The Khmer Rouge Trial (KRT) and the Destiny of the Cambodian People.

http://www.unescap.org/esid/psis/population/workingpapers/LabourMigration/index2.asp.

It is this kind of well-documented  and well-argued report that Cambodians should be using to make the case for the request for the Hun Sen regime to publish the recent census of the such a census he population of Cambodia, and not to hide it for the benefit of Hun Sen and his CPP reelection purpose.  It is reasonable to ask for a release, and not just to imagine of this problem without any foundation. Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. February 17, 2012)

--------------------------------------------------------

Vietnamese migrants in Cambodia

As a part of its studies on migration, CDRI conducted small sample interviews with Vietnamese Associations and individual workers of Vietnamese origin in selected villages of Kompong Chhnang and Phnom Penh in order to determine the status of Vietnamese workers in Cambodia.

The Vietnamese, who had lived in Cambodia for generations, were deported during the Lon Nol regime (1970-1975) and later during the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979). During the 1980s, they gradually returned to Cambodia, along with friends, relatives and neighbours. In the 1990s, a new wave of immigrants from Viet Nam was attracted by the opportunities offered by a sudden opening up of a market economy in Cambodia.

The scale of such immigration is very difficult to estimate. Demographers calculate that, if Cambodia’s population in 1985 (which is again an estimated figure drawn from the internal records of the Ministry of Economy and Finance) was 7.5 million, an average natural growth rate of 2.4 per cent might be expected to have brought the total population to around 9.9 million by 1998. If 360,000 repatriated refugees and their offspring are added to that, the total would add to around 10.3 million. The actual total enumerated in the 1998 census was 11.4 million, implying a contribution of a little more than 1 million by immigrants and their subsequent offspring (mainly composed of Vietnamese). Another estimate, provided by the governments of eight provinces (Kandal, Battambang, Phnom Penh, Takeo, Kompong Chhnang, Pursat, Prey Veng and Siem Reap) representing 53 per cent of Cambodia’s population, indicates that the total Vietnamese population was 227,000 in these provinces in 1995. The Kompong Chhnang Immigration Office, interviewed in April 2000, estimated that there had been a big increase in the number of Vietnamese in the province since the 1980s – from 1,269 households containing 7,064 people in 1985 to 2,708 households with 13,445 people in 1997 (So, 2001).

The occupation of Vietnamese workers varies with their location. Those interviewed in Kompong Chhnang were almost all involved in fishing year round. These small- and medium-scale fishermen earned on average around 10,000 riels (US$ 1 = 3,852 riels) per day, in addition to earnings obtained from cage cultures. The Vietnamese have been found to be especially dextrous in fishing activities; this is the reason why they have been successful in retaining their hold on this activity in Cambodia.

In Phnom Penh, most of those interviewed worked as construction workers, traders and skilled workers in machinery and electronic repair workshops, wood processing enterprises etc. Around 80 per cent of the small-scale contractors and supervisors in the construction industry are believed to be of Vietnamese origin. Employers of skilled workers said that they preferred to employ workers of Vietnamese origin because they found them to be skilled, hard working and patient. In contrast, local Cambodian workers tended to be confined to less skilled work; for instance, in construction, as labourers carrying sand, gravel and cement.

Most representatives of local authorities also admitted that in the villages surveyed the sex trade is to some extent run and staffed by the Vietnamese. In the survey villages, Vietnamese women work in brothels, karaoke bars, massage parlours, dance halls and “coin-rubbing” places. Those who work in dance halls operate independently but others are obliged to receive customers under the strict control of brothel-owners. The owners charge each customer between 5,000 and 70,000 riels: the workers are paid only a subsistence amount.

In short, Vietnamese migrants are low/medium to unskilled category workers; they work hard and they engage in any activity to earn a living. The intentions of Vietnamese migrants, particularly those who migrate to neighbouring countries, are at times to return, and at other times, to stay out permanently. Those who invest in a business outside of Viet Nam (for example, fishing, or personal care business in Cambodia) are typically expected to find roots in the host location.

REASONS FOR MOVING, EARNINGS, WORKING CONDITIONS AND ILLEGALITY

Internal migrants in Cambodia who had left their villages less than one year before the census stated that their principal reason for moving was the need to search for employment (29 per cent of the total), while the second reason given was the need to follow their families (25 per cent). Family reasons in many cases are also related to employment, since spouses move with migrants in search of work. There were few differences in the reasons given by male and female migrants, with females slightly more likely to move for family reasons and males slightly more likely to move for education and marriage. Increasing numbers are leaving villages because of rising population as well as unequal land distribution.

The wage difference between agricultural work and unskilled work in Phnom Penh can be significant: workers in paddy fields earn about 4,000 riels per day – around $1 – while the prevailing wage rate for unskilled/semi-skilled workers in the city can be 6,000- 10,000 riels (Pon and Acharya, 2001). Garment factories, in which about 3 per cent of the Cambodian labour force are employed, pay a minimum of $45 a month; with overtime work, most such workers are able to net $60-75 monthly. Most garment workers are migrants and they remit earnings home (Sok and others, 2001). Additionally, in rural areas work is not available for more than a few months, while in the city, work availability has no apparent seasonality. A larger number of days of work translates into higher incomes. Even in the case of rural-to-rural migration, while the wage rate may not vary much, the number of days of work does. People move from single-crop regions to double-crop ones to fish, engage in logging or even work on road-building and other construction work. Of late, it has not been uncommon for people to take up work under “food-for-work” programmes, even if they have to travel short distances.

Vietnamese migrants in Cambodia

As a part of its studies on migration, CDRI conducted small sample interviews with Vietnamese Associations and individual workers of Vietnamese origin in selected villages of Kompong Chhnang and Phnom Penh in order to determine the status of Vietnamese workers in Cambodia.

The Vietnamese, who had lived in Cambodia for generations, were deported during the Lon Nol regime (1970-1975) and later during the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979). During the 1980s, they gradually returned to Cambodia, along with friends, relatives and neighbours. In the 1990s, a new wave of immigrants from Viet Nam was attracted by the opportunities offered by a sudden opening up of a market economy in Cambodia.

The scale of such immigration is very difficult to estimate. Demographers calculate that, if Cambodia’s population in 1985 (which is again an estimated figure drawn from the internal records of the Ministry of Economy and Finance) was 7.5 million, an average natural growth rate of 2.4 per cent might be expected to have brought the total population to around 9.9 million by 1998. If 360,000 repatriated refugees and their offspring are added to that, the total would add to around 10.3 million. The actual total enumerated in the 1998 census was 11.4 million, implying a contribution of a little more than 1 million by immigrants and their subsequent offspring (mainly composed of Vietnamese). Another estimate, provided by the governments of eight provinces (Kandal, Battambang, Phnom Penh, Takeo, Kompong Chhnang, Pursat, Prey Veng and Siem Reap) representing 53 per cent of Cambodia’s population, indicates that the total Vietnamese population was 227,000 in these provinces in 1995. The Kompong Chhnang Immigration Office, interviewed in April 2000, estimated that there had been a big increase in the number of Vietnamese in the province since the 1980s – from 1,269 households containing 7,064 people in 1985 to 2,708 households with 13,445 people in 1997 (So, 2001).

The occupation of Vietnamese workers varies with their location. Those interviewed in Kompong Chhnang were almost all involved in fishing year round. These small- and medium-scale fishermen earned on average around 10,000 riels (US$ 1 = 3,852 riels) per day, in addition to earnings obtained from cage cultures. The Vietnamese have been found to be especially dextrous in fishing activities; this is the reason why they have been successful in retaining their hold on this activity in Cambodia.

In Phnom Penh, most of those interviewed worked as construction workers, traders and skilled workers in machinery and electronic repair workshops, wood processing enterprises etc. Around 80 per cent of the small-scale contractors and supervisors in the construction industry are believed to be of Vietnamese origin. Employers of skilled workers said that they preferred to employ workers of Vietnamese origin because they found them to be skilled, hard working and patient. In contrast, local Cambodian workers tended to be confined to less skilled work; for instance, in construction, as labourers carrying sand, gravel and cement.

Most representatives of local authorities also admitted that in the villages surveyed the sex trade is to some extent run and staffed by the Vietnamese. In the survey villages, Vietnamese women work in brothels, karaoke bars, massage parlours, dance halls and “coin-rubbing” places. Those who work in dance halls operate independently but others are obliged to receive customers under the strict control of brothel-owners. The owners charge each customer between 5,000 and 70,000 riels: the workers are paid only a subsistence amount.

In short, Vietnamese migrants are low/medium to unskilled category workers; they work hard and they engage in any activity to earn a living. The intentions of Vietnamese migrants, particularly those who migrate to neighbouring countries, are at times to return, and at other times, to stay out permanently. Those who invest in a business outside of Viet Nam (for example, fishing, or personal care business in Cambodia) are typically expected to find roots in the host location.

REASONS FOR MOVING, EARNINGS, WORKING CONDITIONS AND ILLEGALITY

Internal migrants in Cambodia who had left their villages less than one year before the census stated that their principal reason for moving was the need to search for employment (29 per cent of the total), while the second reason given was the need to follow their families (25 per cent). Family reasons in many cases are also related to employment, since spouses move with migrants in search of work. There were few differences in the reasons given by male and female migrants, with females slightly more likely to move for family reasons and males slightly more likely to move for education and marriage. Increasing numbers are leaving villages because of rising population as well as unequal land distribution.

Thursday, 22 December 2011 09:13

Written by WAI MOE

Václav Havel photographed in Prague in 2009 at a ceremony to mark the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution. (PHOTO: AP)

By WAI MOE Irrawaddy Monday, December 19, 2011

--------------------------------------------------------

Comments: this article shows how a network of great leaders know each other and help each other. In this case, it is the relationship between, Aung San Suu Kyi and the late President Váslav Havel of the Czech Republic.  It was President Havel who had nominated Aung Suu Kyi to be a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize while she was in House arrest, which she did receive it in 1991. To read more about Aung Suu Kyi and her life, please,  go to this link;

Does Sam Rainsy have a minimum of moral fortitude and courage to be noticed or  selected and respected by this league of world most celebrated leaders? Has any of these greater world leaders ever thought of  nominating him as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize? The answer is no. It is sad to note that hte majority of Cambodians are so affected by PTSD that led them to retrench into their own seemingly safe corner and have never been able to see the light at the end of the tunnel through the enlightening examples of these great world leaders.

This is why the Cambodian tragedy never got the attention that it deserves. All of these leaders have not been afraid to face mortal danger under their respective dictatorial regimes during their time.  

Until such time when the Cambodian people succeed to find such exceptionally high calibre of a leader, the Cambodian people can hope to get out of the current deadly mess anytime soon. Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. February 13, 2012)

--------------------------------------------------------

Burma’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has expressed her sadness at the death of former Czech President Václav Havel who died on Sunday at his home in Prague.

“Suu Kyi expressed her sadness for him [Havel] when she arrived at the party headquarters for the CEC meeting on Monday morning,” said Ohn Kyaing, a spokesman for her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD) referring to the Central Executive Committee meeting. “The party will announce an official message of condolences soon.”

Havel’s empathy with the people of Burma and with Suu Kyi had long evident. Shortly after he became the president of the former communist country of Czechoslovakia, he nominated the Burmese pro-democracy leader, then under house arrest, for the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize.

Speaking to The Irrawaddy in an interview in 2001, Havel said, “The fact is that my friend, Ms Aung San Suu Kyi, deserved this prize. I hold her, and her non-violent struggle for democracy, in high regard.”

The chain-smoking Czechoslovak, and later Czech republic, president and former dissident playwright, had no doubts as to who was to blame for Burma's woes. "What is unacceptable is when a military which partially creates social and ethnic problems by its actions argues that it is the only entity capable of solving them."

Havel stood until his last days as an advocate for Burma’s pro-democracy movement alongside other figures such as Desmond Tutu of South Africa. In 2005, Havel and Tutu jointly wrote a report titled “Threat to the Peace,” recommending the UN Security Council to intervene in Burmese issues.

Havel never missed a chance to show solidarity with the Burmese people when they faced significant challenges during the 2007 Saffron Revolution and the 2008 devastation of Cyclone Nargis.

“In Burma, the power of educated monks—people who are unarmed and peaceloving by their very nature—has risen up against the military regime,” Havel wrote in September 2007.

“Of course, if they fail to feel the benefit of universal and coordinated international political, economic and media support, all development in Burma may quickly be put back nearly 20 years,” he added.

In May 2008, he joined with other world figures, such as Tutu, former German President Richard von Weizsäcker, Foreign Minister of the Czech Republic Karel Schwarzenberg, and former President of South Africa Frederik Willem de Klerk, in publicly attacking Naypyidaw over its lack of response to the cyclone crisis.

“The enormous suffering of the Burmese people caused by the recent cyclone, which has caused tens of thousands of deaths, deserves the sympathy of the entire world,” said the joint statement, which was titled “Referendum Farce in Burma.”

“But more than sympathy is needed, because the Burmese military junta’s incompetence and brutal oppression are further aggravating the tragic consequences of this natural disaster,” it said.

Even in his last days, Havel did not neglect to cite Burma at international fora. On Dec. 11, Havel called for the international community to encourage the signs of cautious change in Burma.

“It is crucial that the international community adopts effective policies that encourage a meaningful and result-oriented dialogue between the Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and the Burmese authorities,” he said.

A mutual admirer, Suu Kyi often cited Havel’s well-known writings, including quotes from “The Power of the Powerless,” when interviewed or when she spoke to the public in front of her lakeside house in Rangoon in the mid-1990s.

Source http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=22680

               10. WikiLeaks Cambodia Angle: New Files show US anxiety

over a Rising China

China's Emperor and Hanoi's Stooge

22/7/2011 by Douglas Gillison PhnomPenh, Time—Like a roving picaresque novel, the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables have been released since November in chapters, focusing on specific countries and distinct themes. When the anti-secrecy organization turned its focus to Cambodia last week — dumping nearly 800 missives from the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh online in 24 hours — the public was at last treated to a candid record of U.S. efforts to grapple with the rising influence of China here — and by extension in Southeast Asia as a whole.

When the Obama Administration took office in 2008, it was keen not to present itself as China’s direct strategic adversary. Instead, officials said they were reviving American diplomacy in Asia while maintaining an aversion to “competition and rivalry” which could thwart cooperation with Beijing thirty years after it normalized relations with the U.S. But if it isn’t competition and rivalry on display in the cables disclosed last week, it is something very near to it. Though the picture offered by the WikiLeaks archive is incomplete, with the bulk of material generated since 2006, the dispatches show a growing anxiety among U.S. officials about the inroads that Beijing is making in Cambodia.

Beginning in 2006, the embassy began paying increasingly detailed attention to Beijing’s relations with Phnom Penh. In April that year, the embassy was irked when Prime Minister Hun Sen praised a $600 million Chinese aid package announced during a visit by Chinese premier Wen Jiabao as coming “without strings.” According to an unclassified cable, this was “a slap” at other aid donors, who, unlike China, placed conditions of accountability, reform and transparency on aid. “Despite all the hoopla… much of the assistance is old news and announced more than a year ago,” said the cable. (Hun Sen has repeated this view in the years since.)

Four months later, the embassy briefed the State Department’s human trafficking office after sending a Chinese-speaking intern and an official of Asian descent from its political/economic section to pose as customers at “sex establishments catering to the Chinese” where they queried managers, staff and Chinese businessmen. “Prices range from USD 20 to USD 150 depending on the type of service and ethnicity of the girl,” a cable said. “At one bar, the manager tried to sell her daughter to” embassy officials.

By 2008, celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of Cambodia’s diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic really caught the U.S. Embassy’s attention. In late December, less than a month before President Barack Obama took office, the embassy cabled Washington with a breathless inventory of Chinese activities here. Describing a crescendo of lavish attention and warmth, the cable said China was set to achieve a “new apogee” in relations with Cambodia and the region: “Cambodia’s ‘Year of China’ looks to become its ‘Century of China.’” (See TIME’s top 10 leaks.)

That year, King Norodom Sihamoni attended the Beijing Olympics and the Chinese Embassy hosted a royal banquet. China pledged $256 million in aid, mostly in soft loans, “the highest single-donor-country contribution to Cambodia ever.” Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi had visited in February, announcing $55 million in aid and $1 billion in pledged commercial investment. New Chinese roads and dams proliferated, with China as the leading planner and financier of Cambodia’s ambitious hydropower program that will have potentially devastating environmental consequences.

Though Hun Sen had claimed China’s beneficence came with “no strings,” it became clear in 2009 that the Chinese could call in extraordinary favors. That year, the Americans watched in dismay as, under heavy pressure from Beijing, Cambodian authorities flagrantly violated international law by wresting 20 ethnic Uihgur asylum seekers out of the U.N.’s hands and bundling them off to China where the faced execution for deadly riots in China’s Xinjiang region. Within 48 hours, China had pledged $1.2 billion in assistance to Phnom Penh as an apparent reward. The U.S. Embassy swung into high gear, recording minute-by-minute the movements of Cambodian police, the apparent failures of the local and regional U.N. refugee agency officials and private confrontations with the Cambodian government.

Last year, the U.S. Embassy staged a week of cultural events celebrating 60 years of diplomatic relations of Cambodia. In a cable prior to the festivities, the embassy said it hoped Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would attend to help demonstrate “that our commitment to Cambodia is not eclipsed by the growing influence of China.” Clinton did not attend, but she did visit Cambodia in October as part of a regional tour three months after the celebrations. During her visit, the Chinese took the opportunity to announce $600 million in financing for a new rail link to Vietnam.

“The list of Chinese visitors is so long that the Chinese Embassy’s political and economic officers complained to [embassy officials] that they never get any rest,” said a cable in 2008, before the Uighur deportations. The upshot was that the Cambodians maintained a “steely pragmatism by which Cambodia balances China with others, including the U.S.” but uses China as a “blank check.”

A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy, which sits prominently on a Phnom Penh thoroughfare named for Mao Zedong, said the events of 2008, at least, were perhaps misread by the U.S. Embassy. “China is a good neighbor of Cambodia. A lot of aid and a lot of help for a good friend is traditional,” said Yang Tian Yue, director of political affairs. “To help the friend does not mean not to give the opportunity for the other friend of Cambodia.”

Indeed, to all appearances, U.S. relations with Cambodia have not suffered as a result of the country’s growing ties with Beijing. The new U.S. Embassy, a sprawling two-hectare campus completed in 2006, has its own prominent spot in the capital directly opposite Wat Phnom, the hilltop pagoda from which Phnom Penh takes its name. The U.S. has expanded the nations’ military ties, multiplied the number of high-level visits and sought Washington lawmakers’ approval to devote a growing share of the U.S. aid budget to health, human rights and rule-of-law programs in Cambodia.

At her initial meeting with Prime Minister Hun Sen in January 2009, current U.S. Ambassador Carol Rodley noted, according to a classified cable, the warmth of her reception was a sign of the importance Cambodia placed on its relations with Washington. “Gushingly,” the cable said, the premier claimed “he spends more of his time with the American ambassador than with any other members of the diplomatic community.”

So far, most of the Cambodian establishment appears to have greeted the disclosures with equanimity. However, Hor Namhong, the foreign minister, on July 14 summoned the embassy’s new deputy chief of mission to denounce a classified 2002 cable as “full of unacceptable maligned indictment” because it repeated allegations that the minister had in the 1970s committed crimes at a Khmer Rouge labor camp for “intellectuals” and returnees, at least 16 of whom were exterminated by Pol Pot’s secret police. (Hor Nahmong has repeatedly sued over the accusations but flouted a summons in 2009 to testify before a special tribunal investigating the Khmer Rouge regime.)

For the world’s small cadre of Cambodia scholars and journalists, the WikiLeaks disclosures offered rare dish. As they had in other countries, American diplomats had privately recorded downright catty descriptions of public figures, describing the foreign minister as “sclerotic” and labeling the businessman Kith Meng, a ranking member of the Khmer oligarchy, as a “ruthless gangster,” while saying Beijing’s relations with King Father Norodom Sihanouk, the father of Cambodian independence, were “more or less the ‘property of China’ and will revert to the PRC upon Sihanouk’s death,” just like the residence China’s leaders had built for the former King in Beijing.

Virtually all Southeast Asian nations are eager to maintain good relations with both China and the U.S., which serves as an alternative to the growing muscle flexed by Beijing. But, according to Sophie Richardson, an expert on Chinese foreign policy and Asia advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, the U.S. response to China’s growing clout here has been uneven. “In some key instances, the U.S. appears to be engaging with China in a race to the bottom, not an effort to uphold real and rhetorical commitments to human rights and political reform,” she said. “On other occasions, however, the U.S. has on principle vocally defended key human rights issues in Cambodia that neither Phnom Penh nor Beijing cares much about… Cambodia is just one of several countries in which the U.S.’s apparent uncertainty about how to grapple with rising Chinese influence is playing out.”

11. Lessons from Preah Vihear: Thailand, Cambodia, and the Nature of Low-Intensity Border Conflicts

Martin Wagener

Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs 3/2011: 27-59

Abstract: In 1962, the International Court of Justice ruled that the Preah Vihear temple lies within Cambodian territory. The status of the 4.6 km² of land surrounding the temple, however, remained unclear. When UNESCO declared the Preah Vihear temple a Cambodian World Heritage Site in July 2008, the situation was exacerbated. Several firefights between October 2008 and April/May 2011 claimed at least 34 lives. The border dispute became a rollercoaster ride along the way: Talks between Thailand and Cambodia were regularly interrupted by exchanges of fire, only to be resumed a

little later. This prevented a resolution of the conflict. The essay explores how Thailand’s and Cambodia’s conflict behaviour can be explained from a first-image perspective. In doing so, uncovering the motives of both countries’ prime ministers is crucial to understanding Bangkok’s and Phnom Penh’s actions in the border area. The paper argues that in low-intensity border conflicts, motivations are different from those underlying heads of government’s behaviour in high-intensity border conflicts. While this complicates an agreement on the Preah Vihear question, it also means that escalation to a manifest border war is very unlikely.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

_

 Manuscript received 5 August 2011; accepted 18 December 2011

Keywords: Thailand, Cambodia, border conflict, Preah Vihear, Phra Viharn, UNESCO, Abhisit Vejjajiva, Hun Sen, realism, first image, statesman Jun.-Prof. Dr. Martin Wagener is a Junior Professor of political science and international relations at Trier University. His research focuses on security in East Asia, the United States’ Asia-Pacific policy, Chinese security policy, relations between the United States and China, war, strategy and  by international relations theory.

E-mail: <wagener@uni-trier.de>

___ 28 Martin Wagener ___

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Ignited a long-standing dispute over the Preah Vihear temple complex, several  exchanges of fire have occurred on the Thai–Cambodian border since October 2008. Intermittent engagements were first seen early in February 2011, lasting for four days and claiming several lives. After previous exchanges of fire, all participants had still attempted to play down the confrontation, pointing to misunderstandings that had arisen when the two countries’ patrols met. This time, though, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan classified the

February 2011 fights as “open conflict” (ASEAN Secretariat 2011c). Even the United Nations (UN) Security Council weighed in, calling on both sides to show the utmost restraint. Renewed talks and mediation efforts by Indonesia, then chair of ASEAN, also failed to calm the situation. There was further intermittent heavy fighting between late April and early May 2011, lasting almost two weeks and claiming probably more lives than all other previous skirmishes combined. Seasoned observers consider this the most

serious eruption of military violence between two members of ASEAN since its foundation in August 1967 (Thai Press Reports 2011f; Nirmal Ghosh 2011b; Yang Razali Kassim 2011; ICG 2011a: 1).

In fact, violent conflict between Southeast Asian states had become a thing of the past. The last fights took place from November 1987 to February 1988 on the Thai–Laotian border, claiming approximately 1,000 lives (United Press International 1992). The region has not seen another war since then. There are several reasons behind the existing peace between Southeast Asian states, especially the effects of economic interdependence and the process of regional integration. Members of ASEAN pledge not to use or threaten force in their relations. They are bound to this not only by the February 1976 Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC), but also by the ASEAN Charter, which entered into force in December 2008. In this regard, there is an unambiguous empirical finding: When a state joins ASEAN, it becomes less likely that it will go to war against another member state (Kivimäki 2008: 436-441).

This development has not, however, resulted in Southeast Asian states unconditionally trusting one another. Threats of force among two ASEAN members have been seen in recent years. In the dispute between Indonesia and Malaysia over the Ambalat block in the Celebes Sea, for example, two warships collided in April 2005. In May 2009, an Indonesian vessel is even said to have come close to opening fire on a Malaysian warship (BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific 2005; The Straits Times 2009).1 The use of force between two ASEAN members is also documented: There were repeated skirmishes on the

--------------------------------------------------------------------

1 This narration of events is based on Indonesian statements.

___ Lessons from Preah Vihear 29 ___

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Thai–Burmese border, which ran the risk of escalating in the spring of 2001. The refugee and drug problems in the border region had led to the direct exchange of fire between Burmese and Thai soldiers (Ball 2003).

Against this backdrop, the Preah Vihear conflict must be seen as having a new quality among conflicts between two ASEAN states. Never before have the following characteristics been present at the same time: First, both sides actually fired shots at one another instead of merely threatening to use force,2 as had been the case in the maritime boundary dispute between Indonesia and Malaysia. Second, the interstate character of the October 2008 to April/May 2011 border clashes between Cambodia and Thailand was unequivocal. While occasional exchanges of fire between patrols in the past could be classified as accidental, in the case at hand both parties deployed troops to the region and were prepared to accept a potential military clash.

The aim was to enforce territorial claims, not resolve transnational challenges.

Further, there was no diffusion of responsibility, as had been the case on the Thai–Burmese border in the spring of 2001, when it was not always clear whether regular or irregular units were accountable for fights.

At first glance, it seems remarkable that it could have come this far. Since the first firefights in 2008, there had been regular consultations between high-level representatives of both sides’ governments and armed forces. Even the prime ministers of Thailand and Cambodia, Abhisit Vejjajiva and Hun Sen, managed to resume the dialogue time and again after various crises – and this in spite of their open disdain for each other. Nevertheless, the conflict has not been resolved. Mediation offers from the UN and ASEAN have not changed this.

In order to better understand the conflict, this article3 explores the following questions: How can Thai and Cambodian behaviour in the dispute over the Preah Vihear temple complex between 2008 and 2011 be explained?

What lessons can be drawn from both sides’ conflict behaviour for the nature of low-intensity border conflicts?

I argue that examining the immediate causes for conflict is not crucial to understanding Thailand’s and Cambodia’s conflict behaviour. These immediate causes include provocative actions by both sides, such as Thais demonstrating close to the border, Cambodians raising flags in the disputed area, or patrols clashing. To understand Bangkok’s and Phnom Penh’s actions, we must evaluate the motives of both heads of government. In doing so, this paper explains why the conflict has not been resolved so

--------------------------------------------------------------------

2 See Hun Sen’s emphatic portrayal of the situation in the fought-over area in April 2011 (Hun Sen 2011c: 4-5).

3 I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Siegfried Schieder for their very helpful comments and critiques. I am also grateful to David J. Rösch and Julia Wurr for their excellent research assistance.

___ 30 Martin Wagener ___

--------------------------------------------------------------------

far, and whether it has the potential to develop into a manifest border war. Using a

first-image perspective, I argue that state leaders’ motivations in low-intensity border conflicts, such as Preah Vihear, are fundamentally different from those in high-intensity border conflicts. It will become clear that Thailand and Cambodia, because of their central statesmen’s domestically determined motivations, are interested in neither a resolution nor an escalation of the border dispute.

