Buddhism and the Party Line in Cambodia
An interview with a disillusioned monk
By Prah Sokha (with Antonio Graceffo)
Prah Sokha has been a Khmer monk, off and on, for more than ten years. He once left the monkhood because he felt the Cambodian monks had strayed from a pure form of Buddhism, in order to follow the mandates of the Cambodian government (CPP).
He feels that the influence of politics, greed and the modern world have perverted the religion. He complains about the lack of discipline among the monks and stringent government controls on the temples' teachings. Finally, he fears that as the people move further and further away from Buddhist values, the social order of the country could collapse. He sees the monks as being the only ones who could save the people, bringing them back to their core beliefs. But he asks the question, how can corrupt monks be expected to save the Cambodian people?
According to Prah Sokha:
Theravada Buddhism has played an important role in Khmer society for centuries. Khmer people decided to adhere to Buddhism since it was a religion that required the followers to observe strict principles and follow rigid precepts. They paid the highest respect to the people who became Buddhist monks.
Historically, Khmer people have taken the monastery as their refuge, as well as their training centre, where they could develop both their mind and their spirit. Buddhism is one of the strongest influences on Khmer culture and tradition.
In the past, monks fulfilled essential roles in traditional Khmer society, such as teachers and healers. In ancient times, they were the practitioners whose role was closest to that of modern psychiatrists. The monks provided kindly counseling and encouragement to the laity. They helped develop the country, resolving problems that occurred in Khmer society and interceding between the government and the people. A god example is Prah Samdach Song Chhuan Nat, who was the top hierarchical monk and an advisor to King Sihannuk during the 1950s and 1960s.
The Present: Cambodian Buddhism is in Decline
After the Khmer Rouge regime was finished, Buddhism was reborn, and started developing from day to day. But the development came only from outside forms of Buddhism. They new influences focused only on the constructions. They didn't know what the core of Buddhism was. The roles played by the Khmer Buddhist monks in Khmer society were greatly decreased. The Grand Patriarch, the ranking Buddhist monk, who has traditionally been an advisor to the king, lost most if not all of his influence and power. The monks themselves lost their focus and became selfish. They don't dare to share what they have in order to help Buddhism.
Why Khmer Buddhism is in decline:
Practitioners, Buddhist Monks, novices and laity, are not strict in Vinaya, monastic discipline. They are only attracted to modern materialism such as motorcycles, cars, phones, televisions, and electronic entertainment. They concentrate on earning money in anyway way possible, even engaging in illegal or immoral behavior. They are crazy with money at the moment. They don't spend money in the right way.
"Some monks in PP are gambling; betting on football matches. CamboSix centers have opened nationwide, allowing laity and monks to gamble on football matches around the world." says Phra Nhean, living in Thailand 8 years.
The monks suffer from a limited belief system, because they don't study and find out the deep core of Buddhism. So, they are reluctant to commit to the discipline of the religion. Monks don't have enough knowledge to explain Buddha's teaching to the laity.
The Monk Educational System in Cambodia is not up to standard, and the qualifications are not accepted by any university. Even if you complete your monk education, you must study again from beginning. I, Prah Sokha, was also forced to do this. I completed secondary school, then I became a monk and studied the same grade again. It takes us a long time to complete our studies because we have to do everything twice.
Recently, a monk decree was issued, stating that monks who have completed their studies in a foreign country will not be allowed to work in the government or monk hierarchy. I don't understand why they are so crazy.
"They don't want us to grab their power," says Phra Minh, a Khmer monk who recently went to Thailand for education. "They are afraid because they are ignorant, unlearned, and belligerent."
Some monks who need power, try to have a secrete relationship with government officers of the CPP. The monks bow their heads down to the government and flatter them. Some even dare to kneel down to receive money from Hun Sen. Some agree to work as servants. This is all wrong for Buddhist monks!
Outside Threats to Khmer Buddhism
Other religions, Islam, and Christianity, are penetrating into Cambodia everyday. They are trying to use money to buy the people to practice their religions by offering gifts or cash to the poor and then force them, behind the scenes covert. Buddhist monks have not shown any interest in this situation.
I think if All of Cambodian monks are still sleeping in ignorance don't look at the neighboring countries, don't upgrade their thought or idea, Buddhism will possibly vanish or disappear in the nearest future. And there will be a religious war in Cambodia, no longer, no sooner
 Antonio Graceffo has been embedded with the Shan State Army inside of Burma. This article is part of the "In Shanland" project. To raise awareness about the plight of the Shan people Antonio will release one print article and one video per week for a year. He is giving these media away for free to ensure that they will reach the largest audience. You can watch all of the Shan videos released to date on Antonion on YouTube.
Antonio is self-funded. If you wish to contribute to the "In Shanland" film project, you can do so through paypal, through the Burma page of his website.
You can contact Antonio: Antonio@speakingadventure.com
Currently, Antonio is attending paramedic training in Manila, while waiting for word that he can return to Burma as part of a medical aid mission.Labels: Antonio Graceffo, Buddhist
King Sihamoni Celebrates 55th Birthday
14th May 2008
By San Suwith (Radio Free Asia)
Reported in English by Khmerization
King Sihamoni is celebrating his birthday outside of the Royal Palace, this time in Kampong Cham province where his subjects organized a Buddhist ceremony at a local temple in his honour. The king also planned to fly to celebrate his birthday in a location near the historic temple of Preah Vihear on the Khmer-Thai border.
But in Phnom Penh, despite no grand parade and pompous celebration, the king’s pictures were placed along the roads and boulevards everywhere in his honour.
King Sihamoni was born to ex-king Sihanouk and Queen Monique on the 14th of May 1953. He was educated in Beijing and later completed his doctorate degree in classical dance from Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1971.
Between 1975-1976, he studied cinematography in North Korea. From 1975-1979 he lived under house arrest with his parents and his brother, Prince Norindrapong, at Khmamarin Palace in Phnom Penh.
From 1979-1980, he served as a private secretary to the then Prince Sihanouk. And from 1981 onward he served as a permanent representative of the Cambodian resistance to the United Nations, Cambodian Extraordinary Ambassador to the Unesco and also as the president of the Association of Khmer Artists in France.
King Sihamoni is conversant in many languages. Other than his native Khmer, he can speak French, Czech and English very proficiently.
He ascended to the throne on 14th October 2004, succeeding his father, King Sihanouk who had abdicated a second time a few weeks earlier.
Many political leaders hailed King Sihamoni as having a unique and special character.
Mr Ciem Yeap, MP from the Cambodian People’s Party, credited the king as having helped the country moving toward economic prosperity, judicial improvements and have helped solved political issues in the country.
Mr Keo Puth Rasmy, president of Funcinpec Party, said that the king has helped maintain national unity and peace in the country, despite acknowledging the king not being able to fulfill all his constitutional duties.
Mr Son Chhay, MP from the Sam Rainsy Party, said that the current king resides in the country more than the ex-king and therefore helped to ensure political stability. But he also said that the king is still unable to fulfill all his constitutional duties such as ensuring the independence of the judiciary and the army. Despite the king’s shortcomings, MP Son Chhay said that he does not blame the king for not fulfilling all his constitutional duties, but blames the government for not transferring all his constitutional powers to him.
Mr You Hockry, Secretary-General of the Norodom Ranariddh Party, said that the king is a symbol of national unity who can guarantee national independence, sovereignty and the territorial integrity of Cambodia.
Mr Kem Sokha, president of the Human Right Party, wish the king a long life, but also wish to see the king using all his constitutional powers to fulfill all his constitutional obligations. He believed that the king have not been able to fulfill all his duties. The case in point is that the king is a Commander-in-Chief but was and is still unable to ensure the neutrality of the army. Another example is that the king is presently the chairperson of the Council of Magistracy, but he is powerless to ensure the independence of the judiciary.
All civil societies as well as ordinary people have wished His Majesty good health and longevity.Labels: Cambodia's King Norodom Sihamoni, Cambodian Riel Currency
Stanford students try writing a graphic novel
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Justin Berton
San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer (California, USA)
Novel - Shake Girl
Tom Kealey has taught a lot of writing classes at Stanford University, but never one that asked students to consider the dramatic pause provided by the "page flip."
Or how wide to draw "the gutter."
