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 | Loung Ung: Activist, Author, Lecturer
"Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."
~ Cheif Seattle |
Loung's Blog
Thoughts from day to day...
From time to time I will make updates to this page -- while I
travel, have a passing thought, or feel inspired to share with the
world something interesting I will post here.
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Golden Bones by Sichan Siv |
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07/02/2008 @ 9:45 am |
Hot off the press!
Golden Bones
An Extraordinary Journey from Hell in Cambodia to a New Life in America
By Sichan Siv
Price: $25.95
On
Sale: 7/1/2008
While the United States battled the Communists of North Vietnam in the 1960s and '70s, the neighbouring country of Cambodia was attacked from within by dictator Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge imprisoned, enslaved, and murdered the educated and intellectual members of the population, resulting in the harrowing "killing fields"–rice paddies where the harvest yielded nothing but millions of skulls.
Young Sichan Siv–a target since he was a university graduate–was told by his mother to run and "never give up hope!" Captured and put to work in a slave labor camp, Siv knew it was only a matter of time before he would be worked to death–or killed. With a daring escape from a logging truck and a desperate run for freedom through the jungle, including falling into a dreaded pungi pit, Siv finally came upon a colorfully dressed farmer who said, "Welcome to Thailand."
He spent months teaching English in a refugee camp in Thailand while regaining his strength, eventually Siv was allowed entry into the United States. Upon his arrival in the U.S., Siv kept striving. Eventually rising to become a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Siv returned with great trepidation to the killing fields of Cambodia in 1992 as a senior representative of the U.S. government. It was an emotionally overwhelming visit.
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Crickets for dinner |
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06/18/2008 @ 6:59 pm |
Crickets for dinner
Crunchy, protein-rich, cheap, these bugs are a dinner delight in Cambodia
Reuters
They're considered a plague in most parts of the world, but for a province in Cambodia, the millions of crickets that swarm the plains every year are a cause for celebration.
In rural Kompong Thom, crickets are a delicacy, served up deep-fried, crunchy and seasoned.
Some Cambodians believe eating crickets regularly improves health and longevity and the region is the country's leading cricket producer as its watery soil helps the insects flourish.
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Font:****"They taste very good and I like to eat them every day," said Gnoun Vanny who regularly buys the bugs for family dinner.
Crickets are rich in protein and some research suggests they help lower cholesterol. Hunting crickets also helps provide extra income for many poor farmers. "I catch anything between one and 10 kilograms a day and this business helps me to support myself and improve my living conditions," 50-year-old cricket hunter Meo Teun said.
During the cricket season the market fills with the smell of frying crickets and queues of customers who pick through the piles for the fattest bugs.
"To make the crickets taste good, I mix them with a lot of seasoning and fry them in good quality oil," says cricket seller Ren Sreymeo.
Eating crickets is an Asian affair. In Vietnam, the crunchy insects are popular finger food while in Bangkok, water bugs, grasshoppers, larvae and mealworms are sold off carts in the street to both rich and poor.
http://www.canada.com/topics/lifestyle/food/story.html?id=3fef163b-8601-43d1-9409-12c0ac6ee112
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http://www.beyondyearzero.org/ |
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06/18/2008 @ 6:59 pm |
A new site by a conscientious student.
Thanks.
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Cambodia faces challenge of oil |
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06/12/2008 @ 6:22 pm |
James Norman, Cambodia.
June 13, 2008
Page 1 of 2
HERE in Siem Reap, in northern Cambodia, there is a sense of optimism that after decades of brutality, corruption and endemic poverty, better times are finally on the horizon.
Cambodia has struck oil off its southern coast, near the town of Sihanoukville, but no one knows exactly how much is there.
According to Marvin Yeo, who left the Asian Development Bank to establish a Cambodian venture-capital company, it is the only country that has untapped oil and gas reserves and land available for agriculture.
Yet there is good reason for concern that Cambodia's energy reserves might prove to be a poison chalice. In countries such as Nigeria and Chad, the people have been left worse off after big resource booms dragged them further into poverty and corruption. Today, 70% of Nigerians live on less than $1 a day, despite the country earning $450 billion from oil over the past 35 years.
The discovery of oil in Cambodia has attracted significant international investment, and exploration rights are divided between American (Chevron), Chinese, Indonesian, Hong Kong and Singaporean investors. As an indicator of regional enthusiasm, China reportedly gave a $600 million donation to Cambodia, just as Chinese companies were fighting for a larger share of the exploration rights.
During an international oil and gas conference in Phnom Penh in March, Cambodia was told by regional government and energy sector representatives to eradicate corruption or risk losing out on sustained investment. It was also urged to sign the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative that requires governments and companies to disclose their financial records relating to oil, gas or mining deals.
Cambodia remains deeply traumatised by the "killing fields" of the Khmer Rouge, when 1.7 million people died between 1975 and 1979. In a country where 60% of the land is forested, 82% of Cambodians still live without electricity or proper irrigation, and 35% live on less than 50¢ a day.
Moreover, a recent tourism boom — evident in Siem Reap, with its opulent French cafes and bakeries — is having a negative impact on Cambodia's ethnic minorities. There has been a rush of foreign investment in real estate, often cutting into traditional tribal land, with no tangible benefit to the people living there.
Prime Minister Hun Sen and his ruling Cambodian People's Party, buoyed by the tourism boom, last year smoothed the way for investors to form 100% foreign-owned companies that can buy real estate outright.
"Neither the central government nor local officials consider the impacts on minority groups when awarding land concessions to local companies," said Pen Bunna, the Ratanakkiri co-ordinator for the Cambodian rights group Adhoc. Attempted protests by ethnic minorities over the past month have been effectively made illegal by regional authorities.
Lee Tan, the Asia-Pacific region co-ordinator for the Australian Conservation Foundation, said it did not take "rocket science" to work out what was ahead for Cambodia if its oil resources were exploited when corruption remained such a problem. "The governance track record of Cambodia is a problem," she said. "As long as there is no political will or effective governance, oil revenue can be abused.
"Unfortunately, the hunger for oil will see that such resource is exploited — often with support from development banks like the World Bank (which facilitated logging in Cambodia, Papua New Guinea and other forested nations that fuels corruption) and the Asian Development Bank or even AusAID."
The question for Cambodians is closer to home. Prime Minister Hun Sen has said explicitly that "we will try our best to make sure that the oil income is a blessing, not a curse. These revenues will be directed to productive investment and poverty reduction."
