made no mention of the troubles.
Economic ties endure: By the end of this year western Cambodia will have three good roads leading to Thailand, connections that the government hopes will increase trade and investment. Western Cambodia gets most of its electricity from Thailand, and the company that built the road to the border, S.P.T. Civil Group, is based in Thailand. (The company has ties to Thaksin Shinawatra, the Thai prime minister deposed in the military coup of 2006 who last year was named Mr. Hun Sen’s economic adviser.)
The new roads will make it easier for Thai companies to sell more cement, instant noodles and other products across the border. For Japanese companies, the roads will link the supply chains of factories in Bangkok and in Ho Chi Minh City.
And for villagers in western Cambodia, it may help lift rock-bottom incomes.
Yong Da, a 39-year-old deliveryman in the town of Kralanh, has more than doubled his income because of the new road. “The road was bumpy, and I could not take much stuff on my motorcycle,” he said. He now makes $2.50 a day, up from a dollar a day.
The sheets of dust that enveloped the roadside are also gone, and villagers say their children no longer have trouble breathing.
Good roads and the end of the civil war have allowed villagers to take back the night. Travel after dark was discouraged two decades ago because of poor security and the perils of bad pavement.
But with modernity comes another type of danger. Mr. Pheng Sovicheano says he was driving to Phnom Penh one night recently when he came upon a road accident.
A young man had been killed on his motorcycle when he rammed into the back of a poorly lighted truck. The boy’s distraught mother blamed the good road, Mr. Pheng Sovicheano remembers.
“She said, ‘Before, when there were bad roads, he never drove this fast.”’
January 18, 2010
THOMAS FULLER
The New York Times
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Where Gods and Soldiers Tend the Border in Cambodia
December 27, 2009
By DANIEL ROBINSON
The New York Times
Explorer
By DANIEL ROBINSON
The New York Times
Explorer
IN the wet season, the roads through the northwestern region of Cambodia turn into an undulating sea of muck, with potholes the size of cars and ruts as deep as truck axles. To figure out which routes were least likely to leave me wet, muddy and stranded, I buttonholed a dozen long-distance taxi drivers before settling on the toll road from Dam Dek, which had the added attraction of passing by two out-of-the-way Angkorian temples, Beng Mealea and Koh Ker.
My destination was an even more remote Angkor-era complex: Preah Vihear Temple, awesomely perched 1,700 feet above Cambodia’s northern plains, near the country’s border with Thailand. Designated as a Unesco World Heritage Site in 2008 — not without some international controversy — it makes an adventurous alternative to far-better-known Angkor Wat. While several thousand foreign tourists visit the temples of Angkor on a typical day, Preah Vihear Temple gets, on average, just five.
I was traveling with my friend and driver, Hang Vuthy, in a 1991 Toyota Camry with a surprising New York past: according to a window sticker, it had once belonged to a member of the Yonkers Police Captains, Lieutenants and Sergeants Association. Imagining the car in a mid-Atlantic blizzard, it occurred to me that wet-season driving in outback Cambodia is not entirely unlike navigating unplowed snowy side streets. Indeed, for much of our journey we avoided the most treacherous stretches of mire and snaked around potholes of indeterminate depth by religiously following a single serpentine track rendered navigable by earlier cars and trucks.
Preah Vihear Temple — the name means Mountain of the Sacred Temple — is the most spectacularly situated of all Angkorian monuments. Built from the ninth to the 12th centuries atop a peak of the Dangkrek Mountains, it occupies a triangular plateau rising from the Thailand border to a prow-shaped promontory.
An ever-changing architectural, mythological and geological panorama unfolds as visitors progress along the temple’s 2,600-foot-long processional axis, up a series of gently sloping causeways and steep staircases through five gopura, or pavilions, each more sacred than the last.
I began my visit at the bottom of the Monumental Staircase, which, according to the Angkor scholar Vittorio Roveda, “symbolizes the laborious path of faith needed to approach the sacred world of the gods.” The 163 gray sandstone steps, partly carved into the living rock, are flanked by statues of lions and, near the top, two magnificent nagas (seven-headed serpents) facing north toward Thailand. Also intently watching Thai territory were several AK-47-toting Cambodian soldiers in camouflage.
The first structure I came to, called Gopura V by generations of archaeologists, was an airy cruciform construction once topped by wood beams and a terra-cotta tile roof. Many of the stones have tumbled over, but the delicately balanced eastern pediment has survived to become Preah Vihear’s most recognizable icon, appearing on publicity posters, patriotic T-shirts and the new 2,000-riel banknote.
In centuries past, this pavilion was where pilgrims from the plains of Cambodia, having just climbed the steep, mile-long Eastern Staircase (mined and inaccessible for decades but soon to reopen), met their counterparts from what is now Thailand, who had completed a rather less-taxing ascent from the Khorat Plateau.
Alongside a group of saffron-robed monks, I continued north on a majestic, sandstone avenue, 800 feet long, to Gopura IV. There, I came upon a particularly vivid bas-relief depicting the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, a Hindu creation myth in which gods and demons churn the primeval waters to extract the ambrosia of immortality.
Although most of the splendid decorative carvings at Preah Vihear, including this one, depict Vishnu, the temple was originally dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva. In later centuries, it was converted to use as a Buddhist sanctuary, and today many of the visitors are Buddhist pilgrims.
As I continued my ascent, I walked under exquisite lintels and tympanums depicting more scenes from Hindu epics like the Mahabharata, and beneath richly carved double pediments adorned with finials and upturned gable ends — calling cards of Cambodian and Thai architecture to this day. Ancient inscriptions in Khmer and Sanskrit, bearing cryptic details about the history of the temple and the Angkorian kings who built it, were hidden here and there under a patina of lichen.
The temple’s culminating point, geographically and symbolically, is Gopura I, whose mandapa (antechamber) and Central Sanctuary, now a jumbled pile of carved sandstone blocks, are surrounded by galleries that call to mind a French Gothic cloister, except that here the windows are rectilinear and the galleries covered by corbelled vaults. (The Khmers, for all their architectural genius, never mastered the keystone arch.)
The entire structure is inward-looking, its outer walls almost devoid of openings despite the sweeping views just outside. Scholars speculate that while the site was considered holy in part because of its spectacular situation, the ancient architects may have believed that picture windows would distract both priests and pilgrims from their sacred tasks.
As I approached the rocky tip of the promontory, just beyond Gopura I, a breathtaking panorama came into view. Cambodia’s verdant northern plains extended majestically toward the horizon, and in the distance I could just make out Phnom Kulen, about 65 miles to the southwest, where the Khmer Empire was founded in A.D. 802. (Angkor itself lay hidden in the haze, 88 miles away.)
