Too stupid to live

The big news of the weekend was the blast at the ammunition dump just outside the Prime Minister’s compound in Takhmau. Headlines are everywhere. Reuters explains.

Rockets exploded on Sunday at a Cambodian military base near the prime minister’s residence, state-run television said, and military officials said the incident was an accident.

Military and police officials said the explosion was caused by a fire started accidentally by a mechanic working on a truck at the base on the southern outskirts of the capital, Phnom Penh.

The Cambodia Daily has the scoop.

Nuon Rom, 46, a village officer in Samrong village, Takhmau commune, said that he watched the explosion from nearby, and spoke directly with military officials inside the camp by walkie-talkie immediately afterwards.

He said he was told that two truck drivers were trying to gas up a truck filled with B-40 rockets bound for the disputed border area at Preah Vihear temple. At about 7:15 pm, one of the men flicked his cigarette lighter to get a better look at how full the tank was and ignited the gasoline fumes.

Both men died, Rom added.

Riding high

Disadvantaged girls light up posh horse-riding club.

The car park at the Cambodian Country Club on the outskirts of Phnom Penh was an upmarket showroom of top-of-the-range Mercedes, Hummers and Cadillac SUVs. The tuk-tuk parked alongside them seemed out of place.

[ ...]

It is estimated that 335,000 Cambodians below the age of 15 have lost one or both parents, mostly to HIV/Aids. In 2007 it was estimated that 20,000 women aged over had the disease, as did 4,400 children.

It was in recognition of these bleak statistics that Jean-Yves Dufour, a former director of Pharmaciens sans Frontières in Phnom Penh, founded Anakut Laor in the spring of 2005 to house, educate and care for five abandoned girls from remote rural areas. Their crime? They were born HIV positive, had no close relatives and were social outcasts.

[ ... ]

All work and no play, though, can make for a dull life so when, two years ago, the French embassy offered free riding lessons at the CCC’s equestrian centre, Sophal was quick to accept the opportunity on behalf of the girls.

When assessing the content of a person’s character, the make and model of their car account for less than nothing.

God flu

Teen missionaries bring deadly “swine flu” to Kingdom.

Four American teens who went on a mission trip to Cambodia to help the needy, wound up needing help as they became the first cases of swine flu in that Southeast Asian country, officials with the youth ministry said Thursday.

… The teens came down with fever after arriving in Phnom Penh on June 18, according to a statement from Ron Luce, president of Teen Mania, the Christian youth organization based in Garden Valley in East Texas that sponsored the group.

… “This group raised money for months and months to go to Cambodia and serve the lord Jesus … and they’re stuck in a house in Cambodia,” said Ed Hale of Escondido, Calif., whose nephew is one of their hosts in Cambodia. “They can’t do what they were sent to do. It’s a tragedy.”

Yet another reason to give wide berth to the brimstone brigade.

Critics not welcome

The WWF recently said that dozens of Mekong Irrawaddy dolphins had died as a result of toxic levels of pollution in the Mekong River. The government these days is so sensitive that even this level of indirect criticism has sent the ruling party into a tizzy.

The WFF report released last week said 88 dolphins had died since 2003 and researchers had found toxic levels of pesticides and environmental contaminants in their analysis of Irrawaddy dolphin calves.

‘This report simply is not true,’ Touch Seang Tana told a press conference. ‘These findings were reported without consultation with me, so I sent a letter to the WFF to come and meet with me to clarify these points.’ …

‘A few deaths have been caused by dolphins becoming trapped in fishing nets in the Mekong River, but it was not due to pollution,’ he said. ‘I wrote to the WFF to clarify this and if they do not wish to meet with me to discuss this, then their operations in the area could be suspended.’

AP offers some details on the toxicity arguments.

Researchers from WWF Cambodia said they found levels of the pesticide DDT in the bodies of dead dolphin calves from the Mekong that were 10 times higher than in a similar population in India, plus environmental contaminants such as PCBs. They also found mercury, a toxin used in gold mining that can compromise the immune system of marine animals, they said.

The group said it was investigating the source of the pollutants, noting that many young calves died of bacterial diseases that only occur when immune systems are damaged. Many had black and blue lesions on their necks.