Kealey and co-instructor Adam Johnson taught a winter course titled The Graphic Novel, and assigned their students to write, edit and illustrate a collaborative final project. The result is a 224-page graphic novel titled "Shake Girl," based on the true story of a Cambodian karaoke performer named Tat Marina who was the target of an "acid attack" after she had an affair with a married man.
"In a normal writing class, you'd write a poem or finish a chapter and you'd own it," Kealey said. "In this class, we had to collaborate every step of the way, every idea, and make compromises. It was the most difficult and rewarding class I ever taught."
While the study of comics and graphic novels has steadily become an acceptable part of college curricula - "Maus" creator Art Spiegelman taught a course at Columbia University last year - the project-based graphic novel class offered at Stanford appears to be the first of its kind.
Karen Green, a librarian at Columbia who has been acquiring graphic novels for three years, said Yale and Cornell have growing graphic novel collections, and Michigan State, Ohio State and Duke all have archived comic strips and books that span decades.
Yet for the graphic novel, the leap from archived material to in-class study and production at a major university marks an upgrade in status.
"It's a different way to tell a story that has specific rules," Green said. "And to have somebody teaching those rules, that's impressive."
Kealey and Johnson accepted 40 applications from undergrads and graduates in the English and art departments, and accepted 14.
Kealey said most of the students were already familiar with the works of Spiegelman and Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis," set in post-revolution Iran, and were aiming to tell a complex, serious narrative.
Eric Pape, a journalist studying at Stanford on a Knight Fellowship, offered the class his nonfiction piece published in 2006 by Open City magazine about the phenomenon of acid attacks against women in Cambodia.
"It was clear from the outset while we were discussing ideas that the class wanted to do some sort of good with this project," Pape said, "not make it just a vanity project."
Pape said even though the basis of "Shake Girl" is rooted in actual events, the graphic novel genre gave the story more dramatic energy, while maintaining the theme of love gone horribly wrong. He said he wanted to see out the adaptation in part to attract readers who prefer visual to text-only stories.
"Young people read graphic novels," Pape said. "The newspaper industry is struggling, and it's looking for new models to tell stories. Journalistically speaking, this is a domain worth exploring."
One reason graphic novels are being read in university classrooms is that the term sounds more academic than comic books, said Ivan Brunetti, a lecturer at Columbia College in Chicago and the University of Chicago, who has taught the course Writing the Graphic Novel on both campuses for the past three years.
Brunetti says the phrase "comic book" still rings childish to administrators; "graphic novel" is more acceptable when pitching a class.
"Graphic novels are really comic books wrapped in book covers with spines," Brunetti said. "But for some reason, 'graphic novel' sounds more lofty and people have bought into it. The term has helped to create a distinction in people's minds that there's an important art movement occurring that is more concerned about long and serious work; and that's partially true."
The U.S. retail market for graphic novels has grown precipitously over the past decade, reaching $375 million in 2007, up 12 percent from 2006, according to a report last month from ICv2, a trade company that tracks pop culture industry trends. Much of the growth is due to the mainstreaming of the genre by specialty publishing houses, such as Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal and Fantagraphics Books in Seattle, and more recently to traditional houses like Pantheon, which has a graphic novel imprint that publishes Spiegelman, Satrapi and Daniel Clowes, among others.
Thomas LeBien, publisher of Hill and Wang, an imprint of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, who oversees the company's 2-year-old graphic novels division, attributes rising sales to the medium's growing storytelling capabilities. He refers to Hill and Wang's "The 9/11 Report: a Graphic Adaptation" by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon, a controversial work he said forced mainstream book reviewers to ditch the "graphic novel" term for "graphic nonfiction" and "sequential art narration."
"There's an audience out there that doesn't view this as 'comic books,' but as sophisticated storytelling," said LeBien. "The reason professors and universities are so interested in teaching it is the form is so versatile. It does very particular things just like movies do, and just like books of prose do."
At Stanford, Kealey and Johnson knew asking 14 students to collaborate to produce one book was an ambitious task. And their class had six weeks to do it.
"Co-writing with one person is difficult," student Pape said. "Co-writing with 14 was extremely difficult."
After the writing, students cut the story into five acts, and the art students created storyboards from a rough draft. The illustrators mulled over the "page flips" - the kapow-y action sequences often found on the right-hand panels. When the flips are done to maximum effect, the time it takes the reader to turn the page can serve as a dramatic pause.
Kealey said, "That's not something a novelist normally has a chance to do."
"Shake Girl" can be viewed at shakegirl.stanford.edu.
E-mail Justin Berton at jberton@sfchronicle.com.Labels: Khmer Art
Misuse of courts mars Cambodian election
May 07, 2008
By LAO MONG HAY
UPI Asia Online
Column: Rule by Fear
It is widely known that courts in Cambodia are politically controlled and almost all judges and prosecutors belong to the CPP, the ruling party. The president of the Supreme Court, or chief justice, is a member of the party's standing and central committees.
HONG KONG, China - The courts mar the election in Cambodia
Cambodia will hold its next general election on July 27. According to the electoral law, campaigning will not begin until 30 days prior to the polls. Yet leaders of major political parties seem to have already started campaigning, with speeches attacking one another to score points and win votes. As in previous elections, party signs, especially those of non-ruling parties, have been damaged or destroyed, and non-ruling party activists have received threats and intimidation, or have even been killed.
There are now concerns that two court cases involving the leaders of two opposition parties will create more serious trouble, marring the whole electoral process. The first and latest one is a criminal lawsuit against Sam Rainsy, leader of the self-named Sam Rainsy Party, a more established opposition party, for defamation and disinformation against Hor Nam Hong, deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs. This minister is also a leading member of the ruling Cambodian People's Party.
Hor Nam Hong filed this lawsuit on April 22 at the court of Phnom Penh, after Sam Rainsy made a public speech that Hor alleges defamed him. On April 17, at a ceremony to commemorate the seizure of power by the Khmer Rouge and the beginning of their massacres of the Cambodian people on that day in 1975, Sam made a speech in which he said, without naming any names, that two ministers of the current government had been Khmer Rouge cadres. He mentioned that one minister, the senior minister for economics and finance, had been Khmer Rouge Leader Pol Pot's secretary and translator, and the other minister, the deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs, had been chief of the Khmer Rouge prison at Boeung Trabek in Phnom Penh.
The court has acted promptly on this lawsuit and has summoned Sam to appear before it on May 22 -- while it has not acted with the same promptness on cases of violence against opposition parties and their activists. This has prompted further doubts about not only this particular court's but also all Cambodian courts' lack of independence and impartiality. If convicted, Sam could be sentenced to between six months and three years in prison for disinformation, and also fined for each count. Any such imprisonment would cripple his party, which is the second largest after the CPP.
The other court case is an on-going one and involves Prince Norodom Ranariddh, former leader of the FUNCINPEC party, CPP's current coalition partner in the government, and leader of a newly formed party, also self-named the Norodom Ranariddh Party. His former party has filed a criminal lawsuit against him for breach of trust in the handling, while he was leader of that party, of the sale of the party's land when he was alleged to have misappropriated the proceeds from it.
Fearing a negative outcome, Ranariddh has fled the country and is now living in exile in Malaysia. In March 2007 the Court of First Instance in Phnom Penh tried him in absentia, and as widely expected, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay damages to FUNCINPEC. He appealed this court ruling, but in October the Court of Appeal ruled against his appeal. He then appealed the ruling of the Court of Appeal to the Supreme Court. This Supreme Court has now started its proceedings, and it is expected that his appeal would be heard sometime in July, around the time of the election. Ranariddh cannot return to Cambodia to directly lead his party and its electoral campaign lest he is arrested and put in jail.
It is widely known that courts in Cambodia are politically controlled and almost all judges and prosecutors belong to the CPP, the ruling party. The president of the Supreme Court, or chief justice, is a member of the party's standing and central committees. As a local human rights group called LICADHO put it in its report, "Human Rights in Cambodia: The Charade of Justice," published in December 2007, a primary function of the courts in Cambodia is "to persecute political opponents and other critics of the government." Prof. Yash Ghai, the U.N. special envoy for human rights in Cambodia, totally agreed with this assessment in a report which he presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council in March 2008.
Sam Rainsy is Prime Minister Hun Sen's long-time political opponent, and the Sam Rainsy Party is the major contender against Hun Sen's CPP. Nordom Ranariddh and Hun Sen have had a love-hate relationship, but over the last several years the two have fallen out and Hun Sen has made continuous efforts to marginalize this prince from Cambodian politics.
