Gates Fights China Fakes, Drug Failure to Stem Malaria Disaster

By Simeon Bennett


Saron Samnith, 14, slouches in the doorway of his family’s thatched hut off a dusty track near Pailin, a city in western Cambodia. He has chills, diarrhea and a three-day-old headache -- signs of malaria.

The bout of the mosquito-borne disease, for which he tested positive, is his second in a month. The first left him comatose and in danger of dying, before medicines curbed the attack. Coursing through Saron’s veins may be the strain so dangerous that health officials --and the billionaire Bill Gates -- are racing to stop it from spreading before it kills millions.

In Pailin, a flood of counterfeit pills from China and elsewhere is helping to breed a superbug that resists even the most-effective medicine. The development threatens to unleash a global malaria “disaster” and undo decades of work to reduce illness, destitution and death, said Arjen Dondorp, a Thailand- based researcher.

“It’s a time bomb,” said Dondorp, the deputy director of the Wellcome Trust-Mahidol University Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Programme, with headquarters in Bangkok.

The World Health Organization plans to defuse the bomb with a screening and treatment program to contain and eliminate the resistant strain. The effort, in and near Pailin, may begin next month. The program is backed by $23 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, based in Seattle.

“There’s more money put into baldness drugs than is put into malaria,” Gates told an audience in February, in Long Beach, California. “Because the disease is only in the poor countries, it doesn’t get much investment. You can’t get the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much.”

Doom Scenario

The risk of failure raises what Dorndop calls a “doom scenario.” In that sequence of events, migrant workers would first carry the bug to Thailand, Myanmar and India. Later the strain would spread to Africa, which already has 90 percent of the world’s malaria cases.

“We rang the warning bell in 2005 and nobody believed us,” said Pascal Ringwald, the Geneva-based WHO’s leading specialist in the malaria parasite’s ability to resist drugs. “Many people were skeptical.”

The doom scenario may be a decade away from materializing, giving the world time to prevent it, said Charles Delacollette, the head of WHO’s Mekong Malaria Programme, which covers Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and part of China.

“We don’t have many alternatives” to the antimalarial drug artemisinin, to which the parasite is becoming resistant in western Cambodia, Delacollette said in an interview in Bangkok. “That drug should be protected.”

Interpol Operations

Interpol, the international police organization based in Lyon, France, traced counterfeit drugs in Southeast Asia to China in 2006 as part of an investigation called Operation Jupiter. Last year, under Operation Storm, Interpol arrested 27 people in raids across Asia and seized more than 16 million fake pills valued at almost $7 million.

Chemical analysis of pills bought in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam found several other pharmaceutical ingredients, charcoal, and a precursor of the illicit drug ecstasy, according to an account of Operation Jupiter published in the journal Public Library of Science Medicine. Also present were spores and pollen from trees common in southern China, suggesting that at least some of the drugs were made there, the authors said.

“The evidence we have at the moment suggests China and India are sources of fake medicines, including in the case of China, fake anti-malarials,” said Paul Newton, a University of Oxford researcher who monitors counterfeit malaria drugs from an office in Vientiane, Laos.

Market Forecast

Interpol’s actions hardly dented the global market for counterfeit pharmaceuticals, which may reach $75 billion in 2010, an increase of more than 90 percent from 2005, according to estimates by the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, a nonprofit organization based in New York. WHO says fakes, typically cheaper than real drugs, may account for as much as 30 percent of all medicines in developing nations.

“We’re talking about sophisticated, big syndicates, people who are very well organized,” said Aline Plancon, the Interpol officer who coordinated the operations. “It’s just insane. They’re making too much money, they’re betting too much on the health of people. We’ll do it again and again.”

Deadly Disease

Malaria strikes about 250 million people each year and kills more than 880,000, making it the world’s most lethal mosquito-borne disease, according to WHO.

The malady is caused by a microscopic parasite called Plasmodium, which is carried in the saliva of female mosquitoes. When an infected insect bites a person, the parasites multiply in the liver before entering the bloodstream. There they invade red cells, causing fever, chills, nausea and diarrhea. Unchecked, the bugs cause red cells to stick to the walls of capillaries, slowing blood flow. Without treatment, sufferers can die from organ failure.

The most-effective modern drugs against malaria are based on artemisinin, an ancient Chinese remedy derived from the leaves of the sweet wormwood tree. So-called artemisinin derivatives include artesunate and artemether, the key ingredients respectively in Sanofi-Aventis SA’s Coarsucam and Novartis AG’s Coartem.

Breeding Ground

While Cambodia accounts for only about 0.4 percent of the world’s malaria cases, the country is a breeding ground for strains that withstand medicines. Since the 1970s, at least three once-potent malaria drugs have failed in western Cambodia before becoming useless elsewhere in the world, according to WHO: first chloroquine and Roche Holding AG’s Fansidar, then mefloquine.

Now Dondorp and other researchers say the same thing is happening to artemisinin. In a study carried out last year and yet to be published, artesunate failed to clear malaria parasites within two days from the blood of about 70 percent of patients in Pailin compared with 7 percent in western Thailand.

For now, the drugs still clear the parasites, only more slowly -- a sign that resistance to artemisinin-based treatments is building. While Novartis, GlaxoSmithKlinePLC, Genzyme Corp. and Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd. are developing new drugs and vaccines against malaria, those products are in the early stages of development and won’t be available for years.

Malaria ‘Disaster’

“If we lose the artemisinins at this stage, just now when we dare to mention the word ‘eradication’ again, it would be a disaster for malaria control,” said Dondorp, who led the study. “It would cause millions of deaths, without exaggeration.”

WHO aims to eliminate malaria from western Cambodia through the program backed by the Gates Foundation, the world’s biggest charity. The agency, an arm of the United Nations, plans to screen and treat about 25,000 people in the area next month, possibly expanding tests and treatment to hundreds of thousands later this year.

Those who test positive will probably be treated with Glaxo’s Malarone because it doesn’t contain artemisinin and will take the pressure off drugs that do, said Eva-Maria Christophel, a WHO medical officer implementing the plan.

In and around Pailin, Cambodia also plans to start treating patients with Chongqing Holley Pharmaceutical Co.’s Duo-Cotecxin instead of artemisinin-based drugs, said Duong Socheat, director of the nation’s malaria control program, by phone from Phnom Penh.

