The Village

Ride to Poon te'Bang village

Yesterday, I went to Koon's (a man who is part of Trailblazer) village Poon te'Bang (this is how it sounds to me) for the whole day, which was very interesting and great to get out of the city where I fear being run over every other five minutes. We left from Siem Reap at 10am sharp, although I had been up since 6am thanks to the Cambodian music blasting from the house next to me (some sort of traditional violin, wooden xylophone, and loud singing. I have realized this goes on from sunrise to sun set. Seeing as I have dealt with now six power cuts ranging from 30 seconds to 2 hours, it is surprising to me that they use their power on this boombox instead of savoring it for, maybe, light).

I had never been that far outside of Siem Reap before, and it was truly (and expected-ly)  a whole different world from Siem Reap. Although only 31km away, suddenly the roads were not paved, toilets became holes in the ground, doors where non-existent (the houses were on stilts), and patches of different shades of green filled the landscapes like a carpet. It was interesting to see the different government signs, most commonly the Cambodian People's Party (Hun Sen's camp), the Cambodian National Rescue Party (of which I have never heard and wonder if there is a different name as well), and FUNCINPEC (Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Indépendant, Neutre, Pacifque, etc Coopératif or in English National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia). The CPP had a center in nearly every village we passed through, and Hun Sen's face (and a bad picture of him, honestly) plastered on signs in even the most remote areas. 

So I have been told, people continue to vote for Hun Sen because they know nothing else. Elections are this July, and he is expected to win (or rather, he has little competition as people are too scared) again. According to Sophie, a Cambodian-American I met in Poon te'Bang who immigrated to the USA in 1981 from a Thai rescue camp and was returning to visit her mother, the people are just happy that it is not the Khmer Rouge, and that essentially "anything is better than the Khmer Rouge." Even though Hun Sen he no godsend, he is not Pol Pot. If the people and live and work, albeit often under the poverty line, this is still better than the Khmer Rouge. This is not meant to insinuate that the Khmer people do not care.

Also dotted along the villages and houses were signs from where filters, schools, houses, toilets, etc. had been donated. The most popular signs were from Japan, Canada, Australia, the U.S., and I saw one from the EU. I find it interesting that instead of just donating a water filter or toilet, the country or organization has to make it known who donated the filter, etc. rather than just put the filter in. I understand that with Trailblazer, for example, if the filter says Trailblazer then there is knowledge of accountability if something goes wrong. But the Honolulu Air Force Team? No. In my personal opinion, rather than have your name stamped onto the charitable act, just give it. Do you have to be recognized for everything?

I never say no to a coconut. 

After walking about to visit Koon's multiple friends and random cousins (and being told that I was the tallest girl they have ever seen, asking how much I weighed and asking me to step on a scale that looked more appropriate to weigh mangosteens (I declined to step on it), listening to "Thrift Shop" on the radio with smart aleck ten-year-olds and dancing a bit in my chair (they could not contain their laughter), and holding a baby without any pants on who I prayed wouldn't suddenly pee), I ate lunch and drank a huge young coconut. A woman then split open my coconut and gave it to a very young child (age unknown) who proceeded to scrape the meat out and get it all over herself. Lunch consisted of really good rice, a soy sauce chopped chili concoction, fried eggs, and water spinach. Koon kept apologizing that it was not pizza, and that it was not the famous (yet expensive and not widely eaten by Cambodians on a quotidian basis) amok you get in the center of town. I wanted to shake him and tell him that this is what I liked--not the food in the center of town that as I described earlier, the taste is truly MIA. I did not shake him, and I did tell him how good the food was, but I fear he did not understand (which will change soon as I take my Khmer lessons!) It truly aggravates me that everyone thinks that because I am a Western white girl I want pasta and pizza, but no, the pasta and pizza in Asia are often terrible and I much prefer Cambodian food by a landslide. Really--I remember having pasta at a swanky restaurant in Bangalore and just thinking how it tasted like a Lean Cuisine. No thanks. [Side note: Num Pang Sandwich Shop on 12th and University Place is amazing, yet far from anything I have had on the streets of Siem Reap yet)

After lunch we walked around more and talked to even more people, some of whom were huddled around a black and white television, we went back to Siem Reap. My butt was basically numb by the time I got back to my guesthouse and I struggled to sit still on the back of the moto. 3 hours on a motorbike truly takes a toll on your rear end, and even when I sat on my bed upon arriving home (and all I can say about my bed is that I am glad massages here are cheap), I stood up immediately.  

The Perils of Activism and Critical Media in Cambodia

Freedom of press country by country. Some maps vary, for example, one shows
Canada as on par with Sweden, while another shows Burma as being on par
with Thailand.

