By Dustin Roasa
Wednesday, December 1, 2010; 12:41 PM
ANLONG VENG, CAMBODIA - In a dimly lighted concrete classroom with smudged and peeling walls, the principal of Anlong Veng High School recalled the man who had built it, the late Khmer Rouge leader Ta Mok.
"Everyone here loves Ta Mok. He was a good leader, and he cared about his people," 42-year-old Sreng Kor Ma said. Known as "the Butcher" for his brutality during Khmer Rouge rule, the commander remains popular in this remote former Khmer Rouge stronghold in northwestern Cambodia, where he built hospitals, bridges and other infrastructure and where thousands of the organization's former soldiers still live.
But this year, 12 years after the Khmer Rouge surrendered, long-held loyalties are finally being challenged in Anlong Veng. In April, a local truth and reconciliation forum allowed victims to publicly confront people who had participated in the regime. In June, the government distributed a high school textbook here that for the first time teaches the history of the Khmer Rouge to the children of its former soldiers.
And in July, a joint U.N. and Cambodian tribunal handed down its first conviction of a former Khmer Rouge member, sentencing the onetime chief of the notorious Tuol Sleng torture center, Kaing Khek Iev, better known as Duch, to 35 years in prison. With each of those developments, anxiety has grown among Anlong Veng's Khmer Rouge veterans, complicating efforts at reconciliation and their attempts to reintegrate into Cambodian society.
"There is resentment and fear among the former Khmer Rouge, but they are powerless to do anything," said Chhang Youk, head of the independent Documentation Center of Cambodia. "For them, life under the Khmer Rouge was glorious, but the regime has become symbolic of evil. It is creating divisions within families."
Life after the Khmer Rouge
During the Khmer Rouge rule of Cambodia from 1975 until 1979, an estimated 1.7 million people were executed or died from starvation, disease or overwork. When the Vietnamese invaded and toppled the Pol Pot-led government in 1979, remnants of the regime and its military fled to Cambodia's border with Thailand. There they launched an insurgency that endured until the last of the movement surrendered in December 1998.
As Pol Pot, Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary directed the guerrilla war from their bases in western Cambodia's mountains and jungles, Ta Mok cultivated a following in Anlong Veng. But in the mid-1990s, after a U.N.-sponsored peace agreement led to the country's first democratic elections in 1993, Khmer Rouge fighters began defecting to the government, culminating in the surrenders of Ieng Sary in 1996 and Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan in 1998. Pol Pot died of natural causes in 1998, and Ta Mok, who had held out, was captured in 1999 in the nearby Dangrek Mountains. He died in prison in 2006 while awaiting trial.
Most former Khmer Rouge fighters have since descended into the grinding poverty common in rural Cambodia, and many remain nostalgic for the movement. Although a few elite Khmer Rouge officials kept their local government posts in exchange for laying down their arms, the rank and file remain poor, unskilled farmers.
"These people have benefited very little following the surrender," said Sok Leang of the Center for Justice and Reconciliation, which holds public forums throughout Cambodia, including in Anlong Veng. "They are embedded with the utopian agrarian ideology of the regime. They were brought up with no concept of doing business."
Sor Lim, 55, who joined the Khmer Rouge as a teenager in 1974, settled down to life as a poor rice farmer in 1998. "Life under the Khmer Rouge was good. Ta Mok fed everyone, but now life is difficult because we have to provide for ourselves," he said.
The ongoing Khmer Rouge tribunal has also provoked worries here. Early next year, the court is expected to begin trying Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary and his wife, Ieng Thirith, another former Khmer Rouge minister. The court's mandate is to prosecute senior leaders and those most responsible for crimes, but it has not said whether it will pursue cases beyond those four. This has done little to calm fears in Anlong Veng.
Recent media speculation has centered on Im Chaem, 64, who was a provincial district chief during Khmer Rouge rule in the late 1970s. In 2007, she told researchers from the Documentation Center of Cambodia that she had supervised construction of the Trapeang Thma dam, a project in which thousands of forced laborers are thought to have died.
On a sweltering recent evening, Im Chaem returned from working in the fields to her wooden stilt house outside Anlong Veng. As the sun cast long shadows across the parched grass, Im Chaem declined to discuss her past in the Khmer Rouge. If the court summoned her, she said, she would refuse to go. "Cambodia is at peace and stable," she said. "If there are more prosecutions, there will be war."
Prime Minister Hun Sen, who defected from the Khmer Rouge in 1978, has also repeatedly warned of instability if the court pursues more suspects. "Cambodia must dig a hole and bury the past," he has said.
But confronting the past is just what Cambodia must do to move forward, said Chhang Youk, of the documentation center. "Reconciliation in Khmer terms is reconnecting the broken pieces," he said. "It's our obligation to put these broken pieces together, so that we can understand."
The center produced the first government-approved textbook about the Khmer Rouge, the 75-page "A History of Democratic Kampuchea," which it distributed in Anlong Veng in June as a supplement to the Education Ministry's high school history textbook, which contains less than four pages on the Khmer Rouge.
As in much of Cambodia, Anlong Veng's young people know few details about the Khmer Rouge, despite the town's connection to the regime. Touch Valeak, 19, a student at Anlong Veng High School, said the new textbook was helping students understand a key part of their history, though his parents remain skeptical of both the book and the tribunal. "They are suspicious," he said.
This resistance has hindered reconciliation, Sok Leang said. But the public forums, the textbook and the tribunal are beginning to have an impact, he said. Still, the Khmer Rouge retains a powerful allure here. Up in the Dangrek Mountains, an overgrown path leads to a rectangle of black soot under a rusted tin roof. Pol Pot's body was burned here on a pile of tires after his death in 1998.
Nuom Sothea, 31, a roadside cellphone vendor, said she didn't know much about the man. "But he has a strong spirit, and many local people go there to pray to him," she said. It was Nuom Sothea's birthday, and later that day she planned to walk to Pol Pot's final resting place, where she would leave a bunch of ripe bananas in hopes of bringing good luck.
Roasa is a special correspondent.
© 1996-2010 The Washington Post
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
Thursday, December 16, 2010
World Cinema: Cambodians take hard self-look
Two new movies in the nation's inaugural film fest deal with the Khmer Rouge horror.
By Dustin Roasa, Special to the Los Angeles Times
November 28, 2010
Reporting from Phnom Penh, Cambodia —
On an unseasonably cool evening last month, nearly 700 people filed into the Chenla Theater for the final night of the inaugural Cambodia International Film Festival. The four-day event had drawn sizable audiences to films from more than 30 countries, but it was the premiere on this night of a Cambodian film called "Lost Loves" that attracted the festival's largest crowd. As TV crews angled for shots of the well-coifed cast members stepping onto the red carpet, inside the theater multigenerational families chatted excitedly and students snapped cellphone photos and waved to friends.
"Lost Loves" tells the true story of a woman who lost most of her family during the reign of the Khmer Rouge, which oversaw the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Although the brutal communist regime has proved fertile ground for many foreign productions, most notably "The Killing Fields," which won three Academy Awards in 1984, "Lost Loves," by 45-year-old Chhay Bora, is the first feature film about the Khmer Rouge by an all-Cambodian cast and crew in nearly 25 years. It is only the second such movie made since the regime's demise (the first, a mid-1980s action movie called "Shadow of Darkness," did not make much of an impression here).
Together with another landmark Cambodian-made film released this year, "Enemies of the People," a documentary co-directed by and starring 42-year-old journalist Thet Sambath that examines the motives behind the mass slaughter, the movies are a sign that Cambodian filmmakers are finally ready to grapple with the traumas of the past.
