Cambodia: Details are Sketchy

VIA Earth’s Molten Core. Malaysia on Thursday deported Heng Pov back to Cambodia, where the fugitive former police chief was immediately apprehended by authorities and taken to Prey Sar prison to begin serving an 18-year sentence for murder, according the Associated Press.

Security was tight near the Phnom Penh Municipal Court where Heng Peo was taken for processing soon after he arrived. Outside the court, more than 100 police equipped with rifles stood guard.

Heng Peo was later driven in a heavily guarded police convoy to a prison on the outskirts of the capital.

Before his deportation, Heng Peo pleaded with Malaysian immigration authorities not to send him to Cambodia.

“In Cambodia I can die because I have a political problem with the government,” he told The Associated Press after the verdict.

“If you send me, I sure will die, 100 percent,” Heng Peo said in his first public comments since his arrest in Malaysia in October for overstaying his visa.

Outside the court after the verdict, Heng Peo’s wife held his hand and wailed as he was led to a van. Heng Peo, dressed in a T-shirt and gray pants, walked with a limp and was helped into the vehicle by immigration officials.

Down in Sihanoukville, resident expat Fred Tittle says this:

As the holiday season blooms Sihanoukville has become a mad house. Hotels and guesthouses are mostly full and we are still a week away from the main vacation holiday rush that is sure to come. For the big western holidays, Christmas and New Years, many of the NGO & expatiate community in Phnom Penh will come to the beach to enjoy sun and sand with their families and friends. Many Cambodians from the growing middle class of Cambodia come to the beach on a regular basis as well, further inflating the holiday madness.

Plan accordingly.

Despite rosy court pronouncements to the contrary, the Economist reveals the gloomy mood decking the halls of the Extraordinary Chambers.

“THINGS are going well,” says Robert Petit, a Canadian co-prosecutor at the UN-backed tribunal set up to try Khmers Rouges leaders for their atrocities. Five months after it started work, he says he is ready to recommend the first indictment as soon as the tribunal’s Cambodian and international jurists have agreed on its rules of procedure. Sadly, no one is sure when, or even if, that will happen. Human Rights Watch, a lobby group, believes that “political interference has brought the whole process to a screeching halt.”

Publicly, of course, members of the court have been keeping positive. But privately, many will concede that things are not going to plan. Far from it. The whole thing is perilously close to coming unglued, and the Economist article, if not a eulogy, certainly sounds like a reading of the court’s last rites.

VIA Politika Erotica: Nick Kristof is back in Cambodia, and that can only mean one thing — more Cambodian prostitute stories in the New York Times.

Here in Poipet, I met a 27-year-old woman with AIDS, Tem Phok. She had been a prostitute in a brothel, so I assumed that that was how she contracted AIDS. “Oh, no,” she said. “I got AIDS later, from my husband,” who has already died.

If only the adultery law could stop this.

VIA Adrants: Just in time for the holiday shopping season comes the Princess of Cambodia doll, a beautiful standup miniature adorned with dazzling royal robes, a gilded tiara and an oozing bloody stump where her left leg used to be.

The doll is a product of the advertising agency BBDO. The campaign’s goal is to raise awareness of Cambodia’s landmine plight. There’s even a web site, where visitors can ‘discover the hidden secrets of beautiful Cambodia,’ http://www.surprisingcambodia.com/.

According to double-super-secret sources, Ranariddh has already bought 10,000, and plans to give them away as Christmas gifts this year.

The Cambodia Daily VIA Khmer Intelligence: The national political comedy continues.

Princess Norodom Marie Ranariddh has filed a complaint at Phnom Penh Municipal Court seeking the prosecution of her estranged husband Prince Norodom Ranariddh for allegedly breaching the monogamy law, officials said Sunday.

Funcinpec spokesman Nouv Sovathero said that Princess Marie, a Funcinpec lawmaker and senior minister with the party, wants no financial redress from the prince, but does want justice over his alleged infidelity.

Even as some of the country’s most pressing legislation languished in the National Assembly, the adultery law was conceived, drafted, and passed in mere days. At the time, the ruling CPP party assured the country that the law would not be abused for political advantage, as some observers had suggested. The law’s intentions were both honest and honorable, lawmakers argued, nothing more than a forthright attempt to tackle the country’s twin woes of poverty and corruption.

And that’s completely true. That Ranariddh now finds himself as the law’s first victim is obviously a total coincidence.

Over at the BrooWaha, C E Walker writes about Guy Jacobson and the K11 Project and says the project responsible for the movie “Holly” found its roots in 2002 when a group of little girls propositioned Jacobson.

Guy Jacobson, a New York investment banker, while traveling through Cambodia in 2002, was approached for sex by about fifteen 5 to 7 year old girls and witnessed first hand the realities of the sex slave industry. 5 to 7 year old girls. Fifteen of them. At a time when they should have been in school, kindergarten or first grade, learning the basics of language and math and fundamental social skills, these girls where soliciting Mr. Jacobson for sex. … After a year and a half of research and being horrified by the realization of how widespread this problem is, he decided to utilize his production company, Priority Films, to make a film from the POV of the victim. “Holly is really a compilation of a number of the children I met and spoke with in the brothels.”

