Charity dinner to provide cows for Cambodia's poor

An inventive scheme aiming to help impoverished families in rural Cambodia by providing short-term loans of cows is the motive behind a gala charity dinner and auction to be held in Osaka next month.

Hope International Development Agency, a nonprofit organization that helps people overcome poverty by providing human and financial resources, will host the May 10 event at The Ritz-Carlton, Osaka, in the city's Kita Ward.

Funds raised at the event will go toward the Cow Bank project, a part of Hope's microcredit program, which promotes self-help among rural families and sustainable development in Cambodia.

The Cow Bank operates literally as its name implies: Families borrow a cow from Hope and use it to fertilize and plough their fields. Ideally, the cow will give birth during the loan period, and when the calf becomes self-sufficient a few months later, the borrowed cow is "paid back" to Hope.

The family keeps the calf, while the returned cow is then loaned to another poor family. This cycle can be repeated several times, according to Hope.

The May 10 event, to begin at 7 p.m., is the second such event the organization has staged in the Kansai region.

The evening will feature a five-course dinner; a silent auction of items from developing countries, local artists and companies; live entertainment by Japanese musicians; a short video presentation on Hope's activities in Cambodia; and the opportunity to contribute to helping people in the nation.

The organization, based in Naka Ward, Nagoya, and headquartered in Canada, invites organizations, groups and individuals to attend the event. A table for 10 costs 220,000 yen, while individual tickets are 30,000 yen each.

Tickets for the gala event must be reserved by April 21.

The Osaka event, to be hosted in partnership with The Ritz-Carlton, Osaka, is sponsored by Lexus and AstraZeneca K.K.

A similar event hosted by Hope in Nagoya on Feb. 29 saw more than 450 people attend, along with media organizations including NHK and local TV and radio stations.

The Tokyo event is scheduled for May 9 at the Embassy of Canada.

For more information, visit www.hope.or.jp or call (052) 204-0530.

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U.N. chief calls for justice in Cambodia

UNITED NATIONS (CNN) -- On the tenth anniversary of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot's death, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appealed Tuesday for the senior leaders of the regime to be brought to justice.

"I would like to remind the international community of the urgent importance of bringing to closure one of history's darkest chapters," Ban said in a statement.

The secretary-general said he hoped that the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia "will soon deliver long-overdue justice for the people of Cambodia."

"The United Nations and the Royal Government of Cambodia remain actively engaged in efforts to hold the Khmer Rouge senior leaders and those most responsible accountable for their horrific crimes," he said.

Five former Khmer Rouge leaders have been detained and will face the ECCC, most of them on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

They are: Kaing Guek Eav, the alleged chief torturer of the regime; former Khmer Rouge Prime Minister Khieu Samphan; Ieng Sary, the regime's former foreign minister, and his wife, Ieng Thirith; and Nuon Chea, the top surviving regime leader.

The ECCC, which was established by both the United Nations and Cambodia, became operational in 2006, but the first formal hearings took place in fall of last year.

More than 2 million people died during the party's efforts to transform Cambodia into an agrarian utopia before troops from neighboring Vietnam overthrew the regime. Remnants of the Khmer Rouge continued to battle Cambodia's government into the 1990s before they fragmented in the middle of the decade.

Pol Pot, known as "Brother Number One" during the group's nearly four years in power, died in a jungle hideout in 1998. Ta Mok, the former Khmer Rouge military chief known as "The Butcher," died in a Cambodian military hospital in 2006 while awaiting trial for crimes against humanity.

The tribunal, which includes three Cambodian and two international jurists, is expected to continue until at least 2010. Read more!

More U.S. soldiers' remains in Vietnam repatriated

HANOI, April 14 (Xinhua) -- The Vietnam Office for Seeking Mission Persons transferred Monday custody of possible remains believed to be those of Americans who died during the conflict in Southeast Asia and recovered from excavation sites in Vietnam's central region.

At the repatriation ceremony at the Da Nang International Airport in central Da Nang city on Monday, U.S. ambassador to Vietnam Michael Michalak and U.S. Army lieutenant colonel James Saenz, representing the U.S. government, received custody of the remains, according to a press release by the American Embassy in Vietnam. The ceremony marks the 106th post-war repatriation of remains from Vietnam.

To date, 883 Americans have been identified since 1975 -- 627 from Vietnam, 224 from Laos, 29 from Cambodia, and three from China. There are 1,763 Americans still unaccounted for from the war in Southeast Asia, including 1,353 in Vietnam, said the release. 　 Read more!

During Pol Pot's reign of terror 1.7m died. Now locals pray at his grave

By Ker Munthit in Anlong Veng, Cambodia

TEN years after the death of the brutal Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, his grave has become a symbol of spiritual comfort to some in the village where he died.
Villagers pray at the site, asking for blessings of luck, happiness and even protection from malaria – despite the mayhem he wrought upon their country.

"I know it is odd, but I just do as many people here do, asking for happiness from his spirit," said Orn Pheap, 37, who lost a grandfather and two uncles during the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror from 1975 to 1979.

Her house in Anlong Veng, 190 miles north of the capital, Phnom Penh, sits 100 yards from the grave, and she said: "I don't know how long I can stay angry with him, since he is already dead."

For most, Pol Pot, who died ten years ago today from apparent heart failure, is remembered as a murderous tyrant with fanatical communist beliefs. Under his leadership, the Khmer Rouge turned the country into a vast slave labour camp, causing the deaths of some 1.7 million people from starvation, forced labour and execution.

Last week, his grave – a pile of dirt covered by a knee-high corrugated zinc roof – was cluttered with clay jars filled with half-burned incense sticks, a sign of prayer and worship.

Cambodians believe in the influence of spirits and superstitious forces on their daily lives and fortunes, which may be why some worship at the grave.

Anlong Veng, once a jungle war zone, is now a sprawling market town, bustling with the kind of capitalist activities Pol Pot and his comrades sought to stamp out. Ramshackle shops are filled with clothing, homewares, pirated DVDs and other goods from nearby Thailand.

Pol Pot's grave has been designated a tourist attraction, and it is one of the few remnants of Khmer Rouge history, which the government is trying to preserve.

Some Cambodians have travelled to Anlong Veng to spit on the grave and curse him in anger, said Sat Narin, 37, who owns a nearby clothing shop. "Given his bad reputation, he should not be venerated," he said. "But somehow he is popular with some people."

Among the worshippers who seek blessings from Pol Pot's ghost are ethnic Vietnamese who live in the area – a sharp irony given the massacres of ethnic Vietnamese during his rule.

One such woman recalled a nightmare in which she saw a black-clad man sitting on a tree near her hut. When she described the vision to her Cambodian neighbours, they advised her to take offerings to Pol Pot's grave to ask his spirit for protection. "I have prayed at his grave ever since," she said. "I just want to show some respect to the spiritual master of the land."

FIVE FACE WAR CRIMES TRIAL

IF POL Pot were still alive, he would be facing war crimes charges along with five of his former comrades detained by Cambodia's UN-backed genocide tribunal.

Their long-delayed trials are expected to start later this year.

The five are: the alleged chief torturer of the Khmer Rouge, Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch; Khmer Rouge prime minister Khieu Samphan; Ieng Sary, the regime's former foreign minister, and his wife, Ieng Thirith, who was also a Khmer Rouge member and the top surviving Khmer Rouge leader, Nuon Chea.

Nhem En, who was forced to work as the photographer at the Khmer Rouge's Tuol Sleng torture centre in Phnom Penh, says he is setting up his own museum in Anlong Veng about the communist group – not to glorify them, but for educational purposes.

He, too, used to light incense and pray at Pol Pot's grave, he said, but "only for him not to butcher people again in his next life". Read more!

PETRA NEMCOVA - NEMCOVA HAUNTED BY CAMBODIA CHARITY TRIP

Supermodel-turned-humanitarian PETRA NEMCOVA was horrified after witnessing first-hand the brutality of human trafficking during a recent visit to Cambodia.

The Czech Republic-born model was so jarred by the experience she has teamed up with Southeast Asian-based charity the Somaly Mam Foundation in an effort to raise awareness for the devastating crimes.

She says, "It makes me so angry. Girls and boys get sold as young as four-years-old and are put in animal cages. Some of them never see the light anymore. We met this girl who was 13 and a pimp made her lose her right eye. The words 'pimp' and 'child' should never be in the same sentence."

Nemcova was so moved by the Foundation, which seeks to rescue women and girls from the horrors of a life in brothels or on the streets, she wore a dress hand-sewn by women rescued by the group to a recent charity gala.

The model suffered her own hardship during a 2004 vacation to Thailand, surviving multiple broken bones and internal injuries when a tsunami hit land, killing her then-boyfriend, photographer Simon Atlee, and leaving her stranded for hours in a palm tree.

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100 tourists evacuated after Cambodian hotel fire: police

PHNOM PENH - About 100 tourists were evacuated early Saturday from one of Cambodia's biggest hotels and casinos, after a fire broke out at a construction site inside the complex in Phnom Penh, police said.

Wood being used for remodelling the NagaCorp hotel caught fire, sparking a blaze in a district of the city crowded with government offices, including the parliament and foreign ministry, military police officer Klook Chandara said.

About 50 firefighters and volunteers worked for three hours to douse the blaze, he added.

The damage was contained to one part of the hotel, and no injuries were reported, although the hotel evacuated all its guests.

"I had just woken up, and someone called me to get out of the room. I was so shocked," said Malaysian tourist Choy Meng Choong, as he hauled his belongings out of the hotel.

The NagaCorp hotel and casino attracts hundreds of tourists every day, mainly from Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea.

"As soon as we knew that something was burning at the back, we evacuated the all tourists to a safe place outside the hotel," said a hotel marketing manager, who asked not to be named.

"Everyone is safe. No one was injured," he told AFP, as a column of thick smoke billowed into the sky.