“These pollutants are widely distributed in the environment, and so the source of this pollution may involve several countries through which the Mekong River flows,” said Verne Dove, the report’s author and a veterinarian with WWF Cambodia.

Presumably, the WWF is not making these things up, which means there is likely much scientific evidence to support their claims that pollution in the river contributed to the death of the dolphin calves. For the government to call the WWF money-grubbing liars is damaging to the organization’s professional reputation. The WWF should sue Touch Seang Tana for defamation.

The little online journal that could

Far from being ka-put, Ka-set continues to cover the ECCC in unmatched detail. While frequency has sadly diminished, the quality of reportage has not. Let’s hope it lasts, and that at some point, the community can step up and support them.

ECCC co-prosecutor Robert Petit bids adieu

Back in September 2006, when the ECCC was still in its early stages, co-prosecutor Robert Petit answered a question about the court’s ability to meet international standards with this:

“I’m going to go home if I can’t do my job right,” he said.

Today, three years and a single defendant later, Mr Petit announced his resignation.

The Canadian prosecutor at the genocide tribunal trying Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge announced Tuesday he is resigning, citing personal and family reasons.

Robert Petit said in a statement that his resignation will become effective September 1, three years after he joined the United Nations-backed tribunal, which is currently holding its first trial.

“It has been the greatest privilege of my career to have the opportunity to bring some justice to the victims of the crimes of the Khmer Rouge,” Petit said.

POSTSCRIPT: Elena has posted the complete statement, and concludes wryly:

Although Petit has never been particularly warm with press, most journalists covering the court consider him a person of integrity and purpose.

Camp Google

The almighty Google visits Cambodia.

Google is joining forces with the Information and Technology Centre at RUPP to host a gathering of regional IT developers and disease surveillance and response networks IT users from Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia. The group, which includes Google engineers from USA, China, and Singapore, will explore emerging technologies to address emerging infections. Inspired by the concept of barcamps, the group will spend four days in an atmosphere of network building, idea and experience sharing, and finding creative solutions to real problems. The camp will be held at the CJCC centre at the Royal University of Phnom Penh on June 22-25th. Gcamp@RUPP will culminate in an evening of knowledge sharing, social and cultural exchange open to the NGO and health community in Phnom Penh.

btobs.

Golden buffalo

Cambofest is gearing up for the 2009 festival. If you are interested in submitting your film, now is the time. The actual festival is not until December.

UPDATE: The last two sentences have been added for clarity. (Andy threatened to buy us lunch at The Lunch Box if we didn’t.)

Markets get a reprieve

The Council of Ministers last week voted to temporarily halt all Phnom Penh market redevelopments, including the fabled Russian Market, whose vendors recently were handed eviction notices. Most stallholders welcomed the news.

“I was very happy when I got this news. Now I am dancing,” said Lay Silo, a vendor at Serei Pheap Market in Prampi Makara district.

“By doing this, it means he [Hun Sen] cares about us, and that he wants us to have good feelings when we do our business.”

Not everyone, however, waxed so warm and fuzzy.

Muth Phong told the Post that Hun Sen’s decree was designed to stop people from protesting market-development projects, which he says are inevitable.

“Developing countries can’t keep their old markets … so they will continue,” he said.

“The reason they stopped the market-development project was because vendors always protest when authorities want to develop.

“I do not believe the news [that development of markets has been stopped]. They just do this to make us feel confident for a while and later, they’ll start [developing] again,” he said.

Yep. That’s what “temporary” means.

Immunity suspended for Mu Sochua, Ho Vann

As expected, the National Assembly today suspended the parliamentary immunity of Mu Sochua.

POSTSCRIPT: Reuters has more.

About 20 military and police blocked the public road in front of the National Assembly and barred reporters and others from watching the parliamentary vote.

A pompous executioner

In a nuanced portrait of Duch, Seth Mydans reveals the tendencies of a little man.

He gives the judges a humble greeting, both palms pressed together, an obsequiousness that has begun to be annoying to some who once suffered at his hands and now sit across the courtroom from him.