It seems that the courts are again being used to cripple political opponents. It is hard for both Sam Rainsy and Norodom Ranariddh to expect any prompt or fair trial, so they might win their cases and freely and fully lead their respective parties to compete in the election. This use of courts as instruments of political oppression could mar the whole of the electoral process. It could impair the fairness of the forthcoming election and undermine the legitimacy of the new government.
--
 (Lao Mong Hay is a senior researcher at the Asian Human Rights Commission in Hong Kong. He was previously director of the Khmer Institute of Democracy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and a visiting professor at the University of Toronto in 2003. In 1997, he received an award from Human Rights Watch and the Nansen Medal in 2000 from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.)Labels: Election, LAO MONG HAY
US Ambassador Concerned that Hor Namhong’s Lawsuit Against Sam Rainsy
US Ambassador concerned that Hor Namhong’s lawsuit against Sam Rainsy could affect the election
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Rasmei Kampuchea - Posted on KI-Media
 On 06 may, the US Ambassador in Cambodia expressed his concern that Hor Namhong’s lawsuit against Sam Rainsy could affect the election as the court is speeding up this case.
In an interview with reporters on Tuesday, during a vitamin distribution for children in Baray district, Kampong Thom province, Joseph Mussomeli said: “I am concern that it will affect the election, although I hope that it won’t affect it.” Mussomeli added that it will be regrettable if the defamation and disinformation accusation could affect the progress of democracy.
He expressed his personal opinion by saying that the defamation and disinformation should not be considered as criminal case. Instead, it should be considered as a civil case, i.e., a case that should be decided by the civil code instead.
Mussomeli is concerned about this lawsuit because Ka Savuth, Hor Namhong’s lawyer showed up in court even before the summon date. Ka Savuth showed up in court on 02 May, whereas the court summoned him only on 05 May. As for Sam Rainsy, the court summoned him to show up to provide clarification on 22 May.
In addition to his comment on Hor Namhong’s lawsuit, Mussomeli also indicated that he met with a number of political parties in Cambodia recently, among those are the CPP, Funcinpec, SRP, HRP, to talk about the 4th mandate election which will take place on 27 July 2008.
Mussomeli claimed that: “We maintain good contact with all political parties, but we do not support any party in particular, and we don’t care which party will win the upcoming election. But, we hope that the winning party will win the election fair and square.”
Mussomeli said that, in general, prior to the election in Cambodia, near the election there are always some problems that occur and that cannot be avoided. He said that, regardless whether it is in Cambodia, in the US, or in any other country, people focus on the election and they are not too concerned about about daily life. Up until now, no violence related to the election takes place yet, so Mussomeli thinks that the election is moving smoothly. “Currently, we are following up with attention so that there is no violence, no threat, no fear, no forcing in the election. We hope that threat will not take place, and we hope that the upcoming election will be conducted properly. We will send election observers all over Cambodia,” Mussomeli said.Labels: Election, Sam Rainsy, Sam Rainsy Party, US State Department
Government Vows to Reduce Inflation by End of 2008
Wednesday, 07 May 2008
By Chun Sophal
The Mekong Times
Soaring inflation is a painful thorn in the side of Cambodia’s burgeoning economy, but government officials are trying to soothe concerns with assurances that inflation wil be under control by the end of 2008.
“We will reduce the inflation rate to single digits starting from the end of 2008 and into next year,” said Hang Chuon Narun, secretary general of the Ministry of Economy and Finance. He cited the government’s recent efforts to encourage agriculture sector investment, subsidize oil prices, and increase banks’ reserve capital as reasons why inflation would decrease.
Sok Hach, director of the Economic Institute of Cambodia, said that Cambodia would be unable to reduce inflation if open competition with products produced by various dominant Okhna groups is not allowed.
“The government has to decrease taxes on all goods in general and lift barriers to competition in trade,” he said. “I believe we can help reduce inflation to some extent if we have a competition law and implement it well.”
Cambodia, which currently has an inflation rate of over 10 percent, has yet to introduce a trade competition law even though it is a requirement for the Kingdom’s continued membership of the the World Trade Organization.
Economists say that the soaring inflation in Cambodia is partially due to the rising global oil prices, the devaluation of the US dollar and increasing international food prices. Internal factors such as high goods taxes and the lack of open product competition exacerbate the situation.
John Nelmes, International Monetary Fund resident representative for Cambodia, said increased cash flow in Cambodia is linked with the country’s inflation rate. “I think that increasing obligatory reserve funds to reduce growth is a positive step,” he said.
Early this year, the government paid out US$300 million in oil subsidies, US$41 million in electricity subsidies and cut taxes on imported agricultural materials in order to curb increasing prices.
Chhit Sam Ath, director of the NGO Forum on Cambodia, said inflation is a major problem severely affecting the nation’s poor.
“I believe government subsidies can help people,” he said. “I think the government should try its best to lower and stabilize inflation by dealing with the impact from both internal and international factors.”
 - Economist Sok HachLabels: Economic
A new Political Breeze in Cambodia
By Brian McCartan
Source: Asia Times Online
The CPP has a long history of running rough and tumble election campaigns and there are growing accusations that the party is again using intimidation and threats against opposition supporters in the run-up to the polls. CHIANG MAI, Thailand - A gathering coalition of smaller parties could give Prime Minister Hun Sen's now dominant Cambodian People's Party (CPP) an unexpected run for its money at National Assembly elections scheduled for this July.
The CPP has ruled the country either alone or in tandem with rival parties since the restoration of multi-party democracy in 1993 and in recent years has strongly consolidated its grip on political power. With its comparatively strong grassroots network, firm control over the national media, and recent successful economic policies, the CPP is widely expected to win the most seats at this year's polls. But perhaps not by the landslide many analysts had until now predicted.
To be sure, Cambodia's other main political parties are still generally in disarray. The Funcinpec party has recently been undermined by internal divisions, leading party founder Prince Norodom Ranariddh to cut ties and start up a new small political party bearing his name. Meanwhile, the major opposition Sam Rainsy Party (SRP) still lacks the numbers and resources to alone represent a real democratic challenge to the CPP. The SRP party has likewise in recent years been plagued by internal discord over strategy and leadership.
Now, faced by the near certainty of another CPP election victory, talks have begun among medium- and small-sized parties of forming a coalition to contest the elections on the same ticket. Some political analysts believe there is some hope of success for such a coalition considering that the CPP received less than half the popular vote during the last general election in 2003 and the more recent commune elections held in 2007.
The 2003 polls resulted in a political stalemate, as neither the CPP nor Funcinpec managed the two-thirds majority constitutionally required to form a government. After a full year of political wrangling and paralysis, both sides agreed to change the rules to an over 50% majority and a new coalition government was formed in July 2004, which the CPP now dominates.
An estimated 23 parties contested the general elections in 2003; as many as 57 different political parties could contest the next polls, around 20 of which are expected to officially announce their candidacy during the April 18 and May 12 registration process. The three main opposition parties now negotiating the formation of a possible coalition include the SRP, the Human Rights Party (HRP) and the Funcinpec breakaway Norodom Ranariddh Party (NRP). A united opposition would increase the individual parties bargaining power vis-a-vis the CPP and in an electoral upset could together form the next government.
The HRP, formed in July 2007 by human rights activist Kem Sokha, founder of the once influential and foreign-funded Cambodian Center for Human Rights (CCHR), cuts a particularly compelling contrast to the CPP. Sokha was jailed for publicly criticizing Hun Sen's policies and has successfully ridden that controversy, along with the CCHR's strong grassroots network, into politics.
The party claims over 10,000 supporters attended its opening congress and several well known political figures have joined its ranks, including Pen Sovann, a former prime minister of the early 1980s communist government. Kem Sokha has a grassroots reputation for fighting corruption and human rights abuses earned as a lawmaker in the dissolved Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party and later as a senator for Funcinpec before he left to create the CCHR in 2002.
With those political forces coalescing, there are already signs of a CPP rearguard defensive. Several of the newly created parties are allegedly in league with the CPP and have been launched strategically as political Trojan horses to penetrate and disrupt a possible united opposition front.