There is no doubt that Cambodia does not boast the same freedom of speech laws that I, living in the United States, can benefit from. I can write critically about Barack Obama and ObamaCare, and not worry that someone will come after me for doing so. This, needless to say, is not the case in Cambodia. Cambodian journalists live in constant fear of saying or writing something wrong, especially because much of the media in Cambodia are owned by Hun Sen's ruling party, the Cambodian People's Party (CPP). In fact, "spreading false information or insulting public officials," is cause for imprisonment (Cambodia Profile). It is important to note, however, that those media do not wholly include the internet, seeing as only a reported 663,000 Cambodian had access (even if inconsistent) to the internet in June 2012 (Cambodia Profile). This is not to say that government defamation on the internet is free game, but that the internet is not a widely used tool in Cambodia as of late. That being said, the BBC reports a 2012 decree banning any internet cafes from opening up near schools, and that committing crimes that might threaten national security or tradition on the internet is forbidden. The fear behind any freedom of speech spreads beyond journalists and into other activism sectors of Cambodian society.

The pro-government daily Koh Santepheap newspaper
homepage screenshot.

The most famous recent case of an imprisoned Khmer journalist is Mam Sonado, a land rights activist, the president of a pro-democracy movement, and radio host on of the only station that criticized Hun Sen's government. He was charged for supposedly starting a rebellion and accused specifically of instigating villagers in Kratie, Cambodia, to form their own state independent of Cambodia--an accusation that Sonado denies. Although there were clashes between the government and Kratie villagers due to the government taking away their land, Sonado was not involved (Cambodia Jails Journalist Mam Sonando over 'Plot.'). The protests in Kratie escalated because the police shot and killed a fifteen-year-old girl protesting. From what I have read and seen about Cambodia, this is not an uncommon occurrence. Sonado was sentenced to twenty years in prison, something that human rights groups call outrageous, yet as he left the court, he told press: "I am happy that I have helped the nation" (Cambodia Jails Journalist Mam Sonando over 'Plot.'). In March, however, he was released after  indirect pressure from the United Nations. But not all of the journalists and activists in Cambodia have the U.N. at their side.

In September 2012, an environmental activist and journalist named Hang Serei Oudom was brutally killed (at the mercy of axe blows to his head) and found in the trunk of his car by police (Gleensdale). Oudom was known to write stories about the illegal logging of Cambodian timber for luxury corporations--stories the the government would prefer that people do not know about.  Western journalists are not exempt to the government's watchful eye either. There have been reports of harassment at English language newspapers, and in 1997, a Khmer-Canadian photographer was killed. A Canadian journalist was with Oudom when we was brutally killed as well; however, she was spared.

Memorial Service advertisement for Chea
Vichea

Bradley Cox's film Who Killed Chea Vichea? discusses the human rights abuses in Cambodia in relation to the injustice of Chea Vichea's murder and trial. Vichea, Cambodia's former Free Trade Union president, was assassinated in 2004 on Chinese New Year in broad daylight. Six months before he received a text message that he would be killed, but he persevered in his political and activist work. Vichea protected garment workers and promoted strikes and demonstrations to increase minimum wage and improve worker conditions. Today, the U.S. receives $2 billion in garments from Cambodia, while the 250,000 Cambodians working in the garment industry make $0.28 an hour on average, leading to a $45 monthly salary. The 250,000 Cambodians working in the industry support an estimated 750,000 other Cambodians, meaning that the garment industry in Cambodia buttresses one million people (7% of the population). Sam Rainsy, the politician in stark opposition to Hun Sen and the CPP, supported Vichea and human rights (although, Joel Brinkley's book Cambodia's Curse is more critical of Rainsy than the film). The CPP today have a lock on power and control basically everything about the police, military, and public expenditure (or rather, lack there of).

After Vichea's death, nobody was arrested. The government did not do anything. In fact, Hun Sen was astonished that people wanted him to resign because when 9/11 happened in the United States, George Bush was not immediately ousted (of course, the contexts were completely different as only a few people believe Bush was at fault for the attacks--which he was not. This only proves Hun Sen's madness). Human rights groups and international donors--the latter on which Cambodia relies heavily--pressed for justice in the Vichea case. The police then released a drawing of the man they said the one witness, a Phnom Penh shopkeeper named Va Sothy, described as the murderer (after seeking asylum in Thailand and then the U.S., Sothy denies ever speaking to the police). 48 hours later, the police had arrested two men, Born Samnang and Sok Sam Oeun, arrested. But these men did not commit the murder, and as Rainsy said, the government just "had to arrest somebody for the show."

Who Killed Chea Vichea?