But in nearly three months of trial proceedings, a harder man has emerged — alert, vigorous, with a self-confidence that has begun to shade into condescension as he corrects a lawyer or a witness about details of his life as the chief torturer of the Khmer Rouge.

As it turns out, Duch decided to confess his role at Tuol Sleng because he could not bare to let Pol Pot dismiss all his fastidiuosly documented wet-work as so much Vietnamese propoganda.

“I could not bear what Pol Pot said so I had to show my face,” he said in court. “For S-21, I was the chairman of that office. The crimes committed at S-21 were under my responsibility!”

Believing the comedians

Comedians on Bayon TV last week caused a tempest with a week of skits satirizing NGOs and a few obtuse comments in the media. In beautifully cynical commentary on the current state of Cambodia’s ruling party, last week’s prime-time punchlines are now this week’s official CPP party lines.

Commenting on a recent WWF report that said pollutants in the Mekong River where contributing to the death toll of the Mekong River Dolphin, government officials today parroted last week’s jokes.

Touch Seang Tana, chairman of Cambodia’s Commission for Conversation and Development of the Mekong River Dolphins Eco-tourism Zone, said the “report was all lies,” citing it was aimed at discrediting Cambodia and alerting donors to give more aid to the WWF.

What a clown.

CPP to Funcinpec: drop dead

Prime Minister tells royalists to kiss off.

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said Wednesday that he had decided to terminate power sharing to his coalition partner Royalist FUNCINPEC party, at the public function level.

…The premier said he had made the decision on the matter beginning May 29, a move that he said a part of administration reform.

FUNCINPEC party is the only coalition partner with Hun Sen of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party after the CPP had won landslide victory over the general election in 2008.

Trouble in paradise

Emerging Textiles has the bad news.

Cambodia is confronted with a dramatic decline of its apparel exports, down 38% in March. Such a disaster is mostly due to the US economic recession and elimination of US quotas on Chinese products. Salaries were not raised at Cambodian apparel plants in the last years, in addition, leading to a fall in productivity and to repeated strikes.

Depending on whose numbers you believe, April was better or worse. Either way, though, it’s still bad.

“In addition to the slump in US and global demand for garment imports, there are a number of structural challenges to … sustained competitiveness,” US Embassy spokesman John Johnson said Tuesday, also citing low productivity and bureaucracy as constraints.

Immunity vote postponed

Vote to lift the immunity of Mu Sochua will go before the full National Assembly on June 22.

THE National Assembly’s Permanent Committee met Monday to consider a court-sanctioned request to lift the immunity of opposition lawmaker Mu Sochua and allow Prime Minister Hun Sen’s defamation suit against her to go ahead, officials said.

“The issue of lifting [Mu Sochua's] immunity has been included in the agenda for this session of the Permanent Committee, and a decision will come on June 22, when the Assembly will [decide whether to] adopt” the committee’s recommendations,  senior Cambodian People’s Party lawmaker Cheam Yeap told the Post Monday.

A two-thirds majority is required to pass the motion. The CPP holds more than two-thirds of assembly seats. Mu Sochua remains adamant that she will not be cowed.

“I have said again and again that my case is a symbol of the entire justice system in Cambodia, and I repeat: I will not pay…. I am ready to go to prison, and I would like to emphasise I will not flee,” said the former Minister of Women’s Affairs, who has a US passport.

Russian Market vendors get eviction notice

End is nigh, Diana reports.

I got a call from the Bloom manager in Phnom Penh this morning. Vendors at the Russian Market, where we have a stall, were told the government was going to shut down the market.

We have heard similar rumours for the last year or more, that the market would be closed for either (a) renovations or (b) relocation.

The rumors are likely true this time. Diana says vendors are appealing to Los Strongman, Cambodia’s patron saint of lost causes.

Quote of the day

Well-known comedian Chuong Chy, a.k.a Koy, weighs in on the issue of corruption today in The Cambodia Daily.

“Saying that officials are corrupt, I don’t know. I just see them building schools, wells and bridges. There is no corruption. They take money to build things; they didn’t take it to put it in their own pockets.”

Now that’s funny.

A paedophile playground

This is horrifying.