"The Khmer Rouge has been a complex and political issue for a long time. But after 30 years, Cambodia is ready to cope with this," said Chhang Youk, a survivor and the country's foremost researcher of the regime. "You will begin to see more films about this subject now."
Both directors, who are self-taught and were boys during the Khmer Rouge, said their goal in making the films was to spur discussion about a topic that many people here would prefer to forget. "Helping people understand history is the most important thing I can do," Thet Sambath said. "I want Cambodians to know the truth about what happened. Then we can move forward as a country."
The films are generating a level of discussion about the Khmer Rouge that is rare in Cambodia. During many harrowing scenes in "Lost Loves," there were gasps from the audience, and many cried. "I'm no longer angry about the Khmer Rouge," Chhay Bora, who lost two brothers to the regime, told the crowd. "I just want to share with the nation, and with the world, Cambodia's untold story."
"When our parents tell us about their experiences during the Khmer Rouge, we have a hard time believing them," Lim Seang Heng, a 22-year-old university graduate, said after the premiere, echoing a common sentiment. "Telling stories is not enough, because we can't see. Film allows us to see."
Although "Lost Loves" and "Enemies of the People" are very different movies — the former focuses on the nightmarish experiences of one family, while the latter investigates larger issues such as motives and reconciliation — they are complementary.
"Lost Loves," co-written by and starring Chhay Bora's wife, actress Kauv Sotheary, follows Phnom Penh resident Amara, a character based on the actress' mother, as she is shipped with her family into a forced labor camp in the countryside. She endures overwork, near starvation and the death of family members before emerging from her nightmare shellshocked, yet defiantly hopeful, after the Vietnamese invasion in 1979.
Shot in the Cambodian countryside, "Lost Loves" is at times strikingly beautiful, featuring wide-angle shots of shimmering rice paddies and skies smeared purple with the setting sun. But these scenes are punctuated by acts of brutality, turning the landscape into a "prison of torture and killing," as Amara says in the film.
As Amara adapts to this alien world, the familiar structures of Cambodian life crumble around her: She is separated from her family, cruel and uneducated children take positions of authority over adults, and unending, grinding labor under the hot sun becomes the central fact of her life. The mysterious Angkar ("organization" in English), the Khmer Rouge's name for itself, is omnipresent yet somehow always hidden. "The village chiefs endlessly talked about Angkar, Angkar, Angkar, but I didn't know what Angkar was," Amara says in the film.
"Enemies of the People," which was just named as one of 15 contenders for the Academy Award for best documentary feature, attempts to answer some of Amara's questions. Director Thet Sambath, a reporter
at the English-language Phnom Penh Post, spent 10 years traveling alone with a camera into the countryside to interview Nuon Chea, second in command to the late leader Pol Pot and the regime's highest-ranking surviving leader, and foot soldiers who carried out the regime's murderous policies.
English director Rob Lemkin worked with Thet Sambath to craft this raw footage into a finished film. The director was driven by a need to understand the killers' motives (his parents and brother died under the Khmer Rouge) and to share what he found with other Cambodians.
"No one has confessed to killing during the regime," he said. "I felt that maybe I could talk to the killers and understand why they killed."
In "Enemies of the People," Nuon Chea admits for the first time on record that the leadership ordered executions, about which he expresses remorse. But it is the director's interviews with two low-level killers, Soun and Khoun, that are most haunting. They speak matter-of-factly about killing their victims by slashing their throats, dumping their bodies in mass graves and, in one scene, drinking bile from a human gall bladder.
Although it was men like Soun and Khoun who killed Thet Sambath's brother, the director was able to forgive them, an act of reconciliation that he hopes can be repeated throughout Cambodia. "I pity them. They don't understand how they ended up becoming killers," he said. In the film, Soun says he's haunted by shame and regret. "But I want to tell the truth exactly as it happened," he says onscreen. "Otherwise we will be gone soon and the next generation won't know the story."
The directors could not turn for help to the country's few film studios, which invest mostly in low-budget horror movies, the only reliable way to draw audiences to the two remaining cinemas in Phnom Penh. "People told me I was crazy to make this kind of film," Chhay Bora said. Regardless, the films have drawn capacity audiences at screenings in Phnom Penh, and there are plans to show them in rural Cambodia through unconventional means, such as at community forums held by nongovernmental organizations.
calendar@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
By Dustin Roasa, Special to the Los Angeles Times
November 28, 2010
Reporting from Phnom Penh, Cambodia —
On an unseasonably cool evening last month, nearly 700 people filed into the Chenla Theater for the final night of the inaugural Cambodia International Film Festival. The four-day event had drawn sizable audiences to films from more than 30 countries, but it was the premiere on this night of a Cambodian film called "Lost Loves" that attracted the festival's largest crowd. As TV crews angled for shots of the well-coifed cast members stepping onto the red carpet, inside the theater multigenerational families chatted excitedly and students snapped cellphone photos and waved to friends.
"Lost Loves" tells the true story of a woman who lost most of her family during the reign of the Khmer Rouge, which oversaw the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Although the brutal communist regime has proved fertile ground for many foreign productions, most notably "The Killing Fields," which won three Academy Awards in 1984, "Lost Loves," by 45-year-old Chhay Bora, is the first feature film about the Khmer Rouge by an all-Cambodian cast and crew in nearly 25 years. It is only the second such movie made since the regime's demise (the first, a mid-1980s action movie called "Shadow of Darkness," did not make much of an impression here).
Together with another landmark Cambodian-made film released this year, "Enemies of the People," a documentary co-directed by and starring 42-year-old journalist Thet Sambath that examines the motives behind the mass slaughter, the movies are a sign that Cambodian filmmakers are finally ready to grapple with the traumas of the past.
"The Khmer Rouge has been a complex and political issue for a long time. But after 30 years, Cambodia is ready to cope with this," said Chhang Youk, a survivor and the country's foremost researcher of the regime. "You will begin to see more films about this subject now."
Both directors, who are self-taught and were boys during the Khmer Rouge, said their goal in making the films was to spur discussion about a topic that many people here would prefer to forget. "Helping people understand history is the most important thing I can do," Thet Sambath said. "I want Cambodians to know the truth about what happened. Then we can move forward as a country."
The films are generating a level of discussion about the Khmer Rouge that is rare in Cambodia. During many harrowing scenes in "Lost Loves," there were gasps from the audience, and many cried. "I'm no longer angry about the Khmer Rouge," Chhay Bora, who lost two brothers to the regime, told the crowd. "I just want to share with the nation, and with the world, Cambodia's untold story."
"When our parents tell us about their experiences during the Khmer Rouge, we have a hard time believing them," Lim Seang Heng, a 22-year-old university graduate, said after the premiere, echoing a common sentiment. "Telling stories is not enough, because we can't see. Film allows us to see."
Although "Lost Loves" and "Enemies of the People" are very different movies — the former focuses on the nightmarish experiences of one family, while the latter investigates larger issues such as motives and reconciliation — they are complementary.
"Lost Loves," co-written by and starring Chhay Bora's wife, actress Kauv Sotheary, follows Phnom Penh resident Amara, a character based on the actress' mother, as she is shipped with her family into a forced labor camp in the countryside. She endures overwork, near starvation and the death of family members before emerging from her nightmare shellshocked, yet defiantly hopeful, after the Vietnamese invasion in 1979.