But many observers remain wary. Will the revenue be used to improve the appalling road and transport infrastructure, to build clinics and schools and irrigation channels, to raise the standard of living and to provide affordable power to its rural communities?
Or will it be sucked up by a powerful elite, again condemning the 14 million people in this damaged country to continue to suffer?
Sadly, history would indicate the latter to be the more likely outcome.
James Norman, a former Australian Conservation Foundation communications adviser, is writing as an independent journalist.
"Neither the central government nor local officials consider the impacts on minority groups when awarding land concessions to local companies," said Pen Bunna, the Ratanakkiri co-ordinator for the Cambodian rights group Adhoc. Attempted protests by ethnic minorities over the past month have been effectively made illegal by regional authorities.
Lee Tan, the Asia-Pacific region co-ordinator for the Australian Conservation Foundation, said it did not take "rocket science" to work out what was ahead for Cambodia if its oil resources were exploited when corruption remained such a problem. "The governance track record of Cambodia is a problem," she said. "As long as there is no political will or effective governance, oil revenue can be abused.
"Unfortunately, the hunger for oil will see that such resource is exploited — often with support from development banks like the World Bank (which facilitated logging in Cambodia, Papua New Guinea and other forested nations that fuels corruption) and the Asian Development Bank or even AusAID."
The question for Cambodians is closer to home. Prime Minister Hun Sen has said explicitly that "we will try our best to make sure that the oil income is a blessing, not a curse. These revenues will be directed to productive investment and poverty reduction."
But many observers remain wary. Will the revenue be used to improve the appalling road and transport infrastructure, to build clinics and schools and irrigation channels, to raise the standard of living and to provide affordable power to its rural communities?
Or will it be sucked up by a powerful elite, again condemning the 14 million people in this damaged country to continue to suffer?
Sadly, history would indicate the latter to be the more likely outcome.
James Norman, a former Australian Conservation Foundation communications adviser, is writing as an independent journalist.
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Cambodian Schools face up to KR history |
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06/03/2008 @ 10:12 am |
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/200805151854/Post-Life/Schools-face-up-to-KR-history.html
Written by Mom Kunthear
Friday, 16 May 2008
After years of politically charged debate, Cambodia’s Education Ministry has approved plans to teach Khmer Rouge history in high schools, a move that will expose many young Cambodians for the first time to a detailed account of one of the country’s darkest chapters.
The ministry has authorized the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), an organization which has extensively investigated the regime, to train 1,000 teachers on how to present this sensitive era to students.
“At the end of 2009 all high school students will learn about the history of the Khmer Rouge,” DC-Cam Director Youk Chhang told the Post on May 12.
Until now, mention of the Khmer Rouge’s 1975-79 rule over Cambodia was largely absent from school curriculums and most young Cambodians only heard about the atrocities committed by the regime from their relatives.
Up to two million people died of starvation, disease and overwork, or were executed as the Khmer Rouge sought to forge a radical agrarian utopia – emptying the country’s cities and forcing almost the entire population of Cambodia onto vast collective farms.
Cambodia’s government, which includes many former members of the ultra-communist regime, has appeared reluctant to resurrect the country’s painful past by allowing it to be taught in schools.
But many teachers have urged for more information about the Khmer Rouge years to be included in school lessons,
“I support and encourage Cambodian students to learn about the … the Khmer Rouge because Cambodian children have to know about the very painful history that their relatives and country suffered” said Chhun Sarum, director of Wat Koh High School.
Knowledge of Cambodia’s past would help the country’s younger generation prevent a similar upheaval, said Chea Vannath, the former head of the Center for Social Development, one of Cambodia’s key civil society groups.
“This is very good information for Cambodian students so that they have chance to study about their own history,” Vannath said.
“I think students will be shocked and some will get angry when they learn about Khmer Rouge, but this will help them to think about what they should do and not do for their country,” she added.
One high school student, 17-year-old Keo Molika, said she had only ever heard fragments of stories about the Khmer Rouge years from her parents, but was happy that the subject would soon be taught in school.
“I really want to know about this,” she said.
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For investors, Cambodia could be the next Vietnam
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05/30/2008 @ 10:57 am |
International Herald Tribune
By Erika Kinetz
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=13326466
Friday, May 30, 2008
If private equity interest is the bellwether for the hot investments of the future, consider this: At least four new private equity funds, backed by brand-name investors, are aiming to bring $475 million of foreign investment into Cambodia.
"Eventually, Vietnam worked out well," Marc Faber, a fund manager and investment adviser known for his "Gloom, Boom, & Doom Report," said by telephone from Switzerland. "I think the same may happen to Cambodia."
Faber, who is on the boards of two of the new private equity firms in Cambodia - Frontier Investment & Development Partners and Leopard Capital - is not the only one who thinks so.
Jim Rogers, a commodities specialist who founded the profitable Quantum Fund with George Soros in the 1970s, and Robert Ash, former chief executive of AIG Asset Management Services, are also on the board of Frontier.
Heinrich Looser, the retired chief of private banking at Bank Julius Baer in Zurich, and Jim Walker, a former director and chief economist of CLSA Securities, are on the Leopard board as well.
The surge in interest is part of a general turn toward so-called frontier markets as investors seek shelter from the global credit crisis and diminishing returns in developed markets. It is also one more sign that aid-dependent Cambodia, with a gross domestic product of just $8.4 billion last year, could finally be inching out of the shadow of its chaotic past.
For many in the West, Cambodia remains tainted by the communist crackdown after the end of the Indochina wars. Yet China, South Korea and Malaysia have been pouring in investment. In 2006, foreign direct investment totaled $2.6 billion, up from just $340 million in 2004, according to the International Monetary Fund.
A rising segment of Cambodians - a third of whom still live on the equivalent of less than $1 a day - are snapping up Honda Dream motorbikes and KFC chicken drumsticks. Cambodia, which plans to open stock and bond exchanges next year, also has the potential to produce two things the world now craves: more rice and oil.
But take a drive out of the capital, Phnom Penh, where the first skyscrapers are rising in the country, and you return quickly to a landscape of water buffalo and thatch huts, governed by the rhythm of the rains.
That looks like opportunity to Marvin Yeo, who recently quit as a syndicate manager at the Asian Development Bank to co-found Frontier, which manages the Cambodia Investment and Development Fund, with a Singaporean economist, Kim Song Tan. They hope to raise $250 million by the end of the year.
Cambodia, Yeo said, "is where Vietnam was some 8 to 10 years ago." He likes a lot about Cambodia: its location in a fast-growing region, a young and inexpensive work force, rising productivity, a pro-business government, stable politics and strong GDP growth, which peaked at 13.5 percent in 2005 but was expected to mellow to 7 percent or 8 percent in coming years.
