Editorial | Articles about Cambodia | Khmer
By SETH MYDANS (The New York Times)
Incumbent Mu Sochua, 55, is already campaigning for the 2013 parliamentary election
MAK PRAING, CAMBODIA — “I’m going to get my votes!” cried Mu Sochua as she stepped into a slender rowboat, holding one side for balance. “One by one.”
She was crossing a small river here in southern Cambodia on a recent stop in her never-ending campaign for re-election to Parliament, introducing herself to rural constituents who may never have seen her face.
The most prominent woman in Cambodia’s struggling political opposition, Mu Sochua, 55, is campaigning now, three years before the next election, because she is almost entirely excluded from government-controlled newspapers and television.
“Only 35 percent of voters know who won the last election,” she said.
She has no time to lose.
Ms. Mu Sochua is a member of a new generation of women who are working their way into the political systems of countries across Asia and elsewhere, from local councils to national assemblies and cabinet positions.
A former minister of women’s affairs, she did as much as anyone to put women’s issues on the agenda of Cambodia as it emerged in the 1990s from decades of war and mass killings. But she lost her public platform in 2004 when she broke with the government, and she is now finding it as difficult to promote her ideas as it is to simply gain attention as a candidate.
She says her signal achievement, leading the way for women into thousands of government positions, has done little to advance women’s issues in a stubbornly male-dominated society.
And like dissidents and opposition figures in many countries, she has found herself with a new burden: battling for her own rights. As she has risen in prominence, the political stands she has taken have become a greater liability to her than gender bias has been.
Most recently, she has been caught in a bizarre tit-for-tat exchange of defamation suits with the country’s domineering prime minister, Hun Sen, in which, to no one’s surprise, she was the loser.
It started last April here in Kampot Province, her constituency, when Mr. Hun Sen referred to her with the phrase “cheung klang,” or “strong legs,” an insulting term for a woman in Cambodia.
She sued him for defamation; he stripped her of her parliamentary immunity and sued her back. Her suit was dismissed in the politically docile courts. In August she was convicted of defaming the prime minister and fined 16.5 million riel, or about $4,000, which she has refused to pay.
“Now I live with the uncertainty about whether I’m going to go to jail,” she said in a recent interview. “I’m not going to pay the fine. Paying the fine is saying to all Cambodian women, ‘What are you worth? A man can call you anything he wants, and there is nothing you can do.”’
This gesture is one of the few ways she has left to champion the rights of women, the central passion of her public life.
As an outspoken opponent of the prime minister, she has found, her participation taints any group, action or demonstration with the stigma of political opposition.
“My voice kills the movement,” she said. “It’s my failure. Now I am the face of the opposition, a woman’s face in opposition. Women say, ‘We believe in you. We admire you. But we can’t be with you because the movement will die.”’
During her six years as minister of women’s affairs, Ms. Mu Sochua campaigned against child abuse, marital rape, violence against women, human trafficking and the exploitation of female workers. She helped draft the country’s law against domestic violence.
In part because of her work, she said, “People are aware about gender. It’s a new Cambodian word: ‘gen-de.’ People are aware that women have rights.”
But where political empowerment of women is concerned, she said, quantity has not produced quality, and prominence has not translated into progress for a women’s agenda.
Over the years, Ms. Mu Sochua has worked with nongovernmental groups to field thousands of candidates in local elections. Largely because of her activism, there are now 27 women in a National Assembly of 123 seats.
But 21 of these are members of the governing Cambodian People’s Party — window dressing, she said — and have little impact, following the party line like their male counterparts.
“They don’t speak out,” she said. “It’s hard to talk about this — I don’t want to antagonize women — but if women suffer from our silence, we are responsible. What are we doing to make their lives better?
“This is where women can hurt women. They are in politics, but they are part of the problem by keeping silent.”
Cambodia is still a traditional society in which women are expected to behave demurely and subordinate themselves to men. Schooled in the United States, Ms. Mu Sochua said she had to keep an eye on her own Westernized ideas and behavior, to be “careful I don’t push things too far.”
The daughter of a well-to-do merchant in Phnom Penh, she was sent to study in the West at the age of 12, ending up at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a master’s degree in social work and thrived on the culture of outspokenness of the 1970s.
“When I hit San Francisco, I knew that that was my city,” she said. “I began to shine. I let my hair grow. I looked like a hippie.”
She met her future husband, an American, when both were assisting Cambodian refugees on the Thai border after the fall of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime in 1979. Since 1989 they have lived together in Cambodia, where he works for the United Nations. They have three grown children living in the United States and Britain.
“I have to be very, very careful about what I bring from the West, to promote women’s rights within the context of a society that is led by men,” she said. “In the Cambodian context, it’s women’s lib. It’s feminism. It’s challenging the culture, challenging the men.”
She has this in mind as she walks through the villages of her constituency, a woman with power but a woman nonetheless. “I walk into a cafe, and I have to think twice, how to be polite to the men,” she said. “I have to ask if I can enter. This is their turf. I am a woman, and I should be sitting in one of these little shops and selling things.”
And so she paused the other day at the stoop of a little cafe here in this riverside village, an open-fronted noodle shop where men sat in the midday heat on red plastic chairs.
She had succeeded in halting a sand-dredging project that was eroding riverbanks here, and she wanted the men to know that she had been working on their behalf.
“I came here to inform you that you got a result from the government,” she told the men, showing them a legal document. “I want to inform you that you have a voice. If you see something wrong, you can stand up and speak about it.”
Asked afterward what it was like to have a woman fighting his battles, Mol Sa, 37, a fisherman, said, “She speaks up for us, so I don’t think she’s any different from a man. Maybe a different lady couldn’t do it, but she can do it because she is strong and not afraid.”
Fear was a theme as Ms. Mu Sochua moved through the countryside here. At another village, where cracks were appearing in the sandy embankment, a widow named Pal Nas, 78, said the big dredging boats had scared her.
“I’m afraid that if I speak out, they will come after me,” she said. “In the Khmer Rouge time, they killed all the men. When night comes, I don’t have a man to protect me. It’s more difficult if you are a woman alone.”
Mr. Hun Sen’s party holds power throughout most of rural Cambodia, and Ms. Mu Sochua said that party agents kept an eye on her as she campaigned.
Before she boarded the little boat to cross the river, a man on a motorcycle took photographs of her and her companions with a cellphone, then drove away.
Across the river, a farmer greeted her warmly, climbing a tree to pick ripe guavas for her.
“I voted for you,” he said as he handed her the fruit. “But don’t tell anyone.”Labels: Election, Mu Sochua, Sam Rainsy Party, SRP
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The opposition party has lost touch and Chinese patronage is threatening the prospect of multi-party democracy.
By BRENDAN BRADY
Phnom Penh
European Press Photo Agency
Opposition party members watch Sam Rainsy speak from exile.
A Cambodian court on Jan. 27 sentenced the country's main opposition leader, Sam Rainsy, in absentia to two years in jail, in a closed-door trial that opposition politicians and rights groups called blatant political persecution. The eponymous Sam Rainsy Party, the largest opposition party in Cambodia, says their power will not be affected by their leader's absence. He has, after all, fled the country before when facing a similar sentence, which was eventually annulled after negotiations with the ruling Cambodian People's Party and the king.
But when and if Mr. Rainsy returns, the promise of the opposition movement appears bleaker than ever—and his leadership is partly to blame. Many civil society groups that were once moved by Mr. Rainsy's calls for transparent and democratic governance are now critical of his party's current direction: They see the party as having lost touch with its original pro-democracy platform and focusing instead on emotional nationalistic disputes with the ruling party.