The blaze was the second major fire in two days in Cambodia's capital, after more than 200 wooden shacks in a slum area were destroyed early Friday, leaving thousands homeless.

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Cambodia Protects Endangered Bird

By Jerry Harmer

STOUNG, Cambodia (AP) — Conservationists in Cambodia think they may be turning the corner in their fight to save one of the world's rarest birds.

The Bengal Florican, known in Cambodia as "the whispering bird," is remarkable for a male mating display that amounts to a dance competition to attract a mate.

Since 2005, a rush to turn grasslands into large-scale rice farms has gobbled up one-third of the Bengal Florican's habitat in Cambodia, threatening the critically endangered bird with extinction.
Now, a land protection plan devised by the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, along with British-based BirdLife International and Cambodian authorities, appears to be slowing this controversial real estate grab.

Most of the world's Bengal Floricans, believed to number less than 1,000, live in scattered pockets on the fringes of Cambodia's Great Lake. The rest are in India, Nepal and Vietnam.

The Cambodian program to protect Florican habitat bans development in five zones totaling 135 square miles. Villages and farms within the zones can remain, preserving traditional ways of life. Police patrol by motorbike during the dry season and by boat when floods come.

Since the program was adopted, three planned developments have been canceled and another put on hold, says Tom Evans, a Wildlife Conservation Society technical adviser in Cambodia.

"Some prospective developers have been deterred at an earlier stage when they learned that the areas had a special designation," he added.

More such zones, dubbed Integrated Farming and Biodiversity Areas, are planned.

In mid-March, the height of the dry season, the grasslands near Great Lake are at their bleakest. They stretch to the horizon, brown and flat under the blazing sun, with barely a tree to break the monotony. Smoke curls into the air where farmers burn off scrub to rejuvenate pasture for their cattle. Ox carts trundle down deeply rutted tracks. An occasional motor vehicle kicks up clouds of dust.

But for the patient and the sharp-eyed, this landscape offers a sight to behold: the courtship display of the male Bengal Florican.

The bird, a black-and-white bustard that looks like a small ostrich, struts into a clearing, stretches its long neck and ruffles up its feathers. Then, it flits into the air before fluttering back to the ground in an undulating pattern, like a parachutist caught in a crosswind.

As it descends, it emits a deep humming sound that has earned it its Cambodian name, "the whispering bird." The displays are usually carried out within sight of other males, in what amounts to an open dance competition to attract a mate.

"They're really unique," says Lotty Packman, a 24-year-old researcher from the University of East Anglia in England. "They're very striking and very charismatic."

Packman was spending long days in the heat, netting Floricans and attaching tracking devices to learn more about them, especially the elusive female of which very little is known.

"You can't conserve it if you don't know its natural history," Packman said after tagging and releasing a male with a solar-powered transmitter that will send back data every two days. "It's a race against time."

The species was rediscovered in Cambodia in 1999. Until then, the country's decades-long civil war had made detailed exploration of the countryside too dangerous.

But peace has proved to be a far greater threat.

Businessmen have snapped up thousands of acres of land in often murky deals and built more than 100 strip dams, which turn the grassland into emerald-green rice paddies that can produce rice during the dry season.

Conservationists have worked hard to win the villagers' support, but despite the restrictions on development, a new plantation has been laid out in one zone and preparations have been made for another. Signs marking the protected areas have been knocked down — it's not clear by whom.
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Cambodia Suspends Foreign Marriages

Cambodia has temporarily banned marriages between foreigners and Cambodians because of concerns over the rising number of brokered unions involving poor, uneducated women. The move follows the publication of a report highlighting the abuse of many Cambodian brides who went to South Korea following hastily arranged marriages. Rory Byrne reports from Phnom Penh.

The ban will at least briefly halt the increasing number of marriages of poor Cambodian women to foreign men, mostly from Taiwan and South Korea.

Most such marriages are hastily arranged by brokers who charge clients up to $20,000 for each bride. Of this, only $500 to $1,000 typically goes to the Cambodian woman's family - the brokers pocket the rest.

A recent report by the International Organization for Migration says more than 1700 South Korean marriage visas were issued to Cambodian women in 2007, up from just 72 in 2004.

The IOM says the grooms were mostly factory workers and farmers who had trouble finding wives in South Korea because of their low job status.

While the report found no evidence of systematic abuse of Cambodian women who married South Koreans, it says that many do suffer violence.

Srey Roth is the director of the Cambodia Women's Crisis Center.

"Some they cannot stay with the husband because the husband (is) so violent," Roth said. "And then the husband forces them to earn money for support their family. And they cannot get the nationality (citizenship), so it means that they stay under the husband or mother-in-law's control."

Experts say that many marriage brokers from Taiwan and South Korea have moved to Cambodia since Vietnam banned them two years ago.

Now the Cambodian government appears to be cracking down. Three South Korean marriage agencies have been closed recently, accused of using arranged marriages as a front for people trafficking.

The blanket ban on foreigners marrying Cambodians is seen as the next step in the process, designed to give the authorities here more time to properly investigate brokered marriages.

Srey Roth opposes a blanket ban on mixed-marriages, but says that the government should run background checks on all foreigners who wish to marry Cambodian women.

"I want our government (to) have one department to investigate the guy before agree(ing) the foreigner (can) marry to our Cambodian (women)," Roth said. "They should know about the background and living situation and then tell our girl and then our girl can make the decision if they want to marry or not."

Although the IOM report focuses on marriages between Cambodians and South Koreans, it emphasizes that the potential for problems exists globally. It says all brokered unions needed to be better regulated.

Cambodian officials say the ban on foreigners marrying Cambodians will be lifted after the government develops a legal framework to address these marriages.
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Nationalism and the West; Dangerous America?; Kissinger and Cambodia; Foreign policy credentials?

Nationalism and the West

In his op-ed column "Beware an angry China" (Views, April 9), Philip Bowring rightly points out that China-bashing may increase nationalism in China. But Bowring misses the point that the anxiety in the West over losing its superior position in global affairs has been fomenting nationalism in North America and Europe, which fuels a wave of China bashing.

The Olympic crisis is not about China: It is an expression of the West's sense of superiority. There is much anxiety in the West over losing this superior position, and this is exacerbated by economic insecurity in a globalized world.

It's a joke for the West to think it can use the Olympics to leverage China. Nothing can stop China. Even without the Olympics, people would still travel to China for business or pleasure.

Most Chinese are far less nationalist than many people in the West.

Shuaihua Cheng, Geneva

Dangerous America?

It is quite incredible to read a letter to the editor suggesting that NATO be disbanded and asserting that a majority of the people in Europe and Italy consider America to be the greatest danger to world peace (April 10).

If it were not for the U.S. Army in World War II, Italy might still be under a dictatorship fostered by Mussolini and Germany would be the fascist superpower of Europe.

I am a senior citizen, so I vividly remember that thousands of American soldiers, including several friends of mine, died on an Italian beach to free Italians from the yoke of Mussolini. To point to the United States as a danger to peace in the world is a grave insult. America saved Europe, and the American troops stationed in Germany and elsewhere in Europe are today a bulwark against any possible ideas Russia might have to use Russian oil as a weapon to control the future of NATO.

How quickly we forget.

Bernard Ilson, New York

Kissinger and Cambodia

I reside in a country that still lives with the disaster sown by Henry Kissinger ("The debate we need to have," Views, April 8) and the Nixon administration. His orders to the U.S. military a generation ago were to send anything that flies against anything that moves.

Those who witnessed the destruction in Cambodia say that it is impossible to describe. But it did provoke thousands of peasants to join a hitherto marginal force known as the Khmer Rouge. We are familiar with the result.

Even today, Cambodia remains more influenced by Communist Vietnam than by the West - hardly a strategic victory for the erstwhile secretary of state.

John Macgregor, Phnom Penh

Foreign policy credentials?

Regarding the article "Obama tries to bolster his credentials on foreign policy" (April 11): It is worrying, if not pathetic, that Senator Barack Obama and his advisers cite "his ties to relatives in poor villages in Kenya" and " a trip to Pakistan while he was a college student" as relevant foreign policy experience. That background would hardly qualify him for a job on a microfinance project in a developing country.

As the credentials of the two other U.S. presidential candidates are also rather thin, Obama could make a difference if he were supported by heavyweights in foreign policy and diplomacy among whom he might select his vice president.

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Crowds hit the road to mark Cambodia’s New Year holiday

Thousands of people crammed onto buses and cars, some clinging to roofs and spilling out of doors, as they headed out of Phnom Penh yesterday for the Buddhist New Year holiday.

The three-day holiday — also celebrated in Thailand, Myanmar and Laos — gives thousands of Cambodia’s transient workers a rare chance to spend time with family, leaving the normally busy capital unusually empty.

“This is the only chance I have to visit my parents, and I am so excited,” said 22-year-old Sun Srey Pov, who left her hometown in the east to work in a Phnom Penh garment factory.

“It is a pleasurable time, although it is hard to travel,” she said while trying to elbow some room in a 12-seat minibus, which was packed with 20 people inside and five hanging off the roof.

In Phnom Penh, elderly women dressed in traditional costume carried food to give to monks at pagodas. The younger generation pursued different traditions — spraying each other with talcum powder, playing street games and dancing to loud music.

But the practice of throwing water and talcum powder on passing motorists has been discouraged by the government.

A truck with a megaphone patrolled the streets, warning that the practice could cause traffic accidents.
Read more!

Bayon TV, The Latest Edition to Join SuncasTV

Bayon TV, Cambodia's largest television, radio and broadcasting channel, will be featured on SuncasTV.

Chicago, IL (PRWEB) April 11, 2008 -- Bayon TV, Cambodia's largest television, radio and broadcasting channel, will be featured on SuncasTV.