Thirty years of an isolating war, he added, have made Cambodia "one of the best investor diversification plays around."
But as Han Kyung Tae, the chief Cambodia representative of Tong Yang Investment, part of the South Korean Tong Yang Group, points out, promise and pretty macroeconomics are one thing; closing good deals on the ground are quite another.
Han has been trying to start an Indochina investment fund for more than a year. He said he had reviewed 30 to 40 business plans, but had yet to close a single deal. Tong Yang has scaled back its venture capital aspirations and now hopes to invest $25 million in a Cambodian information technology company, as part of a Vietnam-Cambodia fund, Han said.
His search, he said, was complicated by lack of transparency in a business culture built around sealed family empires. "It's hard for us to get the information we need to invest," Han said. "It's totally new to them. Some feel offended if I ask for financial information."
Investors also say that the weak legal system, immature accounting standards and corruption in Cambodia remain challenges. An anti-corruption law has been foundering for more than a decade, and Cambodia ranks near the bottom of Transparency International's corruption perceptions index.
Kathleen Ng, the managing director of the Center for Asia Private Equity Research, which is based in Hong Kong, sees private equity interest in Cambodia as largely "spillover" from a still-emerging Vietnam.
A second wave of private equity investment in Vietnam - the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and 1998 obliterated the first - began to crest in 2006, rising to $2.0 billion in 2007, up from $166.5 million in 2005, according to the center.
The Ho Chi Minh stock exchange opened in 2000, and despite some recent trouble with expensive initial public offerings is beginning to build a track record of profitable exits, Ng said.
In December 2007, Vietnam Manufacturing & Export Processing Holdings became the first company based in Vietnam to be listed on the Hong Kong exchange; Merrill Lynch invested $22 million and realized $13.06 million through the sale of a third of its holdings, according to the private equity center.
Texas Pacific Group and Intel Capital, the venture capital arm of Intel, together invested $36.5 million in the Vietnamese Corporation for Financing and Promoting Technologies. Two months after it went public, Texas Pacific, which invested $21.5 million, sold less than a quarter of its holdings, booking a cash return of $22.17 million, according to the center.
"There's a level of confidence but Vietnam still needs to prove itself," Ng said. "You cannot just use a few divestment results to say, 'Hey, a place is doing well."'
She added that it might be too early yet for thriving private-sector equity investment in Cambodia, but that the country was ripe for development-finance institutions.
Proparco, the financing subsidiary of the French Development Agency, is "studying the possibility" of investing $5 million to $15 million in a Cambodia-focused private equity fund, according to Julien Kinic, an investment officer at Proparco. The French firm is already a shareholder in Dragon Capital, a Vietnamese asset management group, and has provided direct financing to several prominent Cambodian businesses, Kinic said. "Our interest in Cambodia is not new," he said. "What is new is the rising of the economy and the strong need for financing."
Douglas Clayton, who founded Leopard Capital last year, said that Leopard's Cambodia Fund had raised $10 million of its $100 million target since its inception in April, mostly from wealthy individuals and private banking institutions. He expects to close on Leopard's first project, a 250-unit condo project in the Cambodian tourist hub of Siem Reap, in the next few weeks.
"Cambodia needs several billion dollars of investment," said Clayton, who used to head the Thailand office of CLSA Securities. "Part of that can be private equity. The challenge will be to build the businesses. Most are early-stage investments. This is building basic industries and services."
Cambodia Emerald, which split off from Leopard in November, also aims to raise $100 million, said Peter Brimble, who directs Emerald with Bradley Gordon, a former corporate lawyer.
The funds are targeting investment in tourism, agribusiness, infrastructure, real estate, manufacturing and financial services, among other sectors.
Of course, what goes up can come tumbling down. Take Vietnam: After rising 500-fold from 2003 through the end of 2007, its stock market fell by nearly half in the first quarter.
Cham Prasidh, Cambodia's minister of commerce, said he was not worried about wading into the increasingly foreboding tides of global capital markets.
"Even if there is a world recession, if you develop the capacity to create an enabling environment for doing business and investment in Cambodia, you will survive," he said.
Besides, he added, Cambodia is ready to ride the waves: "We're surfers."
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CNN Heroes; Phymean Noun is saving children from Cambodia's trash heap |
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05/30/2008 @ 10:53 am |
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/05/29/heroes.noun/index.html
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (CNN) -- Walking down a street in Cambodia's capital city, Phymean Noun finished her lunch and tossed her chicken bones into the trash. Seconds later, she watched in horror as several children fought to reclaim her discarded food.
Phymean Noun is helping give Cambodian children a chance at a better life.
1 of 2 Noun stopped to talk with them. After hearing their stories of hardship, she knew she couldn't ignore their plight.
"I must do something to help these children get an education," she recalls thinking. "Even though they don't have money and live on the sidewalk, they deserve to go to school."
Six years after that incident, Noun is helping many of Phnom Penh's poorest children do just that.
Within weeks, she quit her job and started an organization to give underprivileged children an education. Noun spent $30,000 of her own money to get her first school off the ground.
In 2004, her organization -- the People Improvement Organization (PIO) -- opened a school at Phnom Penh's largest municipal trash dump, where children are a large source of labor.
Today, Noun provides 240 kids from the trash dump a free education, food, health services and an opportunity to be a child in a safe environment. Watch Noun and some of the children who attend her school »
It is no easy task. Hundreds of them risk their lives every day working to support themselves and their families.
"I have seen a lot of kids killed by the garbage trucks," she recalls. Children as young as 7 scavenge hours at a time for recyclable materials. They make cents a day selling cans, metals and plastic bags.
Noun recruits the children at the dump to attend her organization because, she says, "I don't want them to continue picking trash and living in the dump. I want them to have an opportunity to learn." Watch Noun describe what life is like for children at the trash dump »
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Growing up during the Pol Pot regime, Noun faced unimaginable challenges.
"There were no schools during Pol Pot's regime," she recalls. "Everyone had to work in the fields. My mother was very smart. She told them that she didn't have an education. That was how she survived. If they knew she was educated, they would have killed her."
Noun's mother died of cancer when Phymean was 15. Phymean's sister fled to a refugee camp, leaving her young daughter in Phymean's care.
"When my mom passed away, my life was horrible, " says Noun. "It was very sad because there was only my niece who was 3 years old at that time." Yet Noun was determined to finish high school. Watch Noun decscibe the hardships of life during the Pol Pot regime »
That dedication paid off, and after graduating she spent the next decade working with various aid organizations.