The inquiry is structured as follows: I first present the historical background and the main events of the Preah Vihear conflict. Next, I outline the focus of the analysis, which is situated in the first-image perspective and mostly looks at the motivations of statesmen. Then, in order to explain their respective behaviour, I discuss the motives of the Cambodian and Thai heads of government in the border dispute. The identified motives are then organized hierarchically so as to reflect the nature of a low-intensity border conflict. The paper closes with a brief conclusion, which includes a discussion

of possible ways of resolving the border conflict. Events up to the end of 2011 are considered.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Pages 39-41

3. Cambodia’s Motives

Looking at Cambodia’s conflict behaviour, historical motives stand out. The Khmer Empire had been one of the leading powers of Indochina in the twelfth century. The temple complex of Angkor (“Angkor Wat”) built during this period is considered an architectural masterpiece to this day. The downfall of the Khmer Empire was caused partly by attacks by the Siamese Kingdom of Ayutthaya, which was founded in 1351. In 1431 it conquered Angkor, the Khmer capital.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

__ Lessons from Preah Vihear 39 ___

--------------------------------------------------------------------

In the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, Cambodia became an object of Siam’s and French Indochina’s claims to power; throughout the East–West Conflict, it was at the centre of the respective competitions between Thailand and Vietnam, and between the United States and the Soviet Union. The former Khmer Empire had been degraded to a plaything of neighbouring states. The events of 29 January 2003 show how deep this grievance runs: After actress Suvanant Kongying was said to have refused to appear in Cambodia as long as the Angkor temple complex had not been returned to Thailand, unrest erupted in Phnom Penh, in the course of which the Thai embassy was burned to the ground (Hinton 2006). Suvanant Kongying then denied ever having said

anything to that effect (The Daily Telegraph 2003).

By going to UNESCO, the Cambodian David demonstrated assertiveness to the Thai Goliath. In doing so, Phnom Penh used its most important – currently maybe its only – power resource: the diplomatic prowess of Hun Sen, its prime minister since 1985, who has during his term seen 13 Thai counterparts come and go. In all other categories, Cambodia is clearly inferior to Thailand. This goes for territory (181,035 km² / 513,120 km²), population (2010: 14.14 million / 69.12 million), Gross Domestic Product, GDP (2010: 11.242 billion USD / 318.522 billion USD), defence budget (2010: 274 million USD / 4.81 billion USD), and the size of the armed forces (2010: 124,300 / 305,860) (The World Bank 2011; IISS 2011: 229, 275).

At first glance, it seems to be mostly historical motives that make Hun Sen’s behaviour in the Preah Vihear issue comprehensible. In the case at hand, however, motives rooted in day-to-day politics also come to the fore.

In particular, they explain Cambodia’s behaviour in 2008. The following motives must be considered:

The dispute over the temple complex was, first, instrumentalized by Hun Sen in the lead-up to the 27 July 2008 elections. It was hardly a coincidence that the Cambodian build-up intensified in the week immediately before the election. Hun Sen thus styled himself as the defender of the cultural claims of the Khmer people. The nationalism stimulated by this was presumably a major factor in his landslide victory, with the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) winning over 58 per cent of votes.6 That the Preah Vihear ruins are part of Cambodia’s central cultural heritage had been made clear to

--------------------------------------------------------------------

6 As Caroline Hughes has noted, this course of action has precedents: “The exploitationof Cambodia’s archaeological heritage in the pursuit of short-term nationalist popularity is a familiar part of the political repertoire for Cambodian governments” (Hughes 2009: 211). It stands out that the January 2003 unrests occurred before the July 2003 parliamentary elections and were also instrumentalized by Hun Sen (Hinton 2006: 453-454).

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

___ 40 Martin Wagener ___

--------------------------------------------------------------------

the nation’s citizens before. In January 2008, the National Bank of Cambodia issued a 2,000 KHR bill showing the Angkor temple complex on the front and the entrance gate to the Preah Vihear temple complex on the back (National Bank of Cambodia 2011).

Second, it is striking that the conflict was not only used to launch a new campaign for recruiting soldiers, but also to increase the Cambodian defence budget. A draft budget bill for 2009 published in November 2008 put the defence budget at 223 million USD, which amounted to an increase of over 60 per cent (Xinhua General News Service 2008). In November 2009 it became known that military spending for 2010 was to be increased to 274 million USD (Mocuta 2009). It is questionable whether Hun Sen could have pushed through this significant increase of the defence budget without the clashes

over Preah Vihear. With the additional funds, he was able to buttress the central pillar of his power, the armed forces’ loyalty.

Third, the cultivation of the border dispute at a manageable level opened the possibility for Hun Sen to distract attention from the Khmer Rouge tribunal, whose work he, according to observers, has been hampering for years (Human Rights Watch 2011). The tribunal’s finding could potentially cast a bad light on some members of the Cambodian government.

Even though the following people helped to end Pol Pot’s reign alongside Vietnam, they had previously been members of the Khmer Rouge: Hun Sen (prime minister), Chea Sim (president of the Senate, chairman of the CPP), Hor Namhong (foreign minister), Keat Chhon (minister of economy and finance), Sar Kheng (interior minister), and Heng Samrin (president of the National Assembly, honorary chairman of the CPP). It is thought that they only turned their backs on Pol Pot, whose Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia in 1975, in 1977/1978. Accordingly, 62 per cent of Cambodians stating in a July/August 2009 poll that the trial of Kang Kek Iew (alias “Comrade Duch”) was progressing too slowly (IRI 2009: 36) can be considered criticism of the government. The border dispute gave Hun Sen the opportunity to distinguish himself domestically. In a October/November 2008 poll, 59 per cent of Cambodians picked “Border issues and demarcation” in answer to the question “What three issues or concerns do you feel most impact Cambodia as a country?”. “Prices for goods” came in only second (by a considerable margin: 22 per cent) (IRI 2008: 15).

Fourth, Sam Rainsy, leader of the “Sam Rainsy Party”, charges that Hun Sen, by stoking the conflict with Thailand, is trying to distract attention from his failings in the border dispute with Vietnam.7 Moreover, he asserts 7 Sam Rainsy was probably referring to the issue of Kampuchea Krom (Hughes that Hun Sen supports Vietnamese claims to power in Indochina by trying to weaken Thailand, to which end “nothing is more effective than fanning the flames of internal divisions among the Thai people and supporting one fighting group against the other” (cited in BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific 2009a).

Fifth and last, it is safe to assume that another motive emerged during the dispute. Cambodia, too, is suffering from the effects of the international financial crisis. Whereas GDP grew by 6.7 per cent in 2008, it shrank by 2 per cent in 2009 according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF 2010: 182). Domestically, newspaper coverage of the dispute with Thailand is thus probably much more preferable for Hun Sen than is coverage of factories closing.

In the run-up to the February 2011 fights, Hun Sen’s motives changed.

There were no elections and no imminent increases of the defence budget; the economy had recovered, and distracting from the Khmer Rouge tribunal and other bilateral conflicts with neighbouring states appears to have been merely an accompanying motive. Rather, Hun Sen’s actions were driven by the fact that Abhisit Vejjajiva tried to have the recognition of the Preah Vihear temple complex as a World Heritage Site revoked, which Phnom Penh vehemently opposed. Hun Sen tried to portray his Thai colleague as the true obstacle to a resolution of the conflict (Puangthong Pawakapan

2011). Border fights were helpful as far as they provided him with the opportunity – to great public effect – to call for an international regulation of the conflict, all the while knowing that Abhisit Vejjajiva would have to reject this time and again, as he insisted on a bilateral format for negotiations. Hun Sen, however, could demonstrate his willingness to make peace to the UN and ASEAN.

The foreign policy confrontation was also helpful in distracting from potential domestic problems. A case in point, Hun Sen reacted very touchily to musings about the possibility of uprisings in Cambodia similar to those seen in North Africa in early 2011 (Cheang Sokha 2011). A further motive was floated in the print media: Hun Sen’s oldest son, Hun Manet, was said to have led the February 2011 fights. Some speculate that the aim of this was to improve Hun Manet’s reputation with the Cambodian armed forces in order to build him up as his father’s successor (Thai Press Reports 2011e; BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific 2011d). At the beginning of 2011, he had been promoted to major-general.

The background of the April/May 2011 fights is difficult to assess. Once more, the press speculated about the Hun Manet factor (ICG 2

12. The Case 002 Trial Continues: Conclusion of Testimony from Peoudara Vanthan and Testimony of Witness Prak Yut

January 25, 2012

------------------------------------------------------

(Comments: I am glad to paste below, a updated article titled “The case 002 Trial continues” on Youk Chhang and his collusion with Ben Kiernan, and Helen Jarvis, a self-confessed member of the Australian Communist Party, who was kicked of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (KRT) for not being impartial in her role as the Cambodian information chief appointed by Hun Sen. The article from the recent testimony by Youk Chhang deputy, and from himself, confirms that DCCAM is still under the control of Ben Kiernan and his Genocide Project at Yale University. This collusion between Youk Chhang and Ben Kiernan and Helen Jarvis, was captured in the following paragraph extracted for this updated article as follows:

"Mr. Karnavas then showed Mr. Vanthan an email purportedly from author Peter Maguire to DC-Cam director Youk Chhang, referencing the “Ieng Thirith file.” This document was followed the production of another email copy – this one dated 1998 and sent from Youk Chhang to Khmer Rouge scholar Ben Kiernan and carbon copied to author Helen Jarvis that had a handwritten annotation on it stating “Dara, for NC file.” Mr. Vanthan acknowledged the contents of this annotation, prompting a prosecution interjection for the production of case file document number for the email document."

Youk Chhang is put at the DCCAM to support Ben Kiernan, and not to seek justice as he so often proclaimed in this web site. I cannot give up my responsibility as a free person, in trying to inform the best I can all those Cambodians who want to know the truth and to give Cambodia a better chance to survive. Naranhkiri Tith, Ph.D. January 26, 2012)

------------------------------------------------------

On Wednesday, January 25, 2012, the Trial Chamber of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) resumed its hearing on evidentiary issues with a third consecutive day of testimony from Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) deputy director Peoudara Vanthan. Prior to Mr. Vanthan’s testimony, all three ECCC Case 002 defense teams had vigorously challenged the neutrality of DC-Cam, which researches the history of the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) period in Cambodia.[1] During the previous day’s questioning, the defense teams for accused Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary had both questioned Mr. Vanthan concerning the goals, policies and documentation processes in place at DC-Cam. At times, this questioning became rather adversarial, with the defense teams arguing that Mr. Vanthan was not directly answering questions and challenging Mr. Vanthan on DC-Cam’s neutrality as an institution.

Continued Questioning of Witness Peoudara Vanthan by Ieng Sary Defense

Wednesday’s proceedings began with continued questioning of Mr. Vanthan by Ieng Sary international defense counsel Michael Karnavas, who began by revisiting the issue raised the previous day of whether DC-Cam maintains specific files “dedicated” to individual Case 002 accused. Mr. Vanthan stated that there is no specific file on each accused maintained at DC-Cam. Mr. Karnavas then displayed a document (see Figure 1 below) provided to the ECCC Defense Support Section (DSS) by Mr. Vanthan himself that included compiled documents concerning accused Ieng Sary.

Figure 1. Record of DC-Cam files on Ieng Sary, provided by DC-Cam to the ECCC Defense Support Section.

After some translation confusion relating to the terms “file” and “folder,” Mr. Vanthan stated that DC-Cam has “folders” on each accused and that these were created to assist researchers who came to DC-Cam seeking information. After being accused of being “less than truthful” in his previous testimony, Mr. Vanthan testified that DC-Cam does not organize documents by their relevance to any accused upon receipt.

Mr. Karnavas then showed Mr. Vanthan an email purportedly from author Peter Maguire to DC-Cam director Youk Chhang, referencing the “Ieng Thirith file.” This document was followed the production of another email copy – this one dated 1998 and sent from Youk Chhang to Khmer Rouge scholar Ben Kiernan and carbon copied to author Helen Jarvis that had a handwritten annotation on it stating “Dara, for NC file.” Mr. Vanthan acknowledged the contents of this annotation, prompting a prosecution interjection for the production of case file document number for the email document.

Mr. Karnavas explained that the document had not been entered into the case file and provided a hard copy of the document to the prosecution. He then asked Mr. Vanthan to read out the annotations on the document again. This led to a testy exchange between Mr. Vanthan, who appeared annoyed at being asked to repeat himself, and Mr. Karnavas, who did not appreciate Mr. Vanthan’s perceived reluctance to cooperate during questioning.

The Chamber then intervened and Judge Sylvia Cartwright stated that normally documents not on the case file are not typically used for questioning in civil law jurisdictions and then asked Mr. Karnavas for a further explanation about the provenance of new email document.

Mr. Karnavas explained that the email document was only obtained by the Ieng Sary defense the afternoon of the previous day and could not be put onto the case file. He declined to provide the identity of the individual who provided the document, however, explaining that he had provided assurances of confidentiality to this person. After further discussion between the Chamber and parties, Mr. Karnavas argued that the document goes to the credibility of Mr. Vanthan as a witness, as it impeaches his previous testimony that DC-Cam does not create accused-specific files.

Eventually, Chamber President Nil Nonn sustained the objections against use of the email document, stating that all evidence must be submitted to the case file prior to its use.

Mr. Karnavas accepted this ruling and noted that the document would be submitted for inclusion in the case file. He further noted that the Ieng Sary defense would probably use this document in the future when DC-Cam director Youk Chhang testifies and noted that the Chamber had indicated it would call Mr. Chhang as a witness, apparently confirming recent speculation on this subject.

Following this exchange, Mr. Karnavas turned back to the issue of what, if any, “analysis” of authenticity and reliability is done on documents received by DC-Cam. This line of questioning prompted another objection from the prosecution, which argued that Mr. Karnavas should not be permitted to ask Mr. Vanthan for legal opinions. This objection was sustained, and Mr. Karnavas rephrased by asking Mr. Vanthan about documents found by DC-Cam in the National Archives of Cambodia. Mr. Vanthan responded that DC-Cam did not request any formal statement regarding the previous chain of custody for documents received from the Archives, but Mr. Vanthan did indicate that he asked the custodian of the documents at the Archives about how the documents came into the possession of the Archives.

Upon further questioning on this topic, Mr. Vanthan stated that DC-Cam did not request official documentation from the Archives about the original source(s) of the documents because the Archives is a well-established institution that keeps its own records and is still in existence. Thus, such official information is still available at the Archives, and Mr. Vanthan suggested that, if the defense wants further information on the chain of custody of DC-Cam documents collected from the Archives, it should question a representative from the Archives itself.

Next Mr. Karnavas asked if DC-Cam has any official protocol it uses to record information on the chain of custody for documents received from individual donors. Mr. Vanthan responded that the questions DC-Cam asks donors depends on each particular document and who provided it. He further stated that documents from individuals are typically provided directly to DC-Cam director Youk Chhang, who then turns the documents over to Mr. Vanthan to catalogue. Upon further questioning, Mr. Vanthan explained that he did not personally receive any documents from scholars. As Mr. Chhang typically receives such documents, Mr. Vathan maintained that he cannot comment on the provenance of such documents.

As for documents from the Cambodian Ministry of Interior, Mr. Vanthan testified that he personally went to the Ministry to receive such documents. Mr. Karnavas then asked whether the Ministry simply gave the documents to DC-Cam or whether DC-Cam actually entered the Ministry and was provided full access to their archives. Mr. Vanthan responded only generally, stating that the permission letter DC-Cam received from the Cambodian government allows the Center to collect DK period documents from anywhere within the country.

Mr. Karnavas then turned to the archive of former Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk. Mr. Vanthan stated that he was unsure if DC-Cam made any efforts to access this archive to search for DK period documents.

When asked about efforts by DC-Cam to gather documents from foreign governments, Mr. Vanthan stated that DC-Cam director Youk Chhang authored an open appeal letter that was transmitted to many countries, requesting that the recipient governments send any documents related to the DK period in their possession to DC-Cam. He stated he is unsure whether governments responded to these requests and noted that Mr. Chhang himself is in a better position to answer such questions.

This concluded questioning by the Ieng Sary defense, and the floor was turned over to the Khieu Samphan defense to put questions to Mr. Vanthan.

13.    Scrutiny of DC-Cam Continues in Case 002 Evidentiary Hearings

January 24, 2012

By Randle DeFalco, J.D. Rutgers School of Law – Newark, Legal Advisor, DC-Cam

(Comments: What I have been calling Youk Chhang as the most hypocritical person to be made responsible for the main evidence for the Khmer Rouge Trial. He has been cooperating with the Yale Project on Genocide under Ben Kiernan, a well-known sympathizer of the Vietnamese and a former supporter of the Khmer Rouge, before they broke up with the Vietnamese, from day one. Now, Youk Chhang is being closely challenged for his lack of partiality, which in turn led to the question of the validity of the documents provided by his DCCAM.   

I am being vindicated for what I have been suspecting about this fellow Youk Chhang. Please, read the full report by clicking on “Trial Footage Part, Part 2 Part 3 Part 4” pasted just below these comments. Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. January 24, 2012)

Trial footage: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

P.S.  to read the full report, please, click on Trial footage; Part 1; Part 2, Part 3 Part 4

CTM Blog 1-24-12.pdf

National Deputy Co-Prosecutor Chan Dara Reasmey continues the questioning of DC-Cam Deputy Director Peoudara Vanthan.

On Tuesday, January 24, 2012, the Trial Chamber of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) continued with questioning of witness Peoudara Vanthan, deputy director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam).

Prosecution Continues Questioning Witness Peoudara Vanthan

ECCC National Deputy Co-Prosecutor Chan Dara Reasmey took up questioning Mr. Vanthan where his international colleague, Tarik Abdulhak, had left off the previous day, beginning with how DC-Cam determines that Revolutionary Flag booklets in its possession are genuine documents that were created by the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) during the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) period. Mr. Vanthan explained that authentication of the documents is a lengthy process that is conducted in a holistic manner through considering the language used in the document and comparing this language to common CPK phrases, such as references to “smashing” enemies.

When asked about DC-Cam’s “bibliographic database,” Mr. Vanthan explained that the main purpose of the database is to store biographies of Khmer Rouge combatants collected by DC-Cam.

Regarding the types of documents considered “key” by DC-Cam, Mr. Vanthan responded that DC-Cam “does not do any analysis” of documents, but only categorizes them generally. As for biographies, DC-Cam has created a standardized form to enter data into the database for each document, mostly to help individuals search for missing loved ones. Mr. Vanthan further noted that DC-Cam has a manual at its offices that contains the Center’s policies for data entry into its database. Mr. Vanthan then explained that he is in charge of this data entry and supervises staff members who conduct this work. Furthermore, data entry is reviewed by DC-Cam staff members as a group, to ensure consistency and accuracy. He further noted that accuracy is important because many Cambodian people come to DC-Cam each day to search for information about loved ones who went missing during the DK period. By using the database, he stated, DC-Cam is able to provide answers to some of these people, even if the only information available is about the circumstances of the death of the missing person.

When asked additional questions about the database, Mr. Vanthan suggested that, for more information, anyone with questions should visit DC-Cam’s public website to learn more about the Center’s database.

Upon further questioning, Mr. Vanthan explained that DC-Cam also maintains a photographic database and that people searching for lost loved ones can review these photos. When a photograph is identified by a visitor to the Center, this information is then put into the photographic database.

As for legal ownership of DC-Cam’s documents, Mr. Vanthan stated that the ownership depends on the specific document and the Center’s agreement with whomever donated the document.

When ask who has provided “the most documents to DC-Cam” and who the principal person who receives such documents is, Mr. Vanthan explained that documents can be collected by any member of DC-Cam’s staff but that all such documents are vetted and inspected by Mr. Vanthan personally.

Regarding the coding of video documents, Mr. Vanthan explained that DC-Cam has a list of films available on the Center’s public website and this list includes information such as from where the video document was originally obtained.

Questioning was then turned over to the civil parties.

DC-Cam Deputy Director Peoudara Vanthan testifies before the ECCC on Tuesday, January 24.

Civil Party Questioning of Witness Peoudara Vanthan

Civil Party Lead Co-Lawyer Pich Ang then took up questioning of Mr. Vanthan on behalf of the civil parties, pledging to do his best not to be repetitive. The first topic explored by the civil parties was DC-Cam’s process of becoming independent from Yale University. Mr. Vanthan explained that the initial research activities of DC-Cam were conducted as joint venture with Yale University but that, after two years, Yale’s mandate expired and DC-Cam continued independently. He further explained that, from 1995-1997, DC-Cam had served as an office for Yale’s general genocide studies research program. After 1997, however, DC-Cam became an independent non-governmental organization (NGO).

When counsel continued to question Mr. Vanthan about DC-Cam’s origins and relationship with Yale, Chamber President Nil Nonn interjected and stated that Mr. Vanthan had already been asked and had answered such questions. He then instructed civil party lawyer Pich Ang to use his questioning time to ask non-repetitive questions.

Pich Ang then asked Mr. Vanthan whether DC-Cam considers itself an “investigating” organization. Mr. Vanthan responded that DC-Cam never uses the term “investigate” to describe its work, which is to simply document the history of the DK period.

Regarding his training in New South Wales, Australia, Mr. Vanthan explained that he was trained in “recording” and “compiling” documents and filing them so they can be accessed easily by the public.

When asked to comment on his statement that DC-Cam does not “analyze” documents, Mr. Vanthan stated that the Center’s policy is not to make statements about specific documents, especially regarding whether such documents do or do not implicate a particular individual in crimes.

When Mr. Ang then asked about the Center’s filing and indexing system, Mr. Vanthan appeared frustrated and stated that he had already answered such questions. He explained that he had already discussed how the Center finds documents once they are catalogued through its indexing system. Mr. Vanthan again explained that the Center generally examines the types of paper on which documents are printed but does not have the facilities to forensically examine documents. Furthermore, when the Center has any doubt about the source or authenticity of a document, he maintained, the Center consults with experts, such as historian David Chandler, to assist in determining whether such document is genuine.

Mr. Vanthan also reiterated that documents provided to researchers cannot be altered or damaged because only copies are provided to the public and the researchers complete their research in a specific place at DC-Cam’s office.

He also affirmed that all copies of documents provided to the ECCC are accurate reproductions of the original documents at DC-Cam to the best of his knowledge. When asked about authentication again, Mr. Vanthan responded, “All documents at DC-Cam have been authenticated.”

Having concluded his questioning, Mr. Ang then turned the floor over to his international colleague, Elisabeth Simonneau Fort, to continue questioning. Ms. Simonneau Fort apologized in advance to Mr. Vanthan for the “basic” questions she planned on asking but explained that sometimes simply stating such basic information in court is important.

First, Ms.SimonneauFort explored the nature of DC-Cam’s work and its methodology. She asked whether DC-Cam utilizes a “university-based scientific approach.” Mr. Vanthan affirmed that this was an accurate characterization of the Center’s mandate.

Upon further questioning, Mr. Vanthan testified that DC-Cam has a “clear code of ethics” for staff members who conduct field research in Cambodia’s provinces. Regarding the Center’s research interviews, Mr. Vanthan explained that DC-Cam’s senior legal advisors review standardized questionnaires, which DC-Cam then utilizes when conducting interviews. He noted that these standardized forms have been shared with the ECCC Office of the Co-Investigating Judges (OCIJ).

Mr. Vanthan next affirmed that he considers himself an expert on historical research, as he has 17 years of experience working in the field. He also explained that DC-Cam continues to collaborate with several universities, including Rutgers University and Temple University (both in the United States) among others. When asked whether DC-Cam is renowned among foreign universities, Mr. Vanthan declined to address this subject, stating that he does not want to “boast” about his or DC-Cam’s work.

When asked whether DC-Cam helps to “guide” the research of ECCC parties when they visit the Center, Mr. Vanthan explained that anyone who visits DC-Cam is instructed on how to search for documents and make requests. Thus, “each and every visitor needs to be guided” via a “general orientation session” conducted by DC-Cam staff members.

Upon further questioning, Mr. Vanthan testified that DC-Cam has been recognized by the ECCC as a donor of documents. He did not directly address whether DC-Cam had equally assisted all parties before the Court, however, preferring to state generally that the Center has been recognized and thanked by the ECCC as an institution.

Ms. Simonneau Fort then asked whether any ECCC party representative had been “critical” of DC-Cam’s research methods when conducting research at the Center. Mr. Vanthan responded by only stating generally that DC-Cam honors all documents requests from any party “in due course” and free of charge. He did affirm that DC-Cam has not met with any particular dissatisfaction from any ECCC party thus far.

14. The Diplomatic Dance: Cambodia on the International Stage

·         Cultural survival: 14.3 (Fall 1990) Cambodia

·         Mary Byrne; John McAuliff

·         McDonnell

------------------------------------------

(Comments: this article titled “Diplomatic Dance; Cambodia on the International Stage” written by a group of pro-Hun Sen and pro-Vietnamese scholars, John McAuliff, and Mary Byrne. However, it gives a good view of the complicate and complex maneuvering behind the scene on the Paris Peace agreements (PPA).

Please, read this article by John McAuliff with great caution. To have a more balanced view on the PPA, please, read a companion article titled “Cambodia Curse” by Joel Brinkley, on the real and more objective, but disastrous and deadly look at the Cambodian tragedy, from the past until present-day.

Most importantly, these articles provide a good foundation to better understand that the PPA is anything but alive.  That is why Cambodians should start to look for a capable and morally well-grounded leader, to help the Cambodian people to extricate itself from certain death, and stop counting on others (PPA signatories) to help them out of this current tragic situation, mostly of their own making.  Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. January 21, 2012)

------------------------------------------

Cambodia has not known peace since well before the United States' withdrawal from Saigon on 30 April 1975. With each palace coup, and even with the arrival of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975, many Cambodians believed that finally the wars were at an end. They welcomed Pol Pot's soldiers with hope for the future.

But the war did not end with Pol Pot's arrival, nor with Vietnam's liberation of Phnom Penh in January 1979 from the horrors of his regime. Nor has it ended with Vietnam's withdrawal in September 1989.

Under the current government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, stability and security - a slow process of recovery from the devastation of the Pol Pot years - have been achieved in large areas of the country. The struggle to revive economic life and to provide basic services to the 8.4 million Cambodians, most of whom reside in rural provinces, continues to make progress, with the help of international aid agencies. Dancers are once again performing at the University of Fine Arts; students are studying at Phnom Penh University; makers of fish sauce are once more traveling from outlying areas to the banks of the Tonle Sap for the annual fish run from which the pungent pra hok is made.

Visitors to Phnom Penh contrast the drab, depopulated streets of the early 1980s with the lively, colorful, bustling Southeast Asian market-town atmosphere at the end of the decade. In the early 1980s, many Cambodians seemed to feel compelled to pour out to visitors their personal terrors of the Pol Pot era. By 1989, spirits appeared to be recovering, along with improvements in physical well-being, the revival of dance, music, and art, and the upswing in economic and social activity. Stories of the Khmer Rouge era still circulated, but the emphasis had shifted from the horror to the absurdity and stupidity of the massive Khmer Rouge labor projects directed by Chinese and North Korean advisors.

