The third option

Thailand is assessing her options on how to deal with Cambodia and The Threat, Thaksin Shinawatra, according to a paper leaked to the opposition party.

The paper suggested the government to get rid of the “major threat” (Thaksin) and bring an end to cooperation between Thaksin and Hun Sen.

It listed three possible scenarios in the diplomatic row between the two countries. Thailand could prevent Thaksin and Hun Sen from worsening the situation simply by refusing to respond to them and trying to find an influential figure or country able to persuade Cambodia to back down.

Second, if the conflict does increase in intensity, the Thai government would step up retaliation while remaining sensitive to its effect on ordinary people and the national interest.

Third, in the worst case, such as a violation of Thai sovereignty or anything resembling the establishment of a government in exile for Thaksin, Thailand would cut diplomatic relations and resort to using military force.

This should not come as any surprise. The military is suppose to be prepared for any threat, no matter how remote. To have no plan would be incompetent. Still, the chances that Thailand will invade Cambodia are and always have been exactly zero. And both sides know it.

Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary charged with genocide

In years past, scholars have hotly debated whether what happened under Pol Pot was technically genocide, or some other non-genocidal variety of crime against humanity. The ECCC ended that debate today.

The U.N.-assisted tribunal trying former leaders of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge has charged two defendants with genocide for the first time.

Tribunal spokesman Lars Olsen said Wednesday the co-investigating judges issued the charges this week against the group’s top ideologist, Nuon Chea, and former foreign minister, Ieng Sary.

[...]

Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary have already been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as homicide and torture. They are being held in the tribunal’s jail and are expected to be tried next year.

Olsen said they were charged with involvement in the deaths of members of the country’s ethnic Cham and Vietnamese communities.

Some Chams, who are mostly Muslims, were among the few Cambodians to actively resist Khmer Rouge rule. The Khmer Rouge brutally suppressed the rebellions, which occurred in several villages.

Prejudice against Vietnamese runs high among many Cambodians, who see their eastern neighbor as predatory. The Khmer Rouge shared the communist ideology with Vietnam but had very strained relations with it, and mistrusted even veteran members of their own group with ties to Hanoi. They launched bloody attacks against Vietnamese border villages, which in late 1978 resulted in an invasion by Vietnam that ousted them from power.

Cambodians charged for killing Vietnamese people? That should prompt some revealing quotes in the media in the coming weeks, if not an outright revolt.

The sound of one mouth negotiating

Thailand has laid down the law.

The Thai government laid out conditions on Tuesday that it says Cambodia must meet in order for diplomatic ties to be restored, as fugitive former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra met with Cambodian officials in his capacity as government economics adviser.

Thai government spokesman Panitan Wattanyagorn said Tuesday that if Cambodia wants to bring an end to the conflict between the two countries, it must dismiss Thaksin as a government adviser, recant statements that Thai officials say insulted their justice system and stop interfering in Thai politics.

This is obviously an attempt to convince someone, anyone, that the Abhisit government still commands some authority when it comes to bilateral relations with Cambodia. It’s unlikely, however, that anyone will be fooled by such a laughably transparent bluff, certainly not the Cambodians.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Koy Kuong called the conditions offered by Thailand “nonsense”.

Dengue Fever: Electric Cambodia

VIA Evil Monito Magazine. DF’s latest will hit the streets January 12. As the album cover art suggests, Electric Cambodia is not an LP of Dengue Fever music, but 14 original tracks from the 60s. Which 14 is anybody’s guess, though, ’cause Dengue Fever ain’t sayin’. At least not yet.