Shot in the Cambodian countryside, "Lost Loves" is at times strikingly beautiful, featuring wide-angle shots of shimmering rice paddies and skies smeared purple with the setting sun. But these scenes are punctuated by acts of brutality, turning the landscape into a "prison of torture and killing," as Amara says in the film.
As Amara adapts to this alien world, the familiar structures of Cambodian life crumble around her: She is separated from her family, cruel and uneducated children take positions of authority over adults, and unending, grinding labor under the hot sun becomes the central fact of her life. The mysterious Angkar ("organization" in English), the Khmer Rouge's name for itself, is omnipresent yet somehow always hidden. "The village chiefs endlessly talked about Angkar, Angkar, Angkar, but I didn't know what Angkar was," Amara says in the film.
"Enemies of the People," which was just named as one of 15 contenders for the Academy Award for best documentary feature, attempts to answer some of Amara's questions. Director Thet Sambath, a reporter
at the English-language Phnom Penh Post, spent 10 years traveling alone with a camera into the countryside to interview Nuon Chea, second in command to the late leader Pol Pot and the regime's highest-ranking surviving leader, and foot soldiers who carried out the regime's murderous policies.
English director Rob Lemkin worked with Thet Sambath to craft this raw footage into a finished film. The director was driven by a need to understand the killers' motives (his parents and brother died under the Khmer Rouge) and to share what he found with other Cambodians.
"No one has confessed to killing during the regime," he said. "I felt that maybe I could talk to the killers and understand why they killed."
In "Enemies of the People," Nuon Chea admits for the first time on record that the leadership ordered executions, about which he expresses remorse. But it is the director's interviews with two low-level killers, Soun and Khoun, that are most haunting. They speak matter-of-factly about killing their victims by slashing their throats, dumping their bodies in mass graves and, in one scene, drinking bile from a human gall bladder.
Although it was men like Soun and Khoun who killed Thet Sambath's brother, the director was able to forgive them, an act of reconciliation that he hopes can be repeated throughout Cambodia. "I pity them. They don't understand how they ended up becoming killers," he said. In the film, Soun says he's haunted by shame and regret. "But I want to tell the truth exactly as it happened," he says onscreen. "Otherwise we will be gone soon and the next generation won't know the story."
The directors could not turn for help to the country's few film studios, which invest mostly in low-budget horror movies, the only reliable way to draw audiences to the two remaining cinemas in Phnom Penh. "People told me I was crazy to make this kind of film," Chhay Bora said. Regardless, the films have drawn capacity audiences at screenings in Phnom Penh, and there are plans to show them in rural Cambodia through unconventional means, such as at community forums held by nongovernmental organizations.
calendar@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
Minorities Gather to Discuss Tribunal Genocide Charges
Kong Sothanarith, VOA Khmer | Phnom Penh Thursday, 25 November 2010
“Our minority was forced to eat what we cannot, forced to abandoned our religion.”
More than 300 victims of the Khmer Rouge, many of them Cham Muslim, gathered at the Documentation Center of Cambodia on Wednesday to learn more about genocide charges for the upcoming trial of four regime leaders.
Chams suffered to a great degree under the Khmer Rouge, and their plight in part makes up the charges of genocide against the four leaders.
Those leaders, Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary and Ieng Thirith, will face charges they contributed to the targeted killings of Chams, Vietnamese and the Khmer Krom, the Khmer ethnic minority in today’s southern Vietnam.
Other groups represented at Wednesday’s meeting were those from the Kuoy, Phnong and Mil ethnic groups, as well as Cham and Khmer Krom. They came from as far as Banteay Meanchey province in the north and Takeo in the south.
“We want them to understand widely what genocide is,” said Vannthan Peou Dara, deputy director of the Documentation Center. A better understanding of genocidal acts of the Khmer Rouge could help prevent such acts in the future, he said.
As many as half a million Chams died under the Khmer Rouge, which is thought to have killed up to 2 million Cambodians altogether. Hundreds of Vietnamese were killed while the regime was in power, along with thousands of Khmer Krom.
Cham Muslims were especially targeted, forbidden to undertake their religious practices and forced to eat pork, among other violations.
“Our minority was forced to eat what we cannot, forced to abandoned our religion,” said Ron Sem, a 62-year-old Cham from Takeo province. “They wanted us to die quietly.”
The Chams participated in several revolts against the rule of the Khmer Rouge, which led to massacres, execution of religious leaders and the destruction of mosques and religious schools. How the treatments of the Chams and other groups will play out in the upcoming case remains to be seen.
“We want to know what is going on with the trial,” said Thin Theam, a ethnic minority Mil from Kratie province.
READ MORE HERE: http://www.dccam.org/Projects/Public_Info/Conference_with_the_Minority_Groups_in_Cambodia.htm
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
“Our minority was forced to eat what we cannot, forced to abandoned our religion.”
More than 300 victims of the Khmer Rouge, many of them Cham Muslim, gathered at the Documentation Center of Cambodia on Wednesday to learn more about genocide charges for the upcoming trial of four regime leaders.
Chams suffered to a great degree under the Khmer Rouge, and their plight in part makes up the charges of genocide against the four leaders.
Those leaders, Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary and Ieng Thirith, will face charges they contributed to the targeted killings of Chams, Vietnamese and the Khmer Krom, the Khmer ethnic minority in today’s southern Vietnam.
Other groups represented at Wednesday’s meeting were those from the Kuoy, Phnong and Mil ethnic groups, as well as Cham and Khmer Krom. They came from as far as Banteay Meanchey province in the north and Takeo in the south.
“We want them to understand widely what genocide is,” said Vannthan Peou Dara, deputy director of the Documentation Center. A better understanding of genocidal acts of the Khmer Rouge could help prevent such acts in the future, he said.
As many as half a million Chams died under the Khmer Rouge, which is thought to have killed up to 2 million Cambodians altogether. Hundreds of Vietnamese were killed while the regime was in power, along with thousands of Khmer Krom.
Cham Muslims were especially targeted, forbidden to undertake their religious practices and forced to eat pork, among other violations.
“Our minority was forced to eat what we cannot, forced to abandoned our religion,” said Ron Sem, a 62-year-old Cham from Takeo province. “They wanted us to die quietly.”
The Chams participated in several revolts against the rule of the Khmer Rouge, which led to massacres, execution of religious leaders and the destruction of mosques and religious schools. How the treatments of the Chams and other groups will play out in the upcoming case remains to be seen.
“We want to know what is going on with the trial,” said Thin Theam, a ethnic minority Mil from Kratie province.
READ MORE HERE: http://www.dccam.org/Projects/Public_Info/Conference_with_the_Minority_Groups_in_Cambodia.htm
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
Questions Remain in Cambodia Crush
Justin Mott for The New York Times
People visited the site of the bridge stampede in Phnom Penh on Thursday, paying their respect by offering flowers and prayers and burning incense.
By SETH MYDANS
Published: November 25, 2010
Mourners offered prayers for the victims of the bridge stampede in Phnom Penh on Thursday.
Most of the victims were caught in a crush on a small bridge. Rather than being trampled, the victims suffocated or were crushed to death by a dense, immobile crowd in which some people were trapped for hours.
Various officials gave different counts of the death toll, which may not include victims who drowned or were taken from the scene.
On Wednesday, the government said that at least 350 people had died and that 400 had been injured. But among other tallies on Thursday, a newspaper, The Phnom Penh Post, citing government sources, said the death toll had climbed to 456.
As grief and shock turned to demands for explanations, questions continued to grow over the cause of the crush, over the response by the police and over the city’s readiness to handle an influx of as many as three million people for the festival.