"The Sam Rainsy Party has become reactionary and lost their core liberal democratic message," says Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights. "They have become quite weak, and their future is in great trouble if they keep waiting for confrontational events to get media attention. They need to return to offering alternative policies." A survey released Feb. 2 by the International Republican Institute speaks to Mr. Virak's point. It found that Cambodians want to hear less bickering between parties and more about proposals for solutions to problems they face.
For ammunition, critics need look no further than the recent publicity stunt in which Mr. Rainsy helped villagers uproot posts demarcating Cambodia's border with Vietnam—the same act that earned his recent conviction. To score political points, the Sam Rainsy Party has revved up its criticism of Vietnam's alleged encroachment on Cambodian land, claiming that Prime Minister Hun Sen and his deputies were "letting" their more powerful neighbor do it. But relatively few Cambodians were actually affected by the demarcation of Vietnamese and Cambodian land in the isolated and scarcely populated border region; whereas thousands of Cambodians were evicted from their homes last year throughout other parts of the country.
The Sam Rainsy Party still has a popular leader in Mr. Rainsy's absence: Secretary General Mu Sochua. She is one of the few Cambodian politicians who can frequently be found walking through villages to talk to people about their problems, and her strident criticisms of the ruling party have earned her admiration in some quarters. But even she may not be able to save the party from decline.
To understand what the diminished strength of the Sam Rainsy Party means for Cambodia, it's important to understand the role the opposition party has played in the country's democratic development. Mr. Rainsy returned from to Cambodia from France in 1992, as the United Nations was beginning its peacekeeping mission in the war-torn country. Although the U.N. poured nearly $2 billion and some 20,000 soldiers and civilian staff into the U.N. Transitional Authority in Cambodia, it left in 1993 with only a fragile peace and political agreement in place between the country's factions.
Mr. Rainsy was at the forefront of the budding pro-democracy movement that inspired many at that time. When Mr. Rainsy started his own party in 1995, he distinguished himself from other politicians by putting democratic principles at the helm of his platform, and he claimed his movement would "mobilize millions of people" who shared the same ideals. Indeed, the Sam Rainsy Party offered a significant domestic voice fighting against graft and urging improved wages for workers and greater rights protections for all.
But now even this limited collective bulwark is breaking down—and not just because Mr. Rainsy is in exile. For the last couple of decades many of the most potent checks and balances against the ruling party have come from the leverage of Western aid donors, who attach stipulations of standards in governance and human rights to the hundreds of millions of dollars in aid money that flows into the country each year. But this equation is changing: With Beijing's patronage of Cambodia's government growing, the influence of Western countries to push for transparency and rights protections is weakening.
This was dramatically displayed last December when Beijing officials were able to lean on their counterparts in Phnom Penh to ensure a group of Uighur asylum seekers were sent back to China. Thanks in part to this phenomenon, the ruling party has been able to solidify its dominance over opposition parties by pushing through a constitutional amendment in 2006 that reduces the electoral majority it needs to stay in power.
Cambodia is beginning to look more and more like its neighbors, which are mostly one-party states. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the country's nascent multi-party democracy was riven by intimidation and violence, but there was space for competing ideas and parties to have a voice. Today, the main opposition party finds itself repeatedly muzzled. As China's influence in Southeast Asia continues to expand, this pattern may only grow stronger.
Mr. Brady is a free-lance journalist based in Southeast Asia.Labels: Sam Rainsy, Sam Rainsy Party
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A lake development project is fueling thousands of forced evictions in the Cambodian capital.
A Phnom Penh family, finishes fishing and chores on the banks of the polluted Boeung Kak lake, currently under development. The mass of sand behind them used to line the Mekong River. (photo: Anne Elizabeth Moore)
Phnom Penh, Cambodia - There are plenty of guns in Cambodia, but I cannot get used to them being pointed at me, even in jest. After all, I'm just picking at my lunch, staring lazily at Phnom Penh's biggest lake, Boeung Kak, and the massive sandy beach across the water. Two years ago, the area was thriving with fishermen. Now, the beach is moving closer to the spot where I sit, minute by minute. Most of the fishermen are gone.
The man with the gun stands, gesturing for me to follow him. He jerks his chin upwards as he strides down the open deck of the bar and restaurant of a one-time popular guest house in the seedy backpacker area of the city. His ruddy face projects menace, but only in an act of self-protection. "Is not real," he asides of the rifle when we get to the edge of the water.
I look at the gun. It is carved from a solid piece of wood. It could kill someone, sure, but it cannot protect him from what is being stolen from him, even as we stand watching.
The capital city's largest remaining natural lake is being filled in with sand to make way for a residential and shopping district. It's sparked a wave of forced evictions known more commonly around the country as "landgrabbing," kicked off by the city's February 2007 agreement with Shukaku Inc., in which the company paid $79 million for a 99-year lease on the land.
That is, the land invisible under the water. To make it useful for the development project, of course, Shukaku Inc. had to devise a way ofgetting to that land. So in late August 2008, a massive drainage pipe began pumping sand into the water at a rate of around 25 square meters per hour. Residents fled. Many had not been notified in advance.
I asked the restaurant manager if tourism would soon be affected, and my armed companion scoffs. "Is already," he says in his rolling Khmer accent, waving the gun toward the sandy beach. As many Cambodians do, he declines to give his name to reporters out of fear of government retaliation.
The back door of artist Leang Seckon's studio overlooks Boeung Kak. Many lakeside residents are unsure when flooding, pollution, or landslides will force them to abandon their homes. (photo: Anne Elizabeth Moore)
This isn't an idle fear, either: According to the local human rights group Adhoc, the number of arrests of human rights activists in Cambodia rose by about 70% in 2009. Most arrests were of people speaking out about housing and land rights.
"Before, this was a beautiful lake and people came from the city to watch the sunset. Maybe a part of this is also the amount of tourists coming to Cambodia, I don't know. But now ..."
He turns back and looks at the paltry number of customers lunching at the establishment. Two men argue over coffee, a young woman shoots pool in the corner. This is high tourist season in Cambodia. Other proprietors I've spoken to, in other tourist areas of town, have seen business pick up again after the previous year's drop.
Part of the problem here could be the smell. Pollution was noticeable, but not overwhelming, when the lake was at its peak. Now, rising levels of rotting garbage, fish carcasses and raw sewage are plainly visible - and malodorous.
"... What to do?" The guest house manager finishes his thought.
In early February, 100 affected residents gathered at City Hall to protest the city's handling of drainage at the construction site. Wastewater was backing up, they complained. One woman's kitchen was entirely submerged, she told the Phnom Penh Post, and it was still the dry season. The city has so far failed to create an adequate drainage system for the construction sites.
In Cambodia, fetid water is not only unseemly. It's also a health risk in a country plagued by malaria and Dengue fever.
Of course, the development project also violates several federal laws. A 2009 report from the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), an international human rights organization, finds multiple causes for concern. Among them, that leases for state public property cannot change the function of land nor last for longer than 15 years. And, land over which people already hold titles, which have not been bought out in advance of the agreement, cannot be leased by third parties. Additionally, the report charges, evictions are only legally allowable under certain circumstances that do not include private development projects. (Resultant evictions are also found in the report to be in violation of international human rights law obligations.)
Secondary affects of the development project also concern local organizations. In May of 2009, Prime Minister Hun Sen halted all dredging of sand from the Mekong for export purposes due to environmental concerns, yet dredging for domestic purposes continues. A site directly across the water from Phnom Penh's Royal Palace pipes sand into Boeung Kak. The Cambodia Daily reports that some dredging companies pull as much as 2,000 tons of sand from the riverbed daily, but no official records are maintained.
In residential areas near dredge sites, homeowners report riverbank landslides coinciding with sand pulls. Many have been forced to move from their traditional stilted homes, concerned their families will one day tumble into the water. (These figures are not counted in displacement statistics.)