Fakes Abound

Fake pharmaceuticals abound in Pailin. At the city’s dusty, fly-blown Samaki Market, untrained vendors hawk cheap pills without a prescription at drugstores opposite stalls offering fried locusts. Shoppers on motorbikes squeeze through the busy, narrow lanes. The traffic moves past a woman sitting by a pile of dried fish, waving away flies with a swat made from a stick and plastic bags.

Anti-malaria pills bought by Bloomberg News at two Samaki market stalls for $5 were sold loose in clear plastic bags, with no labeling or printed information about what they contained or how to take them. Even if the drugs are genuine, taking too few of them may not cure patients and may contribute to drug- resistance, Oxford’s Newton said.

Counterfeiters have learned to fool the on-the-spot dye tests used to identify fakes by including small amounts of real medicine in the illegal copies, Newton said.

Murder

“If you make a medicine that contains no active ingredient for a disease you know can be fatal, at best that is manslaughter and at worst it is murder,” Newton said. As many as half of all artesunate pills available at shops in Southeast Asia may be fake, according to studies he has led.
While pills devoid of active ingredients won’t heal patients, those containing small amounts wipe out only the weakest parasites, enabling the hardiest to survive and spread resistance to genuine drugs.

A bigger contributor to drug resistance than counterfeiters is patients who don’t take medicines properly, according to WHO scientists.

So-called artemisinin-derivatives work by giving malaria a short, sharp shock, clearing most of the parasites from the blood within hours. The drawback is that the drugs don’t stick around in the body and, according to WHO guidelines, must be given with one of several less-powerful, longer-lasting partner medicines that mop up stragglers.

Adverse Effects

The problem is that those other drugs, such as mefloquine, an older product, cause adverse effects, including nausea, vomiting and nightmares. When the two drugs are sold side by side rather than in a single pill, some patients take only the artemisinin, paving the way for relapses and resistance.

“If you want to get rid of these resistant parasites, you in fact have to eradicate malaria from western Cambodia,” Dondorp said. “In the effort to reduce it, the last man standing will be the most resistant parasite.”

Apart from artemisinin-based drugs, there are few effective treatments for the disease. Some that do work, such as Glaxo’s Malarone, are too expensive for patients in developing countries, Dondorp said.

Insecticide-treated bed nets, credited with slashing cases and deaths in Africa, aren’t so effective in Southeast Asia, where the Anopheles diris mosquito that spreads the disease bites earlier in the evening, before its victims have taken shelter for the night.

In Pailin, Saron’s mother, Bot Yom, has lost faith in Western pharmaceuticals. She plans to rub a coin against her son’s skin until it becomes red. If the disease renders artemisinin-based drugs as useless as their predecessors, the folk remedy might be just as effective.

To contact the reporter on this story: Simeon Bennett in Singapore at sbennett9@bloomberg.net

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South Korean man charged over Cambodian marriage fraud

Phnom Penh - A Cambodian court on Tuesday charged a South Korean man with falsifying official documents as part of an alleged scheme to broker marriages between Cambodian women and South Korean men, national media reported Wednesday.

Police arrested Lee Kyung Jun, 40, Monday in Phnom Penh after another South Korean man accused him of supplying false marriage certificates, the Cambodian Daily reported.

An Interior Ministry official said Lee was accused of supplying at least 14 false marriage certificates to the man, who owns a marriage agency, at a cost of 500 dollars per person.

The official said the certificates carried the signature of a provincial administrator but were proven to be falsified after the recipient checked their authenticity with the administrator.

The ministry did not say whether the complainant's marriage service was a legal business.

Lee was detained by the Interior Ministry while officials decided whether to release him on bail.

The government in November enforced a temporary ban on marriages between Cambodians and foreigners after an International Organization for Migration report claimed a high number of local women were being married to South Korean men through illegal agencies.

The ban was lifted in January. Read more!

New Exotissimo Tours Explore Hidden Charms of Southern Cambodia and Vietnam's Mekong Delta

Exotissimo unveils diverse local cultures and undiscovered gems of Vietnam and Cambodia in two spectacular programs.

Bangkok, Thailand (PRWEB), Exotissimo Travel, a leading tailor-made travel company in Southeast Asia, presents two exciting programs that traverse Southern Cambodia and Vietnam's Mekong Delta.

In these brand new tours, Exotissimo combines well-known attractions with off-the-beaten-path sites in the itineraries. A particular focus is placed on Cambodia's emerging south, which is home to unspoiled beaches and islands that were frequented by Cambodian royalty in the 1960s. The small towns in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, an alluring region marked by countless waterways, lush paddies and floating markets, are another featured highlight.

"Maintaining a balance of classic attractions with ventures into undiscovered destinations, these new tours are designed for intrepid travelers who wish to discover the true essence of the countries visited. Along the way, the programs offer opportunities to meet locals and engage in traditional customs, creating more than just a holiday but rather a rewarding travel experience," said Anne Cruickshanks, Group Product Manager of Exotissimo Travel.

The 15-day Journey Across Cambodia - Bangkok to the Mekong Delta is an overland program that connects the bustling cities of Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam with unique excursions to unexplored sites. Besides Siem Reap's Angkor Archaeological Park and Phnom Penh's pagodas, other highlights include visits to Sihanoukville's Ream National Park, idyllic beaches of Rabbit Island and the colonial riverside town of Kampot. A cross-border cruise along the Mekong River, combined with boat trips through the waterways and excursions to local workshops in the Mekong Delta, afford in-depth glimpses into the traditional ways of life in the region.
To view the detailed itinerary, visit Journey Across Cambodia.

The 13-day South Vietnam and Cambodia Unveiled starts in dynamic Ho Chi Minh City before heading southwards to Phu Quoc Island, one of Asia's least developed beach destinations. Crossing borders via an overland journey, travelers are shown Cambodia's tranquil coast at Kep and Rabbit Island and natural landscapes and indigenous wildlife at Kirirom National Park. Venturing deeper into Cambodia, the program leads travelers to ancient Khmer temples at Sambor Prey Kuk and Angkor Wat as well as a unique trip to a floating village in Tonle Sap Lake. This tour program can also be conducted in the reverse direction.

To view the detailed itinerary, visit South Vietnam and Cambodia Unveiled.

For other touring ideas in Indochina and beyond, visit Exotissimo multi-country tour packages in Indochina and Beyond.

About Exotissimo TravelExotissimo Travel is a premier destination management company that specializes in tailor made tours in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand. Established in 1993, the company is now a network of 15 locally-based offices staffing over 500 travel professionals, and sales offices in San Francisco, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona and Melbourne. For more information, please visit http://www.exotissimo.com/.