Bayon TV: Cambodian TV with a Smile! was founded in 1998 in the Kingdom of Cambodia. The channel is broadcast directly from Phnom Penh and has 4 sub-stations in Kampong Cham, Seim Reab, Shihanouk Ville and Stung Treng. This popular channel broadcasts current events, entertainment news, movies and also features the arts. It is owned by the Prime Minister of Cambodia, Hun Sen, who is also the leader of the Cambodian People's Party.

SuncasTV is a subsidiary of the Suncast Network, Inc., located in Arlington Heights, IL. SuncasTV offers Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) to the North American television viewing public, with a specialty towards providing programming from Asian channels and networks.
SuncasTV is the first IPTV to have full contractual rights to broadcast Bayon TV, which is going to be a channel available to viewers 24/7.

Amongst the channels featured on SuncasTV are English, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Malaysian, Chinese, Korean, Indian, Filipino, Thai and Japanese. Apart from that, there are also channels covering sports, entertainment and the arts, food and real estate.

This new venture between Bayon TV and SuncasTV will serve as a platform to nurture future relations and help strengthen ties between the Cambodians and the Asian American public.

SuncasTV is happy to present you Bayon TV and invites you all to watch this new channel at http://www.suncastv.com/cambodia/index.html; it will be available for viewing on April 1, 2008. SuncasTV provides our Khmer viewers, 24-hour coverage directly from Cambodia with news, interviews, sports, political programs, dramas, documentaries, variety shows and movies. The vision of SuncasTV Cambodia is to bring all the Khmer communities from all over the United States together by allowing all the organizations to post their local news and event video to our Khmer Community Channel.

ABOUT SuncasTV
SuncasTV is ahead of the curve in introducing the IPTV concept to American audiences. SuncasTV is an IPTV service provider which supports IPTV viewers in the U.S. and globally by offering a wide range of information and entertainment content from around the world. (www.suncastv.com). It has a specialty towards providing programming from Asian channels and networks. It targets IPTV viewers in the U.S. with initial entry in the Asian market by offering content from a variety of Asian countries. Currently the channel carries content from China, Korea, Philippines, India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Japan, and there is an English channel.

Traditional TV viewing required broadcast reception, satellite dish, or cable. Without installing any cables or satellite dishes, one can watch your favorite broadcasts delivered to your TV set whenever you want, regardless of where in the world you are. This is the future trend for TV viewing/delivery. IPTV will soon be the standard platform for delivery for video on demand (VOD), pay per view (PPV) and subscription content from providers.

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Thousands homeless after Cambodian slum fire: police

PHNOM PENH - Thousands were made homeless early Friday after a slum fire in Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh destroyed more than 200 homes, police said.

The blaze broke out in an area crowded with poorly-built wooden shacks, police said, adding that the cause of the fire was still under investigation.

"Hundreds of houses were completely destroyed," said Pong Savrith, military police deputy commander.

"They were all small wooden houses that were built in a disorderly manner," he told AFP as a column of thick smoke continued to billow into the sky.

Neighbourhood residents swarmed into nearby streets, struggling to rescue their belongings, while others huddled on the curbside, crying as their homes burned.

About 200 firefighters and volunteers worked for five hours to douse the blaze, said fire chief Sok Vannar.

"This is the biggest fire this year," he said, adding that no one had been hurt.

Although large neighbourhood fires are increasingly rare in Phnom Penh, a series of suspicious blazes several years ago destroyed a number of slum areas, forcing tens of thousands to flee.


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Cambodia, Indonesia's Rajawali to set up airline

JAKARTA, April 10 (Reuters) - The Cambodian government and Indonesia's Rajawali Corporation agreed on Thursday to set up a new national flag airline to serve Cambodia's growing tourism industry, the company said in a statement.

The joint-venture company's capital is estimated to reach $50 million and the Cambodian government will own 51 percent while Rajawali Group will own the rest.

"With a national flag carrier, we envisage our economy and tourism industry will grow rapidly," Cambodia's Deputy Prime Minister, Sok An, said in the statement released by Rajawali.

Cambodia launched its own national flag carrier, Royal Air Cambodge (RAC), in the mid-1990s but it went bankrupt, resulting in heavy losses for the government.

The new carrier, however, might have a better chance due to the rising number of tourists to Cambodia. In 2007, the country attracted more than 2 million tourists and more than 60 percent of them used air travel.

The number of tourist arrivals in 2007 rose almost 19 percent from the previous year and air travel increased more than 25 percent, according to the tourism minister on the official Web site www.mot.gov.kh.

Rajawali was founded by Indonesian entrepreneur Peter Sondakh, ranked by Globe Asia magazine as 19th wealthiest Indonesian with a net worth of $510 million. The group controls diversified businesses from a cement firm to department stores and a taxi company.

It holds an around 25 percent stake in Semen Gresik SMGR.JK, Indonesia's largest cement maker. Rajawali also founded the country's third-largest mobile phone firm before selling its stake to Telekom Malaysia (TLMM.KL: Quote, Profile, Research) and Emirates Telecommunications ETEL.AD.

(Additional reporting by Tyagita Silka) (Reporting by Nury Sybli, writing by Tyagita Silka, editing by Sugita Katyal)

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The relevance of Cambodia

There are some names in the obituary columns that say more than the voices of the living.

Such is the name of Dith Pran, who died last Sunday at 65. He was the Cambodian photographer who somehow survived the collection of killing fields that his country became after the Americans abandoned it. And who somehow made his way to the United States to tell the world about it.

Hundreds of thousands of his countrymen would lose their lives after the Khmer Rouge swept into Phnom Penh and began rounding up just about anybody who could read and write. Literacy is dangerous. It gives people ideas, and the only ideas allowed in the new Cambodia were the Party's.

The toll of the Khmer Rouge's brief reign of terror in Cambodia (1975-78) is uncertain –– a million, two? Maybe a third of the country's pre-Communist population. The numbers can only be estimated, but the pictures of pyramids of skulls are well known. They've become emblematic of that bloody time.

It wasn't supposed to happen that way, not according to the sophisticates who were advocating an American withdrawal from Indochina in the 1970s. They blithely dismissed all the warnings that a bloodbath would follow once the United States abandoned its allies in Southeast Asia:

"Indochina Without Americans/For Most, A Better Life," –– headline in The New York Times, April 13, 1975.

The Times' correspondent in Phnom Penh, Sydney Schanberg, may have been the most blithe of all about Cambodia's better future once the Americans left. In a report four days before Phnom Penh fell, he wrote that for "ordinary people of Indochina ... it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone."

Schanberg's limited imagination would soon enough be demonstrated by the unspeakable realities to follow. He was still sending optimistic dispatches even as the holocaust was proceeding. He was so monstrously wrong about what would happen in Cambodia after the Communist victory there that he won a Pulitzer Prize for it. The name of his Cambodian photographer, translator, guide and friend? Dith Pran.

The fast-talking Cambodian managed to save Schanberg and other Western journalists from the Khmer Rouge, but was unable to make it out of the country with them. In the swirling chaos of the Communist takeover, all was terror and confusion. The Khmer Rouge were emptying schools and hospitals and whole cities in their hunt for class enemies. (Anybody who wore glasses –– the surest sign of a bourgeois intellectual –– was in danger.)

Dith Pran managed to survive the ceaseless labor, the brutal beatings and the starvation diet (a tablespoon of rice a day), and eventually snuck across the Thai border. Reunited with Schanberg, he would go on to become a photographer for the Times.

Now, once again, the sophisticates are urging Americans to abandon an ally, this time beleaguered Iraq. The leading Democratic presidential candidates speak glibly of pulling out of that country as if there would be no ill effects. As in Cambodia?

This week the American commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is testifying once again before Congress, and once again he'll be met by a chorus of cynicism, no matter how much real progress his strategy, aka The Surge, has made. Last time he testified, Hillary Clinton told the general it would take "a willing suspension of disbelief" to credit what he said. The critics of the war have their script and are sticking to it. Just as Sydney Schanberg knew all would be better once the Americans had left Cambodia.

What would an American withdrawal now mean for the Iraqis? It is now too late to ask Dith Pran. But his life and trials speak eloquently enough.


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Vietnam donates rice seeds to Cambodia

VietNamNet Bridge – The Committee for Southwestern region of Vietnam has donated 300 tonnes of rice seeds to Cambodia to help local farmers with the crop cultivation.

The rice seeds were presented at a ceremony on April 9 during a visit to Cambodia by Vice Chairman of the Committee Son Song Son.

Deputy Head of the Cambodian Prime Minister’s Office Heng Bun Heng accepted the donation, saying it further strengthened the traditional friendship between the people of Cambodia and Vietnam .

Heng thanked the Government and people of Vietnam for their solid commitment to Cambodia during their past struggle against the Pol Pot genocidal regime as well as current national construction and development.

In addition to rice varieties, the committee will donate another 150,000 USD worth of goods, including 300 packages of instant noodles, five tonnes of glutamate and six tonnes of soap.

(Source: VNA)
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Foreign Ministry protests against Cambodia

The world will be laughing at Thailand's claims about Cambodia violation sovereignty of Thailand. Thailand have been stealing lots of temples and antiques from Cambodia. Preah Vihear temple and surrounding area is belong to Cambodia, any pieces of rock, the West entrance inside Thailand, any thing the whole area belong to the Temple should be belong to Cambodia.

The Foreign Ministry Thursday lodged an official protest with Cambodia over sovereignty violation in the overlapping area near Preah Vihear temple.

Virachai Plasai, Director General of Treaties and Legal Affairs summoned Cambodia's Ambassador Thailand Ung Sean to take an aide-memoire after Phnom Penh dispatched a number of armed forces the area in question over a month ago.

The protest was made as Cambodia has violated a memorandum of understanding signed by both sides in 2000 which barred two countries from making any changes in the area before the boundary demarcation, Virachai said.