A twice-convicted Belgian paedophile who moved into a victim’s home after being released from a Cambodian prison plans to marry the victim’s mother, national media reported Tuesday.Anti-trafficking police said Philippe Dessart, who was released from prison April 4, proposed to his victim’s mother shortly before he left for Belgium on June 3, The Cambodia Daily reported.

Dessart was released after serving three years of an 18-year prison term for abusing the then-13-year-old boy after a successful appeal of his sentence.

…Police said Dessart travelled to Belgium to arrange documents for the marriage and would return to Cambodia in the next few weeks

If authorities in Belgium have any decency at all, they will not let this monster leave the country ever again.

Democracy

The CPP model.

THE Khmer Civilisation Foundation president, Moeung Sonn, has fled to France to avoid arrest, he said, after the Cambodian government sued him for incitement and disinformation over his public accusations that the installation of new lights at Angkor Wat had damaged the temple.

Moeung Sonn is part of the Global NGO Conspiracy to make the government look bad, and a law-breaker who has absconded from justice. He should be considered armed and dangerous.

Echoes from the past

The government says Lichado is un-Cambodian.

PHNOM Penh Deputy Governor Mann Chhoeun has criticised a recent land rights report by the advocacy group Licadho, calling it biased and un-Cambodian.

“I think that NGO is not Khmer, and I want to tell them that no one loves Khmer [more] than Khmer,” he told the Post.

“You come from outside, so you don’t understand Khmer people, and when we didn’t have food to eat, you were not with us. So you should look at our achievements and what we have done,” he said.

The government can continue to lash out at its critics, instead of addressing their concerns. But as long as it does, it will continue to be judged unkindly by the world. No sentient human being will ever buy the line that putting destitute families on the street constitutes development. Any member of the government who believes such a notion should have his or her soul checked.

CPP diplomacy

The government is aghast at U.S. Ambassador Carol Rodley’s suggestion that corruption exists in Cambodia.

In a statement Tuesday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected Rodley’s comments, labeling them “politically motivated and unsubstantiated”.

“It is very much regrettable that a representative of a foreign government has made such an allegation based on a biased assessment and without any proof,” the statement said.

“The Royal Government of Cambodia wishes to remind all members of the diplomatic corps that they must maintain their neutrality and refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Cambodia.”

While the stalwarts of the CPP appear more than adept at playing politics, they still seem unable to grasp the ways of foreign media. No one cares when the ambassador gives a prepared speech. By design, such statements are almost always innocuous.

When local governments react in outrage, that’s news. So now, the media gets to remind the world that Cambodia not only has the 14th most corrupt government in the world, but that it’s also run by a bunch of thuggish brutes who would intimidate a foreign dignitary.

Us and them

Rory and Melita Hunter of the Brocon Group, in their gorgeous, $2,000 per month rent house.

News flash

The Phnom Penh Post has the scoop: Court seen as tool to stop critics

THREE Sam Rainsy Party lawmakers are now on the receiving end of defamation lawsuits filed by officials from the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, drawing criticism from rights groups who say that the government is increasingly using the courts to silence political opponents.

“The defamation lawsuit against the SRP lawmakers shows an inclination to shut down the rights and freedoms of this party,” the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights said in a statement Monday.

Is the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights just now coming to this realization? Is The Post? The story is written as if the last 15 years of political history never happened — you know, hand grenades, 1997, shadow armies, Sam Rainsy exiled not once but thrice. The current defamation suits are just the latest flavor of pretense to which the ruling party has taken a fancy.

Mothers dying

The BBC says five maternal deaths occur daily.

In Cambodia , five women die every day because of inadequate health care during childbirth – making it a leading cause of death among women of child-bearing age.

The government is trying to improve health services but it is proving a long slow process.

Lvea village, in north-western Cambodia, is a collection of wooden stilt-houses along a dirt track, hectic with dogs, piglets and chickens.

Most of the women here have been told to have their babies in the local health centre.

So when one woman, Low’t, went into labour recently with her ninth child, she made her way there too.

Needless to say, Low’t didn’t make it. Millions of dollars in aid could not produce a few cents worth of life-saving medicine. Go figure.