Democratic dirty tricks
The CPP has a long history of running rough and tumble election campaigns and there are growing accusations that the party is again using intimidation and threats against opposition supporters in the run-up to the polls. Senate elections held in January 2006 were criticized by local election monitoring organizations as undemocratic and slanted in favor of CPP-affiliated candidates. For the upcoming elections, 7,000 local election observers and 40 international monitoring bodies have registered to observe the elections.
Ou Virak, the current president of CCHR, believes that while overall the election environment will be better than previous polls, by international standards they still will not be free and fair. He claims that in recent months opposition activists have received threats and that a few have even been killed under mysterious circumstances.
Although there is not yet any hard evidence to indicate any political motivation behind the murders, Ou Virak sees the upshot in killings as "worrisome", particularly considering one of the main opposition parties is running under a human rights banner.
There has also been growing pressure on opposition members to defect to the CPP, particularly among SRP candidates. Where that doesn't work threats have been made against certain SRP commune chiefs and at least one, Tout Saron from Kompong Thom province, was jailed on March 18 on the some say trumped up charges of allegedly preventing an SRT activist from defecting to the CPP. The arrest of two other SRP officials is also being sought in connection with the case.
The arrest and warrants are already drumming up bad publicity for the CPP. Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch, said in a March 23 statement, "Dubious arrests of opposition officials months ahead of an election should set alarm bells ringing. This divide-and-conquer strategy is a well-known tactic of Prime Minister Hun Sen to subdue his opponents."
In the same statement, the US-based rights advocacy group said it believes that the CPP is conducting a "concerted campaign to coerce SRP members to defect to the CPP and punish those who refuse to do so, with the intention to split and weaken the opposition party before the national elections".
Hun Sen's CPP has long harassed the SRP, according to rights groups. In 2005, SRP member of parliament Cheam Channy was convicted to seven years in prison for what many considered an unsubstantiated charge of creating a rebel army. He served one year and was released after receiving a pardon from King Norodom Sihamoni. SRP leader Sam Rainsy, meanwhile, was convicted that same year for defamation of government leaders and fled the country. That intimidation follows on the bloody and still unresolved grenade attack against a Sam Rainsy rally in 1997 which killed 16 and injured 150 people. Human Rights Watch has alleged the attack was carried out by Hun Sen's own bodyguard unit, charges the premier has strongly denied.
Faced with such strong-arm tactics, few expect the opposition to actually win the July polls. Amendments to previous election laws mean that the CPP can form a government as long as it wins over 50% of the vote, rather than the previous constitutional requirement of a two-thirds majority. In 2003, inconclusive poll results meant that neither the CPP nor Funcinpec could form a government until several months later an agreement to amend the rules was reached.
With an opposition coalition in the offing, it's unclear if the CPP will need to reach out to one of the medium or several of the small parties to form the next government. After a major split and a number of defections, the CPP's current coalition partner, Funcinpec, is not expected to win as many seats at the upcoming polls as it managed in 2003. The party currently holds 20 of the National Assembly's 123 seats.
Due to their historical antagonistic relations with Hun Sen, it seems unlikely for now that the leaders of any of the other major opposition parties - including the SRP, HRP and NRP - would be keen without major concessions to join a CPP-dominated coalition government. Whether their party representatives, many as in the case of the SRP now in the opposition for over a decade, share those views after this July's polls will represent the success or failure of a united opposition.
Brian McCartan is a freelance journalist based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He may be reached at brianpm@comcast.net.Labels: CPP, Election, hun sen
Statement by Khmer Kampuchea-Krom Federation
United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues
Seventh Session
Thursday, April 25, 2008
Speaker: Sothy Kien
Collective Statement by Khmer Kampuchea-Krom Federation and the Montagnard Foundation
Madame Chair,
We would like to say thank you to Vietnam and the other countries for taking the positive step of supporting the 13 September 2007 adoption of UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. However, unlike many of our indigenous Native American and Native Canadian brothers and sisters, our people from Asia are not recognized at all.
We believe unless such recognition occurs, our people will continue to be denied our basic fundamental freedoms as guaranteed under the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples. Already our rights are not realized. Future work will become irrelevant at the international level and for each individual Khmer if we are not recognized.
Taking advantage of the recent adoption of the UN Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples, we would like to request the help the Permanent Forum and governments around the world to help set up an appropriate timeframe for which countries who has not yet recognized its indigenous people to do so. The adoption must not only be superficial but substantive in the daily lives of indigenous peoples.
During Human Rights Council meeting last March, Vietnam announced that it was ready for human rights dialogue. For the last four years, we have affirmed the need of an open dialogue between Vietnam and the KKF on human rights at the Permanent Forum. Let us make a historic moment and start a human rights dialogue here today.
We would to contribute the following recommendation to the Permanent Forum in regards to this item:
- Request the aid of the Permanent Forum to set up an open dialogue between Vietnam and KKF during a session on the Permanent Forum.
- Through such interactions, we can begin to look at ways in which we can initiate the process of recognizing the Khmer Krom people and the Montagnard as indigenous peoples and explore effective mechanisms to ensure that they are included in free and informed decision making processes affecting Khmer communities.
- Ask that Vietnam provides a detailed summary of specific policies or programs targeting Indigenous Peoples that are currently taking place or proposed in their Five Year Socio-Economic Development Plan.
- That a national education campaign is established in Khmer language about the MDGs as well as international human rights instruments such as CEDAW, so our Khmer-Krom people are aware of their basic rights and able to be active participants.
- That the consultation and implementation of such national plans are conducted under the principles of free, prior and informed consent with indigenous groups and local people to ensure that such programs do not destroy the ancestral lands and compromise our traditions
- Request that the aid from the World Bank and IMF to allocate specific funds donated to Vietnam to create vocational programs in the local areas where millions of the indigenous Khmer Krom people who are living in the Mekong Delta.
- Ask that Vietnam work in close collaboration in genuine partnership with specialized agencies and KKF and the Montagnard Foundation to meet mutual objectives.
- Seek a reversal of current trend of urbanization and Vietnamization. KKF ask that victims of the State’s failure or disastrous projects that result in contaminating land be immediately compensated to provide the basic living essentials and to halt the influx of Khmer Krom people being forced to move to other provinces to find employment.
- Request the aid of FAO, ILO and Vietnam to help provide employment opportunities for many local Khmer Krom people who are now finding themselves landless as result of land confiscation by corporations and the country of Vietnam.
- Ask that all special inter-agencies be open to workshops in Kampuchea Krom and where our people live in large diaspora around the world to allow for more effective partnership from indigenous organizations about policies and programs taking place in our homelands
- Ask that Vietnam allows independent organizations to be formed to enable further social and cultural development of indigenous peoples.
- Ask for projects that will integrate the indigenous peoples into mainstream society be culturally appropriate and sensitive to their distinctive culture without eroding their sense of identity.
- While Vietnam is recognized as Asia’s second fastest growing economy in recent years with GDP annually increasing over 8% and making 138.6 Billion USD in 2005, the rural areas where Khmer Krom people are living, does not have a proportional share of Vietnam’s social and economic progress. The KKF remain behind as we are deemed backward by the Vietnam government. We demand to be equal partners for the economic and social development of our homeland.
We are particularly concern that the MDGs for indigenous peoples will not be met if Vietnam continues to undermine the positive contribution of our work at the Permanent Forum.
Thank you
Madame ChairLabels: Khmer Krom
Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues
Source: Economic & Social Council - UN.ORG
Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues Discuss Ways to More Effectively Promote Countries Implementation of Declaration on Rights
Delegates Underscore Need for National Governments to Protect People over Profits
Monday 28 April 2008
ROMY THACH, speaking for the Khmers Kampuchea-Krom Federation and the Montagnard Foundation, said the district of Svay Tong in the province of Mouat Chrouk had recently been the scene of acts of terror targeting indigenous peoples. Even as the target date for achieving the Millennium Development Goals approached, the rights of Viet Nam’s indigenous peoples were being neglected. Viet Nam must realize that the implementation of the Declaration was imperative if the Goals were to be achieved. The Permanent Forum should lead a collaborative initiative that would include exact deadlines to foster Viet Nam’s recognition of indigenous peoples such as the Khmer Krom and the Montagnards. The Forum should insist that Viet Nam, as a non-permanent member of the Security Council, cooperate more fully with United Nations human rights mechanisms. It should also address inquiries by the United Nations special rapporteurs on issues of religious intolerance, torture, indigenous peoples and arbitrary detention.