To the east, toward Laos, and the west, the Dangkrek Mountains stretched into the distance in a series of serrated bluffs. Looking north, almost everything I could see was in Thailand, rendered remote and mysterious by its inaccessibility.
Thailand ruled much of northwestern Cambodia, including Preah Vihear Temple, from the late 18th century until 1907, when the French colonial administration forced the Thais to withdraw to the current international frontier; Cambodian sovereignty over Preah Vihear was confirmed by the International Court of Justice in 1962.
Thailand, despite unresolved land claims, initially supported Cambodia’s Unesco bid for World Heritage status, but the temple soon became a pawn in Thai and Cambodian domestic politics, unleashing nationalist passions in both countries.
In July 2008, according to Cambodian authorities, Thai soldiers intruded into Cambodian territory near the temple. The Thai government denied that any border violations had taken place. Since then, a total of at least seven soldiers from both sides have been killed in intermittent exchanges of fire, according to local news reports. At the time of my visit, though, the frontier had been quiet for several months.
Curious about what the standoff actually looked like, I asked my guide, conveniently a moonlighting army officer, if I could get a glimpse of the Thais. He took me to the bottom of the Monumental Staircase, where I could hear the distant sounds of war — air-raid sirens and shooting — but the combat was taking place on a tiny television, which off-duty soldiers were watching with rapt attention.
We walked along a forest trail past a volleyball court and trenches, passing soldiers in hammocks with their wives stealing a moment of intimacy in an encampment with little privacy, to a forest clearing with a bamboo table at the center.
About 20 yards in front of us stood a line of neatly built bunkers; uniformed men could be seen among the dark green sandbags. “So those are Cambodian soldiers?” I asked, trying to get my bearings. “No,” my guide answered, “those are Thais. Over there” — he turned 180 degrees and pointed to a line of bunkers 20 yards in the other direction — “are Cambodians.” The table, I realized, marked the midpoint of no-man’s land.
The Cambodians’ front-line bunkers, made of disintegrating sandbags sprouting grass, were shaded by blue and green tarpaulins and surrounded by orderly gardens. Their raised observation post, topped by a thatched roof, looked as if it might have been on loan from “Gilligan’s Island.” I was in the middle of a very un-Korean Panmunjom, a laid-back, tropical version of Christmas 1914 on the Western Front.
I soon learned that the Cambodian soldiers stationed there call the site Sambok Kmom, or beehive, because, they say, the area’s many wild bees leave Cambodians unmolested but set upon any Thai who encroaches on Cambodian land. Moved by national feeling, domestic tourists wearing krama (traditional checked scarves that serve as something of a Cambodian national symbol) wandered by, distributing cigarettes and other morale-boosting gifts to the soldiers who were deployed to help the bees protect Cambodian sovereignty.
Around the clearing, soldiers from both sides, unarmed and without body armor or helmets, were relaxing in front of their own front-line bunkers. Cambodian officers seemed to find the bamboo table, shaded by trees tall enough to let breezes through, especially congenial. A few paces away, the Thais had strung a hammock between trees, and one soldier, lounging in a white T-shirt, black combat pants and black military boots, was engrossed in a cellphone call.
Despite the apparent tranquillity, I knew that if the order were given, the men on both sides of the invisible line would not hesitate to shoot. In fact, many of the Cambodian troops stationed around Preah Vihear are battle-hardened former Khmer Rouge fighters. For now, though, relations are casual and, I was told, some wary friendships have developed.
The best staging point for a visit to Preah Vihear Temple is Sra Em (also spelled Sa Em), 19 miles by road from the temple. Two years ago, it was a sleepy crossroads hamlet with a single grimy restaurant and one rundown guesthouse. These days, in the wake of the area’s military buildup, it feels like a Gold Rush boomtown, with haphazardly parked four-wheel-drives instead of tethered horses; karaoke bars sporting pink fluorescent lamps and colored lights, instead of saloons; and the gleanings of Cambodia’s recently doubled defense budget, instead of gold nuggets glinting in the stream. Armed men in camouflage uniforms abound.
Sra Em’s accommodation options are rudimentary, to put it politely. My room’s star amenity was a cold-water spigot for filling the plastic bucket used both to bathe and to flush, and below the cheap plastic mirror and its public access comb, dust bunnies had formed around the hair of guests past. Each time I returned to my room, I found a dead cricket, a new one every day, hinting, perhaps, at the presence of some sinister insecticide.
Preah Vihear Temple is, obviously, not quite ready for mainstream tourism. During the two days I spent at the temple in October, I saw only four other Westerners, including an unhappy German couple whose day trip from Angkor Wat had been rather more trying than expected, and perhaps 50 or so Cambodian tourists. But intrepid travelers who brave the diabolical (though improving) roads, substandard accommodations and alarming government travel advisories are richly rewarded.
For 40 generations, Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims have trekked to this temple, seeking to ascend toward the holy and the transcendent. Today, the awe-inspiring nature of this Angkorian masterpiece, accentuated by the challenges of getting there, confer on every trip the aura of a pilgrimage.
NAIL-BITING TAXI TRIPS AND A VOLCANO AT YOUR TABLE
GETTING THERE
With the visa-free crossing from Thailand closed for the foreseeable future, getting to Preah Vihear Temple requires battling Cambodia’s famously potholed roads, which are at their worst during the wet season (about June to October).
Share-taxis, which have no set schedule and depart when full, link Sra Em with Siem Reap via the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Anlong Veng ($7.50 a person; 130 miles; three hours) and with the provincial capital of Tbeng Meanchey ($6.50; 65 miles; two hours). The U.S. dollar is widely accepted.
The taxis, usually “jacked-up” Toyota Camrys, carry six or seven passengers in addition to the driver, so if you want the front seat to yourself you’ll have to pay two fares. Ante up six times the single fare and you’ve got yourself a private taxi.
From Sra Em, a ride to Kor Muy on the back of a motorbike will run about $3.75. Then the three-mile ride up the mountain to Preah Vihear Temple, on a concrete road whose gradients will impress even San Franciscans, is $5 by motorbike or $20 to $25 by four-wheel-drive pickup.
WHERE TO STAY
Glassless windows, sinkless bathrooms, towels with the absorptive capacity of a plastic bag, fans that run only when a generator is sputtering outside your window (usually from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.) and laissez-faire housekeeping are, alas, the norm in Sra Em’s guesthouses. I should have stayed at the 25-room Tuol Monysophon (855-99-620-757), which opened this year. A brown, barn-like structure topped with a red tile roof, it has basic rooms downstairs with private baths, mosquito nets and wood-plank floors, for $10; smaller upstairs rooms with shared facilities are $7.50. To get there from the triangular crossroads, head west (toward Anlong Veng) for 500 yards.
