Cambodia: Details are Sketchy

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from everyone at Details are Sketchy. Thank you for reading and commenting. A very special thanks to those unnamed individuals who contribute behind the scenes — you know who you are.

Prime Minister Hun Sen on the Khmer Rouge Tribunals:

A U.N.-backed tribunal is holding former Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan in a comfortable room that bears no resemblance to the notorious torture cells his regime operated, Cambodia’s prime minister said Thursday.

Well, that’s a relief.

Cambodia newbie Anne Elizabeth Moore tries grasping the scope of corruption in the kingdom.

Well, so then I met with a woman whose name I cannot give you. [...]

So can you give me an idea of how rampant corruption is, I asked. Is it many people, some people? I do not understand.

All the people. She said. All the people.

C’mon, this sort of woe-is-my-whole-country self-loathing really does get tiresome. Not everybody in Cambodia is corrupt — that’s ridiculous — just everybody in the government.

A week or so ago news started spreading about a shipment of football gear headed to an orphanage in Cambodia. The stuff was meant to be a Christmas gift for the orphans — last year — but corrupt port authorities had refused to let the stuff through without a hefty Christmas gift of their own.

Enter Hillary Rodham Clinton.

After reading in The News about the standoff last week, U.S. Sens. Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton turned up the heat, e-mailing and phoning officials in Cambodia. Their persistence paid off.

“Like Ebenezer Scrooge and the Grinch, the port officials blocking this gift had a miraculous change of heart,” Schumer said.

Now that’s responsive government!

RFA reports:

[Adhoc representitive] Uch Leng said: “The case of Venerable Ieng Sok Thoeun from the Tronum Chroeung pagoda, when he came back from the demonstration, at about midnight, he was murdered and burnt alive, he was accused of possessing drug etc… Therefore our human rights group is concerned and we are looking for a strategy to prevent a clash with the authority.”

So a monk was murdered and burned alive after Monday’s protest outside the Vietnamese embassy? That seems kind of noteworthy, no? But RFA, rather inexplicably, offers nothing beyond that quote. Some details would be nice, please, thank you.

UPDATE: Andy says in comments that the murder of Ieng Sok Thoeun happened in February. You can’t tell that from reading the RFA story, though.

Journalist Rachael Louise Snyder moved to Cambodia in 2003 to cover the Khmer Rouge Tribunals. When progress at the trials proved slower than expected, she had to find something to fill her time. She discovered the ILO’s better factories program, and that sparked the idea of her latest book, “Fugitive Denim,” about the human beings who make the clothes we wear.

Snyder, who also authored Slate’s Dispatches from Cambodia series, recently spoke to Bill Thompson of Eye on Books about her experiences researching “Fugitive Denim.” She connects Bono’s fashion designer to a family in remote Cambodia, explains the relationship between brand names such as The Gap and the factories that produce their clothes, and assures us that management, like labor, are people too, and seldom are they out to screw the third-world help.

Quoting Cambodia’s Development Weekly, VNA says that Cambodia has so far this year pulled in $2.5 billion in foreign direct investment.

Foreign investment into Cambodia has so far this year reached 2.5 billion USD, much higher than last year’s figure.

Secretary General of the State Committee for Investment Suon Sothy said the increase was due to the Government’s approval of foreign-invested projects to develop tourism on islands in Sihanoukville and Kampot province, according to Cambodia’s Development Weekly.

Oh, the perils of financial reporting. That $2.5 billion figure is total investments, not total foreign investments. There is a difference.

Still, considering that two months ago Minister of Commerce Cham Prasidh told a UN conference that investment for the first three quarters of 2007 totaled just $1.8 billion, that’s a moderately impressive 3-month run. Prasidh had hinted as much at the time, though, saying that “two mega-projects under negotiation could boost the figures by year-end,” according to the Phnom Penh Post.

So those two mega-deals — worth about $700 million perhaps, but probably less — must have come through. Still, Cambodia remains well behind last year’s investment total of $4.3 billion, no matter what VNA says.

Bronwyn tells an all-too-familiar tale:

What woke me up I don’t know. I just remember realizing there was someone in my house who shouldn’t be there, and glancing over to see a robber almost within touching distance going through an antique wardrobe a friend had just left when she went back to Australia.

She saw me the same time as I saw her. I froze and waited for a knife or a gun, but thankfully she just ran into the night.

The cops arrived soon after, and in no time flat cracked the case: The cupboard was possessed, and it needed a chicken.

The Foreign Policy Research Institute takes a look at Asian democracies.