PHAM HAI ANH ( Viet Nam) said his delegation respected the work of the Permanent Forum and had participated actively in its work by providing all relevant information about its efforts to achieve equality of life for every citizen. However, the Forum’s work should be based on accurate and credible information. Unfortunately, it had not always been provided with that type of information. Viet Nam strongly rejected the participation of the Khmers Kampuchea-Krom Federation and the Montagnard Foundation, both of which operated outside Viet Nam and pursued a separatist agenda. Their participation wasted precious time that could be better spent helping indigenous peoples around the world. Viet Nam also strongly supported implementation of the Millennium Development Goals in the Montagnard districts and the United Nations had recognized its work in doing so.
In response, the Chairperson stressed the reality that some indigenous peoples were in exile from their countries, and suggested that the Special Rapporteur investigate that situation as the Permanent Forum lacked the capacity to do so at present. The Chair welcomed, however, the rights of individual countries to appear before the Forum to raise issues about the veracity of any statement or report. That was, of course, part of the important dialogue on the situation of indigenous peoples, which was the role and entire point of the Forum.
Closing Statement
RODOLFO STAVENHAGEN, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous peoples, expressed solidarity with and best wishes for success to his successor, James Anaya, noting that the intense activity brought to the Forum’s dialogue would bear fruit for the indigenous peoples of the world. The mechanisms of United Nations agencies, including the Forum, the office of the Special Rapporteur and the Human Rights Council, would be more effectively used to promote the rights of indigenous communities.
One of the most important mechanisms that could be employed to that end would be the presentation of complaints, accusations and statements about the situation of indigenous peoples, he said. Without that opportunity, the international community had no way of really finding out what was going on. There were too many filters that did not allow such information to circulate. Both in the Forum and in the Human Rights Council, when some Government delegations were directly confronted with an accusation, they completely rejected the groups making the accusations. Nonetheless, the Forum was a place where those types of groups could meet together.
He said that, over the years, he had sent out more than 200 communiqués to different Governments on the basis of documents, complaints and statements. Unfortunately, some Governments had not responded, while others had simply stated that they had received the information. Very few investigated each situation and complaint, much less dealt with them. While the Forum and the Office of the Special Rapporteur were not legal mechanisms, they provided opportunities for dialogue. It was to be hoped that the Forum would continue to be a place to meet and discuss the issues of indigenous populations, perhaps becoming a joint quest for a solution to the problems raised.
Concluding today’s dialogue, the Chair thanked Mr. Stavenhagen for his service as Special Rapporteur and offered best wishes to his successor, Mr. Anaya, while also thanking Mr. Littlechild and Ms. Nicolaisen for their active involvement in preparing the documents for the current session. Mr. Littlechild presented a token of appreciation to Mr. Stavenhagen in the form of a traditional vest from the Cree Nation.Labels: Khmer Krom
Cambodia - Country for Sale
Almost half of Cambodia has been sold to foreign speculators in the past 18 months - and hundreds of thousands who fled the Khmer Rouge are homeless once more. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark report
Source: guardian.co.uk
# Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark
# The Guardian, Saturday April 26 2008
Sang Run, his hair stiff with sea salt, chugs out into the Gulf of Kompong Som in his weather-beaten turquoise boat, looking for blackling. He scours the shallow, blue water, waiting for a shoal to appear, before skimming his net across the water. He does the same every day, taking his catch to auction on Independence Beach in Cambodia's southern port city of Sihanoukville.
It looks like a scene Sang Run was born into. But 20 years ago the beach was deserted, and he was a schoolteacher in Mondulkiri, a forested province hundreds of miles away in the east of the country. Back then, he could talk all day about palm sugar and betel nuts. He was something of an amateur botanist, but had never seen the sea - nor had any of the group who today gather around his silvery haul flapping in the sand on Independence Beach. Former nurse Srey Pov, who runs a Khmer restaurant along the beach, also came from a province many miles away. She still cannot swim, she says, shrugging. Heads nod around her. Cambodia is a nation that would drown if their boat tipped over; it is also a country whose citizens mostly do not belong to the places where they have ended up.
The Khmer Rouge saw to that, eviscerating the kingdom after coming to power. It was a movement that drew inspiration from Mao's Cultural Revolution, collectivising all the land; but it grew to love terror more than ideology. The ferocity of the regime sent more than 300,000 rushing into exile. At least two million urban Cambodians were route-marched into the paddy fields to near certain death. Worst hit was the Eastern Zone, bordering Vietnam, where Sang Run came from. Its people were derided as "duck's arses with chicken's heads" as the Khmer Rouge grew to mistrust the Vietnamese and accused Mondulkiri people of being disloyal - too sympathetic to their neighbours across the border. Their names were added to those who were to be purged; the catalogue of "crimes" became so long, so general, that anyone could stand accused. The wave of random violence and retribution that scythed through the countryside for three years, eight months and 21 days killed one in five of the population.
Sang Run's family all vanished, but he survived, hiding in the forests, living off what he could pluck and hunt. When the Vietnamese invaded in 1978 - overthrowing the Khmer Rouge a year later - Sang Run found his way, like thousands of others, to Cambodia's 300-mile long shoreline. Stretching between Thailand and Vietnam, the region had been a Khmer Rouge stronghold, controlled by Pol Pot's notorious commander, Ta Mok, who was known as The Butcher. In the 80s, when the fishing shacks and noodle stores went up along the Sihanoukville coast, there was no development plan. There had never been a tradition of thriving fishing communities along the coast - few Cambodians lived there except in the old French colonial towns. The shoreline had been empty - miles of palm-fringed beach front interspersed with the few port towns, including Kep, Sihanoukville and Ream.
Survivors began to build new lives there, learning to love the sea. Some took boats to a nearby archipelago of 22 coral-fringed, uninhabited islands, building up clusters of villages on atolls with names such as Rabbit, Snake and Turtle. Within 10 years, the whole coastline had been patchily settled by newcomers, among them a former farmer, Soch Tith, a stocky man with corncob hands, who was sick every time he got in a boat, but still found his way to faraway Koh Rong, the largest of the islands - 7,800 hectares of jungle. There he cleared small patches to grow fruit.
By 2006, these communities had schools, political representation, and many householders even had papers, stamped by the Sihanoukville governor, Say Hak, which guaranteed them the permanent right to stay under the 2001 Cambodian Land Law. The central government in Phnom Penh had in the 90s designated the entire coast and its islands as State Public Land that could not be bartered or developed.
Then, during the past couple of years, a disturbing wave of rumours swept the coastal communities. Sang Run says that in September 2006 he heard that Snake Island, half a mile out to sea, had been secretly sold to Russians. He did not check. Cambodians ask little from their government; a wariness of authority is a legacy of years of blood-letting under Pol Pot. In any case, it was a familiar story. Shortly after Hun Sen, Cambodia's prime minister, came to power in 1985, frenzied landgrabbing began: influential political allies and wealthy business associates raced to claim land that the Khmer Rouge had seized, gobbling up such large chunks of the cities, forests and paddy fields that Cambodians used to say the rich were eating the country. By 2006, the World Bank estimated that 40,000 had been made homeless in Phnom Penh alone. But, until now, no one had bothered with the coast. Sang Run paid no particular attention to the Snake Island rumour. He should have - it signalled a radical new course for the Cambodian government.
Three months later, Sang Run was out in his boat at 7am when disaster struck his village. He arrived back at 11am to find bulldozers had flattened his home and those of the 229 families who lived beside him. He heard from neighbours that it had happened in an instant. Uniformed men, sent in by governor Say Hak, used electric batons to chase terrified residents from the burning ruins; three of Sang Run's neighbours were knocked unconscious. Village Number One - a mundane name that failed to capture the beauty of its uninterrupted sea views and vegetable gardens that ran to the beach - had been erased. Sang Run heard that a hotel was planned, although no information was given to the people evicted from their homes for a further 18 months.