WHERE TO EAT
The Preah Vihear area’s best restaurant, hands down, is Sra Em’s Pkay Prek Restaurant (855-12-636-617), an unpretentious complex of open-air, fluorescent-lit pavilions with plenty of geckos. The specialty is phnom pleoung (hill of fire; $3.75), a meat and veggie feast you grill yourself at your table on an aluminum “volcano” suspended above glowing coals.
SAFETY
Before setting out to Preah Vihear Temple, check the Phnom Penh Post (phnompenhpost.com), the Cambodia Daily or other reliable sources to make sure that Thai-Cambodian tensions are not rising.
According to the Cambodian Mine Action Center (www.cmac.org.kh), the immediate vicinity of the temple is now safe, having been cleared in recent years of more than 8,800 anti-personnel mines. However, nearby areas are still heavily mined, so do not, under any circumstances, wander off the footpaths.
WHAT TO READ
The most useful guidebook in English (and Thai) to the temple’s architecture, symbolism and history is “Preah Vihear” by Vittorio Roveda (Bangkok: River Books, 2000), but it may be difficult to find.
My destination was an even more remote Angkor-era complex: Preah Vihear Temple, awesomely perched 1,700 feet above Cambodia’s northern plains, near the country’s border with Thailand. Designated as a Unesco World Heritage Site in 2008 — not without some international controversy — it makes an adventurous alternative to far-better-known Angkor Wat. While several thousand foreign tourists visit the temples of Angkor on a typical day, Preah Vihear Temple gets, on average, just five.
I was traveling with my friend and driver, Hang Vuthy, in a 1991 Toyota Camry with a surprising New York past: according to a window sticker, it had once belonged to a member of the Yonkers Police Captains, Lieutenants and Sergeants Association. Imagining the car in a mid-Atlantic blizzard, it occurred to me that wet-season driving in outback Cambodia is not entirely unlike navigating unplowed snowy side streets. Indeed, for much of our journey we avoided the most treacherous stretches of mire and snaked around potholes of indeterminate depth by religiously following a single serpentine track rendered navigable by earlier cars and trucks.
Preah Vihear Temple — the name means Mountain of the Sacred Temple — is the most spectacularly situated of all Angkorian monuments. Built from the ninth to the 12th centuries atop a peak of the Dangkrek Mountains, it occupies a triangular plateau rising from the Thailand border to a prow-shaped promontory.
An ever-changing architectural, mythological and geological panorama unfolds as visitors progress along the temple’s 2,600-foot-long processional axis, up a series of gently sloping causeways and steep staircases through five gopura, or pavilions, each more sacred than the last.
I began my visit at the bottom of the Monumental Staircase, which, according to the Angkor scholar Vittorio Roveda, “symbolizes the laborious path of faith needed to approach the sacred world of the gods.” The 163 gray sandstone steps, partly carved into the living rock, are flanked by statues of lions and, near the top, two magnificent nagas (seven-headed serpents) facing north toward Thailand. Also intently watching Thai territory were several AK-47-toting Cambodian soldiers in camouflage.
The first structure I came to, called Gopura V by generations of archaeologists, was an airy cruciform construction once topped by wood beams and a terra-cotta tile roof. Many of the stones have tumbled over, but the delicately balanced eastern pediment has survived to become Preah Vihear’s most recognizable icon, appearing on publicity posters, patriotic T-shirts and the new 2,000-riel banknote.
In centuries past, this pavilion was where pilgrims from the plains of Cambodia, having just climbed the steep, mile-long Eastern Staircase (mined and inaccessible for decades but soon to reopen), met their counterparts from what is now Thailand, who had completed a rather less-taxing ascent from the Khorat Plateau.
Alongside a group of saffron-robed monks, I continued north on a majestic, sandstone avenue, 800 feet long, to Gopura IV. There, I came upon a particularly vivid bas-relief depicting the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, a Hindu creation myth in which gods and demons churn the primeval waters to extract the ambrosia of immortality.
Although most of the splendid decorative carvings at Preah Vihear, including this one, depict Vishnu, the temple was originally dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva. In later centuries, it was converted to use as a Buddhist sanctuary, and today many of the visitors are Buddhist pilgrims.
As I continued my ascent, I walked under exquisite lintels and tympanums depicting more scenes from Hindu epics like the Mahabharata, and beneath richly carved double pediments adorned with finials and upturned gable ends — calling cards of Cambodian and Thai architecture to this day. Ancient inscriptions in Khmer and Sanskrit, bearing cryptic details about the history of the temple and the Angkorian kings who built it, were hidden here and there under a patina of lichen.
The temple’s culminating point, geographically and symbolically, is Gopura I, whose mandapa (antechamber) and Central Sanctuary, now a jumbled pile of carved sandstone blocks, are surrounded by galleries that call to mind a French Gothic cloister, except that here the windows are rectilinear and the galleries covered by corbelled vaults. (The Khmers, for all their architectural genius, never mastered the keystone arch.)
The entire structure is inward-looking, its outer walls almost devoid of openings despite the sweeping views just outside. Scholars speculate that while the site was considered holy in part because of its spectacular situation, the ancient architects may have believed that picture windows would distract both priests and pilgrims from their sacred tasks.
As I approached the rocky tip of the promontory, just beyond Gopura I, a breathtaking panorama came into view. Cambodia’s verdant northern plains extended majestically toward the horizon, and in the distance I could just make out Phnom Kulen, about 65 miles to the southwest, where the Khmer Empire was founded in A.D. 802. (Angkor itself lay hidden in the haze, 88 miles away.)
To the east, toward Laos, and the west, the Dangkrek Mountains stretched into the distance in a series of serrated bluffs. Looking north, almost everything I could see was in Thailand, rendered remote and mysterious by its inaccessibility.
Thailand ruled much of northwestern Cambodia, including Preah Vihear Temple, from the late 18th century until 1907, when the French colonial administration forced the Thais to withdraw to the current international frontier; Cambodian sovereignty over Preah Vihear was confirmed by the International Court of Justice in 1962.
Thailand, despite unresolved land claims, initially supported Cambodia’s Unesco bid for World Heritage status, but the temple soon became a pawn in Thai and Cambodian domestic politics, unleashing nationalist passions in both countries.
In July 2008, according to Cambodian authorities, Thai soldiers intruded into Cambodian territory near the temple. The Thai government denied that any border violations had taken place. Since then, a total of at least seven soldiers from both sides have been killed in intermittent exchanges of fire, according to local news reports. At the time of my visit, though, the frontier had been quiet for several months.