A few days before Vichea's murder, Samnang's mother brought a photo of Samnang to the police station to claim she was disowning him because he owed some money to a pharmaceutical company, and she did not want her house taken from her to repay her son's debt. Oeun had a one-time-business-partner Din Doeun who reported him for stealing money, around the same time Vichea was killed as well. Thus, both of the names and photo were easy for the Cambodian police to use to arrest somebody. The head police said they admitted to the crime and were guilty; however, footage shows both men crying, screaming "Let the earth swallow me whole," "Shoot me in the mouth and let me die if I did it," and about the Cambodian police, "They can make white black." Later, former police officials admitted that there were two undercover police on the scene directly after the murder acting as journalists, and the police were not strict about protecting potential forensic evidence from the public.

Who Killed Chea Vichea? Poster

Watching these men crying in unfathomable amounts of distress was inexplicably heart-wrenching. They were arrested without proof. Although he said that he was threatened and coerced into it, Samnang signed a confession saying he was guilty. Samnang actually had dozens of alibis that he was in a village, Neak Long, forty kilometers outside of Phnom Penh. Oeun maintained his innocence, and friends at the Chinese New Year party he claimed to be attending would not come forward with any alibi information unless they were allowed to leave the country, because "in Cambodia, if you know things, you can die." At court when both Samnang and Oeun were sentenced to twenty years in prison, they screamed and cried when leaving, asking, for the "King Father" (the late King Sihanouk) or "international guests" to do something becuase "this is injustice." Relatives and friends screamed as the police van took the two away--that they should be given poison so they can kill themselves, and one of the mothers asked for the police to just let her son "die tomorrow." Human rights groups insisted that the wrong men had been convicted. In Cambodia, only the police and military have guns, meaning it was the police or military, controlled by the government, that killed Vichea.

According to an old police officer living France, Cambodia's police force is "as powerful as God." They are also known to torture prisoners, similar to S-21 and the political prisoners of the Khmer Rouge. In fact, one officer (filmed privately through a wall) said that feeding corpses to crocodiles was a common practice. Indeed: "A Cambodian's life is worth the same as a chicken's...a French dog is worth more."A former judge told Cox that not only are many judges not properly educated in the legal systems (part of the Khmer Rouge's educational legacy), but also that "there isn't a single judge who is innocent" from the CPP.

On the part of the elite, there is no want to change the current Hun Sen dominated system--while many activist groups believe there might be. The CPP and its high ranking members can do whatever they want, including quash any opposition. Before the 2003 elections, there were a lot of high profile killings: a judge, a politically active monk, and an opposition advisor. Shortly after the highly contested elections (that were not resolved for nearly a year), a journalist was killed. And then Vichea. According to Rainsy, the government "will kill any secondary target." The message: accept Hun Sen or die.

Vichea's brother in part of the film castigates the U.S. and U.K. governments for not caring about human rights abuses, and in fact claiming that human rights in Cambodia have improved. But at the end of the day, as one of the international workers put it: The U.S. just does not care enough, and they have more important things attending to their interests than a small country. It does not bother them that they ravished the country in the 1970s leading Cambodia to disarray, genocide, and injustice (and a host of other problems).

Samnang (left) and Oeun at their appeals trial on
November 7, 2012.

At the end, the filmmakers tell where the main players are today. In fact, some of the policemen involved in the case have died (Hok Lundy in 2008 in a "mysterious" helicopter fire) or are in prison themselves (such as Heng Pov, once Hun Sen's "right hand man" is a victim of "political infighting"). Both Oeun and Samnang were provisionally released on December 31, 2008, but then on December 27, 2012 were re-sentenced even after King Sihanouk said they were innocent, and Heng Pov said so also. It is a widely held belief that Samnang and Oeun are the unfortunate scapegoats. No one knows for sure who killed Chea Vichea, but the killing is almost certainly (although I will not say 100% in a legal case as such) connected to Hun Sen.

And what about the activists who did not attract this much media attention?

Works Cited:
"Cambodia Jails Journalist Mam Sonando over 'Plot.'" BBC. 1 Oct. 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19783123

"Cambodia Profile." BBC. 21 Feb. 2013. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13006543 Web.

Gleensdale, Roy. "Cambodian Journalist Murdered." The Guardian. 12 Sept. 2012. Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2012/sep/12/journalist-safety-cambodia Web.

Who Killed Chea Vichea? Cox, Bradley Dir. Independent Television Service, 2010. Film.

The Great (illegal) Timber Trade

I just finished reading Joel Brinkley's book Cambodia's Curse: A Modern History of Development for my Independent Study Seminar. Although the writing is honestly a bit elementary (which also on the other hand opens it up to a wider audience), the book does provide a wealth of information. A wealth of information, except that (in my opinion) he fails to organize his chapters well with subject headings or at least string the book chronologically.