A preliminary government investigation reported that the mostly rural festival-goers panicked when the suspension bridge began to sway slightly under the weight of the crowd.
This conformed to a report by a military police investigator, Sawannara Chendamirie, who said on the morning after the disaster that survivors told him there had been shouts that the bridge was collapsing.
There were also questions about whether some people had been electrocuted, possibly by strings of lights on the fretwork of the bridge. Reports to that effect began immediately after the disaster, with some saying the police fired water hoses at the crowd that might have contributed to the problem.
Doctors at the city’s main hospital, Calmette, did not rule out that possibility, but said they had seen no sign of electrocution among either the injured or the dead. But they said most of the injured had suffered from the squeezing of the packed crowd. Some patients at the hospital said they had been unable to breathe and had passed out.
The police came under criticism for a failure of crowd management and for an inadequate and incompetent response to the disaster. One officer said only half the officially reported number of police officers were actually deployed. Seriously injured survivors reported being dumped into vehicles together with the dead.
The government did quickly mobilize help for relatives of victims, many of whom traveled from distant provinces to claim the dead. Tables were set up near a makeshift morgue to confirm identities. Military trucks offered transportation home for coffins and family members. The morgue was all but cleared within a day, although some people wandered the hospital grounds holding snapshots of missing relatives.
The Asian Human Rights Commission, based in Hong Kong, issued a report that documented the questions and criticisms.
“While the exact cause of the stampede last night remains unclear, with contradictory reports indicating it may have been instigated by either crowd antics or poor construction of the bridge to Koh Pich Island, the failure of the state to control the crowd and limit the damage from the stampede is clear,” the report said.
“It is clear, too, that Phnom Penh was unprepared for any large-scale disaster,” the report said. “Responses by police and military were lacking and may even have contributed to the stampede while hospitals were overwhelmed. Emergency and medical personnel resorted to piling bodies together, covering them with mats or sheets.”
www.AstonBali.com
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
People visited the site of the bridge stampede in Phnom Penh on Thursday, paying their respect by offering flowers and prayers and burning incense.
By SETH MYDANS
Published: November 25, 2010
Mourners offered prayers for the victims of the bridge stampede in Phnom Penh on Thursday.
Most of the victims were caught in a crush on a small bridge. Rather than being trampled, the victims suffocated or were crushed to death by a dense, immobile crowd in which some people were trapped for hours.
Various officials gave different counts of the death toll, which may not include victims who drowned or were taken from the scene.
On Wednesday, the government said that at least 350 people had died and that 400 had been injured. But among other tallies on Thursday, a newspaper, The Phnom Penh Post, citing government sources, said the death toll had climbed to 456.
As grief and shock turned to demands for explanations, questions continued to grow over the cause of the crush, over the response by the police and over the city’s readiness to handle an influx of as many as three million people for the festival.
A preliminary government investigation reported that the mostly rural festival-goers panicked when the suspension bridge began to sway slightly under the weight of the crowd.
This conformed to a report by a military police investigator, Sawannara Chendamirie, who said on the morning after the disaster that survivors told him there had been shouts that the bridge was collapsing.
There were also questions about whether some people had been electrocuted, possibly by strings of lights on the fretwork of the bridge. Reports to that effect began immediately after the disaster, with some saying the police fired water hoses at the crowd that might have contributed to the problem.
Doctors at the city’s main hospital, Calmette, did not rule out that possibility, but said they had seen no sign of electrocution among either the injured or the dead. But they said most of the injured had suffered from the squeezing of the packed crowd. Some patients at the hospital said they had been unable to breathe and had passed out.
The police came under criticism for a failure of crowd management and for an inadequate and incompetent response to the disaster. One officer said only half the officially reported number of police officers were actually deployed. Seriously injured survivors reported being dumped into vehicles together with the dead.
The government did quickly mobilize help for relatives of victims, many of whom traveled from distant provinces to claim the dead. Tables were set up near a makeshift morgue to confirm identities. Military trucks offered transportation home for coffins and family members. The morgue was all but cleared within a day, although some people wandered the hospital grounds holding snapshots of missing relatives.
The Asian Human Rights Commission, based in Hong Kong, issued a report that documented the questions and criticisms.
“While the exact cause of the stampede last night remains unclear, with contradictory reports indicating it may have been instigated by either crowd antics or poor construction of the bridge to Koh Pich Island, the failure of the state to control the crowd and limit the damage from the stampede is clear,” the report said.
“It is clear, too, that Phnom Penh was unprepared for any large-scale disaster,” the report said. “Responses by police and military were lacking and may even have contributed to the stampede while hospitals were overwhelmed. Emergency and medical personnel resorted to piling bodies together, covering them with mats or sheets.”
www.AstonBali.com
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
Cambodia is familiar with ghosts
By Terry McCoy — Special to GlobalPost
Published: November 23, 2010 12:07 ET in Asia
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Cambodia is a country of ghosts and superstition. Don’t go out at night, they say in the countryside — ghosts. Always live with other people, others say — ghosts. Did you hear the crying last night in the quiet? Ghosts.
Every year in my high school classes in provincial Cambodia I ask my students to rank their greatest fears, and ghosts, despite nagging concerns for HIV, cancer and leeches, always creeps to the top of the list. At first I found this amusing. Now, I get it.
Every single person in this country has been touched by the egalitarian-driven genocide that killed 2 million people between 1975 and 1979. Every single person you see here lost someone during the Khmer Rouge and the apparitions linger and linger. Ghosts.
Now, more wraiths have come for one of Cambodia’s last remaining havens safe from the past: celebration. On Monday night, during the country’s raucous Water Festival in Phnom Penh, which swelled the city’s population from 2 million people to 5 million, nearly 400 people were crushed to death while trying to cross a narrow bridge connecting a small island in the Bassac River.
Prime Minister Hun Sen has called it the worst disaster to beset the country since the Khmer Rouge, personally pledging 5 million riel ($1,250) to the families of the dead.
It’s rumored this country has the most holidays in the world and a glance at the calendar — Constitution Day, Coronation Day, Royal Ploughing Ceremony Day — gives some weight to that claim. They are a time for Cambodians to live it up and forget the past, the poverty, the days slogging behind a water buffalo or inside a garment factory. There’s a sense among most Khmer that says: We lived through hell and so what if we want our holidays long, loud and plentiful?
Monday night’s disaster, however, is a sober reminder that nothing in this genocide-ravaged, impoverished country is safe from tragedy. Cast its lot with the Haitis of the world. A vibrant people ridden by terrible luck yet again.
“This will be a shadow over every boat festival, and it will happen during the water festival next year,” said Youk Chhang, Director of Cambodia’s Documentation Center, which tracks the country’s history. “What happened [Monday] night will have people more cautious. ... This was unexpected. Everyone thought this holiday would be safe.”
I didn’t see the stampede Monday night, though I was in the capital for Water Festival. Phnom Penh is a city that definitely sleeps, but at 10 p.m. Monday night when I finally chose my way home, the streets still teemed with open-shirted Khmer, teeny-bop stands and motorcycles.
Around that time, right when I was deciding I had better get off the streets, a nervous energy began to emerge out of the chaos. All day, everyone had smiled. But as the night dragged itself deeper, the smiles disappeared. By 10 p.m., everyone looked as though they had the same thought as I did. There were too many people. Far too many people.
It’s still unclear what started the stampede that crushed hundreds to death and sent hundreds more to the hospital. But almost all reports agree that something sparked a massive panic on Diamond Island that propelled thousands of people to try and cross a two-lane bridge at the same time. They were scared of something.