"I tell the children my story and about the importance of education," she said. "I'm their role model."
Some of the children who attend her school continue to work in the dump to support themselves and their families. Without an education, she said, these children would be vulnerable to traffickers or continue to be caught in the cycle of poverty.
"We are trying to provide them skills that they can use in the future," Noun said. "Even though we are poor and struggling and don't have money, we can go to school. I tell them not to give up hope."
Noun has even bigger plans for them. "These children are our next generation and our country depends on them. They are our future leaders."
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Cambodia donates $50,000 to cyclone-struck Myanmar |
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05/13/2008 @ 4:00 pm |
The Phnom Penh Post
Cambodia donates $50,000 to cyclone-struck Myanmar
Written by Kay Kimsong
Friday, 02 May 2008
Cambodian has donated $50,000 to the Myanmar government to aid survivors of cyclone Nargis which ravaged the Southeast Asian nation the previous weekend, leaving 60,000 dead or missing amid fears tens of thousands more may die due to the military dictatorship’s handling of aid operations.
Hor Namhong, Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, met with Myanmar ambassador to Cambodia Aung Naing on May 7 to announce the donation, which was made directly to the junta.
“I told the ambassador (Aung Naing) that the money is not a huge amount, but it’s an important show of Cambodia’s willingness (to help),” Namhong told reporters following the meeting.
He said the government was waiting to see how the situation developed in Myanmar’s hardest hit Ayeyarwaddy River delta and the commercial capital Yangon, and might consider a further donation.
“I understand that the danger affecting Myanmar could one day happen to any country,” Namhong said. “This is a danger facing all people so at this time we, and the whole world, must work together to help the people of Myanmar.”
Namhong also voiced his support for a “yes” vote in Myanmar’s May 10 referendum on a new constitution that enshrines the military’s role in government and has been widely criticized in the West for the lack of democratic participation in its drafting.
“I hope that the referendum on May 10 will be a new step towards a democratic election in Myanmar,” he said. Areas badly affected by cyclone Nargis are set to vote on May 25
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The Guns May Be Silent But for Some, There Is No Cease-Fire
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04/28/2008 @ 6:59 pm |
In the Wake of War, Survivors Still Struggle
By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 26, 2008; C01
"While this war is difficult," President Bush said this month, "it is not endless."
"Not endless." So odd-sounding. So counterintuitive. Some people who have survived wars in foreign lands are struck by the phrase. War, they say, never really ends. War keeps going long after bombs have stopped and troop levels are reduced. Long after refugees return and motherless children grow up.
War leaves survivors powerless against its memories, its futile silence. There's a father who won't speak of war. But his daughter can see it in him every day as this man educated in Vietnam goes to a factory job in Michigan, where people make fun of his English. A girl from Cambodia hides, terrified here in America, when she hears Fourth of July fireworks that remind her of bombs. It leaves a boy with no mother -- just the memory of her warning him that war would eventually come to his village in Sudan and the enemy would "pour fire" on them from the sky.
War, sanitized by distance, lives abstractly on television; you watch it from your brown corduroy sofa, in your cul-de-sac, flipping channels. You have the luxury of hitting the remote and turning the volume low as you hear another report of U.S. soldiers killed, Iraqis killed, insurgents, roadside bombs, corpses. Or change the channel, skip the carnage. Or watch, and listen, because something -- you don't know what -- draws you in.
You wonder what war feels like to those who have survived it in their homelands, have written about it, have made it their mission to always remember so that others will never forget.
* * *
"The soldiers walked around the neighborhood, knocking on all the doors, telling people to leave. Those who refused were shot dead right on their doorsteps," Loung Ung wrote in her book "First They Killed My Father."
Ung escaped Cambodia as a child when Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge stormed into Phnom Penh in April 1975. She fled with her family.
"Yesterday," she wrote, "I was playing hopscotch with my friends. Today we are running from soldiers with guns. . . . Pa whispers that from now on we are to give the soldiers anything they want or they will shoot us. We walk from the break of day until the dark of evening. When night comes, we rest by the roadside near a temple. We unpack the dried fish and rice and eat in silence. Gone is the air of mystery and excitement; now I am simply afraid."
Ung now lives in Cleveland, where she owns a Belgian beer bar and an Italian restaurant. So far from war, you say. But she says no. "When I hear politicians talk about war ending or not ending, my first thought is, it is really too bad so few of them have personally experienced war," Ung says. "We are ruled by a group of many armchair soldiers. War doesn't end."
The idea for a second book she wrote was prompted by Bush's 2003 "mission accomplished" announcement. At that moment she thought, " 'Oh my gosh, there are people who believe this and think this is true.' But I know 25 years after my war, it doesn't end just because the guns have fallen silent, doesn't end just because peace treaties have been signed. It doesn't end in my life. It is too bad so many people talk about it without having firsthand experience of it."
Her war goes on, living as if it were a close relative who remembers what you remember, someone who was there when the most horrible thing in your life happened, and knows all the details.
"The thing I still feel on my skin and in my heart is the experience of hiding in a bomb shelter," Ung says. "The fear that invades your body, that sets your mind ablaze even when the bomb doesn't hit. Fear. When I was hiding in a bomb shelter, everything is quiet except for the whizzing of cannons and rockets overhead. We are all counting under our breath, hiding from the bombs that were thrown by invisible people. They don't know you. You don't know them. You are counting and counting and waiting.
"When it doesn't hit, there is a moment of disappointment. You know it won't stop. . . . When you are in war, there is no relief."
* * *
In Sudan, the attack on Alephonsion Deng's village came without warning. "Explosions, horses and camels chasing people, shooting, screaming, crying: It was like the end of the world," he wrote with Benson Deng, Benjamin Ajak and Judy A. Bernstein in "They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys From Sudan."
"I watched as the invaders tied the arms and legs of their captives and put long ropes around their necks. They led them from the village on a line blindfolded so they didn't know the place they were going. 'Drowning them in the river,' a person cried. 'They don't want to waste bullets.' "
Alephonsion Deng ran and hid. He could not return to his village to look for his family. Someone told him there was no one left alive except for the enemy. So he and other boys -- tens of thousands of boys who fled massacres between 1987 and 1989 -- walked countless miles across Sudan, without parents, walking barefoot at night, with wounds on his feet.
Almost 20 years later, Deng lives in San Diego and works as a filing technician at a hospital. The memories of war reside with him, like a piece of him.