[T]he weakest Asian states, such as Cambodia, are neither democracies nor likely to become democratic in the near future.

Those silly policy wonks. Where do they get such ridiculous ideas?

After years of research and test drilling, Chevron remains undecided over the future of its Cambodian oil fields.

Chevron Corp. (CVX) is in the “very late stages” of evaluating oil fields discovered offshore Cambodia in 2004 and may make a decision on their development within three months, a senior executive said Tuesday.

“Probably I would expect some decisions coming out of Chevron in the first quarter or so of 2008 about what our go-forward plans are,” said Stephen Green, chief executive of Chevron’s South Asia unit. [...]

Meetings will take place with the Cambodian government and project partners before a final investment decision is made, he said.

At this late stage Chevron must surely have a firm idea of how much oil is out there. And surely the company knows what it will cost to get that oil out of the ground. Chevron, after all, is the world’s most profitable oil company. Determining these things is not something the company is prone to take lightly.

The one thing Chevron can’t predict with any certainty is the size of the pile of money it will need to placate the government’s penchant for wine, women and song. For a government reared on the UN teat, Chevron must look like the world’s wealthiest corporate rube. So odds are high that Chevron’s professed uncertainty is but a negotiating ploy; the company would sooner sell its stake and go home than stick around and get punked by two-bit government thugs for the next 20 years.

But this is Chevron, don’t forget, the world’s most profitable oil company. It didn’t get there by being soft or having a conscience. Pimping third-world dictators and ravaging whole nations are the kinds of things it takes with afternoon tea. The odds that it will get had by the Cambodian government are in the single digits — zero.

David Lynch in The USA Today remarks on the heady, boom-town feel of Phnom Penh.

The streets of this riverside capital are thick with traffic, sport-utility vehicles favored by foreign aid workers as well as the more modest cars piloted by locals. Scaffolded construction sites dot the dusty downtown and locals spy Western investment bankers with the enthusiasm reserved elsewhere for celebrity sightings.

Spying investment bankers? Man, who’s this guy hangin’ out with?

Criticism of the Cambodian government’s shortcomings on human rights continues to reverberate.

Five leading international human rights organizations today called upon the Cambodian government to respect its international human rights commitments as well as United Nations officials mandated to monitor them.

The five organizations – Human Rights Watch, the Asian Human Rights Commission, the Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA), the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), and the World Organisation against Torture (OMCT) – expressed deep concern about the Cambodian government’s ongoing unwillingness to engage with the UN secretary-general’s special representative on human rights in Cambodia, Professor Yash Ghai.

Yesterday, using similar language, the office of Yash Ghai released a statement (PDF) expressing its displeasure with the government’s intentionally coarse diplomacy.

The Special Representative does not intend to dialogue with the Government through the media. He has sought meetings with several ministers well in advance of his visit. They either did not respond or refused to meet him. In the absence of such meetings, he has described publicly his main concerns as he is duty bound to do. These concerns will be addressed in detail in his forthcoming report. He hopes that the Government will respond to the substance of his assessment. He is ready to discuss it in detail, and will listen to the views of the Government at any time. The door of dialogue must always remain open. To have dialogue one must have interlocutors and the Special representative will pursue his efforts in this direction.

As Sara Colm ever so deftly puts it:

Yash Ghai is not an isolated maverick. All of his findings have been repeatedly raised in the past by local and international rights groups, UN agencies, and bilateral and multilateral donors. Donors who commit millions of dollars to Cambodia each year for poverty alleviation, judicial reform and economic development should not condone government policies that result in thousands of Cambodians losing their homes, their livelihoods, and in some cases their lives.

Licadho writes:

Dear friends,

This morning, a group of approximately 40-50 Kampuchea Krom (KK) monks gathered peacefully in front of the Vietnamese embassy in Phnom Penh to appeal for the release of Kampuchea Krom monks who are detained and convicted in Vietnam.

Intervention and local police immediately set up road blocks to prevent people from entering the area and shortly after talking to the group of KK monks, intervention police proceeded to disperse the group of KK monks by kicking some of the KK monks and using electrical and wooden batons on others. Police were heard shouting that these were “fake monks”. So far, we have treated 2 KK monks with serious injuries and 4 other KK monks with lesser injuries. Due to the seriousness of this situation, I am taking the liberty to send you various photos and will send a joint statement later in the day.

http://www.licadho.org

More photos below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »

Xinhua reports that an “international” border crossing has opened in Ratanakiri province.