The Nation
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French navy ship arrives in Cambodia for visit

PHNOM PENH, April 10 (Xinhua) -- The French naval vessel Dupuy de Lome docked at the south-western Cambodian port of Sihanoukville on Thursday for a visit aimed at strengthening bilateral ties with Cambodian navy, French embassy official said.

The French navy delegation will exchange experiences with the Cambodian navy side, said Sabyene Mansecan, spokeswoman of the French embassy to Cambodia.

She said that the Dupuy de Lome ship, which is 102 meters in length and has 100 crew members, will anchor at Sihanoukville for four days.

The French delegation will meet with some senior Cambodian officials, including Say Hak, Governor of Sihanoukville, she added. Read more!

Cambodia: Phnom Penh Empire Win Hun Sen Cup

A single strike from Anucha Chuaisri early in the second half was enough to allow Phnom Penh Empire FC to be crowned as the champions of the Samdech Akka Moha Sena Padei Decho Hun Sen Cup 2008 after beating Preah Khan Reach 1-0 in the final.

Anucha made clever use of limited space just four minutes after the restart to slam home to give Phnom Penh the crown to at least alleviate some of the disappointment of losing the league title in the recently concluded Cambodian Premier League season.

Phnom Penh Empire made the final this year after a convincing performance in the semi-finals in which they sent Build Bright University FC packing with a 4-1 beating while Preah Khan Reach eliminated Khemara Keila FC 5-4 in the other tie.

In the fight for third and fourth placing, Build Bright emerged victorious when they beat Khemara 3-2.

But it was Khemara who drew first blood when Kuoch Sokomphiak scored the opening goal in the fourth minute for Build Bright to stage a late reply in the 61st minute off Sem Bunny before adding further goals off Saidu Zila Sani (64th minute) and Nnandi Sylester Ahiem (88th minute).
Akpueze Kenneth late strike deep in injury time failed to change the scoreline as Khemara settled for fourth place.
Read more!

Cambodia lifts ban of rice exports for three provinces

PHNOM PENH, April 9 (Xinhua) -- Prime Minister Hun Sen has lifted the ban of rice exports for three provinces neighboring Vietnam due to their difficulty of processing and storing newly-harvested paddy, English-Khmer language newspaper the Mekong Times reported on Wednesday.

The premier made the decision on Monday under the request of Commerce Minister Cham Prasidh to allow Prey Veng, Kandal and Takeo provinces to export rice, while the ban still remain valid for other provinces.

Hun Sen imposed the two-month-long ban of rice exports on March26 in order to help curb the spiraling price of the staple food.

Minister Agriculture and Fisheries Chan Sarun said that the permission is being offered because the farmers in these three provinces have harvested dry-season rice and found it difficult to store.

"Cambodia will not face a problem of food security because plenty of rice is already in stock," he added.

At the end of March, as another measure to help bring down the price, the government released national stockpile of rice into the market. High-quality rice once sold one U.S. dollar per kilo, almost two times the previous price.

Experts believed that the decrease of global rice production and the over purchase by Vietnam and Thailand from Cambodia had caused the price hike on the Cambodian market
Read more!

Thailand, Cambodia reopen talks on disputed waters

By an OGJ correspondent
BANGKOK, Apr. 8 -- Thailand and Cambodia plan to resume negotiations Apr. 21 in Bangkok over long-standing differences covering ownership of gas reserves in disputed waters.

An impasse has prevented development of 26,000 sq km area in the Gulf of Thailand. The area is believed to hold substantial hydrocarbon deposits.

Negotiations are being prompted by skyrocketing oil prices and the need of both Thailand and Cambodia to find indigenous energy supplies.

In 2001, both sides agreed to adopt the Joint Development Area (JDA), a scheme embraced earlier by Thailand and Malaysia, for developing oil and gas in the disputed zone without resolving exact maritime boundaries.

The original model negotiated by Thailand and Cambodia called for a 50-50 split of resources arising from the middle portion of the JDA, with sharing ratios differing on areas flanking the plot, depending on the proximity to their territorial claims.

However, Phnom Penh authorities are pressing for a 60-40 sharing ratio, unlike the 50-50 split adopted by Thailand and Malaysia on the 7,250-sq-km triangular JDA (OGJ Online, Aug. 15, 2006).

Songpop Polachan, deputy director-general of Thailand's Department of Mineral Fuels, said Thailand will insist that the Malaysia-Thailand JDA sharing model is adopted for the Thailand-Cambodia pact.

Read more!

Cambodia, Vietnam exchange methods on protecting forests, wildlife

Law enforcement officers from two provinces in central Vietnam have completed a week-long Forest and Wildlife Law Enforcement Study Tour of Cambodia, a press release said Wednesday.

During the visit organized by WWF (World Wildlife Fund) Vietnam and PeunPa, a member of the Wildlife Alliance, officials from Vietnam's Forest Protection Department (FPD) and Police met their Cambodian counterparts, observed rangers training at Preah Monivong (Bokor) National Park, visited Phnom Tamao wildlife rescue center, and attended seminars focusing on wildlife and forest conservation, the WWF press release said.

They also discussed inter-agency cooperation with Cambodia's Wildlife Rapid Rescue Team, which comprises Forestry Administration officials and members of the Royal Gendarmerie Khmer, it added.

The study tour gave participants first hand experience of regionally tested methods of forest and wildlife law enforcement, and will encourage greater international inter-agency cooperation between the two countries to suppress nature crime, the release said, adding that the chance to observe and discuss Cambodia's best practices will also help the participants consider ways to implement their own strategies for forest protection.

"Forest crime in Southeast Asia is a multi-million dollar activity that is stripping the region of irreplaceable natural heritage to the enrichment of a limited few. In Vietnam, responsibility for suppressing this criminal activity is shared between a wide range of agencies, from forest rangers to economic and traffic police, through to customs and border security forces," said Mark E Grindley, WWF Technical Advisor in central Vietnam.

"The Vietnam Government is encouraging the inter-agency cooperation necessary to address the problem, and we are pleased to support an exchange of ideas with Cambodia, where there are some highly successful models from which to learn," Grindley said.

The trip was jointly hosted by Cambodia's Ministry of Forest and Fisheries and Ministry of the Environment.

Source: Xinhua Read more!

Phnom Penh's totem elephant – Sambo – survives

By Suzy Khimm

The Christian Science Monitor (www.csmonitor.com)

The speckle-eared pachyderm escaped machetes and famine, and now rests as Phnom Penh's totem of good things.

Phnom Penh, cambodia -- In the center of a traffic-mobbed roundabout, encircled by the crush of cars and motorbikes, a small act of veneration regularly takes place. A small gray-haired woman buys a bunch of bananas and toddles with her cane up to Sambo, a 10-foot-tall, 4,000-pound elephant standing calmly in the urban chaos.

Sambo grasps the offering with her trunk, gobbling the entire bunch in one bite as the woman brings her palms together in a sign of respect for the last remaining elephant in Phnom Penh.

Once plentiful in the Cambodian countryside, elephants like Sambo were historically fixtures at the royal palace. While the animals still evoke the nation's ancient legacy of kings and warriors, Sambo also represents a more recent piece of Cambodian history. Having survived the machetes of the Khmer Rouge she has become one of the capital city's most visible cultural icons – a magnet for tourists, children, and those who venerate her as a sacred beast.

For Sin Son, a fourth-generation elephant handler, Sambo is a beloved link to life before the Khmer Rouge regime: "For me, elephants represent God – they represent people who have been saved, who have lived a long time."

For more than a century, Sin Son's relatives kept elephants on the family's five-acre plot to transport rice, clear forests, and haul logs. Following tradition, at a time when wild elephants were abundant in the wild, they captured and trained them.

In mid-1977 Khmer Rouge cadres descended upon Sin Son's farm near Samrong Tong, a district west of Phnom Penh. They attacked the family's five elephants with machetes. Sin Son, 24 at the time, watched in horror as the Khmer Rouge seized the animals that his family had raised for generations. When the cadres struck 17-year-old Sambo – the youngest elephant – on a hind leg with a machete, Sin Son could no longer contain his anguish.

At the risk of being killed, says Sin Son, he protested, "Friend, friend! Please, do not kill her, she is so small – take pity on her!"

In his final glimpse of Sambo, Sin Son saw the wounded elephant running from her captors, fleeing into the chaos of the evacuation.

Sin Son was sent to a labor camp in the northwestern Battambang Province. He says he wept openly after hearing reports that the four older elephants had been killed.

"We took care of Sambo since she was 8," Sin Son says, describing how the elephant learned to come when he called and bumped him playfully with her trunk. "I thought of her as my blood relative, my sister."

Sin Son spent two years in the labor camp, where his parents, two brothers, and two aunts would be among the 1.7 million Cambodians who perished as a result of execution, starvation, disease, and overwork under the regime.

After the Khmer Rouge was ousted in 1979, Sin Son returned to his village to find that only one neighbor had survived. He was astonished to hear that Sambo, too, was still alive. Sambo had been taken in by a chief cadre and was living hundreds of miles away in the Cardamom Mountains, the neighbor told Sin Son.

Sitting today with his elephant in front of Wat Phnom's ornate steps, Sin Son breaks into a smile as he tells – for the umpteenth time – the story of his remarkable reunion with Sambo.

Sin Son pedaled his bicycle for three days to get to the small farm where Sambo was being kept.

"At first they did not believe I was her owner," he says. "But when I called her name, she came out from the jungle behind their house. I was so happy, so excited – I never thought she'd be there, or that they'd give her back to me."

He arranged Sambo's release in exchange for a buffalo he scrounged to buy from a neighboring farm.

"The Khmer Rouge destroyed pagodas, they killed monks and cut their throats ... but maybe they took pity on [Sambo]," Sin Son says.