One of the greatest frustrations experienced by the aid community in Phnom Penh has been the refusal of Western governments to acknowledge the internal transformation in Cambodia. From total devastation in 1979, a flourishing society has been rebuilt, albeit with still unresolved social and economic problems. All of the institutions destroyed in the mad utopia of the Khmer Rouge have reemerged: agriculture, currency, commerce, banking, schools, hospitals, the art, religion, communications. Initially largely administered by advisors from Vietnam, the Hun Sen government has gradually improved its credibility as Khmer have steadily increased their role and responsibility within the context of Vietnam's phased departure. As conditions have improved, so has the prime minister's personal stature.

In Phnom Penh, early in 1989, the mood was optimistic. Everyone said Pol Pot could not return.

International and Regional Flexibility

Although an international Cambodian settlement was not yet in view, in the late 1980s many Cambodians felt that accommodation among their current leaders, who had achieved so much with so little, and their former head of state, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, could prevent the return of the dreaded Khmer Rouge. Sihanouk had taken a leave of absence (May 1987), and then resigned (July 1988) from leadership of the resistance coalition fighting against the Hun Sen government. It seemed plausible that a settlement was near.

The past two years have seen almost constant movement toward a compromise solution to the Cambodian dilemma, in contrast to the stagnation of the previous decade. The international situation has undergone dramatic change, unimagined a few years ago. Since 1986, there has been unprecedented cooperation between the United States and Vietnam on humanitarian issues, rapprochement between the United States and the Soviet Union, between the Soviet Union and China, and among Vietnam, Laos, and their large northern neighbor, China. The Soviet Union's desire to exert regional influence more subtly and with less direct economic cost, has left significant room for compromise. Indochina watchers have even speculated that China would be flexible on the Cambodia issue in aid to regain international credibility following the Tianamen Square massacre.

US policy over the past decade has been primarily concerned with pressuring Vietnam to withdraw from Cambodia. To this end the United States has maintained a diplomatic, trade, and aid embargo against Vietnam and Cambodia. In addition, it has provided financial support for "nonlethal" aid to the noncommunist resistance (NCR), channeled through Thailand, and logistical support to their military wings via the Bangkok-based Cambodian Working Group. US pressure has discouraged international agencies such as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the International Monetary Fund from dealing with Vietnam and Cambodia in the normal fashion. The United States has supported the retention of the United Nations seat by the Khmer Rouge government of Democratic Kampuchea in the guise of a Sihanouk-led coalition. (Should the coalition be dissolved, the seat reverts to the Khmer Rouge.) To pursue the goal of pressuring Vietnam, an implicit pact was made with China by National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1979 to revitalize the China-backed Khmer Rouge, the only effective fighting and diplomatic force within the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK).

By May 1989, US policy under the Bush Administration was showing some signs of change. Secretary of State James Baker, in a 5 July speech to ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) foreign ministers in Brunei, indicated a new willingness to accept the functioning government in Phnom Penh, headed by Hun Sen, as long as Sihanouk received face-saving guarantees. Over the next month, a number of official statements and press accounts reaffirmed this position while emphasizing a strengthened anti-Khmer Rouge line.

On the regional level, change has been staggering. Since 1986, all the countries in Indochina have embarked on distinctive forms of glasnost and perestroika, Economic restructuring is occurring along market-oriented lines, as property is privatized, openings made to foreign investment capital and ownership, exchange rates stabilized, and inflation reduced. Petty trading, private workshops, joint ventures, and partnerships are replacing communes and cooperatives. The Vietnamese economy, according to World Bank experts, achieved more reform in the past two years than China was able to achieve in ten. Cambodia has gone furthest in reforms, including the reestablishment of Buddhism as the state religion.

Unofficial trade with the ASEAN countries (Brunei Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand) had already been strong. Indochina's internal reforms combined with the regulations had led businesspeople from many Western and east Asian countries - particularly Japan, Taiwan, Australia, France, Sweden, and even China - to join the increasing numbers of their colleagues from Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore in searching for business opportunities in this labor - and resource-rich region. Internal reforms have also led to a loosening of the ties among the three countries and with the socialist world, and to interest in forging new bonds with China, ASEAN, and Western countries. Tourism and academic exchanges have expanded in this climate.

In the last several years, the political climate within ASEAN has moved toward an overwhelming desire to resolve the Cambodia situation and get on with the business of economic development and regional reintegration. Indonesia, long in favor of openness and flexibility toward Indochina, found an ally in Thailand. Although Thailand had been the leader of the hard-line camp against any accommodation with the countries of Indochina, the assumption of office in August 1988 of Prime Minister Chatichai Choonhavan set a new course. Chatichai, concerned with improving relations within the region, proposed to turn Indochina "from a battlefield to a trading market." Thailand had torpedoed previous Indonesian efforts at compromise, but Chatichai's government began to work with Indonesia to implement the JIM (Jakarta Informal Meeting) process, which in turn led to the convening of the 19-nation international conference on Cambodia in Paris in August 1989.

The rekindled interest in achieving a settlement, and the heightened level of diplomatic activity on several fronts, led to optimism about the outcome of the Paris conference. However, the intransigence of the Khmer Rouge and China, the abrupt about-face of Sihanouk, and the willingness of the United States to accept passively the situation contributed to the failure of the international effort. It foundered on the essential issue of whether to include the Khmer Rouge in an interim government. ASEAN, Sihanouk, China, the United States, and the Khmer Rouge favored inclusion; Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and Hun Sen's State of Cambodia insisted on exclusion.

Prior to the Paris talks, the Bush Administration reportedly had been prepared to insist that the long-deposed prince break with his Khmer Rouge allies (and, by implication, his Chinese sponsors), as he appeared to be doing during the JIM process and in several meetings with Hun Sen since December 1987. Following the prince's reversion to alliance with the Khmer Rouge, the US State Department's Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs Richard H. Solomon explained that Sihanouk was "our horse in this race" and that "we went along with his judgment." In fact, the Paris talks immediately followed the secret Scowcroft-Eagelberger mission to China, suggesting that Sihanouk's was not the only influential voice involved.

The conference ended with international resignation that the only way the four Cambodian factions could settle their differences was on the battlefield of their homeland. The international community essentially sanctioned the factions to fight until weakness might bring them back to the bargaining table, ready to deal.

New Pressures, New Opportunities, Old Questions

On the heels of the failed Paris conference, Vietnam withdrew its remaining forces from Cambodia. Shortly after the 30 September withdrawal, US military intelligence analysts confirmed that, despite the resistance claims and Chinese claims to the contrary, the long-awaited withdrawal had, in fact, taken place. Until then, US policy had concentrated almost solely on this goal, paying little heed to what might happen to Cambodia were the Vietnamese actually to leave. Scant consideration had been given to the State of Cambodia's fragility or to the potential for renewed ravages of a revitalized Khmer Rouge.

The failure of the Paris conference and the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops did not diminish diplomatic activity aimed at finding a face-saving exit from a situation growing daily more embarrassing for many of the key players, and daily more dangerous for Cambodians. Khmer Rouge forces on the ground began to make some gains. Although fewer than their propagandists claimed (and uncritically reported by the Western press), reports of their success infused the process with greater urgency. It began to dawn on the international community that the diplomatically isolated and economically fragile Hun Sen government might not be able to withstand, unaided, the onslaught of resistance forces nurtured and supplied by China and the United States over the past decade.

Prime Minister Chaitichai invited Prime Minister Hun Sen to Bangkok for the third time in a year. Chatichai and his advisors shuttled among the various players trying to obtain agreement for another meeting.

Although the UN once again voted in November 1989 to seat the Khmer Rouge-dominated CGDK, Finland and Sweden, longtime supporters of the annual resolution, refused to fall in line. Others, in their speeches, evoked the sentiments expressed by British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd: Britain's vote to accept the credentials of the CGDK "in no way implies readiness to deal with the coalition government of Democratic Kampuchea as a government, much less support for the Khmer Rouge."

Since October 1989, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and Australia have announced new diplomatic overtures to Cambodia and/or Vietnam, further cracking the hitherto firm bulwark against interaction with the Hun Sen government and adding to its growing international legitimacy. The most promising diplomatic initiative has come from Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Senator Gareth Evans. In late November, Evans announced a proposal calling for a UN-supervised interim administration and vacant UN seat. "What I would be envisioning would be one, two or maybe three hundred bureaucrats... putting in a top structure of an administration for this transitional period." He argues that this administration would get around the stumbling block of power sharing in the interim government. The plan does not call for the complete dismantling of the Hun Sen government (some 250,000 personnel countrywide) during the interim period before elections, but it does involve "Hun Sen stepping back from a position of formal authority."

This proposal became the basis for a new round of diplomatic efforts. Within days, both Sihanouk and Hun Sen had agreed to the proposal, followed shortly by Son Sann, leader of the smallest member of the resistance coalition, the Khmer People's National Liberation Front (KPNLF). Only the Khmer Rouge rejected Australia's proposal outright, continuing to insist on quadripartite power sharing before elections. Beijing's and Moscow's subsequently favorable responses led to a 15 January meeting in Paris among the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. The text of a joint declaration issued following the two-day meeting specified agreement to "accept an enhanced UN role in the resolution of the Cambodian problem." This "enhanced" role includes the verification of the withdrawal of foreign forces and an effective UN presence to monitor internal security during the transition period. The communique clearly supports the notion of UN involvement in the interim period, but does not directly address the extent of UN involvement in a transitional government. Nor does the text mention the Australian plan, which would keep the core of the Hun Sen administrative apparatus in place during the period before elections.

Senior UN officials have noted that this communique reflects Soviet and Vietnamese flexibility, rather than concessions on the part of China. Since all parties except China and its Khmer Rouge allies had already accepted the Australian plan as a basis for discussion, the Paris communique should be seen as a step in what is apt to be a lengthy process, rather than as the breakthrough originally reported. It may prove significant, however, that certain previous stumbling blocks are not mentioned in the new text; for example, the joint statement omits reference to a role for Sihanouk and to a quadripartite interim government.

Journalist Nayan Chanda has reminded New York Times readers of the particular omission. Previously "even China endorsed a UN statement calling for 'nonreturn' to the universally condemned policies and practices of Cambodia's recent past." While the absence of such a statement here might seem to be backsliding on this issue, a high-ranking UN official insists that the UN has been assured that the language will reappear in a subsequent statement. However, this has not happened.

The fundamental issue that continues to thwart a settlement is who will govern in the interim before an election. The Khmer Rouge insists on quadripartite power sharing. Sihanouk often advocates the same thing but also has called for dismantling the Hun Sen government to the district level and replacing it with a UN administration. Congressman Solarz and the Bush Administration also seem inclined toward widespread replacement of the Hun Sen Administration with UN administrators. Senior UN officials indicate that the UN does not see itself as the administrator of a country with direct responsibility for its everyday functioning. They stress that UN expertise lies in a supervisory and monitoring role - a watchdog function meant to induce confidence and provide an atmosphere for free and fair elections. Such a role could only be based on the assumption that all parties are willing to cooperate in good faith.

Unfortunately, the laudable Western goal of assuring free and fair elections has been confused by assumptions that Sihanouk is still popular and plays a central unifying role, and by accession to China's demands that its Khmer Rouge client should be absolved of past crimes and given access to power prior to elections.

In conversations in Phnom Penh in January, it became clear that the Hun Sen government sees the UN role primarily to carry out elections, but that it is willing to accept UN supervision wide enough to assure that normal administrative powers are not used to prejudice the electoral process against its opponents. Phnom Penh has not mitigated its rejection of the Khmer Rouge in an interim government, nor, at this writing, is it prepared to have the stability of its governance undermined to the benefit of the Khmer Rouge by the removal of top political officials.

Although Phnom Penh would probably still prefer that Cambodia's seat in the UN be vacated, and although it rejects the quadripartite formula for UN representation, it is willing to preserve Cambodian sovereignty through a national council consisting of equal representatives from both administrations. It would be up to the resistance coalition to determine the nature of Khmer Rouge participation in its administration. An alternative is a council composed of eminent personalities acceptable to both sides.

The Khmer Rouge shows little desire to accept such a formula; its military options, however, could be forestalled by Thai closure of supply lines and sanctuaries. This can only happen if the United States, ASEAN, Western Europe, and Japan together support Chatichai and make it clear that China would be completely isolated in its attempts to resupply the Khmer Rouge. Although this would not please the Khmer Rouge, it may gamble on elections allowing it to extend its penetration and provide some legitimacy. Such elections could always be later denounced as fraudulent, too. The Sihanoukists and Son Sannists would agree because they must calculate carefully how much they can reasonably expect in preelection power sharing, as opposed to a chance for open electoral competition. If they try to ride the Khmer Rouge tiger into military victory over the Phnom Penh government, they know they will soon become Pol Pot's next victim.

Nonetheless, there is cause for optimism. A highly placed UN official hastened to remind his listeners that although the January joint statement is vague and contentious issues remain, the five powers had been unable to issue any joint statement at all following the August Paris conference: They spoke only of blame and the certainty of renewed civil war. All parties have now accepted a major UN role. This signals significant progress, although disagreement simmers over just what kind of UN role will satisfy all parties.

While Sihanouk continues to be a valued symbol of national unity for all sides, his impact on events has steadily diminished. France and the United States lost confidence in him as a result of the Paris conference. Washington was so disturbed by the growing collaboration between Sihanoukist and Khmer Rouge forces that it pressured the prince to distance himself, leading to yet another resignation by him from his position as head of the CGDK. However, Sihanouk maintained he was still the legal leader of Cambodia based on the illegitimacy of his overthrow in 1970. He manifested that by changing the CGDK's name, anthem, and flag at the UN.

In March, shortly after taking up permanent residence in border villages "liberated" by his forces, pressing personal matters took him again to Beijing, Pyongyang, and Bangkok. Observers increasingly wondered whether the unpredictable maneuvering with which Sihanouk had once maintained his nation's independence had now become a destructive parody of itself.

Despite doubts over exact interpretation of events and the high level of abstraction present in official statements, it is clear that the situation has been moved off dead center by the process begun with the Australian proposal. The coming months will see a further flurry of diplomatic activity as the various players work to gain consensus based on the Australian plan. The permanent members of the Security Council met again in New York on 11-13 February. Little progress was made and final statements were even more abstract than those following the January meeting.

The third JIM meeting (in Jakarta on 23-26 February 1990) resolved little. Although all participants came giving at least lip service to the Australian plan, Foreign Minister Evans expressed great frustration at the less than full participation of the French, the "wrecking crew" behavior of the Khmer Rouge, and Vietnam's insistence on retaining anti-genocide language in the conference statement, which therefore died for lack of a consensus by all four Cambodian parties.

The burden of finding a solution then shifted back to the major external powers in a 12 March gathering of the Permanent 5 Security Council members in Paris. Substantial attention was given to the enhanced task of the UN in carrying out elections, but crucial questions were left unresolved about the role of the existing governmental structure in Cambodia and the fate of the four armies. Optimists saw this process leading to a situation in which China would either have to accept a face-saving formula that in reality left the Phnom Penh regime intact until elections were held, or find itself completely isolated. Pessimists felt the Chinese were winning key points in their diplomatic game of white-washing the Khmer Rouge record and playing for time while their client extended its influence on the ground.

Military successes in April by Phnom Penh, combined with Thai intentions to replace guerrilla camps and supply lines with neutral camps and apparent cuts in Chinese arms supplies, offer on-the-ground support for a realistic settlement. The decisive factor on the diplomatic front and in Thai willingness to cut off the Khmer Rouge is US policy. In the final analysis, will Washington stand up to Beijing over the question of the Khmer Rouge? Is vindictiveness toward Vietnam and desire to roll back the defeat of 1975 still dominating US policy?

Playing Russian Roulette with Cambodian Lives

It is too early to tell if these renewed diplomatic machinations will bear fruit and salvage what the Hun Sen government has achieved for the Cambodian people in the past decade. Some recent visitors to Phnom Penh say that people in the capital are trying to carry on with their lives, but clearly the national situation has deteriorated since the Vietnamese withdrawal. Press accounts of Khmer Rouge victories are highly exaggerated, but the mood in Phnom Penh is not as optimistic and hopeful as it was in the summer of 1989. People continue to say they are sure the Khmer Rouge cannot rule again. However, spirits have been dampened by intensified security, a reimposed curfew, and occasional bomb and grenade explosions within the capital.

Perhaps more serious are the soaring inflation, corruption, and growing disparity between urban and rural life brought on by the intensified war and the transition to a market economy. Some Western residents report occasional severe electricity and fuel shortages. It is not clear whether this is related to an intensification of the civil war or whether the new regulations allowing foreign residents to move out of relatively well-maintained hotels into private villas have brought previously protected foreign observers is closer contract with longstanding problems confronting Cambodian residents of Phnom Penh.

If the situation deteriorates seriously, the specter of renewed instability may well lead to panic and the flight of some who are too tired and worn to face another Khmer Rouge victory or to start rebuilding their country anew, should international rescue be delayed too long.

The West is counting on the Khmer Rouge being strong enough to threaten the Hun Sen government, but not so strong as to topple it. It is also assuming Hun Sen will be weak enough to contemplate political suicide, but not so weak as to leave a vacuum for the Khmer Rouge. This scenario does not consider the almost irreparable damage that delays in peace will bring to a Cambodia just beginning to recover from its earlier devastation. It is easy to see how such a complexly choreographed set of assumptions could backfire. In that case, the West has a diplomatic failure; the Cambodian people have Pol Pot.

Article copyright Cultural Survival, Inc.  

16. DC-Cam wanted on stand

Mary Kozlovski

The Phnom Penh Post: Tuesday, 17 January 2012

-----------------------------------------

(Comments: this article and the next one titled “Uncertain verdict” together have revealed and unmasked the real identity of Youk Chhang, the director of the DCCAM.

Youk Chhang’ pretention to seek justice and the truth for the Cambodian people regarding the Khmer Rouge mass murder is only a façade to implement the real objective of those who have been helping him get the job, such as; Ben Kiernan (Yale Genocide Project), Michael Vickery, Alex Hinton, and Craig Etcheson, who are well-known supporters of  the Vietnamese and Hun Sen, as I have been alluding to so many times in this web site, by their process of  “demonizing the demons,” while making the Khmer Rouge not only mass murders, which they are, but, by also making them racists, thereby implying that all Cambodians are, so as to make the Vietnamese and Hun Sen only demons and not racists therefore better than the Khmer Rouge monsters.

I am happy to have found an important scholarly-written article titled “Conflicting Sites of Memory in Post-Genocide Cambodia,” giving strong support to my criticism of Youk Chhang and his friends of the DCCAM as supporters of the Vietnamese and Hun Sen.

Until Cambodians have learned not to depend on other people but on themselves, they can never improve their chance for survival. Naranhkiri Tith Ph. D. Washington DC. January 17, 2011))

-----------------------------------------

Defence teams at the Khmer Rouge tribunal requested yesterday that the director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia appear in court to testify about documents obtained through the organisation that were put before the Trial Chamber in the court’s second case.

Will Baxter/ Phnom Penh Post

Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, gestures while giving a tour of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum to a US delegation in November 2010.

During a hearing addressing the admissibility of documents supporting the indictment, co-defence counsel for former Brother Number Two Nuon Chea, Jasper Pauw, said in court that it was “imperative” the court hear the testimony of DC-Cam director Youk Chhang.

“If Youk Chhang is not heard by your Trial Chamber, then our position is that all evidence stemming from DC-Cam cannot be considered to be authentic and reliable, and must therefore be called inadmissible,” he said.

The DC-Cam has been collecting documents and information relating to the Democratic Kampuchea period since its establishment as in independent NGO in 1997, 500,000 of which have been provided to parties to the Khmer Rouge tribunal.

Pauw said that while another representative had been called to testify on issues relating to the authenticity of documents provided by DC-Cam, Youk Chhang was the “most informed” person respecting the organisation’s activities, adding that the defence was not criticising Youk Chhang’s approach.

“Youk Chhang is not a neutral observer in the search for the truth, he is a partisan researcher that has been working with a goal of having, among others, Nuon Chea prosecuted,” Pauw said in court.

In response to questions concerning allegations of bias, Youk Chhang said in an email yesterday that “it is pitiful” and, in response to a question about the appearance of a DC-Cam representative in court, said that “we have to listen to the judge”.

He added that DC-Cam had provided 500,000 documents to the ECCC, and that the documentation was available to defence teams at the tribunal.

Deputy international co-prosecutor William Smith said that it was not especially necessary for the representative of DC-Cam appearing in court to be Youk Chhang.

“We disagree with the defence position in that, although part of DC-Cam’s role is to search for the truth of … the Democratic Kampuchea period, we’re of the view that the organisation doesn’t demonstrate any significant bias in the work they do,” he said.

“The fact that DC-Cam are looking at crimes…that occurred during the Democratic Kampuchea period doesn’t … make them an unreliable or a biased organisation,” he added.

Defence teams for co-accused former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary and former nominal head of state Khieu Samphan echoed the request for Youk Chhang to appear in court.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

16. a. Uncertain verdict

Bridget Di Certo

The Phnom Penh Post:  Monday, 16 January 2012

ECCC

Reserve co-investigating judge Laurent Kasper-Ansermet.

Late on Friday, a day after inadvertently leaked government information showed Prime Minister Hun Sen had become involved in his appointment to the Khmer Rouge tribunal, Investigating Judge Laurent Kasper-Ansermet received the first phone call.

By yesterday morning, there had been several more, all telling him the same thing – the Supreme Council of Magistracy had met and refused to endorse him.

The purported meeting, which Kasper-Ansermet was told took place on Friday, remains shrouded in secrecy, and neither the United Nations nor the Council of Ministers’ Press and Quick Reaction Unit had received confirmation from the Supreme Council of Magistracy when contacted yesterday.

Without the SCM’s official endorsement, Kasper-Ansermet is unable to officially investigate the court’s controversial cases 003 and 004.

“If my rejection is confirmed, I may explain the situation to the UN, but I can’t do more,” Kasper-Ansermet said. “I am of the opinion that I replaced my predecessor validly under the law governing the tribunal, and that is contested by my national colleague.

“Everyone understands now that I intend to conduct further investigations in cases 003 and 004.

“I was expecting some difficulties [in assuming the co-investigating judge position], but not the real determination from my colleague to have such different opinions on the matter,” the Swiss national said yesterday, referring to a recent flurry of publicly combative statements by The failure of the SCM to swiftly appoint Kasper-Ansermet has effectively paralysed investigations into the cases, which are opposed by the Cambodian government.

“The position adopted by my national colleague leads to the situation where the [Office of the Co-Investigating Judges] would not be anymore constituted according to the law and therefore not properly functioning,” Kasper-Ansermet said. “It has been like walking in shackles.”

Cambodian Co-Investigating Judge You Bunleng.

The UN’s nominee, who has served as reserve judge at the tribunal since December 2010, said he has taken important decisions in respect of cases 003 and 004 and that he has a team of international investigators ready to begin work.

 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

16. b. Conflicting Sites of Memory in Post-Genocide Cambodia

By Brigitte Sion

Download as PDF

A new road connects the towns of Siem Reap to Along Veng, in northern Cambodia; it now takes less than two hours from the temples of Angkor to reach the last bastion of the Khmer Rouge, in what used to be a dense jungle. It is enough time for my driver, thirty-one-year-old Vann, to tell me the story of his family.

“Every Cambodian family has lost relatives under the Khmer Rouge,” he says. Vann’s mother lost her husband and children in the early years of Pol Pot’s murderous regime. She remarried and gave birth to a new set of children, including Vann. “A total of ten family members died,” he sums up. Later, when Vann was in school, he was required, along with all residents of his village outside Siem Reap, to excavate the killing fields and exhume the bodily remains for cremation. “The smell was horrible,” he recalls. “I see too many bones. It scares me.” For years, Vann avoided the former mass graves. “My children don’t know what happened.”

A Khmer song is playing in the car. “Old music from the 1960s,” he says by means of introduction. “The singer was killed.” We pass Along Veng and continue through the lush countryside and rice fields toward the Thai border. It takes a number of stops and questions, and a few dollars, to find the cremation site of Pol Pot, who was burned hastily in 1998 on a pile of rubbish. It is hidden behind a house, amid high weeds, junk, and garbage. A low wooden fence and a rusty corrugated-metal roof mark the spot. Next to it, a faded blue sign in Khmer and English reads, “Pol Pot was cremated here. Please help preserve this historical site. Ministry of Tourism.”

There are plastic plates for offerings and small jars filled with burnt incense. As I start taking pictures of the site, Vann takes off his sandals, pulls out a lighter, and ignites an incense stick as a tribute to the spirit of the dead. I cannot help but react strongly. “Vann, what are you doing? Pol Pot was responsible for the death of ten family members, and you are paying your respect to him?” Holding the smoking incense between his joined palms, he answers, “I know, but it is a long time ago. It is time to forget.”

This vignette from the summer of 2009 illustrates the divided memory of the genocide perpetrated in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979, under the leadership of Pol Pot. Thirty years after a Marxist dictatorship, the self-proclaimed “Democratic Kampuchea,” caused the death of about 1.5 million people, or a quarter of the population, collective memory inches its way through monuments, commemorations, an international court judging Khmer Rouge cadres, new textbooks, and artistic productions. However, memorialization stands at the center of conflicted interests—the government’s politics of reconciliation, Buddhist beliefs in karma, economic development, mass tourism opportunities, international law, and national historical narratives.

This essay examines the performance of memory in Cambodia through the lens of various memorials and commemorative practices: the major sites of murder in Phnom Penh (Tuol Sleng prison and Choeung Ek killing fields); local repositories of victims’ remains in villages; places associated with the perpetrators such as Pol Pot’s cremation site, as well as various holidays connected to the genocide. I look at the boom in memorials, the multiple functions they have to perform, the various populations and interests they serve, the different commemorations and ceremonies, and the resulting tensions. I argue that memorialization efforts take on different shapes and espouse conflicted narratives that serve opposing agendas, in which the memory of the Khmer Rouge’s victims is not always the priority.

Many remarkable scholarly works have been written about the Khmer Rouge takeover, the establishment of Democratic Kampuchea, the atrocities committed against civilians in the name of Marxist ideology, and the terrifying human death toll.¹ In the last decade, a growing number of survivors published testimonies and memoirs about their personal suffering, mending their lives after the genocide, or finding peace in exile.² Together with documentary films by Cambodian directors who are often survivors themselves, these accounts brought the genocide to a larger international audience.³

Cambodia has recently been in the news with the first trial of a Democratic Kampuchea leader under the auspices of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). After the National Assembly passed a law in 2003 establishing an international court for the prosecution of crimes committed under the rule of Democratic Kampuchea, the first warrants against high-ranked leaders were issued in April 2004. The first defendant was Guek Eav Kaing, alias Duch, who was the commander of the Tuol Sleng prison (known as S-21 in the Khmer Rouge code). As such, he was responsible for sending over 14,000 people to their deaths after extended torture and inhumane treatment. Duch’s trial, which spanned from 2009 to 2010, was the first opportunity to publicly document the genocidal operations and to memorialize the victims, since numerous civil parties were represented and scores of witnesses testified in memory of the dead. Another four top-ranked officials—Khieu Samphan (alias Hem), Ieng Thirith (alias Phea), Ieng Sary (alias Van), and Nuon Chea, all elderly—have been indicted for crimes against humanity and detained since 2007. They are awaiting trial, provided they do not die first, as did Pol Pot and Ta Mok (“the butcher”).

