Cambodia

Power To The People

Posted on by Laughingnomad

It is ironic that people who suffer from the worst oppression seem to be the most able to thrive and “find themselves and their calling,” a woman friend from Iran recently said to me as we were discussing the release of Haleh Esfandier, the Iranian American who was recently released after 7 months in jail in Iran. And there is Sharon Ebadi, the Iranian attorney who has been incarcerated for defending over 200 jailed journalists and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. Recalling the take-over of a television station by a group of women in Oaxaca last year, I am so proud of the women of the world who are courageously fighting for justice.

But of course, as in Oaxaca, it is usually the destitute that have the least to lose, except for their lives. You won’t see an uprising in the U.S. anytime soon. We have the most to lose…jobs that provide 401Ks destined for retirement and education of our children are more important to us in the short term than holding corrupt leaders accountable. Witness the University of Florida journalism student who was tasered after being handcuffed and removed from a venue where he was vociferously questioning Senator Kerry. See video here. Safer to hold leaders in other countries accountable.

Cambodia
Nuon Chea, the top surviving leader of Cambodia’s notorious Khmer Rouge, whose radical policies were responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people, was charged by an International Tribunal Wednesday with crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Nuon Chea, considered the right-hand man to Pol Pot, was arrested early Wednesday morning at his home in Pailin in northwestern Cambodia near the Thai border and flown to the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, where he was put in the custody of a U.N.-supported genocide tribunal. The late Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died in 1998 and his former military chief, Ta Mok, died in 2006 in government custody.

The tribunal is investigating abuses committed when the communist Khmer Rouge held power in 1975-79. The Khmer Rouge have been blamed for the deaths of their countrymen from starvation, ill health, overwork and execution.

Officers later took the 82-year-old Nuon Chea – who denies any wrongdoing – into custody and put him into a car and then a helicopter for the capital, Phnom Penh, as his son and dozens of onlookers gathered to watch the historic scene in silence, witnesses said.

Burma
UPDATE Sunday September 23, 2007
The AP has reported that 20,000 March in Yangon (formerly Rangoon) Myanmar…double the number that marched yesterday in Mandalay.

The monks shouted support for Suu Kyi, while about 10,000 people protected them by forming a human chain along the route but riot police and barbed wire barricades blocked hundreds of monks and anti-government demonstrators from approaching the home of the detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi

Plainclothes police trailed the marchers. Some, armed with shotguns, were posted at street corners. Sunday’s security presence came after several days of a hands-off attitude by the authorities, who had clearly been trying to avoid provoking the well-disciplined and widely respected monks. One observer said “the military is not prepared, unless things get worse, to directly confront the monks in their uniforms but violence on a significant scale is not to be discounted.”

UPDATE Saturday September 22, 2007
London’s Guardian reported that witnesses say that upwards of 10,000 monks marched through the city of Mandalay in the 5th straight day of demonstrations against the iron-fisted military junta, the largest demonstration in a decade.

September 19, 2007
The associated press today reported that the Myanmar monks were taking to the streets for the second day in a row, marching in disciplined ranks as they extended a series of spirited demonstrations against the country’s military government into a second month.

The marches on Tuesday by thousands of monks in Myanmar marked the 19th anniversary of the 1988 crackdown in Myanmar in which the current junta took over after crushing a failed pro-democracy rebellion that sought an end to military rule, imposed since 1962.

The junta held general elections in 1990, but refused to honor the results when pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party won. Suu Kyi has been detained under house arrest for more than 11 years.

The Yangon march and rallies in other cities Wednesday were to protest hardship brought on by the government’s economic policies, especially a sudden hike in fuel prices. The hike last month sparked the persistent protests – first by pro-democracy activists and now primarily by monks. The rallies also reflect long pent-up opposition to the repressive military regime.

The authorities know that restraining monks poses a dilemma. Monks are highly respected in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, and abusing them in any way could cause public outrage.

In addition to protests, monks have threatened to cut off contact with the military and their families, and to refuse alms from them – a humiliating gesture that would embarrass the junta.

Monks have nothing to lose…except their lives.