Sin Son moved to the capital in 1980 to rebuild – bringing his huge "sister" with him.

• • •

Having served the powerful and elite for centuries, elephants are still venerated in Cambodia, says Dougald O'Reilly, director of Heritage Watch, an archeological preservation group.

At Angkor Wat, stone reliefs depict elephants carrying warriors into battle and parading in royal processions. According to legend, elephants hauled the stones for building the world-famous temple, though it's more probable that they helped create the canal network around the complex, says Mr. O'Reilly.

Though she's served neither gods nor kings, Sambo has served a newer form of authority in Cambodia: democracy. Since the country's first UN-organized elections in 1993, civil society groups and political parties have made Sambo the outsized centerpiece of their public demonstrations. She has marched to protest global child labor, to raise awareness about UN's Millennium Development Goals, and to promote children's vaccinations. During election season, she's routinely trotted out to support the ruling party – and even its opponents.

"[Elephants] are a symbol of force that helped Cambodia when we didn't have trucks and machines in the past," says Kek Galabru, founder of Licadho, a rights group that has included the elephant in multiple demonstrations. "It's the animal of Cambodia."

• • •

Though city life was a huge adjustment for the farm-dwelling elephant – "[Sambo] was terrified of cars," says Sin Son, and train whistles caused her to cry deafeningly – she became accustomed to it. Eventually, the pair set up shop at Wat Phnom, a 14th-century pagoda surrounded by a park of shady trees. In 1982, Sin Son built a staircase and began selling elephant rides for 25 cents.

Sambo now ambles daily to Wat Phnom at 7 a.m. Surrounded by monkeys, incense-sellers, beggars, and snack vendors, Sambo flaps her speckled ears and waits under a tree for her visitors. On a recent day a family of Korean tourists finished a photo session as a young woman carrying her son walked under Sambo's trunk three times for luck. Pregnant women will also come to pass underneath her belly.

Though Sin Son has hired a cousin to guide Sambo to work, he still sits next to his lifelong partner each day, to monitor Sambo's condition in the heat, hose her off, and make sure she gets her 150 pounds of sugar cane and bananas.

"I feed her, she feeds me. We go back and forth, like siblings," says Sin Son, whose rate for the popular ride has risen to $15.

Such prosperity has enabled Sin Son to send four children to college; his oldest son even went to Utah to study information technology.

But while his family's partnership with its elephants survived the horrors of war, Sin Son doesn't expect his children to carry on the tradition.

"They like school, they like to study," he says. "Maybe it's finished with me."
Read more!

Cambodia, Vietnam exchange methods on protecting forests, wildlife

Law enforcement officers from two provinces in central Vietnam have completed a week-long Forest and Wildlife Law Enforcement Study Tour of Cambodia, a press release said Wednesday.

During the visit organized by WWF (World Wildlife Fund) Vietnam and PeunPa, a member of the Wildlife Alliance, officials from Vietnam's Forest Protection Department (FPD) and Police met their Cambodian counterparts, observed rangers training at Preah Monivong (Bokor) National Park, visited Phnom Tamao wildlife rescue center, and attended seminars focusing on wildlife and forest conservation, the WWF press release said.

They also discussed inter-agency cooperation with Cambodia's Wildlife Rapid Rescue Team, which comprises Forestry Administration officials and members of the Royal Gendarmerie Khmer, it added.

The study tour gave participants first hand experience of regionally tested methods of forest and wildlife law enforcement, and will encourage greater international inter-agency cooperation between the two countries to suppress nature crime, the release said, adding that the chance to observe and discuss Cambodia's best practices will also help the participants consider ways to implement their own strategies for forest protection.

"Forest crime in Southeast Asia is a multi-million dollar activity that is stripping the region of irreplaceable natural heritage to the enrichment of a limited few. In Vietnam, responsibility for suppressing this criminal activity is shared between a wide range of agencies, from forest rangers to economic and traffic police, through to customs and border security forces," said Mark E Grindley, WWF Technical Advisor in central Vietnam.

"The Vietnam Government is encouraging the inter-agency cooperation necessary to address the problem, and we are pleased to support an exchange of ideas with Cambodia, where there are some highly successful models from which to learn," Grindley said.

The trip was jointly hosted by Cambodia's Ministry of Forest and Fisheries and Ministry of the Environment.

Source: Xinhua Read more!

Cambodia's 'happy pizza' faces chop in drug crackdown - Feature

Phnom Penh - Changing times and politics in South-East Asia may finally spell extinction for one of the most famous (or infamous) fusion cuisines enjoyed by backpackers, Cambodia's "happy pizza."Legendary amongst travelers for more than a decade, this hippy's little helper version of pizza is simply the traditional Italian favourite with a Cambodian twist - the rich tomato base comes heavily laced with marijuana.

Although officially illegal for several years, locals have traditionally used marijuana in soups or medicinally. Pioneering travelers crossing the Lao-Cambodian border previously even reported a small garden of the stuff being lovingly tended by customs officials.

And then foreign inspiration transformed the drug into arguably the world's most talked-about pizza topping. Dozens of happy pizza parlours sprang up around the country as backpack tourism boomed.

But now the Cambodian government's current battle against drugs has given "pizza wars" a whole new meaning.

This week marijuana was claimed as Cambodia's first "total victory" in eliminating a drug from both domestic and export markets by Interior Ministry anti-drug chief, Police General Lou Ramin.

"Marijuana is no longer a problem in Cambodia," he declared. "We are strengthening our monitoring throughout the country and its borders."

Massive plantations which once required helicopter airlifts to clear them have been wiped out, he said, leaving the government free to concentrate on the increasingly prevalent evils of heroin, cocaine and synthetic drugs such as methamphetamines.

The government's anti-grass putsch began in 1999, when seven elderly women who had previously openly sold marijuana at traditional medicine stalls in one of the capital's largest markets were arrested in a police raid and 38 kilos of the weed were confiscated.

Back then, a compressed brick of marijuana sold for around 2 dollars, and a packet of 25 ready-rolled cigarettes was just a dollar, according to experts, but inflation and repeated crackdowns quickly pushed the price up to a dollar per cigarette.

Somehow, however, the iconic happy pizza survived, until now.

The spiked pizza's status as a backpacker's rite of passage has earned it mentions even on reputable travel websites such as Lonely Planet. YouTube features videos of it being made, eaten, sold - and its extremely potent side effects.

"This is my journey into Happy Pizzaland Phnom Penh. The obvious happened - paranoia, and missing two paid-for flights back to Bangkok. FOOL!!!" one YouTube poster writes of his video clip.

A former Foreigner Police officer says that tourists ingesting marijuana in pizza form often got dangerously out of hand in culturally conservative Cambodia.

"Many times I saw people take their clothes off after eating this - especially women. Some people laugh, but some cry, and some just jump in the lake," he said.

Expatriates familiar with the potent pizza grin when they tell the story of one of the capital's most famous happy pizza chefs admitting himself to hospital and spending the night on a drip after sampling a slice of his own cuisine for the first - and last - time.

For most adventurous tourists, however, "happy pizza" provided no more than a great travel yarn, insists one of the country's dwindling chefs of Cambodia's quasi-clandestine classic, speaking on condition of anonymity.

On his menu, it costs as little as 3 dollars for a small pizza of happiness.

But he agrees that life as a purveyor of happy pizza is becoming increasingly precarious and expensive.

"It is much more expensive to make now because of the ingredients," he says. "The special ingredient costs much more now, but our biggest problem is that tourists do not ask for it anymore because they are afraid it is illegal."

"We still make the happy pizza if the tourists ask directly, but we put less special ingredient now because we don't want any problems with the police if they get crazy."

So how long can the marijuana pizza last out the law?

"The government goal is that this drug does not exist any more in Cambodia," says Police General Lou Ramin. "We will only be satisfied when it is not available at all."
Read more!

Participation of int'l peace-keeping exercise good for Cambodia's reputation

The participation of 40 Cambodian soldiers in a three-week multinational peace-keeping exercise in Bangladesh will help improve the country's international military reputation, national media on Wednesday quoted official as saying.

"We are really proud of our armed forces joining this international peace-keeping exercise," Tea Banh, minister of National Defense, told English-Khmer language newspaper the Mekong Times.
"We hope the exercise will help our soldiers improve their capacity in peace-keeping for the region and the entire world," he added.

The U.S.-led mission, named "Ambassador of Peace," began this week and involved 400 soldiers from 12 countries including Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Nepal, Brunei, Mongolia, Tonga, Cambodia and the United States.

The drills involve checkpoint and convoy operations, patrols, search, relief mission and disaster management.

Cambodian soldiers previously took part in multinational peace-keeping exercises in Mongolia and Bangladesh as well as U.N. peace-keeping missions in Sudan.

Source:Xinhua Read more!

Cambodia lifts ban of rice exports for three provinces

PHNOM PENH, April 9 (Xinhua) -- Prime Minister Hun Sen has lifted the ban of rice exports for three provinces neighboring Vietnam due to their difficulty of processing and storing newly-harvested paddy, English-Khmer language newspaper the Mekong Times reported on Wednesday.

The premier made the decision on Monday under the request of Commerce Minister Cham Prasidh to allow Prey Veng, Kandal and Takeo provinces to export rice, while the ban still remain valid for other provinces.

Hun Sen imposed the two-month-long ban of rice exports on March26 in order to help curb the spiraling price of the staple food.

Minister Agriculture and Fisheries Chan Sarun said that the permission is being offered because the farmers in these three provinces have harvested dry-season rice and found it difficult to store.

"Cambodia will not face a problem of food security because plenty of rice is already in stock," he added.

At the end of March, as another measure to help bring down the price, the government released national stockpile of rice into the market. High-quality rice once sold one U.S. dollar per kilo, almost two times the previous price.

Experts believed that the decrease of global rice production and the over purchase by Vietnam and Thailand from Cambodia had caused the price hike on the Cambodian market.
Read more!