Vietnam has opened an international border gate in central highlands Gia Lai province, bordering Cambodia’s Ratanakiri province, local newspaper Vietnam News reported Monday.

The border gate, coming into operational last weekend, is expected to facilitate trade activities in the two countries’ border areas and cement the ties of their residents.

Although an exact location is not mentioned, it must be the Ban Lung-Pleiku crossing to which the story is referring. The word “international” would appear to indicate that the crossing is now open to foreigners.

UPDATE: Andy has the details:

Cambodian visas are available (you’ll have to get your Vietnamese one beforehand) at the new border checkpoint which is located in Ratanakiri province and is called the O’Yadaw - Le Tanh crossing, leading into Vietnam’s Gia Lai province. To be honest, it’s been an unofficial crossing for a while but has now been declared the official, and sixth, international border-crossing between the two countries.

Putsata Reang went to Duch’s detention hearing. Far from finding the monster of her elders’ nightmares, she found a frail and frightened old man.

Outside the courtroom and in the community, most of the Khmers I talked to were, like my aunt, quick to categorise Duch as something other than human. Duch must have thought much the same thing about his victims when he ordered them to their deaths. When we start to see each other as less than human, we respond with inhuman acts.

It is this narrow, black-and-white view of humanity that has perpetuated a cycle of violence in Cambodia, where raging mobs beat to death robbery suspects and young mistresses suffer acid attacks by jealous wives. To say that Duch is a monster who does not deserve rights ignores the grey area between good and evil, between man and monster, where anything is possible.

That’s exactly right. We cannot kill the monsters as they have killed without becoming monsters ourselves.

Tensions over Kampuchea Krom and the arrest of Tim Sakhorn erupted into violence this morning when, according to Reuters, a peaceful gathering of armed police officers was assaulted by Buddhist monks.

ABOUT 40 Cambodian Buddhist monks fought with police, knocking one unconscious before being beaten back with batons, as they tried to hand a petition to Vietnam’s embassy.

The clash broke out when 100 police refused to allow the monks to approach the embassy in the Cambodian capital.

They knocked one officer unconscious, Phnom Penh police chief Touch Naruth said. [...]

One of the monks, 20-year-old Thach Mony said they simply wanted to drop off their petition calling for the release of Tim Sakhorn and for the return of land that Cambodia claims was seized by Vietnam in 1978.

Land that Cambodia claims was seized by Vietnam in 1978. Huh?

Presumably, Thach Mony is talking about Kampuchea Krom here, and the (massively flawed) argument that Vietnam “siezed” that land in 1953. You would think somebody attending a protest would have even a vague understanding of the facts, no?

But about that land … Vietnam didn’t take it; Sihanouk gave it away in return for Cambodia’s independence. That was 55 years ago. It’s time to move on.

(Photo: Shamelessly stolen from Reuters/Chor Sokhunthea)

UPDATE: Eric disagrees.

The Cambodians never made the agreements themselves, and were not in a position of sovereignty when the decision to give the land to the Vietnamese happened. If sovereignty must underpin the decision to alienate rights and/or property from oneself, then the decision cannot be a truly legal one. The fact that it is accepted as legal doesn’t change the situation, but merely highlights the fact that the legal system itself operates for purposes much broader than the distribution of universal justice.

The groups efforts to make computing a native Khmer-language experience is turning heads.

KhmerOS has won the second prize in the prestigious international Stockholm Challenge GKP Award in the category “economic development”. The global recognition was awarded on 11. December 2007 in Kuala Lumpur/Malaysia by the two organizations “Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP)” and “The Stockholm Challenge”. The award is given for excellent examples of implementations of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) that show clear benefits to people and their communities, wide impact and sustainable business models.

Three cheers!

Citing Yale University archives, Khmer Intelligence says current Minister of Finance Keat Chhon was a “close assistant” to Pol Pot.

There is evidence to prove that Cambodian Finance Minister Keat Chhon was a close assistant to Khmer Rouge top leader Pol Pol. For instance, on 30 November 1975, Keat Chhon sent, in the form of a telegram, a report to Pol Pot about “the withdrawal of people from the East to the North”. In his report, Keat Chhon mentioned several districts, especially Chhlaung, in Kratie province, which he is a native of. [There is currently a "Keat Chhon University" in Chhlaung]. Keat Chhon signed his telegram by writing only “Chhon”. But Pol Pot had only one close assistant whose given name is “Chhon” and who is a native of Chhlaung district in Kratie province.