Curious about what the standoff actually looked like, I asked my guide, conveniently a moonlighting army officer, if I could get a glimpse of the Thais. He took me to the bottom of the Monumental Staircase, where I could hear the distant sounds of war — air-raid sirens and shooting — but the combat was taking place on a tiny television, which off-duty soldiers were watching with rapt attention.
We walked along a forest trail past a volleyball court and trenches, passing soldiers in hammocks with their wives stealing a moment of intimacy in an encampment with little privacy, to a forest clearing with a bamboo table at the center.
About 20 yards in front of us stood a line of neatly built bunkers; uniformed men could be seen among the dark green sandbags. “So those are Cambodian soldiers?” I asked, trying to get my bearings. “No,” my guide answered, “those are Thais. Over there” — he turned 180 degrees and pointed to a line of bunkers 20 yards in the other direction — “are Cambodians.” The table, I realized, marked the midpoint of no-man’s land.
The Cambodians’ front-line bunkers, made of disintegrating sandbags sprouting grass, were shaded by blue and green tarpaulins and surrounded by orderly gardens. Their raised observation post, topped by a thatched roof, looked as if it might have been on loan from “Gilligan’s Island.” I was in the middle of a very un-Korean Panmunjom, a laid-back, tropical version of Christmas 1914 on the Western Front.
I soon learned that the Cambodian soldiers stationed there call the site Sambok Kmom, or beehive, because, they say, the area’s many wild bees leave Cambodians unmolested but set upon any Thai who encroaches on Cambodian land. Moved by national feeling, domestic tourists wearing krama (traditional checked scarves that serve as something of a Cambodian national symbol) wandered by, distributing cigarettes and other morale-boosting gifts to the soldiers who were deployed to help the bees protect Cambodian sovereignty.
Around the clearing, soldiers from both sides, unarmed and without body armor or helmets, were relaxing in front of their own front-line bunkers. Cambodian officers seemed to find the bamboo table, shaded by trees tall enough to let breezes through, especially congenial. A few paces away, the Thais had strung a hammock between trees, and one soldier, lounging in a white T-shirt, black combat pants and black military boots, was engrossed in a cellphone call.
Despite the apparent tranquillity, I knew that if the order were given, the men on both sides of the invisible line would not hesitate to shoot. In fact, many of the Cambodian troops stationed around Preah Vihear are battle-hardened former Khmer Rouge fighters. For now, though, relations are casual and, I was told, some wary friendships have developed.
The best staging point for a visit to Preah Vihear Temple is Sra Em (also spelled Sa Em), 19 miles by road from the temple. Two years ago, it was a sleepy crossroads hamlet with a single grimy restaurant and one rundown guesthouse. These days, in the wake of the area’s military buildup, it feels like a Gold Rush boomtown, with haphazardly parked four-wheel-drives instead of tethered horses; karaoke bars sporting pink fluorescent lamps and colored lights, instead of saloons; and the gleanings of Cambodia’s recently doubled defense budget, instead of gold nuggets glinting in the stream. Armed men in camouflage uniforms abound.
Sra Em’s accommodation options are rudimentary, to put it politely. My room’s star amenity was a cold-water spigot for filling the plastic bucket used both to bathe and to flush, and below the cheap plastic mirror and its public access comb, dust bunnies had formed around the hair of guests past. Each time I returned to my room, I found a dead cricket, a new one every day, hinting, perhaps, at the presence of some sinister insecticide.
Preah Vihear Temple is, obviously, not quite ready for mainstream tourism. During the two days I spent at the temple in October, I saw only four other Westerners, including an unhappy German couple whose day trip from Angkor Wat had been rather more trying than expected, and perhaps 50 or so Cambodian tourists. But intrepid travelers who brave the diabolical (though improving) roads, substandard accommodations and alarming government travel advisories are richly rewarded.
For 40 generations, Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims have trekked to this temple, seeking to ascend toward the holy and the transcendent. Today, the awe-inspiring nature of this Angkorian masterpiece, accentuated by the challenges of getting there, confer on every trip the aura of a pilgrimage.
NAIL-BITING TAXI TRIPS AND A VOLCANO AT YOUR TABLE
GETTING THERE
With the visa-free crossing from Thailand closed for the foreseeable future, getting to Preah Vihear Temple requires battling Cambodia’s famously potholed roads, which are at their worst during the wet season (about June to October).
Share-taxis, which have no set schedule and depart when full, link Sra Em with Siem Reap via the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Anlong Veng ($7.50 a person; 130 miles; three hours) and with the provincial capital of Tbeng Meanchey ($6.50; 65 miles; two hours). The U.S. dollar is widely accepted.
The taxis, usually “jacked-up” Toyota Camrys, carry six or seven passengers in addition to the driver, so if you want the front seat to yourself you’ll have to pay two fares. Ante up six times the single fare and you’ve got yourself a private taxi.
From Sra Em, a ride to Kor Muy on the back of a motorbike will run about $3.75. Then the three-mile ride up the mountain to Preah Vihear Temple, on a concrete road whose gradients will impress even San Franciscans, is $5 by motorbike or $20 to $25 by four-wheel-drive pickup.
WHERE TO STAY
Glassless windows, sinkless bathrooms, towels with the absorptive capacity of a plastic bag, fans that run only when a generator is sputtering outside your window (usually from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.) and laissez-faire housekeeping are, alas, the norm in Sra Em’s guesthouses. I should have stayed at the 25-room Tuol Monysophon (855-99-620-757), which opened this year. A brown, barn-like structure topped with a red tile roof, it has basic rooms downstairs with private baths, mosquito nets and wood-plank floors, for $10; smaller upstairs rooms with shared facilities are $7.50. To get there from the triangular crossroads, head west (toward Anlong Veng) for 500 yards.
WHERE TO EAT
The Preah Vihear area’s best restaurant, hands down, is Sra Em’s Pkay Prek Restaurant (855-12-636-617), an unpretentious complex of open-air, fluorescent-lit pavilions with plenty of geckos. The specialty is phnom pleoung (hill of fire; $3.75), a meat and veggie feast you grill yourself at your table on an aluminum “volcano” suspended above glowing coals.
SAFETY
Before setting out to Preah Vihear Temple, check the Phnom Penh Post (phnompenhpost.com), the Cambodia Daily or other reliable sources to make sure that Thai-Cambodian tensions are not rising.
According to the Cambodian Mine Action Center (www.cmac.org.kh), the immediate vicinity of the temple is now safe, having been cleared in recent years of more than 8,800 anti-personnel mines. However, nearby areas are still heavily mined, so do not, under any circumstances, wander off the footpaths.
WHAT TO READ
The most useful guidebook in English (and Thai) to the temple’s architecture, symbolism and history is “Preah Vihear” by Vittorio Roveda (Bangkok: River Books, 2000), but it may be difficult to find.