"The consequences of war? What can I tell you?" Deng asks. "The war experiences are not so much fun. I always tell people everybody hates war. You can't really benefit from it."
The war takes everybody equally.
"Our ancestors fought certain wars and nobody won," he says. "There is victory, but nobody won. There are wounds and sorrows and pains that remain in individual hearts that will never be healed until the individual dies."
Wars are eternal, he says. "Looking at the American war or any other war, it will not be easy. You cannot set a date: 'This will end.' What about the wounds created? What about people with vengeance? Who will repay? Who is responsible for those things? . . . Whether it be the Iraqi war or the war in Darfur or wars in the rest of the world, the experiences are the same. The pain the same. The same wounds."
* * *
Bich Minh Nguyen left Vietnam in the spring of 1975. Her sister was 2. She was 8 months old. Her father was trying to get out of Saigon before the communists came.
"Everyone in Saigon knew the war was lost, and to stay meant being sent to re-education camps, or worse. The neighbors spoke of executions and what the Communists would do to their children; they talked of people vanished and tortured," she wrote in her memoir, "Stealing Buddha's Dinner."
Her father received word that the Americans were airlifting children out of the country in Operation Babylift. Two thousand children were flown away. But the first flight crashed, she wrote. And her father decided there must be another way, though time was running out.
"All around us people were running, dropping suitcases and clothes, trying to flag down cars," she wrote. Desperation, repeated over and over in war. "A full panic had hit the city, the kind that sent people racing after airplanes on the runway, that made people offer their babies to departing American soldiers."
They escaped Saigon on a boat and sailed to the Philippines, then transferred to a U.S. ship heading for Guam. From there, they flew to Arkansas, then on to Grand Rapids, Mich. Landing in a foreign world.
All of Nguyen's thoughts of war are shaped through her father. "He talked about it very rarely," she says.
She sees war's wounds on him. "He fought in the South Vietnamese army. He had three brothers. One was killed," she says. "We had to leave my mother behind." Her father had to make a quick decision to get his family out of Saigon and her mother did not know that they had left. (Her mother survived.)
"It is a story I've seen and heard in so many other families: how it tears families apart and results in many years of separation. . . . Part of moving forward is not looking back."
Nguyen lives in Chicago and teaches at Purdue University. She speaks of "how privileged most of us are as Americans."
She is 33, the age of her father when he left Vietnam. But in her Americanness, she cannot fathom a war like the one she escaped.
"What if one day I had to get up and leave every single thing behind," she says. "And I had to leave this country by boat and find some way to get out because if I didn't I would go to a concentration camp. It is hard to imagine."
It is war.
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Country for sale--Cambodia |
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04/28/2008 @ 6:59 pm |
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/26/cambodia
Saturday April 26 2008
Country for sale.
Almost half of Cambodia has been sold to foreign speculators in the past 18 months - and hundreds of thousands who fled the Khmer Rouge are homeless once more. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark report
Sang Run, his hair stiff with sea salt, chugs out into the Gulf of Kompong Som in his weather-beaten turquoise boat, looking for blackling. He scours the shallow, blue water, waiting for a shoal to appear, before skimming his net across the water. He does the same every day, taking his catch to auction on Independence Beach in Cambodia's southern port city of Sihanoukville.
It looks like a scene Sang Run was born into. But 20 years ago the beach was deserted, and he was a schoolteacher in Mondulkiri, a forested province hundreds of miles away in the east of the country. Back then, he could talk all day about palm sugar and betel nuts. He was something of an amateur botanist, but had never seen the sea - nor had any of the group who today gather around his silvery haul flapping in the sand on Independence Beach. Former nurse Srey Pov, who runs a Khmer restaurant along the beach, also came from a province many miles away. She still cannot swim, she says, shrugging. Heads nod around her. Cambodia is a nation that would drown if their boat tipped over; it is also a country whose citizens mostly do not belong to the places where they have ended up.
The Khmer Rouge saw to that, eviscerating the kingdom after coming to power. It was a movement that drew inspiration from Mao's Cultural Revolution, collectivising all the land; but it grew to love terror more than ideology. The ferocity of the regime sent more than 300,000 rushing into exile. At least two million urban Cambodians were route-marched into the paddy fields to near certain death. Worst hit was the Eastern Zone, bordering Vietnam, where Sang Run came from. Its people were derided as "duck's arses with chicken's heads" as the Khmer Rouge grew to mistrust the Vietnamese and accused Mondulkiri people of being disloyal - too sympathetic to their neighbours across the border. Their names were added to those who were to be purged; the catalogue of "crimes" became so long, so general, that anyone could stand accused. The wave of random violence and retribution that scythed through the countryside for three years, eight months and 21 days killed one in five of the population.
Sang Run's family all vanished, but he survived, hiding in the forests, living off what he could pluck and hunt. When the Vietnamese invaded in 1978 - overthrowing the Khmer Rouge a year later - Sang Run found his way, like thousands of others, to Cambodia's 300-mile long shoreline. Stretching between Thailand and Vietnam, the region had been a Khmer Rouge stronghold, controlled by Pol Pot's notorious commander, Ta Mok, who was known as The Butcher. In the 80s, when the fishing shacks and noodle stores went up along the Sihanoukville coast, there was no development plan. There had never been a tradition of thriving fishing communities along the coast - few Cambodians lived there except in the old French colonial towns. The shoreline had been empty - miles of palm-fringed beach front interspersed with the few port towns, including Kep, Sihanoukville and Ream.
Survivors began to build new lives there, learning to love the sea. Some took boats to a nearby archipelago of 22 coral-fringed, uninhabited islands, building up clusters of villages on atolls with names such as Rabbit, Snake and Turtle. Within 10 years, the whole coastline had been patchily settled by newcomers, among them a former farmer, Soch Tith, a stocky man with corncob hands, who was sick every time he got in a boat, but still found his way to faraway Koh Rong, the largest of the islands - 7,800 hectares of jungle. There he cleared small patches to grow fruit.
By 2006, these communities had schools, political representation, and many householders even had papers, stamped by the Sihanoukville governor, Say Hak, which guaranteed them the permanent right to stay under the 2001 Cambodian Land Law. The central government in Phnom Penh had in the 90s designated the entire coast and its islands as State Public Land that could not be bartered or developed.