The Ministry of Environment claims that the amount of removed sand is recovered annually. The landslides, it charges, are caused by natural erosion.
It's this kind of official response that has my friend with the wooden rifle frustrated. He's been to meeting after meeting, and signed petition upon petition. All to no satisfaction. "I wish I could go to the government," he says and he looks over at the encroaching sand.
Across from us, three of the last remaining handful of fisherman that work the lake shuffle something small from the water in their bamboo baskets, even as more land piles up behind them. Figures on how many people made their living selling fish from this lake are unavailable, as are the number of people who sustained themselves almost exclusively by eating their catch, or picking the vegetables that grow along the lakeside.
In 2007, city authorities claimed that only 600 people would be affected by the development project; that number has been surpassed. NGOs place the number of persons displaced at between 4,250 and 30,000 people. The city has offered some families three choices: move to the northeast corner of the city, into government-approved housing projects still under construction; take an $8000 lump payment in compensation, far lower than the market value of their property; or wait until alternative housing is built in the neighborhood.
Other families have simply seen their houses crumble, with no advance warning from construction crews or government officials.
Artist Leang Seckon hopes this doesn't happen to him. His studio opens onto the lake thousands of Cambodians have called home ever since the Khmer Rouge regime ended and people started moving back into the city 30 years ago. Born in the provinces, Seckon spent the first ten years of his life in the rice fields. His work often touches on the environmental issues that are close to his heart.
"I need nature, I need water, I need"-here he breathes deeply- "fresh air." He's excited that the government has made recent moves to cease illegal logging and halt some sand-dredging from the Mekong. But he's received no notice about when he's expected to vacate the space he's worked in for 18 years.
His studio sits north of the backpacker district, so he probably has a little more time. He just doesn't know how much. "Now the company buy the lake, and destroy the lake. Soon-I don't know when but soon-they build a city."
Land prices in Phnom Penh have increased tenfold in recent years. Prices are expected to rise even more as high-profile projects like the country's first-ever skyscraper, Gold Tower 42, are completed as soon as 2012. The country may be under development, and it's clear that some are seeing benefits from the boom. But others wonder who is paying the real price.
More upset at the loss of the city's natural resource than the loss of his studio, Seckon considers the matter. "I not feel happy at all," he declares.
Little is known about the company behind the development project, Shukaku Inc. Some press reports have linked it to Cambodian People's Party Senator Lau Meng Khin, also a close friend of Hun Sen. Chinese investment has been linked to the controversial project, but South Korea has denied any involvement. South Korean interests are behind many development projects in the city, including Gold Tower 42.
"It's got to be developed," my weaponed associate proclaims of the city from the deck of the guest house. He then outlines a plan where the lake is cleaned of pollution instead of filled, and the ramshackle guest houses in the rundown backpacker district are funded to make improvements. "It's good for tourism," he offers.
This should count for something. Alongside the construction/real estate sector, tourism is one of the fastest-growing industries in the country. It's the justification for a handful of new public works projects in the city, such as Watermusic, a light show and fountain timed to blaring pop songs that draws local-and tourist-crowds every weekend night.
The guest house proprietor's revitalization plan, he says, has been incorporated into various official proposals for years. Still, it's gotten nowhere. Rather, as my armed companion explains, the powers that be just don't like it.
"I'm sure the government don't think the same," he says, using the Khmer phrase more properly translated as, "agree with us."
But there is more than a difference of opinion at stake. He rests his prop gun against a table and refuses to comment on the friends and neighbors who have already been forced to move. Where they are, how they're adjusting, what businesses they've gone into: he doesn't want to say, for fear he'll be labeled a political agitator.
Or maybe his fear is more personal. Soon, he'll have to close down the guest house and join them, he says.
"We'll see," he says, when asked what he'll do next. "We'll see."Labels: Corruption, Phnom Penh
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In recent years, Cambodia has experienced a surge in the use of methamphetamines, known here and in Thailand as "crazy medicine." Apart from the 11 government-run centers, drug users in Cambodia have few places to turn for help with their addictions.Photo: Justin Mott for The New York Times - More photos
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Nguyen Minh Tam said he got used to the routine during three months in a government drug detention center, although he sometimes lost consciousness: three punches to the chest when he woke up in the morning and three more before he went to bed.
Another heroin addict said he was whipped until he passed out with a twisted metal wire as thick as his thumb. “They used a blanket to cover me, and they beat me,” said the detainee, who insisted that only his first name, Chandara, be used. “There were 10 of them beating me.”
Ban Sophea, on the other hand, an emaciated man who supports his heroin habit by collecting used cans and bottles, said things were quite different for him during a carefully monitored 10-day detention.
“They gave us medicine three times a day from a bottle that looked like a whiskey bottle,” he said. “The rest of the time we just wasted time and ate. They let us dance and eat cake. We were eating all the time.”
These treatments — both the physical abuse and the involuntary administration of an experimental drug — have stirred concern in Cambodia since they were documented recently by the New York-based monitoring group Human Rights Watch.
In a report last month, Human Rights Watch described in detail abuses in 11 government-run centers that included electric shocks, beatings, rapes, forced labor and forced donations of blood.
“Sadistic violence, experienced as spontaneous and capricious, is integral to the way in which these centers operate,” the report said. “Human Rights Watch found the practice of torture and inhuman treatment to be widely practiced throughout Cambodia’s drug detention centers.”
This description echoes a separate Human Rights Watch report, also issued in January, about compulsory drug detention centers in China that it said denied inmates treatment for drug dependence and “put them at risk of physical abuse and unpaid forced labor.”
In Cambodia, the government dismissed the report as being “without any valid grounds” but did not address most of its allegations.
“The centers are not detention or torture centers,” said Meas Virith, deputy secretary of the National Authority for Combating Drugs, at a news conference this month. “They are open to the public and are not secret centers.”
In December, the government tried another approach that also drew criticism from rights groups and health professionals: administration of an experimental herbal drug imported from Vietnam but not registered for use in Cambodia.
Twenty-one drug users were taken to one of the drug treatment centers and administered a potion called “bong sen” for 10 days before being released to their homes or to the streets. No systematic follow-up was done, and the national drug authority conceded that at least some of those treated returned to drug use.
“No information is known to exist as to the efficacy of this claimed medicine for the detoxification of opiate dependent people, nor to its side effects or interactions with other drugs,” said Graham Shaw, an expert on drug dependence and harm reduction with the World Health Organization in Phnom Penh, in a briefing note in early December.
Like its neighbors, Cambodia has experienced a surge in recent years in the use of methamphetamines, known here and in Thailand as “crazy medicine.” A smaller number of people are heroin users.
Vietnam has a network of drug treatment centers and is reported to be widely using the herbal drug in detoxification treatments. In 2003, Thailand embarked on a “war on drugs” in which an estimated 2,800 people suspected of being dealers were summarily shot and killed.
Apart from the 11 government-run centers, drug users in Cambodia have few places to turn for help with addictions. In some cases, desperate families commit their relatives to the centers, but most former detainees interviewed by Human Rights Watch said they had been locked up there against their will.
The centers appear to be used not only for drug users but also as a means to clear the streets of vagrants, beggars, prostitutes and the mentally ill, according to Human Rights Watch and the reports of other former detainees.
Government figures for drug use in Cambodia are unreliable and range from about 6,000 to 20,000. The United Nations has estimated that as many as half a million people in Cambodia may be drug users.
In 2008, the National Authority for Combating Drugs reported that 2,382 people were detained in government drug detention centers, almost all of them involuntarily. Some families, with no other recourse, pay the centers to take in relatives for what they hope will be a cold-turkey cure.