Helvetica, sans-serif; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.exotissimo.com/">Maintaining a balance of classic attractions with ventures into undiscovered destinations, these new tours are designed for intrepid travelers who wish to discover the true essence of the countries visited. Along the way, the programs offer opportunities to meet locals and engage in traditional customs, creating more than just a holiday but rather a rewarding travel experience
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Cambodian farmers urged not to cut down palm tree

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia's palm wine producer urged farmers not to cut down palm trees, saying the trees could earn much money for them, the official Agency Kampuchea Press (AKP)reported on Tuesday.

Cambodian farmers could earn an income of 500 million U.S. dollars per year if the exploitation of the palm trees was made as fully as possible, AKP quoted Confirel Company, the palm wine "Jaya" producer, as saying.

The company launched its palm wine named "Jaya" in early May.

An income being earned by each palm tree could vary from 101 U.S. dollars to 224 U.S. dollars per year, the company said, urging that the Cambodian farmers not to cut down such trees.

According to the company, its palm wine named "Jaya" available for exporting to Asian countries, mainly Vietnam. The company also presented the quality of the palm drinks, and its taste could be as competitive as imported wines, it said. While the palm juice supply was provided by as many as 500 families of the Cambodian farmers in the provinces.

Besides palm wine, the company made other products from the palm juice including vinegar, sugar and jam, which had a success in the country and abroad.

As estimated, Cambodia has 2.5 million palm trees, but at least one million trees were tapped by the Cambodian farmers.
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China provides preferential loan for Cambodia's road development

PHNOM PENH, China on Tuesday provided about 73 million U.S. dollars of a concessional loan to Cambodia to build a part of main road in the northeastern part of the country to develop that area into a newly potential economic zone.

The fund will be used for building a 121km-long road, a part of national road 78 from Stung Treng province to Ratanakiri province, according to the Cambodian Ministry of Economics and Finance.

The road will be used for border-crossing trade activities, transport, and tourism with the neighboring countries in the framework of triangle development in the Great Mekong Sub-region (GMS), Keat Chhon, deputy prime minister and minister of economics and finance, said at the signing ceremony with Chinese Ambassador to Cambodia Zhang Jinfeng.

The project will be contributed to integrate the internal road system in the country and linking the road to regional road networks, he said, adding that it will connect the northeastern part of the country with central Vietnam.

The road is a blood vessel for northeastern areas, Keat Chhon said. He also thanked the Chinese government for its persistent support to Cambodia's social and economic development.

Ambassador Zhang expressed confidence that the road will be sure to help the poverty reduction in Cambodia's northeastern area and to play an important role in promoting the economic development there.
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Israel announced the nomination of its first economic attaché to Cambodia

The economic mission in Phnom Penh will function under the charge of the Israeli economic attaché in Thailand

Israel's Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor announced last week the opening of Israel's first economic mission in Cambodia's capital of Phnom Penh.

The Government announcement noted that the economic mission in Phnom Penh will function under the charge of the Israeli economic attaché in Thailand, Tzahi Selzer. During March a first Israeli delegation of telecommunications companies visited the Southeastern Asian country. Some 15 companies took part in the delegation, including such high profile names as ECI, Gilat and Comverse, whose representatives met with top local Government officials.

The visit was part of an Israeli effort announced last year to expand economic and political ties with Cambodia. According to Selzer, Cambodia is mainly interested in Israeli companies involved in irrigation technologies, agriculture, infrastructure and medical devices.

Israel was ranked the fourth-largest foreign investor in Cambodia last year in terms of value of projects approved, with 2.75 percent of total investment, or 300 million U.S. dollars, according to Cambodian Investment Board figures.
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Flu fears, rains buoy Cambodia rat exports to Vietnam

By Ek Madra

CHREY THOM, Cambodia (Reuters Life!) - Stir-fried or grilled, Vietnamese can't seem to get enough of Cambodian rat meat, and the global influenza outbreak as well as recent heavy rains have proven a boon for both consumers and exporters.

In Chrey Thom, a Cambodian town on the border with Vietnam, motorbike after motorbike carries wooden cages full of hundreds of the plump, furry, brown rats.

The rains in the Mekong Delta area have helped boost the Cambodian trappers' catch, as more rats rush out from their flooded holes and into waiting cages.

"There were so many rodents we just can't eat them all, so we need to export lots more to Vietnam," Cambodian rat trader Kang Chanthan told Reuters. "It's good business."

"If you prepare them well and fry the meat with garlic and put some mint on it, they're tastier than chickens," he added.

Worries about swine flu, as the H1N1 influenza virus was first called, may have also spurred demand. The spread of H1N1 flu was not caused by pigs and pork, but many people and governments have reacted to the name.

"Rat meat substitutes well for pork these days," said Khe Le, adding that her family exported up to a tonne of live rats across the border on good days.

Rat meat was eaten in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s and for some time afterwards when little else was available. The poor took to rat meat last year when the price of other meat soared, but younger Cambodians tend to avoid it.

In Vietnam, rat meat is something of a delicacy.

Online Vietnamese newspaper, VietNamNet Bridge, said more than 35 tonnes of rat meat a day was imported from Cambodia.

Cambodian officials said they did not keep records of this aspect of bilateral trade but reckoned the figure was realistic.

"The high season for catching rats has returned for the farmers in my district, where I see several thousand kilos of live rats transported every day to Vietnam," said Ly Marong, an agriculture official in Koh Thom district on the border.

Live rats sold for $1 per kilo and dead ones -- used for feeding crocodiles in Vietnam -- went for $0.37, officials said.

"Some rats are as big as piglets, 2 kilos, and that has intrigued the Vietnamese. They see them as wild animals and they find them tasty," Marong said.

Bun Tuon Simona, a Cambodian official in the southern province of Kandal, said the Vietnamese appetite for rat meat has helped a government campaign to get rid of the rodents that were destroying rice fields.

"Before, we rewarded farmers with milled rice in exchange for a rat's tail after they killed one. Now it's not a problem. They catch the rat and can sell it to make some money on top of what they get from farming," he said.

Cambodian farmer Chan Pakdeiratha, whose family has rather taken to the meat, said the rats gave birth three times a month and had about 15 babies each time.

"If we don't catch them this year, they'll destroy our crops next harvest," he said.

(Additional reporting by Lach Chantha and Chor Sokunthea) Read more!