All day Tuesday, images of the dead and dying bombarded anyone watching Khmer television, and even international attention has turned its eye to this often-forgotten country sandwiched between a pair of famous neighbors, Thailand and Vietnam. But soon, despite the tragedy of Monday night, the international community will become bored and the ghosts will be left to the Khmer alone.
And if there’s anything Cambodia has become familiar with, it’s ghosts.
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
Published: November 23, 2010 12:07 ET in Asia
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Cambodia is a country of ghosts and superstition. Don’t go out at night, they say in the countryside — ghosts. Always live with other people, others say — ghosts. Did you hear the crying last night in the quiet? Ghosts.
Every year in my high school classes in provincial Cambodia I ask my students to rank their greatest fears, and ghosts, despite nagging concerns for HIV, cancer and leeches, always creeps to the top of the list. At first I found this amusing. Now, I get it.
Every single person in this country has been touched by the egalitarian-driven genocide that killed 2 million people between 1975 and 1979. Every single person you see here lost someone during the Khmer Rouge and the apparitions linger and linger. Ghosts.
Now, more wraiths have come for one of Cambodia’s last remaining havens safe from the past: celebration. On Monday night, during the country’s raucous Water Festival in Phnom Penh, which swelled the city’s population from 2 million people to 5 million, nearly 400 people were crushed to death while trying to cross a narrow bridge connecting a small island in the Bassac River.
Prime Minister Hun Sen has called it the worst disaster to beset the country since the Khmer Rouge, personally pledging 5 million riel ($1,250) to the families of the dead.
It’s rumored this country has the most holidays in the world and a glance at the calendar — Constitution Day, Coronation Day, Royal Ploughing Ceremony Day — gives some weight to that claim. They are a time for Cambodians to live it up and forget the past, the poverty, the days slogging behind a water buffalo or inside a garment factory. There’s a sense among most Khmer that says: We lived through hell and so what if we want our holidays long, loud and plentiful?
Monday night’s disaster, however, is a sober reminder that nothing in this genocide-ravaged, impoverished country is safe from tragedy. Cast its lot with the Haitis of the world. A vibrant people ridden by terrible luck yet again.
“This will be a shadow over every boat festival, and it will happen during the water festival next year,” said Youk Chhang, Director of Cambodia’s Documentation Center, which tracks the country’s history. “What happened [Monday] night will have people more cautious. ... This was unexpected. Everyone thought this holiday would be safe.”
I didn’t see the stampede Monday night, though I was in the capital for Water Festival. Phnom Penh is a city that definitely sleeps, but at 10 p.m. Monday night when I finally chose my way home, the streets still teemed with open-shirted Khmer, teeny-bop stands and motorcycles.
Around that time, right when I was deciding I had better get off the streets, a nervous energy began to emerge out of the chaos. All day, everyone had smiled. But as the night dragged itself deeper, the smiles disappeared. By 10 p.m., everyone looked as though they had the same thought as I did. There were too many people. Far too many people.
It’s still unclear what started the stampede that crushed hundreds to death and sent hundreds more to the hospital. But almost all reports agree that something sparked a massive panic on Diamond Island that propelled thousands of people to try and cross a two-lane bridge at the same time. They were scared of something.
All day Tuesday, images of the dead and dying bombarded anyone watching Khmer television, and even international attention has turned its eye to this often-forgotten country sandwiched between a pair of famous neighbors, Thailand and Vietnam. But soon, despite the tragedy of Monday night, the international community will become bored and the ghosts will be left to the Khmer alone.
And if there’s anything Cambodia has become familiar with, it’s ghosts.
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
Festival stampede worst tragedy since Khmer Rouge, says PM
A woman next to the body of a stampede victim at a Phnom Penh hospital
Reuters/Chor SokuntheaBy RFI
More than 330 festival-goers were killed in a stampede Monday on a bridge in
Phnom Penh. The Prime Minister called it the country’s worst tragedy since
the Khmer Rouge.
"This is the biggest tragedy since the Pol Pot regime," said Prime Minister
Hun Sen in a live television broadcast early Tuesday morning.
Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge regime that ruled Cambodia between
1975 and 1979, leaving up to a quarter of the population dead.
At least 339 people died in the stampede, and more than 300 were injured.
The circumstances that triggered the stampede remain unclear.
Millions of people were in the streets for the third, and final, day of the
Water Festival, which marks the reversal of the flow between the Tonle Sap
and Mekong rivers.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/international/over-300-dead-in-cambodia-festival-stampede-1.326165
22:34 22.11.10
Latest update 22:34 22.11.10
Over 300 dead in Cambodia festival stampede
Prime Minister describes chaos in Phnom Penh water festival as the biggest
tragedy to strike his country since the communist Khmer Rouge.
By The Associated Press
Tags: Israel news Cambodia
Thousands of Cambodians celebrating a water festival on an island in a river
in the capital stampeded Monday night, leaving more than 300 people dead and
hundreds injured. Some in the panicky crowd who tried to flee over a bridge
were crushed underfoot or fell over its sides into the water.
An injured visitor being carried by Cambodian police and another visitor
after a stampede onto a bridge at an accident site during the last day of
celebrations of the water festival in Phnom Penh, Cam
Ambulances raced back and forth between the river and the hospitals for
several hours after the stampede. Calmette Hospital, the capital's main
medical facility, was filled to capacity with bodies as well as patients,
some of whom had to be treated in hallways. Many of the injured appeared to
be badly hurt, raising the prospect that the death toll could rise as local
hospitals became overwhelmed.
Hours after the chaos, the dead and injured were still being taken away from
the scene, while searchers looked for bodies of anyone who might have
drowned.
An Associated Press reporter saw one body floating in the river, and
hundreds of shoes left behind on and around the bridge.
Prime Minister Hun Sen, in the third of three post-midnight live television
broadcasts, said that 339 people had been killed and 329 injured. He
described the chaos as the biggest tragedy to strike his country since the
communist Khmer Rouge ruled in a reign of terror in the 1970s, and ordered
an investigation.
Hun Sen declared Thursday would be a national day of mourning, and ordered
all government ministries to fly the flag at half-staff.
Authorities had estimated that upward of 2 million people would descend on
Phnom Penh for the three-day water festival, which marks the end of the
rainy season and whose main attraction is traditional boat races along the
river.
The last race ended early Monday evening, the last night of the holiday, and
the panic started later on Koh Pich - Diamond Island - a long spit of land
wedged in a fork in the river where a concert was being held. It was unclear
how many people were on the island to celebrate the holiday, though the area
appeared to be packed with people, as were the banks.
Soft drink vendor So Cheata said the trouble began when about 10 people fell
unconscious in the press of the crowd. She said that set off a panic, which
then turned into a stampede, with many people caught underfoot.
Information Minister Khieu Kanharith gave a similar account of the cause.
Seeking to escape the island, part of the crowd pushed onto a bridge, which
also jammed up, with people falling under others and into the water. So
Cheata said hundreds of hurt people lay on the ground afterward. Many
appeared to be unconscious.
Cambodia is one of the region's poorer countries, and has an underdeveloped
health system, with hospitals barely able to cope with daily medical
demands.
Koh Pich used to host a slum community, but in recent years the poor have
been evicted to make way for high-rise and commercial development, most yet
to be realized.
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
Reuters/Chor SokuntheaBy RFI
More than 330 festival-goers were killed in a stampede Monday on a bridge in
Phnom Penh. The Prime Minister called it the country’s worst tragedy since
the Khmer Rouge.