Then, during the past couple of years, a disturbing wave of rumours swept the coastal communities. Sang Run says that in September 2006 he heard that Snake Island, half a mile out to sea, had been secretly sold to Russians. He did not check. Cambodians ask little from their government; a wariness of authority is a legacy of years of blood-letting under Pol Pot. In any case, it was a familiar story. Shortly after Hun Sen, Cambodia's prime minister, came to power in 1985, frenzied landgrabbing began: influential political allies and wealthy business associates raced to claim land that the Khmer Rouge had seized, gobbling up such large chunks of the cities, forests and paddy fields that Cambodians used to say the rich were eating the country. By 2006, the World Bank estimated that 40,000 had been made homeless in Phnom Penh alone. But, until now, no one had bothered with the coast. Sang Run paid no particular attention to the Snake Island rumour. He should have - it signalled a radical new course for the Cambodian government.
Three months later, Sang Run was out in his boat at 7am when disaster struck his village. He arrived back at 11am to find bulldozers had flattened his home and those of the 229 families who lived beside him. He heard from neighbours that it had happened in an instant. Uniformed men, sent in by governor Say Hak, used electric batons to chase terrified residents from the burning ruins; three of Sang Run's neighbours were knocked unconscious. Village Number One - a mundane name that failed to capture the beauty of its uninterrupted sea views and vegetable gardens that ran to the beach - had been erased. Sang Run heard that a hotel was planned, although no information was given to the people evicted from their homes for a further 18 months.
Nurse-turned-restaurateur Srey Pov tells us that, by early 2007, rumours were buzzing around Sihanoukville's covered market that virtually every island in the region was up for sale. Over the following months, Koh Russei and Koh Ta Kiev, Koh Bong and Koh Ouen, Koh Preus, Koh Krabei and Koh Tres were all snapped up by foreigners, who then started negotiating for mainland sites, too, among them public beaches with names such as Serendipity, Occheuteal and Otres. In February, 47-year-old Srey Pov was evicted, too, her Independence Beach restaurant shut down to make way for another rumoured hotel. "All I've got left is the chairs and tables," she says - they're stacked up in the cramped living room of her Sihanoukville home. Former farmer Soch Tith, on Koh Rong, was the last to hear that last month his island had been sold, too, to a British developer.
What none of these people knew was that the troubled kingdom of Cambodia, a precarious debtor-nation underpinned by more than £500m of hand-outs from the international community, had suddenly found itself a refuge for cash and speculators fleeing paralysed western financial markets. As London and New York, overcome by the US sub-prime crisis, began grinding to a halt last year, many in the City had moved on, transferring liquid assets to the east.
Foreign fund managers had started pitching up in Phnom Penh wearing linen shirts and khaki drip-dry jungle wear, alerted by the country's unexpected boom in tourism that in 2006 had seen one-and-a-half million visitors overcome the west's collective memories of Cambodia's recent past to travel to the temples of Angkor Wat. Enticed also by indicators that suggested the feeble economy was turning a corner, super-rich, predominately British, French and Swiss speculators, fuelled by a high-risk machismo, came hunting for profits of 30% or more. Their interest was land speculation: buying up large sites in developing countries that they would then sit on in the hope that, with the influx of tourists, land values would soar.
Hun Sen and his ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP) have, in effect, put the country up for sale. Crucially, they permit investors to form 100% foreign-owned companies in Cambodia that can buy land and real estate outright - or at least on 99-year plus 99-year leases. No other country in the world countenances such a deal. Even in Thailand and Vietnam, where similar land speculation and profiteering are under way, foreigners can be only minority shareholders.
There were other inducements. Many foreign funds - hedge funds, property funds, private equity funds - operating on the outer margins of the financial world thrive on complexity, risk and maximising profit. In Phnom Penh, they found an ideal partner in the prime minister, who has created a unique business environment. Since the mid-90s, Hun Sen and the CPP have declined to enforce money-laundering legislation and have concerned themselves little with the probity of investors. Foreign businessmen were offered nine-year tax holidays, and were allowed to hold their cash in US dollars in banks outside the country.
"Only recently, no one would touch us," Brett Sciaroni, a Phnom Penh-based US lawyer who acts for many new western investors, tells us. "We were dirt. And suddenly we were gold." John Brinsden, a British banker, now vice chairman of Cambodia's national Acleda Bank, agrees: "In 2001, only 200 people came to the government's investment conference. At our most recent, we ran out of chairs."
In July 2007, Hun Sen, gambling on his people's tenuous connection with the land, changed the designation of the southern islands so they could be sold. The forests, lakes, beaches and reefs - and the lives of the thousands of residents - were quietly transferred into the hands of private western developers. Arguing that Cambodia could become a tourist magnet to challenge Thailand, the prime minister began a fire sale of mainland beaches. By March this year, virtually all Cambodia's accessible and sandy coast was in private hands, either Cambodian or foreign. Those who lived or worked there were turfed out - some jailed, others beaten, virtually all denied meaningful compensation. The deals went unannounced; no tenders or plans were ever officially published. All that was known was that more than £1,000m in foreign finance found its way into the country in 2007, a 1,500% increase over the previous four years. It was as if Alistair Darling, the British chancellor, had decided to raise some extra cash by trading the Isles of Wight, Man and the Hebrides, throwing in Formby Sands, the entire Cornish coastline and Brighton seafront - before trousering the proceeds.
It was abundantly clear to observers, including the World Bank and Amnesty International, that by making these private deals, Hun Sen was denying prosperity to most of his people, causing the country's social fabric to unwind like thread from a bobbin. Today, more than 150,000 people are threatened with eviction. Forty-five per cent of the country's entire landmass has been sold off - from the land ringing Angkor Wat to the colonial buildings of Phnom Penh to the south-western islands. Professor Yash Ghai, the UN human rights emissary to Cambodia, warned, "One does not need expertise in human rights to recognise that many policies of the government have... deprived people of their economic resources and means of livelihood, and denied them their dignity." He added, "I believe that the deliberate rejection of the concept of a state governed by the rule of law has been central to the ruling party's hold on power."
It was Hun Sen who, as early as 1989, realised the power of land. Rhodri Williams, a researcher for the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, points out that, as Hun Sen privatised the land, "he simultaneously cut off the rights of 360,000 exiled Cambodians, awarding prime slices to political allies and friends." The exiles were Cambodians who had fled the Khmer Rouge into Thailand and beyond in 1975; they had titles to the land, but this counted for nothing when they returned to claim it. Hun Sen said Cambodia should start again.