Let Freedom Ring in 2010
This article was written f0r the approaching new year of 2007, but it is still relevant three years on. I heartily agree that the four freedoms are apt expressions for a new year's resolution.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
KI Media
"National New Year Resolution: Upholding the Four Freedoms"
First published in January 2007 (reprinted in January 2008) in The Phnom Penh Post and Khmer translation in Koh Santepheap, as part of the Voice of Justice columns. Rather than progressing, Cambodia is regressing on these four freedoms, most notably with the re-stripping of parliamentary immunity of the political opposition leader and the crackdown on democracy and human rights activists. As we pray for the safety of those unjustly arrested in Svay Rieng, let us be reminded of Gandhi's words: "An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so." Another, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." And also, "Freedom is never dear at any price. It is the breath of life. What would a man not pay for living?" The lessons we learned from the American civil rights movement which resulted in Barak Obama becoming president are summed up by Martin Luther King, Jr., "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." Now, more than ever, we need to be reminded and uphold these four freedoms here in oppressed Cambodia.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations reminds us that whoever we are - rich or poor, farmers or city dwellers, white or black, male or female, Buddhist or Christian, Khmer or Vietnamese or African or American or French - whoever, it doesn't matter - each of us innately yearns for the freedom of expression, the freedom of belief, the freedom from fear and the freedom from want These four freedoms encapsulate what it means to be fundamentally human and express the highest aspirations of the common person throughout all ages. These four freedoms form the cornerstone of a democracy and are fundamental to social development, whatever level of progress of that society or nation.
We are starting a new year and at a time like this, it is instructive to reflect and re-commit ourselves to fundamentals, beginning with the upholding of these four freedoms. In the ten months that I have been at the helm of the Center for Social Development (CSD), I have witnessed that these four freedoms are not yet sufficiently present in current Cambodian society as reflected in the persistent angst of the common Cambodian.
• Freedom of Expression In 2006, we have witnessed our fundamental freedom to express our thoughts, desires, opinions and ideas curbed and suppressed, sometimes violently, sometimes through ill-constructed laws. We witnessed grass-roots human rights activists imprisoned, villagers protesting illegal land-grabbing suppressed violently, garment workers killed or wounded. We were aghast that members of the National Assembly should vote to limit their own ability to debate ideas (or as more memorably put by US Ambassador Joseph A Mussomeli, ''castrate themselves") and thus downgrade the quality of their duties and responsibilities. And as we go into 2007, our freedom to expression continues to be fundamentally inhibited by the criminalizing of defamation.
• Freedom of Belief This freedom to believe according to the dictates of one's conscience exists but is limited by the lack of other freedoms. Currently in Cambodia, it is true a Khmer is free to believe (in law and in practice) in whatever religion, whatever political party, whatever ideas. However, this freedom of belief is meaningless if this belief cannot be expressed or if this belief is inhibited by fear,
• Freedom from Fear Fear is the worst enemy of freedom. Fear robs a person of opportunities. Fear oppresses. Fear inhibits. In Cambodia, fear thickly pervades the air and consumes the hearts and minds of Khmers. It can be said a culture of fear rules Cambodia and Cambodians. To a large degree, Aung San Suu Kyi is correct in her observation that it is not power that corrupts but fear.
Courage is the only response to fear. As with any other disposition, courage is only fixed in us through practice. As Aristotle notes in the Nicomachean Ethics almost 2,400 years ago, we become brave only by doing brave acts: "By being habituated to despise things that are terrible and to stand our ground against them we become brave, and it is when we have become so that we shall be most able to stand our ground against them." Moreover, when we encounter obstacles, let us be reminded that they are only invitations to courage. Fear destroys a person's spirit whereas courage builds a person and in turn society, and encourages other freedoms. In this New Year, let us now resolve to be more courageous; let us not be stilled by fear
• Freedom from Want Poverty is living in want; poverty deprives a Cambodian of dignity, opportunities and human potential I believe one of the greatest crimes is to deprive a person of her human potential Here, I grieve the loss of human potential on a monumental scale.
Most Cambodians live in poverty, many of them in abject poverty. According to a UNDP estimate for 2006, one in three (approximately 4.7 million) Cambodians live on less than 2000 Riels (50 cents) a day.
The necessary but not sufficient first steps toward combating poverty must include quality education for Cambodians. We know that the Cambodian education system is in crisis. Corruption pervades. Teachers are woefully underpaid a non-livable wage of US$30 a month and are tasked with educating an average of 55 students per class with woefully inadequate teaching materials. What does it say about political will and generally about our society when we have a high school teacher who is surprised to learn that are different time zones, that when it is 9 a.m. in Cambodia, it is not like this all over the world? This is analogous to thinking that the world is flat; it was acceptable to do so in 1492 but not in 2007,
Hence, let us as a nation make a New Year resolution to the protection and upholding of these four freedoms: freedom of expression, freedom of belief, freedom from fear and freedom from want. They are the highest aspirations of the common Cambodian.
Theary C Seng
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Teachers reinstated after extorting "too much" from pupils
Dec 8, 2009
DPA
The director of Bak Touk primary school in Phnom Penh said the school had given its teachers permission to charge each pupil 500 riel (12 cents) per day, but claimed the suspended teachers regularly charged twice that amount.
'I repeatedly warned them about taking (too much) money from students, but they didn't listen,' school director Yim Sokheng told the Cambodia Daily newspaper.
Under Cambodian law, primary and secondary education is free, but low civil service wages mean teachers either take other jobs to make ends meet or extort money from students.
Yim Sokheng told the newspaper that the school's 166 teachers are paid cash every day by students. The 500-riel daily limit was imposed following a directive from the Education Ministry.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Help Build A School In Cambodia, And Maybe Win Something, Too!
My friend, CanCan, hosts the blog Mom Most Traveled, and is participating in the Passports with Purpose, annual event to raise $13,000 to build a school in Cambodia through American Assistance for Cambodia. And anything that helps education in Cambodia is a big CHECK-PLUS in my grade book!
For every $10 that is donated, you are entered to win some of the fabulous prizes available by the various sponsors and blog hosts! Check out the prizes here.
For every $10 that is donated, you are entered to win some of the fabulous prizes available by the various sponsors and blog hosts! Check out the prizes here.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Transparency needed
Cambodia's corruption index improves by a hair ... but still near the bottom, i.e. one of the most corrupt country in the world
Wednesday, November 18, 2009KI-Media
Transparency International issued its 2009 Corruption Perception Index (CPI). Cambodia's rank moved to 158 out of a total of 180, a slight improvement over 2008 when Cambodia ranked 166. Among ASEAN countries, Cambodia ranks lowest along with Laos.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Glowing bugs could find landmines
Monday, 16 November 2009
BBC News
Bacteria which glow green in the presence of explosives could provide a cheap and safe way to find hidden landmines, Edinburgh scientists claim.