"This is the biggest tragedy since the Pol Pot regime," said Prime Minister
Hun Sen in a live television broadcast early Tuesday morning.
Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge regime that ruled Cambodia between
1975 and 1979, leaving up to a quarter of the population dead.
At least 339 people died in the stampede, and more than 300 were injured.
The circumstances that triggered the stampede remain unclear.
Millions of people were in the streets for the third, and final, day of the
Water Festival, which marks the reversal of the flow between the Tonle Sap
and Mekong rivers.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/international/over-300-dead-in-cambodia-festival-stampede-1.326165
22:34 22.11.10
Latest update 22:34 22.11.10
Over 300 dead in Cambodia festival stampede
Prime Minister describes chaos in Phnom Penh water festival as the biggest
tragedy to strike his country since the communist Khmer Rouge.
By The Associated Press
Tags: Israel news Cambodia
Thousands of Cambodians celebrating a water festival on an island in a river
in the capital stampeded Monday night, leaving more than 300 people dead and
hundreds injured. Some in the panicky crowd who tried to flee over a bridge
were crushed underfoot or fell over its sides into the water.
An injured visitor being carried by Cambodian police and another visitor
after a stampede onto a bridge at an accident site during the last day of
celebrations of the water festival in Phnom Penh, Cam
Ambulances raced back and forth between the river and the hospitals for
several hours after the stampede. Calmette Hospital, the capital's main
medical facility, was filled to capacity with bodies as well as patients,
some of whom had to be treated in hallways. Many of the injured appeared to
be badly hurt, raising the prospect that the death toll could rise as local
hospitals became overwhelmed.
Hours after the chaos, the dead and injured were still being taken away from
the scene, while searchers looked for bodies of anyone who might have
drowned.
An Associated Press reporter saw one body floating in the river, and
hundreds of shoes left behind on and around the bridge.
Prime Minister Hun Sen, in the third of three post-midnight live television
broadcasts, said that 339 people had been killed and 329 injured. He
described the chaos as the biggest tragedy to strike his country since the
communist Khmer Rouge ruled in a reign of terror in the 1970s, and ordered
an investigation.
Hun Sen declared Thursday would be a national day of mourning, and ordered
all government ministries to fly the flag at half-staff.
Authorities had estimated that upward of 2 million people would descend on
Phnom Penh for the three-day water festival, which marks the end of the
rainy season and whose main attraction is traditional boat races along the
river.
The last race ended early Monday evening, the last night of the holiday, and
the panic started later on Koh Pich - Diamond Island - a long spit of land
wedged in a fork in the river where a concert was being held. It was unclear
how many people were on the island to celebrate the holiday, though the area
appeared to be packed with people, as were the banks.
Soft drink vendor So Cheata said the trouble began when about 10 people fell
unconscious in the press of the crowd. She said that set off a panic, which
then turned into a stampede, with many people caught underfoot.
Information Minister Khieu Kanharith gave a similar account of the cause.
Seeking to escape the island, part of the crowd pushed onto a bridge, which
also jammed up, with people falling under others and into the water. So
Cheata said hundreds of hurt people lay on the ground afterward. Many
appeared to be unconscious.
Cambodia is one of the region's poorer countries, and has an underdeveloped
health system, with hospitals barely able to cope with daily medical
demands.
Koh Pich used to host a slum community, but in recent years the poor have
been evicted to make way for high-rise and commercial development, most yet
to be realized.
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
China's billions reap rewards in Cambodia
By John Pomfret
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 20, 2010; 11:40 PM
IN KOH KONG, CAMBODIA Down a blood-red dirt track deep in the jungles of
southwestern Cambodia, the roar begins. Turn a corner and there is the
source - scores of dump trucks, bulldozers and backhoes hacking away at the
earth. Above a massive hole, a flag flaps in the hot, dusty breeze. The flag
of the People's Republic of China.
Here in the depths of the Cardamom Mountains, where the Chinese-backed Khmer
Rouge communists made their last stand in the late 1970s, China is asserting
its rights as a resurgent imperial power in Asia. Instead of exporting
revolution and bloodshed to its neighbors, China is now sending its cash and
its people.
At this clangorous hydropower dam site hard along Cambodia's border with
Thailand, and in Burma, Laos and even Vietnam, China is engaged in a massive
push to extend its economic and political influence into Southeast Asia.
Spreading investment and aid along with political pressure, China is
transforming a huge swath of territory along its southern border. Call it
the Monroe Doctrine, Chinese style.
Ignored by successive U.S. administrations, China's rise in this region is
now causing alarm in Washington, which is aggressively courting the
countries of Southeast Asia. The Obama administration has cultivated closer
ties with its old foe Vietnam. It has tried to open doors to Burma, also
known as Myanmar, which U.S. officials believe is in danger of becoming a
Chinese vassal state. Relations have been renewed with Laos, whose northern
half is dominated by Chinese businesses. In a speech about U.S. policy in
Asia on Oct. 28, before she embarked on her sixth trip to Asia in two years,
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton used military terminology to refer
to U.S. efforts: "forward-deployed diplomacy."
During a recent trip to Phnom Penh - the first of a U.S. secretary of state
since 2002 - Clinton, while speaking to Cambodian students, was asked about
Cambodia's ties to Beijing. "You don't want to get too dependent on any one
country," she told them.
Still, China powers ahead.
China has concluded a free-trade deal with all 10 countries of the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations, while a similar U.S. pact is only in
its infancy. It is cementing ties with Thailand - a U.S. ally - despite
recent political unrest there.
In Cambodia, Chinese firms have turned mining and agricultural concessions
in Mondulkiri province in the eastern part of the country into no-go zones
for Cambodian police. Guards at the gates to two of them - a gold mine and a
hemp plantation - shoo travelers away unless they are able to pay a toll.
"It's like a country within a country," quipped Cambodia's minister of
interior, Sar Kheng, at a law enforcement conference earlier this year,
according to participants at the meeting.
China's real estate development firms have barged into Cambodia with all the
ambition, bumptiousness and verve that American fruit and tire firms
employed in Latin America or Africa in decades past. One company, Union
Development Group, of Tianjin in northern China, won a 99-year concession
for 120 square miles - twice the size of Washington - of beachfront property
on the Gulf of Thailand. There Chinese work teams are cutting a road and
mapping out plans for hotels, villas and golf courses. The estimated
investment? $3.8 billion. The target market? The nouveau riche from Beijing,
Shanghai and Guangzhou.
Last month, China pledged to support the construction of a $600 million
stretch of railway between Phnom Penh and Vietnam that will bring China a
major step closer to incorporating all of Southeast Asia, as far south as
Singapore, into its rail network.
Across Cambodia, dozens of state-run Chinese companies are building eight
hydropower dams, including the 246-megawatt behemoth on the Tatay River in
Koh Kong. The total price tag for those dams will exceed $1 billion.
Altogether, Cambodia owes China $4 billion, said Cheam Yeap, a member of the
central committee of the ruling Cambodia People's Party.
"This takeover is inevitable," said Lak Chee Meng, the senior reporter on
the Cambodia Sin Chew Daily, one of the country's four Chinese-language
dailies, serving a population of 300,000 Chinese-speaking Khmer-Chinese and
an additional quarter-million immigrants and businessmen from mainland
China. "Cambodia is approaching China with open arms. It's how the United
States took over its neighborhood. It's geopolitics."
The perennial question about China's rise is when will Beijing be able to
translate its cash into power. In Cambodia, it already has.