The passage implies that Jacobson, while visiting the sites just like any average tourist, was openly propositioned for sex by a group of 5 to 7 year olds.

That is ridiculous. While prostitution certainly exists in Cambodia — even, to some difficult-to-quantify degree, child prostitution — to suggest that 5-year-olds are openly walking the streets and hanging out at the tourist sites is too stupid for words to describe.

Among other enlightening facts contained in this Phnom Penh Post article about the violent lives of prostitutes is this:

• 100% of sex workers who say they pay protection money, say they pay it to police

Nice!

Although Maytel gives no indication of the people responsible for such dubious marketing, it seems likely that this is the product of those genius minds at the Apsara Authority.

Outside the construction site of what is to be Angkor Wat’s new mueseum is a large billboard that reads, “See Angkor Wat and Don’t Die Yet!”.

What could these people be thinking?

VIA Khmer Intelligence: AP is reporting that Heng Pov will be deported by Malaysia to Singapore, from where Cambodia’s most famous criminal is expected to catch a flight for Finland.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia: A former Cambodian police chief on Friday won a legal bid in Malaysia to avoid being deported to his home country where he is wanted for murder.

Malaysian High Court Judge Abdul Kadir Musa ruled that immigration authorities should “remove (Heng Peo) to his last port of embarkation,” which was Singapore. The ruling paves the way for him to fly out of Singapore to Finland, which has granted him a visa.

Heng Peo’s lawyer, N. Sivananthan, said he has provided immigration authorities with a flight ticket for his client to travel from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore and on to Finland. It was up to them to decide when to put him on a plane, Sivananthan said, adding that he expects the move later Friday or Saturday.

Ostensibly, Heng Pov has spilled the beans already, but surely he can do better than that. So it will be interesting to see if the cop’s self-professed crusade to clean up Cambodia will continue, or whether he will quietly fade away to Finland with his frozen assets.

Hello Magazine has a few exclusive shots of Angelina and Brad during their jaunt through the Land of Wonders. Cleverly, Brad dressed to blend in. Disguised in the garb of a clueless tourist — a krama wrapped around his head — he looked just like any other of the thousands of unwashed travelers that come wandering over the borders every year, except for, you know, that he is Brad Pitt.

According to the Malaysian national news agency Bernama, Finland has accepted Heng Pov’s application for asylum.

Former Cambodian police chief Heng Peo, who is involved in a legal battle to stop the Malaysian authorities from deporting him to Cambodia, has been granted a visa by the Finland government, his counsel, N. Sivananthan, said Wednesday.

He said he received a letter, which was personally signed by Finland’s ambassador to Malaysia Lauri Korpinen this morning stating that the Finland government had officially approved Heng Peo’s application for asylum.

Sivananthan told a news conference that Heng Peo, through his counsel, had sought political asylum to several countries since his detention by the Immigration Department on Oct 3 for allegedly overstaying.

“The Finland government had carried out its own investigation on Heng Peo’s application and decided the application had strong merit where the ex-police chief might be subject to torture and unjust prosecution for an alleged crime which was not committed by him,” he said.

While it is technically possible that Malaysia could still deport Heng Pov back to Cambodia, it seems extremely unlikely. Surely all the diplomatic wheeling and dealing was not done in vain.

This nifty little Chinese-made video game based on the real-life Christian-Islamofacist Armageddon to end all Armageddons looks rather nifty.

Open it up, and it instantly feels good in your hand. Not too heavy, if you know what I mean. A modern, grey and dark grey LCD (thats liquid crystal display) is the heart of the experience, and if you look at the picture, you’ll see that the LCD features the lifelike rendering of a plane hitting a tall building. To play, you aim a little space invader-style rocket launcher at aeroplanes which continue to launch themselves into the tall buildings. You keep knocking ‘ em down, and rackin’ up the points.

Try getting past U.S. customs with that.

VIA CSR Asia: According to a recent study by the World Health Organization and the Ministry of Health, more than 70,000 people die every year in Cambodia due to cigarette related illnesses.

Cambodia loses 38 million U.S. dollars and over 70,000 lives each year due to cigarette smoking, according to a recent survey jointly conducted by Ministry of Health and World Health Organization.

From 1996 to 2006, 82 percent of rural men, 62 percent of urban dwellers, and 82 percent of youth nationwide were cigarette smokers, said the survey.

Meanwhile, 54 percent of men and seven percent of women in Cambodia were cigarette smokers, it added.

The story doesn’t say how, exactly, WHO and the MoH arrived at the number 70,000,  but it’s just about impossible to believe that it’s accurate. That’s nearly 200 people dying each and every day, or nearly 60%  of all deaths annually. That can’t be right, can it?