Although these trials have generated new research on the genocide and the remembrance of victims, little has been written about the memorialization efforts, especially in relation to memorial sites and commemorative practices. The articles written by Paul Williams and Judy Ledgerwood espouse an anthropological and museum studies perspective but focus exclusively on the center of the Khmer Rouge killing machine, Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek.⁴ Rachel Hughes is one of the rare scholars to explore local genocide memorials as well, albeit briefly.⁵ Here, I examine a variety of memorial sites and commemorative practices, embracing the hyper-local and the transnational, as well as political, economic, and religious motivations.

There are over one hundred memorial sites related to the genocide in Cambodia, from mass graves to urns and ossuaries to public artworks, but most of them are scattered in the provinces and not easily identifiable by foreign visitors. This partially explains why local memorials have not generated much scholarship. However, the main reason that national and international attention turned to Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek lies in the original agenda of these memorials. Both sites were the first “genocide museums” that meant to display the crimes of the Khmer Rouge while primarily fulfilling a political agenda. In other words, Tuol Sleng did not become a tourism destination over time; curatorial and marketing strategies to attract visitors have been essential from its inception.

When 100,000 Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia in January 1979, those who stormed the barricaded compound of Tuol Sleng found dead bodies in shackles, fresh bloodstains on the walls, human bones, torture instruments, photographic archives, and memos left by the Khmer Rouge who had just fled. While the Khmer Rouge were physically eliminating thousands of people and making the identification of human remains impossible, they were meticulously documenting their crimes—mug shots of those imprisoned, tortured, and killed; volumes of “confessions” obtained under pressure; lists of names given under duress—a paradoxical policy of erasure and evidence not unlike that of the Nazis.

The army preserved everything and immediately asked a Vietnamese museum expert, Mai Lam, to turn Tuol Sleng into a museum that would document the crimes of Democratic Kampuchea. Mai Lam was a colonel in the Vietnamese army who had fought in Cambodia during the first Indochina war and had previously organized the Museum of American War Crimes in Ho-Chi-Minh City. He came with experience and with an agenda. The genocide museum opened a year later, in 1980, first to foreign dignitaries and later to the general public.

A former school, Tuol Sleng consists of four three-story concrete buildings around a grassy courtyard planted with palm trees. A wall with an entrance gate surrounds the compound. To the left of the courtyard, next to the hanging pole, are the fourteen tombstones of the dead bodies found by the Vietnamese army. To the right, there is a gift shop selling bootlegged books and DVDs about the genocide, as well as Cambodian arts and crafts; next to it, one can buy cold drinks at a stand. The first building includes the torture rooms, each with a rusty metal bed, some torture instruments such as shackles, and a photograph on the wall that shows the room at the time of its discovery—with a dead body on the bed and blood on the floor. The objects are not protected or cordoned off; there are no signs that prepare the visitor for what is inside. As the Lonely Planet guidebook warns, “Tuol Sleng is not for the squeamish.”⁶

The mirror effect of the old photograph in the empty room is unsettling; some visitors move around to capture the same angle as the photograph and compare details. Others find the stains on the pillow, the proximity of death, and the raw photograph repulsive. The shock value is obvious, and so is the staging of objects and pictures. The display of physical horrors clearly served political goals earlier: it helped to justify the Vietnamese presence in Cambodia and its image as liberators from the “genocidal clique” of Pol Pot and others (who were tried and condemned in absentia in 1979) and to legitimize the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), the new government that had been installed by the Vietnamese. Now it operates as a major tourist attraction that counts on the horror on display to generate substantial income.

In the second wing hundreds of black and white photographs that look like police mug shots are to be found: these were the prisoners of Tuol Sleng, photographed before, during, or after torture. Many faces reflect physical pain, terror, anger, despair, or panic. They now stare at the tourists who try to make sense of what happened. This building also contains thousands of pages of forced confessions obtained under torture or with the false hope that they could ease a prisoner’s fate.

The third wing’s classrooms were divided with brick walls into minuscule individual cells for important prisoners. The fourth wing includes pictures of the perpetrators and paintings made by survivors, including Vann Nath’s depictions of torture scenes. One room is used to display a gigantic map of Cambodia made of skulls and bones, with blood-like streaks representing rivers. “The map is shocking and disturbing, the emotional climax of the tour,” wrote Judy Ledgerwood. It was removed in 2002 and replaced by a photograph of the map. However, skulls are still on display at Tuol Sleng, under glass cases. The work of Mai Lam, the map was supposed to describe more than the scope of the crime, as David Chandler wrote: “It was important for the Vietnamese and the PRK to label Democratic Kampuchea a ‘fascist’ regime, like Nazi Germany, rather than a Communist one, recognized as such by many Communist countries. Finally, it was important for the Vietnamese to argue that what had happened in Cambodia under Democratic Kampuchea, and particularly at S-21, was genocide, resembling the Holocaust in World War II, rather than the assassinations of political enemies that at different times had marked the history of the Soviet Union, Communist China, and Vietnam.”⁷ The post–Khmer Rouge discourse is very similar to that of the German Democratic Republic after World War II. This state aligned itself with the Soviet Union in denouncing the fascist crimes of (West) Germany and siding with the liberators. In the case of Cambodia, the Vietnamese forces and the new DRK government divorced the labels “Communist” or “Socialist” from Democratic Kampuchea, in favor of “Pol Pot’s genocidal clique,” “traitors of the people,” and “fascists,” so as to position themselves as liberators, even though they were Communists.

The Tuol Sleng Museum also served to divert national and international attention from the need for justice. Instead of addressing the past, the new regime—the People’s Republic of Kampuchea—promoted national “reconciliation,” an effective strategy to turn the page and avoid accountability. The reason had to do with the Cambodian political cadres who joined the new government: most of them were former Khmer Rouge officials who participated in or witnessed crimes. Prime Minister Hun Sen is no exception. A former member of the Khmer Rouge elite, he escaped to Vietnam and joined a rebel army. After the Vietnamese takeover in 1979, he was naturally appointed foreign minister; in 1985 he was appointed prime minister, a position he has held ever since. Like many of his fellow ministers, he refers to the Khmer Rouge with great precaution and clear distancing.

Not surprisingly, Hun Sen publicly stated that the United Nations–backed tribunal on Khmer Rouge atrocities should not prosecute additional suspects besides the five already indicted.⁸ “Under these circumstances, it is easy to see why no process resembling ‘denazification’ ever occurred in Cambodia,” Suzannah Linton writes. “None of the reformed Khmer Rouge/CPK who now form the backbone of the Establishment has ever expressed contrition or regret about the past. They have adjusted their memories in ways that many victims find impossible to do. ‘Then was then,’ they seem to be saying, ‘and now is now.’ For many victims of the Khmer Rouge, on the other hand, ‘then’ recurs, traumatically, every day.”⁹

Another reason to understand Tuol Sleng as a promotional tool for post–Khmer Rouge government is confirmed by the types of visitors allowed inside. While the museum did not open to the general public until July 1980, it offered private tours to guests as early as March 1979, barely two months after the Vietnamese discovered dead bodies and fresh blood. The first guests were mostly members of socialist parties from abroad. The rush to turn a death site into a gallery for visitors is another indication that the new leadership had less concern about the memory of victims than about using the site for immediate political purposes. “A 1980 report from the Ministry of Culture, Information, and Propaganda said that the museum was ‘used to show the international guests the cruel torture committed by the traitors of the Khmer people.’”¹⁰ When nationals were allowed to visit on Sunday, thousands came to Tuol Sleng, many to find information about lost relatives.¹¹

In the course of time, the number of Cambodian visitors decreased, while statistics for foreign visitors increased. Since 1993 and the establishment of the Kingdom of Cambodia, the prison has seen thousands of tourists from capitalist countries (Australia, Japan, South Korea, United States, France, Germany, etc.). Consequently, it has adapted its offering to mass tourism: a US $3 entrance fee charged to foreign visitors, guided tours, marketing with travel agents, pamphlets in various languages, bathrooms, a souvenir shop, a food and drink stand, and parking areas. The neighborhood has developed accordingly, with numerous shops selling arts and crafts, rickshaw drivers hailing potential customers, and beggars working for their daily pittance.

The current guestbook in which visitors can write comments shows a uniformity of messages that can be sorted in five categories: feelings of sadness; bewilderment at human evil (“I can’t believe this country had to suffer such a terrible fate”); variations on “never again” and “do not forget”; praise for the exhibit and the learning experience; and positive messages of hope, peace, reconciliation, and love, sometimes with a religious reference.¹² Visitors often mention other regions of the world where human rights are or were violated—Myanmar, Angola, Chile, and others. These stereotypical messages, whether written in English, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Korean, or German, could describe many other sites of terror, from Auschwitz to Kigali to Srebrenica to Buenos Aires. Just as tourism is available to the masses, memory and memorialization are becoming globalized, inspiring the same emotions, standardizing architecture, and curatorial practices, and blurring the uniqueness and specific historical context of each tragedy.

Thirty years after Tuol Sleng became a museum to document, archive, and educate about the Khmer Rouge genocide, it has also become a best seller in the international tourism industry, but not a memorial for locals who suffered from the Khmer Rouge. It has become a symbol for thanatourism, defined by A.V. Seaton as “traveling to a location wholly, or partially, motivated by the desire for actual or symbolic encounters with death, particularly, but not exclusively, violent death.”¹³ Thanatourism is a subgenre of tourism, an industry usually dedicated to leisure, time out, and escape. Its goal is to market attractions and pleasurable experiences rather than moral uplift. Marketing a memorial requires a delicate negotiation between staying true to the serious purpose of the memorial and promoting it as an attractive destination that recounts a country’s negative history. Tuol Sleng is still struggling to find a sensitive balance.

The same can be said of the other main site of the Khmer Rouge genocide, the killing fields of Choeung Ek, also discovered by Vietnamese troops and turned into a tourism site by Mai Lam in the early 1980s. Located ten miles southeast of Phnom-Penh, Choeung Ek is described, on the official flyer, as “hell on earth in the 20th century.” A former orchard and Chinese cemetery, Choeung Ek was the main killing field where prisoners from Tuol Sleng were transported to be murdered in 1977–78. When the Vietnamese troops discovered the site, they found about 9,000 bodies in mass graves; many were headless, naked, their hands tied; the separated heads were blindfolded. The skulls and bones showed traces of bullets, knives, and other forms of violence inflicted upon men, women, and children. Babies were thrown against trees and instantly killed.

Choeung Ek opened to the public in 1989, after Lim Ourk was commissioned to build a monumental stupa where 8,000 skulls and bones would be preserved. A stupa, according to Rachel Hughes, is “a sacred structure that contains the remains of the deceased—especially those of greatly revered individuals—in Buddhist cultures. The construction of stupa is a significant activity that produces merit for the living and encourages the remembrance of the dead.”¹⁴ This stupa is inspired by Khmer religious motifs, such as the snakes (naga) and lions that guard the edifice, and by traditional architecture—the roof and pediments resemble the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh. However, contrary to stupas in other parts of the country, this one contains the anonymous remains of ordinary people.

Through the glass doors, one can see hundreds of skulls and human bones stacked almost to the top of the sixty-two-meter-high structure. The glass doors are ajar, and the skulls stare at the visitors. Foreign tourists constitute over 90 percent of the total visitors, according to the statistics for 2007 and 2008 released by the administration of the memorial.¹⁵ In line with this statistic, the development and management of the site seem to be entirely geared toward international tourism. The mission statement on the official flyer announces, “Choeung Ek Killing Field became a historical museum for humankind and is one of the most popular attractions for both domestic and foreign tourists in Phnom-Penh.”¹⁶

The official management policy lists the following goals: “Preserve genocide history . . . ; make Choeung Ek an international symbol of genocide; bring Choeung Ek to the attention of the world; make Choeung Ek a model for conservation.^”17 The means to achieve the goals include improving communication with tourists, generating income by attracting more tourists, finding alternative sources of income aside from the entrance fee, and developing ties with other tourism sites such as Tuol Sleng. The strategic plan recommends “the progressive enhancement of the facilities so as to increase income by providing resting chairs, a coffee shop, a restaurant, a souvenir and bookshop and toilets; the development of a calendar of special events, information projects, lectures that will eventually attract 1,000 visitors per day.”¹⁸ The notions of remembrance or memory are almost absent from the official document; so are Cambodian nationals, who do not seem worthy of much attention, as opposed to paying international tourists.

This situation may have to do with the 2005 takeover of Choeung Ek by a Japanese corporation, JC Royal, which obtained from the Cambodian government a thirty-year license to operate the site in exchange of an annual $15,000 fee and the award of a few scholarships to needy Cambodian students. The agreement between the government and the private company created a major controversy; to this day, the profit made from Choeung Ek remains a mystery, as do the operating budget and the number of scholarships allotted.¹⁹ What is clear is that the killing fields are a source of profit whose beneficiaries are neither survivors nor relatives of victims.

Meanwhile, some effort has been spent on beautifying the site—the lawns and flowers are well kept, the tar road and the gate are recent additions—and adding amenities such as toilets, a gift shop, a cafe, as well as an air-conditioned screening room with comfortable chairs where a short documentary about the genocide is shown every half hour. Besides the traditional arts and crafts, books and postcards, the Choeung Ek gift shop also sells the complete Khmer Rouge attire—red checkered scarf, black uniform, rubber sandals—as well as t-shirts that depict the stupa, or landmines, or bones over the Cambodian map. According to the management policy, beggars are kept outside the entrance gate so as not to disturb the tourists.

Visitors wander freely in the vast compound that includes excavated pits with signs bearing minimalist descriptions: “mass grave of 166 victims without heads.” There is no trail to follow, no itinerary. Some excavated pits are fenced, other graves are untouched, and people often walk on clothes and bones that stick out of the ground. Nobody pays attention to the rules displayed at the entrance, such as “please dress suitably while remaining at the center,” or “bones and other items in the center are not allowed to take out.” In fact, most foreign visitors wear light summer clothes such as shorts and sleeveless t-shirts; some stand by the stupa drinking soda or smoking, while others touch the skulls through the open door.

Next to the stupa, there is a small and outdated outdoor exhibition with photographs and didactic panels translated in poor English:

Even in the 20th century, on Kampuchean soil, the clique of Pol Pot criminals had committed a heinous genocidal act. They massacred the population with atrocity in a large scale. It was more cruel than the genocidal act committed by the Hitler fascists, which the world has never met . . .

The method of massacre which the clique of Pol Pot criminals was carried upon the innocent people of Kampuchea cannot be described fully and clearly in words because the invention of this killing method was strangely cruel so it is difficult for us to determine who they are for. They have the human form but their hearts are demon’s hearts. They have got the Khmer face but their activities are purely reactionary. They wanted to transform Kampuchean people into a group of persons without reason or a group who knew and understood nothing, who always bent their heads to carry out Ankar’s orders blindly.

The new management has barely updated the narrative, the panels, or the leaflets available on premise, except for the noncredited paragraphs plagiarized from Rachel Hughes’s article. Little historical background is given on how the Khmer Rouge came to power, what drove their ideology, how they implemented their genocidal policy, and how they were later defeated.

Not surprisingly, a recent survey among foreign visitors showed that “victims at this site are represented as a vague aggregation of grim experiences. None are individually named, and no victim’s biography is recounted . . . The perpetrator is represented as a barbaric ‘genocidal clique’ without further definition, biography, or images.”²⁰ In spite of the sustained increase in tourists and the additional exposure gained from Duch’s trial taking place minutes from Choeung Ek, the management has made minimal improvements to the site.

The high point of Choeung Ek is not didactic but visual—the stupa and its stacks of skulls at a hand’s reach. Skulls are aestheticized—clean, neatly arranged in a window case—and their endless accumulation turns the victims into statistics. The shock value of this raw display lies both in the proximity of death and in the objectification of human remains, in the tension between the educational agenda of the memorial site and the commodification of genocide. A national debate arose after the discovery of thousands of unidentified and often incomplete dead bodies: Should they be preserved? Cremated? Buried? The government argued in favor of preserving and exhibiting human remains as evidence of the crimes perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, and as a pedagogical resource to educate the Cambodian population. This attitude served the propaganda of the time, which emphasized the crimes of the Khmer Rouge regime so as to affirm the control of the country by the “clean” PRK party.

The king held the opposite view: “Sihanouk and prominent members of the Buddhist order have given quite vocal support to the idea that all the bones of the dead should be gathered together and given a mass incineration in tune with Buddhist values. The resulting ashes would then be enshrined in a national stupa envisaged as offering the possibility of rebirth both to the individual victims and the nation as a whole. In February 2004, the King made the following characteristically robust statement on his website: ‘What Buddhist man or woman accepts that, instead of incinerating their dead relatives . . . one displays their skulls and their skeletons to please ‘voyeurs”?’”²¹

According to Khmer Buddhism, “The souls of persons who die sudden deaths, considered to be untimely deaths, deaths which are not good, will remain around the place where they died. They will not be reborn as is ordinarily the case. Villagers fear these souls very much, fear that the spirits of those who died sudden deaths will haunt them or cause good people to fall ill.”²² Traditionally, people who die suddenly or violently are cremated or buried as quickly as possible, on the site where they died. A violent death is particularly inauspicious; cremation immediately following death allows the spirit to move into the next karmic realm, instead of haunting the place of death forever. However, in the case of mass murder, where bodies were often dismembered, putrefied, impossible to identify, mixed with others in mass graves, and discovered years after the death, many Cambodians faced a religious dilemma and eventually seemed to support the preservation of skulls and human remains. “This support is reinforced by an underlying belief in Buddhist tradition that people can cremate only the remains of their family members. Because virtually no individuals in the country’s killing fields have been identified from their remains, cremation could pose some obstacles in Cambodia.”²³

If traditional rituals cannot be performed, one can understand that Cambodians have no personal or religious stake in the human remains on display at Choeung Ek. This would also explain the relative lack of interest from Cambodians in Choeung Ek as a memorial. “Both religious relics and bodies in museums are recontextualized human remains, removed from the graveyard or tomb, sites often associated with both literal and metaphorical pollution, into another sacred context where they are preserved for a different function,” Mary Brooks and Claire Rumsey observe. “Museums objectify the bones conceptually for research and display. Whether the motivation is theological or analytical, macabre or morbid, the display of dead bodies is an increasingly contested issue. Displaying bodies can serve as connection of the past with the present, and the dead with the living, offering succor, solace, inspiration, or information, but it also renders them ambivalent, both ‘persons and things.’”²⁴ The bones in Choeung Ek have lost their spiritual value and elicit only mild interest from locals. They serve a higher purpose as evidence or educational tool than as an improbable vehicle for karmic reincarnation and personal closure. For tourists, the skulls still carry a shock value, but it is sanitized by the transformation of human remains as objects typically on display behind glass.

However, in villages where people were killed and buried on premises, the bones retrieved from local mass graves have kept their spiritual connection. As my driver, Vann, recalled from his youth, the whole community took part in the excavation and transfer of remains into a stupa, often near the village’s temple. This participatory act was not always spontaneous and sometimes responded to repeated government calls, which asked “all local authorities at the province and municipal level [to] cooperate with relevant expert institutions in their areas to examine, restore and maintain all existing memorials, and to examine and research other remaining grave sites, so that all such places may be transformed into memorials.”²⁵ The excavation of pits and transfer of human remains into a stupa was not a sheer forensic act; it was a religious ritual that had to be performed by spiritual leaders.

In the years following Democratic Kampuchea, meeting the required quorum of monks to lead such ceremonies became a challenge. Over 60,000 monks had been killed or left Cambodia under Khmer Rouge rule. “Ordination in the early post–Khmer Rouge period proved difficult,” as Ian Harris remarks. “Some took to shaving their head and wearing white and, in this way, Buddhist ceremonies, particularly those commemorating the dead, were performed.”²⁶ The responsibility for completing the physical transfer of bones and for the religious rituals fell to laypeople—who were all survivors and mourners. As of 2007, the Documentation Center of Cambodia has identified close to 20,000 mass graves, as well as 81 memorial sites located throughout the country.²⁷

One such local memorial stands at Kampong Tralagh, in the Kampot province, southwest of Phnom Penh, not far from the Vietnamese border. Most villagers work in the adjacent rice fields. In the heart of the village is a majestic old pagoda, tall, well kept, and beautifully decorated. Its typical Khmer architecture echoes the Royal Palace and the Choeung Ek stupa: the four receding roofs each have an ornate triangular pediment that is guarded by erect snakes. The white, gold, and orange pagoda is surrounded with lush greenery; the area is very quiet, even with workers toiling in rice fields.

A few feet away stands a much more modest edifice—a little house painted white, with a traditional roof and erect snakes. It is small, almost invisible in the shadow of the impressive pagoda. The door is open. The single room is split into two, one side for skulls, one side for bones. Hundreds of bones piled up. If my driver had not asked about it, I would not have known about the village and the bone repository, though there are dozens of them in Cambodia, often built near a pagoda so as to balance good and evil. The local ossuaries were built by villagers who have reclaimed their dead, their history, and their spiritual lives.

Penh Samarn, patriarch monk at the Kroch Seuch pagoda, who initiated the construction of a memorial, combines a spiritual and a practical perspective. “I do not want to lose the evidence, so that people from various places can come to pray and pay homage to the dead. . . . I am thinking of having monks stay there and for people to come and pay homage because some souls of the dead have made their parents or children dream of them, and told them that they are wandering around and have not reincarnated in another world. I want to have monks meditating there so that the souls of the dead will rest in peace. In Buddhism, when someone dies and their mind is still with this world, then their souls wander around.”²⁸

Local villagers honor the dead on various occasions, often individually. In Rithy Panh’s film on S-21, in which he interviews former Khmer Rouge criminals, the parents of a former soldier beg him to hold a religious ceremony to chase the evil spirits. “Hold a ceremony so that we never see those men again. Become a new man . . . Tell the truth, then have a ceremony. Make an offering to the dead so that they find peace, so there is no more bad karma in the future. Ask the dead to remove the bad karma.” A communal occasion to commemorate the dead takes place on the Day of the Ancestors, Phachum Benn, a fifteen-day period that falls some time around September and October according to the lunar calendar.

Throughout this period that begins on the first day of the waning moon, people go to the temples and stupas with offerings for the spirits of the ancestors. The monks serve as intermediaries between the living and the spirits of the dead; they chant daily prayers that are also broadcast on the radio. On the last day, people bring dozens of Cambodian cakes wrapped in banana leaves and have a ceremony called bansolkaul performed for their ancestors, “in which four monks recite texts while connected by a white cord to an urn containing ashes of ancestors. In this way, merit is transferred to the departed. . . . Most families visit seven wat over the festival period to ensure the goodwill of their hungry and restless ancestors.”²⁹

For many Cambodians, remembrance of relatives killed under the Khmer Rouge regime takes place on the Festival of the Ancestors and at the local wat. A traditional Buddhist holiday, Pchachum Benn took additional significance after the genocide, since it gave people an opportunity to grieve and commemorate the dead even without proper funerary rites. This ancient ritual is widely followed in Cambodia, in contrast to two other holidays established by PRK rule, January 7 and May 20.

January 7, or Victory Day, commemorates the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime and the liberation of Cambodia by the Vietnamese army in 1979. Similarly to the Tuol Sleng exhibit that aimed at denouncing the crimes of the “Pol Pot genocidal clique” and legitimizing the new Cambodian government, the January 7 date is a political holiday that does not commemorate the victims but rather praises the saviors. It consists of a patriotic parade followed by a speech from a top-ranked party official who celebrates national unity, as did Senator Chea Sim in 2004, for the twenty-fifth anniversary:

It was no doubt that our homeland was on the brink of extinction if there was no salvation in a timely manner. The coming into existence of the Kampuchea National Salvation and Solidarity Front, which was the forerunner of the Cambodian People’s Party, on the 2nd December 1978 fully responded to the aspirations of the Cambodian people and peace and justice loving people in the world as a whole. Under the leadership of 2nd December Front, the people throughout Cambodia stood up and united as the greatest national solidarity force coupled with the sincere and timely support from the Vietnamese volunteer army as well as our friends both near and far, had fiercely fought against the Pol Pot genocidal regime.³⁰

In 2009, for the thirtieth anniversary, the CPP celebrated the day in an Olympic stadium filled with 50,000 attendees—party members, civil servants, and students from all Cambodian provinces—who gathered to hear slogans and speeches glorifying the party.³¹ This commemoration has never caught up with the Cambodian population, for which Vietnam was not only a liberator but an occupier, and the event has remained a day of self-congratulation for the Cambodian People’s Party, which has been in power ever since.

The other holiday instituted by the party is the Day of Anger, or tivea chang kamheng. It falls on May 20, the day, Linton writes, when “the Khmer Rouge adopted the ‘cooperative scheme,’ a policy of total agrarian collectivization that transmuted the [Khmer Rouge] from progressive communist revolutionaries to an extremist regime . . . It was the beginning of the people’s starvation . . . It was the day the Khmer Rouge began to kill people by forcing them to accomplish labor-intensive works with little food allowance.”³² Here is another negative date that is politically motivated and based on the Gregorian calendar; it is not associated with the Khmer calendar or an existing religious tradition. “This unusual holiday has effectively focused public opinion on the ‘otherness’ of the Khmer Rouge, solidifying popular support for the regime.”³³

When the commemoration was instituted in 1984, it consisted in public condemnations of Khmer Rouge crimes organized by official institutions—political rallies and speeches, banners and posters bearing slogans, songs and prayers recited in schools, and wreath laying at memorial sites such as Choeung Ek. Survivors were asked to tell their individual stories, and villagers often carried knives, axes, clubs, or placards saying things like “Defeat the Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary clique” or “Remember Life under Pol Pot who tried to destroy the Cambodian Lineage.” These orchestrated activities reinforced the core message of the day: be aware of the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge and be vigilant against their possible return. At the time, Pol Pot and his comrades were still hiding in the jungle near Along Veng, engaging in guerilla warfare against the government.³⁴

This official holiday was suspended after the 1991 Paris peace agreement, so as “not to arouse a spirit of revenge.”³⁵ It was quietly promoted again around 1999 but is not often observed except by faithful party members. A news article from 2008 described the religious ceremony that took place at Choeung Ek in the presence of a few hundred people. The article headline read, “A ‘Day of anger’ less and less attended in Cambodia.”³⁶ Some Cambodians say that over the years they have shed their anger; others feel less concerned by events that occurred thirty years ago. For the most part, however, May 20 does not constitute a meaningful date, nor is the acting out of hatred an effective way to mourn the victims, fulfill religious obligations vis-à-vis the dead, and find closure. The ceremonies have been too politically charged and have never explicitly acknowledged the responsibility of the state in the genocide. As Vann Nath, the painter who survived Tuol Sleng, argues, “No word of forgiveness, of acknowledging that something wrong was done by the leaders, only ‘reconciliation.’ They don’t even say it was wrong! Why ask for forgiveness if they did nothing wrong?”³⁷

These official ceremonies are neither remembering victims nor comforting survivors; they are self-serving spectacles that feed the ambiguous discourse of the government and its manipulation of commemorative performances and memorial sites for political and economic purposes. The post-1979 Cambodian leaders turned Choeung Ek and Tuol Sleng into efficient moneymakers benefiting from international tourism. They considered piles of skulls and bones as a sheer commodity that, once publicly exhibited, covered up the involvement of former Khmer Rouge still active in public affairs and enjoying complete impunity. They established artificial commemorations that did not acknowledge the suffering of the Cambodian people, the responsibility of the state in the genocide, or the need for mourning rituals, moral and material reparations, and complete accountability.