The bugs can be mixed into a colourless solution, which forms green patches when sprayed onto ground where mines are buried.
Edinburgh University said the microbes could be dropped by air onto danger areas.
Within a few hours, they would indicate where the explosives can be found.
The scientists produced the bacteria using a new technique called BioBricking, which manipulates packages of DNA.
Alistair Elfick, from the university's school of engineering, who supervised the student-led project, said: "This anti-mine sensor is a great example of how innovation in science can be of benefit to wider society.
"It also demonstrates how new scientific techniques can allow molecules to be designed for a specific purpose."
Each year, between 15,000 and 20,000 people are killed or injured by landmines and unexploded ordnance, according to the charity Handicap International.
Some 87 countries are riddled with minefields, including Somalia, Mozambique, Cambodia, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The bugs can be mixed into a colourless solution, which forms green patches when sprayed onto ground where mines are buried.
Edinburgh University said the microbes could be dropped by air onto danger areas.
Within a few hours, they would indicate where the explosives can be found.
The scientists produced the bacteria using a new technique called BioBricking, which manipulates packages of DNA.
Alistair Elfick, from the university's school of engineering, who supervised the student-led project, said: "This anti-mine sensor is a great example of how innovation in science can be of benefit to wider society.
"It also demonstrates how new scientific techniques can allow molecules to be designed for a specific purpose."
Each year, between 15,000 and 20,000 people are killed or injured by landmines and unexploded ordnance, according to the charity Handicap International.
Some 87 countries are riddled with minefields, including Somalia, Mozambique, Cambodia, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Follow up from the American family reported by Khmer Intelligence
Posted: 15 Nov 2009 10:39 AM PST
On 14 November 2009, Khmer Intelligence published the following report:
Part 2: Below is a follow up from the family:
---------------
Dear Khmer Friends,
Thank you everyone for your patience with us, considering the ramifications of our story.
If you your site could use the information in this letter to make a difference in the corruption rampant in the medical field in Cambodia, please contact me to discuss how we can cooperate. This is a bit long, but please bear with me.
We came to Cambodia to save lives, but because of our outspoken stance againt this corruption, we became targets and nearly lost our lives.
Yes, we managed to escape Cambodia, thanks to supporters of our NGO who used their personal funds and air miles to arrange a ticket. We have nothing left but our suitcases, and must start over here in the US. Cara is still unwell, and will require continued medical care for some time.
For your patience I'll provide you the details, but please be aware this is not a simple story of another assault. As they say in Cambodia, there is little random violence. There IS violence, but nearly all of it is for a reason. It's the reason for the attack that had us so worried.
The initial details of the attack are outlined in the forwarded letter below. It wasn't until a few days later that we put the pieces together to realize this wasn't random.
Since we arrived in Cambodia this past March, we had been working at a small clinic in Kampong Thom Province. At the request of National Assembly Representative from Kampong Thom, His Excellency Nhem Thavy, we were given a closed down Community Health Center. Using our own funds, we renovated and restored the clinic. We were incredibly successful, seeing up to 100 patients a day, who often came hundreds of K's and waited days to see us, as we were the only reliable and available care in the provinces. It reached the point we were getting busloads of sick people arriving daily from past Siem Reap, Kampong Cham, and kampong Channg. As long as we were spending our own cash, we were fine. We had opened on the advice and request of the Ministry of Health while awaiting our MOU to be finalized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We had thought that it would be completed shortly, but as of Oct 12, the day of the attack, it had not yet been approved. We had been told by many other NGO's that a significant "donation"(bribe, specifically cash, a nice camera, or laptop) needed to be paid to get our MOU cleared, but we refused to pay. Therefore, we were told repeatedly by the MFA that our MOU wasn't good enough- basically our budget was under $100,000- too small for their % cut. We were given odd reasons, like we dated it before it was signed, then we removed the date, then it was declined because it didn't have a date. We had used the old Min of Health Logo. We used blue ink on the stamps, and red ink is supposed to be used prior to approval. Then, they didn't like our date. Then, our typeface was too small. We kept making these ridiculous modifications to appease them, until finally, "the ink on our logo was too bright". It reached the point the Secretary General Leng Peng Long, Vice President Nguon Nhel, the Assembly President and finally Minister of Health H.E. Mom BunHeng all appealed to the MFA and we still never got approved. And all this time we were still saving the lives of 100 people a day from our little clinic.
That was the big corruption we were dealing with, but not the most deadly. It was the little guys who we believe came after us. In the Baray-Santouk referral district of Kampong Thom Dept of Health, there are 19 health care centers just like ours. Almost like our, that is. They are all boarded up, shut down, and non-functioning. Some see a few patients, but not many people go to them because they have no medicine and no staff. At the Baray-Santouk Referral Hospital, there are 10 paid doctors and 37 paid nurses on staff- but me made a practice to bring by every international visitor and challenge them to find a health care worker on the grounds. Not once in 8 months was someone working there. They average 3 to 5 patients a day, and most are never given the medications they need. We would often visit there, and on occasion gave money to the patients to catch a bus to Siem Reap so they could actually get treatment- if you didn't have $50 cash, you couldn't take one of the three empty ambulances sitting there.
But it wasn't the lack of treatment and staff that was the big problem. Each of the other 18 closed down health Care centers in the District were reporting to the Regional Director Dr. Meas Cham that they were treating 900 patients a month. The medicine for these imaginary patients was being shipped there, stolen, and sold by the staff. Every week we would submit our legitimate medication requests, only to be told "we don't have any". Our patients were dying over 50 cents worth of Cipro, and we were quickly running out of our own funds to purchase medicine. We finally confronted Dr Meas Cham and his Supervisor, Dr Vao Lough Kuhn, Kampong Thom regional Director, over this issue, and were told we were going to be reported (to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs!) over our outrageous behavior.
Every time we demanded we be sent the even the basic medication that they were already listing as being distributed to us, we were told they had just run out, or that our "MOU wasn't completed so they didn't have to send us anything". We did not receive one dose of vaccines for 6 months when we were seeing over 1800 patients a month. They had run out every single month. At one point we contacted the head of the Cambodian Red Cross, HE Ho Noun, who paid a visit to our clinic. She was very impressed, and we had a big media day, but still no medicines came. Every now and then we would get a box with 10 IV's, and a few bottles of the stuff that no one could sell (Vitamin A and Birth Control Pills), but never Paracetemol or Antibiotics.
