26 November 2003--Impunity for Kids of Officials (Part 3) [1] The nephew of Prime Minister Hun Sen, 22-year old Nim Sophea, was arrested yesterday on charges of causing a traffic accident and murder. A police spokesman said they believe he was the one who actually fired the shots that killed two bystanders after a traffic accident at the end of October. His mother is Hun Sen's sister, a Foreign Ministry official. His father is undersecretary of state at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Usually when the children of the rich and powerful of Cambodia get in trouble they are released with a warning or for "lack of evidence." We'll see what happens in this case.
[2] In another incident yesterday, two men on a motorbike drove the wrong way around a traffic circle near a stadium where two universities had just finished a soccer game. Another youth had stopped the car he was driving and run away before the two on the motorbike drove up and shot up the car. They then entered the stadium and fired into the air. The incident was witnessed by the traffic and military police who said they dared not arrest the two because they feared they might be the sons of powerful families. According to one police officer, the gunman shouted "I can kill everyone. Nobody here dares to arrest me." He was right.
14 November 2003--Shoe Companies in Cambodia Shoe companies, most of Taiwanese origin, arrived in Cambodia in the late 1990s. Presently there are ten footware companies here--down from sixteen just a few years ago--and there are fears more may leave. The reason is that Cambodia cannot compete with the world's largest and second-largest shoe producers, China and Vietnam. Unless Cambodia can develop a niche market in the shoe industry, it is feared that Cambodia's slow design-to-delivery time; the lack of government support for developing environmentally sound products; Cambodia's higher costs for importing and transporting materials; and the big cost of corruption will cause shoe companies here to simply move across the border.
5 November 2003--Sad Stories of Cambodia--One day in the newspaper
4 November 2003--Impunity for Kids of Officials (Part 2) On Sunday evening there was another incident involving the children of high officials in Cambodia. This time two children (one 25 and the other 15) of an air force general had their car shot up while driving away from a nightclub birthday party where there was some argument about someone's stepping on another's feet. As usual people are reluctant to identify the criminals. (One official who wisely did not want to be identified suspects that those involved in this second incident were from the same group responsible for the earlier drunken car crash and shootings that left three dead and four wounded.)
3 November 2003--Impunity for Kids of Officials Last week one car of a four-vehicle convoy of children of high officials, coming from a birthday party, ran into a truck that was unloading coconuts on one of the main Phnom Penh streets. The party goers were drunk. One of the coconut workers was killed in the crash, but then one of the men from the other cars got out an AK-47 and started shooting bystanders, killing two of them. The occupants of the other three cars then drove away. The driver of the crashed car has been identified as has another of the assailants who has been "invited" to come and talk to the police about the incident. If you're rich and a child of the elite, you can get away with a lot in Cambodia.
2 September 2003--Better, but not good at all Every year students finishing high school in Cambodia take an exam, and this year 40.6% of them passed it, a figure up from 39.9% last year. A 40% pass rate is certainly nothing to be proud of. The figures were highest in the Phnom Penh area where 77.3% passed. The head of the teachers union said that was because of the widespread cheating here. A real problem is the lack of a standardized grading system which prevents students from judging their grasp of the material and also from comparing their performance against others. An Australian advisory group has recommended a system to remedy the situation but it has not been adopted by the Ministry of Education which prefers to let standards be set by senior ministry officials who may know nothing about education.
1 September 2003--Not much hope Cambodia is conservatively estimated to have 160,000 people infected with AIDS at present. Of those, approximately 1,300 are receiving the anti-retroviral drugs which give them a promise of years, decades of prolonged life. At a meeting today, officials proposed to give the ARVs to 5,000 people with AIDS by the year 2005. It's a drop in the bucket, but that's life--and death--in Cambodia.
31 August 2003--Election Results The CPP has been trying to build a coalition ever since preliminary figures showed their lead, but Funcinpec and the SRP have now formed a coalition and are demanding that someone other than Hun Sen become prime minister or else they will not work with the CPP. The NEC will now send the results to King Sihanouk who, according to the constitution and election law, will call for the first assembly of the new legislature to be on September 24.