Instead, a hungry strategy of profit making has prevailed, to the detriment of human dignity and memory. As Youk Chhang, director of DC-Cam, confided, “there is nothing in Cambodia that is not for sale.”³⁸ The most recent illustration of this statement is the official announcement that the government had decided to “preserve and develop” Along Veng, the last Khmer Rouge stronghold, and transform the town and the area into a “historic tourism site for national and international guests to visit and understand the last political leadership of the genocidal regime.”³⁹ The head of the Along Veng district, Yim Phana, mentioned fourteen sites, among them Pol Pot’s cremation site, Ta Mok’s grave, his former house, an ammunition depot, and other decrepit buildings and abandoned vehicles located in the northern part of the country near the Thai border. A circular from the prime minister dated December 14, 2001, and titled “Circular on Preservation of remains of the victims of the genocide committed during the regime of Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1978), and preparation of Anlong Veng to become a region for historical tourism” already announced this agenda.^.40

At the time, a few blue signs in Khmer and English were affixed near Khmer Rouge sites, sometimes indicating a “historic attractive site.” There is still a decrepit shack called the “tourism information office of Along Veng,” where a woman nursing her young children charges US $2 to foreign visitors. A faded map of the province hangs next to a list of sites divided in four zones: the first around Ta Mok’s house, the second around Pol Pot’s cremation site, the third around the Son Sen’s house, and the fourth around Pol Pot’s and Khieu Samphan’s houses. Among the eight sites I visited in August 2009, none offered any kind of historical description; I relied on my local driver and my Lonely Planet (which gave detailed instructions on what to see and how to reach these far-flung ruins).

The sites to be promoted have little interest per se. Ta Mok’s secret house, or the three walls that are still standing, is lost in high grass and covered with graffiti, including “Ta Mok assassin de l’histoire” (Ta Mok, history’s assassin). The last house in which he lived after the fall of Democratic Kampuchea is empty, except for large naive frescoes that depict Cambodian landscapes—Angkor Wat, wild animals in the jungle, the rice fields. The windowless house faces a desolate view of dead trees and muddy swamps, the result of Ta Mok’s flooding of the fields to create an artificial lake. The Khmer Rouge radio command is a rusty truck abandoned in a courtyard. These ruins are neither informative nor moving; the plan to transform them into “attractive” sites of tourism betrays yet another commercial venture rather than the need to preserve and teach history.

Until now, most visitors of these Khmer Rouge relics were Cambodians who felt some nostalgia for the regime (especially in the Along Veng region), pilgrims who believed that a prayer on Pol Pot’s or Ta Mok’s grave would bring good omens, and a handful of tourists.⁴¹ With the construction of the new road, the announcement of the prime minister’s office, the prospect of generating profit, and the commercialization of sites associated with the genocide, one can expect more traffic in this province in the years to come. At the same time, a former Khmer Rouge soldier and photographer, Nhem En, now an elected official of the Along Veng district, is attempting to raise $300,000 to build a museum to display 2,000 of his own photographs depicting the leaders of Democratic Kampuchea, “so that the world knows why Pol Pot ruled the country and massacred people.”⁴² Nhem En’s project encapsulates the larger political situation, in which guiltless former Khmer Rouge enjoy impunity, currently sit on city councils, and use Cambodia’s darkest history to generate personal income.

Cambodians find themselves torn between religious traditions and national politics, between memorialization efforts and economic demands. National memorial sites and holidays have been co-opted by a government in constant quest for legitimacy and forgetful of its past responsibility. Whether in Tuol Sleng, Choeung Ek, or Along Veng, whether on January 7 or May 20, the Cambodian people are left out of the picture. The establishment of the international court allowed for a public and genuine expression of memory, but future trials are uncertain, and the next generations feel less concerned about the past.

In Cambodia, memory and memorialization are not performed in the main sites of murder such as Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek, and not on official holidays such as January 7 and May 20. It is clear that these government-sponsored memorials serve primarily other purposes—political legitimacy, economic development, and profit-making ventures. They are not directed to locals who have a personal connection to memory but to international travelers who feed the global tourism industry and the national economy. To this end, all strategies are acceptable, even if they involve commodifying skulls, capitalizing on human suffering, promoting sites associated with criminals, and ignoring religious traditions.

In Cambodia, remembrance of the genocide does take place, but quietly, traditionally, and locally—in each village, in each stupa, next to the pagoda, on religious holidays. There, human dignity is respected, mourning rituals have meaning, and the spirits of the murdered can eventually find rest.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NOTES

This article was written with the support of “Transitions,” a center for international research in the humanities and social sciences established between New York University and the Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, France). I thank the directors of Transitions, Emilienne Baneth-Nouailhetas, Edward Berenson, and Christophe Goddard, for suggesting and financing a research trip to Cambodia in August 2009.

1. See, among others, Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); David Chandler, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1999); Craig Etcheson, After the Killing Fields: Lessons from the Cambodian Genocide (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005); Alexander L. Hinton, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

2. The most famous one is Vann Nath, A Cambodian Prison Portrait (Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 1998), which is both a narrative and a visual testimony, since Vann Nath survived S-21 by painting propaganda portraits of Khmer Rouge leaders and later documented what he saw in Tuol Sleng in large and detailed oil paintings depicting scenes of torture and bad treatment. See also David Chandler, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Loung Ung, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).

3. For the films, see, for example, S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, DVD, dir. Rithy Panh (New York: First Run Features, 2003); Survive: In the Heart of the Khmer Rouge Madness, DVD, dir. Roshane Saidnattar (Neuilly-sur-Seine, France: Morgane Productions, 2009); New Year Baby, DVD, dir. Socheata Poeuv (Vancouver: Broken English Productions, 2006).

4. Paul Williams, “Witnessing Genocide: Vigilance and Remembrance at Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 18, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 234–54; Judy Ledgerwood, “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes: National Narrative,” Museum Anthropology 21, no. 1 (1997): 82–98.

5. Rachel Hughes, “Memory and Sovereignty in Post–1979 Cambodia: Choeung Ek and Local Genocide Memorials,” in Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda: New Perspectives, ed. Susan E. Cook (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2006), 257–79. It is worth noting that this article has been almost entirely plagiarized by the Choeung Ek memorial—full paragraphs were pulled and used on the panels of the indoors exhibition and on the official website without ever giving credit to the author or to the book where they were originally published.

6. Nick Ray and Daniel Robinson, Cambodia (Footscray, Australia: Lonely Planet, 2008), 85.

7. David Chandler, “Tuol Sleng and S-21,” Searching for the Truth, Magazine of DC-Cam 18 (June 2001).

8. See, for example, the press release published by Human Rights Watch on July 22, 2009: Human Rights Watch, “Cambodia: Political Pressure Undermining Tribunal,” Human Rights Watch, http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/07/22/cambodia-political-pressure-underm... (accessed July 10, 2010).

9. Suzannah Linton, Reconciliation in Cambodia (Phnom-Penh: Documentation Center of Cambodia, 2004), 12.

10. Ledgerwood, “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum,” 88.

11. Ledgerwood writes that 32,000 Cambodians came the week of July 13, 1980. From January to October 1980, 11,000 foreigners and 309,000 Cambodians visited Tuol Sleng.

12. Note written by Amber Martin, from Perth, Australia, in August 2009, for the long citation.

13. A. V. Seaton, “Guided by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 2, no. 4 (1996): 234–44.

14. Hughes, “Memory and Sovereignty,” 261.

15. In 2007, there were 13,000 Cambodian and 181,000 foreign visitors; in 2008, 15,000 Cambodians and 195,000 foreigners. See the detail by month from 2005 to 2008 on the official website: “Statistics,” Choeung Ek Genocidal Center, http://www.cekillingfield.com/statistics.htm (last accessed July 10, 2010).

16. See also “About Choeung Ek,” Choeung Ek Genocidal Center, http://www.cekillingfield.com/aboutchoeungek.htm (last accessed July 10, 2010).

17. Management Policy for Choeung Ek Genocide Center, document in Khmer given by Choeung Ek deputy director Ros Sophearavy on August 12, 2009, and translated into English by Sin Saroeun.

18. Ibid.

19. See, for example, Chhang Bopha, “‘Killing Fields’: Pas de trace d’aménagement du site après trios ans de gestion privée,” Ka-Set, May 21, 2008, http://ka-set.info/actualites/khmers-rouges/cambodge-actualite-khmers-ro... (last accessed July 10, 2010).

20. Louis Bickford, Transforming a Legacy of Genocide: Pedagogy and Tourism at the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek (New York: International Center for Transitional Justice, 2009), 13.

21. Ian Harris, Buddhism under Pol Pot (Phnom Penh: Documentation Center of Cambodia, 2007), 233

22. Phra Khru Anusaranasasanakiarti and Charles F. Keyes, “Funerary Rites and the Buddhist Meaning of Death: An Interpretative Text from Northern Thailand,” Journal of the Siam Society 68, no. 1 (January 1980): 1–28.

23. Wynne Cougill, “Remains of the Dead: Buddhist Tradition, Evidence, and Memory,” in Night of the Khmer Rouge: Genocide and Justice in Cambodia, ed. Jorge Daniel Veneciano and Hinton (Newark: Paul Robeson Gallery, 2007), 32–48.

24. Mary M. Brooks and Claire Rumsey, “The Body in the Museum,” in Human Remains: Guide for Museums and Academic Institutions, ed. Vicki Cassman, Nancy Odegaard, and Joseph Powell (Lanham, Md.: Altamira Press, 2006), 261.

25. Cited in Cougill, “Remains of the Dead,” 40.

26. Ian Harris, “Buddhism in Extremis: The Case of Cambodia,” in Buddhism and Politics in Twentieth Century Asia, ed. Ian Harris (London: Cassell, 1999), 54–78.

27. Veneciano and Hinton, eds., Night of the Khmer Rouge, 109.

28. Cited in Cougill, “Remains of the Dead,” 40.

29. Hughes, “Memory and Sovereignty,” 269–70.

30. “Chea Sim’s Speech at Cambodian Victory Day Celebration,” Asia-Africa Intelligence Wire, January 8, 2004, http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-19930942_ITM (last accessed July 10, 2010).

31. Duong Sokha, “Des celebrations du 30e anniversaire du 7 janvier au Cambodge sur un air de louange au PCC,” Ka-Set, January 7, 2010, http://ka-set.info/actualites/pouvoirs/cambodge-politique-7-janvier-viet... (last accessed July 10, 2010).

32. Linton, Reconciliation in Cambodia, 63.

33. Etcheson, After the Killing Fields, 150.

34. The choice of a negative date such as May 20 echoes Argentina’s commemoration of March 24, based on the 1976 military coup that led to the Dirty War and the policy of forced disappearances. However, the day was appropriated early on by human rights activists as a day of “repudio,” or repudiation, and used to advance their agenda—prosecution of criminals, reparations to survivors and relatives, memorialization efforts, and education. In 2006, this date was officialized as a national holiday by the government.

35. Etcheson, After the Killing Fields, 150.

36. Chheang Bopha, “Une ‘Journée de la haine’ de moins en moins suivie au Cambodge,” Ka-Set, May 20, 2010, http://ka-set.info/breves/breves/cambodge-actualite-journee-haine-khmers... (last accessed July 10, 2010).

37. Vann Nath interviewed in Rithy Panh’s film S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine.

38. Youk Chhang, personal interview, Phnom Penh, August 10, 2010.

39. Andrew Buncombe, “Cambodia Puts the Cremation Site of Pol Pot on ‘Historic’ Tourist Trail,” Independent, March 11, 2010.

40. Hun Sen, “Government Circular on the Preservation of Victim Memorial,” Documentation Center of Cambodia, http://www.dccam.org/Projects/Maps/Victim_Memorials.htm (last accessed July 10, 2010).

41. It is interesting to note that Hitler’s Berlin bunker, in which he died, was never marked as such, so as to prevent pilgrimages from Neo-Nazis; the opposite approach seems to prevail at Pol Pot’s cremation site.

42. Nhem En, personal interview, Siem Reap, August 13, 2010.

2. Phnom Penh Pivot Phno2 Penh; January 20, 2012

Asia 360: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen in Phnom Penh in 2010. Upcoming discussions this year are expected to take a more positive turn. Image:Tang Chhin Sothy / AFP ------------------------------------------- (Comments: this article and picture show how Hillary Clinton is now so warm to Hun Sen. As the article pointed out that: “The US will be sharply focused on building the kind of relationship with Cambodia that China has managed to craft in two decades of assiduous diplomacy. China and Cambodia now enjoy close diplomatic and economic ties, with China contributing large sums of aid money to Cambodia over the past few years Cambodia has reciprocated by opening its doors wide to Chinese businesses and by supporting China’s policy positions at various international forums. This collaborative attitude has extended to human rights issues. In 2009, Cambodia deported 20 Uyghur asylum seekers back to China reportedly in exchange for military equipment, sparking accusations from Amnesty International that they could face severe punishment by the Chinese authorities on their return. “ With these facts out in the open, how could anybody who is aware of the political position of the main stakeholder like the USA, to agree to reconvene the Paris Peace Agreements, simply because, those Cambodian-Americans who are desperately hoping for this event to take place again, had asked for it. Please, also read a companion article titled “Security Council Bid Pursued” posted just below this page, regarding the British Government is backing Hun Sen’s request to have a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security council. As I have often proclaimed that nobody can save Cambodia but the Cambodians themselves. In order to do that, a respectable, courageous, and inspiring leader is sorely needed. Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington dc. February 15, 2012) ------------------------------------------- Impending visit by Obama points to race against China for influence in Asian region PHNOM PENH (20 January 2012) — Nearly four decades after the US bombed parts of Cambodia as part of its Vietnam War strategy, the two countries will take a crucial step on the road towards normalised relations when US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visit Phnom Penh later this year. Cambodian officials confirmed this week that Prime Minister Hun Sen’s government would host Obama and Clinton, breaking decades of near-silence and simmering ill-will between the two countries. Clinton will visit in July while Obama will be in Cambodia for the US summit with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in October. Cambodia suffered extensively from US bombing during the Vietnam War, an experience that poisoned relations between the two countries for decades. The targets were north Vietnamese forces using Cambodia to avoid detection but thousands of Cambodians died in the attacks, which some scholars believe enabled the Khmer Rouge to take power. The visits are seen as strong signs of a thaw in relations between the US and Cambodia, driven in part by China’s increasingly cozy relationship with the Southeast Asian nation. The last visit by a US president was in 1953 when Richard Nixon toured the Angkor Wat temple complex as a guest of former King Norodom Sihanouk. While it will be Obama’s first official trip to the Kingdom, it will be the second time for Clinton, who made a two-day stopover during her seven-country Asian tour in November 2010. Clinton pulled few punches in her criticism of Cambodia’s human rights record back in 2010, which humanitarian groups say Hun Sen has failed to improve. This time, however, much of the dialogue is expected to accentuate the positives in a bid to counter China’s growing influence in the country. US interests in ASEAN have been described as a ‘strategic pivot’ point in its relationship with the region, which is being rebuilt after being largely ignored over the past decade while Washington focused on the Middle East. Chea Vannath, an independent political analyst in Cambodia, told Asia360 News that both the US and China want to enhance their profile in Cambodia, due in part to its current chairmanship of ASEAN. “These visits clearly demonstrate that the US is keen on boosting its influence in this region,” said Chea. The US will be sharply focused on building the kind of relationship with Cambodia that China has managed to craft in two decades of assiduous diplomacy. China and Cambodia now enjoy close diplomatic and economic ties, with China contributing large sums of aid money to Cambodia over the past few years Cambodia has reciprocated by opening its doors wide to Chinese businesses and by supporting China’s policy positions at various international forums. This collaborative attitude has extended to human rights issues. In 2009, Cambodia deported 20 Uyghur asylum seekers back to China reportedly in exchange for military equipment, sparking accusations from Amnesty International that they could face severe punishment by the Chinese authorities on their return. Clinton’s ‘good-cop’ diplomacy will have to dance around the delicate issue of what is to be done about the repayment of more than US$300 million the US loaned to the Lon Nol regime in the early 1970s to fight communism. The Cambodian government wants the loan cancelled as it was granted to a regime that was responsible for the deaths of large numbers of Cambodians. The Kingdom at the time borrowed large amounts of money from sponsors including the then-USSR, much of which was spent to buy armaments rather than improve the lives of impoverished Cambodians. In meetings with Hun Sen and other top officials during her last visit, Clinton encouraged them to work with the US on human rights issues. From this standpoint, China seemed more acceptable to Cambodia as its aid money did not have conditions attached to it, said Chea. Foreign ministry spokesman Koy Kuong told Asia360 News that Cambodia would try its best to manage more visits by regional and global leaders. The Cambodian media have been largely upbeat in its coverage of the impending visits. Raksmey Kampuchea Daily reported on Monday that Obama’s participation in the November ASEAN summit is a clear sign of improving relations between the two countries.

---

7. The Beleaguered Cambodians

The New York Review of Books: JANUARY 13, 2011

Margo Picken

The causeway across the moat at Angkor Wat; photograph by Steve McCurry

More than thirty years after an estimated two million people died at the hands of Pol Pot’s regime of Democratic Kampuchea, trials of senior Khmer Rouge leaders and those most responsible for the deaths are at last taking place in Cambodia. On July 26, the first to be tried, Kaing Guek Eav, commonly known as Duch, was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity—a sentence that he and the prosecution have since appealed. Duch directed Security Prison 21, also known as Tuol Sleng, where at least 14,000 prisoners, mostly Khmer Rouge cadres and officials, were tortured and killed.1

Even more important, the next trial, which will probably begin in 2011, involves the four most senior Khmer leaders still alive: Nuon Chea, known as Brother Number Two; Ieng Sary, who was foreign minister; his wife, Ieng Thirith, minister for social affairs; and Khieu Samphan, who was president of Democratic Kampuchea. Now in their late seventies and early eighties, all four were arrested in 2007 and on September 16 were formally charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and related crimes under Cambodian laws.

While the trials have refocused international attention on Cambodia’s dark past, little attention has been given to how the much-watched proceedings relate to the troubled politics of Cambodia today. Will they lead to a new era of justice and accountability for a beleaguered people or end in another betrayal?

Cambodia is ruled by longtime Prime Minister Hun Sen and his Cambodian People’s Party. They govern with absolute power and control all institutions that could challenge their authority. Opposition political parties exist, giving the illusion of multiparty democracy, but elections have not been fair and the opposition no longer poses any threat to Hun Sen. The monarchy has survived but has little influence. The freedoms of expression, association, and assembly are severely curtailed. Human rights organizations are intimidated, and a draft law aims to bring them under the regime’s authority. The judiciary is controlled by the executive, and the flawed laws that exist are selectively enforced. Hundreds of murders and violent attacks against politicians, journalists, labor leaders, and others critical of Hun Sen and his party remain unsolved.

The regime’s violence against political opponents has been flagrant. In March 1997 Hun Sen’s bodyguards were clearly implicated in a grenade attack on a peaceful rally in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, led by opposition leader Sam Rainsy.2 Sixteen people were killed and over 140 injured, including a US citizen. No serious inquiry was ever completed. Royalist opponents of Hun Sen were murdered when he deposed Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh in a coup on July 5–6, 1997. More people were killed during the July 1998 elections, which Hun Sen won. In January 2004, the popular labor leader Chea Vichea, an outspoken critic of the government, was shot, one of several contract killings in Phnom Penh before and after the July 2003 elections, carried out in broad daylight by helmeted gunmen on motorbikes.

In October 2005, in an attempt to encourage prosecution of these murders and other serious crimes, Peter Leuprecht, at the time the United Nations secretary-general’s special representative for human rights in Cambodia, issued a report tracing a continuing and accepted practice of impunity since the start of the 1990s. However, open discussion of the report and its recommendations was not possible in Cambodia and it was ignored.

By confronting the crimes committed between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge trials offer hope of breaking the pattern of impunity that has characterized Cambodia’s recent history. But they could also allow Cambodia’s leaders to claim a commitment to justice and the rule of law while avoiding accountability for their own crimes and repressive practices.

Cambodia was once one of Asia’s greatest empires. The only existing account of life in what we now call Angkor was written by Zhou Daguan, a Chinese envoy, after he spent almost a year there at the end of the thirteenth century. What he saw and described was an extraordinary civilization still at its height, the outcome of five centuries of political and cultural continuity. His stories are taught in schools and scholars draw on them to gain a picture of life and society in Angkor.3

Angkor’s ancient glory is reassuring to a people whose history after gaining independence from France in 1953 has been so perilous. Drawn into the cold war and the war against Vietnam, they endured the Nixon administration’s covert and illegal bombing in the late 1960s in pursuit of the Vietcong; the overthrow of their head of state and former king, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, in 1970; and years of more bombing and civil war that culminated in the Khmer Rouge taking absolute control when it captured Phnom Penh in April 1975 and founded the state of Democratic Kampuchea. It ruled until it was ousted in January 1979 by Vietnamese troops who installed the People’s Republic of Kampuchea with Soviet backing.

Hun Sen, formerly a Khmer Rouge regimental commander who fled to Vietnam in 1978, emerged as a principal leader of the new government, serving first as foreign minister and then as prime minister. The Khmer Rouge, meanwhile, had retreated to camps on the Thai border, allied itself with other opposition forces, and continued to claim power. Since the US and other nations did not want to recognize a Cambodian government dominated by Vietnam, these disparate forces were supported and armed by China, the US, and Thailand, among others, and recognized by the United Nations as the legitimate government of Cambodia.

The end of the cold war, and exhaustion among Cambodians after so many years of war, made possible an internationally brokered peace agreement in 1991—the Agreements on a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict4—and the deployment a year later of the United Nations Transitional Authority for Cambodia (UNTAC), the largest peacekeeping operation the UN had ever mounted. UNTAC was charged with overseeing an end to armed conflict, disarming the armies of the fighting factions, repatriating refugees, and creating a neutral political environment for fair elections, which it was to organize.

The royalist party won the May 1993 elections.5 When Hun Sen threatened armed secession, a power-sharing arrangement was brokered to meet his demands, resulting in an unwieldy coalition government that he came to dominate. Cambodia became the Royal Kingdom of Cambodia under a new constitution, and Norodom Sihanouk returned to the throne. UNTAC left in September 1993, its departure dictated by the UN Security Council, not by conditions in Cambodia where violence and fighting against the Khmer Rouge, which had boycotted the elections, continued. For the outside world, the main objective had been achieved, namely to enable the former cold war powers to disengage from a country in which they no longer had any interest.

The stage was set for a series of deceptions and disappointments. In 1993, the UN Commission on Human Rights asked the secretary-general to appoint an independent expert to serve as his special representative for human rights in Cambodia and to establish an office in the country. The UN office and the special representative were jointly charged with assistance to the government, monitoring the human rights situation, and reporting annually to the commission and UN General Assembly. This mandate, one of the strongest ever given to a UN human rights operation, deserved support, but many governments regarded it as too intrusive. Wary of setting precedents that might be followed elsewhere, they gave little help, making an already difficult task almost impossible.

For a decade and a half, four successive special representatives tried to get the Cambodian government to set up the laws, institutions, policies, and practices necessary to uphold and protect elementary rights. From the outset, Hun Sen, who was steadily consolidating his power over the country, swung between reluctant cooperation with the representatives and vindictive personal attacks on them.6 He spoke of Yash Ghai, the last representative—a distinguished academic and constitutional lawyer from Kenya—with utter contempt and refused to meet him. In his reports, Ghai regretted that deliberate and systemic violations of human rights had become central to the government’s hold on power. Hun Sen’s ruling party still dominated Cambodian politics; the constitution and legal and judicial system were regularly subverted; corruption was entrenched; and government impunity and threats against those who criticized the status quo continued.

Hun Sen demanded that Ghai be dismissed and that the position of special representative of the secretary-general be abolished. In the end he got his way. Yash Ghai resigned in frustration in September 2008, and the UN Human Rights Council, which had replaced the Commission on Human Rights in 2006, eliminated the position. The council established instead its own “special rapporteur,” thereby bringing this office under its direct control. The human rights office has also not been exempt from criticism, and Hun Sen has asked that it be closed down on several occasions, first in 1995 and most recently when Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon visited Cambodia in October.

Despite the country’s poor record on human rights, Hun Sen and his party boast that Cambodia has the most liberal and open economy in Southeast Asia. Economic growth has indeed been rapid since the mid-1990s, averaging 7 percent a year. But the new wealth is concentrated in Phnom Penh, a city with its back turned on rural Cambodia, where over 80 percent of Cambodia’s 14.6 million people live. One in three Cambodians lives below the poverty line. Many more live just slightly above it. Most subsist on farming tiny plots of land and by foraging.

About nine million hectares, half of Cambodia’s surface area, are estimated to be reasonably productive. Under the Khmer Rouge, all land was expropriated, entire populations uprooted, and land records destroyed. During the Vietnamese occupation that followed, land remained largely collectivized. The Land Law of 2001 could have helped to bring about equitable land distribution and security of tenure; instead, under a compliant judiciary, well-connected investors and companies have grabbed land at an alarming rate, rapidly destroying the livelihood of the rural poor. Those living on the land are simply told that it now belongs to someone else and they must go. The urban poor also suffer, notably in Phnom Penh where thousands have been evicted from their homes to desolate settlements outside the city.7

The Land Law allows the government to lease land to national and foreign companies for plantations and commercial agriculture for up to ninety-nine years under terms tantamount to ownership. Basic information about these “economic land concessions,” such as the identity of companies and shareholders, is hard to obtain. The largest lease was awarded in 2000 to Pheapimex Company Ltd., which is owned by close friends of Hun Sen. It spans two provinces and is over 300,000 hectares, far exceeding the 10,000-hectare ceiling stipulated in the Land Law.

The leaseholders of these concessions have seldom adhered to the conditions and safeguards stipulated in the law; nor have they contributed to state revenue, reduced poverty, or increased rural employment, which was the government’s rationale for granting them.8 Most often the concessions have been held for speculative purposes or have provided a cover for cutting down forests, which are protected under other laws. Since 1994, the government has also handed over vast tracts of land to the military as “military development zones,” ostensibly to provide land and jobs to demobilized soldiers. It refuses to say how much land it has allocated or where these zones are.

Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP/Getty Images

Cambodian children holding portraits of Hun Sen and his wife, Bun Rany, at a protest 
in front of the prime minister’s residence, Phnom Penh, September 2010

The World Bank has advised the government to support small farms and smallholder agriculture, which, it argues, would be as or more economically beneficial than Cambodia’s leasing policy.9 But the government has ignored this advice, and still more concessions are in the offing. Concessions for gem and mineral exploration, hydroelectricity dams, special economic zones, and tourism development have raised similar concerns.

For over a decade, the UK-based organization Global Witness has courageously exposed widespread illegal logging, asset stripping, and corruption involving highly placed government and military officials. Its reports have been confiscated, its staff threatened, its recommendations dismissed; and it can no longer operate in Cambodia. Its report “Cambodia’s Family Trees,” issued in June 2007, provides shocking evidence that the country is run by an elite that generates much of its wealth from the seizure of public assets. It shows how a relatively small group of Cambodian tycoons with political, business, or family ties to senior government officials have benefited from the allocation of forest concessions.10 “Country for Sale,” issued in February 2009, finds the same patterns of corruption and patronage in the management of Cambodia’s oil, gas, and minerals. It deplores the rapid parceling up and selling off of the country’s land and resources, with millions of dollars in company payments to secure contracts unaccounted for.11 “Shifting Sand,” issued in May 2010, records the wholesale removal of Cambodia’s sand to Singapore where it is used to extend the island’s landmass.12

These policies have wrought havoc on Cambodia’s environment and driven vast numbers of poor people out of the city and off the land, their meager livelihoods destroyed. With nowhere to go, they become a source of cheap labor for plantations and factories in special economic zones. When members of desperate communities protest, their villages come under ever stricter control and their leaders are arrested on charges such as incitement or damage to property.