1. Give Me One Kiss  – Dara Chom Chan
2. Don’t Speak – Pan Ron
3. Jombang Jet – Pan Ron
4. Flowers In the Pond – Ros Sereysothea
5. Shave Your Beard – Ros Sereysothea
6. I Will Marry You – Pan Ron
7. I Want To Shout – Ros Sereysothea
8. Jasmine Girl – Pan Ron / Sinn Sisamouth
9. I Want To Be Your Lover – Pan Ron
10. Hope To Meet You
11. Snaeha – Pan Ron
12. I Will Starve Myself To Death – Ros Sereysothea
13. [Untitled] – Pan Ron
14. Cold Sky – Ros Sereysothea

Song samples are available from FYE. Amazon is taking pre-orders. Proceeds from the album go to Cambodian Living Arts.

UPDATE: In comments, GM passes on the link to FYE, which lists the songs on the album and provides short audio samples. The post has been updated accordingly.

The speed of justice

Tom Fawthrop checks in with the ECCC.

The next case: the all-important trial of four surviving senior Khmer Rouge leaders is shrouded in doubt, given the court’s timetable and calculations that the trial not begin until mid-2011. … The court’s UN administrator, Knut Rosandhaug, has said it that the joint trial of the leaders will not be concluded before 2014 or even 2015. That seems to stack the odds even further against the surviving leaders ever facing the final verdict.

Everyone understands the need to do things properly, that legal corners cannot be cut, that international standards must be followed. But if the defendants are all dead, the court’s truckloads of meticulously crafted arguments and painstakingly culled evidence will amount to little but another heartless boot in the gut of the Cambodia people.

The evidence against the remaining four — Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary and Ieng Thirith– is plentiful. To borrow a quote, it’s a slam dunk case. So spare us all the legal kabuki.

In this tribunal the race against time has always been the enemy of justice. The whiff of defendants in their death throes is the hovering menace that threatens to derail justice, but it appears that the judges, the court and the UN administration, are not facing up to it. They cannot just allow things to take their normal time-consuming legalistic course and ignore the geriatric factor – the probability that one or more untimely deaths will cloud diminish and undermine the proceedings. If justice is to be realised, all sides need to recognise the need to expedite the hearings, while still respecting the rights of the accused.

From the outside, at least, the court remains un-trifled with such concerns. The law must be followed to the letter. And if the people for whom the court was created are robbed by the Grim Reaper, well, so be it.

The 1997 grenade attack, revisted

The Cambodia Daily last week published a three-part series about the infamous 1997 grenade attack on Sam Rainsy. Written by Doug Gillison, the series was based on newly declassified FBI documents supplied by the US government. Ron Abney, an America, was wounded in the buttocks during the attack, which killed 16 Cambodians and wounded more than 150 others. Abney’s shrapnel wound prompted the involvement of the FBI, which spent weeks investigating the attack but never publicly drew any conclusions.

With apologies to The Cambodia Daily and Mr Gillison for the unabashed theft of copyrighted material, the first installment is republished below.

For the complete story, A Tragedy of No Importance, written by former Daily staffers Rich Garella and Eric Pape, is still the definitive piece on the attack.

Introducing the Angkor iPhone app

From Travelfish. It’s not available yet, but soon. Check it out.

The Garcia’s story

The story of the American couple began circulating a few weeks ago on the Internet. It started when a copy of this letter began appearing in online forums. It broke into the mainstream media a few days ago with an opinion piece by Joel Brinkley in Global Post.

James and Cara Garcia, both health professionals from South Carolina, sold everything and moved with their two daughters, 13-year-old Samantha and 10-year-old Moira, to Baray district in Kampong Thom about a year ago to help operate a woefully under-equipped government health clinic.

In addition to the idyllic landscapes and smiling children they found on vacation a year earlier, out in the provinces, the Garcias slowly began to uncover the depths of dysfunction that haunt Cambodian society.

The corruption was the hardest to take. Local health officials, Mr Garcia said, stole medicine that was intended for indigent patients, sold the drugs and pocketed the profits. Children were dying while fat-cat oknhas got rich. And no one was outraged.

No one except James and Cara Garcia.

Rather than accept the bodies of dead children as payment for the provincial capo’s fleet of luxury vehicles, Cara Garcia pleaded loudly and often to the clinic’s benefactors and anyone else who would listen. The corruption was killing children. Something must be done.