On 30 August, the National Election Commission in Cambodia declared Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party the official winners of the national elections for the legislature held on 27 July. The results gave the CPP 73 seats in the 123-seat body while the royalist Funcinpec party got 26 seats and the opposition Sam Rainsy Party got 24. However, the CPP did not receive a two-thirds majority which would have enabled it to rule on its own. Now it must create a coalition in order to form a new government.
20 August 2003--Mayor: The city government is not responsible for squatter fire Phnom Penh Governor (mayor) Kep Chuktema met with the poor people burned out in a fire in a squatter area earlier this week. He wanted to assert the city's non-involvement in the fire which killed two boys and left 96 families homeless. It's a sad commentary when people would believe their own government would burn them out, but there are strong suspicions on the part of many that officials were responsible for starting fires that burned out tens of thousands of people in the last year and a half.
18 August 2003--The Sad State of Schooling Some Cambodian children in Preah Vihear province, one of Cambodia's poorest, cross the nearby border to study in Laos because of the poor educational facilities in their own area. The border is close by and the nearest district schools are 80 km away and the nearest provincial schools 140 km. There are 138 provincial schools in Preah Vihear, all but 27 of them primary schools. Of all the schools only fifteen have a latrine and only eighteen have a water supply. Save the Children Norway, an NGO, believes only about 40% of the province's children attend any school. Now there is a fear that those studying in Laos will lose their cultural identity and even their Khmer language so that they won't be able to get jobs if they return to Cambodia. The province is particularly deprived because it was one of the last strongholds of the Khmer Rouge until they demobilized in 1998, and the government and aid agencies were not able to reach the province before then.
17 August 2003--Favoring friends? There's a brouhaha going on in Cambodia now because of the way the Finance Ministry advertised for bids for uniforms for the country's customs officials. Several companies decried the process as non-competitive, one saying that it would provide the uniforms for $700,000 instead of the $1.3 million that was the bid of the winning company. One bizarre twist to the story revealed how a government official went to a newspaper at night and stopped their press run in order to insert the ad that is required by law. The trouble was that many of the papers had already been printed and were not destroyed, so only some copies of the paper had the required notice. Somehow this doesn't seem all that strange given that this is Cambodia.
14 August 2003--ARV Drugs Produced in Cambodia Yesterday anti-retroviral drugs to combat AIDS--made in Cambodia for the first time--went on sale in Phnom Penh. These drugs will be a little cheaper than the ARVs imported from other countries, but at $30 a month for the two pills a day, they are still far beyond the reach of the large majority of the AIDS sufferers in Cambodia.
13 August 2003--First the firemen, now the police While the firemen are trying to exact payment for fighting fires (see 12 August 2003), the police are finding new opportunities for shaking down people trying to make a meagre living. Police have been deployed along national highways in the post-election season, ostensibly to check vehicles for guns, but are using the opportunity to stop motorists and demand money. One truck driver hauling cattle said that in this period after the elections, his truck has usually been stopped about seven times on each trip between Kampong Chhnang and Phnom Penh, with the demand for money about $1.25 at each stop. Recently, however, the demands have escalated. One trip resulted in a demand for $500 and a cow, and the truck was detained for a day before it was released after the authorities settled for about $80 and the cow.
12 August 2003
--Doubly Victims of Fire Another 96 families from a poor area were left homeless by a fire that destroyed their homes a few nights ago. Besides losing their homes and possessions, the displaced families were angry at the firemen who "worked for a few minutes" and then quit because the villagers couldn't pay them. The firefighters had been asking $1,500 to fight the blaze (that's more than five times the per capita income for the country) and were actually paid up to $400 by some families, but all to no avail.
27 July 2003--Elections 2003 About thirty candidates and party activists have been killed in the campaign leading up this election, and most observers are noting favorably the reduction (!) in assassinations and incidents of intimidation. While recognizing the lower number of people who have been killed, however, the neutral election observers have said that the level of fear and threat is still quite strong, those doing the threatening having learned to be a bit more subtle about it. As violent as the campaign has been, observers are even more worried about the period after the elections, fearful that those unhappy with the results of the polling could easily turn to violence.