Big lineup expected for Cambodian parade today

By Greg Mellen, staff writer

LONG BEACH - The final nails are being pounded into floats and the last VIPs are being added to the lineup as the fourth annual Cambodian New Year Parade prepares to set off from the corner of Junipero Avenue and Anaheim Street today.

Parade organizer Richer San predicts the annual celebration, which annually brings thousands of visitors to the Cambodian Town area, will be the largest to date.

As of Friday, the parade had 87 official entrants, the most yet, with a few more stragglers expected.

San said three of six floats were still under construction and nearing completion near Sophy's Restaurant on Anaheim Street.

"I think we all feel great," San said.

This year, there are five grand marshals for the parade. They are 1st District City Councilwoman Bonnie Lowenthal, 6th District Councilman Dee Andrews and local Cambodians Charles Song, Sweety Chap and Michael Sar.

A new wrinkle this year is participation in the parade by representatives of Cambodia's ministries of tourism and culture and fine arts, plus the Council of Ministries.

Deputy Prime Minister Sok An had been invited, but in in the wake of a torrent of community dissent, his name was withdrawn.

San says that from 2 to 5 p.m. tourism officials will offer workshops at the Mark Twain branch library on tourism business opportunities in Cambodia.

The library will also be open to display some of the more than 1,000 books and items
purchased by library officials on a recent trip to Cambodia.

The parade will begin at 9:30 a.m. with an interfaith celebration. The parade route runs along Anaheim Street between Junipero and Warren avenues. After the parade, a celebration with entertainment will be held at MacArthur Park, 1321 E. Anaheim St.

greg.mellen@presstelegram.com , 562-499-1291

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Survivor recalls horrors of Cambodia genocide

Editor's note: Christiane Amanpour is currently in production on a major CNN documentary that focuses on those people who stood up and said, "Listen! We must stop the killing. Stop the genocide."

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (CNN) -- A recently disclosed memo gave U.S. interrogators the ability to use harsh methods -- what many call "torture" -- to extract information from terrorist suspects after 9/11. Around the world, critics saw it as another blow to American prestige and moral authority.

The 2003 document also invokes wartime powers to protect interrogators who violate the Geneva Conventions, for example, by the use of waterboarding -- when a prisoner is made to think he is drowning.

Half a world away, the divisive debate over whether waterboarding constitutes torture comes into sharp relief at the infamous S-21, Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

This is where the genocidal regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge imprisoned and brutalized its enemies from 1975 to 1979. I visited the once secret S-21, now a museum, with Van Nath, a former inmate. He remembers being brought here blindfolded and terrified:

"I thought that was the end of my life," he told me. "In my room people kept dying, one or two every day."

Van Nath was kept in a room packed with 50 other inmates, shackled together and forced to lie down.

"We could not sit. If we wanted to sit, we had to ask permission first. No talking, whispering or making noise," he told me.

Van Nath described how male prisoners were whipped raw, their fingernails were yanked out, they were hogtied to wooden bars. Prison guards mutilated women's genitals, ripped off their nipples with pliers. And worst of all, babies were ripped from their mothers' arms and slaughtered.

Van Nath was accused of being a CIA agent and given electric shock torture, but he survived when his jailers found out he was one of Cambodia's most prominent painters. And what did they make him paint?

"Pol Pot's picture. Big pictures," he told me. "I had to paint the same one again and again. If they didn't like my painting, that would have been the end of my life."

So when Pol Pot finally fell in 1979, Van Nath returned to paint what he had really seen and heard at S-21. He did it as a memorial to the 14,000 who had been tortured and executed in the prison. It's one of the few public reminders of the regime's crimes.

Take water torture, for instance. Van Nath remembers it as if it were yesterday. I gasped as I entered a room filled with his vivid depictions.

One of his paintings shows a prisoner blindfolded and hoisted onto a makeshift scaffold by two guards. He is then lowered head first into a massive barrel of water. Another shows a prisoner with cloth over his face, writhing as an interrogator pours water over his head.

Van Nath still remembers the accompanying screams: "It sounded like when we are really in pain, choking in water," he told me. "The sound was screaming, from the throat. I suppose they could not bear the torture.

"Whenever we heard the noises we were really shocked and scared. We thought one day they will do the same thing to us."

As he talked and showed me around, my mind raced to the debate in the United States over this same tactic used on its prisoners nearly 40 years later. I stared blankly at another of Van Nath's paintings. This time a prisoner is submerged in a life-size box full of water, handcuffed to the side so he cannot escape or raise his head to breathe. His interrogators, arrayed around him, are demanding information.

I asked Van Nath whether he had heard this was once used on America's terrorist suspects. He nodded his head. "It's not right," he said.

But I pressed him: Is it torture? "Yes," he said quietly, "it is severe torture. We could try it and see how we would react if we are choking under water for just two minutes. It is very serious."

Back then, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge cadres recognized this for what it was and used it with brutal efficiency. The Cambodian genocide ultimately killed 2 million people.

Fourteen thousand of them had passed through the gates of hell at Tuol Sleng Prison. Read more!

Cambodia's KRouge genocide inspires first of its kind art exhibit

PHNOM PENH (AFP) — Forced from his home by the Khmer Rouge, Svay Ken remembers joining tens of thousands of other Cambodians choking the roads leading away from the capital Phnom Penh more than 30 years ago.

Carrying what few household goods he could grab in the frantic hours after the communist guerrillas' seizure of the city, he clutched his children's hands, terrified they would be swallowed by the crush of bodies.

Although not yet the painter he would become, Svay Ken -- now a frail but driven 76-year-old who has emerged as one of Cambodia's pre-eminent contemporary artists -- remembers desperately trying to commit each moment of his ordeal to memory.

"I thought that if I survived this, I would record these experiences in paint to preserve the memory of what I experienced," he recalls, sitting in the living room of his Phnom Penh apartment.

One of those memories, rendered in a primitive style, shows grim, black-clad patients lining up to be fed out of a communal bucket.

Entitled "Khmer Rouge hospital," it is among two dozen works displayed at Phnom Penh art gallery Meta House in the first exhibit of its kind, called "Art of Survival".

Through paint, sculpture, charcoal or pencil, Cambodian artists have converged to create works inspired by the 1975-1979 rule of the Khmer Rouge, during which as many as two million people died of starvation and overwork, or were executed by the regime.

But organisers say it reaches beyond Cambodia's genocide to illuminate some more universal truths about humanity and its capacity to both hurt and heal, and they hope to take the exhibit on the international circuit.

"Examining the complexity and horror of the Pol Pot regime is not only important and relevant for the Cambodian people -- it is of great concern for the rest of the world as well," says American artist Bradford Edwards.

"The weathered cliche 'It can happen anywhere' must be applied here, for no nation is immune to the possibility of genocide," he adds.

For Edwards, who has set out to expand the show in order to introduce a global audience to Cambodian artists, "Art of Survival" serves dual purposes: to create art out of one of Cambodia's most destructive periods and to open a window onto the country's nascent art scene.

"I'm trying to make this exhibition appeal to the widest variety of people," he said.

-- Dialogue through art --

"Art of Survival" spans the range of emotions and experiences that are tied to the defining moment in modern Cambodia's history.

Fear and violence are evident in the more literal works of older artists who survived the regime -- bleached skulls crowding canvases, or a bound and blindfolded figure bending under the foot of a Khmer Rouge cadre.

Younger artists born in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge's rule produced more abstract interpretations of the genocide, like Vandy Rattana's "Going Fanatic," a photograph of squares of light crowded between the communist movement's hammer and sickle and two blocks representing the United States.

"It's a political chessboard," says the 28 year-old.

"Cambodia's war was not just created by Cambodia -- it belonged to the world. If we talk about war in Cambodia we need to talk about Vietnam, the United States," he adds.

The exhibition, he says, "gives me a voice to say something about my history".

Edwards says this dialogue through art is long overdue, and calls the exhibit "an accumulation of years" of collective trauma and recovery.

"We've been waiting for an art show that deals with the Khmer Rouge period specifically. I would call this a 29-year process," he says.

"It is much more than an art exhibit because of the context in which it is taking place," he adds.

The "Art of Survival" coincides with efforts to bring former Khmer Rouge leaders to justice after nearly three decades.

Cambodia's genocide tribunal expects later this year to prosecute the first of five senior cadres currently in its custody in what many see as the biggest step yet towards the country's reconciliation with its brutal past.

The UN-backed court gives weight to the art. The art, in turn, is a tangible sign of Cambodia's emergence from beneath the shadow of the Khmer Rouge, says Meta House's director Nico Mesterharm.

"Art is a marker of development," says Mesterharm, a German documentary maker who has positioned his gallery at the forefront of Cambodia's cultural recovery.

"We see 'Art of Survival' as a platform for a community dialogue. We hope that our project contributes to the reconciliation process," he says.

Read more!

Iloilo City inks twinning pact with Phnom Penh, Cambodia

The chief city executive of this southern metropolis inked Friday a twinning agreement with officials of Phnom Penh, Cambodia for a collaboration to strengthen Phnom Penh's promotion of improved sanitation and environment health.

Iloilo City, on the other hand, will share its experience and lessons learned in implementing a sanitation promotion program.

A letter of intent was signed at the office of city Mayor Jerry P. Treñas between the city mayor and Deputy Governor H.E. Mann Chhoeurn of the municipal government of Phnom Penh.

The collaboration between Iloilo and Phnom Penh began in August 2007 when Iloilo representatives headed by Engr. Noel Hechanova, city environment and natural resources officer, went to the capital city of Cambodia to share experience at the inception workshop for their pilot initiative on sustainable water and sanitation.