The Garcia’s stance earned them few friends. And likely a few enemies.

In October, Cara Garcia was beaten, gang raped and left for dead in a rice paddy.

Thaksin returns

AFP reports:

Thailand’s fugitive former premier Thaksin Shinawatra was expected in Cambodia Sunday to meet a Thai man jailed for spying on him last month, a government spokesman said.

“He (Thaksin) will arrive today,” government spokesman Khieu Kanharith told AFP. “He will meet the Thai man… and he will conduct one or two (economic) workshops in Cambodia during his stay.”

Thailand has yet to respond, but it seems likely that Thaksin’s visit will prompt yet another round of discord between the two countries.

Thai spy goes free

The king has pardoned Siwarak Chothipong.

Cambodia’s king pardoned a Thai man Friday who had been sentenced to seven years in prison for spying on Thailand’s fugitive ex-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in a case that soured relations between the neighbors.

Government spokesman Khieu Kanharith said Thai national Siwarak Chothipong would be released from prison Monday following his pardon by King Norodom Sihamoni.

… Siwarak, an employee of the Cambodia Air Traffic Service, which manages flights in the country, was accused of stealing Thaksin’s flight schedule before his Nov. 10 arrival and sending it to the Thai Embassy in Phnom Penh. Thaksin stayed five days, getting red-carpet treatment as he talked to Cambodian economists.

Siwarak, 31, was arrested Nov. 12 and charged with stealing information that could impact national security.

Municipal Court Judge Ke Sakhan ruled that Thaksin’s flight information was confidential and sharing it was a breach of security protocol for dignitaries.

What a complete mockery of justice.

Thai ’spy’ hit with unlucky 7

The court has convicted a Thai national for giving the Thai embassy flight details of Thaksin Shinawatra’s arrival at Phnom Penh International.

A Thai man was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison Tuesday for spying on fugitive former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra during the tycoon’s visit to Cambodia.

Siwarak Chothipong, 31, an employee at the Cambodia Air Traffic Service, was also fined 10 million riel (2,500 dollars) for supplying Thaksin’s flight schedule to the Thai embassy when the ousted premier was there last month.

This conviction is clearly political. Arrival and departure details are, by definition, public information. And rather ironically, trumped-up political charges are the exact reason Prime Minister Hun Sen cited for hosting Mr Shinawatra in the first place.

Coming home

There is something endearing about the gusto with which young people embrace the outside world.

I have been always interested in a business place such as Starbucks, a famous franchise for a business that provides a nice environment for friends or family to talk and be with each other. There are several Starbucks in Bonn, Cologne, Berlin and Munich!! Amazing for me. Since now I am in Germany, I really want to go there once and for all.

… The only comment I gave after drinking Starbucks’ coffee in Cologne was, “It tastes like coffee.”

To paraphrase a line from a long-forgotten movie, Cambodia is a great place to come home to, but you have to leave it first. And the more you understand about life outside the Kingdom, the greater it becomes.

Cashing in on the real estate boom

KJE weighs in on the approval of a new law allowing foreigners to purchase property. In summary:

The Cambodian law now being proposed is for psychological purposes only; to signal to foreign investors that Cambodia is becoming more liberal and, to put it bluntly, is definitely very much interested in their money. But how many condos are there in Cambodia? Camko City, the Golden Tower, the DeCastle projects, and various others account for most of them. A rough estimate puts them around 2,000 to 2,500 units. That is a gross market value of around $500 million. Most of it is foreign capital to begin with, which will be repatriated and most likely not used for further investment in Cambodia. So the impact on the economy will be virtually nil.

That sounds about right.

War, death and justice

Prime Minister Hun Sen wields the specter of war as he threatens the ECCC against pursuing additional suspects.

“I prefer the failure of the tribunal than to let the country fall into war,” he said, reiterating concerns that further indictments could lead to instability. “You must consider this. If there is no peace, but it turns to war, how many people will die? It will not be the court eradicating the war. But be careful of the court making war.”