For the third time since the creation of the world, Cambodia had elections today to choose a legislature. This is a picture of the polling taking place at a small school across the dirt street from our Maryknoll office. There weren't many people there at any one time, but there seemed to be a stream of people all day long.
7 July 2003--Campaign Violence Makes its Appearance Last week election monitoring and human rights groups expressed concern at the violence that has started to mar the election campaign that began June 28th. Eight party activists or supporters from each of the three main political parties were killed in the first five days of the campaign period, and there were 26 reported cases of intimidation of political opponents in the same period. It's interesting that the 24 deaths were distributed evenly among the parties although the instances of intimidation show only two against the ruling CPP party of Prime Minister Hun Sen.
26 June 2003--Election Campaigns Get Underway Today was the first day of legal campaigning for national elections to be held on July 27th. These will be only the third elections in Cambodia's history. International observers have been recruited to monitor the campaign and the voting on election day. Among the local people there is a real fear of election-related violence. The local-level elections last year saw 22 candidates assassinated during the campaigns.
22 June 2003--Children in Difficult Situations More from the annual report of Save the Children Norway:
Children at Risk in Cambodia:
20 June 2003--Education in Cambodia Save the Children Norway, an international NGO, has reported on one area of its work--education for children in Cambodia--in its 2002 annual report:
* Primary school enrolment was up from 83% just a year ago, but the balance to that encouraging sign is the fact that only 52% of primary schools offer all six grades.
18 June 2003--ASEAN Meetings (Part Two) Apart from the joint communique (requesting the release of Aung Suu Kyi), most member countries went easy on Burma, some minor countries defended the country, and several reserved their right not to comment on the issue on grounds that it wasn't in the ASEAN spirit." From The Nation, a Thai English-language newspaper. The mildly critical communique was a step in the right direction, but a really small one given that there were no consequences laid out for Burma's non-compliance. Basically ASEAN is a feckless talking shop, a half-hearted attempt to project some sort of unity in the face of free-trade agreements, the formation of the European Community, and other geo-political developments. ASEAN still has a long way to go before it gets a backbone.
"...For the first time, ASEAN--which Burma is a member of--has broken its policy of not interfering with member countries' internal issues.....
16 June 2003--ASEAN Meetings Foreign Ministers and top officials from 23 countries have descended upon Phnom Penh for the ASEAN Regional Forum that begins on Wednesday. Before that forum, there is a two-day ASEAN Ministerial Meeting starting today. Then on Thursday there will be a Post-Ministerial Meeting in which ASEAN diplomats will meet with representatives from Australia, Canada, China, the European Union, India, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, South Korea, and the United States. The agendas for these meetings will include terrorism, human trafficking, piracy at sea, money laundering, and SARS. In a departure from usual policy, ASEAN will also address the deteriorating political situation in Burma. In the past ASEAN has been rather impotent because of its policy of non-intervention in members' internal affairs. It will be interesting to see if they actually take a stand on Burma.
15 June 2003--Garment Worker Troubles Cambodia's main source of foreign exchange--and also the main source of employment for people in the city--is the garment industry. Approximately 200 companies employ about 200,000 workers, mostly young women. On Friday there were large demonstrations of workers protesting low wages and the firing of a union leader. Riot police fired into the crowd, killing one worker, and a policeman was also killed as protestors threw stones. The Cambodian government was embarrassed as it was forced to call an emergency cabinet meeting to deal with the troubles just before the ASEAN Regional Forum and ASEAN ministerial meetings that start on Monday.
3 April 2003--Cambodia's Railroads: Old and Dangerous A derailment last week in which a tanker car filled with gasoline went off the tracks and tipped over highlighted the horrible condition of Cambodia's railroads. There are only two functioning lines in the country, and the one going south to Sihanoukville, where the mishap occurred last week, consists of track laid 80 years ago in the French colonial era. An official of the railroad said that the track is so old, "Our train cannot run on it fast, just 3 to 15 MPH."