Although he bathes his speeches in socialist values, even his closest aides told us that Hun Sen was more often than not a pragmatist. He joined the Communist party in the 60s and enlisted in the Khmer Rouge in the 70s, before defecting to the Vietnamese-backed government in the 80s. In the 90s, he embraced the free market. Tourism was not a promising prospect in the early days - the remnants of Khmer Rouge, violently hostile to outsiders, were too much of a risk. When western travellers did begin to explore, they were taking their lives in their hands. In 1994, Briton Mark Slater, Frenchman Jean-Michel Braquet and Australian David Wilson were kidnapped while riding a train through Sihanoukville, and all of them executed. Two years later, Christopher Howes, a British de-mining expert, together with a Cambodian colleague, were murdered as they worked 10 miles north of Angkor Wat.
By 2006, the country seemed safer, and was finally becoming a tourist destination. That September, the CPP received its first foreign offer in the coastal area: a Russian investor living in Phnom Penh wanted to buy an island. This deal would become the template for every developer to come. Alexander Trofimov created a Cambodian shell company to buy Koh Puos, or Snake Island. With cash apparently no object, he proposed to stunned government officials that he would link the island to a mainland beach - known as Hawaii - with a 900-metre suspension bridge. "He also asked to buy Hawaii beach," the official who oversaw that meeting told us. "And we gave it to him." No figures were published. The official claimed he didn't know them.
Locals who used the beach and island were kept in the dark. No one quizzed Trofimov. He produced a book of cut-and-paste designs that he said would encompass a £150m resort consisting of 900 tightly packed villas, a dolphin aquarium, two hotels, a shopping centre and a marina - all crammed into an egg cup-sized island. It was enticing stuff for the CPP, although the project faltered when Trofimov was accused of having sex with underage girls, and jailed this year. However, two more Russian businessmen seamlessly emerged to take up the reins, representing a Cypriot-holding company that, it later transpired, had owned the Koh Puos project from the off.
Arnaud Darc was quick off the mark, too. A quietly spoken and likeable French businessman, Darc had arrived in Cambodia in the 90s, building a hotel and restaurant business in Phnom Penh. In 2006, after hearing from a French colleague working at Sihanoukville's provincial airport that the runway was likely to be extended, he identified two massive beach-front sites totalling more than 220 hectares that he liked the look of. He brought in Jean-Louis Charon, a Parisian real estate tycoon, whose Nexity company is the largest in France, and whose name brought in "40 French high-net worths", as Darc described them; they raised £12.5m to be held by City Star, a foreign-owned investment company. "The maths was easy, and the returns potentially fantastic," Darc said. City Star's land values quadrupled as soon as the Cambodian government confirmed the airport rumours, a spokesman for the Sihanoukville governor's office told us.
The investors could have sold up and come away rich. But this was development with a difference. City Star investors wanted more, but did not want to go to the trouble of constructing anything. They were speculating on the future value of the land, believing that by adding only modest infrastructure, perhaps attaching big-name hoteliers, they would reap vast profits in seven to 10 years. Darc's group continued buying, snapping up 333 hectares on Koh Russei and Koh Ta Kiev, two islands off Ream. Such was the appetite for easy money that City Star raised a further £30m in a matter of days from a second group of French high rollers last July, this time to buy in Phnom Penh.
Darc's model appealed to British investors behind LimeTree Capital, a Hong Kong-based private equity group that in 2007 bought up chunks of beach front near Ream; sites it planned to leave idle for many years until prices peaked. This spring, a third entrepreneur, Frenchman Alain Dupuis, through his Cambodian company LBL International, bought Koh Sramaoch. Soon after, Koh Tonsay, or Rabbit Island, was auctioned off to Chinese investors; 14 fishing families were evicted to make way for a casino and a golf course.
On the mainland, Sang Run returned to the beach to find his village in Sihanoukville destroyed to make way, supposedly, for a hotel. A few hotels have been built, but generally the sites remain empty. The Cambodian economy has grown by more than 24% over 18 months and land values have in some cases risen by more than 100%, so there are fortunes to be made from doing nothing but wait.
Australians Rory and Mel Hunter were the only investors who made an attempt to incorporate into their plans the people whose land they were buying. An advertising executive, Rory had come to Cambodia to work for an agency in Phnom Penh. During a week-long vacation in 2006, he and his wife, Mel, had set out on a diving trip around the Koh Rong archipelago and fell in love with the twin islands of Koh Bong and Koh Ouen, attached to one another by a coral reef and cupped in a shallow strait - they were known collectively as the Sweethearts. "We dreamed of a beautiful resort where people could immerse themselves in a new part of Asia," Mel said. They began negotiations with two village men to buy their houses and those owned by 60 other families. "They thought we were nuts," Rory said. "The two head guys wanted £7,500 each. We agreed and signed the contract in a boat out in the strait. We helped take down their tin shacks, and slowly relocated all the families and their homes to Koh Rong, across the strait." They worked for weeks to clear 20 years of debris, while beginning negotiations with the government to buy the islands themselves.
The Hunters drummed up backing from a handful of British speculators, including a currency broker who (preferring we didn't use his name) tells us why he leapt at the opportunity. "I loved the deal from the start. Let's be honest, who wants 6%? I wanted a deal that would wake me up in the night, sweating. We could make good money," he says over drinks in Phnom Penh, his City suit exchanged for shorts and a T-shirt. "There was a buzz about Cambodia you don't get elsewhere. It's Cambodia, the killing fields and all that stuff. Something different to show your mates back home. I show them the visa in my passport. I have something they don't."
But the Hunters' enterprise would soon be challenged by a cascade of deals involving neighbouring islands. While they worked on retraining local fishermen on neighbouring Koh Rong, British property developer Marty Kaye bought the ground from under their feet. Kaye, who had spent much of his career working on construction in Hong Kong, had spotted the island while planning an £800m luxury tourist development on a nearby Vietnamese island, Phu Quoc. He told us: "I was walking down the beach on Phu Quoc, seeing where we were going to put the golf course, and I spotted another island. No one knew what it was. We looked on Google Earth and it seemed to be Koh Rong, in adjacent Cambodia. I said, 'Let's see if we can get anywhere on Koh Rong, too.'"
Kaye, who runs Millennium property fund, began negotiating. "Here was a chance to buy an undeveloped island almost as long as Hong Kong," he said. "Nowhere else in the world could you create your own kingdom from scratch - unlike the car-crash planning of Thai islands like Koh Samui." The Cambodian government gave him 18 months to produce more details, and he worked on an outline plan whose initial development would cost £100m. When the government signed the deal, it made no mention of the census it had just carried out recording how many thousands of people (the government won't reveal the figures) live on the 7,800-hectare island.