Nurse-turned-restaurateur Srey Pov tells us that, by early 2007, rumours were buzzing around Sihanoukville's covered market that virtually every island in the region was up for sale. Over the following months, Koh Russei and Koh Ta Kiev, Koh Bong and Koh Ouen, Koh Preus, Koh Krabei and Koh Tres were all snapped up by foreigners, who then started negotiating for mainland sites, too, among them public beaches with names such as Serendipity, Occheuteal and Otres. In February, 47-year-old Srey Pov was evicted, too, her Independence Beach restaurant shut down to make way for another rumoured hotel. "All I've got left is the chairs and tables," she says - they're stacked up in the cramped living room of her Sihanoukville home. Former farmer Soch Tith, on Koh Rong, was the last to hear that last month his island had been sold, too, to a British developer.
What none of these people knew was that the troubled kingdom of Cambodia, a precarious debtor-nation underpinned by more than £500m of hand-outs from the international community, had suddenly found itself a refuge for cash and speculators fleeing paralysed western financial markets. As London and New York, overcome by the US sub-prime crisis, began grinding to a halt last year, many in the City had moved on, transferring liquid assets to the east.
Foreign fund managers had started pitching up in Phnom Penh wearing linen shirts and khaki drip-dry jungle wear, alerted by the country's unexpected boom in tourism that in 2006 had seen one-and-a-half million visitors overcome the west's collective memories of Cambodia's recent past to travel to the temples of Angkor Wat. Enticed also by indicators that suggested the feeble economy was turning a corner, super-rich, predominately British, French and Swiss speculators, fuelled by a high-risk machismo, came hunting for profits of 30% or more. Their interest was land speculation: buying up large sites in developing countries that they would then sit on in the hope that, with the influx of tourists, land values would soar.
Hun Sen and his ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP) have, in effect, put the country up for sale. Crucially, they permit investors to form 100% foreign-owned companies in Cambodia that can buy land and real estate outright - or at least on 99-year plus 99-year leases. No other country in the world countenances such a deal. Even in Thailand and Vietnam, where similar land speculation and profiteering are under way, foreigners can be only minority shareholders.
There were other inducements. Many foreign funds - hedge funds, property funds, private equity funds - operating on the outer margins of the financial world thrive on complexity, risk and maximising profit. In Phnom Penh, they found an ideal partner in the prime minister, who has created a unique business environment. Since the mid-90s, Hun Sen and the CPP have declined to enforce money-laundering legislation and have concerned themselves little with the probity of investors. Foreign businessmen were offered nine-year tax holidays, and were allowed to hold their cash in US dollars in banks outside the country.
"Only recently, no one would touch us," Brett Sciaroni, a Phnom Penh-based US lawyer who acts for many new western investors, tells us. "We were dirt. And suddenly we were gold." John Brinsden, a British banker, now vice chairman of Cambodia's national Acleda Bank, agrees: "In 2001, only 200 people came to the government's investment conference. At our most recent, we ran out of chairs."
In July 2007, Hun Sen, gambling on his people's tenuous connection with the land, changed the designation of the southern islands so they could be sold. The forests, lakes, beaches and reefs - and the lives of the thousands of residents - were quietly transferred into the hands of private western developers. Arguing that Cambodia could become a tourist magnet to challenge Thailand, the prime minister began a fire sale of mainland beaches. By March this year, virtually all Cambodia's accessible and sandy coast was in private hands, either Cambodian or foreign. Those who lived or worked there were turfed out - some jailed, others beaten, virtually all denied meaningful compensation. The deals went unannounced; no tenders or plans were ever officially published. All that was known was that more than £1,000m in foreign finance found its way into the country in 2007, a 1,500% increase over the previous four years. It was as if Alistair Darling, the British chancellor, had decided to raise some extra cash by trading the Isles of Wight, Man and the Hebrides, throwing in Formby Sands, the entire Cornish coastline and Brighton seafront - before trousering the proceeds.
It was abundantly clear to observers, including the World Bank and Amnesty International, that by making these private deals, Hun Sen was denying prosperity to most of his people, causing the country's social fabric to unwind like thread from a bobbin. Today, more than 150,000 people are threatened with eviction. Forty-five per cent of the country's entire landmass has been sold off - from the land ringing Angkor Wat to the colonial buildings of Phnom Penh to the south-western islands. Professor Yash Ghai, the UN human rights emissary to Cambodia, warned, "One does not need expertise in human rights to recognise that many policies of the government have... deprived people of their economic resources and means of livelihood, and denied them their dignity." He added, "I believe that the deliberate rejection of the concept of a state governed by the rule of law has been central to the ruling party's hold on power."
It was Hun Sen who, as early as 1989, realised the power of land. Rhodri Williams, a researcher for the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, points out that, as Hun Sen privatised the land, "he simultaneously cut off the rights of 360,000 exiled Cambodians, awarding prime slices to political allies and friends." The exiles were Cambodians who had fled the Khmer Rouge into Thailand and beyond in 1975; they had titles to the land, but this counted for nothing when they returned to claim it. Hun Sen said Cambodia should start again.
Although he bathes his speeches in socialist values, even his closest aides told us that Hun Sen was more often than not a pragmatist. He joined the Communist party in the 60s and enlisted in the Khmer Rouge in the 70s, before defecting to the Vietnamese-backed government in the 80s. In the 90s, he embraced the free market. Tourism was not a promising prospect in the early days - the remnants of Khmer Rouge, violently hostile to outsiders, were too much of a risk. When western travellers did begin to explore, they were taking their lives in their hands. In 1994, Briton Mark Slater, Frenchman Jean-Michel Braquet and Australian David Wilson were kidnapped while riding a train through Sihanoukville, and all of them executed. Two years later, Christopher Howes, a British de-mining expert, together with a Cambodian colleague, were murdered as they worked 10 miles north of Angkor Wat.
By 2006, the country seemed safer, and was finally becoming a tourist destination. That September, the CPP received its first foreign offer in the coastal area: a Russian investor living in Phnom Penh wanted to buy an island. This deal would become the template for every developer to come. Alexander Trofimov created a Cambodian shell company to buy Koh Puos, or Snake Island. With cash apparently no object, he proposed to stunned government officials that he would link the island to a mainland beach - known as Hawaii - with a 900-metre suspension bridge. "He also asked to buy Hawaii beach," the official who oversaw that meeting told us. "And we gave it to him." No figures were published. The official claimed he didn't know them.
Locals who used the beach and island were kept in the dark. No one quizzed Trofimov. He produced a book of cut-and-paste designs that he said would encompass a £150m resort consisting of 900 tightly packed villas, a dolphin aquarium, two hotels, a shopping centre and a marina - all crammed into an egg cup-sized island. It was enticing stuff for the CPP, although the project faltered when Trofimov was accused of having sex with underage girls, and jailed this year. However, two more Russian businessmen seamlessly emerged to take up the reins, representing a Cypriot-holding company that, it later transpired, had owned the Koh Puos project from the off.
Arnaud Darc was quick off the mark, too. A quietly spoken and likeable French businessman, Darc had arrived in Cambodia in the 90s, building a hotel and restaurant business in Phnom Penh. In 2006, after hearing from a French colleague working at Sihanoukville's provincial airport that the runway was likely to be extended, he identified two massive beach-front sites totalling more than 220 hectares that he liked the look of. He brought in Jean-Louis Charon, a Parisian real estate tycoon, whose Nexity company is the largest in France, and whose name brought in "40 French high-net worths", as Darc described them; they raised £12.5m to be held by City Star, a foreign-owned investment company. "The maths was easy, and the returns potentially fantastic," Darc said. City Star's land values quadrupled as soon as the Cambodian government confirmed the airport rumours, a spokesman for the Sihanoukville governor's office told us.
The investors could have sold up and come away rich. But this was development with a difference. City Star investors wanted more, but did not want to go to the trouble of constructing anything. They were speculating on the future value of the land, believing that by adding only modest infrastructure, perhaps attaching big-name hoteliers, they would reap vast profits in seven to 10 years. Darc's group continued buying, snapping up 333 hectares on Koh Russei and Koh Ta Kiev, two islands off Ream. Such was the appetite for easy money that City Star raised a further £30m in a matter of days from a second group of French high rollers last July, this time to buy in Phnom Penh.
Darc's model appealed to British investors behind LimeTree Capital, a Hong Kong-based private equity group that in 2007 bought up chunks of beach front near Ream; sites it planned to leave idle for many years until prices peaked. This spring, a third entrepreneur, Frenchman Alain Dupuis, through his Cambodian company LBL International, bought Koh Sramaoch. Soon after, Koh Tonsay, or Rabbit Island, was auctioned off to Chinese investors; 14 fishing families were evicted to make way for a casino and a golf course.