The situation was becoming critical, and we began to put more pressure on the district. We staged a visit with "simulated" visitors from World Health, who asked about why vaccines weren't being delivered. Dr Meas Cham walked out on them, so we called some friends and were arranging an actual aduitor come visit to help out. AT the end of September, we had to close the clinic. We were out of our personal money, and without our MOU, could not even apply for grants and loans. We did get some funding from the Camkids Charity (Dominique and Benita Sharpe, very nice people), but could not operate without adequate supplies. We hoped closing for a few days would put pressure on the MFA and MOH to get our papers completed so we could operate. That's when the top level of the Nat'l Assembly began to put on the pressure. It looked like we might finally get it done, and the local Min of Health would be forced to give us the required medications.
And that was precisely when Cara was attacked.
You see, a lot of people were making a lot of money off of those stolen medications. A lot of staff had very nice Camrys, and a Lexus or two, and without that extra cash, they could lose them. Most importantly, if two westerners could legitimately open and operate a clinic, and treat 2000 patients a month with almost no money, then they might be expected to improve THEIR standards a little bit.
So we were battling corruption everywhere- the MFA at the top, the MOH in the middle, and the thieving doctors at the bottom. This was never our intent- we just wanted our medicine so we could save lives.
We asked for help, and told of the corruption- asked for help from the Red Cross, from Parliament, from UNICEF and World Health, but it seems everyone has their finger in the pie, and everyone had a lot to lose by us succeeding. We were succeeding, and with a completed MOU would have the clout to get around these hurdles.
What's also implied is that many of the larger NGOs in Cambodia are aware of this situation as well- we sat through endless lectures on Child and Maternal Health from UNICEF, when it struck us that they were getting their statistics from the same people who were forging patient records to get enough medicine to sell so they could make their car payments. How many children die every year in the jungles? Who really knows, because I swear every statistic is made up by the other 18 boarded up health care centers that never actually treated patients. Take a drive up Road 6 one day, or any of the tiny villages, and spend 5 minutes visiting the little "Blue H" signs. Do you see 900 patients a month being treated there? Maybe at Sihanouk inPP or Angkor in SR, but not where these statistics are coming from. We can tell you that despite the MOH charging 28000 Riels to deliver a baby, the midwives are charging them $75, so they never come, deliver alone at home, and die a few days later from the jagged episiotomies, the inevitable blood loss or infection, or the tetanus that follows. But UNICEF doesn't see that, they just take the fabricated numbers, spend $3 million on writing the nice powerpoint report, and never see the dying children who never got the stolen tetanus shots.
Someone needed to stop us. So we got what they consider "a warning" in Cambodia. Those details are outlined below.
We are grateful we got out alive- Cara was never meant to survive this attack. We are most grateful it wasn't our children (Samantha, 13, and Moira, 10) who were injured- we don't know how we would have recovered from that.
So we hid for a week, and got a donated flight out of there. We stayed a few days in NY, then a week in Ohio to get Cara medical treatment near her family. We are finally back in South Carolina, and hope to put our lives back together. We will keep our NGO "open" long enough to recover some of the costs for getting home and Cara's medical expenses, and would be grateful for any donations to our website www.sharethehealthcambodia.org
We hope at some point to find the right people to go to with this information. As you know, Cambodia receives close to $1 BILLION in foreign aid, much of it for health care. When the world discovers NONE of that money or medicine actually makes it to the people who need it, things may change. Even telling this story puts us in more danger, but we came to Cambodia to help the people, not to buy Camrys for corrupt doctors. When Ho Noun came to visit us, the staff at Baray-Santouk heard she was coming and washed the walls in the front rooms, and hired people from the village to pose as patients so it looked like they were functional. It was a good ploy, because no one ever really checked. Somehow and somewhere, we'll find the right people who are interested in where all that money goes. Maybe then, the people who need the help can actually get it.
Several people have asked me if I'd ever consider returning to Cambodia. I say yes, with a bullet proof vest and a team of inspectors and auditors from the UN intent on cleaning up corruption. I personally saw too many children dying over 50 cents worth of antibiotics while the people that were getting these millions to care for them were laughing and sipping coffee.
We were careless in speaking openly about corruption while we were still in Cambodia. That was our mistake. When they tried to kill my wife, they didn't get the job done. That was their mistake.
James Garcia
Share the Health Cambodia
On 14 November 2009, Khmer Intelligence published the following report:
Part 2: Below is a follow up from the family:
---------------
Dear Khmer Friends,
Thank you everyone for your patience with us, considering the ramifications of our story.
If you your site could use the information in this letter to make a difference in the corruption rampant in the medical field in Cambodia, please contact me to discuss how we can cooperate. This is a bit long, but please bear with me.
We came to Cambodia to save lives, but because of our outspoken stance againt this corruption, we became targets and nearly lost our lives.
Yes, we managed to escape Cambodia, thanks to supporters of our NGO who used their personal funds and air miles to arrange a ticket. We have nothing left but our suitcases, and must start over here in the US. Cara is still unwell, and will require continued medical care for some time.
For your patience I'll provide you the details, but please be aware this is not a simple story of another assault. As they say in Cambodia, there is little random violence. There IS violence, but nearly all of it is for a reason. It's the reason for the attack that had us so worried.
The initial details of the attack are outlined in the forwarded letter below. It wasn't until a few days later that we put the pieces together to realize this wasn't random.
Since we arrived in Cambodia this past March, we had been working at a small clinic in Kampong Thom Province. At the request of National Assembly Representative from Kampong Thom, His Excellency Nhem Thavy, we were given a closed down Community Health Center. Using our own funds, we renovated and restored the clinic. We were incredibly successful, seeing up to 100 patients a day, who often came hundreds of K's and waited days to see us, as we were the only reliable and available care in the provinces. It reached the point we were getting busloads of sick people arriving daily from past Siem Reap, Kampong Cham, and kampong Channg. As long as we were spending our own cash, we were fine. We had opened on the advice and request of the Ministry of Health while awaiting our MOU to be finalized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We had thought that it would be completed shortly, but as of Oct 12, the day of the attack, it had not yet been approved. We had been told by many other NGO's that a significant "donation"(bribe, specifically cash, a nice camera, or laptop) needed to be paid to get our MOU cleared, but we refused to pay. Therefore, we were told repeatedly by the MFA that our MOU wasn't good enough- basically our budget was under $100,000- too small for their % cut. We were given odd reasons, like we dated it before it was signed, then we removed the date, then it was declined because it didn't have a date. We had used the old Min of Health Logo. We used blue ink on the stamps, and red ink is supposed to be used prior to approval. Then, they didn't like our date. Then, our typeface was too small. We kept making these ridiculous modifications to appease them, until finally, "the ink on our logo was too bright". It reached the point the Secretary General Leng Peng Long, Vice President Nguon Nhel, the Assembly President and finally Minister of Health H.E. Mom BunHeng all appealed to the MFA and we still never got approved. And all this time we were still saving the lives of 100 people a day from our little clinic.