Khmer Rouge Trials

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Ever since visiting the killing fields in Cambodia in 2002, (for pictures click on the category for Cambodia on the right-hand side of the screen) I have watched closely the development of an international tribunal that hopefully will try the remaining Khmer Rouge killers of as many as 1.7 million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979. Anyone who was educated…even wore eyeglasses…was targeted in the interest of blasting Cambodia back to the stone age and creating an agrarian society, leaving Cambodia one of the most destitute and corrupted countries in the world today. So much for ideas. Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge’s despotic leader, died a free man in 1998. Many of the remaining Khmer Rouge leaders, including Nuon Chea, Pol Pot’s chief deputy known as “Brother Number Two,” are aged.
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Khmer Tribunal Starts

Posted on by Laughingnomad

The Seattle Times July 4, 2006 reported that the Khmer tribunal is starting so I went on-line and found the article below by The New Republic Magazine on July 12, 2006.

These are some pictures we took of the Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh Cambodia in 2002:
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Observers see trouble ahead for the tribunal:

CAMBODIA’S WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL.
Trial and Error
by Joshua Kurlantzick
07.12.06

… In a hall of the royal palace in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, in front of a Buddhist monk, judges for the upcoming tribunal of the Khmer Rouge were sworn into office. “The time for justice has finally arrived,” United Nations Under-Secretary-General Nicolas Michel told the Daily Telegraph.

Soon, the capital will be transformed into a hive of activity for the long-delayed tribunal of top leaders of the Khmer Rouge, who killed some 1.7 million of their countrymen between 1975 and 1979. There’s not much time left: Khmer Rouge supreme leader Pol Pot is dead, and top Khmer Rouge lieutenants, men like Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, are aging and unwell. After the United Nations last year gave final approval to the tribunal, organizers chose a site, began training court workers, and started translating documents.

As I found on a recent visit, Cambodians clearly want the tribunal to begin. In a poll taken by the Khmer Institute of Democracy, a Phnom Penh NGO, nearly 97 percent of Cambodians favored a Khmer Rouge trial, and over 70 percent said they would attend its hearings. Yet that 97 percent may wind up 100 percent unsatisfied, a lesson for other tribunals like the ones in Sierra Leone or Iraq, or a potential future tribunal for East Timor. Despite praise from U.N. officials about the tribunal’s potential, the major actors needed to create an effective tribunal–in this case, China, the United States, the United Nations, and the Cambodian government itself–all have not truly gotten on board, and Cambodia could wind up with a badly misgoverned trial. And a failed tribunal would be a disaster not only for Pol Pot’s survivors, who desire some closure. As could happen in Sierra Leone or East Timor, a failed tribunal would decimate the country’s justice system and political culture, which are already on life support.
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Siem Reap

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My original plan was to take a boat up the Mekong River in Cambodia to the Lao border and then on up through Laos but I kept hearing reports about the opening and closing of the border and you have to pay off the guards to let you through and someone reported they had to pay $200 and if they don’t let you through for some reason that day and then you are faced with coming all the way down the Mekong back to Phnom Penh and starting over in another direction so I said the heck with it and decided to do the “tourist route” to Siem Reap instead.

Siem Reap
While Bob took a bus to the Thai border and then on to Bangkok, I took a fast boat down the Tonle Sap (Great Lake) to Siem Reap, a sleepy village famous for it’s many wats (temples and monasteries) especially the biggest-Angkor Wat-but fast becoming a major tourist destination. Most of the people sat on the roof of the boat for the four hour trip through marshes and past entire villages on stilts.

I spent an entire day on a motorcycle taxi going from one temple to another that was built between the 9th and 14th centures in the middle of the jungle when the Khmer civilisation was at the height of its creativity.

Angkor is one of the most important archaeological sites in South-East Asia. Stretching over some 400 sq. km, including forested area, Angkor Archaeological Park contains the magnificent remains of the different capitals of the Khmer Empire, from the 9th to the 15th century. These include the famous Temple of Angkor Wat and, at Angkor Thom, the Bayon Temple with its countless sculptural decorations. UNESCO has set up a wide-ranging programme to safeguard this symbolic site and its surroundings.

You could easily spend a week or more here seeing all the monuments. Most temples are actually little more than ruins…blocks of carved volcanic and sandstone rock lying in piles at the foot of the remaining structures. Much of Angkor’s finest statuary is stored inside conservation warehouses because of the danger of theft. In some monuments such as Ta Prohm, where a French movie company was filming the few days I was there, the jungle has stealthily waged an all-out invasion with bare tree roots spilling out and over the walls.

I had a Cambodian roast chicken and vermicelli salad late lunch at Les Artisans D’Angkor, a small artisan shop and cafe amazingly situated directly opposite Angkor. I thought of my friend Jana who visited here in the 60’s and wondered how the town had changed since then. My day ended taking pictures of the sun setting pink on the face of the dark stone of Angkor Wat.