Perhaps more proof exists of this connection and KI has just failed to pass it along. But based on the above passage, arguing that the telegram’s author, a person named Chhon, is in fact Minister of Finance Keat Chhon, based on nothing more concrete than a shared name is beyond outrageous. Such gossamer-thin logic wouldn’t get past your average 8-year-old, and such dubious speculation amounts to little more than partisan character assassination.

That doesn’t mean it’s not true, though.

UPDATE: It’s not true.

VIA Magnoy: While out drinking, 36-year-old Chab Kear discovered a 2-meter cobra in a nearby pond.

The newspaper reported Kear’s last words as being “don’t worry - it’s nothing a drink can’t fix” before he succumbed to the cobra’s venom.

Doh!

VIA The Monkey Puzzle: New York radio station WFMU gets it psychedelic Cambodia rock on.

In 1996, the Parallel World label released the LP “Cambodian Rocks”, a collection of Cambodian psych and garage music from the 60s and early 70s (probably), compiled by an American tourist named Paul Wheeler from some cassettes he bought in Phnom Penh. No information on the songs was provided at all, no artist names, no song titles, and no recording dates. Four years later, Parallel World reissued this compilation on CD with a few extra tracks, but still without any identifying information. Unfortunately, it is more than likely that many of the featured musicians, showing a definite Western influence in their music, were murdered by the Khmer Rouge regime which took over power in 1975. Certainly none of them ever received any money from the sales of this compilation. However, the music is wonderful, and here it is for your enjoyment.

All 21 songs from the original “Cambodia Rocks” LP are available for download.

UPDATE: Flapjax has more, including tons of links — Sin Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea have MySpace pages? Who knew?

This whole Yash Ghai-Human Rights Day thing just keeps spiraling down the bizarro Cambodian abyss. It started on Monday, Human Rights Day, when the UN’s special envoy for human rights, Yash Ghai, released a report calling Hun Sen a murderous dictatorous thug questioning the government’s commitment to protecting human rights (pdf report here).

Mature and statesmanlike, Hun Sen responded by calling Yash Ghai a stupid tourist. He blasted the UN for its previous support of the Khmer Rouge. He demanded the UN replace Yash and he vowed to never, ever talk to Yash again. Then he blasted the UN some more for its current stance on Burma, accusing the world body of putting the kibosh on Burma’s proud march to democracy.

No really, he did.

Previous to the prime ministers recent remarks on his daughter’s gold-digging girlfriend, it’s been quite literally months since some astute Cambodian politician has said something earth-shatteringly stupid. Nature abhors a vacuum. The country was due.

Dany Chheang, deputy director of the Agriculture Ministry’s Wildlife Protection Office, complains that local poachers, who typically sell their game on the black market for cheap, are wiping out Cambodia’s wildlife for a pittance. But Mr Cheang has a plan.

Cambodia is considering laying on hunting safaris for well-heeled foreign tourists in its remote jungle-clad northeast, to the consternation of green groups who say it could be a recipe for disaster.

Officials said on Tuesday a Spanish firm called Nsok Safaris had already drawn up plans for a five-star jungle camp to house hunters after trophies on a list of 30 mammals, birds and reptiles in a 100,000-hectare (250,000-acre) forest reserve. [...]

Dany Chheang, deputy director of the Agriculture Ministry’s Wildlife Protection Office, said allowing foreigners to pay to shoot game was far better for conservation than having poachers take it illegally.

“Illegal hunters are burning dollars every day,” he told Reuters. “We have not explored all the potential of our natural resources. Now is the time to do so.”

“The money we net will be invested in preserving the animals and forest. It is better for sustainable development than letting local hunters deal with cheap black markets.”

But of course.

UPDATE: AP has more.

The customs department is hard at work defending its reputation as Cambodia’s most corrupt government entity.

A Brooklyn school group’s gift of soccer balls and jerseys for an orphanage in Cambodia has been caught up in a bureaucratic nightmare of red tape and corruption.

For more than a year, the donated equipment intended to make life a little happier for needy kids has been held up at a Cambodian port while local officials demand hundreds of dollars in fees.

The people behind the donations, a group called Brooklyn Bridge to Cambodia, have tried nearly everything — short of paying the bribe, of course — to get the balls and jerseys through customs. They have written their senator, the Cambodian ambassador to the U.S., the U.S. ambassador to Cambodia, even The Cambodia Daily. When those people proved powerless, they turned to the Strongman himself. Although the Prime Minister could move that stuff through customs with the wave of a pinky ring, he has thus far declined to intervene.