Cambodian youth to participate in 2009 China-ASEAN Youth Camp

PHNOM PENH, A Cambodian youth delegation will join the 2009 China-ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asia Nations) Youth Camp, to be held on May 19-26 in Nanning and Guangzhou, China, at the invitation of the Chinese Youth Federation, the official Agence Kampuchea Presse (AKP) reported on Monday.

The 10-member Cambodian delegation consists of two officials from the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (MEYS), two young journalists, two young entrepreneurs, two best students and two artists.

The program aims at giving an opportunity to the China-ASEAN youth to exchange their knowledge and experiences and to discuss important topic related to impacts of the global economic crisis, youth challenges and government, civil and youth organizations' measures to support the youth, said a MEYS official.

The China-ASEAN youth delegation will also visit exhibition centers, museums, ports, industrial parks and economic development zones in China.

ASEAN groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
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North Hunterdon Students Raise Money To Build Cambodia Schools

by Hunterdon County Democrat


North Hunterdon High School students have raised about half the money needed to build a school in rural Cambodia.

Through the community service project Schools Building Schools, the English Department raised $6,066 for the American Assistance for Cambodia organization.

During spring recess in April, students were encouraged to read books, magazine and newspapers, and gather pledges for every minute of reading they did while out of school.The 221 participating students read for 1,840 hours. Lauren Sheldon's period 5-6 class earned a bagel breakfast for raising the highest number of pledges.

All of the money raised goes to American Assistance's Rural Schools Project program, which has led to the construction of more than 300 primary and lower secondary schools -- with matching funds from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank -- in rural Cambodia. Each school is sponsored by a donor to provide improvements, such as English/computer teachers, Internet connections and access to clean water.Information on the Rural Schools Project can be found at www.cambodiaschools.com/. Read more!

Survivors Shed Light on Dark Days of Khmer Rouge

Chum Mey, a mechanic, was spared because he was needed to make repairs. The two men are to testify against their torturer.

Bou Meng was singled out during the Khmer Rouge reign of terror in Cambodia to produce portraits of the group’s leader.

By SETH MYDANS

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Looking across the courtroom where he is on trial for crimes against humanity, the chief Khmer Rouge torturer cannot avoid seeing an artist and a mechanic who sit watching him but mostly avoid his gaze.

One short and forceful, his feet dangling just above the floor, the other melancholy and drooping a bit, they are rare survivors of Tuol Sleng prison, where at least 14,000 people were sent to their deaths three decades ago.

In the weeks ahead, the two survivors will take the stand to testify against their torturer, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, who commanded the prison, and both have stories to tell about a place of horror from which almost no one emerged alive.

Bou Meng, 68, the short one, survived because he was a painter and was singled out from a row of shackled prisoners to produce portraits of the Khmer Rouge chief, Pol Pot.

The other, Chum Mey, 78, was a mechanic and was spared because the torturers needed him to repair machines, including the typewriters used to record the confessions — very often false — that they extracted from prisoners like himself.

Duch (pronounced DOIK), 66, is the first of five arrested Khmer Rouge figures to go on trial in the United Nations-backed tribunal here. His case began in February and is expected to last several more months.

Mr. Bou Meng and Mr. Chum Mey are living exhibits — like a third survivor, Vann Nath — from the darkest core of the Khmer Rouge atrocities. They are tangible evidence, like the skulls that have been preserved at some killing fields, or like hundreds of portraits of their fellow prisoners that are displayed on the walls of Tuol Sleng.

The photographs were taken as detainees were delivered to the prison, before they were stripped and fettered and tortured and sent to a killing field.

Those ordered killed at Tuol Sleng are among 1.7 million people who died during the Communist Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979 from starvation, disease and overwork, as well as from torture and execution.

Duch is accused of ordering the kinds of beatings, whippings, electric shocks and removal of toenails that Mr. Bou Meng and Mr. Chum Mey describe; indeed, he admitted in the courtroom to ordering the beating of Mr. Chum Mey.

Both men endured torture that continued for days, and Mr. Chum Mey said, “At that time I wished I could die rather than survive.”

But both men did survive, and in interviews they now describe scenes that almost none of their fellow prisoners lived to recount. “Every night I looked out at the moon,” Mr. Bou Meng recalled. “I heard people crying and sighing around the building. I heard people calling out, ‘Mother, help me! Mother, help me!’ ”

It was at night that prisoners were trucked out to a killing field, and every night, he said, he feared that his moment had come. “But by midnight or 1 a.m. I realized that I would live another day.”

Though many Cambodians have tried to bury their traumatic memories, Mr. Bou Meng and Mr. Chum Mey have continued to return to the scene of their imprisonment and torture as if their souls remained trapped there together with the souls of the dead.

During the first few years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, Mr. Bou Meng returned to work in an office at Tuol Sleng, which was converted into a museum of genocide. Now he uses it as a rest stop, spending the night there on a cot when he visits the capital, Phnom Penh, from the countryside, where he paints Buddhist murals in temples.

Mr. Chum Mey, retired now from his work as a mechanic, spends much of his time wandering among the portraits, telling and retelling his story to tourists, as if one of the victims on the walls had come to life.

An eager and passionate storyteller, he will show a visitor how he was shoved, blindfolded, into his cell during 12 days of torture, and he will drop to the floor inside a small brick cubicle where he was held in chains.

“As you can see, this was my condition,” he said recently as he sat on the hard concrete floor, holding up a metal ammunition box that was used as a toilet. “It upsets me to see Duch sitting in the courtroom talking with his lawyers as if he were a guest of the court.”

Like many other Khmer Rouge victims, both men say they have no idea why they were selected for arrest or why they were tortured to admit to unknown crimes. Both men lost their wives and children in the Khmer Rouge years, and although both have rebuilt their families, the past still holds them in its grip.

Mr. Bou Meng does not wander like his friend among the Tuol Sleng pictures, but he does keep one in his wallet: a snapshot-size reproduction of the prison portrait of his wife, Ma Yoeun, who was arrested with him but did not survive.

“Sometimes when I sit at home I look at the picture and everything seems fresh,” he said. “I think of the suffering she endured, and I wonder how long she stayed alive.”

Mr. Bou Meng has since remarried twice, but he remains shackled to his memories. “I know I should forget her,” he said, “but I can’t.”

She visits him, he said, in visions that are something more than dreams, looking just as she did when he last saw her — still 28 years old, leaving Mr. Bou Meng to live on and grow old without her.