“If Cambodian authorities think they are reducing drug dependency through the policy of compulsory detention at these centers, they are wrong,” said the report by Human Rights Watch. “There is no evidence that forced physical exercise, forced labor and forced military drills have any therapeutic benefit whatsoever.”
Like other former detainees, Mr. Tam, 25, an ethnic Vietnamese, said he was committed involuntarily along with other drug users and street people. He confirmed allegations in the report that a number of the detainees were children.
He described what he called the “eight punishments” — painful and humiliating exercises that included rolling shirtless on the ground, running into walls and a series of physical contortions with names like leopard crawl, hopping like a frog, vampire jumping and shooting Rambo.
“I think this is not treatment,” he said. “This is torture.”
As soon as he was released, he said, he resumed his heroin habit.
“Inside, you are thinking of drugs all the time,” he said. “When you come out, you are free to use again.”Labels: drug, Phnom Penh
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Asian villages carve out a new life
Wildlife Alliance - The thick forest, winding streams and rivers and abundant wildlife around Chi Phat Commune, pictured, made it a natural spot for an ecotourism business
By STEVE MOLLMAN
The village of Tmatboey in the northern plains of Cambodia seemed to have little going for it. It lacked clean water; there were no real roads. The people toiled mostly at subsistence farming, barely scraping by.
The villagers didn't realize they had a valuable asset -- hiding in plain sight, so to speak: a tourist attraction that a niche group of international travelers would happily pay to see, even if it meant a stay in basic accommodations.
It's a bird. Actually, two: the long-legged giant ibis and the white-shouldered ibis, both among the rarest in the world. In the eyes of hard-core bird-watchers, they carry near-mythical status.
And now they're making money for Tmatboey. In 2004, the Wildlife Conservation Society, which credits itself with having saved the American bison a century ago, set up the Tmatboey Ibis Ecotourism Project to lure bird-watchers. During the most recent peak season, November 2008 to May 2009, providing services to bird-watching visitors brought in more than $12,000 all told, a fortune by local standards. About 30% went into a community fund for improving basics like education and plumbing; today, life in Tmatboey has been significantly improved by new wells, water pumps, roads and a new school.
In villages in many parts of Asia, nonprofit groups from around the world are putting into practice that time-worn proverb: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, but teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Rather than donating clothes or books, handing out mosquito nets or building schools, they're bringing money-making enterprises to rural Asian communities. Some involve training in activities such as sewing and bamboo craft; many are tourist-related.
Among environmental groups, there has been a shift in the past decade or so toward "a more integrated view of conservation and development," says Graham Bullock, a former ecotourism coordinator for the Nature Conservancy's China program. For instance, says Tom Clements, a technical adviser to the Wildlife Conservation Society's Cambodia program, the Tmatboey project works "by empowering local people to manage their own tourism enterprise, in a way that explicitly links revenue received to conservation outcomes."
The goals of each organization vary, of course, as do the circumstances of each village. "One size definitely does not fit all," says Mr. Bullock. But more organizations now seek "the participation and empowerment of local communities," he adds.
Below, a pair of projects aimed at helping villages help themselves.
Chi Phat Commune, Cambodia
The Chi Phat Commune -- a collection of four villages that's home to about 550 families, or nearly 3,000 people in all -- sits on the banks of the Piphot River in Cambodia's Cardamom mountains near the Thai border. Getting there from Phnom Penh takes four to five hours and involves two highways and a scenic ride upriver on a long-tail boat.
The villagers get by mostly on rice farming and fishing. To make extra money, some work as laborers on nearby plantations. Others sell livestock and other goods at the local market.
And some engage in illegal activities like poaching and logging -- which, along with land-clearing for farming, have exacted a heavy environmental toll. While large animals including elephants still roam the Cardamoms, their numbers -- along with those of scaly anteaters, wild pigs, deer, monkeys, bears and lizards known as Bengal monitors -- are dwindling. And so is their habitat, one of Southeast Asia's largest remaining tracts of rainforest.
After studying the Chi Phat village situation, the Wildlife Alliance, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit founded in 1994 with the goal of protecting wildlife, forests and oceans, concluded that poverty was the root cause of wildlife and forest loss in the Cardamoms. The alliance also saw that ecotourism -- the area's thick forest, winding streams and rivers and abundant wildlife make it ideal for mountain biking and trekking -- offered the possibility both of alleviating poverty and leading villagers to see value in the nature surrounding them.
Before Wildlife Alliance started to help develop Chi Phat as an ecotourism gateway (its Web site: www.mountainbikingcardamoms.com), though, it approached not only villagers, but also local authorities and tour operators to see if the project could fly. One challenge would be attracting customers; little has been written about the area. Another would be explaining ecotourism to the locals.
"Often throughout the world, NGOs enter a local community telling them that tourism is the answer to their problems and very much raising expectations, without any consultation with local tour operators to see whether there will actually be any market for what they are proposing," says Mark Ellison, who runs Asia Adventures, an independent tour operator. "Then one or two years down the line they sit back and scratch their heads wondering why after all the training, capacity building, meetings, and infrastructure development, no tourists are coming."
Today a handful of private companies make up the Friends of Chi Phat tour-operator group, which works with Wildlife Alliance to attract tourists. They market Chi Phat as a destination, handle reservations and bring guests to and from the village.
The "Friends" operators can charge tourists whatever they wish, but they pay upfront for services provided by the villagers, such as cooking, guiding, bike maintenance and lodging. About 80% goes to the villager providing the services; the remaining 20% goes into a community fund that improves the village's education, water supply, roads and so on.
Of course some training was needed at first: The villagers of remote Chi Phat were not accustomed to seeing tourists, much less catering to them. In fact, says Mr. Ellison, "until a few years ago many of the locals had not even seen a foreigner."
So in early 2008, Wildlife Alliance -- which established a permanent base in the village in January 2007 (after more than four years of research) -- and its tour-operator partners set up training programs in sanitation, hospitality, English, first-aid and waste management.
A bike mechanic, for instance, was brought in from Phnom Penh to teach villagers how to maintain a modern mountain bike. The hiking and biking trails were created by former hunters and loggers from the village, who now serve as trail guides. So far they've finished two mountain-biking trails (both there-and-back routes) and four circular trekking trails, including some night-camping sites. More trails are in the works.
Not surprisingly, old habits die hard. One villager who was asked to head the group for transporting guests on motorbikes was caught transporting something else instead: a wild pig. The local village council demoted him, with a warning that another transgression would get him kicked out of the project.
"People have been dependent on the forest for livelihoods and domestic needs for quite some time now -- and still are," says Oran Shapira, a 33-year-old Israeli working in Chi Phat for the Wildlife Alliance. "This will not completely change in one day or one year. It's a process."
Tourists stay in a handful of villager huts that have been converted -- with help from the Wildlife Alliance -- to accommodate guests. They're still rustic, but a little better-equipped than before. Squat toilets were added, for instance, so that guests didn't have to relieve themselves in the fields.
The first guests arrived early in 2008, and by year's end there had been about 200. Last year, the village received more than 670 guests, who biked, hiked, swam in the river and played volleyball with the locals.
Asia Adventures charges $250 a person for a three-day trip that includes a one-day mountain-biking excursion and transport to and from Phnom Penh. In 2008 the village collected about $7,000, says Mr. Shapira; last year, more than $19,200.
David Miller, who works for the Australian Taxation Office in Canberra, visited Chi Phat for three nights in December 2008. He wasn't expecting luxury: "You don't go visit a place in the middle of the jungle if you're expecting comfort all the way," he says.
He went on a guided hike one day and on a mountain-biking trip another. "Cycling through remote jungle, and not recognizing much of the flora, made it much more exciting" than biking back in Australia, he says. His tour guides were village men who didn't speak English but were friendly, communicated well with body language, and knew the forest like the back of their hands.