2 April 2003--Return the bribes but don't worry about prosecution Officials of the Department of Education have been told by Prime Minister Hun Sen to return up to $500,000 in bribes paid by temporary teachers who were told they could acquire permanent teaching positions with the payments. A teacher association president said, however, that around the country the bribes were not being returned. There was never any mention of prosecution so now it seems that the corrupt officials will retain their jobs and the stolen money, and the poor teachers--who average $20 a month for a primary school position--will be even poorer.
24 March 2003--Khmer Rouge Trial Agreement Flawed Amnesty International has described as seriously flawed the recent agreement between the United Nations and the Cambodian government to establish tribunals for former Khmer Rouge leaders charged with the atrocities of the Killing Fields. Amnesty says that the agreement, the result of years of protracted negotiations, must be significantly modified before it is ready to be approved by the respective assemblies in the UN and in Cambodia.
18 March 2003--Two Steps Forward Cambodia made two political steps forward yesterday: First, the Cambodia government transferred $6 million into a Thai government bank account as reparations for the damage done to the Thai embassy and ambassador's residence in the January 29th riots. That should start to normalize relations between the two countries. Second, the Cambodian government and the United Nations negotiators finalized an agreement on how the government and the world body would cooperate to create a tribunal for former Khmer Rouge leaders. Now the agreement must be approved by the Cambodian legislature and the UN General Assembly.
7 March 2003--A Dangerous Game of "Chicken" In developments eerily reminiscent of events that led to Cambodian mobs burning the Thai embassy and Thai-owned business in Phnom Penh, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has made a speech accusing Thailand of killing Cambodians and then closed the border with Thailand on the Cambodian side. In the January 29th riots, many commentators said that a speech by Hun Sen in which he alluded to alleged remarks by a Thai movie star denigrating Cambodia was a principal factor in encouraging the short-lived violence that had the two countries on the brink of war. Rumors of Cambodian embassy staff killed in Thailand--totally untrue--further provoked the crowds here. Now in another speech, the prime minister has referred to Cambodians killed in Thailand's anti-drug campaign (which also is being widely denounced for its lawlessness). And in retaliation for Thailand's re-opening the border only to Cambodians entering Thailand on a one-day visa and not allowing Thais to enter Cambodia, the prime minister has closed the Cambodian side of the border. That move will hurt Cambodia more than Thailand. It keeps the local traders along the border from earning their living trading with their larger neighbor. Perhaps Hun Sen just doesn't realize how grievously offended Thailand was by the riots and destruction of its embassy. Some western diplomats believe the more plausible explanation of Cambodia's behavior is that the ruling party and the prime minister are in election mode, trading on nationalism and anti-Thai feeling before the July elections. Whatever the reason, Cambodia has shot itself in the foot again. Hopefully, as one foreign diplomat said, Bangkok will take a measured response to this further provocation and continue to maintain "the moral high ground" it has held since the riots.
4 March 2003--TB Cases: Less than Predicted Cambodia is one of 22 "burden countries" with the highest incidence of tuberculosis in the world. Within this group of nations, it is expected that the number of TB infections could double by 2005 due to complications caused by the spread of AIDS. So it was somewhat surprising when Cambodia's first formal study of the occurrence of TB in the country found a rate about half of what the WHO had predicted. WHO had projected that 572 of every 100,000 Cambodians would have the disease. Instead the study, carried out in 20 of the provinces, found that approximately 270 of every 100,000 tested positive. Health officials say the improvement is due to better detection and care programs.
28 February 2003--Warning about Christian Proselytizing The Cambodian Ministry of Cults and Religion has issued a broad directive forbidding proselytizing by Christian groups and the distribution of religious materials in what has been described as a pre-emptive move to lessen the possibility of conflict between Buddhists and Christians. Buddhism is the official state religion of Cambodia. Some of the more specific parts of the directive prohibit Christian groups from knocking on people's doors; from uttering the words "The Lord is coming" in public; and from locating churches within two kilometers of each other. The Mormons--who are said to have more than 60 "elders" bicycling around Phnom Penh--may be one of the targets of the new ruling.