On the mainland, Sang Run returned to the beach to find his village in Sihanoukville destroyed to make way, supposedly, for a hotel. A few hotels have been built, but generally the sites remain empty. The Cambodian economy has grown by more than 24% over 18 months and land values have in some cases risen by more than 100%, so there are fortunes to be made from doing nothing but wait.
Australians Rory and Mel Hunter were the only investors who made an attempt to incorporate into their plans the people whose land they were buying. An advertising executive, Rory had come to Cambodia to work for an agency in Phnom Penh. During a week-long vacation in 2006, he and his wife, Mel, had set out on a diving trip around the Koh Rong archipelago and fell in love with the twin islands of Koh Bong and Koh Ouen, attached to one another by a coral reef and cupped in a shallow strait - they were known collectively as the Sweethearts. "We dreamed of a beautiful resort where people could immerse themselves in a new part of Asia," Mel said. They began negotiations with two village men to buy their houses and those owned by 60 other families. "They thought we were nuts," Rory said. "The two head guys wanted £7,500 each. We agreed and signed the contract in a boat out in the strait. We helped take down their tin shacks, and slowly relocated all the families and their homes to Koh Rong, across the strait." They worked for weeks to clear 20 years of debris, while beginning negotiations with the government to buy the islands themselves.
The Hunters drummed up backing from a handful of British speculators, including a currency broker who (preferring we didn't use his name) tells us why he leapt at the opportunity. "I loved the deal from the start. Let's be honest, who wants 6%? I wanted a deal that would wake me up in the night, sweating. We could make good money," he says over drinks in Phnom Penh, his City suit exchanged for shorts and a T-shirt. "There was a buzz about Cambodia you don't get elsewhere. It's Cambodia, the killing fields and all that stuff. Something different to show your mates back home. I show them the visa in my passport. I have something they don't."
But the Hunters' enterprise would soon be challenged by a cascade of deals involving neighbouring islands. While they worked on retraining local fishermen on neighbouring Koh Rong, British property developer Marty Kaye bought the ground from under their feet. Kaye, who had spent much of his career working on construction in Hong Kong, had spotted the island while planning an £800m luxury tourist development on a nearby Vietnamese island, Phu Quoc. He told us: "I was walking down the beach on Phu Quoc, seeing where we were going to put the golf course, and I spotted another island. No one knew what it was. We looked on Google Earth and it seemed to be Koh Rong, in adjacent Cambodia. I said, 'Let's see if we can get anywhere on Koh Rong, too.'"
Kaye, who runs Millennium property fund, began negotiating. "Here was a chance to buy an undeveloped island almost as long as Hong Kong," he said. "Nowhere else in the world could you create your own kingdom from scratch - unlike the car-crash planning of Thai islands like Koh Samui." The Cambodian government gave him 18 months to produce more details, and he worked on an outline plan whose initial development would cost £100m. When the government signed the deal, it made no mention of the census it had just carried out recording how many thousands of people (the government won't reveal the figures) live on the 7,800-hectare island.
Kaye is not worried: "Two guys and a lawyer will see everyone. But what most of them don't understand is that even if they have papers, they are not worth anything. All of them are registered only locally, not in Phnom Penh, so they will have absolutely no case. Others are just squatters with no papers at all." It helped that Kaye's Cambodian partner was tycoon Kith Meng, a multi-millionaire with interests in banking, mobile phones and real estate - and a close friend of the prime minister, Hun Sen.
"Kith Meng wants everything done yesterday," Kaye said. "We are going to move as fast as we can. It's fantastically exciting, the opportunity to zone the whole island, to see where the luxury exclusive villa plots will be, for the Brad Pitts, etc." It is an investment that gives the present residents of Koh Rong just over a year to make a solid case for keeping their homes or finding new ones.
If they are evicted, places in the area to make a new home are becoming scarce. With all the big islands sold, even smaller outcrops have gone, too, including a clump of rocks known as Nail Island, bought by Ukrainian entrepreneur Nickolai Doroshenko, who has transformed it into a James Bond-style lair, complete with a giant fibre-glass shark that soars over the fortress-like construction. He already owns Victory Beach, in Sihanoukville, a restaurant stuffed with live snakes and a bar that advertises "swimming girls".
The sale of the century continued with the mainland beaches. At the end of January, the Sokha Hotel Group, run by Sok Kong, a Cambodian oligarch and Hun Sen ally, was confirmed as the new owner of the lion's share of Occheuteal Beach, the largest and most popular public dune in the region, which was closed off to make way for a 1,000-room hotel and golf course. The deal was originally negotiated in June 2006 when, local fisherman told us, bulldozers and 10 trucks of armed men demolished 71 homes and 40 local restaurants.
Not wanting to be left out, Say Hak, Sihanoukville's governor, acquired a small island for himself, on which he built a villa and jetty; while Sbaung Sarath, the wife of his deputy, bought half of Sihanoukville's public Independence Beach in February 2008, evicting scores of families in the process. Among them was Srey Pov. She travelled to Phnom Penh with 27 other families to protest, but returned with nothing. "The developer issued a warning," she says. "They threatened to pay the city authorities to get rid of us. We knew what that meant." Independence Beach now languishes behind high fencing, as Srey Pov feared, waiting for the five-star tourists who will enjoy exclusive access to the powder-white sand.
Days later, Sbaung Sarath struck again, securing part of Sihanoukville's Otres Beach, one of the last public dunes, where Queenco, a London-listed casino company, also announced in February that it had bought 56 hectares. Queenco declined to comment on its Sihanoukville project, but it has already had consequences - 100 fishing families have been evicted. They have built a row of makeshift bamboo shacks, held together with plastic sheeting and whatever rubbish they could recycle, along a 200-yard stretch of a nearby main road. On the day we visited, they were drying out from an overnight storm that had filled their ramshackle homes with rainwater.
Aom Heat, 63, used to have a wonderful view over Otres beach and the gulf beyond. She was forced off her land last April. Now all she can see are the hubcaps and exhaust pipes of lorries that tear by. She and many of her neighbours had arrived on Otres Beach after fleeing the Khmer Rouge in the early 80s, building a fishing village they christened Spean Ches, or Burning Bridge. "When the eviction notices were served on us in September 2006, we were determined to fight," she says. She could not bear to lose everything again. "We lodged a complaint with the Senate Committee on Human Rights that ruled it was a matter for the courts." But the Sihanoukville governor's men did not wait for a court order. They turned up at the seaside village in April last year, Aom Heat says, and, "they burned down 26 houses and bulldozed 86 more, destroying all the pots and pans, clothes and food supplies. We were in a blind panic." Thirteen injured men were arrested and jailed, including one of Aom Heat's sons. Although made homeless, they were charged with "wrongful damage of property", and nine of them found guilty without witnesses or evidence produced. Despite having served their time while waiting for the case to be heard, the men were thrown back into jail pending an appeal from the prosecution, who complained they had been dealt with too leniently.
No one can agree what impact the foreign land sales will have on the Cambodian economy because so little information is made public. Although Cambodia is nominally a democracy that has held three general elections to date, and has a nominal opposition party, the CPP parliamentarians and cabinet are remote and dismissive of their people. They are not required to report on their interests or assets, making it impossible to deduce how much Hun Sen and his cabinet have personally benefited - although the World Bank reported last year that corruption, coupled with a lack of transparency, was "choking economic growth".
Since the land sell-offs, members of the government and its allies have been splashing huge sums around. A Korean developer told us that when he marketed Phnom Penh's first skyscraper, the 42-storey Gold Tower project in February, all two dozen £750,000 penthouse suites were bought within 24 hours by "an honour roll of the CPP and its friends in the military". There are other telltale signs, such as the canary yellow Hummers and hi-spec Range Rovers with blacked-out windows that rumble around Phnom Penh, in a country where the average annual income is less than £150.
Simon Taylor, the director of Global Witness, an international NGO that was forced to leave the country last year, having accused the CPP of running a logging racket, paints a depressing picture: "A shadow state has grown up, a government that misappropriates public assets, extorts from businesses and manages an extensive illicit economy. It is administered by senior ministers who are fluent in the jargon of good governance and sustainable development." One of Hun Sen's closest advisers, who requested anonymity, disagrees, telling us: "Hun Sen believes that liberal democracy is unsuited to a country whose skills have been drained and demographics wildly skewed by the Khmer Rouge."