On his bike trip, he passed large swaths of burned land. (Fires not only clear land but also chase out animals, making them easier to catch.) "I don't know of many other ways to offer alternatives to these people so they will stop cutting down the rain forest," he says. "Action like ecotourism is better than no action at all."
Nawung, Indonesia
In 2006, an earthquake in central Java reduced many small villages to near rubble. But aside from some light damage to a few ramshackle buildings, the quake had little outward effect on Nawung, a rural village of about 500 people in the foothills near Yogyakarta. Below the surface, however, was a different story: Geological shifts caused the village's few natural wells to dry up.
It was a blow to farming, the village mainstay, already a challenge in the dry, hilly land. The village needed a new gig.
Enter Arbeiter-Samariter-Bund, a century-old German aid organization that bolsters rural communities through reconstruction, livelihood training and disaster-risk reduction. Some years ago in Kosovo, it reconstructed homes and taught returning war refugees to cultivate saffron as a cash crop.
At the time of the Java earthquake, more than half the people of Nawung earned less than $1 a day, says Sae Kani, an ASB program manager for Indonesia who specializes in disaster-risk-reduction education. Young villagers typically left to find work in retail, manufacturing, housekeeping or construction in places like Jakarta and Yogyakarta.
But in 2007, ASB noticed the village had something going for it -- a new road linking Nawung with Yogyakarta, 45 kilometers to the west, and other significant towns, including Sleman, to the northwest, and Wonosari, to the south. The road -- a scenic route through hills, forests and paddy fields -- significantly boosted the trade and tourism potential between Nawung and Yogyakarta, a hub for Indonesian arts and crafts, as well as other towns and villages.
Within this setting, ASB set out to help make the village self-reliant by teaching villagers to make crafts and foods that they could sell to nearby merchants and retailers.
The ASB team -- three field staff members and a project manager (plus, in the beginning, an architect and engineer) -- moved into the village and set up workshops to train villagers in four skills: bamboo weaving, stone carving, textile making and food preparation.
The food-preparation group is the largest, with about 50 members, all women. Tumiyem, a mother of two small children who like many Indonesians goes by a single name, is one of them. Through an interpreter she says that before the training, "we knew nothing about cooking snacks." Now, she says, the benefit is two-fold: The women can generate extra income and "we can gather with our friends regularly."
About 18 men studied stone craft; now nine of them churn out soap dishes, small statues and water fountains for gardens. The textile group -- three women and two men -- sew pillowcases and containers.
ASB helps with marketing and business connections, teaches bookkeeping and profit management, and provides a little start-up capital for each group. The food-preparation group, for instance, received about $550, part of which went to buy supplies.
Sales are climbing. Last year a woman named Atun who makes chips -- primarily from banana and cassava -- sold about $390 of her snacks from July to November, compared with $110 in the first six months of the year. The stone-masonry group, which sells most of its products to a pair of buyers from Yogyakarta, saw the biggest jump in sales: Between March and November, it pulled in nearly $900, up from about $110 for all of 2008.
ASB has spent about $100,000 on the project, along the way building things such as a small showroom to display the village's goods, production and storage houses for the bamboo-weaving and stone-masonry groups and a Web site (www.nawung.com). Its three staff members in Nawung will stay through the end of this year, when ASB plans to focus more on tourism development and improved marketing for village handicrafts.
The German nonprofit also set up a microfinance fund within each group so members can take out small loans. For instance in the food group, borrowers can obtain three-month loans at an interest rate of 5% a month. (The interest income is used to benefit the groups, such as for raw materials.) And villagers have a good track record of repaying the loans, which they've used for a variety of purposes. Last spring, for example, a member of the stone-craft group named Tukino borrowed $21 to buy fertilizer and pay his children's school fees.
Today, Nawung is on the upswing: New homes are springing up, streets are better paved and cellphones are a more common sight. More important, when ASB leaves, the skills it has taught will likely remain.
—Steve Mollman is a writer based in Asia.Labels: The village of Tmatboey, Wildlife Conservation Society
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The huge Phnom Penh mansion owned by Victor's parents, General Meas Sophea. (Good Weekend Magazine)
Written by Andrew Marshall
Good Weekend Magazine for the Sydney Morning Herald
They live in one of the poorest countries on earth, yet they drive flash cars, dwell in mansions and scorn their impoverished brethren. Andrew Marshall meets the rich sons and daughters of Cambodia elite.
“I’m going to drive a little fast now. Is that Okay?” There is one place in Cambodia where you can hold a cold beer in one hand and a warm Kalashnikov in the other, and Victor is driving me there. We’re powering along Phnom Penh’s airport road with Oasis on his Merc’s sound system and enough guns in the boot to sink a Somali pirate boat. Victor is rich and life is sweet. His father is commander of the Cambodian infantry. He has a place reserved for him at L’Ecole Speciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr, France’s answer to Duntroon. And, in his passenger seat, there is a thin, silent man with a Chinese handgun: his bodyguard.
“His name is Klar,” says Victor. “It means tiger.”
Victor is only 21, but when reach our destination—a firing range run by the Cambodian special forces—the soldier at the gate salutes.
Devastated by decades of civil war, Cambodia remains one of the world’s poorest nations. A third of its 13 million people live on less than a dollar a day and about 8 out of every 100 children die before the age of five. But Victor—real name Meas Sophearith—was raised in a different Cambodia, where power and billions of dollars in wealth are concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite. This elite prefers to conceal the size and sources of their money—illegal logging, smuggling, land-grabbing—but their children just like to spend it. The Khmer Rouge are dead; the Khmer Riche now rule Cambodia.
I first met Victor at a fancy Phnom Penh restaurant called Café Metro. Outside, Porsches, Bentleys and Humvees fight for parking spaces. The son of a powerful general, Victor has his future mapped out for him. He went to school in Versailles, speaks French and English, and now studies politics at the University of Oklahoma. “My mother wanted us to get a foreign education so we could come back and control the country,” he says. The shooting range is where Victor and his friends go to relax. “I’ve grown up with guns and soldiers all around me,” he says, laying out a private arsenal on a table: two automatic assault rifles, two Glock pistols, one sniper’s rifle, one iPhone.
"My mother wanted us to get a foreign education so we could come back and control the country". Meas Victor Sophearith (above) is one of Cambodian's privileged elite.
Victor and his generation are Cambodia’s future. Will they use their education and wealth to lift their less fortunate compatriots out of poverty? Or will they simply continue their parents’ fevered pursuit of money and power? Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID), which gave almost $US30 million of its taxpayers’ money to the country in the last fiscal year, offered one answer in June, when it announced the closure of its Cambodia office by 2011. The official reason? “It was felt UK aid could have a larger impact … where there are greater numbers of poor people and fewer international donors,” said a DFID statement. But the development agency might also have tired of throwing money at a nation where so much poverty can be blamed on a grasping political elite—and their luxury-loving children. (Australia clearly has not: it has allocated $61.4 million in development assistance to Cambodia for 2009-10.)
Depressingly, the Khmer Riche Kids sometimes seem indistinguishable from the old colonial ruling class. They were educated overseas—partly because their families’ wealth made them targets for kidnapping gangs—and often speak better English than Khmer. They carry US dollars – only poor people pay with Cambodian riel – and live in newly built neoclassical mansions so large that the city’s old French architecture looks like Lego by comparison. And their connection to the Cambodian masses is almost non-existent.
Sophy, 22, is the daughter of a Deputy Prime Minister. Rich, doll-like and self-obsessed, she could be the Paris Hilton of Cambodia. She imports party shoes from Singapore, brands them “Sophy & Sina” (Sina is her sister-in-law), hen displays them in her own multistory boutique. It has six staff, no customers and a slogan: “It’s all aboutme.” Sophy’s name is spelled out in sparkling stones on the back of her car, a Merc so pimped up that I have to ask her what make it is. “It’s a Sophy!” she replies.