But don’t dare say he is trying to influence the court.

Chaw and motherhood

This is a bit unbelievable, really.

When pregnant Cambodian women suffer morning sickness, they often reach for an unlikely source of relief: a wad of chewing tobacco.

Many become hooked, and the World Health Organization warned Thursday it is a tradition putting the health of both mothers and babies at risk.

The largest tobacco survey ever conducted in Cambodia found that about half of all women older than 48 regularly chew tobacco, and about one in five rural women first took up the habit during pregnancy, to soothe their prenatal nausea.

Frightening. Tobacco use during pregnancy is linked to lower birth weights and an increased incidence of SIDS, among other significant health dangers. In addition to roasting –  isolating new mothers above an open fire — this practice too needs to stop. Education is the key, as with nearly all of the country’s problems.

Justice watch

In The New York Times, Richard Bernstein takes a look at American indifference to the Khmer Rouge Tribunals and the pace of court justice. He argues that the court’s tepid progress is the result of its adherence to international standards of justice. And in regards to pending cases, he moves the opening dates even further into the future.

Bringing about the event has taken a very long time, more than a decade to decide on the composition of the tribunal and, once that was decided, more years to allow for international standards of due process to be observed — which is why the next phase of the tribunal, the one involving the highest surviving former Khmer Rouge leaders, won’t start for another two years or so — assuming that any of the aging remaining defendants live that long.

So the next case is scheduled to begin 2012 now? Murpy had no idea?

SEA Games

Andy has gone to Communist Lao with the national football team for the SEA Games. Lots of team pics and nice reporting. And paper-pushin’ commies.

As I thought, obtaining my press pass, despite having an email letter from the Laos authorities confirming approval of my accreditation, was a complete hassle. I’m afraid Laos has embraced officialdom and jobsworth mentality in earnest and after completing more forms, handing over more portrait photographs and deciding whether I was a journalist or photographer, as I couldn’t be both, I was officially handed my press pass and media booklet about an hour and half after arriving. It took so long that I missed the Cambodian football team’s first training session at the army stadium, but no-one knew where it was anyway, so I’ll have to try and get to the afternoon session at the television stadium, though again, no-one at the media center could tell me its location!

Misery is a writers best friend.

Stock market delayed

AFP gets the scoop!

The global financial crisis has caused Cambodia to push back its plans to open a national stock exchange this year, officials said Wednesday.

Cambodia signed an agreement last year with representatives from South Korea’s stock exchange, the Korea Exchange (KRX), Asia’s fourth-largest bourse operator, to establish a stock market in 2009.

However government officials said Wednesday that the Southeast Asian nation was not ready to go ahead with the plans due to the world financial slowdown.

Considering the stock market was originally scheduled to open in September, 09 09 09, this news is at least three months old.

UPDATE: Reuters sets the record straight.

New guy at the court

The ECCC names a new international prosecutor.

Briton Andrew T. Caley, who has worked at the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has been formally appointed by Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni, a court statement said.

The appointment was welcomed by court observers, who said it was important to get a permanent international prosecutor in place as soon as possible.

‘There are many critical decisions that should be made in the (next) case in the next two months and they should be made by the international prosecutor who will have the responsibility for carrying them out,’ Heather Ryan, court monitor for the Open Society Justice Initiative, told AFP.

Welcome to the rabbit hole, Mr Caley.

Journalistic malpractice

The Bangkok Post is delirious.

The Prey Sar prison which is presently home to Thai spy suspect Sivarak Chutipong and thousands of other Cambodian and foreign inmates is under fresh fire for its “appalling conditions”.

The complex – described as one of the most notorious jails in Southeast Asia and often compared with the infamous Tuol Sleng prison under Khmer Rouge rule – has been slammed for alleged human rights violations.

Prey Sar is no doubt a horrible place, maybe even as bad as Thailand’s own world-famous prison hellhole Bang Kwang. But to compare it with Tuol Sleng betrays a stunning level of incompetence.