20 February 2003--Legislative Assembly Elections In July of this year, elections will be held for the national assembly. There is a fear that the elections may trigger a period of political instability and even violence. Yesterday a high-ranking official of an opposition party--a man spoken of very highly by my friends who knew him--was shot outside a restaurant as he finished lunch. Interior Ministry officials claimed he was the victim of a robbery. His mobile phone was taken, almost as an afterthought, according to eye witnesses. Other officials, however, described the killing as a "warning signal" as the country prepares for the elections, and foreign diplomats said the murder had the hallmarks of a professional killing.
17 February 2003--Health Care in Cambodia (Part 2) [Click here for Part 1] Eight Cambodian women die every day during childbirth, deaths that are avoidable if the women receive minimal medical treatment during pregnancy and have been provided with a few basic nutritional and vitamin supplements. And dozens of Cambodians of both genders and all ages die every day of malaria and tuberculosis, diseases for which cheap, effective medical cures have been around for decades.
The ravages of disease are worsened by a medical system that is often corrupt and constantly overwhelmed. It is a system often lacking basic technology, a system that regularly dispenses outdated medicines or spoiled vaccines and is so widely despised and distrusted by ordinary people that victims of serious illness routinely refuse to seek help until it is too late. (From "Health Scare" by Colin Nickerson of the Boston Globe in The Cambodia Daily, 8-9 Feb 2003)
16 February 2003--Health Care in Cambodia (Part 1) "In the rural areas, where 80 percent of Cambodia's 12.7 million people live, fewer than 30 percent of families have access to clean drinking water, less than half the children receive basic immunizations, and tuberculosis infection rates are the highest in the world, according to the World Health Organization and other international health monitors.
Of every 1,000 children born, 124 die before reaching age 5--a rate nearly unchanged in 20 years despite massive efforts by Western relief agencies and tens of millions of dollars in emergency and development aid.
Put another way: 150 Cambodian children died every day, most succumbing needlessly to wholly curable diseases--upper respiratory infections, dehydration caused by diarrhea, tetanus, and mosquito-borne dengue fever."
(From "Health Scare" by Colin Nickerson of the Boston Globe in the Cambodia Daily, 8-9 Feb 2003)
13 February 2003--Heads must roll A lot of high-level words and emissaries have been going back and forth between Thailand and Cambodia in the last week or so as the government here scrambles to rebuild its reputation in the international community and reassure investors to bring their money to the kingdom. Thailand will have a LOT to say about the pace and the extent to which commercial and diplomatic relations are reestablished, with a lot of bartering going on because Cambodia doesn't have the money just to compensate Thailand for the damages inflicted on Thai business interests and the Thai embassy in Phnom Penh. Probably Thailand will be able to exact political considerations from the Hun Sen administration.
One sign of that may be the firing yesterday of the mayor of Phnom Penh. He wasn't even in the city when the riots occurred but some people suspect he may have been set up as the fall guy. Thailand has hinted that several Cambodian officials were responsible for the rioting and had to go, and the mayor may be just the first. Some locals speak of his unpopularity in Thailand because he has been rebuilding the road on the Cambodian side to a popular border temple that was previously accessible only from the Thai side, and they suspect Thailand may have had a hand in his being appointed ambassador to Burma(!). And his departure may have been politically opportune, too, for the ruling party here because the mayor was popular and considered a possible future contender against Hun Sen to be prime minister.