Cambodia has avoided criticizing Beijing over the dams China is building
along China's stretch of the Mekong River - installations that experts
predict will upend the lives of millions of Cambodians who live off the
fishing economy around the great inland waterway, Tonle Sap.
Cambodia so strictly follows Beijing's "one China" policy that it has
refused Taiwan's request to open up an economic office here despite the many
millions of dollars' worth of Taiwanese investment in Cambodia.
China's heft was also clearly on display in December when Chinese and
American diplomats went toe-to-toe over the fate of 20 Uighur Chinese who
had fled to Cambodia and were seeking asylum. China said that some of the
men, members of a Chinese Turkic minority, were wanted for having
participated in anti-Han Chinese riots in Xinjiang in July 2009. The United
States said don't send them back.
China threatened to cancel a trip by its vice president, Xi Junping, who was
coming to Cambodia with deals and loans worth $1.2 billion in his briefcase.
So Cambodia returned the Uighurs to China. Two days later Xi, who is on
track to be China's next leader, arrived in Phnom Penh.
In April of this year, the U.S. State Department announced that to punish
Cambodia, it was canceling a shipment of 200 U.S. surplus military trucks
and trailers. Less than three weeks later, China donated 257 military
trucks.
Cambodia has also followed China's lead when it comes to the South China
Sea, a 1 million-square-mile waterway that China asserts belongs to Beijing.
In July, Clinton, speaking in Hanoi, challenged China's claims to the open
seas and advocated a multilateral approach to divvying up the fishing rights
and offshore oil and gas that the sea is believed to contain. China opposes
multilateral negotiations, preferring to divide and conquer with bilateral
talks. Last month, Cambodia's prime minister, Hun Sen, backed China's
approach.
China's one-upmanship with the United States continued earlier this month. A
day after Clinton left Cambodia, Wu Bangguo, one of China's top Communist
Party officials, arrived in Phnom Penh. During her visit, Clinton had raised
the possibility that the United States might forgive a portion of Cambodia's
debt to the United States; it owes $445 million. Wu was more forthright. He
struck $4.5 million off Cambodia's tab; Chinese officials are considering
forgiving an additional $200 million.
Only a few obstacles
China's road to domination here hasn't been without potholes. Vietnam, which
ousted the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979 and installed Hun Sen, has woken up to
the threat of increased Chinese influence and has directed Vietnamese
state-owned companies to pour money into Cambodia. From $28 million in 2008,
Vietnamese investment jumped to $268 million in 2009 and to $1.2 billion
this year, according to Cambodian government statistics.
The Vietnamese military runs Cambodia's No. 2 - and soon to be No. 1 -
telecommunications company. Most government officials use its services
because it gives them SIM cards loaded with free minutes.
But China is quick to counter Vietnam. Chinese and Cambodian officials this
month signed a $591 million loan package - Cambodia's biggest ever - from
the Bank of China for Cambodia's other main telecommunications company. The
only catch is that $500 million was earmarked to buy Chinese equipment from
the Chinese telecom giant Huawei.
Even Cambodia's ruler, Hun Sen, has sometimes chafed at the bearhug from
Beijing. In December 2009, Chinese workers finished a massive $30 million
government building where the prime minister was supposed to house his
offices. But Hun Sen didn't like the place, complained about its squat
toilets and the fact that "it didn't even have a proper chandelier,"
according to a Western diplomat. There were also concerns that China had
bugged the premises. So Hun Sen built new offices next door and opened both
buildings last month.
Historical influence
China has exercised imperial sway over Cambodia for centuries. Eight hundred
years ago, Chinese troops bailed out Khmer kings; friendly Chinese warriors
are carved on the side of the famed 12th-century Bayon temple near Angkor
Wat. In the 1950s and 1960s, Communist China embraced the regime of King
Norodom Sihanouk and provided the Khmer Rouge with inspiration, security and
economic assistance throughout their bloody rule from 1975 to 1979.
Sihanouk, now 88 and the king father, resides in Beijing.
Huo Zhaoguo, a Chinese manager of Union Development's massive project along
the Cambodian coast, is typical of the new Chinese coming to this country.
In the 1980s in Lanzhou in northwestern China, Huo struck it rich selling
beans but then lost his fortune. He washed up in Cambodia in the 1990s,
chasing a Vietnamese dealer who owed him money. Huo returned to Lanzhou
penniless but couldn't stay. "I'd been rich there once and so everybody
laughed at me," he said. "A man needs self-respect."
Huo moved back to Cambodia and opened a noodle stand. He moved up to a
noodle restaurant and then met the boss of Union Development, who came to
his shop searching for northern Chinese food. The boss gave Huo a chance at
Union, and now Huo is overseeing road construction. Union got the land
because it had the cash and the connections, Huo said.
"This country is too poor and the corruption is the same as China," he
observed. "If you have power here, you have a great future."
"Cambodians feel no pressure to succeed. They even take weekends off. Not
us," he said, with the air of colonial supremacy you hear from many Chinese
in Cambodia. "We work."
© 2010 The Washington Post Company
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 20, 2010; 11:40 PM
IN KOH KONG, CAMBODIA Down a blood-red dirt track deep in the jungles of
southwestern Cambodia, the roar begins. Turn a corner and there is the
source - scores of dump trucks, bulldozers and backhoes hacking away at the
earth. Above a massive hole, a flag flaps in the hot, dusty breeze. The flag
of the People's Republic of China.
Here in the depths of the Cardamom Mountains, where the Chinese-backed Khmer
Rouge communists made their last stand in the late 1970s, China is asserting
its rights as a resurgent imperial power in Asia. Instead of exporting
revolution and bloodshed to its neighbors, China is now sending its cash and
its people.
At this clangorous hydropower dam site hard along Cambodia's border with
Thailand, and in Burma, Laos and even Vietnam, China is engaged in a massive
push to extend its economic and political influence into Southeast Asia.
Spreading investment and aid along with political pressure, China is
transforming a huge swath of territory along its southern border. Call it
the Monroe Doctrine, Chinese style.
Ignored by successive U.S. administrations, China's rise in this region is
now causing alarm in Washington, which is aggressively courting the
countries of Southeast Asia. The Obama administration has cultivated closer
ties with its old foe Vietnam. It has tried to open doors to Burma, also
known as Myanmar, which U.S. officials believe is in danger of becoming a
Chinese vassal state. Relations have been renewed with Laos, whose northern
half is dominated by Chinese businesses. In a speech about U.S. policy in
Asia on Oct. 28, before she embarked on her sixth trip to Asia in two years,
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton used military terminology to refer
to U.S. efforts: "forward-deployed diplomacy."
During a recent trip to Phnom Penh - the first of a U.S. secretary of state
since 2002 - Clinton, while speaking to Cambodian students, was asked about
Cambodia's ties to Beijing. "You don't want to get too dependent on any one
country," she told them.
Still, China powers ahead.
China has concluded a free-trade deal with all 10 countries of the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations, while a similar U.S. pact is only in
its infancy. It is cementing ties with Thailand - a U.S. ally - despite
recent political unrest there.
In Cambodia, Chinese firms have turned mining and agricultural concessions
in Mondulkiri province in the eastern part of the country into no-go zones
for Cambodian police. Guards at the gates to two of them - a gold mine and a
hemp plantation - shoo travelers away unless they are able to pay a toll.
"It's like a country within a country," quipped Cambodia's minister of
interior, Sar Kheng, at a law enforcement conference earlier this year,
according to participants at the meeting.