Sometimes she appears with the spirits of others who were killed, he said. They stand together, a crowd of ghosts in black, and she tells him, “Only you, Bou Meng, can find justice for us.”

Mr. Bou Meng said he hoped that testifying against Duch and seeing him convicted would free him from the restless ghosts and let him live what is left of his life in peace.

“I don’t want to be a victim,” he said. “I want to be like everybody else, a normal person.”

But he said he knew that this might be asking too much of life.

“Maybe not completely normal,” Mr. Bou Meng said. “But at least 50 percent.”

Read more!

Hennessy: An amazing story of an odyssey from the Killing Fields to the White House

Life dangled from a precipice. Your best chance of survival was to pass yourself off as an illiterate peasant.

If you were educated, you might die. If you wore glasses, suggesting you were educated, you might die. If you were seen foraging for food, even grass or insects, you might die.

It was Cambodia, 1976. A year earlier, the Khmer Rouge had taken power. Now they were determined to establish a primitive society, one easily ruled. When the decade ended, they were gone. But up to 2 million people were dead.

Or so it is thought. No one can make an accurate count.

But Sichan Siv, 27 years old, resourceful and brave, had survived. He was especially vulnerable, having once worked for the humanitarian group CARE and having helped refugees from the Vietnam War, which, if revealed, would have meant certain death.

Siv escaped Cambodia by walking 500 harrowing miles past land mines, Khmer Rouge patrols, decomposed bodies, wild jungle animals and booby traps. It took him almost a year to reach neighboring Thailand.

Separated from his family by the Khmer Rouge, he never saw his loved ones again, but he survived in part by recalling his mother's words: "No matter what happens, never give up hope."
It was a message that would carry him to the United States, the White House and the United Nations.

Coming to Long Beach

Sichan Siv will tell his remarkable story Tuesday in Long Beach as a guest of the Long Beach Library Foundation.

Meanwhile, I have interviewed him from his home in San Antonio, Texas, where he now lives and has written his story in a book called "Golden Bones."

Q: What is meant by "Golden Bones?"

A: Cambodians call somebody who is extremely blessed and lucky a person of golden bones.

Q: And you were extremely lucky to have escaped Cambodia. Why did you leave?

A: The Khmer Rouge turned Cambodia into a land of blood and tears. It was an enormous slave labor camp where people toiled for 18 hours a day with only one meal. It was deepest hell. I was sentenced to death twice, for trying to escape and for damaging a truck.

Q: Your life under the Khmer Rouge and while trying to flee Cambodia was nightmarish. Do you still dream about those days?

A: Not anymore. I used to have nightmares for a long while. As I woke up, I felt very relieved when I realized that I was in America.

Q: How did you escape Cambodia?

A: On Feb. 13, 1976, I jumped off a logging truck in northwest Cambodia and ran across the jungle for three days having nothing to eat or drink. I fell into a booby trap and was severely wounded. In Thailand, I was jailed for illegal entry before being transferred to a refugee camp. I spent a few months teaching English to fellow refugees and being ordained a Buddhist monk. I arrived in Connecticut on June 4, one month before the Bicentennial.

To the White House

Q: After being sponsored by a Connecticut family, you assimilated very quickly. How did you manage that?

A: I felt I had to adapt to be adopted. So I did everything that came my way to the best of my ability, from picking apples to driving a taxi. I got a scholarship to graduate school at Columbia. I worked on Wall Street and other places until 1988 when I volunteered in the (George H. W.) Bush campaign. I was one of the lucky few to be asked to serve at the White House in 1989.

Q: That's a remarkable career.

A: I was at the right place at the right time. The Bush transition was looking for someone to handle the communications aspects of our national security. I was born in a poor country, spoke several languages, and was familiar with international relations. When President Bush left the White House in 1993, I returned to the private sector and continued to work on global issues. This experience also helped me when George W. Bush nominated me to be a U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in 2001. I was unanimously confirmed by the Senate.

Q: What do you consider the achievements of the Bush presidents?

A: It's hard to describe them in a few sentences. At the White House, first among equals was President George (H.W.) Bush's decision to extend Most Favored Nation trading status to China and to receive the Dalai Lama. Then you have to give high marks on his management of the post-Cold War world. At the U.N., George W. Bush was the first president to increase foreign assistance by 50 percent since JFK, and the first head of state to bring human trafficking to the world's attention. I feel very privileged to have served two presidents, and through them the American people.

Q: In 1992, you returned to Cambodia as a member of the highest-level mission to that country since 1975. Describe what it was like to go back.

A: It was an emotional return. I had left 16 years before, on foot through the jungle. I returned as a presidential assistant in a U.S. government aircraft. I did not recognize anything. For a few hours, I was numb.

Q: Soldiers returning to their old battlefields sometimes say it is therapeutic to see them at peace. Has that been the case for you in returning to Cambodia?

A: It is therapeutic. I try to take my wife there once a year to reconnect and to show her new places. (Siv's wife, Martha, is Texan.) In November 2008, we went to Ratanakiri (a province) in the Northeast, a remote wild and mountainous region. I was there with my older sister 40 years ago. It brought back fond memories, as well as sad ones.

Q: What does Cambodia need to do at this point in its history?

A: Cambodia needs to address domestic issues such as injustice, crime and corruption. When these are resolved, it can be a politically mature nation.

Q: You travel often to American cities with large Cambodian populations. Why?

A: It's part of carrying my mother's wisdom of never giving up hope, as I describe in "Golden Bones," and encouraging others to continue to work hard, do great things, and lead a good life. I also try to connect all these communities so that they can compare and build upon their experiences.

Cambodia to Texas

Q: You now live in Texas, a far cry from life in Cambodia. How is that working for you?

A: I love Texas. While growing up in Cambodia, I enjoyed watching Western movies in French and was amazed at the "can-do" attitude of Texans. As we usually say, "I was not born in Texas, but I got here as soon as I could." I also love California. Each time I am here, I say to myself, "I'll be back."

Last month, Siv was honored for his service by being given the George H.W. Bush Asian/Pacific American Heritage Association's Award. The award came with a letter from the former president, who wrote, in part: "When we think of you, we think about an outstanding leader and public servant; we think about honor, decency, and integrity....Well done, my friend and well deserved."

Tom Hennessy's column appears on the first and third Sundays of the month. He can be reached at 562-499-1270 or by e-mail at scribe17@mac.com.