There are a few solitary sentences of the book that I find particularly problematic (for example on page 5 when Brinkley states that modern Cambodia has not changed since the Middle Ages), but besides this, Brinkley has researched and knows Cambodia well. Because of his vast experience in Cambodia, Brinkley has a tendency to over-assume and make blanket statement about numerous aspects of Cambodian society and government. Although I am no expert on Cambodian history and cannot directly refute any of his statements, his language is rather dogmatic.

The overwhelming majority of the book covers Cambodian history after independence from France in 1953, with only a few references to the ancient Khmer Empire and French influence on Cambodia. Much of the book covers the U.N. Occupation of Cambodia (and its failure to do anything substantial except help with the first free elections in 1993, according to Brinkley) in the early 90s and the corruption that is embedded in the government and how this adversely affects the people. The picture that Brinkley paints of Cambodia is, as I assumed before reading, very grim. His chapters go in circles describing the awful corruption that occurs within the government, and how unfortunately, NGOs and aid organizations (from grassroots to the World Bank) actually indirectly encourage this corruption rather than hinder it (which is debatable). Corruption, he describes, is an inherent feature of the Cambodian government today and functions like a hierarchical patronage system, similar to that during the Khmer Empire.

Cambodian Rosewood, taken from a website of a man who
says that it is endangered due to "general clearing of the land"
and not the small amount of exports. I beg to differ.

One offshoot about corruption that greatly intrigued me was Cambodia's illegal logging. Cambodian wood is absolutely stunning with unique coloration, and needless to say: much nicer than anything at IKEA. Deforestation continues to be a massive problem, and in top of this, the government is extremely tangled in a net of corruption so that NGOs, government aid, loans, etc. cannot even help the problem. The Cambodian government even reports faulty statistics on how much of the Cambodian forests are left. The International Monetary Fund found that only 1.7-3.4% of Cambodia still had primary growth (200 year old+) forests, but the Cambodia Forest Ministry stated there was 59%--a huge difference (the actual number is likely somewhere in-between, closer to the IMF's estimation) (Brinkley 292). As for forest cover, the U.N. reported that today Cambodia's land is 57% forested (in 2010), although this estimate likely includes tree plantations. In 1990, the number was 73%. The World Bank tried to funnel money to the save the forests, only to have their money squandered through systematic governmental corruption.

Illegal logging on a mass scale in Cambodia has its roots during the Khmer Rouge. During the Khmer Rouge's reign, which officially started in 1975, a lot of their funding came from illegal logging and wood exports to China and Thailand. China was actually a supporter of the Khmer Rouge, and essentially funded Pol Pot's luxury jungle villa. In fact, illegal logging supported the Khmer Rouge until it officially left Cambodia in 1993. That's right: contrary to popular belief, the Khmer Rouge was still an active force in Cambodia until mid-1996 when Prime Minister Hun Sen offered them amnesty, and then basically inactive when Pol Pot died in April 1998.

The remnants of what was once a tree.

Still in 1995 after U.N. occupation, Cambodian military was illegally exporting teak, rosewood, and mahogany-like lumber to Thailand, raking in about $20 million a month (99, 157). One haul of illegal timber meant for Vietnam alone cost $13 million (270). Brinkley describes how military forces will come in the middle of the night to set aside land for logging. He depicts one incident in 2004 in which 800 villagers camped in a forest to prevent it from being clear cut, only to have a hand grenade thrown at them in the middle of the night (no one was killed) (176). In December 2002, 150 Cambodians protested outside of the Forestry and Wildlife Ministry against the deforestation and loss of livelihood--only to be attacked by the police leaving seven wounded and one dead. A lot of the loggers will donate money to supporting governmental public works, and therefore gain free reign to the forests. Acquiring this status only takes $100,000. The Cambodian government has authorized 3-4 million cubic meters of illegal logging, with the international NGO Global Witness stating that Hun Sen's 4,000 men bodyguard unit "serves as a nationwide timber trafficking service." In fact, Global Witness was denounced by Hun Sen who threatened to terminate the workers' visas and sue the NGO (177).

Most recently, NPR released a story about Chinese growth and the impact this has on Cambodian logging. Because Thailand, a country with similar wood, has placed and enforced strict regulations about their wood leaving the country, Cambodia faces extra pressure to supply the Chinese market. Moreover, China is one of the biggest foreign aid donors to Cambodia. But when it comes to illegal logging: in a country with one of the lowest GDPs in the world, who wouldn't try and make money any way possible? And with stories about journalists who uncover the illegal logging being killed, who is going to tell? And with NGOs who report the problem being threatened to leave, what can we do?

[Shameless self promotion: Check out what I wrote about deforestation in Alaska last semester!]

Works Cited:

Brinkley, J. (2011). Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land. New York, New York: PublicAffairs.