Kaye is not worried: "Two guys and a lawyer will see everyone. But what most of them don't understand is that even if they have papers, they are not worth anything. All of them are registered only locally, not in Phnom Penh, so they will have absolutely no case. Others are just squatters with no papers at all." It helped that Kaye's Cambodian partner was tycoon Kith Meng, a multi-millionaire with interests in banking, mobile phones and real estate - and a close friend of the prime minister, Hun Sen.
"Kith Meng wants everything done yesterday," Kaye said. "We are going to move as fast as we can. It's fantastically exciting, the opportunity to zone the whole island, to see where the luxury exclusive villa plots will be, for the Brad Pitts, etc." It is an investment that gives the present residents of Koh Rong just over a year to make a solid case for keeping their homes or finding new ones.
If they are evicted, places in the area to make a new home are becoming scarce. With all the big islands sold, even smaller outcrops have gone, too, including a clump of rocks known as Nail Island, bought by Ukrainian entrepreneur Nickolai Doroshenko, who has transformed it into a James Bond-style lair, complete with a giant fibre-glass shark that soars over the fortress-like construction. He already owns Victory Beach, in Sihanoukville, a restaurant stuffed with live snakes and a bar that advertises "swimming girls".
The sale of the century continued with the mainland beaches. At the end of January, the Sokha Hotel Group, run by Sok Kong, a Cambodian oligarch and Hun Sen ally, was confirmed as the new owner of the lion's share of Occheuteal Beach, the largest and most popular public dune in the region, which was closed off to make way for a 1,000-room hotel and golf course. The deal was originally negotiated in June 2006 when, local fisherman told us, bulldozers and 10 trucks of armed men demolished 71 homes and 40 local restaurants.
Not wanting to be left out, Say Hak, Sihanoukville's governor, acquired a small island for himself, on which he built a villa and jetty; while Sbaung Sarath, the wife of his deputy, bought half of Sihanoukville's public Independence Beach in February 2008, evicting scores of families in the process. Among them was Srey Pov. She travelled to Phnom Penh with 27 other families to protest, but returned with nothing. "The developer issued a warning," she says. "They threatened to pay the city authorities to get rid of us. We knew what that meant." Independence Beach now languishes behind high fencing, as Srey Pov feared, waiting for the five-star tourists who will enjoy exclusive access to the powder-white sand.
Days later, Sbaung Sarath struck again, securing part of Sihanoukville's Otres Beach, one of the last public dunes, where Queenco, a London-listed casino company, also announced in February that it had bought 56 hectares. Queenco declined to comment on its Sihanoukville project, but it has already had consequences - 100 fishing families have been evicted. They have built a row of makeshift bamboo shacks, held together with plastic sheeting and whatever rubbish they could recycle, along a 200-yard stretch of a nearby main road. On the day we visited, they were drying out from an overnight storm that had filled their ramshackle homes with rainwater.
Aom Heat, 63, used to have a wonderful view over Otres beach and the gulf beyond. She was forced off her land last April. Now all she can see are the hubcaps and exhaust pipes of lorries that tear by. She and many of her neighbours had arrived on Otres Beach after fleeing the Khmer Rouge in the early 80s, building a fishing village they christened Spean Ches, or Burning Bridge. "When the eviction notices were served on us in September 2006, we were determined to fight," she says. She could not bear to lose everything again. "We lodged a complaint with the Senate Committee on Human Rights that ruled it was a matter for the courts." But the Sihanoukville governor's men did not wait for a court order. They turned up at the seaside village in April last year, Aom Heat says, and, "they burned down 26 houses and bulldozed 86 more, destroying all the pots and pans, clothes and food supplies. We were in a blind panic." Thirteen injured men were arrested and jailed, including one of Aom Heat's sons. Although made homeless, they were charged with "wrongful damage of property", and nine of them found guilty without witnesses or evidence produced. Despite having served their time while waiting for the case to be heard, the men were thrown back into jail pending an appeal from the prosecution, who complained they had been dealt with too leniently.
No one can agree what impact the foreign land sales will have on the Cambodian economy because so little information is made public. Although Cambodia is nominally a democracy that has held three general elections to date, and has a nominal opposition party, the CPP parliamentarians and cabinet are remote and dismissive of their people. They are not required to report on their interests or assets, making it impossible to deduce how much Hun Sen and his cabinet have personally benefited - although the World Bank reported last year that corruption, coupled with a lack of transparency, was "choking economic growth".
Since the land sell-offs, members of the government and its allies have been splashing huge sums around. A Korean developer told us that when he marketed Phnom Penh's first skyscraper, the 42-storey Gold Tower project in February, all two dozen £750,000 penthouse suites were bought within 24 hours by "an honour roll of the CPP and its friends in the military". There are other telltale signs, such as the canary yellow Hummers and hi-spec Range Rovers with blacked-out windows that rumble around Phnom Penh, in a country where the average annual income is less than £150.
Simon Taylor, the director of Global Witness, an international NGO that was forced to leave the country last year, having accused the CPP of running a logging racket, paints a depressing picture: "A shadow state has grown up, a government that misappropriates public assets, extorts from businesses and manages an extensive illicit economy. It is administered by senior ministers who are fluent in the jargon of good governance and sustainable development." One of Hun Sen's closest advisers, who requested anonymity, disagrees, telling us: "Hun Sen believes that liberal democracy is unsuited to a country whose skills have been drained and demographics wildly skewed by the Khmer Rouge."
Everything comes down to how much money you have in your pocket, according to Doug Clayton, from Leopard Asia, a fund of Swiss and British bankers that is about to invest £25m in Cambodia. "This kind of money opens any door," he says. How does Clayton pitch the Hun Sen brand back home? "Candidly? In investment circles, no one knows anything about this place. It's off the radar. In our pitch I talk up the new economic figures. I talk up stability." Clayton adds: "When the dust settles, the government here will probably end up looking something like the one in Singapore." There, Lee Kuan Yew served as prime minister from 1959 to 1990. Cambodian pollsters, looking to the general election that will run this July, predict a clear CPP victory, putting Hun Sen at the helm for many more years, too.
What will this mean for people such as Sang Run, who is now surviving in a makeshift home behind Independence Beach? Has the legacy of the Khmer Rouge been purged? Naly Pilorge, director of Licadho, a local human rights NGO, thinks not: "Everyone claims Cambodia has come through the period of barbarism, but the sadism is still bubbling beneath the surface. Extreme violence, greed and disregard for the most basic human rights - of giving people a place to live - are still with us daily. The methods of the past are being used to dictate our future."
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Loung Ung
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