We meet at her hair salon, where she is prepping a model for a fashion shoot for a magazine she is starting up with her brother Sopheary, 28, and their cousin Noh Sar, 26,. All three were educated abroad and prefer to speak English together. Sopheary, who studied in New York state, seems both amused and slightly embarrassed by his wealth and privilege. “What can you do?” he asks. “Your parents give you all these things. You can’t say no. If someone gives you cake, you eat it.”
Talk to Sopheary and his friends, and Cambodia’s tragic history seems very far away. The genocidal Khmer Rouge blew up banks and outlawed money before being driven from power in 1979. Later came the 1991 Paris Accords, and the plunder of Cambodia’s rich natural resources—forests, fisheries, land –began in earnest. Cambodia’s official economy largely depend on garment, exports, but there is a much larger shadow economy in which only the ruthless and the well-connected survived and prosper. “If you’re doing business, you have to know someone high up, so he has your back,” says Victor.
The closer you get to Hun Sen, Cambodia’s autocratic Prime Minister, the better connected you are. Hun Sen staged a bloody coup d’etat in 1997 and has kept an iron grip on power ever since. Opponents have been silenced while loyalists have grown rich. This includes ministers, a handful of tycoons and generals. Cambodians are often driven from their land by soldiers or military police. Formerly a French possession, Cambodia has been colonized all over again, this time by its own greedy elite.
But the Khmer Riche have a problem. “None of them can answer a simple question: where does all your money come from?” says a Western journalist in Phnom Penh. Ask Cambodian ministers how they got so rich on a meager government salary, and they will reply, “My wife is good at business.”
When I ask Noh Sar, whose father is a senior customs official, why he is so wealthy, he gives me a slight variation: “My mother works a lot.”
Victor’s mother is also good at business, according to “Country for Sale,” an investigation into the elite published by the London-based corruption watchdog Global Witness in February 2009. “She is a key player in RCAF [Royal Cambodian Armed Forces] patronage politics, holding a fearsome reputation among her husband’s subordinates on account of her frequent demands for money,” says the report. “RCAF sources have told Global Witness that military officers sometimes bribe [her] in order to increase the chances of her “close connections” to a major timber smuggler.
It is only in the past few years that the children of Cambodian’s elite have grown confident enough to show off their family’s wealth. “If you want people to respect you in Cambodia, you must have a good car, good diamonds, a good cell phone,” explains Ouch Vichet, 28, better known as Richard. “It’s an I’m-richer-than-you competition.” Richard is quite a competitor: he drives a $US150,000 Cadillac Escalade and wears a $US2,500 Hermes watch and a $US13,000 2.5-carat diamond ring. He doesn’t have a bodyguard, although some friends keep them as status symbols.
"Crazy money": (above) Ouch "Richard" Vichet is surprisingly candid about his wealth. (Good Weekend Magazine)
Richard was sent to New Zealand to be educated after a gang tired to abduct his brother. He is a short, affable man with an impish grin. In a city where the elite have a tribal suspicion of outsiders, he is refreshingly candid about his wealth. “My money is from my parents,” he says, and then breaks it down. They gave him a villa, half a million US dollars, and a 400-hectar rubber plantation that will generate income for the rest of Richard’s life. His parents-in-law gave him $US100,000 in cash and another villa, worth $200,000, which he sold and invested in real estate. Richard also runs a busy Phnom Penh nightclub called Emerald – his parents made their first fortune in gems – which provides him with “pocket money”. A party of rich kids can spend $US2,000 on drinks in a single night, more than an average Cambodian earns in 3 years.
His parents’ second, much larger, fortune comes from real estate. A few years ago they bought about five hectares of land just outside Phnom Penh for $US14 a square metre, then sold it for $US120 a square metre two years later, making more than $US5 million in profit. “Where else can you make profits like that?” grins Richard. “It’s crazy money.” He has a daughter called Emerald and a son called Benz. (His other Benz is a GL450.) They all live with his parents in a newly built mansion.
Yet Richard’s house is modest by the operatic standards of Phnom Penh’s Tuol Kuok precinct, part of which was once a notorious red-light district. A taxi driver shows me the neighborhood – it’s like a “homes of the stars” tour in Beverly Hills, except that Tuol Kuok’s backstreets are piled with rubbish. My driver points out giant mansion after mansion, and tells me who lives there. Hun Sen’s son, Hun Sen’s daughter, Secretary of State at the Ministry of Labour. A Deputy PM—Sophy and Sopheary’s dad. A four-mansion compound with lots of razor wire, and a gate guarded by special forces soldiers – Victor’s family.
Tuol Kuok’s houses are well-guarded for a reason: until there was real estate to invest in, many wealthy Cambodians kept their money at home in bricks of cash. “We don’t trust banks,” says Richard. “The old generation kept their money under the bed. The new generation keep it in safes in their houses.” Victor says his family also stays away from banks, but for a slightly different reason. “If you put your money in a bank, everyone will know how much you have,” he explains.
I had also heard that rich Cambodians had repatriated hundreds of millions of dirty dollars from Singapore banks after a post-September 11 shake up of global banking, and that his money had helped fuel the land speculation.
For the children, the wealth comes with one big condition: they must do what Mum and Dad tell them. “I wanted to go to art school but my parents wouldn’t let me,” says Sopheary. Most kids dutifully join the family business—Richard translated for his father during overseas gem-buying trips. For some, that business is politics. Concept like nepotism and conflict of interest don’t count for much in Cambodia. Commerce Minister Cham Prasidh—whose giant house resembles an airport departure hall, one with its own jet-ski lake – gave a ministry position to his wife and made his daughter his chief of cabinet. Cambodia’s ambassadors to Britain and Japan are brothers, and their boss is also their father: Foreign Minister Hor Namhong. He says he hired his sons on merit. “It’s not nepotism,” he insists.
Their parents also expect them to marry young—men in their 20’s, women in their teens—and strategically, meaning to someone from a rich and influential family. These marriages are often arranged. “It’s like medieval times in France,” complains Victor, still a bachelor. This means that many high-society Cambodians soon find themselves trapped in loveless unions; affairs are common. Sophy was married off at 17 to the son of the rich and powerful Interior Minister.
The web of marriages binds together Cambodia’s political and business elite and ensures the ruling Cambodian People’s Party’s stranglehold on power. At the centre of the web sits Prime Minister Hun Sen. His three sons and two daughters are all married to the children of senior ruling party politicians or, in the case of his son Hun Manit, to the daughter of the late national police chief. Now in his 30’s, Hun Manit is being groomed to succeed his father. He graduated from West Point, the US military academy, in 1999, amid protests by members of the US Congress over his father’s human rights record. In July, Global Witness urged the British Government to revoke the visa of the Cambodian Prime Minister, who visited Bristol University to watch Hun Manit receive a doctorate in economics.
Senior Khmer Rouge figures such as Comrade Duch, the mass-murdering commandant of Tuol Sleng prison, are currently on trial at a United Nations-based tribunal in Phnom Penh. The Khmer Riche, on the other hand, remain above the law. Victor displays a military VIP sticker on the front dash of his Mercedes. “It means the police cannot touch me,” he says. Richard is an advisor to a military police commander, which also effectively grants him legal immunity.
Many of his generations abuse such privileges. Last August Hun Chea, a nephew of the Prime Minister, hit a motorcyclist with his Cadillac, ripping off the man’s leg and arm. Hun Chea tried to drive off but couldn’t because the accident had shredded a tyre. Military police arrived, removed the car’s license plates and, according to “The Phnom Penh Post”, told Hun Chea: “Don’t worry. It wasn’t your mistake.” Hun Chea walked away. The motorcyclist bled to death on the road.