In September 2007, representatives from Iloilo and Phnom Penh attended a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Environmentally Sustainable Cities Initiative in Bangkok, Thailand where they decided that further collaboration would be mutually beneficial. They also informally agreed to twin as a means of supporting their broader goals.

The delegation from Cambodia includes Deputy Governor Chhoeurn, Say Kosal, village chief of Tuol Sangkae, one of the sub-districts in Phnom Penh; Mrs. Tep Ketsiny, a representative from local non-government organization called the Center for Development; and Khoy Khim, the ECO-Asia country coordinator.

They will learn first hand about Iloilo's efforts to improve wastewater treatment and sanitation campaigns through social marketing outreach programs and infrastructure development.

Their city itinerary include a briefing of the Iloilo River Master Plan to be presented by Arch. Manuel Tingzon, chairman of the technical working group of the Iloilo River Development Council; a tour of the Iloilo River; briefing at the Iloilo Doctor's Hospital on its treatment plant; presentation of the city's initiatives at the Western Institute of Technology; and viewing of exhibits and press conference at the Marymart Mall.

Hechanova said the exchange visit here April 4-5, 2008 of the Cambodian representatives was made possible by the Environmental Cooperation-Asia Program (ECO-Asia) of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in promoting twinning relationships between selected cities in Asia. (PNA)
Read more!

Opposition supporters rally in Cambodia

A crowd of around 300 supporters of Cambodia's main opposition Sam Rainsy Party rallied outside parliament on Sunday, in protest against double-digit inflation and demanding wage increases.

About 100 anti-riot police carrying electric prods and tear gas blocked the surrounding streets to prevent the protesters from entering neighbourhood markets.

Mr Rainsy has called on the government to reduce the price of essential items, or increase salaries in line with inflation.

Cambodia's inflation went above 10 percent late last year, and currently hovers around 11 percent.

Phnom Penh has implemented a number of measures aimed at keeping prices stable, including banning rice exports and allowing pork imports, but observers say basic foodstuff prices remain stubbornly high.
Read more!

Not all bliss for take-away Cambodian brides

By Brian McCartan

As Cambodia's once war-shattered, now booming economy opens to the world, Cambodian women are leaving in droves as several international marriage brokers have established match-making services in the impoverished country. Operating in a shadowy legal space, questions have been raised about the possible exploitative nature of the business, which some contend has acted as a front for global human trafficking rings.

Last week, the Cambodian government moved to put that trade on hold while it investigates whether any of the international brokers have ties to underworld crime syndicates. The Geneva-based International Organization for Migration (IOM) had earlier drawn attention to the trade and is scheduled to release next month an investigative report on the growing numbers of South Korean men who come to Cambodia in search of brides.

The mechanics of the trade are still murky. What is known is that women from mostly rural areas are brought by brokers into the capital city of Phnom Penh and put on display for prospective foreign grooms. The brokers are usually either informal operators or connected to one of several matchmaking businesses, which until now operated freely in Cambodia.

Most of the women who contract with the matchmaking services are in their teens or early 20s and usually from rural areas where they have received basic, if any, schooling. The IOM's report says "the vast majority of [Korean-Cambodian] marriages occur through an informal and exploitative broker-arranged process".

The introductions are more transactional than romantic. Bride selection often takes place in hotel restaurants where as many as 100 women, the IOM report claims, are lined up and put on display for prospective grooms. After a woman is chosen, details are worked out between the groom and bride-to-be and the broker.

A marriage is held after a few days, followed in some cases with a short honeymoon. The groom then returns to his home country while paperwork is processed for his new wife to follow. In 2007, the number of foreign marriage licenses rose to 1,759, up from a mere 72 in 2004. There were 160 foreign marriages registered in Cambodia in January of this year.

South Koreans make up a large percentage of the men seeking brides in Cambodia. In 2005, marriages to foreigners accounted for 14% of all marriages in South Korea, up from 4% in 2000. According to the United States 2007 Trafficking in Persons Report, 72% of South Korean men in foreign marriages marry women from Southeast Asia or Mongolia. They are often lured by billboards which dot the South Korean countryside, advertising marriage services to foreigners.

Rural governments have even been known to subsidize marriage tours as a way of dealing with growing rural depopulation. The South Korean marriage brokering business began in the late 1990s, where it first aimed to pair Korean farmers or physically handicapped men with ethnic Koreans from China. The Korean Consumer Protection Board claims 2,000 to 3,000 marriage agencies now operate in South Korea.

Marriage tours also began in Vietnam and by 2007 the number of South Korean marriages to Vietnamese women ranked second only to brides from China. The search for foreign brides has been driven by low birth rates and the growing difficulty South Korean men have finding brides among the country's newly ambitious young females.

Many of the men coming on marriage tours to Cambodia have already arranged contacts through online services, which usually host images of eligible women on their websites. One such service is "Mr Cupid", which offers Cambodian, Vietnamese, Vietnamese Muslim and Chinese women. The agency, which has been operating since 1993 from Singapore and does not cater specifically to South Koreans, claims to customers to "transform your life in six days!"

Its operations were expanded beyond Vietnam to Cambodia and China in 2000 and Mr Cupid's website also offers franchise services. The website claims, "Come to Cambodia today and we guarantee that your visit will be fruitful, you will find the lady of your dreams waiting for you right there." From services like this, or those based in South Korea, men can arrange four- to six-day marriage tours.

Match made in hell
In many ways such services are false advertising. Marriages between Cambodian women and South Korean men are known to be fraught with difficulties, frequently caused by huge cultural and linguistic divides. "Often the women have misguided expectations of what life may be like abroad; there is a lack of realistic information about life in Korea," the IOM's report says.

Indeed, most of the women's fantasies of what their new lives will be like are based on Korean movies and television shows that have recently gained popularity in Cambodia and other parts of Asia. The new Cambodian brides often expect their South Korean grooms to be rich, successful businessmen; the reality, however, as the IOM report explains, is that they are often poor and poorly educated. This impacts the women's hopes that through marriage they would be able to send money home to support their families.

The pressures often result in disappointment and physical abuse. The deaths of several Vietnamese wives in South Korea in 2007 and early 2008 due to mistreatment by their South Korean husbands have already raised hard questions about the trade in Vietnam. One case that made headlines in both Vietnam and Cambodia involved the death of Tran Thanh Lan, a purchased bride who jumped or fell from her 14th floor balcony after only six weeks of marriage in South Korea. Her mother recently went to the country to demand an inquiry into her daughter's death.

Because the business apparently lacks a coercive element - women are allowed to turn down a marriage offer - it is not technically considered human trafficking. The business side of the trade, however, is certainly exploitative. Potential grooms pay as much as US$20,000 to brokers for their services, while the bride's family is given $1,000 as well as money to cover the costs of the wedding. The broker and agency divvy up the rest of the spoils.

The IOM report indicates that while there have been cases of abuse and domestic violence, "human trafficking has been far more difficult to identify". This may be the case in Cambodia so far, but there is plenty of documentation of Vietnamese women tricked by marriage brokers into factory work in South Korea. On February 26, police in Busan, South Korea, arrested a Vietnamese woman under suspicion of arranging sham marriages for $10,000 each. Once the purchased brides receive Korean citizenship, the women were divorced from their husbands and forced to work in factories.

Abuse against Cambodian brides has also been reported and some have ended up running away from bad marriages. The 2007 US Trafficking in Persons Report said, "NGOs [non-governmental organizations] are reporting cases of foreign women placed in conditions of commercial sexual exploitation or forced labor by fake 'husbands' who work for trafficking rings or exploitative husbands who feel they 'own' the woman and can use her as a farm hand or domestic worker."

After recent crackdowns on the trade by Vietnamese authorities, the marriage brokering industry has grown rapidly in Cambodia, leading some trafficking experts to conclude that the brokers and trafficking rings have simply shifted countries. Marriage brokering is now illegal in Vietnam, but at its peak 20,000 brides were leaving the country every year.

Current Vietnamese law allows only the establishment of marriage support centers by non-profit women's groups. The Vietnamese Ministry of Justice has recently recommended legalizing the service in order to place stricter controls on it. The police, however, have recommended raising penalties, making the offering of Vietnamese women as brides on a par with human trafficking.

The Cambodian government first publicly acknowledged a potential problem in March. Sar Keng, deputy prime minister and minister of interior, said at the launch of a national anti-trafficking awareness campaign that some cases of human trafficking had been identified in the Cambodia marriage industry. Prime Minister Hun Sen has since ordered a crackdown on the industry, including cancelation of the licenses two South Korean companies engaged in the trade.

Brian McCartan is a Thailand-based freelance journalist.

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Doctors not nearly as diverse as the valley

Southeast Asians and Latinos underserved

By Barbara Anderson

A huge gap exists between the minority populations in California and the number of doctors of diverse backgrounds, particularly Latino and Southeast Asian doctors in the San Joaquin Valley, according to a report made public Wednesday.

Results of a California Medical Board Survey found just 3,282 Latino doctors are practicing medicine in the state and only 90 in the state are of Lao, Cambodian, Hmong or Samoan background. There are about 61,800 doctors with practices in California.

Researchers were shocked by those results, said Dr. Kevin Grumbach, director of the Center for California Health Workforce Studies at the University of California at San Francisco and principal author of the study.

"The problem is even worse than we thought," Grumbach said during a teleconference at the University of California at Davis School of Medicine.

When physicians share a language and culture with patients, they can communicate better and provide better medical care.

The survey, which used ethnic information collected from doctors when they renew medical licenses every two years in California, also shows a stark disparity between the Latino doctor work force in the valley and the patients they treat.

Only 5.2 percent of doctors statewide are Latino; in the survey region that includes the valley, only 8.1 percent of doctors are Latino.

But Latinos represent 38 percent of the population in Stanislaus County, 36 percent in San Joaquin County and more than 50 percent in Merced County, according to the U.S. Census Bureau 2006 American Community Survey.