 

A stone’s throw

ESPN visits Baribo Field, home of Cambodian baseball.

I thought this would be a feel-good story. Of course, that was before I shook hands with a dead man. Before two heartsick peasants begged me to find their missing daughters. And before I learned the Khmer words for “help me” and “motherf—er.”

Yes, I definitely thought this would be an elevating assortment of words, a triumph of the human spirit with lots of pretty prose and a bright, happy ending. Sports. Uplift. An emotional shot in the arm. Tonic for a world forever going wrong. But that was before this. Before I ventured halfway around the planet to drink from a half-empty glass of half-curdled joy, before I discovered that a tale too inspiring to be true — Cambodian refugee escapes the Killing Fields, comes to America, takes hope and baseball back to his homeland (and yeah, someone already is filming a documentary) — is probably too deranged to make up.

I guess I should start with the headless chicken.

The chicken is my first mate. Maybe dinner. I’m not really sure. About anything. I’m sitting in a ramshackle wooden skiff that’s floating — barely — down a reedy marsh running through central Cambodia, where the temples beckon and the dirty, shoeless children seem to outnumber everything except the brightly colored land-mine warning signs. Around me are an interpreter and a “fixer” and the aforementioned bird by my feet, plucked and stuffed into a black plastic garbage bag, talons up. The sun hangs low in the hazy late-November sky. We’re heading south, possibly north, on our way to speak with a man who has bad things to say about another man whose supposed good works and assumed good motives are the reason I’m here.

The other man’s real name is Joeurt Puk. But everyone calls him Joe Cook.

It’s a long story, about 12,000 words. So don’t click the link unless you have an hour to spend reading the whole thing. Because it’s brilliantly written. And you will read the whole thing.

HAP TIP to TW for the link.

Property law inches forward

Changes to property laws that will give non-citizens ownership rights appear imminent.

And while the proposed law is focused on the property market, experts agree it also would be a general boost for the country, which has been struggling through its own version of the global economic downturn.

“The law, in essence, will not help the whole economy recover. But it’s part of a wider picture,” said Daniel Parkes, country manager for the CB Richard Ellis real estate company. “What it is doing is making investment in Cambodia more transparent and easier.”

The law, which is expected to go to the National Assembly for a vote in the coming months, would allow foreigners to own apartments and condominiums on buildings’ upper floors. Now they are limited to 99-year leaseholds on any property.

Ground-level residences, which include ownership of the land that the units stand on, would continue to be reserved for Cambodians.

The assumption seems to be that there is a pent up demand of foreigners out there waiting to buy overpriced boxes of air in regulation-weak third-world countries. And once Cambodia can change her property laws, cashed-up foreigners will come rafting in on river of greenbacks.

That seems a tad optimistic, really. But if you’re sitting on a hundred million dollars worth of property that the locals have shown virtually zero interest in owning, what else are you going to believe?

The truth is, a half-million dollars will buy you a 3-bedroom high-rise condo in the city. But drive 20 minutes in any direction, and that same money will buy you a palace, if not two. Local people know that, of course. Hence the new law.

The 1960s

Cambodia video footage circa 1960.

UPDATE: Consensus agrees that the video is not of Cambodia.

The resolution of justice

In the pursuit of truth, no detail is beyond scrutiny.

Inner City Press ventured down to another UN Dispute Tribunal hearing on November 20, to find a official of the United Nations Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials explaining by video conference that a staffer working on audio visual production for UNAKRT had been underperforming. Or was it that the equipment bought by UNAKRT — already embroiled in corruption allegations — was of the wrong kind?

Somewhere, deep in the halls of the Extraordinary Chambers, under the weight of 2 million dead souls and twice as many living, the bureaucrats are debating with profound gravitas the moral implications of NTSC v PAL.

Raging bullies

Forty percent of Thais polled recently say Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva should have taken “harsher measures” against Cambodia for its overtures toward Thaksin. A majority 52 percent said Abhisit’s response was “appropriate.”