All of which is a pretty sad commentary. Extorting businesses, which is customs primary function, is one thing. But holding gifts for orphans hostage? That’s truly low.

Compared to years past, it would be impossible to deny that Cambodia has made some progress in the area of human rights. Political murders, for instance, number in the single digits these days. In both 1993 (an election year) and 1997 (a coup year) there were more than 100.

That one tiny bright speck, however, does nothing to change the fact that the state of human rights in Cambodia is abysmal. Torture and arbitrary arrests are common. Government complicity in human trafficking is well-documented. Politically connected murderers walk free while petty thieves rot in confinement. Underpinning it all is the endemically corrupt Cambodian judicial system.

The Cambodian justice system has failed. Despite the UNTAC intervention and 15 years of aid to legal and judicial reform, in 2007 the primary functions of the courts continue to be to:1/ Persecute political opponents and other critics of the government, 2/ Perpetuate impunity for state actors and their associates, 3/ Protect the economic interests of the rich and powerful.

That’s the beginning of Licadho’s latest report, “Human Rights in Cambodia: The Charade of Justice Report 2007.” What follows is a well-researched survey of official court indifference and interference in politically sensitive cases. The report documents politically motivated criminal charges against politicians. It lists more than 25 cases of judicial indifference to violent crimes committed by the police and military. It notes a litany of unlawful detentions, influence peddling, conflicts of interest, graft, bribery and general everyday corruption.

The conclusion, while unstated, is undeniable: Cambodia is a one-party state, and the kleptocrats at the center of government habitually abuse their power to enrich themselves and persecute their opponents.

And it gets worse. The country’s donor group, that band of self-professed mighty white saviors, is in on the fix. Licadho points specifically to two recent revisions in the criminal law concerning prisoner detention during the appeals process.

If a prosecutor appeals a verdict by the court of first instance, the detainee remains incarcerated until the appeal court hears the case. As a consequence, detainees who have been acquitted, or convicted prisoners who have already served their prison sentences, can remain in prison for years awaiting appeal hearings. Previously a policy that was explicitly stated only in a 2003 Decision issued by the Ministry of Justice, it is deplorable that this practice has now been formalized into the new criminal procedure code.

These two revisions to the criminal procedures make a mockery of the assertion that new legislation necessarily equates to reform. Rather than imposing stricter conditions on a judiciary that is notorious for its disregard of the presumption of innocence, the new criminal procedures have given them yet more leeway to keep innocent and undeserving people imprisoned for increasing lengths of time.

It is of deep concern that this new criminal procedure code was drafted with considerable technical assistance from foreign donors, and that its passing is widely touted as being a positive step forward.

The government, of course, is unlikely to reform by itself. It’s also pretty clear that the international community is worthless. They have been demanding reforms for a decade and gotten squat in return. Yet like Sisyphus and his stone, Licadho cannot escape its fate to pursue a more humane Cambodia, no matter what the odds or the effects of its labor.

So today, Human Rights Day, we would like to say Thank You — Thank You, Thank You, Thank You — to Licadho and all of Cambodia’s human rights workers, for their tireless efforts to make Cambodia a better place.

The Bangkok Post talks to Francois Bizot about Duch.

Recounting his own experience when dealing with his captor, Comrade Douch, Bizot says: “I realise that I had a rare opportunity to look behind a killer … I suddenly realised that I was in front of a monster who killed others, participated in torture, and who would get the order to kill me. I was afraid of him, but when we discussed things I realised that what I saw when he dropped his mask was much more frightening. I saw a young guy like me, he was the same. He was a killer, but he was also the same guy he was before he became a guerrilla.

“Douch married his young wife about six months after I was released. It was a war, it was very bad conditions, he was a director of that small camp, he was torturing people to death, and he was in love and he got married. We as humans need to know that we are able to do that,” he continues.

Chilling.

The United States today said it will consider funding the Extraordinary Chambers — when Hell freezes over.

The United States will consider giving money to fund Cambodia’s U.N.-backed genocide tribunal only after the court properly addresses allegations of corruption and mismanagement against it, a U.S. diplomat said Friday. …

[U.S. ambassador for war crimes Clint] Williamson said any decisions about U.S. funding “are going to be contingent” on how the U.N. and the Cambodian government deal with its internal problems and on the court’s ability “to deliver justice at international standards.”

This can’t really be happening, can it? The United States — that is, the country that illegally bombed Cambodia during the 1960s and 1970s, killing more than an estimated 500,000 innocent people, and the same country that is right now torturing people using techniques documented at Tuol Sleng — is lecturing Cambodia on international standards of conduct? Via some incompetent George Bush sycophant, no less.