That was the big corruption we were dealing with, but not the most deadly. It was the little guys who we believe came after us. In the Baray-Santouk referral district of Kampong Thom Dept of Health, there are 19 health care centers just like ours. Almost like our, that is. They are all boarded up, shut down, and non-functioning. Some see a few patients, but not many people go to them because they have no medicine and no staff. At the Baray-Santouk Referral Hospital, there are 10 paid doctors and 37 paid nurses on staff- but me made a practice to bring by every international visitor and challenge them to find a health care worker on the grounds. Not once in 8 months was someone working there. They average 3 to 5 patients a day, and most are never given the medications they need. We would often visit there, and on occasion gave money to the patients to catch a bus to Siem Reap so they could actually get treatment- if you didn't have $50 cash, you couldn't take one of the three empty ambulances sitting there.
But it wasn't the lack of treatment and staff that was the big problem. Each of the other 18 closed down health Care centers in the District were reporting to the Regional Director Dr. Meas Cham that they were treating 900 patients a month. The medicine for these imaginary patients was being shipped there, stolen, and sold by the staff. Every week we would submit our legitimate medication requests, only to be told "we don't have any". Our patients were dying over 50 cents worth of Cipro, and we were quickly running out of our own funds to purchase medicine. We finally confronted Dr Meas Cham and his Supervisor, Dr Vao Lough Kuhn, Kampong Thom regional Director, over this issue, and were told we were going to be reported (to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs!) over our outrageous behavior.
Every time we demanded we be sent the even the basic medication that they were already listing as being distributed to us, we were told they had just run out, or that our "MOU wasn't completed so they didn't have to send us anything". We did not receive one dose of vaccines for 6 months when we were seeing over 1800 patients a month. They had run out every single month. At one point we contacted the head of the Cambodian Red Cross, HE Ho Noun, who paid a visit to our clinic. She was very impressed, and we had a big media day, but still no medicines came. Every now and then we would get a box with 10 IV's, and a few bottles of the stuff that no one could sell (Vitamin A and Birth Control Pills), but never Paracetemol or Antibiotics.
The situation was becoming critical, and we began to put more pressure on the district. We staged a visit with "simulated" visitors from World Health, who asked about why vaccines weren't being delivered. Dr Meas Cham walked out on them, so we called some friends and were arranging an actual aduitor come visit to help out. AT the end of September, we had to close the clinic. We were out of our personal money, and without our MOU, could not even apply for grants and loans. We did get some funding from the Camkids Charity (Dominique and Benita Sharpe, very nice people), but could not operate without adequate supplies. We hoped closing for a few days would put pressure on the MFA and MOH to get our papers completed so we could operate. That's when the top level of the Nat'l Assembly began to put on the pressure. It looked like we might finally get it done, and the local Min of Health would be forced to give us the required medications.
And that was precisely when Cara was attacked.
You see, a lot of people were making a lot of money off of those stolen medications. A lot of staff had very nice Camrys, and a Lexus or two, and without that extra cash, they could lose them. Most importantly, if two westerners could legitimately open and operate a clinic, and treat 2000 patients a month with almost no money, then they might be expected to improve THEIR standards a little bit.
So we were battling corruption everywhere- the MFA at the top, the MOH in the middle, and the thieving doctors at the bottom. This was never our intent- we just wanted our medicine so we could save lives.
We asked for help, and told of the corruption- asked for help from the Red Cross, from Parliament, from UNICEF and World Health, but it seems everyone has their finger in the pie, and everyone had a lot to lose by us succeeding. We were succeeding, and with a completed MOU would have the clout to get around these hurdles.
What's also implied is that many of the larger NGOs in Cambodia are aware of this situation as well- we sat through endless lectures on Child and Maternal Health from UNICEF, when it struck us that they were getting their statistics from the same people who were forging patient records to get enough medicine to sell so they could make their car payments. How many children die every year in the jungles? Who really knows, because I swear every statistic is made up by the other 18 boarded up health care centers that never actually treated patients. Take a drive up Road 6 one day, or any of the tiny villages, and spend 5 minutes visiting the little "Blue H" signs. Do you see 900 patients a month being treated there? Maybe at Sihanouk inPP or Angkor in SR, but not where these statistics are coming from. We can tell you that despite the MOH charging 28000 Riels to deliver a baby, the midwives are charging them $75, so they never come, deliver alone at home, and die a few days later from the jagged episiotomies, the inevitable blood loss or infection, or the tetanus that follows. But UNICEF doesn't see that, they just take the fabricated numbers, spend $3 million on writing the nice powerpoint report, and never see the dying children who never got the stolen tetanus shots.
Someone needed to stop us. So we got what they consider "a warning" in Cambodia. Those details are outlined below.
We are grateful we got out alive- Cara was never meant to survive this attack. We are most grateful it wasn't our children (Samantha, 13, and Moira, 10) who were injured- we don't know how we would have recovered from that.
So we hid for a week, and got a donated flight out of there. We stayed a few days in NY, then a week in Ohio to get Cara medical treatment near her family. We are finally back in South Carolina, and hope to put our lives back together. We will keep our NGO "open" long enough to recover some of the costs for getting home and Cara's medical expenses, and would be grateful for any donations to our website www.sharethehealthcambodia.org
We hope at some point to find the right people to go to with this information. As you know, Cambodia receives close to $1 BILLION in foreign aid, much of it for health care. When the world discovers NONE of that money or medicine actually makes it to the people who need it, things may change. Even telling this story puts us in more danger, but we came to Cambodia to help the people, not to buy Camrys for corrupt doctors. When Ho Noun came to visit us, the staff at Baray-Santouk heard she was coming and washed the walls in the front rooms, and hired people from the village to pose as patients so it looked like they were functional. It was a good ploy, because no one ever really checked. Somehow and somewhere, we'll find the right people who are interested in where all that money goes. Maybe then, the people who need the help can actually get it.
Several people have asked me if I'd ever consider returning to Cambodia. I say yes, with a bullet proof vest and a team of inspectors and auditors from the UN intent on cleaning up corruption. I personally saw too many children dying over 50 cents worth of antibiotics while the people that were getting these millions to care for them were laughing and sipping coffee.
We were careless in speaking openly about corruption while we were still in Cambodia. That was our mistake. When they tried to kill my wife, they didn't get the job done. That was their mistake.
James Garcia
Share the Health Cambodia
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Added On May 1, 2009 CNN's Dan Rivers profiles members of the Khmer Rouge, as they face justice before a U.N.-backed trial.
Part 2
Part 3