HEAR HIS STORY

Former Ambassador Sichan Siv will speak from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Long Beach's Main Library, 101 Pacific Ave.

Admission: $30 benefiting the Long Beach Library Foundation. For reservations, call 562-628-2441.

The book: Barnes & Noble will sell copies of "Golden Bones." Read more!

Red Cross helping Cambodian family separated by war reconnect

Inside the Long Beach Red Cross offices, Cambodian refugee So Chhim,left, his daughter Bo Oum, and his grandson Brandon Oum, 3, get a first look at small photo of his sister and her aunt, So Sophan. The Red Cross is beginning a process that will help them reunite with So s sister, who became separated from her brother during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. (Stephen Carr/Staff Photographer)


By Greg Mellen, Staff Writer


LONG BEACH - So Chhim sat quietly with an international envelope and a passport-sized photograph of his sister clutched between his fists.

In a nearby seat, Mike Farrar, a volunteer case worker with the Red Cross' Tracing and Location services, explained the process for So to reconnect with his sister, So Sophan, in Cambodia.

The two have not seen each other since 1968 when So Chhim was a soldier in the Cambodian army. They have not had any contact since 1991 when they were able to communicate through an intermediary. When the go-between disappeared, so did any chance at communication.

In the 17 years since, So Chhim has gone about the business of making a living, raising his four children and seeing five grandchildren added to his family.

He buried the memories of his surviving sister along with those of the family he lost to the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, which was responsible for the deaths of upwards of two million Cambodians from execution, starvation and disease.

In August 2008, So Sophan reached out to the Red Cross, which offers a global free service to help reconnect families that have become separated by disaster, natural or man-made.

Red Cross officials say the service is offered whereever there is need.

After an exhaustive search, So Chhim was found through a brother-in-law at a liquor store in Norwalk.

Coincidentally, it was learned that So Chhim works at an airplane parts manufacturer just across the San Diego (405) Freeway from the Long Beach offices of the Red Cross.
It was joked that if the Red Cross had put his name on a balloon, he could have seen it from work and walked over.

Although So Chhim maintained a stoic exterior when Farrar first made contact, his daughter Bopha Oum said he later "teared" in his room.

"He tried to pass it off as something in his eye," Oum said.

As So Chhim talks about contacting his sister and as he recalls the harrowing circumstances of his escape from Cambodia and the slaughter of his family, there is no feigning a lack of emotion.

"It's very important to reconnect," he said through translation. "Now, even though physically we can't be close, emotionally and spiritually we can be connected."

So Chhim doesn't know if he will ever return to Cambodia. A military man trained in special forces, he was intensely sought by the Khmer Rouge.

Even though So Chhim and his wife, Chandy Ma, escaped to Thailand, the Khmer Rouge tried to have So Chhim turned over. They even sent family to try to cajole him.

So Chhim knew better. He says his name was posted on a kill list and that he was to be tortured for seven days before being put to death if caught.

He later learned that his three brothers and their entire families were executed by the Khmer Rouge. Only the younger sister, who was forced to marry a Khmer Rouge soldier, and an older brother, a simple farmer, survived.

Although So Chhim got in touch with his sister after the war, because of his notoriety he did not contact her directly for fear she might face reprisals. When the friend disappeared, so did their only connection.

On Friday, So Chhim drafted a simple letter to his sister.

Oum looks forward to learning more about the aunt she's only heard about.

"I'm very excited. I was in shock," she said. "I mean, we've grown up with the stories, but it never came to mind that we might contact her."


Farrar said he was thrilled to help reconnect the family.


"It's rewarding that we can do humanitarian work like this," Farrar says. "A lot of people think we only do blood work, but it's so much more."


In the case of the So family, it's about bring blood relatives together again.



greg.mellen@presstelegram.com, 562-499-1291
Read more!

Cambodia's first Cannes buyer leaves town

By Patrick Frater


CANNES -- Sales companies seeking to make their first deals in Cambodia might have missed their chance this week as the country's first-ever buyer at the Cannes market left town Saturday, having snapped up a handful of titles.

"The market is very narrow and focused almost entirely on four genres -- action, horror, comedy and Korean romances," said Kmy Films founder Mariam Arthur, a U.S. film exec now residing in Cambodia.

Arthur picked up two Korean titles this week, including Prime Entertainment's 2006 romance "The Elephant on the Bike." The deals add to the seven movies she bought at Filmart, headed by "Parasomnia" from American World Pictures, "Last of the Living" from Quantum Releasing and others from Lonely Seal and Fries Films.

Cambodia, like neighboring Vietnam, is one of Asia's last undeveloped cinema markets.

"There are almost no 35mm projectors, there are no multiplexes at all, and the Hollywood majors do not distribute there, though this week I had meetings with Universal," Arthur said. "Piracy, with masters coming from Malaysia, is also a problem."

Most films are screened from 2K digital projectors. But distribution technology could skip a generation and further open up the market even if long-awaited multiplexes remain unbuilt. Phone companies are now streaming movies to hand-held devices as well. Read more!

Cambodia: a patient waiting

The response in Cambodia to the emergence of the H1N1 virus is a singular example of how a predominantly rural country is preparting for the threat of an epidemic without borders, says Michel Thieren.

May the tevoda grant us good health and prosperity, freeing us from suffering and fear. [...]
I am finishing my call, o nineteen pralung, come back all together now.

There is no more suffering, no more fear, no more misfortune.

O my dears, your relatives are gathered together in great number."

- Hau Pralung, Treatise for Calling the Souls of the Sick

"Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity"

- the World Health Organisation, constitution

The emergence of a new threat to people's health is always refracted through the immediate and local circumstances of their lives. The worldwide reaction to the Influenza A (H1N1) virus is an example. Cambodia, where I work and live, offers a singular portrait of how a society - rural and poor, with its own unique cultural and ethnographic character - responds to and copes with an epidemic without borders .

The cost of ignorance

The World Health Organisation (WHO) reported that as of 06:00 GMT on 15 May 2009, there were had officially 7,520 cases of Influenza A (H1N1) infection in thirty-four countries; there had to that point been sixty-five deaths. The world has since 4 May been on level five (on a scale of six) of "pandemic alert".

This category, to health professionals, indicates a sustained community transmission of the virus in at least two countries within the same region (continent); a situation that in turn augurs the imminence of a global pandemic (active transmission in two continents). When it occurs, the emergency committee of the International Health Regulations (IHR) - an international legal instrument binding 194 countries to help the international community prevent and respond to acute public-health risks - can activate plans and preventive measures, publish daily updates, and make available knowledge about the evolving situation.