Prosecutor seeks 40-year sentence for Duch

The BBC reports.

Former Khmer Rouge prison chief Kaing Guek Eav should be jailed for 40 years, a prosecutor has told Cambodia’s UN-backed war crimes court.

Kaing, known as Comrade Duch, has admitted responsibility and apologised for overseeing the deaths of 15,000 people at Tuol Sleng prison.

To anyone with an American-frontier sense of justice, 40 years sounds like the kind of sentence someone gets for nicking a candy bar from the local Quick-E Mart.

Dudley Wayne Kyzer, for example, was sentenced by an Alabama court to 10,000 years in prison for killing his wife and two others. Oklahoma rapist Darron Bennalford Anderson was handed 2,200 years, and upon retrial dealt another 90 centuries, “including 4000 years each for rape and sodomy, 1,750 years for kidnaping, 1,000 years for burglary and robbery, and 500 years for grand larceny.”

Duch methodically orchestrated the torture and execution of more than 15,000 people. Forty life sentences would be a relative slap on the wrist. Forty years is practically an admission of innocence.

 

Sambo’s story

VIA Alison: Sin Son, the mahout of Wat Phnom’s world-famous elephant Sambo, tells their story to Al Jazeera.

Talking securities

Available at fine book stores everywhere.

Bunkers for the kiddies

Just as many news outlets are reporting that ties between Thailand and Cambodia are returning to normal, Marwaan Macan-Markar at UPI says that Thailand is building bomb shelters at a school near Preah Vihear and shuttering border crossings.

Children at the largest school in this village close to the Thai-Cambodian border have a new regimen to follow besides books and sports. They have drills, practising evacuation, in case their school comes under an artillery attack.

The destination of such flight is visible across Pom-Sa-Ron Widhaya. Spread around the corners of the school’s playing field and behind the only building where 600 students study are 14 bunkers. Each is built with cement, fortified with sandbags and earth and can hold 30 students comfortably.

The bunkers at the school are among the clearest signs of unease that has swept across this area as relations between Thailand and its eastern neighbour Cambodia worsen. Thai authorities have built 340 bunkers in two schools and several villages in three sub-districts in Sri Saket, the province where Baan Pom-Sa-Ron sits. The bunkers, which have been built over the past three months, cost 40 million baht (1.2 million U.S. dollars).

This almost certainly has more to do with corruption in the Thai military than any perceived threat from Thailand’s neighbor. The idea that Cambodia would launch missiles at school children is absurd. Really, really absurd.

Gov’t to KRT defendants: Drop dead

Tribunal watch dog OSJI offers mixed praise for the Extraordinary Chambers. From today’s Cambodia Daily:

In a periodic report on the court’s activities that was due to be released in New York yesterday evening, the Open Society Justice Initiative also said UN and the Cambodian government had made no progress to enforce a new anticorruption program that both sides at the court agreed to in August.

… In the report, OSJI described the concluding trial of crimes against humanity suspect Kaing Guek Eav as a “major achievement,” which though imperfect, proved that the tribunal is technically and physically able to conduct a complex procedure meeting international fair trial standards.

Still, OSJI reasserts its stance that the court is not independent. Citing public speeches of the prime minister, OSJI says that Hun Sen continues to cast his influence over the court. Citing confidential sources, the group says the government refuses to allow investigation of additional suspects.

According to insiders, however, the white elephant in the room is the tribunal’s empty 2010 calendar. The court’s next trial is not expected to began until 2011, at the earliest. No one at the chambers can give a reasonable explanation for this laggardly approach,  and cynics darkly suggest that the court and the government are stalling in hopes that the four remaining defendants all drop dead.

If Ieng Sary, Ieng Thirith, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan all died in the next year, that not only would be incredibly unfortunate, it also would be incredibly suspicious. Surely there’s a less murderous explanation for the delay. So why isn’t anyone making it?