Hun Sen has yet another bad-boy nephew, the widely feared and mega-wealthy Hun To (“Little Hun”). In 2006 a newspaper editor filed a lawsuit against Hun To for alleged death threats, then fled overseas to seek asylum with the United Nations’ help. Hun To was also once spotted sitting in his luxury speedboat, its sound system cranked up high, being towed around Phnom Penh by a Humvee. A few weeks before, Victor had been in Los Angeles, where he test-drove Hun To’s latest acquisition before it was put in a Cambodia-bound shipping container: a $US500,000 Mercedes McLaren SLR supercar.” He has already built a special garage for it,” says Victor.
Victor will not – dare not—criticize Hun To. But he is critical of Cambodian society. “From top to bottom, everyone is corrupt,” he says. He hopes to one day set up a foundation to help poor Cambodians send their children to study overseas. “We want to change things, but we’ll have to wait until our parents retire,” he says.
But older generation shows no sign of retiring – not when there’s so much cake left to eat. In January, foreign donors pledged $US1 billion to Cambodia, its biggest aid package yet. The Government relies on foreign aid for almost half its budget. It could break this reliance by exploiting its reserves of oil, gas and minerals: the International Monetary Fund estimates Cambodia’s annual oil revenues alone could reach $US1.7 billion by 2021. Could, but probably won’t. Why? Because the same elite who cut down the trees and sold off the land are now poised to extract the oil and minerals, with the help of their children.
Some Hun Sen loyalists have already been allocated exploratory mining licences. One of them is General Meas Sophea, the army chief. He recently hired a temp to act as his foreign liaison officer. The temp is his son. His son’s name is Victor.Labels: Riche
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Visitors, including Buddhist monks, make their way along a stone-paved pathway at Preah Vihear Temple on a mountaintop in northern Cambodia.
By DANIEL ROBINSON
Published: December 27, 2009
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.Labels: Preah Vihear, Preah Vihear, Thailand
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Photo: Wikipedia Phnom Penh airport, Aug. 1, 2006
A legal visitor in Cambodia was apparently swept up in a mass deportation to China.
WASHINGTON—One of 20 ethnic Uyghur asylum-seekers deported from Cambodia to China as illegal migrants entered the country legally and on the advice of U.N. refugee officials, Radio Free Asia (RFA) has learned.
Aikebaerjiang Tuniyaz, 27, left China in March 2009 after serving a one-year jail term in Liudawan prison in Urumqi for allegedly “leaking secret information abroad.”
Tuniyaz, born in Aksu and a graduate of Shanghai Jiaotong University, spoke in 2007 with RFA’s Uyghur service about the shooting of a Uyghur man by Chinese security forces in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).
Tuniyaz entered Thailand in early 2009 and sought asylum through the Bangkok office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), where a staff member suggested he might expedite the process by approaching the UNHCR office in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, instead, he said in an earlier interview.
He obtained a visa through the Cambodian embassy in Bangkok and entered Cambodia legally, he said. Tuniyaz was in Cambodia legally when deadly ethnic rioting erupted in Urumqi on July 5 this year.
The 20 Uyghur Muslims deported Saturday under intense Chinese pressure had fled to Cambodia in search of asylum after witnessing and documenting violent ethnic riots in the restive western Chinese region of Xinjiang this summer that left nearly 200 dead.
They had warned the UNHCR that they feared long jail terms or even the death penalty if they were sent back to China, according to statements obtained by The Associated Press.
Tuniyaz had been translating for and staying with the group of 21 Uyghurs in Phnom Penh—two are said to have fled—when the group was detained.
Cambodia said it expelled the Uyghurs because they had illegally entered the country. It has since been sharply criticized by Washington, which said the deportations would harm bilateral ties with the United States, though they may have strengthened relations with Beijing.
On Monday, China signed off on more than U.S. $1.2 billion in aid to Cambodia during a visit there by Vice President Xi Jinping. The assistance, including 14 agreements for grants and loans, ranges from help in building roads to repairing Buddhist temples.
More protests
The European Union said Monday it was "deeply concerned" about Cambodia's decision to return the group of Uyghurs to China and urged Beijing to respect the rights of the returnees.
On Tuesday, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak slammed the deportations.
“This is a blatant violation of Cambodia’s obligations under the principle of non-refoulement as stipulated in Article 3 of the U.N. Convention Against Torture,” Nowak said in a statement.
Nowak said that he had reports of “severe torture” in Xinjiang following the unrest and that recent executions there violated “the most basic fair trial guarantees.”
“I am calling on the Chinese authorities to treat the 20 persons humanely upon return in accordance with international standards, to grant access to them in case they are detained and to afford them due process guarantees, if charged with criminal offenses”, he added.
U.N. Independent Expert on Minority Issues Gay McDougall called on Beijing to allow U.N. rights envoys to examine ethnic tensions in Xinjiang after the deadly violence there.
Original reporting by Shohret Hoshur for RFA’s Uyghur service. Uyghur service director: Dolkun Kamberi. Written in English by Sarah Jackson-Han.Labels: Uighurs, United States of America, US State Department
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PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - A U.N.-backed Cambodian war crimes court on Monday charged a fourth top Khmer Rouge cadre with genocide, broadening the scope of a long-awaited trial of the ultra-communist "Killing Fields" regime's top ranks.
Ieng Thirith, 78, had already been accused of "murder, imprisonment and other inhumane acts" for her role as social affairs minister in a regime blamed for the deaths of 1.7 million people.
The new charges relate to the slaughter of Cambodia's ethnic Vietnamese and Cham Muslim minorities during the 1975-1979 Khmer Rouge era. The tribunal on Monday also charged her with torture and religious persecution.
Ieng Thirith, a former Shakespeare scholar known as the "Khmer Rouge First Lady", was arrested in November 2007 with her 85-year-old husband and ex-foreign minister Ieng Sary.
The French-educated Communist revolutionaries had lived under a government amnesty granted to Ieng Sary in 1996.
They were the closest associates of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader who died in 1998. Ieng Thirith's sister, Khieu Ponnary, was married to Pol Pot.
The Khmer Rouge-era president, Khieu Samphan, was dealt an additional charge of genocide on Friday. Similar charges of genocide were also issued for "Brother Number Two" Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary last week.
They have also been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, along with two other former leaders.
Experts on the Khmer Rouge have been critical of the additional charges, which they said would bog down a trial already criticized for taking too long.
Many of the defendants were in poor health and could die before they see a courtroom, while some cases were already so complex and politicized that they may not even go to trial, the experts said.
The first trial of a senior Khmer Rouge cadre, Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, came to an end three weeks ago. He was accused of overseeing the torture and murder of more than 14,000 people as head of the notorious Tuol Sleng prison.
A verdict in that case is expected by March.
(Writing by Jason Szep; Editing by Martin Petty)Labels: Ieng Thirith, Khmer Rouge Tribunal
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Just more than a year ago, Cambodia was praised by the United Nations for its work on behalf of refugees. It was one of only two nations in Southeast Asia to sign the 1951 international convention on refugees, and it opened a brand new office that seemed to suggest a new determination to protect refugees’ human rights.
That was then. Today, Cambodia has baldly violated its international commitments and put at risk the lives of 20 members of the Uighur minority — including two infants — who were forcibly deported back to China on Friday.
Poor, weak Cambodia is not the only villain in this piece. China shoulders even more blame for misusing its growing wealth and clout to force Cambodia to do its bidding. Already Cambodia’s largest foreign investor, China rewarded Cambodia on Monday with 14 deals, valued at an estimated $850 million, including help in building roads and repairing Buddhist temples.