This mechanical precision is indispensable, but it also comes up against the limits of current understanding: for as yet, science knows very little about A/H1N1, and this opens the door to all sorts of allegations and interpretations of what is actually happening.

On 12 May 2009, for example, a leading online political magazine in the United States had as its main headline: "The List: Five Disease Outbreaks that are Worse than Swine Flu". There, A/H1N1 was retrospectively minimised by comparing it (already!) to five serial-killers: cholera, meningitis, HIV/Aids, Ebola, and dengue fever. By thus comparing numbers which should not be compared - because they denote different events, risks, patterns - the result is to remove readers and citizens from the core realities, instead of bringing them closer.

In any event, it will be a long time before the data on A/H1N1 will allow general inference for a long time, and therefore cannot now be subjected to (abusive) "analysis". The issue around A/H1N1 is not whether it spreads less or spares more lives than many other ongoing threats: it is that 7 billion humans are at equal risk of being infected by an entirely new virus against which no one is immune and whose epidemic and killing path cannot be predicted. This is what makes A/H1N1 different from any other disease - regardless of their respective morbidity and mortality totals.

The gaps in scientific knowledge are too easily filled by rumour, myth, hyperbole and attention-seeking media dramas. Many public-health practitioners have come to realise that fighting these requires much more work than solving a real problem.

In science's name

The WHO director-general Margaret Chan made her first official communication on A/H1N1 on 29 April 2009. She warned the world that "new diseases are, by definition, poorly understood and influenza viruses are notorious for their rapid mutation and unpredictable behaviour". The implicit message was that science - both virology and epidemiology - would restrict itself to support evidence-based communication on the new phenomenon. The tone was set that the WHO's messages with regard to A/H1N1 would for the foreseeable future operate with a degree of approximation and conditionality, all in the name of scientific exactitude.

However, when scientific evidence remains largely unsettled, the communication interface can be problematic. A messenger is scientifically accountable and needs to stand on the true ground of current knowledge; yet the recipient of the message requires a simplified and unambiguous formulation in order to take appropriate action. When an international health agency speaks within the strict limits of health and biomedical science, it may compromise its duty to preserve the collateral consequences on its auditors of the possible ambiguities these limits contain.
Yet if the same organisation presented user-friendly categorical statements without proper acknowledgment of doubt, it would to some degree sacrifice its commitment to scientific excellence. How to reconcile theory with practice? Only by stratifying messages through different audiences, from lay individuals to scientific experts, progressively loading them with technically complex and interpretable content.

In the end, however, there must be a consistent thread that links the two ends of the discourse, and in a way that the recipient at each point along the way can make sense of it for their own purposes: the virologist researcher who typified the A/H1N1 virus or decoded its ADN sequence; the epizootic expert who implements the food-standard guidelines, the Codex Alimentarius; the epidemiologist who estimates the lethal risk and the contagion of the virus (and who establishes the principles of the IHR); the economist who estimates the macro- or micro-economic consequences of a pandemic on a household's purchasing-power; all the way to the pig-farmer in the Argentinean pampa or among the Cambodian ricefields, whose only income depends on the readiness of people to eat pork.

The fact that there is very little in common in the knowledge, beliefs and daily lives of the people who exist along the communication "thread" makes it vulnerable to conflicting or overlapping messages. Often, experts speak from their respective scientific locus with no concern that different locuses may conflict with each other. Even as individual statements are pronounced in the name of scientific excellence, the "excellence" of an influenza epidemiologist may collide with the one of a public-health

veterinarian or an economist. When science leaves interpretation on pork-safety open with regard to A/H1N1, the consumer may start to see the threat coming from the food rather than from the person coughing and spluttering in the vicinity.

Cambodia in the world

Cambodia, like its immediate neighbours in southeast Asia - Vietnam, Laos, Thailand - has at the time of writing experienced no case of A/H1N1, and the situation has remained in preparedness mode. In the three weeks since (on 24 April 2009) the World Health Organisation released its first report of an "Influenza-like illness in the United States and Mexico", Cambodians have been waiting for their "public enemy". Many predicted that it would kill in massive numbers - something not so hard to conceive in a country which in 1975-78 experienced genocide at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.

It is indeed often the case that contingency planning is - rightly - planning for the worst scenario, even if it is rarely the worst scenario that ultimately prevails. So, in Cambodia, "pandemic contingency plans" were discussed, updated and activated at all levels. The international organisations operating in Cambodia reviewed their procedures on how to protect their personnel and maintain business continuity. Cambodian health authorities refreshed their plans too with the support of international-aid agencies; they received up-to-the-minute messages from Mexico, Atlanta, Ottawa, Geneva; and they took the necessary actions to broadcast basic prevention measures to the Cambodian population.

For example (albeit a weak example, as the measure generates a very low transmission-limiting dividend), a thermal scanner was installed at Phnom Penh and Siem Reap international airports to monitor returning travellers over possible contamination with the virus. This was complemented with quarantine and medical evacuation of screened suspected cases at Calmette general public hospital - perhaps not necessarily the one that people who can afford international travel would select, but the one where effective mass patient management could be organised.

A stoic response

The Cambodian media has done a good job in relaying what the country's 13.4 million people needed to know about the new disease without either distortion or panic. In most parts of the country, it quickly became clear that this was an enemy to be watched but from afar rather than an immediate danger; and that this new disease was a human-to-human problem and not about animals - a piece of information Cambodians can't but be very receptive to.

The common sense of the rural population has been strikingly evident. There is no sign that the pork-based economy in provinces like Kompong Thom is in any way affected. Cambodian farmers continue to raise and sell pork to smoking factories, and people continued to consume pork without further questioning.

But discreet signals of fear have been visible in the cities - mostly among the higher economic end of the Cambodian population and the expatriate community. Pork-meat and pork-based products were left in piles on the shelves of main supermarkets. In Phnom Penh, there was a roaming undercurrent of worry - of a new flu virus that would spread fast and kill in numbers (the memory of "severe acute respiratory syndrome" [Sars] in 2003 was ever-present here). The louder fears expressed by leading global voices and media outlets were softly replicated. The fact that Vietnam and Hong Kong had been epicentres of recent flu outbreaks added to the concern.