Everything comes down to how much money you have in your pocket, according to Doug Clayton, from Leopard Asia, a fund of Swiss and British bankers that is about to invest £25m in Cambodia. "This kind of money opens any door," he says. How does Clayton pitch the Hun Sen brand back home? "Candidly? In investment circles, no one knows anything about this place. It's off the radar. In our pitch I talk up the new economic figures. I talk up stability." Clayton adds: "When the dust settles, the government here will probably end up looking something like the one in Singapore." There, Lee Kuan Yew served as prime minister from 1959 to 1990. Cambodian pollsters, looking to the general election that will run this July, predict a clear CPP victory, putting Hun Sen at the helm for many more years, too.
What will this mean for people such as Sang Run, who is now surviving in a makeshift home behind Independence Beach? Has the legacy of the Khmer Rouge been purged? Naly Pilorge, director of Licadho, a local human rights NGO, thinks not: "Everyone claims Cambodia has come through the period of barbarism, but the sadism is still bubbling beneath the surface. Extreme violence, greed and disregard for the most basic human rights - of giving people a place to live - are still with us daily. The methods of the past are being used to dictate our future."Labels: "country for sale"
China Ascendant
China Ascendant – Part I
Bertil Lintner - 4/29/2008
Source: Global Politicians
China, which Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen referred to as “the root of everything that was evil in Cambodia” in a 1988 essay, has emerged as a major donor to Cambodia and, unlike aid from the West, Chinese assistance comes with no strings attached for promoting democracy or good governance. China is also a major investor in Cambodia, mainly in the garment industry, but also in agriculture, mining, hotels and tourism. The Chinese are coming. If the plan holds, the small and sleepy capital of Laos, Vientiane, might look like Manhattan on the Mekong. More than architectural statement, the construction of the new Chinatown in Laos will mark the newest evidence of China’s rising influence in Indochina, once the playpen of Vietnam.
An artist’s impression in state-owned media shows the shape of new development that will turn marshland into a modern city, populated by an estimated 50,000 migrants from China. The Associated Press reports that a Chinese company leased the land.
China’s profile and influence in Laos have grown steadily over the past few years at the expense of the landlocked country’s longstanding friendship with Vietnam. Similar development has taken place in Cambodia, another close ally of China’s longtime rival in the region, Vietnam. China, which Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen referred to as “the root of everything that was evil in Cambodia” in a 1988 essay, has emerged as a major donor to Cambodia and, unlike aid from the West, Chinese assistance comes with no strings attached for promoting democracy or good governance. China is also a major investor in Cambodia, mainly in the garment industry, but also in agriculture, mining, hotels and tourism.
This development has not gone unnoticed in Vietnam. In the case of Laos, to alleviate fears of a shift in foreign allegiances, the official media have over the past year protested a bit too much about the traditional friendship with Hanoi, repeatedly mentioning the 1977 Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between the two communist-ruled countries. Symbolically, a stylistic painting showing Lao and Vietnamese soldiers and civilians linking arms under national flags won first prize in a Vientiane art competition 19 September 2007, the 20th anniversary of the treaty’s signing. On Lao television, Lao and Vietnamese dignitaries meet and proclaim the “everlasting friendship” between the two countries.
But Laos’ allegiances have changed and that’s reflected in the history of three apartment blocks on the road to Vientiane’s Wattay Airport. Built in the early 1970s to accommodate operatives of the US Central Intelligence Agency and other American advisers, the buildings were taken over by Soviet technicians when the communist Pathet Lao took over in 1975. Today, the Mekong Hotel and Apartments cater to a mainly Chinese clientele, with one floor housing the Beijing Restaurant.
The number of Chinese working in Laos has increased in recent years. According to official statistics, about 30,000 Chinese now live in Laos, but the real figure could be 10 times greater. Thousands of Chinese work on the Asian Development Bank–funded Route 3 that runs from Boten, on the border with the southern Chinese province of Yunnan, through Luang Nam Tha in Laos, down to the Mekong River at the Houei Xay ferry crossing opposite Chiang Khong in Thailand, where a bridge is planned as well. When finished, the highway – and Laos – will be China’s main overland connection with Southeast Asia.
At the same time, China has become a major investor in Laos with 236 projects worth around US$876 million, a considerable increase from US$3 million worth of investment in 1996. The total Chinese direct investment approved by Laos’ Committee for Planning and Investment up to August 2007 amounts to US$1.1 billion, second only to Thailand’s projects worth US$1.3 billion. About a third of the Chinese investment is in hydropower, and the Laos government has granted Chinese companies concessions to mine gold, copper, iron, potassium and bauxite. Vast tracts of land have been farmed out to Chinese interests for rubber plantations.
China’s assistance to Laos since the late 1990s has reached nearly US$500 million in grants, interest-free loans and special loans. China has built a huge Culture Hall in Vientiane, ostensibly in traditional Lao style. In November 2004, China beautified the park around the Vientiane landmark Patouxay, the capital’s Arch of Triumph, and now constructs a stadium for the Southeast Asian Games, which Laos will host in 2009.
According to a June 2007 report in the English-language Vientiane Times, special loans from China helped establish the Lao Telecom Company and Lao Asia Telecom, and also funded a cement factory, the purchase of two MA 60 aircraft for Lao Airlines, as well as several government internet projects. The Chinese ambassador in Vientiane participates in donors’ meetings and plays an active role in the social life of Lao-based diplomats. Soon he’ll be joined by thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Chinese citizens in Vientiane’s new Chinatown, which, for reasons of sensitivity, is called a “New City Development Project.”
In Cambodia – where China once supported the dreaded Khmer Rouge regime both when it was in power and later as a resistance force against the regime that Vietnam installed in Phnom Penh in January 1979 – the political situation began to change when Hun Sen ousted his then coalition partner, royalist leader Prince Norodom Ranariddh, in a June 1997 coup. Cambodia’s Western donors were not amused: The US and Germany suspended non-humanitarian aid until a free and fair election was held. Japan, Cambodia’s largest donor, said it would halt new projects.
But China came to Hun Sen’s rescue. Longtime Cambodia watcher Julio Jeldres notes that China was the first country to recognize the regime after the coup; in December that year, Beijing delivered 116 military cargo trucks and 70 jeeps valued at US$2.8 million. In February 1999, Hun Sen paid an official visit to China and obtained US$200 million in interest-free loans and US$18.3 million in foreign-assistance guarantees. The number of Chinese settlers in Cambodia is unknown, but estimated to be in the thousands.
The “new” Chinese, who for various reasons have settled in countries such as Cambodia and Laos, are more assertive than older Chinese communities in the region. According to Andrew Forbes, a Thailand-based China expert who spent more than 20 years studying China’s relations with Southeast Asia: “They’ve grown up in a country which is stronger and far more unified than before. There’s a new sense of being Chinese: the new migrants are patriotic and loyal to the motherland.”
This sense of national pride provokes tensions between new-generation migrants and older settlers, who fear the newcomers’ outward display of nationalism could rekindle longstanding suspicions towards ethnic Chinese communities in their adopted countries.
There have been incidents of anti-Chinese hostility that bear out those concerns. For example, in May 1999, 300 “new” Chinese massed outside the US embassy in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh to protest the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. A smaller gathering of ethnic Chinese Cambodians, in the country for generations, held a counterdemonstration, heckling the protesters: “You’re not our brothers,” one yelled, referring to the suffering of Cambodia’s Chinese during the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge regime. “Your people killed my people during Pol Pot’s time.”
But the Vietnamese have greater reason to fear China’s rising economic, political and demographic clout in the region. Vietnam, once a leading force in Indochina, is becoming isolated from traditional allies. It still retains some influence in Laos, and trade between the two countries is not insignificant. But once Vientiane’s new Chinatown is built, that may change and the people of Laos have to adjust to their country’s becoming an extension of Yunnan.Labels: China, hun sen
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Antonio Graceffo has been embedded with the Shan State Army inside of Burma. This article is part of the "In Shanland" project. To raise awareness about the plight of the Shan people Antonio will release one print article and one video per week for a year. He is giving these media away for free to ensure that they will reach the largest audience. You can watch all of the Shan videos released to date on Antonion on YouTube.