The Uighurs, members of a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority who say the Chinese government discriminates against them, entered Cambodia about a month ago with the aid of Christian missionaries and asked for asylum. China has been cracking down on the Uighurs since the ethnic unrest in July, the worst in decades.
Beijing said that at least 197 people — mostly majority Han Chinese — were killed in that violence. Han Chinese retaliated and hundreds of Uighurs have since been detained. Several of the fugitive Uighurs told the United Nations in written statements that they had been involved in the unrest and feared lengthy jail terms or even the death penalty if they were returned to China.
Chinese authorities claimed the Uighurs were criminals but offered no proof. Such charges are often a specious excuse of repressive societies, but in any case the Uighurs had protected status while their asylum cases were being investigated by the United Nations’ refugee agency. China and Cambodia had a responsibility under international law to allow that process to be completed.
It is alarming that the United States, Europe and United Nations, despite making an effort, could not figure out a way to persuade Cambodia to do the right thing. They should make sure Cambodia pays a price for its behavior, but the focus must be on China, starting with an urgent demand for access to the 20 Uighurs to ensure that they are not mistreated. No Chinese refugee can feel safe if China is allowed to bully other countries into forcing them back to an uncertain and unjust future.
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By SETH MYDANS
Published: December 21, 2009
BANGKOK — China signed 14 deals with Cambodia on Monday worth approximately $1 billion, two days after Cambodia deported 20 ethnic Uighur asylum seekers under strong pressure from Beijing.
The deportation, in defiance of protests by the United States, the United Nations and human rights groups, came on the day before a visit to Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, by Vice President Xi Jinping of China.
The package of grants and loans was signed at the end of Mr. Xi’s visit. The Cambodian Foreign Ministry quoted Mr. Xi as saying: “It can be said that Sino-Cambodia relations are a model of friendly cooperation.”
The exact value of the agreements was not announced, but the chief government spokesman, Khieu Kanharith, said they were worth $1.2 billion. “China has thanked the government of Cambodia for assisting in sending back these people,” he said. “According to Chinese law, these people are criminals.”
Members of a Turkic-speaking ethnic minority living mostly in western China, the 20 Uighurs said they were fleeing persecution in a crackdown that followed riots in which the Chinese government said at least 197 people were killed.
Hundreds of Uighurs have been detained since then and several people have been executed for involvement in the rioting. At least 43 Uighur men have disappeared, according to Human Rights Watch.
Twenty-two Uighurs entered Cambodia about a month ago, aided by a Christian group that has helped North Koreans fleeing their country. Two of the Uighurs have disappeared, the Cambodian government said.
Before being deported, several of the asylum seekers told the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Cambodia that they feared long jail terms or even the death penalty, according to statements reported by The Associated Press. In the statements, which had been provided to the United Nations in support of asylum applications, the Uighurs described chaotic and bloody scenes during the rioting.
“If I am returned to China, I am sure that I will be sentenced to life imprisonment or the death penalty for my involvement in the Urumqi riots,” said a 29-year-old man.
Another man, a 27-year-old teacher, said: “I can tell the world what is happening to Uighur people, and the Chinese authorities do not want this. If returned, I am certain I would be sent to prison.”
China is Cambodia’s leading investor, committing hundreds of millions of dollars for projects including dams, roads and a headquarters for the government Council of Ministers in Phnom Penh. In October, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China met Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen, in Sichuan, China, and concluded a deal worth $853 million.
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Sarun Sar
U.S. Army / Silver Star
After taking a bullet in the helmet, he shot his enemy and disrupted Taliban ambush
Master Sgt. Sarun Sar takes a break on a mountainside in Afghanistan. Sar, a native of Cambodia, was awarded a Silver Star after he slowed a Taliban ambush in 2005. (Photo courtesy of Sarun Sar)
By Kevin Maurer
© Stephens Media LLC 2009
He is no stranger to war.
Sarun Sar’s first combat experience came in his native Cambodia, where he fought with anti-Vietnamese guerrillas. But when the Vietnamese invaded, his family was split up. His father died in prison, his brother was executed for smuggling weapons for anti-government guerrillas and his mother and two other brothers died from starvation.
Sar ended up on the western side of the country, where he was wounded several times and eventually sent to a refugee camp in Thailand.
There, he met up with his older sister and eventually moved to the United States. Sar gained his citizenship while in the Army and has deployed all over the world with Special Forces to places such as Bosnia, Kosovo, Africa, Colombia and Afghanistan.
In the latter country, he would distinguish himself again.
On March 5, 2005, Sar could see the Taliban fighters running from the village as his Black Hawk helicopter touched down.
“Follow me,” Sar screamed to his 7th Special Forces Group teammates before jumping to the ground, hoping to cut the enemy off.
He could hear radio reports about the team’s other helicopter taking fire as he rushed up the snowy mountain in Paktika province along the Pakistan border. He saw several Taliban running toward some woods. Another ran into a house.
Sar reached the house, throwing himself against a wall near the door and waiting for the rest of his team.
But “I didn’t feel anyone tap me on the shoulder,” said Sar, who was the Special Forces team sergeant, the most senior enlisted soldier.
Looking back down the hill, he saw that his teammates were pinned down by enemy fire. It was just Sar and a medic trapped at the house, far from their unit.
The squat house was made of thick mud and rock with a small door cut out. As Sar peeked inside, thick smoke hung inside the room. He barreled through the small, low opening, gun at the ready, and was halfway in when the flashlight on his M-4 rifle illuminated the face of a Taliban fighter.
The enemy’s muzzle flash lit up the darkness — three times.
Two shots missed. But the third hit the edge of Sar’s Kevlar helmet at his forehead, the force throwing him back out the door.
“I will never forget that little flash I saw,” Sar said. “He was waiting. It felt like I was hit in the head with a hammer.”
Dazed, he rolled back outside and started screaming, “I’m hit! I’m hit!” to the medic. The medic searched for a wound, but the bullet hadn’t penetrated Sar’s helmet. Sar pulled a flash-bang stun grenade and threw it into the room before he re-entered the house and killed the Taliban fighter.
His charge up the mountain had disrupted the Taliban ambush and prevented his team from getting bogged down.
Maj. John Litchfield, the Special Forces team leader at the time, said Sar’s actions also inspired the team to push up the hill.
“The rest of the team was under fire and pretty well pinned down,” Litchfield said. “Human nature takes over, and you start clawing for a piece of ground. Sar did the opposite of that. We certainly wouldn’t have achieved the goal in the same manner, and some of us could have been severely wounded.”
Soon afterward, the Special Forces team cleared the other huts in the village and rounded up a huge cache of enemy weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades, bomb-making materials and explosives. Sar and another soldier were the only wounded Americans.
Looking back to the time on that mountain in 2005, Sar said he wouldn’t change what he did:
“That is how we do things. I would still go in the house. Next time, the whole team would follow behind me.”
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Sarun Sar
U.S. Army / Silver Star
Born May 15, 1966, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Married; one daughter.
Joined the Army in January 1985, deployed to Afghanistan in October 2004. Since has been promoted to sergeant major. Has had two tours of duty to Afghanistan and numerous tours throughout the Pacific theater since the start of the war on terror.
WHAT HE DID
Disrupted a Taliban ambush that had pinned down his unit and led a charge that eventually uncovered a large cache of enemy weapons.
WHERE HE IS NOW
Assigned to Special Forces Command-Pacific at Camp Smith, Hawaii.
WHY HE JOINED THE ARMY
“I just wanted to serve my country. I only planned to do three years. I guess it (the Army) just grew on me.”Labels: Sarun Sar
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Incumbent Mu Sochua, 55, is already campaigning for the 2013 parliamentary election