Roughly half of Cambodia’s national budget is provided by foreign governments and development agencies. Known collectively as “the donors,” they form a large and diverse presence in Phnom Penh. Yash Ghai repeatedly underlined their moral and legal responsibility toward Cambodia, urging them to be far more active in demanding progress on human rights and democratic and accountable institutions. While several voice the need for “good governance,” “participation,” “transparency,” “accountability,” and “the rule of law,” these concepts lack the clarity of human rights standards defined in law, and Cambodia’s leaders have become masters at interpreting them narrowly.

Hun Sen has routinely criticized and threatened organizations advocating for human rights, accusing them of pursuing a politically partisan agenda and inciting the people to unrest. Donor nations ranging from Japan to France have typically advised human rights groups to engage in a more “constructive” dialogue with the government. Many are inclined to view human rights as far too ambitious a concern for a country like Cambodia, and are more at ease with the UN’s 2000 Millennium Development Goals than with human rights treaties that are legally binding.

In any case, the donors have competing interests. China, which stands apart, is the largest contributor and does much to keep the ruling party in power.13 Japan is next, vying with China for influence. It is also largely supportive of the regime, and takes a lead role in UN deliberations on the Khmer Rouge trials and human rights. France, the former colonial power, is pragmatic and influential in the European Commission, a significant contributor. In 2008, the US resumed direct government aid, cut off after the 1997 coup. It has funded civil society organizations like the Community Legal Education Center and has sought to improve the functioning of political parties and the electoral system, but lately has given increasing priority to counterterrorism measures and military training and cooperation.14

The UN Development Program and other UN agencies, which together contribute a considerable amount, are supposed to give human rights central attention in their programs; but they have been hesitant to take on human rights violations. The Asian Development Bank and the World Bank have generally steered clear of human rights altogether.15

While donor nations have called for measures to strengthen the rule of law—primarily to improve the environment for foreign investment and private business development—the results have been disappointing. The judiciary remains the creature of the executive, and an anticorruption law, under discussion since 1994 and then rushed through parliament in March 2010, is extremely weak. Meanwhile the discovery of potentially significant deposits of oil and natural gas has made concerns about corruption ever more pressing.

For all but a few Cambodians, the supposed “beneficiaries” of overseas development aid, the donor world is remote and hard to comprehend, and such organizations as Human Rights Watch and Global Witness urge donors to be far more exacting about the way their funds are used. Despite these concerns, in June, donor nations including Japan, the US, and members of the EU pledged a record $1.1 billion with few questions asked.

The Khmer Rouge trials capture what little attention the outside world has to give Cambodia. The country’s citizens remain bewildered about the killings, deaths, and enormity of suffering under Democratic Kampuchea, and the forthcoming trial of the four senior Khmer Rouge leaders may provide some of the answers and understanding they are looking for. But it is far from clear that the proceedings will have a useful effect on Cambodia’s current predicament.

The prosecution, with the title Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), was formally set up by the UN and the Hun Sen government in 2006 to prosecute

senior leaders of Democratic Kampuchea and those who were most responsible for the crimes and serious violations of Cambodian penal law, international humanitarian law and custom, and international conventions recognized by Cambodia, that were committed during the period from 17 April 1975 to 6 January 1979.

The ECCC is a hybrid court, with Cambodian judges and staff in the majority, assisted by international judges and staff recruited through the UN. Its complex structure was initially established in a 2003 agreement, the result of years of wearisome negotiation between the representative of then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Hun Sen’s government.

Many more hurdles had to be overcome, including the court’s location. The government persuaded the UN to agree to a location not in central Phnom Penh but instead at the site of the new Military High Command Headquarters, some ten miles from the city center, arguing that it would have advantages for security and would reduce costs. Meanwhile, Kofi Annan’s recommendation that the trials be funded through the UN’s regular budget and not exposed to the vagaries of voluntary contributions was disregarded, leaving the court in continuing financial difficulties, dogged by corruption, and open to meddling from donors and the government alike. The court’s budget was increased in 2008 from the original $56.3 million to $135.4 million to allow the trials to continue until the end of 2010. Many more millions will be needed to keep them going after that date.

The court continues to be mired in political interference and delay, and Hun Sen has made clear his opposition to extending prosecutions beyond the present five defendants.16 The judges and staff assigned by the UN to assist the court face familiar dilemmas, among them how to avoid lending legitimacy to a process in which Cambodia’s judiciary is not independent and the country’s leaders have set out to limit and control the trials.

The ECCC agreement allows the UN to withdraw should the government cause the court to function in a manner that does not conform to UN standards. But most certainly the UN, not the government, would be blamed. One of Hun Sen’s main claims is that the UN has a history of betraying Cambodia. Why, he asks, did it do nothing during Pol Pot’s regime? Why did it give the Khmer Rouge a seat in the General Assembly in the 1980s, when his own government in Cambodia went unrecognized? If the UN withdraws from the trials, or additional funds are not forthcoming, he will ask why the international community is abandoning Cambodia and failing to confront one of the most horrendous atrocities of the twentieth century, when a quarter of the country’s population died, even though the ECCC is set to accomplish little that the ordinary Cambodian courts could not accomplish themselves.

If the trials are to serve justice, one outcome must be the transformation of the “ordinary” system of justice in Cambodia today and an end to impunity for government and military officials and their friends once and for all. The trials must also establish as complete a record as possible of the crimes committed under the Khmer Rouge, and open the way to dispassionate examination of what happened before and after. Cambodia’s recent history continues to be intensely contested, and the questions it raises cannot continue to be buried if Cambodians are to build a decent future for their nation.

For most foreigners, Cambodia seems to be a relatively stable country, hospitable to outside investment and welcoming for expatriates and visitors touring Angkor’s temples and the killing fields. Hun Sen, now one of the world’s longest-serving prime ministers, maintains good relations with China, Japan, the US, Australia, and France. Unlike the Burmese generals, he has managed to manufacture an outwardly acceptable face, and has used international assistance to gain legitimacy at home and abroad.

Taking credit for ridding Cambodia of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, Hun Sen cooperates with the trials as long as they don’t diminish his power. He talks of sustainable development and reducing poverty while he and his party have exploited the country’s resources and pocketed the payoffs. He tolerates the UN human rights presence, provided it limits itself to overcoming the legacy of Cambodia’s tragic Khmer Rouge past. He uses Pol Pot’s record as the yardstick to measure progress, thereby making failure impossible. The trials reinforce this message. No outside governments care to ask too many questions. Their economic and security interests are more important, as Hun Sen knows, and human rights are treated as dispensable.

Some believe that sooner or later Cambodians will rebel, but it seems more likely that their discontent will instead be channeled into extreme forms of nationalism, as under the Khmer Rouge. Cambodia has been divided and preyed upon for much of its modern history. Many Cambodians fear Vietnam and Thailand as predatory neighbors, and passions against both countries can become quickly inflamed.17

In the 1991 peace agreements, the “international community” assumed special responsibilities to the people of Cambodia that have yet to be properly honored. Cambodia today is a corrupt and cruel semidictatorship that should be getting much more scrutiny from the rest of the world. The Cambodian people deserve better. Thirty years after the appalling transgressions of the Khmer Rouge, much of the country still lives in fear.

—December 15, 2010

1.Duch will serve nineteen years of this sentence. He benefits from deduction of the eleven years he has served since his arrest in May 1999, and a five-year reduction to compensate for the time he spent in military detention without trial before his transfer to the court in July 2007. His trial divulged little information that was not already known about his responsibility for the systematic torture and killing of thousands. Now being held in the special prison complex built for the trial, he has appealed his sentence and is seeking acquittal, while the prosecution is asking for life imprisonment. A detailed account of Duch can be found in Richard Bernstein's " At Last, Justice for Monsters ," The New York Review , April 9, 2009, and in Stéphanie Giry's " Cambodia's Perfect War Criminal ," NYR Blog, October 25, 2010. ↩

2. In January 2010, Sam Rainsy was sentenced quite unjustly to two years' imprisonment in absentia, which Cambodia's Appeal Court upheld in October—for damage to property and incitement to racial discrimination in connection with the demarcation of Cambodia's border with Vietnam, a highly volatile issue. In September he was sentenced, again in absentia, to ten years' imprisonment on related charges of disinformation and falsifying public documents. ↩

3. The first rendition into English from the original Chinese of Zhou Daguan's A Record of Cambodia: The Land and its People was published in 2007 by Silkworm Books. Peter Harris, the translator, provides a fascinating introduction setting Zhou in his time and place, along with meticulous notes, maps, and photographs to explain the text. ↩

4. The peace agreements were signed in Paris on October 23, 1991, following the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops in 1989. They laid down a blueprint for a liberal democratic political regime. They were signed by Cambodia and eighteen other nations, including Australia, Canada, China, France, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the USSR, the UK, the US, and Vietnam. Cambodia was represented by a twelve-person Supreme National Council, chaired by Sihanouk, with members from the State of Cambodia (the renamed People's Republic of Kampuchea); the Party of Democratic Kampuchea (the Khmer Rouge); the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, which became the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party; and the royalist party, Funcinpec, established by Sihanouk in 1981. Funcinpec is the French acronym for Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Indépendant, Neutre, Pacifique, et Coopératif, or the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia. ↩

5. Four and a quarter million Cambodians voted in the election, representing 90 percent of the registered electorate. Funcinpec received 45 percent of the vote, the Cambodian People's Party 38 percent, and the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party 4 percent, with the rest shared between seventeen other political parties. William Shawcross's " A New Cambodia " provides a firsthand account of the election and its immediate aftermath: see The New York Review , August 12, 1993. ↩

6. The special representatives were Michael Kirby, Thomas Hammarberg, Peter Leuprecht, and Yash Ghai. They served without remuneration, discharging their mandate through regular missions to Cambodia. Their reports can be found on the website of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Cambodia: cambodia.ohchr.org. ↩

7. Reports recording the impact of these policies on Cambodia's poorest people include "Rights Razed: Forced Evictions in Cambodia," Amnesty International, February 2008; "Untitled: Tenure Insecurity and Inequality in the Cambodian Land Sector," issued in October 2009 by Bridges Across Borders Southeast Asia, the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, and the Jesuit Refugee Services; and "Losing Ground: Forced Evictions and Intimidation in Cambodia," September 2009, the Cambodian Human Rights Action Committee, a coalition of national nongovernmental organizations. ↩

8. Reports with these findings include "Land Concessions for Economic Purposes in Cambodia: A Human Rights Perspective," Special Representative of the Secretary-General for human rights in Cambodia, November 2004. This report was updated in June 2007 with much the same overall findings. ↩

9. Cambodia: Halving Poverty by 2015? Poverty Assessment 2006," report of the World Bank, February 2006. ↩

10. "Cambodia's Family Trees: Illegal Logging and the Stripping of Public Assets by Cambodia's Elite," Global Witness, June 2007. The report includes a detailed case study of illegal logging in Prey Long Forest, the largest lowland evergreen forest in mainland Southeast Asia, which has allegedly involved Hun Sen, his minister of agriculture, the director of forest administration and families and friends. ↩

11. "Country for Sale: How Cambodia's Elite Has Captured the Country's Extractive Industries," Global Witness, February 2009. In a statement of March 5, 2010, Global Witness urged donors to condemn a new policy announced by Hun Sen in late February whereby private businesses will support particular military units through voluntary donations. Its concern was that this policy officially sanctions and legitimizes a practice of companies hiring soldiers to protect their business interests. Cambodian businessmen Ly Yong Phat and Mong Reththy, who figure prominently in "Country for Sale," were among those named as sponsors. ↩

12. "Shifting Sand: How Singapore's Demand for Cambodian Sand Threatens Ecosystems and Undermines Good Governance," Global Witness, May 2010. ↩

13. China has only recently begun to put figures to the development assistance it provides. Its pervasive economic presence in Cambodia is described in François Hauter's " Chinese Shadows ," The New York Review , October 11, 2007. ↩

14. According to Human Rights Watch, the US has provided more than $4.5 million worth of military equipment and training to Cambodia since 2006, some of which has gone to military units and officials with records of serious human rights violations. In a statement of July 8, 2010, the organization called for a halt to US military aid pending thorough vetting of Cambodia's armed forces to screen out individuals and units with records of human rights violations. Its call was prompted by Angkor Sentinel, a regional military exercise held in Cambodia in July as part of the US Defense and State Departments' 2010 Global Peace Operations Initiative to train peacekeepers, and the selection of the ACO Tank Unit, which has been involved in illegal land seizures, to host part of the exercise. ↩

15. Other donor nations include Australia, Canada, Sweden, Germany, the UK, and Denmark, and aid agencies such as AUSAID, USAID, JICA, and Sida. ↩

16. Hun Sen reiterated this position during his meeting with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on October 27, 2010. See also "Political Interference at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia," Open Society Justice Initiative, July 2010, and "Salvaging Judicial Independence: The Need for a Principled Completion Plan for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia," Open Society Justice Initiative, November 2010. ↩

17. Anti-Thai riots were set off in the lead up to the July 2003 elections by ill-founded rumors that a Thai actress popular in Cambodia had said that Angkor Wat belonged to Thailand and that Cambodians were dogs. Anger against Thailand erupted again just before the July 2008 elections over Preah Vihear, a disputed eleventh-century Angkor temple on the Thai-Cambodian border, a source of continuing tension. ↩

                                 8. Security Council bid pursued

Vong Sokheng

The Phnom Penh Post: Thursday, 09 February 2012

-----------------------------------------------

(Comments: this article clearly shows that the EU is fully backing Hun Sen in his quest to be a non-voting member at UN Security Council (UNSC). How can overseas Cambodians continue to hold hope for the EU to help them topple the Hun Sen regime?

Not being aware of what is going around the world would not make the task of defending the survival of the Cambodian people a realistic and realizable objective, especially without any dignified and respected and respectable leader in sight. Naranhkiri Tith Ph. D. Washington DC. February 10, 2012).

-----------------------------------------------

The European Union and British ambassadors pledged yesterday to take Cambodia’s campaign for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council to their respective governing bodies, officials said after meetings with Deputy Prime Minister Hor Namhong.

Heng Chivoan/Phnom Penh Post

European Union Ambassador Jean-Francois Cautain (left) speaks with Cambodian Foreign Minister Hor Namhong during a meeting yesterday in Phnom Penh.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Koy Koung said the deputy prime minister had, in separate meetings, requested that newly appointed British Ambassador Mark Gooding and European Union Ambassador Jean-Francois Cautain lobby other nations to support Cambodia, as the Kingdom seeks votes in an election later this year for one of 10 non-permanent spots on UNSC in 2013 and 2014.

“Mark Gooding has pledged that he will take Cambodia’s request to the British leaders, and he also requested Cambodia’s support as Britain seeks membership of the Treaty of Amity and Co-operation in the Southeast Asia,” said Koy Koung.

Hor Namhong held talks with Kurt Campbell, US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, last week.

A press release issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs afterward said the US had also pledged to support Cambodia’s UNSC bid.

Cheang Vannarith, executive director of the Cambodian Institute for Cooperation and Peace, said that increasing Cambodia’s international involvement in UN peacekeeping duties and its role as the chair of ASEAN would help Cambodia to successfully campaign for a seat on the UNSC.

“Cambodia has played a leading role sending approximately 1,000 peacekeeping troops to the UN therefore…the image of Cambodia at the UNSC will build confidence for an international investment in Cambodia,” he said.

9. Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Jeopardy

Barbara Crossette

The Nation: November 15, 2010

--------------------------------------------------------------------

(Comments: these two articles titled ‘Khmer Rouge Tribunal in jeopardy,’ and ’Weakileaks: Cambodian Angle,‘ and an excerpt from a paper titled ‘Lessons from Preah Vihear,’ have confirmed my repeated suggestion that Cambodians should stop depending on other people and nations, especially on Vietnam, and the god-king in order to help save them from the disastrous and deadly situation that they are now in, since the Angkor time. Only Cambodians can save Cambodia and the Cambodian people.

The Preah Vihear article is especially illuminating as far as how Hun Sen is manipulating the whole internal and external Cambodian problems in his and those of Vietnam’s interests, by enhancing his role as the defender of Cambodia’s national interests, and at the same time by promoting his son Hun Manit to perpetuate his murderous regime and his high treason through his submission to Vietnam total control. By promoting his son, Hun Sen is now assured the continuation of his control of Cambodian political, economic and aspect of life in Cambodia, in order to better serve the Vietnamese interests. It is obvious, by maintaining Hun Sen in power the Vietnamese can continue to send at will millions of Vietnamese illegal immigrants into Cambodia without any check or control by Hun Sen and his CPP. What is more baffling is the fact that Sihanouk is not only totally silent on this crucial and deadly issue, but the old king has repeatedly said that this now supporting Hun Sen one hundred percent until the end of his life.

The other issue is Cambodia’s dependence on external powers to save them. In this case, it is the role of the USA and China in Cambodia. Many Cambodians still believe that America and China can save Cambodia from Vietnamese conquest. As the article from Weakileaks has clearly shown that both China and the USA are only looking for their own interests, which is normal, and those interests are not always in the interests of Cambodia.

However, I want to make it clear that in the case of the USA, Hillary Clinton's desire to confront China's resing power in Asia and the world by using Vietnam as the US ally, is not either a wise move and in the best interests of the USA. It is in this context, that we, as citizens of this country, are abjecting to her so zealous anti China policy, and not because she had solely chosen Vietnam as an ally of the USA..

Surrounded from its inception by squabbles between the Cambodian government and the United Nations, mired in charges of corruption and perennially short of cash, the tribunal set up to judge surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime is once again in jeopardy.

About the Author

Barbara Crossette

Barbara Crossette is The Nation's United Nations correspondent. A former foreign correspondent for the New York Times

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

The question of where the tribunal is headed arose again in early November because of two events: an unusually candid and critical farewell message from the departing chief of the defense support section and the publication by the New York–based Open Society Justice Initiative of a report acknowledging that the court will sooner or later be wound down, and that plans should be made now to avoid having its work cut short by the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has made no effort to hide his distaste for it.

In a third, separate but not unrelated development, Hun Sen has told the UN that unless it removes its chief human rights representative in Cambodia, Christophe Peschoux, the government will close down the Phnom Penh office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the first of its kind to be established in a national capital. Peschoux, who is accused by officials of favoring opposition politicians, has been outspoken on threatened political and economic rights, including the beating of protesters and the practice of "land-grabbing," when poor Cambodians' properties are seized illegally for the use of politically well-connected people or foreign companies.

The Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights said on November 2 that the dual threats to the Khmer Rouge tribunal and the UN human rights office "seriously question the state of the rule of law and the development of democratic institutions in the country."

Though the Cambodian government has usually been cast as the villain in this long-running story—the court was first proposed formally in 1997 and took a decade to be fully functioning—both the UN and the United States are complicit, given their missteps in the years leading to the tribunal’s creation.

Cambodia’s autocratic and uncooperative government, and Hun Sen himself, might not be so strongly and willfully entrenched if the UN, running a transitional administration in the early 1990s, had not so readily given in to his bullying. Hun Sen was a holdover from a government installed under virtual Vietnamese occupation after Hanoi’s troops overthrew the Khmer Rouge in 1979, and he stood for reelection in 1993, under UN oversight. His Cambodian Peoples Party lost decisively to a royalist party led by Nordom Ranariddh, a son of King Norodom Sihanouk.

In the years that followed, Hun Sen, as co-prime minister with Ranariddh in an unworkable coalition, simply pushed the victor aside by claiming key ministries—with UN acquiescence—and finishing the job with a coup after the UN was no longer in charge.

From the American side, UN legal experts say that there was intense pressure on them to set up a tribunal to try Khmer Rouge figures. The United States and Southeast Asian nations had in the 1980s backed an armed opposition arrayed against Hun Sen and the Vietnamese that included the defeated Khmer Rouge. There was something exculpatory about the way Washington campaigned for a tribunal to try leaders of the monstrous regime after that fact. The State Department also funded the Cambodia Genocide Project, an archive of Khmer Rouge atrocities based at Yale that later moved much of its operation to Phnom Penh.

Kofi Annan, then UN secretary-general, and his top legal advisor, Hans Corell, a Swedish judge, were skeptical of the odd hybrid of a tribunal being created, and wanted to back out at one point, but the United States pressed on, at times in almost a threatening manner, UN officials said. What resulted was a court based in Cambodia (on a military outpost no less) that is officially part of the Cambodian justice system. It is a half-and-half setup, with the UN supplying half the professional legal staff and the Cambodians the other half. Prosecution and defense teams have to work in tandem, one local and one international, literally side by side. Judges are an international mix. To make life even more complicated, the court uses three languages: Khmer, English and French. Finding quality translators and interpreters have been persistent problems.

On November 10, Richard J. Rogers, the British-born international lawyer who has been chief of the defense support section—not an easy mantle to wear when the Khmer Rouge are the defendants—said in his departing statement that the court operates "in a country where the institutions of justice and respect for the rule of law are still developing." He added that "the greatest challenge for the defense remains the threat of political interference that may undermine the independence of the court."

Rogers and others working in the defense section were not only under constant scrutiny by the government (which has former Khmer Rouge figures in its ranks) but also faced strong public reaction against the very idea that Khmer Rouge leaders should have their day in court. A weak and politically manipulated judicial system has not taught Cambodians the principle of fair trial.

Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge regional official himself who fled to Vietnam when the movement split in the late 1970s—is content to see the biggest names of the "other" faction on trial, but wants to leave it at that. The danger to him seems to be that more prosecutions would sooner or later focus on some people in his government.

As the showcase trial of four top Khmer Rouge leaders still alive looms in the new year, pressure is mounting on the court to wind up its business and not indict any further figures from the 1975–79 experiment the revolutionaries called Democratic Kampuchea, which left up to 2 million Cambodians dead or in exile.

So far only one trial has been completed, that of Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, the commander of Tuol Sleng prison and torture center, who was convicted in July and is appealing a jail sentence.

Next on the docket—combined into one case—are Nuon Chea, “Brother Number Two” to Pol Pot, who died in 1998; Khieu Samphan, the regime’s head of state, and the powerful couple of Ieng Sary, foreign minister, and his wife, Ieng Thirith, minister for social affairs. All are in their 80s or late 70s, none of them in robust health, and there are concerns that one or more of them may die before the completion of their trials, due to start in mid-2011.

Prosecutors for the court want to add another round of cases, with a total of five more defendants, none of them named so far. That provoked Hun Sen, who told Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in October that new cases beyond that of the big four now preparing to go on trial will not be allowed.

The report from the Open Society Justice Initiative, part of the Open Society Institute founded and funded by George Soros, suggests that additional trials would not necessarily have to prolong the tribunal’s life, since they could take place parallel to the one beginning in 2011, which is bound to be dragged out, possibly over a year or more.

The report—Salvaging Judicial Independence: The Need for a Principled Completion Plan—strongly rejects the proposal that any new cases should be turned over to Cambodian national courts. The Justice Initiative, which has a Cambodian branch in Phnom Penh, says that both the UN and donor countries, chafing at perennial demands for more funds, would be failing in their responsibility to insure that trials would meet international standards if cases were transferred entirely to Cambodian jurisdiction from the hybrid tribunal, formally titled Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, or ECCC.

This would amount, the report says, to the tribunal risking the appearance that it is "dumping" new cases "because it is unwilling or unable to deal with the political interference that has come to haunt the ECCC."

15. Cambodia's Curse - by Joel Brinkley



ISBN: 1586487876
READ: 2011-10-05
RATING: 1/10

Go to Amazon

Cambodia's political history from 1978 to 2009 or so. Appalling, horrible, infuriating,

disgusting, etc. I hated this book. I was hoping to learn more about Cambodia and its culture,

but this only gives chapter after chapter detailing the horrible things the people in government did, and nothing else. No bright side. No other insights. Just horror.

Derek Silvers: my notes by http://sivers.org/book/CambodiaCurse

Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land.

This was 1979. The Vietnam War had ended just four years earlier, but the convulsions it caused in neighboring states played out for years following. In Cambodia a few months after Saigon fell, Communist insurgents known as the Khmer Rouge overthrew Lon Nol, the military dictator.

Two million Cambodians, one-quarter of the nation’s population, were killed during Pol Pot’s three and one-half years in power.

Eighty percent of Cambodia’s teachers were killed and 95 percent of the doctors, along with almost everyone else who had an education.

In December 1978 Vietnam had invaded Cambodia and quickly deposed the Khmer Rouge regime. In the months that followed, tens of thousands of refugees stumbled toward Thailand,

A decade after their invasion, the Vietnamese had pulled out of Cambodia, in 1989, and left a puppet Marxist government in place. The Khmer Rouge, still directed by Pol Pot, continued waging a guerrilla war against the occupiers and their government.

In 1992 and 1993 the United Nations occupied Cambodia. The state became a UN protectorate - the first and last time the United Nations tried anything so ambitious. The UN deployed 16,000 troops and 5,000 civil administrators. It ran the country for two years, and the whole enterprise cost $3 billion. The United Nations gave Cambodia a constitution that afforded the people - 5 million Khmer Rouge survivors - all the human rights and privileges of a modern democratic state. Then the UN staged elections. To everyone’s surprise, 90 percent of the electorate voted.

Joseph Mussomeli, while he was the U.S. ambassador to Cambodia, he would adopt a melodramatic tone as he told them: “Be careful because Cambodia is the most dangerous place you will ever visit. You will fall in love with it, and eventually it will break your heart.”

Cambodia is the only place where the bulk of the nation, more than three-quarters of its people, still lives more or less as they did 1,000 years ago. Until the 1940s, the nation had no schools outside the capital. The populace relied upon village monks who taught the principles of Buddhism and not much else. The state had not a single middle school, high school, or college. In large areas of the nation, the first schools were not built until the 1990s.

60 percent of the nation’s women could not read or write.

In a good year - that is, a year with a lot of rain - the family can earn 2 million riel, the Cambodian currency, or about $500. In a drought year, she says, the total may fall to $125 - about 34 cents a day on average - for the entire year.

At least 80 percent of the nation’s 13.4 million people live in rural areas, more or less as she does.

A smattering of rural homes now have metal roofs - an anthropologist’s measure of social advancement. What’s more, in the past few years, motorbikes have shown up parked outside some of those Middle Ages huts.

Thailand, Cambodia’s western neighbor, has a gross domestic product per capita more than four times higher than Cambodia’s. The average annual income for the Thai is about $3,000, compared to just under $600 for Cambodians - the second lowest in Asia.

Only Burma is poorer, on a per-capita basis. The average Burmese “were actually more productive and much better off on a material basis than the rural people in Cambodia - even though the Burmese are under a much worse political regime.” Even North Koreans are more prosperous. The average income there is almost triple Cambodia’s.

The war in Vietnam ended just four years before the Khmer Rouge defeat in 1979. Yet today Vietnam’s gross domestic product per capita is almost ten times higher than Cambodia’s. Only 19 percent of the economy is based on agriculture, compared to more than one-third for Cambodia. Vietnam manufactures pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and high-tensile steel. Cambodia manufactures T-shirts, rubber, and cement.