I had had my fill of war museums in Vietnam and Phnom Penh so I avoided the War Museum in Siem Reap with an exhibition of Soviet and Chinese Mi-8 helicoptors, Mig 19 destroyers, T 54 Tanks and US 105mm artillery. You could also see an artificial minefield here, the brochure says. My motorcyle driver did pull onto the grounds of a Buddhist temple on the way back from Angkor that displayed a glassed-in pagoda filled with bones and skulls that could be viewed from all four sides.

Back in my hotel I spent some time organizing photos on my computer…we have some really wonderful ones of people…especially women and children. I gave a two hour English lesson to one of the Khmer girls that worked in the kitchen of the guesthouse where I was staying.

Finally, after five days, it came time to leave Siem Reap so I regretfully said goodbye to Arnfinn and his Khmer staff and left the simple and elegant Earthwalker Guesthouse that was built and managed by a young Norwegian cooperative and made my way down a dirt road out to the highway with my pack on my back to flag down a motorcycle taxi for the 10 minute ride to the airport. The young guys working in the airport laughed at my hair when I walked in. “Motorcycle Hair” I said laughing! The $100 Lao Aviation flight that took me to Vientiane Laos had no safety card, no airline magazine, no safety demonstration by the hostess and no floatation device under the seat…and I doubt if there were oxygen masks…but we did get a sad little hamburger patty and bun with a packet of catsup.

Cambodia Today

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Pol Pot, the architect of one of the most brutal and radical revolutions that had its origins in Beijing China, was never brought to international justice. He died in 1989 from Malaria (or some say a massive heart attack). Some of his cohorts are running free; some are in jail in Phnom Penh.

The guesthouse where I was staying offered motorcycle tours to Pol Pot’s house and grave about four hours from Siem Reap but knowing that there are still a few thousand Khmer Rouge out there and knowing they hate the Americans I decided to stay put. Today Hun Sen of the Cambodian People’s Party, who destroyed all his opposition with political guile and cunning and likes to be called The Strongman of Cambodia, was elected Prime Minister in 1998, amid rioting and demonstrating, but recently seems to be a force for stability. There will be another election in 2003.

The People
Even though the country is very poor, the Cambodian people are surprisingly open, cheerful and friendly…busily going about their business on bicycles and motorcycles…scars lying just beneath the surface by years of conflict and the legacy of an estimated four to six million landmines dotting the countryside awaiting new victims. As many as 40,000 Cambodians have lost limbs due to mines…the highest per capita rate in the world…about one in 250 people. But they are reserved and guarded with foreigners…those human ATM machines.

At the Goldiana Hotel in Phnom Penh, the desk folder contained 7 double sided pages of Non Governmental Organizations with 35 NGO’s listed on each page…all attempting in one way or another to undue the ravages of war…providing over 70% of the income of the country.

It is heartening to see children gleefully playing marbles in the street and friends laughing over a beer in a sidewalk cafe…life bravely continuing on. We still prefer to eat at sidewalk food stalls, many of which are really extensions of the family kitchen that is all moved back inside at the end of the day. We did stop in one restaurant for Bob’s favorite drink, iced coffee and my favorite drink, Lemon Juice, to find that as many as 35 older children from the countryside lived and worked there so of course Bob entertained them all with his camcorder…their giggling and laughing…

Facing Cambodia’s Past at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

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We got our second wind and almost reluctantly mounted a motorcycle taxi to do what we (or at least I) came here to do and that is to see, after more than 30 years of war and terror, what has finally happened to this country that has survived carpet bombing under Nixon’s secret orders to go after Viet Cong in the 70’s.

Remember Nixon told us we were not bombing Cambodia. We weren’t-officially-our pilots and “advisors” dressed in T shirts and shorts, along with Cambodian pilots, were. Cambodia has somehow survived four years of Pol Pot’s murderous regime and his attempt to completely erase Cambodia’s past by outlawing money and dismantling the entire education system and then another 20 years of political instability and armed insurgencies and coups by various political aspirants, including former president Sihanouk and his own son.

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, opened in 1980, is a former high school that became the Khmer Rouge’s S-21 secret prison. After the Khmer Rouge revolutionaries under Pol Pot and inspired by Chairman Mao took over the city in April 1975, they immediately forced the entire population into the countryside as part of its radical social program to turn the country into an agrarian society.