China's real estate development firms have barged into Cambodia with all the
ambition, bumptiousness and verve that American fruit and tire firms
employed in Latin America or Africa in decades past. One company, Union
Development Group, of Tianjin in northern China, won a 99-year concession
for 120 square miles - twice the size of Washington - of beachfront property
on the Gulf of Thailand. There Chinese work teams are cutting a road and
mapping out plans for hotels, villas and golf courses. The estimated
investment? $3.8 billion. The target market? The nouveau riche from Beijing,
Shanghai and Guangzhou.
Last month, China pledged to support the construction of a $600 million
stretch of railway between Phnom Penh and Vietnam that will bring China a
major step closer to incorporating all of Southeast Asia, as far south as
Singapore, into its rail network.
Across Cambodia, dozens of state-run Chinese companies are building eight
hydropower dams, including the 246-megawatt behemoth on the Tatay River in
Koh Kong. The total price tag for those dams will exceed $1 billion.
Altogether, Cambodia owes China $4 billion, said Cheam Yeap, a member of the
central committee of the ruling Cambodia People's Party.
"This takeover is inevitable," said Lak Chee Meng, the senior reporter on
the Cambodia Sin Chew Daily, one of the country's four Chinese-language
dailies, serving a population of 300,000 Chinese-speaking Khmer-Chinese and
an additional quarter-million immigrants and businessmen from mainland
China. "Cambodia is approaching China with open arms. It's how the United
States took over its neighborhood. It's geopolitics."
The perennial question about China's rise is when will Beijing be able to
translate its cash into power. In Cambodia, it already has.
Cambodia has avoided criticizing Beijing over the dams China is building
along China's stretch of the Mekong River - installations that experts
predict will upend the lives of millions of Cambodians who live off the
fishing economy around the great inland waterway, Tonle Sap.
Cambodia so strictly follows Beijing's "one China" policy that it has
refused Taiwan's request to open up an economic office here despite the many
millions of dollars' worth of Taiwanese investment in Cambodia.
China's heft was also clearly on display in December when Chinese and
American diplomats went toe-to-toe over the fate of 20 Uighur Chinese who
had fled to Cambodia and were seeking asylum. China said that some of the
men, members of a Chinese Turkic minority, were wanted for having
participated in anti-Han Chinese riots in Xinjiang in July 2009. The United
States said don't send them back.
China threatened to cancel a trip by its vice president, Xi Junping, who was
coming to Cambodia with deals and loans worth $1.2 billion in his briefcase.
So Cambodia returned the Uighurs to China. Two days later Xi, who is on
track to be China's next leader, arrived in Phnom Penh.
In April of this year, the U.S. State Department announced that to punish
Cambodia, it was canceling a shipment of 200 U.S. surplus military trucks
and trailers. Less than three weeks later, China donated 257 military
trucks.
Cambodia has also followed China's lead when it comes to the South China
Sea, a 1 million-square-mile waterway that China asserts belongs to Beijing.
In July, Clinton, speaking in Hanoi, challenged China's claims to the open
seas and advocated a multilateral approach to divvying up the fishing rights
and offshore oil and gas that the sea is believed to contain. China opposes
multilateral negotiations, preferring to divide and conquer with bilateral
talks. Last month, Cambodia's prime minister, Hun Sen, backed China's
approach.
China's one-upmanship with the United States continued earlier this month. A
day after Clinton left Cambodia, Wu Bangguo, one of China's top Communist
Party officials, arrived in Phnom Penh. During her visit, Clinton had raised
the possibility that the United States might forgive a portion of Cambodia's
debt to the United States; it owes $445 million. Wu was more forthright. He
struck $4.5 million off Cambodia's tab; Chinese officials are considering
forgiving an additional $200 million.
Only a few obstacles
China's road to domination here hasn't been without potholes. Vietnam, which
ousted the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979 and installed Hun Sen, has woken up to
the threat of increased Chinese influence and has directed Vietnamese
state-owned companies to pour money into Cambodia. From $28 million in 2008,
Vietnamese investment jumped to $268 million in 2009 and to $1.2 billion
this year, according to Cambodian government statistics.
The Vietnamese military runs Cambodia's No. 2 - and soon to be No. 1 -
telecommunications company. Most government officials use its services
because it gives them SIM cards loaded with free minutes.
But China is quick to counter Vietnam. Chinese and Cambodian officials this
month signed a $591 million loan package - Cambodia's biggest ever - from
the Bank of China for Cambodia's other main telecommunications company. The
only catch is that $500 million was earmarked to buy Chinese equipment from
the Chinese telecom giant Huawei.
Even Cambodia's ruler, Hun Sen, has sometimes chafed at the bearhug from
Beijing. In December 2009, Chinese workers finished a massive $30 million
government building where the prime minister was supposed to house his
offices. But Hun Sen didn't like the place, complained about its squat
toilets and the fact that "it didn't even have a proper chandelier,"
according to a Western diplomat. There were also concerns that China had
bugged the premises. So Hun Sen built new offices next door and opened both
buildings last month.
Historical influence
China has exercised imperial sway over Cambodia for centuries. Eight hundred
years ago, Chinese troops bailed out Khmer kings; friendly Chinese warriors
are carved on the side of the famed 12th-century Bayon temple near Angkor
Wat. In the 1950s and 1960s, Communist China embraced the regime of King
Norodom Sihanouk and provided the Khmer Rouge with inspiration, security and
economic assistance throughout their bloody rule from 1975 to 1979.
Sihanouk, now 88 and the king father, resides in Beijing.
Huo Zhaoguo, a Chinese manager of Union Development's massive project along
the Cambodian coast, is typical of the new Chinese coming to this country.
In the 1980s in Lanzhou in northwestern China, Huo struck it rich selling
beans but then lost his fortune. He washed up in Cambodia in the 1990s,
chasing a Vietnamese dealer who owed him money. Huo returned to Lanzhou
penniless but couldn't stay. "I'd been rich there once and so everybody
laughed at me," he said. "A man needs self-respect."
Huo moved back to Cambodia and opened a noodle stand. He moved up to a
noodle restaurant and then met the boss of Union Development, who came to
his shop searching for northern Chinese food. The boss gave Huo a chance at
Union, and now Huo is overseeing road construction. Union got the land
because it had the cash and the connections, Huo said.
"This country is too poor and the corruption is the same as China," he
observed. "If you have power here, you have a great future."
"Cambodians feel no pressure to succeed. They even take weekends off. Not
us," he said, with the air of colonial supremacy you hear from many Chinese
in Cambodia. "We work."
© 2010 The Washington Post Company
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
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About Me
- Duong Dara
- Dara Duong was born in 1971 in Battambang province, Cambodia. His life changed forever at age four, when the Khmer Rouge took over the country in 1975. During the regime that controlled Cambodia from 1975-1979, Dara’s father, grandparents, uncle and aunt were executed, along with almost 3 million other Cambodians. Dara’s mother managed to keep him and his brothers and sisters together and survive the years of the Khmer Rouge regime. However, when the Vietnamese liberated Cambodia, she did not want to live under Communist rule. She fled with her family to a refugee camp on the Cambodian-Thai border, where they lived for more than ten years. Since arriving in the United States, Dara’s goal has been to educate people about the rich Cambodian culture that the Khmer Rouge tried to destroy and about the genocide, so that the world will not stand by and allow such atrocities to occur again. Toward that end, he has created the Cambodian Cultural Museum and Killing Fields Memorial, which began in his garage and is now in White Center, Washington. Dara’s story is one of survival against enormous odds, one of perseverance, one of courage and hope.