Cambodia found more than 2,000 ghost civil servants

Cambodian government has found more than 2,000 irregular civil servants (simply called as ghost civil servants) who got government payrolls, a government report showed Tuesday.

The report said since the third census on civil servants began early last month, more than 2,000 irregular civil servants have been found at national level, which accounts for the loss of about 2 million U.S. dollars per year from the government budget.

Average salary for civil servants is about 80 U.S. dollar per month.

It remains unclear how many more of irregular civil servants will be found until this third census to be ended by the end of this month while there remain six more government institutions that need to be reviewed with.

After a new Royal Cambodian Government was formed in 1993, Cambodia held its first census on civil servants in 1995, and the second of its kind in 2001.

Source: Xinhua
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Cambodia Upstream Oil & Gas Fiscal Regime: 2010

Cambodia upstream oil and gas fiscal regime report is an essential source for information related to the upstream fiscal system enacted in Cambodia's oil and gas industry. This report contains information related to various types of payments that are to be made by any oil and gas producing company to the host government. The report provides the most recent laws and tax policies in the country. Each fiscal report is supported by a fully editable and interactive Excel model, where all the fiscal terms are applied on a hypothetical base asset. This interactive Excel model, with the latest fiscal term information, is the most appropriate tool to evaluate the profitability of operating oil and gas fields under the country's fiscal environment.

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History Can Help National Healing: Professor

A scene from the Play Breaking the Silence

The teaching of Khmer Rouge history through books, radio and other new methods can help the spirit of national reconciliation, a leading historian said Monday.

Sombo Manara, a history professor at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, said teaching the history of Democratic Kampuchea through such new initiatives as the radio play “Breaking the Silence,” was a path to peace, healing and reconciliation.

“Breaking the Silence” urges victims and perpetrators—many of whom live in the same villagers together but may never speak to each other—to address their collective trauma.

Sombo Manara said the radio play, which also toured as a live performance earlier this year and last year, can prompt memories and healthy debate.

“To have reconciliation in society for those people to apologize, that’s not to create a new fault and not to educate children to act with such wrongdoing,” he told “Hello VOA.” “That is a proper apology for those who were victimized.”

Sombo Manara also said apologies to victims from perpetrators not currently held by the Khmer Rouge tribunal would show the next generation a better way of doing things.

If apologies are made at the local level, it will help explain morality to the young, where the old can teach the rule of Buddha and merit and avoidance of sins, “in order to prevent such actions again,” he said.

Sombo Manara was responding to questions from guests about the Khmer Rouge tribunal, which is now seeking to prosecute its second case against jailed leaders of the regime. But so far only five have senior-most leaders been detained.

Low-ranking cadre will not be targeted by the tribunal’s prosecutors and judges, but Sombo Manara said they still bear some responsibility for helping the country overcome the atrocities of the regime.

Meanwhile, teachers who give lessons about the regime in history must make sure they are not producing new fault lines in the next generation through embittered or vengeful instruction, he said.

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Ambitious Monk Mixes Business With Buddhism

Monk, Hoeurn Somnieng recieves a degree in Business Management from the St. Ambros University in Iowa, USA.

One determined monk says he wants to use his education and experience from the US to help fund a number of projects, including a network that helps combat child trafficking.

Hoeurn Somnieng is the deputy head of Wat Damnak pagoda in Siem Reap. He studied at St. Ambrose University in Iowa in 2008. He says now he plans to return to Cambodia with a degree in business management and ideas to help his home country.

“I want to use my education to represent people in need and to represent the poor and powerless,” Hoeurn Somnieng told VOA Khmer in a recent interview. “This education gives me a louder voice.”

Hoeurn Somnieng is the founder and executive director of a junior high school, a boarding house for girls, a vocational training program, an orphanage and the Life and Hope Association.

The Life and Hope Association is the umbrella organization for his school, partially funded by foreign aid programs in the US, Australia and Germany. The program pays for student transportation and meals and supplements salaries of government teachers.

The association also works to improve the lives of disadvantaged Cambodians, particularly children and women, through education, vocational training, and health services. Many of those students who attend the school are victims of domestic abuse, orphans or street children. Many of them live in misery; some are trapped in the sex trade.

Hoeurn Somnieng heads the NGO Network in Siem Reap, as well as the Chamber of Social Service Network Against Child Labor. He is a program director for the Salvation Center Cambodia, where he worked on HIV and AIDS, including as a provincial monk core trainer on the disease and drug prevention.

What has all this taught him?

“You can change your future,” he said. “Bring hope into your life and keep working hard. Your future will be bright.”

He’s even developed a mathematical formula. “Life plus hope equals change,” he said. “And life plus hope plus education equals a great change.”

John Hawry, who teaches at the nursing department of Black Hawk College and is a colleague of Hoeurn Somnieng, said the monk remains dedicated to his country and has as strong work ethic.

He “helped establish a small shrine for the Buddhist community that lived around us,” Hawry said. “We have many people that migrated from Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos that lived in our town, so that was the first time that they had a shrine.”

Another colleague, Adam Vilmont, a graduate student at St. Ambrose, said Hoeurn Somnieng taught him meditation.

“It was a very profound experience for me,” he said. “In a period of great suffering, I was kind of not knowing what to do, and I just sat and closed my eyes and focused on my breathing.”

Another support of the monk’s work, Vivian Norton, said she organized a fundraiser for enough money to purchase 12 tons of rice—about a year’s supply—for the Life and Hope Association.

“I went to Cambodia three and a half years ago at a volunteer center that Venerable Somnieng established for young girls,” Norton said. “I met him at the sewing center and saw he had a project that worked and found him to be a very effective administrator for the project. But at the same time he certainly stands by Buddhist principles, and he is very devoted to his project and to his people.”

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