Young children were trained as guards that became exceptionally cruel to the engineers, technicians, intellectuals, professors, teachers, students and ministers and diplomats that ended up in mass graves in the extermination camps of Choeng Ek. As the revolution reached greater heights of insanity the torturers and executioners who worked here killed their predecessors and were in turned killed by those who replaced them. When asked if the guards knew they would end up being killed the tour guide said they probably did not owing to the paranoia and secrecy of the regime. S-21 and all its many branches was headed by a former mathematics teacher by the name of Kang Kek Ieu or Comrade Duk.

When asked, our guide said that the movie “The Killing Fields” was only about 40% true…suggesting that the horror was about 60% greater than the film allowed. The Khmer Rouge, like the Nazis, were meticulous in keeping records and the walls of the school-turned-prison and now museum is covered with the photographs of the men, women and children who were later killed or sent to the countryside to work in the rice fields. Incidentally, several foreigners from Australia, France and the US were also held here and tortured before being murdered.

The situation was made especially complex by the fact that China supported not only Pol Pot but also Sihanouk who is still living in Beijing after all these years. Thailand supported the Khmer Rouge and harbored Pol Pot in a fenced compound throughout the 80’s, the Soviet Union supported Vietnam-a historical enemy of Cambodia’s-and the US and the UN supported anyone that was anti-Vietnamese, including the Khmer Rouge, because after all the Vietnamese were communist. Never mind that the Khmer Rouge was communist too…so the Western world stood by silently while Vietnam intervened in 1979 to help insurgency groups try to kick out the Khmer Rouge.

But the Vietnamese stayed. Finally in 1989, when, suffering with it’s own disastrous economic experiment, it withdrew it’s troops. However, with most of the Vietnamese gone, the opposition coalition, still dominated by the Khmer Rouge, launched a series of offensives against the government forces and in the first 8 months of 1990 another 2000 Cambodians lost their lives. Well, it’s all as clear as mud to me too but you get the idea. (The expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and events through the mid 70’s are documented by William Shawcross in “Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon & the Destruction of Cambodia.”)

The UN
Then a plan was devised whereby the UN was to supervise the administration of the country and ensure fair elections in 1993, which it did, before it packed up and went home leaving behind a mess because so many of the powers involved in brokering the deal had their own agendas. It was a travesty that the Khmer Rouge was allowed to play a part in the process and must have seemed like a cruel joke to the Cambodians who had lost family members under its rule. To make it worse, when the UN left it took weapons away from rural militias who provided the backbone of the government defence force against the Khmer Rouge.

According to analysts, by 1994, when it was finally outlawed by the government, the Khmer Rouge was probably a greater threat to the stability of Cambodia than at any time since 1979. But in 1994 the Khmer Rouge resorted to a new tactic of targeting tourists; three people were taken from a taxi on the road to Sihanoukvile and shot and a few months later another three foreign backpackers were taken from a train bound for Sihanoukville and executed. This is the road that Bob is going to take back across the Thai border when we leave Cambodia so he could have a tooth extracted in Bangkok!

Then the government, in a bid to end the war, offered amnesty to Khmer Rouge units who were willing to come over to the government side. But the break-through came in August 1996 when Ieng Sary, Brother No. 3 in the Rouge hierarchy, was denouncd by Pol Pot for corruption. Sary then led a mass defection of fighters that severed the Rouge from the source of it’s resources…the Pailin area rich in gems and timber. Then the paranoid Pol Pot ordered the execution of Son Sen, former defence minister of the regime and many of his family members. This provoked a putsch within the Khmer Rouge leadership to put the responsibility of the mass murders on one person as the hardline general Ta Mok seized control of the movement and put Pol Pot on ‘trial’.

Entering Cambodia

Posted on by Laughingnomad

October 13-25 2002
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At the Phnom Penh airport your passport is passed along from one to another of 13 uniformed and polished immigration officials sitting all in a row before it is finally stamped. I think to myself that this may be an omen of things to come but our interaction with the country’s bureaucracy turned out to be minimal.

I’m exhausted from trying to sort out all my conflicted feelings about Vietnam and don’t feel like doing much which is ok anyway because Bob turned up with a gastro-intestinal condition the day after we arrive that takes about three days to work itself out so to speak.

Walking around the town center reminds me of what I think of as the wild west in the states..dirt roads full of potholes and detritus…4-wheel drives and motorcycles and bicycles throwing hot dust in your face as they go by. Later on we discovered that the main roads in the nicer parts of town were paved.