30 January 2003--Anti-Thailand Riots, continued There was no more trouble last night after the riots of the night before, but now the Cambodian government has to deal with the political fallout of the attack on the Thai embassy. English short-wave radio and the English-language press have been rather hard on Prime Minister's Hun Sen's administration for not containing and controlling the violence--and perhaps for starting it. The BBC this morning reported suspicions that in this period before the elections two weeks from now, Hun Sen's ruling party may have been playing the nationalist card, stirring up animosity against the Thais to whip up nationalistic fervor and distract attention from the real issues and the failings of the government. Local newspapers have been ranting about the alleged comment of the Thai actress for many days now, and Hun Sen, in some people's eyes, gave the green light for something to happen when he spoke at the opening of the deaf school in Kampong Cham on Monday. I was there and heard his comments which were also broadcast on national radio:
Thailand's response to the incidents so far has been angry but measured. A crowd that gathered in front of the Cambodian embassy in Bangkok dispersed after a rare personal appeal from the Thai king who is greatly revered there. A memorandum given to the Cambodian ambassador in Bangkok said the Cambodian government had "either professed helplessness or merely indicated seeming indifference at the acute plight of our diplomatic mission" during the turmoil. The Thai-Cambodian border was closed by Thailand and flights of Thai Airways and Bangkok Airways were halted, but our travel agent called today to say that the flights will resume tomorrow.
The whole tragedy points out how weak Cambodia really is. NGOs and donors continually develop programs to build up the technical capacity of this country. Perhaps more attention needs to be given to building up the moral capacity of Cambodia also to help people deal with the slights and silliness that are part of life. One positive note: the fire trucks finally arrived at the site of the fire in the plastics company pictured yesterday--about a day and a half after the fire started.
"I have seen that people have had a strong reaction around the rumor of 'Morning Star,' who looks down on Cambodia and demands Angkor Wat before she will visit Cambodia. Morning Star is no longer popular in Cambodia.... Many people's houses installed the Thai pictures on the wall, instead of the King and Queen and their parents. I heard from Kampong Chhnang province that many people threw the Thai pictures into the river.... Please, TV5, hurry to stop broadcasting the films that have Kop Suvanant Kongying because I am afraid people will go to destroy the television station.... The life of 'Morning Star," or thief star, is not equal to a few bushes of grass near Angkor Wat."
30 January 2003--Anti-Thailand Riots I first heard about the rioting at 9:00 PM from BBC radio. We had several visitors with us from the US and Japan, and they were out at a restaurant so we were concerned although the embassy is two miles from us. They all returned safely, though. One of them was scheduled to leave today and just barely made it because the offices of Bangkok Airways, on which he was flying, was sacked also and the computer reservation system destroyed so all the company's flights today were canceled. Luckily our colleague was able to transfer to a Cambodian-owned airline to continue his journey back to Bangkok and on to the US. (To be continued)
Last night a mob about 1,000 strong stormed and burned the Thailand embassy in Phnom Penh. The reason? Maybe Thailand troops invaded Cambodia? Maybe Thai-government sponsored thugs tried to assassinate the Cambodian prime minister? No, not actually. A Thailand soap-opera heroine is supposed to have maybe (no one is sure if she did or not) insulted Cambodia as her least favorite place to go, and in retaliation the Khmer-language newspapers vilified her for a week; the Cambodia prime minister banned her soap opera from local television; and then yesterday an enraged crowd attacked the embassy because they felt the Thais were looking down on them. Well, if the Thais didn't look down on the Cambodians before, they probably will now. And so will the rest of the world, with reason. 
The top picture shows an armored personnel carrier outside of the Thai embassy (the pink building on the right) and the lower picture shows a plastics factory still burning the next day after being sacked and set alight.
12 January 2003--Now, if there were just a road... Prime Minister Hun Sen and the Council of Ministers (his cabinet) have decreed that foreigners can now drive across the border into Cambodia. Previously, commercial trucks were the only cross-border traffic allowed. The new decree is one of many encouraged by ASEAN to reduce trade barriers and tariffs and to waive visas among its member countries, but the ruling has not made everyone happy. Taxi drivers and motorcycle taxi operators in Siem Reap, the most probably destination for future drivers, are complaining that self-driven vehicles will diminish their income. They also predict that the decree will cause smuggling to increase. There won't be much change any too soon, though. That road is one of the worst in the country even though it is the most important. We traveled 180 miles of it and it took more than ten hours.