Most Vietnamese students stay in school until at least the tenth grade. By the tenth grade in Cambodia, all but 13 percent of the students have dropped out. Vietnam’s national literacy rate is above 90 percent. UN agencies say that Cambodia’s hovers around 70 percent.

90 percent of Cambodia’s roads remain unpaved.

Cambodian farmers grow a single rice crop per year - the only nation in Asia that does not grow more - and almost none of their farmland is irrigated. Vietnamese embrace change. Cambodians tend to resist it. Even now, Cambodia’s Ministry of Agriculture cannot convince most farmers to adopt modern rice-cultivation strategies that would increase Cambodia’s yield - also the lowest of any major rice-growing nation.

One-third to one-half of all Cambodians who lived through the Khmer Rouge era have PTSD. Symptoms of PTSD and related traumatic illnesses are being passed from one generation to the next.

This learned behavior is one reason most Cambodians do not react to their leaders’ misbehavior. They are silent when officials enrich themselves on public proceeds and live in mansions. They are quiet when the government sells their property to wealthy businessmen and then soldiers forcibly evict them in the night.

Today it’s not unusual for the most desperately poor couples to have as many as eight or ten children.

Most Cambodians lack ambition or any hope for a better life. Their religion, Theravadist Buddhism, taught them to shun status and eschew material possessions because “contentment is wealth.”

Monks preached that children should be pleased with the lives they had and not aspire for more.

King Norodom promised to abolish slavery and end the monarchy’s insistence that all land belonged to the crown. He also pledged to reform “tax collection,” which had grown into a system of runaway thievery. But then Norodom employed a passive-aggressive tactic that would remain commonplace, even into the modern era. He signed orders for all of these reforms - but then declined to enforce them.

The Khmer Rouge, like most Cambodians, hated the Vietnamese. And from the beginning of their reign the two states had skirmished along the border. Finally, by the end of 1978, Vietnam had had enough. Thousands of troops poured over the border, and in short order they deposed the Khmer Rouge. Millions of Cambodians quietly cheered as their historical enemy swept through the nation. Three years, eight months, and twenty days after they seized power, the Khmer Rouge slipped furtively into the night. For decades to come, Cambodians, with little prompting, would affirm that the Vietnamese saved their lives.

Yet in response to the Vietnamese invasion, the White House merely slapped more sanctions on Vietnam. Nothing was done for the 5 million Khmer Rouge victims.

Surprisingly, the United Nations chose to reseat the Khmer Rouge instead of “those puppets,” as Washington referred to the government in Phnom Penh. To the State Department, giving a seat to Vietnam’s government was effectively giving Moscow another vote in the General Assembly. And although the Khmer Rouge were butchers, they were out of power now, living in the jungle - and allied with China, Washington’s new friend.

When Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981, he resolutely refused to recognize Cambodia’s quisling government. UN aid agencies were forbidden to set foot in Cambodia. No one was to have anything to do with the stooges Hanoi had installed in Phnom Penh.

Vietnamese administrators sat in every government ministry and provincial office, and they worked to remake Cambodia as a Marxist-Leninist state.

Cambodia was stuck in a mire, occupied by its mortal enemy, represented before the United Nations and the world by its former genocidal government, governed by Communist dictators despised in the West, locked out of any significant assistance or aid. Cambodia had 7.7 million people in April 1975. Left when the Khmer Rouge fell from power were fewer than 5 million.

Vietnam was forced to reassess its own foreign adventures. The government was overstretched. Loath as they were to do it, in 1988 and 1989 the Vietnamese army withdrew from Cambodia - leaving Hun Sen’s puppet Communist government in charge.

Finally, on July 18, 1990, Secretary of State Baker announced a change in American policy - a complete reversal. The United States would end its political and tacit military support of the Khmer Rouge more than eleven years after they had fallen from power, a decade after it had become perfectly clear that Pol Pot and his minions had murdered “at least 1.7 million” people, 25 percent of Cambodia’s population.

The United Nations would actually take control of Cambodia; the state would become a UN protectorate. The four competing armies would be disarmed, their troops held in special camps until national elections were held and a new democratic government chosen.

Michael Hayes, a young American from Massachusetts, had come to Phnom Penh looking for work. He’d been on the staff of the Asia Foundation in Bangkok. But this was the new boomtown. It was 1991, and he was just twenty-four years old. “I was staying at the Royale Hotel,” where everyone from the West stayed - journalists, UN officers, drug dealers, NGOs. “I went to the dining room for breakfast and asked for a newspaper. The waitress told me there are no newspapers here. So I began thinking: Maybe I should be a journalist. I had a lot of friends who were journalists. Maybe I should start a newspaper.” So he did. With help from the UN and his friends, he founded the Phnom Penh Post in 1992, the nation’s first English-language paper, still publishing today.

The UN force offered a great deal more than the prospect of military reconciliation. Most Cambodians loved having them in town. The visitors spent money, more money, and then more money still - $3 billion in all. Every staffer was given a daily living allowance of $145 on top of his salary - a year’s income for most Cambodians. Contractors had quickly put up apartment buildings and now were taking in $2,000, $3,000 a month - ridiculously high rents for Phnom Penh. Hotels were full, and new ones were under construction. Anyone who’d ever had a fleeting thought of running a restaurant scrambled to open one. Everyone with a car hired himself out as a driver. Brothels worked overtime; UN doctors treated thousands of their men and women for sexually transmitted diseases. Liquor vendors couldn’t keep up with demand; restaurant and bar owners had to replace fixtures and furniture broken in drunken brawls almost every evening. UN vehicles and equipment routinely disappeared in the night, but no one was sure whether the thieves were Cambodian or renegade UN employees.

Under the UN, freedoms of all kinds flowered. A group of political prisoners let out of jail opened a legal-aid organization. Under UN auspices new human-rights advocacy groups began work; education, agriculture, health assistance, and a host of other civil-society organizations opened shop. Groups like these had never been permitted by the Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge, or the monarchy. But would the new government, whoever won the upcoming election, allow all of this to continue?

So, just as his Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese tutors had taught him, Hun Sen went after Ranariddh with everything he had. In 1993 the United Nations reported more than one hundred political assassinations. Nearly all of the dead were Funcinpec officials. A few worked for another smaller Buddhist party. Hun Sen’s political party, the Cambodian People’s Party, or CPP, controlled every province, every town and village - every political jurisdiction in the country. How could it not? Under Vietnam Cambodia had been a one-party state, and Hun Sen had led it. He directed his loyalists in all of these regional offices to bribe, or threaten, everyone to vote for him. The regional officers jumped into the fight with abandon. They burned down Funcinpec headquarters, disrupted rallies, and killed prominent party officials. After all, a few years earlier, when Vietnam ruled the nation, that had been the way things were done.

Hun Sen explained, “We have been accused of seizing equipment belonging to two political parties. So I would like to clarify that the equipment has been seized because the parties have acted illegally. They have imported 63 cars without paying taxes, and they illegally set up radio stations in Phnom Penh without applying for proper authorization. And now they are bringing in television equipment without, as before, any permission at all.” Hun Sen was just beginning to make an art of these facile explanations for his government’s belligerent actions.

Cambodia then was still a pure dictatorship, with a bit of superficial UN oversight. If Hun Sen wanted to blame faceless bureaucrats following his own unwritten regulations, often invented on the spot, who was to stop him?

Washington had turned away from Cambodia almost as soon as Baker stepped down from the podium. The month after Baker made his Cambodian announcement, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and the Bush administration applied all of its attention and energy to the Gulf War. Soon after that came the 1992 presidential campaign. “People lost interest in Cambodia; they were just going through the motions,” Bolton said.

Across Cambodia the polls opened the morning of May 23, 1993, and stayed open for six days. Khmer Rouge gunners shelled polling and police stations in Kampong Thom, Kampong Chhnang, Siem Reap, and elsewhere. Election workers fled; several were killed. But the major national offensive the Khmer Rouge had promised never came to pass, and over the six days more than 4 million Cambodians voted, even including some Khmer Rouge soldiers - 90 percent of the eligible voters. Their decision was clear. Hun Sen lost.

Only one party came out of the election a clear winner: the United Nations. For all the UN’s shortcomings, mistakes, and failures, it had pulled off a successful election, despite threats, boycotts, and violence. It had repatriated 370,000 refugees who had been living on the Thai border.

Hun Sen, Ranariddh, and Sihanouk had sat in that ornate conference room in Paris two years earlier, each conniving to achieve an outcome that would place himself on top. Now, it seemed, each of them had come quite close. Sihanouk was king, but without all the powers he had held before 1970. Both Hun Sen and Ranariddh were heads of the government, but they had to share power. Nevertheless, through all of its history, only one absolute leader had ruled Cambodia. All three men had accepted the new arrangement - but only temporarily. Each of them wanted to be the nation’s absolute ruler and remained determined to make that happen. As Hun Sen had said a few years earlier, “You can talk about sharing power in Paris, but not in Cambodia.”

In 1992, the United Nations had arrived with billions of dollars to spend. The nation was awash in cash, though little of it went into the government treasury. Every project the UN undertook offered opportunities for graft - or theft. All that UN money bloated the Cambodian economy. A lot of people got rich. But then, at the end of 1993, the UN and all of its money and expertise were gone. That left “a huge vacuum.”

After the UN left, they worried: Who would step up? Who would be the new patron, the next funder?

In February 1995, the state seemed to be falling headlong back into its old corrupt ways. Police had begun setting up unofficial checkpoints on the highways where they pulled over drivers and shook them down. Schoolteachers were demanding bribes from students every day as a condition for staying in class. And then, of course, there was the disappearing foreign aid.

“Over the last 10 years, people, especially leaders, tended to confuse their personal assets with the state’s assets,” he told the Toronto Star in June 1994. “They saw their personal interests as the national interest. This was the worst combination we could have, a jungle economy and former Communist cadres who use their discretionary powers to serve their personal interests. They’ve been doing whatever they want. They just use their political power to get rich by disposing of national assets like they are their own assets.” A bit later he told the Associated Press, “You cannot start a business here without all the officials asking you for money.” And now, with a divided government, “instead of bribing one party, you have to bribe two.”

Even with Hun Sen’s lofty pronouncements about corruption and a free and open press, it quickly became clear that Cambodia remained a dangerous place for the reform-minded. Two months after Rainsy left office, two men riding by on a motorbike shot and killed Chan Dara, a young reporter for the Koh Santepheap (Island of Peace) newspaper, in Kampong Cham, about seventy-five miles northeast of Phnom Penh. Chan Dara had been writing stories about corruption in government - as Hun Sen had publicly requested. A few weeks earlier in downtown Phnom Penh assassins on a motorbike had gunned down Nguon Chan, the editor of the Voice of Cambodian Youth newspaper. He, too, had been reporting on corruption.

During a meeting in Paris in 1996 Cambodians held a demonstration against him. Hun Sen warned them: “You can hold a demonstration in France, but do not do it in Cambodia!”

Almost 20 percent of all newborns died before they reached age five. One mother in ten did not survive childbirth - among the worst rates in the world.

Second-generation effects: He studied two hundred children in a Phnom Penh high school and found that the more they knew about their parents’ traumatic experiences, the worse off they were. “Children, seeking approval, parrot their parents’ aberrant behavior,” Fields said. “There’s also a tendency for children to become ‘parents’ for their parents, to try to help quell their parents’ anxieties. These children tend to see danger when there is no danger,” just like their parents. When asked to list the events they knew their parents were exposed to - starvation, torture, near death - “some of them get angry when they talk about it, showing the role reversal. They have higher anxiety, depression. These stresses take a toll on their lives.”

If you have a traumatic childhood, you are more likely to get PTSD. So we have children who are growing up with violent parents who are drunk and beat them. That’s the generation that’s coming.” That new generation has already arrived. In about 2004 Cambodian officials estimated that one-quarter of the nation’s men frequently beat their wives and children - one of the highest rates in the world. By the end of the decade, as more of the Khmer Rouge victims’ children married and had children of their own, the rate had actually increased, to about one-third of the nation’s families.

More than 80 percent of the people lived in the countryside. In 1998 most of them did not have television or radio. Newspapers did not circulate outside the cities, and most of the rural residents could not read. What news of the campaign they were able to hear usually came from their village chiefs, every one of them a CPP stalwart.

The government was riven with marital and professional nepotism. In a nation where no one trusted anyone else and everyone looked out only for himself, the family stood as the only social grouping in which people confidently relied on one another.

Serge Thion, a French sociologist, said it best: “Explaining Cambodia is typically a foreigner’s business,” he wrote. “For about one century, foreigners have been providing explanations.”

In 2002 the Cambodian government sold the rights to explore for oil off its coast to Chevron Oil Company.

In 2005 Chevron put out a statement, saying, “We are very encouraged to find oil in each of the first four wells of this drilling program.” Two years later the International Monetary Fund ventured an estimate. Within a decade, it said, Cambodia could begin taking in $1.7 billion in oil revenues each year.

Cambodia chartered a new national oil company, and Hun Sen gave the oil portfolio to Sok An, the deputy prime minister. The new company operated in total secrecy; one human-rights group charged that state oil-company employees were forbidden even to use the telephone. Hun Sen talked about using the profits to reduce poverty and promote development. No one believed him. The IMF urged Cambodia to pass.

The World Bank pressured Cambodia to sign the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, an international agreement that would require public disclosure of oil and gas revenues.

But in 2008 Hun Sen refused and called external criticism of his oil policies “crazy.” Then, in the fall of 2010, opposition politicians grew so frustrated about all of this that they wrote a plaintiff letter to twentytwo U.S. senators, saying, “Cambodia is ripe for disastrous extraction of our oil reserves” because the government was granting “99 year concessions for enormous swaths of land” over presumed oil reserves “in exchange for private pay-offs to a small number of associates at the top of the ruling party.”

That’s why we have to try to develop systems” that bring transparency to government spending. “And, yes, there is a sense of urgency here.” Then in 2010 the reason for the urgency became clear. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation into whether one oil company paid a $2.5 million bribe to government officials in 2007 for the right to look for oil.

When Hun Sen learned of the SEC investigation three years later, he said the money had gone into a “social fund” for schools and hospitals. “It’s not under-the-table money.” But he refused to say exactly how the money had been spent. Traveling the country, talking to governors, looking at schools and hospitals, no one told me of any significant new projects. And, of course, the new anticorruption agency chose not to take up this case.

China became Cambodia’s single largest donor. When donors pledged almost $1 billion in December 2008, $257 million of that came from China. Beijing actually spent billions more to build dams and roads and other infrastructure. And, of course, China’s aid came with no strings - except that Hun Sen had to endorse Beijing’s “one-China” policy on Taiwan.

So where is Cambodia heading? “I have become so dispirited,” lamented Yeng Virak, executive director of the Community Legal Education Center. He sighed heavily and shook his head. “The foreigners, the donors, they say Cambodia is so much better off than in the past. But I feel sad and worried. We are falling off a cliff!”

Cambodians have been abused by so many leaders over so many years that they expect nothing from their government. In fact, they remain convinced that any change at all will be painful, if not fatal. As Vickery put it, they want only to be left alone.

The Sudanese government slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people, but in both places rebel groups fought back - eventually bringing the conflicts to a military standstill. Cambodians are incapable of that.

Burmese are far more productive. They grow almost twice as much rice per acre and generally are more prosperous. Occasionally, they stage massive pro-democracy demonstrations, even knowing that the government will strike back. Cambodians are incapable of that.

Haiti remained the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere and one of the poorest in the world. As in Cambodia, most residents did not have electricity, toilets, or clean water. But by almost every measure Haitians were better off.

In 2007 10 percent of Haiti’s people had access to the Internet. In Cambodia the number was close to zero.

When Joseph Mussomeli was the U.S. ambassador, he said he would “always tell the Cambodians that we put about six hundred American government officials in jail each year for corruption. It reminds me that we also have a corrupt society and that we are doing the right thing about it. We’re putting them in jail. There’s no shame in admitting corruption; the shame is in denying it and not doing something about it.”

Many nations have suffered dark histories that left sad legacies. Many of those same nations are ruled by leaders who mistreat the people now. But no nation has suffered so much in the recent past. No other people lived through an era when their own leaders killed one-quarter of the population - only to find that when the offending government fell, uncaring, avaricious leaders replaced it. No other nation’s population is so riven with PTSD and other traumatic mental illnesses that are being passed to a second generation and potentially to a third - darkening the nation’s personality. All of that offers the Cambodian people a toxic mix of abuse unmatched anywhere in the world. But given their history, given the subservient state Cambodians have accepted without complaint for more than a millennium, they don’t seem to care. Once, just once, they dared to hope. The world’s major nations gave them the chance to choose their leader for the first time in history. Almost every Cambodian embraced it; 90 percent of them voted. But then their leaders betrayed them, and the world deserted them. Now, once again, most expect nothing more than they have. They carry no ambitions. They hold no dreams. All they want is to be left alone.

The nation grows ever more prosperous, too. For all his faults, Hun Sen has given Cambodians one very important thing: more than a decade of stability and calm that bring some predictability to their lives for the first time in centuries. Stability is important not just for Cambodians. It encourages more tourists to visit the Khmer Rouge sites in Phnom Penh and the monuments left behind from the Khmer empire at Angkor. Tourism, one of the three legs of Cambodia’s economy, continues to grow. Leopard Capital, an investment-fund manager in Southeast Asia, said tourist arrivals increased by 26 percent between 2008 and 2009. In the first half of 2010, 1.2 million people visited Cambodia, another large increase. Foreign investment is still slow to come and is unlikely to grow significantly, as long as businessmen see that so many hands will be reaching into their pockets as soon as they arrive. For now, few Western companies dare to try.

It’s hard to overstate how important trees are to Cambodians. Since the beginning of human habitation of this bucolic state, people have built their homes from tree trunks, limbs, and branches - even making use of the leaves. They’ve taken food from the fruit trees, burned tree limbs to cook their food, lived in the shade of trees as protection from the brutal heat, tapped tree resin to seal the hulls of their fishing boats, and much more. That is why so many people looked on with genuine distress as the Khmer Rouge, after their defeat, denuded northwestern Cambodia of vast forests and sold the lumber to Thai generals. These weren’t just any old trees. Cambodia is fortunate to be home to tropical trees that produce some of the world’s most beautiful woods. Some provide exquisite-looking lumber that in appearance offers a rich, unique coloration. It’s roughly a cross between walnut and mahogany with an attractive meandering grain. Some feature a blondwood stripe, maybe three-quarters of an inch wide, that twists and turns through the tree. Cambodians call the lumber from these trees “luxury wood.” It is prized and quite valuable.

Through the 1990s all manner of Cambodians plunged into this orgy of deforestation. Patrons to roadside beer bars in Pailin, near the western border, sat in luxury-wood chairs pulled up to table tops made from one solid slab of this wood, four feet wide, six feet long - and seven inches deep. A fifteen-dollar-a-night guesthouse in Battambang featured massive luxury-wood beds with heavily carved headboards, eight feet tall. One of those blond stripes coursed through the footboard, and each of these beds weighed well over 1,000 pounds. Cambodia’s trees were fast disappearing. But early in the 2000s the World Bank office in Phnom Penh made saving the remaining forests a major priority.

In 2001 two mothers visited the Licadho offices in Phnom Penh asking for help. They were divorced and impoverished, and both said a kind man had come to them, promising to help. He offered to take their babies - one was six months old, the other just four days - to a children’s center that would care for them until the women got back on their feet. The mothers could visit their babies as often as they wanted. He gave each of them a bit of cash and took the babies away. But once they had given up their babies, the mothers were not permitted to see them. Licadho investigated and found that the children had been taken to “an orphanage run by an adoption facilitator who caters to the U.S. market,” the group reported. And this was no isolated incident. Across Cambodia hundreds of women were being tricked or coerced into giving up their babies. The children effectively were being sold to Americans. They were eager to adopt Cambodian children and did not know the babies had been stolen. Fees for such a service generally ran up to about $10,000. But the scam didn’t simply end with unscrupulous baby brokers. For these babies to leave the country, each had to have a passport issued by the Ministries of Interior and Foreign Affairs. Officers in both ministries were demanding rich bribes from the brokers, and as usual they were passing part of the proceeds up to their superiors.

“Sometimes a woman would have a difficult birth, and someone would agree to treat her in the hospital - and take care of the baby. When she woke up, they’d say, ‘Baby? What baby?’ The babies were taken to warehouses of sorts. They might have fifty babies at a time. I visited a number of them.”

___________________________________________________________________ 

17. Cambodia’s historical legacy

David Chandler

(November 1998)

Conciliation Resources

http://www.c-r.org/our-work/accord/cambodia/historical-legacy.php

----------------------------------------

(Comments: this article by David Chandler, an American historian specialized in Cambodia history is an important document for all Cambodians, especially those who still believe that the Paris Pease Agreements can be and must be revived in order to save Cambodia. This dependency mentality dated way back in the Cambodian history in the Angkor time.

This dependency behavior of the majority of Cambodians projects a very negative image on the Cambodian people in general, as a people who cannot defend themselves but always depend on foreigners to defend them.

I hope this article will open the eyes of those who still not totally locked in this age-old dependency behavior, as dive themselves a better chance to remain free is to stop talking about the Vietnamese as an enemy, (They certainly are) because the way the majority of the Cambodian people have been talking about the Vietnamese with such uncontrollable anger can only play against them and in favor of the Vietnamese.

The only way Cambodians can do to promote their chance to remain free is to concentrate on the criticism of Hun Sen and Sihanouk and their corrupt and selfish practice and policy. This way, they will get all the support from the international community that all Cambodian crave for.

However, for this goal to be reached, a good leader must be found. And for a good leader to be found is to maintain a high standard of moral and professional code of conduct in the image of Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, or Nelson Mandela of South Africa.

Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. January 16, 2012)

----------------------------------------

Cambodia’s past, with its mixture of grandeur, obscurity and horror, weighs on its people and on those who study it with peculiar force. Two stretches of Cambodia’s history in particular have tended to hold fascination and have shaped the country’s present-day politics. These are the medieval era known in the West as ‘Angkor’ and the late l970s when Cambodia was ruled by the murderous Khmer Rouge.

Contrasting images

Angkor

Between the ninth and the 15th centuries AD, a Hindu-Buddhist, Khmer-speaking kingdom centred in Cambodia’s northwest was a powerful presence in Southeast Asia, extending its influence over much of present-day Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. Hundreds of elegant stone and brick temples, over 1,000 inscriptions in Sanskrit and Khmer and a wealth of mesmerisingly beautiful sculpture testify to the magnificence and complexity of the kingdom, the richness of its art and the sometimes awesome power of its rulers.

After Angkor was abandoned in the 15th century following a series of attacks from the west, Cambodia’s centre of gravity shifted southwards to the vicinity of Phnom Penh. But Angkor lingered on in popular mythology. Several of the temples came to be associated with ancestral spirits and a few became Buddhist pilgrimage sites. Inscriptions could no longer be read, however, and the names of Angkorean kings, their demands on ordinary people and the cruelty of the Angkorean wars were forgotten. Over the next four centuries, the power of the Angkorean era was gradually watered down.

When Cambodia, like Vietnam and Laos, became part of French Indochina in the late 19th century, French scholars ‘discovered’ Angkor. Deciphering its inscriptions, they named its Angkorean kings, supervised the restoration of its major temples and established the sequence of Cambodian art. To their protégés, the Khmer, the French presented evidence of grandiose autonomy that contrasted sharply with the country’s diminished size and dependent status. The Angkorean heritage has been used ever since by Cambodian nationalists to differentiate Cambodia from its neighbours and to enhance its own identity. An image of Angkor has appeared on every Cambodian flag — of which there have been five — since the l940s.

The Khmer Rouge

The second period of Cambodian history that springs to mind is uglier and more recent. In April l975, following 90 years of French ‘protection’ and 22 years of independence, an indigenous communist movement known in the West as the ‘Khmer Rouge’ seized power in Cambodia. Inspired by Mao’s China, it stamped its utopian brand of socialism onto a population devastated by five years of foreign invasions, aerial bombardment and civil war. Until January l979, when the regime was swept from power by a Vietnamese invasion, Cambodia called itself Democratic Kampuchea. It was ruled by a shadowy Communist Party led by a deceptively soft-spoken former teacher named Saloth Sar who hid behind the pseudonym ‘Pol Pot’.

The so-called Party Centre which ruled Democratic Kampuchea consisted of Pol Pot and a handful of colleagues who believed that they had ‘grasped the wheel of history’, as they put it. Filled with revolutionary zeal they decided to cut off Cambodia from the rest of the world. They tried to revive its past grandeur and forestall what they saw as the corrupting influences of modernity by drawing on the perceived limitless revolutionary empowerment of its people. Their goal was to achieve socialism faster and more thoroughly than it had been achieved anywhere else.

The human costs of this experiment were enormous, and are still being paid by survivors of the regime. Within a week of the Khmer Rouge ‘liberation’ of Phnom Penh in April 1975, its population was driven into the countryside en masse to begin establishing a collectivised agricultural system. Thousands of people died on the way. Within a month, towns, private property, markets and money were abandoned; law-courts, government offices and schools were closed and religious practices were forbidden. As everyone set to work under the supervision of revolutionary soldiers, Democratic Kampuchea became a prison farm. Pol Pot and his colleagues, who believed that secrecy had played an important role in their victory, only revealed their identity to the world in October l977 when forced to do so by their Chinese patrons.

Conditions in Democratic Kampuchea varied from time to time and from place to place, but were generally harsher than most Cambodians had ever known. The Khmer Rouge had systematically set out to obliterate Cambodia’s Buddhist culture, its family-based system of social organization and its educated classes. Between April l975 and January l979 perhaps as many as l.5 million Cambodians died from malnutrition, overwork and disease. At least 200,000 others were executed without trial as ‘class enemies’.

It was only during the 1980s that the full horrors of the Khmer Rouge period became known to the outside world. The Khmer Rouge had presided over the deaths of roughly one in five of Cambodia’s inhabitants, pursuing what the French writer Jean Lacouture has called a policy of ‘auto-genocide’, which left deep scars on its survivors. What had happened in Democratic Kampuchea also altered people’s views of Cambodian history. This era provided a striking contrast to the prevailing, sentimental view of Cambodians as peace-loving, non-violent people, more sinned against than sinning, whose culture reflected the beauty of Angkorean art without the passion and destructiveness of Angkorean politics. The Khmer Rouge period, in other words, exposed an inherent ferocity in Cambodian politics that had been either neutralised by foreign ‘protection’ or played down in the historical record written to favour those in power.

For many people, therefore, the word ‘Cambodia’ conjures up images of the medieval temples of Angkor — which seem so peaceful — or the killing fields of the l970s, or both. At first glance, it is difficult to establish any continuity between these two epochs or to see beyond these two clichés. The intervening centuries are poorly documented and lack comparable emotional force. Nonetheless, to understand the background to present-day Cambodian politics, it is helpful to examine the more obscure years between l400 and l975 when times of prosperity and national self-confidence alternated with periods of subservience to outside powers. Was Cambodia a great nation treated unjustly by larger, inferior powers, or was it a weak state unable or unwilling to resist the inevitable dominance of its more advanced and more ambitious neighbours?

The roots of vulnerability

Expansionist neighbours

One key to understanding Cambodian history and the policies of its leaders lies in the country’s physical geography and its relations with Thailand and Vietnam. In the Angkorean period, Cambodia owed much of its greatness to its ability to subjugate peoples immediately to the west. The Mekong Delta to the southeast, which was populated by Khmer-speaking people, had not yet come under the influence of the Vietnamese empire. Like Angkor itself, these areas were easily accessible to armies, immigrants and traders, with no natural barriers to protect them. As its neighbours became more populous and ambitious after 1400, the territory and population under the control of Cambodia’s kings shrank markedly.