Watch out for lightening bolts.

Cambodia has a 500-pound gorilla on its back.

Cambodia has become one of the worst drug nations in the region, a Cambodia drug official said Monday.

Youths, laborers, even fishermen, are driving the demand for cheap methamphetamines of the sort found in a major lab bust in April that put Cambodia on the production map, said Tea Phaully, a program officer for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. …

Workers along the Thai border are highly susceptible to drug addiction, Tea Phaully said, where they begin at first by smoking the drug, then injecting it intravenously, a practice that spreads HIV.

Not good.

RFA says the Thai Army has taken possession of the Ta Moan temple in Oddar Meanchey province.

Orn Roeun, the Banteay Ampil district governor, recognized that the Ta Moan Khmer ancient Temple fell into the Thai occupation about three years ago, when Thailand built a paved road reaching the temple.

Orn Oeun said: “To sum it up, in the last 2-3 years, Thailand built a road and came to occupy the temple. Earlier, during the Sangkum era (Sihanouk regime), and up to 1993, we moved back into our territory, therefore, when our troops move back in, Thailand moved their troops forward to defend their territories, when they saw the temple, they made the arrangement (to occupy it). This issue is of (high) concerns for us, but it is an issue that must be dealt by the government.”

Apparently, Ta Moan is similar in landscape to the Preah Vihear temple; that is, it sits atop the Dangrek Escarpment, making access from the Thai side easy but access from the Cambodian side nearly impossible. To believe that the Thai military, unilaterally, would build a highway to Ta Moan and then send its army in to protect it, is also impossible. Somebody on the Cambodian side is surely in on the fix, doing what high-ranking government officials seem to do so well: auction off slices of the country’s soul to the lowest bidder.

Last week The Cambodia Daily ran a story about Phatry Derek Pan’s latest business start up: Khmer-language tutoring services for expatriates. Phatry, it seems, has created quite a tempest by marketing the company’s sole tutor, Sreynim Song, as a “pretty” university student.

Global Voices writer Geoffrey Cain, for one, is aghast — not at Phatry for pimpin’, but at the Daily for calling Ms Song a ho.

I must voice my disturbance over your recent article, “New Business Peddles Khmer Lessons With Pretty Faces,” for essentially portraying a harmless group of students as a morally dubious network of pimps and call girls. As a journalist based in Washington, DC, I have studied Khmer extensively under Song Sreynim and was present at the founding of her teaching business.

While I understand Song advertising teachers as “pretty university students” may be suggestive, Tim Sturrock’s reporting on the matter is deceptive and, in many instances, downright sensational. While Sturrock seems to imply one teacher, Phatry Pan, is exerting pimp-like dominance over these young women (referring to female teachers as “his” teachers), I can assure you this business was a mutual endeavor between Ms. Song and Mr. Pan.

It’s a pretty valid complaint. Says Ms Song:

I felt hurt and became saddened. I lost the motivation to teach after reading Tim’s article. I feel that his writing made me look as I am an uneducated girl that has fallen victim to Derek’s exploitation. And many of my Khmer friends, young and old, commented that the story made me look as though I am a “prostitute.” …

In the end, all I seek from Tim Sturrock is a public apology. In Khmer culture, a women’s reputation is sacred. When it’s smeared, regardless if there is any factual base, her name is forever stained.

IntelliBriefs on U.S. motives in Southeast Asia and Cambodia.

Through an analysis of the economic relations between the US and the other South-East Asian countries it is evident that the main humanitarian aids for the region are concentrated fairly exclusively on three nations: Indonesia, Philippines and Cambodia. They receive on their own 70% of the annual available budget for the whole of Asia, which amounted to $531m for 2007 and $522m for 2008. If the circumstances for the provision of aid have been established for Philippines and Indonesia, as far as Cambodia is concerned they depend on its geographic position. This poor state on the Indo-Chinese peninsula and neighbour of China represents an appealing opportunity for Washington. The country’s precarious economic conditions make American investments and aid plans attractive. This allows Washington to inaugurate itself economically, politically and commercially within the Chinese sphere of influence. This constitutes a diplomatic strategy which, besides concerning the Chinese ‘court-yard’, tends to steer Cambodia towards US-oriented economic development. This eventuality will allow a future bilateral collaboration to the detriment of Beijing.

That sounds about right, no? The only thing is, using the words “economic development” and “US” in the same sentence is so 20th century. In the 21st, smart money is on the Chinese.