Large numbers of Cambodians, Hmong and Vietnamese live in the valley.

Making a healthier community

There's no question the valley needs to increase the number of minority doctors, said Bertha Dominguez, education director for the UCSF-Latino Center for Medical Education and Research.

To do so would benefit the entire population, not just minorities, she said. "Overall, it will make us a healthier community."

The Scenic Faculty Medical Group has 26 doctors serving patients in the Stanislaus County Health Services Agency clinics, which provide health care to low-income and uninsured patients. The clinics have three Latino doctors, and eight other doctors have learned Spanish to try to bridge the language gap, the group said.

But there is only one Cambodian physician to focus on the county's Southeast Asian community.

"Most Southeast Asian people in the county don't have a doctor who speaks their language or understands their culture," said Marge Leopold, site coordinator for The Bridge, a Southeast Asian community organization in Modesto.

Because of the language barrier, Hmong and Cambodian patients with English-speaking physicians have limited understanding of their prescription medication. Some of the Cambodians are survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide in the late 1970s, Leopold said.

"A lot of Southeast Asians are put on antidepressants because of the trauma they have experienced," she said. "After they have been on antidepressants, they have had side effects they don't understand because they didn't comprehend what the doctors told them."

Residency program recruiting

Peter Broderick, director of the Stanislaus Family Medicine Residency Program, said it's tougher for Latinos and Southeast Asians to get into medical school. Many grew up in poor or rural communities without access to good schools.

The county's residency program prides itself in giving culturally competent training to the 27 residents in the three-year program. Right now, it has four Latino residents and two who are Hmong, and it's always looking for Southeast Asian residents to recruit, Broderick said.

Graduates of the program are encouraged to work in the community, although there is no guarantee they will. Dr. Sa Vang, who is Hmong, will complete her residency in June and plans to work at the county's Ceres Medical Office starting in September. The other Hmong resident is in the second year.

The physician survey found 20 percent of doctors statewide spoke Spanish and more than half were non-Latino white doctors, which was encouraging, Grumbach said. But the pattern wasn't the same for Asian languages. For example, 2 percent of doctors spoke Vietnamese.

Children continue to serve as interpreters at medical appointments when doctors are not fluent in Hmong or other Southeast Asian languages, said Silas Cha, associate director at the Fresno Center for New Americans.

"When things are communicated through the young child, the young child does not understand the level of seriousness of the condition or may not even understand the condition at all," he said.
Area medical school needed

The doctor survey found minority doctors are more likely to work in underserved communities and areas with large minority populations, such as those in the valley. And they were more likely to work in primary care, such as family and internal medicine and pediatrics, than are white physicians.

But doctors, regardless of ethnic background, are in short supply in the valley.

There are 173 doctors per 100,000 residents, the lowest of any region in the state, according to a recent study by the Central Valley Health Policy Institute.

A medical school proposed for UC Merced could boost the numbers of doctors, said Maria Pallavicini, dean of natural sciences. "Certainly a mission of the proposed medical school is to train students to become physicians who will stay in the valley and reflect the face of the valley, which is certainly diverse," she said.

The UCSF health work force researchers recommended increasing minority representation in medical schools and increasing incentives for doctors to work in underserved areas. They said the state needs to invest more in the educational pipeline to prepare minority students for careers in medicine and other health professions.

Bee staff writer Ken Carlson can be reached at kcarlson@modbee.com or 578-2321.

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Global rice reserves at lowest

Global rice reserves are at their lowest in 30 years and wholesale price of rice in Thailand has increased to $580 per tone in past three months.

Rice is one of the most important parts of daily diet in many Asian countries. People of China, Japan, India, Pakistan, Turkey and Iran are among those who at least consume rice once in a day.

The rising price of rice undoubtedly imposes hardship to many people in these countries.

Thailand and Vietnam are the first two largest exporters of rice in the world and the latest news indicate Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia have imposed restrictions on their rice exports to assure having enough rice for their domestic consumption.

Vietnam has reduced its rice exports, Cambodia has banned exports of rice altogether and Indonesia has levied a new tax on its rice exports.

Afzal Ali, an Asian Development Bank economist, predicts shortage of rice and its higher price could cause some social tensions and that is the main reason some Southeast Asian countries have imposes restrictions on rice exportation.

Social tensions can prove to be very dangerous, class tension destabilizes the countries and that is why Southeast Asian countries are so sensitive to the issue, he added.

The Philippines, with 58 million citizens, imports more than 2 million tons of rice annually and more than any other Southeast Asian nation is vulnerable.

The country does not have enough arable land to produce its own consumption needs and about 10 million of its population is suffering from hunger.
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Realty investors target Cambodia

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — An old hospital was razed to make way for Phnom Penh’s tallest building — a 42-story twin condominium tower. A garbage-strewn slum became prime real estate after police evicted its dwellers to a parched rice field outside the capital.

Cambodia is experiencing a construction boom fueled by foreign investment, particularly by South Koreans, and buying and selling among the country’s few nouveaux riche — while leaving the poor majority behind.

Shopping malls and tall apartment buildings are sprouting up, transforming the capital’s landscape that once bore the charm of colonial French-styled villas but resembled a ghost town at the fall of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime nearly 30 years ago.

Political stability and robust economic growth of nearly 10 percent have lured investors to the real estate market that has seen prices surge over the last few years — though they are still lower than in neighboring Vietnam or Thailand.

“Cambodia was sleeping for many years and now it’s waking up,” said Claire Brown, managing director of Britain-based Claire Brown Realty, who began buying and selling property in Phnom Penh two years ago.

“Everybody wants to get a piece of the action,” she said by phone. “The time to get in is now because soon it’s going to be too late.”

Prime city land prices have tripled over the last two years to $3,000 per square meter ($279 per square foot). Those kinds of returns have drawn rich and middle-class Cambodians, as well as those living abroad.

“In buying and selling land, they could get profit 100 or 200 percent a year, if they make the right bet on the right location,” said Dith Channa, the sale manager of CPL Cambodia Properties Ltd., a Phnom Penh-based real estate agency.

But the soaring real estate market is also widening the gap between the rich and the poor.

“Phnom Penh city is getting modern every day — of course for the wealthy,” said Chhorn Et, a former slum dweller now living with hundreds of others in a village in the middle of rice field about 12 miles from the capital.

“The government swept us away because they regarded us as very unpleasant for their eyes,” said the 34-year-old woman who scavenges for discarded cans and bottles to sell for a living.

The flourishing property market is also happening in the shadow of problems of land rights disputes that, in recent years, have often pitted the poor against wealthy developers with link to the Cambodian political establishment.

“We’re moving toward possibly about 10 percent of the population owning 90 percent of the land in Cambodia,” said Naly Pilorge, director of the nonprofit human rights group Licadho.

That could fan social and political unrest, she and others have warned.

The biggest projects are being funded by South Korean investors and companies, which have been the leading investors in Cambodia following the resumption of diplomatic ties between the two countries in 1997. Investment and tourists from South Korea have surged following a 2006 visit to Cambodia by former President Roh Moo-hyun.

World City Co., of South Korea, is investing $2 billion to build a “satellite” urban complex called Camko City on a 300-acre area on the northwest side of Phnom Penh. The project, the single biggest foreign direct investment in Cambodia to date, will include residential, commercial and public facilities — villas, condos, trade and financial centers, office buildings, shopping centers, hotels, schools and hospitals.

Meanwhile, at a busy corner leading up to the city’s landmark Independence Monument, an old government hospital has been torn down to make way for a 42-story condominium and shopping complex worth about $250 million. That’s going to dramatically change Phnom Penh’s skyline, where the tallest building now is a 15-story hotel.

It is going to be the first luxury residential building and tallest structure in Cambodia, said Kim Tae-Yeon, chairman of Yon Woo Inc., a South Korean developer.

Kim said the towers will have about 500 units of apartments, office space and retail shops with price tags ranging from $112,000 to $1.8 million a unit. Construction will start next month and take 3½ years to complete, but Kim said nearly half of the units have already been bought.

In recent years, Siem Reap, a northwestern town near the famed Angkor Wat ruins, also has seen frenzy of hotel and guesthouse construction for the growing numbers of tourists.

Thrilled with the boom, Prime Minister Hun Sen has said it has been made possible by the political stability he has brought. In a recent speech he warned that if he isn’t re-elected in July elections, property prices could nosedive.

“It was a threat, a dirty trick to gain votes,” said Son Chhay, an opposition party lawmaker.

Son Chhay and some human rights workers, including Pilorge of the human rights group Licadho, believe that the boom is partly fueled by people laundering money from illegal logging, drug trafficking and tax evasion by plowing the cash into the real estate market.

“This is not going to be healthy for the Cambodian economy,” Son Chhay said.

There are also concerns that the rapid price gains are creating a bubble that will eventually pop.

Eric Sidgwick, senior economist at the Asian Development Bank office in Phnom Penh, said the real estate market has been “driven by a combination of genuine demand for business-related and residential construction,” as well as a growing population, increased urbanization and speculation.

Still, there were “reasons to be concerned about the recent increase in real estate prices and the dangers of further inflating a speculation-led bubble,” he said in an e-mail. He declined to comment about any possible link between money laundering and the property market boom.

Meanwhile, the poor like Chhorn Et, the former slum dweller who was moved outside the capital, are left to cope with a stark reality in their new village, which has no running water or sewage system.

Although each family has been given a small piece of land to live on, they complained of the lack of means to support their livelihoods. They have to travel daily to the capital to do odd jobs as motorbike taxi drivers, in construction or scavenge for bottles and cans to sell to buy food.

Many of them are even too poor to afford a latrine and have to use a nearby rice field as toilet, said 37-year-old Mom Somaly, a mother of five children.

Pointing to a distant land-for-sale sign, she said “soon they may not even have a field to use as toilet any longer.”

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