Cambodia was often invaded by Thai or Vietnamese armies which, in turn, would be expelled by forces assembled by the other neighbour. This destructive process reached a climax in the mid-19th century when the kingdom was on the brink of disappearing. It was at this point, with its western half falling under the patronage of Thailand and the land east of the Mekong coming under Vietnamese control, that the French offered the Cambodian King their protection.

During the French colonial era, Thai influence over Cambodia declined, but hundreds of Vietnamese civil servants worked in Cambodia and thousands of Vietnamese settlers came to live there. Many Cambodians and, in particular, nationalist members of the minuscule élite, were wary of the Vietnamese and fearful of their long-term intentions. This animosity persisted after independence and most markedly among the Khmer Rouge. Anti-Vietnamese feeling continues to smoulder today among many Cambodians both inside the country and abroad. Despite repeated Thai depredations throughout Cambodian history, however, anti-Thai feelings among the population have been rare.

Social volatility

Another key to recent Cambodian politics is the nature of power and social relations in post-Angkorean, pre-revolutionary times. Chronicle histories, law codes, travellers’ accounts and normative poetry from the period suggest that the King’s power was in theory absolute. The word for ‘govern’, or ‘reign’ also meant ‘to consume’. There was almost no corresponding notion, which is familiar in the West, China and Vietnam, of the King acting as the ‘servant’ of the people. Absolute power flowed downwards onto a powerless population. In practice, however, the King presided over a fractious family, rivalrous factions at court, ambitious officials with regional power-bases and a cowed but scattered rural population that was hard to reach.

Society, also, was rigidly structured in theory, but highly volatile in practice. The word ‘society’ was, in fact, not introduced into the Cambodian vocabulary until the 20th century. Instead, the population was seen as a collection of subjects subservient to the King, who in theory owned all of the land. The population was traditionally divided into those who gave orders (neak prao) and those who received them (neak bomrao), between those who exploited others and those who paid homage; as the Cambodians graphically put it, between the few who ‘possessed’ goods and power (neak mean) and the much larger component of the population who were deprived (neak kro). Loyalty was not a two-way street.

The volatility of post-Angkorean patterns of social relations was in some ways reinforced by Cambodia's dominant belief system, Theravada Buddhism. While it preached the avoidance of violence, it also awarded merit to those in high positions. There were, however, neither legal restraints on people holding power nor peaceful methods to replace them. Concepts of primogeniture or a loyal opposition did not exist. When a King died struggles for succession were often fierce and losers were routinely killed. Because Cambodia was regularly prey to foreign invasions, often encouraged by factions at the court seeking foreign help, supposedly absolute rulers were often fearful and forced to negotiate their positions with their rivals or foreign powers.

During the French colonial period the King's powers were curtailed, though the institution of royalty remained powerful and deferential attitudes in the population at large remained in place. While political activity was forbidden by the French, little was done to diminish the hierarchical nature of Cambodian society or to introduce such concepts as accountability or a respect for human rights. Dependency was the order of the day. French rule, like monarchic rule in earlier times, was unquestioned. At the same time, the French brought much needed peace and security to Cambodia. The rural population flourished and expanded and a small, educated elite was trained to help the French govern their protectorate. With hindsight it could be argued that the French did less harm to Cambodian society than most post-colonial administrations.

Personalized rule

Because Cambodia's kings — like those in Laos but unlike those in Vietnam — accepted French protection, resistance to the French in Cambodia was rare. Cambodian nationalism, which was slow to develop, was not particularly anti-French. When Cambodia gained independence in l953, its young King, Norodom Sihanouk, who had been crowned by the French in l941, embarked on a political career that took advantage of the ingrained habits of deference among the people (whom he called his ‘children’) and reflected his own considerable skills at subduing his political opponents.

Sihanouk claimed to have won independence almost single-handedly, ignoring the role played by the Vietnamese-led communist resistance. In l955, in the face of the growing threat to his grip on power posed by Cambodia’s nascent democratic parties, he abdicated, started a national political movement, and swept to power as an ‘ordinary citizen’. Under various titles, he ruled the country almost single-handedly. Like previous Cambodian rulers Sihanouk interpreted opposition to his rule as treason. Fawning associates compared him favourably to the monarchs of Angkor. In the Sihanouk era, no countervailing institutions, such as an independent judiciary or an analytical press, were allowed to develop. His official ideology, a ramshackle confection called ‘Buddhist socialism’, effectively institutionalized the status quo.

In foreign affairs, Sihanouk wisely opted for a neutralist position. His greatest contribution was to keep Cambodia out of the Vietnam War which engulfed the country after his overthrow in 1970 in a pro-American coup. This contribution, however, needs to be balanced against his failure to allow political debate or suppress corruption, and his tendency to monopolise political life. Sihanouk allowed himself to be compared to Angkorean kings and repeatedly stressed Cambodia’s past grandeur. In so doing he also encouraged some Cambodians, including the Khmer Rouge, to assume that they could — by virtue of their glorious Angkorean past — overwhelm the vast forces arrayed against them.

The makings of revolution

Cambodia’s fledgling post-World War II political movements comprised both right- and left-wing tendencies, and covered the gamut of pro- and anti-monarchist sentiments. Despite the fact that King Sihanouk allowed elections to be held, he remained intolerant of dissent. This radicalised many young Khmers and, as the strength of the leading Democratic Party waned in the early 1950s, a more virulent left-wing opposition began to emerge.

The Cambodian communist party, formed in 1951, linked its opposition to Sihanouk with the anti-French nationalist movement. The Communists saw independence as but one stage in their revolution to completely transform Cambodian society. They had both a clandestine and a legitimate face and initially remained heavily dependent on the Vietnamese communists for support. When Sihanouk cracked down on the left-wing in 1963, three Phnom Penh teachers — Pol Pot, Son Sen and Ieng Sary — the core of the future Khmer Rouge leadership, fled to the jungle.

Even as the expanding Vietnam War undermined Sihanouk’s power and the Cambodian economy, the Khmer communists were forced to delay the official launch of their armed struggle. The North Vietnamese refused to provide adequate support to their Khmer counterparts until the Americans had been driven out of Indochina. Moreover, the Vietnamese communists were eager to maintain good relations with Sihanouk who had secretly allied himself with Vietnam in 1966 in a desperate bid to avoid being drawn into the war.

Following Sihanouk’s overthrow in 1970, the pro-American regime which replaced him steadily crumbled and Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer communists on 17 April 1975. This came two weeks before the communist victory in Saigon and ushered in a new phase of the Cambodian revolution without any connection to the one in Vietnam.

Prisoners of the past

Descent into chaos

Delusions of grandeur also plagued the American-backed regime that took office in 1970 under General Lon Nol. Encouraged by a United States increasingly involved in Indochina, the new regime quickly launched a holy war against the Vietnamese ‘unbelievers’ (communists) then sheltering in eastern Cambodia. But Lon Nol’s holy war was unwinnable from the start. Despite continuing US military assistance and massive bombing of the Cambodian countryside, the Vietnamese armies, much better-equipped and trained, soon neutralised his forces. The indigenous Khmer Rouge, until then a marginal group, flourished and expanded until they were strong enough to seize power in April 1975.

The same fondness for absolute power that had characterized every Cambodian regime in the past reached grandiose proportions under the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot and his colleagues believed that they could lead the swiftest and most thorough socialist revolution in history. Like many previous rulers, they paid little attention to the human costs involved and equated debate with treason. Like Lon Nol, they also embarked on a holy war against Vietnam, counting as he had done on open-ended foreign patronage — from the United States in Lon Nol’s case, from China in the case of Democratic Kampuchea. Like Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge leaders were also inspired by Angkor. ‘If our people can build Angkor,’ Pol Pot declared on one occasion, ‘they can do anything’.

Resenting the patronage of the Vietnamese communists and their policy of subordinating the Cambodian revolution to their own, the Khmer Rouge stepped up attacks on its former ally in 1977. In December l978, Vietnamese forces launched a devastating attack on Cambodia. Within a month, the Khmer Rouge had been driven into exile in Thailand and a pro-Vietnamese regime took its place, protected by over 200,000 Vietnamese troops.

Isolation and destabilization

Throughout the 1980s, the Cambodian government was deprived of all humanitarian and development assistance by the United Nations. Moreover, Pol Pot's delegation was allowed to hold the country’s seat at the UN, the only government in exile to do so. Because of the Khmer Rouge’s horrendous record, however, the delegation officially represented the so-called Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK). This comprised the two non-communist factions — the royalist FUNCINPEC founded by King Sihanouk and the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (KPLNF) — and the Khmer Rouge, the most powerful of the three.

The tripartite ‘resistance’ shared a hatred for Vietnam and a dependence on foreign support. This was provided through their sanctuaries in the huge refugee camps along the Thai border, home to some 350,000 Cambodians and the source of the factions’ fighters. With relations between the superpowers warming in the early 1980s, China was actively encouraged by the US to arm the Khmer Rouge. The CIA itself, with the support of the Thai army, Singapore and various European countries, ensured food relief and military assistance reached all three armed factions. When the US Congress clamped down on the CIA’s activities in 1986, they continued to provide assistance covertly and the British were also prevailed upon to provide the factions with military training.

With the tripartite resistance benefiting from the credibility of an international relief operation, the dividing line between humanitarian activity and war in Cambodia became very confused. Despite this massive assistance, the resistance factions never succeeded in gaining more than a small foothold on Cambodian territory. However, the US campaign to destabilize Cambodia and, by extension, Vietnam — the ultimate target of its aggression — was largely successful. With this broader objective in mind, the terrible price being paid by Cambodia’s people, together with the fact that the West was actively supporting the perpetrators of the Khmer Rouge genocide, could be conveniently overlooked.

Recovery impeded

The government of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) that took power in January l979 differed from its predecessors. Headed by former Khmer Rouge officials, who had defected to Vietnam some years earlier, it understandably declined to stress Cambodian grandeur at the expense of Vietnamese intentions and took a more realistic view of power relations between the two countries. Under close Vietnamese supervision, Cambodia struggled to its feet in the 1980s though it remained isolated from global capitalism. Opportunities for corruption (or economic development for that matter) were few. Because of the welcome contrast the regime presented to the Khmer Rouge, few observers paid much attention to its systematic suppression of dissent and its monopoly of information.

Young member of the non-communist resistance, Oddar Meanchey province, 1990

Credit: Roland Eng

Cambodia suffered inordinately in the closing stages of the Cold War because of the backing it enjoyed from Vietnam and the Soviet Union. The United States and its allies isolated Cambodia by cutting all economic and political ties. Using the armed forces mustered by the three resistance factions (Khmer Rouge, KPLNF and FUNCINPEC) on the Cambodia-Thai border, the United States and its allies conducted a proxy war against Vietnam and the Soviet Union. The war dragged on through the 1980s, raising hopes among exiled Cambodians that the Vietnamese-sponsored government in Phnom Penh would at some stage collapse or be overthrown.

These hopes proved illusory, and the main victims of the anti-Vietnamese strategy were Cambodia’s own people. In effect they were punished for having been invaded by Vietnam (the US’s enemy) and, at another level, for having been saved from Pol Pot (Vietnam’s enemy). The end of the Cold War sharply diminished the interest of foreign powers in the conflict and led to the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia in 1989 as support from their Soviet patrons was reduced. Negotiations to solve the Cambodian problem nonetheless languished because of the severe intransigence among the Khmer factions and the difficulties of achieving a settlement acceptable to the major powers.

Inklings of peace

The Paris peace accords of l991 represented an honourable, if belated, effort by Cambodia’s patrons to distance themselves from their unruly clients and lay the groundwork for a lasting peace. Hun Sen, the young Prime Minister of the ‘State of Cambodia’ regime (SoC — successor to the PRK), seemed to offer a pleasing contrast to his predecessors in the meetings and conferences that preceded the 1991 settlement. Unlike Sihanouk, Lon Nol and Pol Pot, Hun Sen seemed to be open to new ideas and eager to bring Cambodia into the wider world. United Nations-sponsored elections resulted in the formation of a government of ‘national reconciliaton’ in 1993 between Prince Ranariddh and Hun Sen. It seemed as if Cambodian politics — while still far from open - were emerging from the shadows and practices of the past.

Although the Paris agreements were sweetened with promises of extensive foreign assistance, the powers drafting the accords also looked forward to a time when Cambodians would rejoin a wider world and deal with their own affairs. However cynical or well-intentioned these efforts may have been, what happened over the next few years, as David Ashley's article makes clear, was disillusioning to everyone. The hope that the authoritarian style of Cambodian politics might be altered faded rapidly as the animosity between old enemies returned to earlier levels. With Prince Ranariddh’s overthrow in July 1997, Hun Sen has again come to resemble a more traditional and intolerant leader. Indifferent to constitutional constraints and concerned with stifling dissent, this brings him into line with every recent Cambodian ruler.

Cambodian politics have remained in many ways a prisoner of a past in which effective or ineffective despots have seen themselves as born to rule. The Cambodian people, who deserve a better fate, are still being treated as commodities to be commanded, outmanœuvred and ‘consumed’.

The struggle for a settlement

From the beginning, the Paris agreements were worked out by foreign powers who exercised tight control over the factions and the form the final settlement would take. This was because, on the one hand, the factions refused to cooperate among themselves, and on the other the superpowers sought a solution which would officialise their withdrawal from the conflict on terms they found acceptable. For the Americans this required a solution which would not give any kind of victory to Vietnam even if this meant inclusion of the Khmer Rouge in a final settlement.

A ‘comprehensive’ solution

At a December 1987 meeting in France between Prince Sihanouk and Hun Sen, which marked the beginning of the peace process, the possibility of a power-sharing arrangement between the two non-communist factions — FUNCINPEC and the KPLNF — and the SoC regime was discussed. This would have ended the war, but was rejected by the US and China on the grounds that it excluded the Khmer Rouge and legitimized the Vietnamese-backed regime already in power. The inclusion of all four factions henceforth became the pre-requisite for a comprehensive settlement of the conflict acceptable to the superpowers; it would ironically often be argued that the Khmer Rouge were too ‘militarily powerful’ to be left out.

Future negotiations would therefore focus on an overall timeframe for a ceasefire and the withdrawal of Vietnamese forces from Cambodia; demobilisation of the factions’ armies; measures to prevent further gross abuses of human rights such as had occurred under the Khmer Rouge; and the organization of elections, which were key to bringing about an ‘internationally-recognized’ government. Negotiations would nonetheless constantly founder on the SoC’s insistence that a Vietnamese withdrawal be linked to guarantees of a non-return to power of the Khmer Rouge. Though this was simply interpreted as political manœuvering on the part of SoC to stall the peace process, it raised a delicate issue — rarely broached by the international community — concerning the fact that the peace process would legitimize the Khmer Rouge.

The factions made few concessions at their first face-to-face talks in Jakarta, Indonesia in July 1988 and February 1989, though the role of an international control mechanism for supervising implementation of a future agreement was discussed. In August 1989, 18 countries and the four factions attended the ‘Paris Conference on Cambodia’ where the US, China and ASEAN pressed for a ‘quadripartite’ government to be formed as a solution to the conflict. This would not only require Hun Sen to dissolve his goverment, but give 25% of power to the Khmer Rouge, a condition he found unacceptable.

International guarantees

Internationally-supervised elections were seen as the way forward, requiring that viable administrative arrangements be made for the transition period leading up to them. Drawing upon an Australian proposal to enhance the role of the UN in the process, a framework for a future settlement was proposed by the permanent five members of the Security Council in August 1990. The UN welcomed this initiative, though stressed it would need a well-defined and practicable mandate, backed by adequate resources, if it were to implement an eventual peace agreement.

In September, the Cambodian parties accepted the framework and in April 1991 announced their first ceasefire in 12 years. In mid-June 1991, the factions made this ceasefire ‘permanent’ and announced a halt to receiving outside military assistance. Most of the outstanding difficulties were ironed out at an August meeting in Pattaya, Thailand, which opened the way to the signing of the final agreement on October 23 at the second Paris Conference on Cambodia. This act marked the beginning of the transitional period in Cambodia, which would lead to the formation of a new Cambodian government following elections, to be overseen by the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC).

Compromises all round

There were reasons for optimism at this time. With the end of the Cold War, all four factions had been deprived of external military backing, were weary of war and in need of international legitimacy. At the same time, however, the Paris agreements were the product of numerous compromises focusing on the interests of each of the Cambodian factions as well as the superpowers, which did not bode well for its implementation.

The bottom-line for each of the Khmer factions, as the next article underlines, was that the peace would not be considered a ‘just’ peace unless they each won a share of the power. Hence, each stood to potentially gain from signing the agreements, though not necessarily from respecting its provisions. But the positions of the Khmer Rouge and Hun Sen’s government, in particular, were irreconcilable.

18. France to Honor on Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi

French Embassy in the United States

Published on January 13, 2012

http://ambafrance-us.org/spip.php?article3135

-----------------------------------------

(Comments: Aung San Suu Kyi represents the essence of what a real and dignified and respectable leader of a country is and should be. As contained in this French Embassy public tribute to her that:

“The Head of State paid formal tribute to the political courage Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi has shown working for democracy and freedom in Burma, especially during her many years under house arrest. President Sarkozy announced his decision to award Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi the insignia of Commandeur in the Ordre national de la Légion d’Honneur, in recognition of her exemplary commitment. Alain Juppé, Minister of Foreign and European Affairs, will present her with this decoration on his visit to Burma on 15 and 16 January.”

By asking the world to revive the Paris Peace agreements (PPA), those Cambodians make them look more pitiful than honorable and dignified. This attitude will only bring disdain and not respect to them.

Of course, they are free to do whatever they want, I am only one voice; and I will continue to remind others who want to wake up to pay more attention to the important issue of the kind of leader that Cambodia needs, with moral courage and dignity like Aung San Suu Kyi, to allow Cambodia to better survive the Vietnamese onslaught, without asking for help from others. Help will automatically come, if and only if Cambodians know what kind of leader they would like to have, such as Aung San Suu Kyi. Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. January 14, 2012)

------------------------------------------

Français

Top of Form

France to Honor on Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi

Burma/telephone conversation between Nicolas Sarkozy, President of the Republic, and Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi – Communiqué issued by the Presidency of the Republic

Paris, January 13, 2012

President Sarkozy has spoken on the telephone to Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi.

The Head of State paid formal tribute to the political courage Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi has shown working for democracy and freedom in Burma, especially during her many years under house arrest. President Sarkozy announced his decision to award Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi the insignia of Commandeur in the Ordre national de la Légion d’Honneur, in recognition of her exemplary commitment. Alain Juppé, Minister of Foreign and European Affairs, will present her with this decoration on his visit to Burma on 15 and 16 January.

President Sarkozy signaled his support for the reform process begun in Burma and underlined France’s very high expectations of the Burmese government, particularly in terms of the essential release of all political prisoners, national reconciliation through dialogue with each minority, and the necessary free and transparent nature of the parliamentary by-election on 1 April 2012. In this respect, the Head of State welcomed the milestone of the prisoner amnesty which the Burmese authorities have just announced.

19. Delay in appointing judge worries UN

The PhnomPenh Post: Thursday, 12 January 2012

-------------------------------------

(Comments: this comment is made by and extracted from Open Society Foundations, a Soros-financed NGO for justice, spelled out the expected and ongoing trouble for the KRT by Hun Sen and his CPP, as the Cambodian dictator have got what he wanted, from the KRT, that is to glorify the Vietnamese/Hun Sen, as liberators, and to make them look better in the eyes of the international community; while depicting the Khmer Rouge not only as mass murderers, but, racists, for which, I had coined the phrase, “Demonizing the Demons.”

“The United Nations’ Secretary-General’s office has expressed concern over the Cambodian government’s failure to confirm the appointment of the international co-investigating judge at the Khmer Rouge tribunal in Cambodia, to replace Judge Siegfried Blunk, who resigned in October.

The spokesman for Secretary General Ban Ki-moon noted that the Cambodian government was obliged under its agreement with the UN to confirm the Swiss reserve co-investigating judge, Laurent Kasper-Ansermet. The Open Society Justice Initiative earlier issued a statement saying that the new judge’s status “must be made clear and unequivocal”, in order to allow the court to move forward with the two outstanding investigations into five former senior Khmer Rouge officials (Cases 003/4)—both cases are being resisted by the Cambodian government.

Clair Duffy, our court monitor in Phnom Penh, was again cited by international news wires and the local press over the latest impasse.”

Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. January 12, 2012)

-------------------------------------

The United Nations expressed concern yesterday about ongoing delays in Cambodia to officially appoint international Reserve Co-Investigating Judge Laurent Kasper-Ansermet to the full position at the UN-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal.

Kasper-Ansermet, a Swiss national, was nominated by the UN to replace former international co-Investigating judge Siegfried Blunk, who resigned abruptly in October.

Martin Nesirky, spokesman for the UN office of the secretary-general, said via email yesterday the UN had “made every effort” to secure Kasper-Ansermet’s appointment, including several discussions with Cambodian officials.

“The United Nations is concerned that, more than three months after the resignation of the international Co-Investigating Judge, the Supreme Council of the Magistracy has not appointed the reserve international Co-Investigating Judge to replace him,” Nesirky said.

He added that, according to the agreement that established the tribunal, Cambodia was obliged to appoint the reserve judge to the position when it fell vacant.

Sam Pracheameanith, chief of cabinet at the Ministry of Justice, told the Post he was unsure when the Supreme Council of Magistracy would call a meeting about Kasper-Ansermet’s appointment.

Justice Minister Ang Vong Vathana and Appeal Court prosecutor Uk Savuth, both Supreme Council of Magistracy members, could not reached.

Since his arrival in Cambodia, Kasper-Ansermet has sparred with National Co-Investigating Judge You Bunleng.

In a statement released by the court this week, he said he regretted Bunleng’s disagreement with him about the release of “important” information regarding the files for cases 003 and 004.

Bunleng replied that Kasper-Ansermet was not “legally accredited” to undertake action with respect to the case files.

On Tuesday Clair Duffy, a monitor for the Open Society Justice Initiative, said via email that while the UN’s engagement with the government should continue, the broader issue was the government overstepping its executive authority in relation to the court’s prosecutions.

“Whether that’s by publicly stating its opposition to the cases, by stalling on providing a rubber stamp to Kasper-Ansermet’s appointment or by its administrators dismantling the [Office of the Co-Investigating Judges],” she said.

“That’s never been addressed head-on by the UN.”

20. Borderline compliment

The Phnom Penh Post: by Meas Sokchea

Monday, 09 January 2012

Photo by: Heng Chivoan

(To see the photo, click on the title)

Vietnamese soldiers block a group of Sam Rainsy Party members who were trying to visit a controversial border marker in Kampong Cham province’s Memot district in December 2010.

---------------------------------

(Comments: an article published by the Phnom Penh Post, posted below with a sarcastic title "Borderline Complement," that was published in the Phnom Penh Post, and that Ou Ritthy sent to me in Khmer, about Sam Rainsy’s letter to Hun Sen praising him for defending the borders of Cambodia with Vietnam (Please, see the letter in English posted as an appendix just below this article).

This article shows that Sam Rainsy’s blind followers should now know who this Sam Rainsy is. A real snake. Our group has been spotting him for a long time, now it is a reality, a sad one but a true image of who Sam Rainsy is.

This Sam rainsy's letter had provied Hun Sen an opportunity to have a win/win proposition, by making Sam Rainsy look even more stupid. Hun Sen can now say that he did not ignore the border issue at all, and he is working hard on it. Thus, making Sam Rainsy look like a provocateur or inciter, instraed of a real leader that he pretends to be.

In addition, this letter shows that Sam Rainsy is trying to cajole Hun Sen into accepting his return to Cambodia. But, what Sam Rainsy did not know is the fact that Hun Sen cannot decide on this important issue; it is the Vietnamese who alone can decide on that problem. For the Vietnamese, a Cambodian leader must be totally subservient to them, otherwise he will be dismissed from power, as they did in the case of Pen Sovann.

How can anybody who has a minimum of moral decency and dignity, still believes that Sam Rainsy is the needed leader who can bring peace and freedom to the Cambodian people? How can a so-called leader like Sam Rainsy help Cambodia to improve its chance to survive Vietnam's centuries-old determined and deadly form of colonialism known as "Nam Tien." that slowly destroying Cambodia's society, culture, and people? Naranhkiri Tith, Ph.D. Washington DC. January 09, 2012)

---------------------------------

Exiled opposition leader Sam Rainsy, a long-time and vociferous opponent of the ruling party’s relationship with Vietnam, has written to Prime Minister Hun Sen, praising the premier for his work on demarcating the contentious Cambodia-Vietnam border in Svay Rieng province.

The shock letter of praise obtained by the Post yesterday was originally sent by Sam Rainsy to Hun Sen on December 26. “I would like to express my support to the Royal Government for taking a proper stance on defending the territorial integrity of Cambodia,” Sam Rainsy wrote. “Please [Hun Sen] believe that all Khmer patriots would surely join forces completely with the Royal Government … in an effort to find an appropriate resolution to the border demarcation.”

In his letter, Sam Rainsy also wished his political rival a happy new year and sent well wishes to the prime minister’s family.

There are long-standing bitter relations between the two party leaders, who take opposing political stances toward Vietnam.

Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party was initially brought into power with the backing of Vietnam in 1979 when Cambodian and Vietnamese coalition forces ousted the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh. The CPP and the premier are quick to praise the “friendship” of Vietnam, an ally they view as “liberating” Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge.

Sam Rainsy and his eponymous party conversely see Vietnam as a predator that “occupied” Cambodia and continues to encroach on the Kingdom’s territory. In 2009, Sam Rainsy was sentenced by Phnom Penh Municipal Court to two years in prison after he uprooted boundary marker 185, which he claimed was incorrectly placed in the middle of a rice paddy in Cambodian territory.

In a letter to Sam Rainsy Party parliamentarians on December 2, Hun Sen said the Cambodia-Vietnam border in Svay Rieng has yet to be defined “in a suitable and acceptable manner” and that the Cambodia-Vietnam commission working to define the border was “continuing to negotiate the position of [the border] markers and others over which agreement is need in the future”.

SRP parliamentarians, and the party’s leader, took this as evidence the charges against Sam Rainsy were baseless, as the border marker he had uprooted was not an official border post.

“It means that the marker post removed by Sam Rainsy in October 2009 is not a mistake of Sam Rainsy, and the government must drop a lawsuit against him to pave the way for him to return home for the upcoming election,” SRP spokesman Yim Sovann told the Post yesterday.

Senate and commune elections are scheduled to be held this year, with national elections scheduled for 2013.

Sam Rainsy now resides in France, where he fled to escape up to 10 years of incarceration in Cambodia for various convictions on what the 62-year-old politician sees as trumped-up charges.

Despite the letter of “support” to Hun Sen, Sam Rainsy’s tone flipped from cordial to caustic in an open statement published yesterday that was highly critical of the ruling CPP’s Victory over Genocide Day celebrations.

“There are only traitors or people who have sold themselves to traitors or people who have been duped by the traitors’ propaganda who celebrate January 7,” Sam Rainsy’s statement read.

The Council of Ministers’ Press and Quick Reaction Unit spokesman Ek Tha dismissed the criticisms of Sam Rainsy yesterday.