In short, Cambodians' relatively stoic attitude has not reflected a lack of public concern. The signs are that the country's government - doubtless aware of the political gains and losses associated with good and bad pandemic management - is truly committed to protect the health of its people. The response to A/H1N1 in Cambodia has been free of what have been regarded as democratic malpractices.

A fragile balance

This balance of communication and precaution was somewhat jeopardised by a report in the leading newspaper the Cambodian Daily on 7 May 2009 on the sensitive subject of meat-consumption. The approach was precisely to pick some dissonances from among leading voices on the pandemic, each one speaking from its own specialised interpretation of partial evidence. An expert warned that "meat from sick pigs or pigs found dead should not be consumed under any circumstances"; another attested that "all pork products are safe for consumption"; a further said that "this new strain of influenza virus does not contaminate humans easily and has a very low pathogenicity for both humans and pigs, unlike the avian flu which killed millions of poultry".

The appearance of scientific cacophony makes the consensual and reassuring message of the WHO director-general even more essential, in reaffirming that "influenza viruses are not known to be transmissible to people through eating processed pork or other food products derived from pigs". The relatively low intensity of the new disease abroad and its absence in Cambodia have played a role in holding rumours at bay. The consumption of pork is safe because there is no case of A/H1N1 in Cambodia, not because the virus is primarily associated with human-to-human transmission. But if any proof of A/H1N1 transmission appears in the country, the mixed messages in the 7 May report could revive and eclipse the WHO's efforts to achieve coherence in communication.

The result could then be stories about the power of A/H1N1 to attack humans and animals, followed by people ceasing to eat pork and the sudden imperiling of an entire vernacular economy of subsistence. In an instant, tens of thousands of people in Cambodia would move from daily subsistence to daily survival; and in a country where five mothers still die every day in childbirth, and where 127 children in every 1,000 born to the poorest families already die before reaching the age of 5, the fragile health gains that have been made may be wiped out. In short, to overestimate the food-borne risk of A/H1N1 in the name of (incomplete) science and consequent difficulty to estimate and aggregate risks could lead to underestimating the one of sudden poverty-induced illness. The media too has a crucial role in matters of life and death.

Thinking in Cambodia

Even those international public-health doctors who now mostly sit in research laboratories or other institutions once sat at the bedside of a patient. It is important for all of us to maintain the doctor's ethos at the heart of our work, and preserve direct contact with the realities and lives of the population we serve. In Cambodia and for Cambodians, good public-health practice must begin by integrating two basic features of Khmer culture: how illness is represented, and how the language accommodates semantic nuances.

Cambodia is predominantly a rural country; the Cambodian farmer is the socio-cultural nexus, at the core of the country's identity and heritage. The Cambodian farmer - and by extension every Cambodian - carries some sense of a direct line of descent from the ancestors of the ricefield; it is routine to be at the same time loaded with animist convictions while riveted to an unequivocal pragmatism.

All Cambodians - including public-health officials - can accept and understand that the "early signs of Influenza A (H1N1) are flu-like, including fever, cough, headache, muscle and joint pain, sore throat and runny nose, and sometimes vomiting or diarrhoea". They also know that "when a person is gravely ill, on the verge of losing consciousness, it is understood that the person's pralung (independent soul-entities) are no longer in his or her body"; thus, traditionally, to call the pralung to return to their residence within the patient's body requires a ritual to be performed. Moreover, the pralung are "also found in certain objects, plants and animals, whose integrity at particular moments is likewise essential to the integrity of the community". The way illness is conceived in this profound and affectively rich context presents singular challenges to the communication of scientific argument that disaggregates animal-to-human and human-to-human transmission of new viruses.

The Khmer language does not formally mark the distinction between different conditionals, nor easily accommodate assumptions, understatements, or subordinate and multifaceted assertions. The semantic nuances of "could be", "should be", "can be" and "will be" are easily lost in translation; in most cases they would end up by converging on the last one. The development of WHO-style consensual messaging using multivariate conditionality to incorporate initially dissenting opinions is not easy in this context.

The outcome of a situation where being scientifically right can generate conceptual or semantic ambiguities is, where A/H1N1 is concerned, yet to be fully tested in Cambodia. So far, its people are continuing to handle everything the world can throw at them with characteristic yet extraordinary grace and fortitude. The global is everywhere local. In the end people will, within their own cultural and social reality, find ways to manage a threat and protect themselves against it.
Read more!

Visitors to Cambodia dip as global economic crisis continues

The number of foreign tourists visiting Cambodia dropped in the first quarter of 2009 as the global economic crisis cuts the number of people travelling.

Visitors from South Korea and Japan are down sharply.

Presenter: Robert Carmichael
Speakers: Ell Lavy, Siem Reap tuk tuk driver; Dr Thong Khon, Cambodian Minister for Tourism

CARMICHAEL: Leave the famous jungle temple - known as Ta Phrom - outside Cambodia's tourism capital of Siem Reap and - as you can hear - you are surrounded by vendors selling cold drinks, musical instruments and postcards. Cambodia has relied for a decade on the expanding tourist trade as one of its pillars for economic growth. A record 2.1 million people visited the country last year.

So the news that tourism numbers have dropped in the first quarter of 2009 from the same period last year is not good. Overall the number is down just three and a half percent to 622,000 which is better than the government had feared. But the headline figure tells only one part of the story. Tourists from richer countries such as Japan and South Korea have dropped by a third, with short-term visitors from neighbouring Vietnam making up the numbers.

And that is why tourism worker Ell Lavy - a 25-year-old driver of a motorised rickshaw around the temples of Angkor Wat - has seen his monthly earnings drop from one hundred US dollars to just seventy. Previously he would get two or three tourists a week - now he is lucky to have one.

LAVY: You know last year when I recommend them to another place they say no problem for them. But this year when I invite them to somewhere they say they that no - they have no money to pay everything. [CARMICHAEL: So you have noticed they are spending less money, and there are less tourists?] Yes, less tourists also.

CARMICHAEL: Government figures show the number of visitors from South Korea and Japan, which last year provided the largest and third-largest number of foreign visitors respectively, dropped by one-third to around 100,000 in the first quarter of this year.

Gregory Anderson is the general manager of the upmarket Le Meridien Angkor hotel in Siem Reap. He has noticed there are fewer Japanese tourists in town, and says occupancy rates are down 20 percent for Siem Reap's upmarket hotels. He blames the global economic situation, as well as political volatility in Thailand and an ongoing border dispute between Cambodia and Thailand.

So in the face of lower spending on travel and tourism in the current global downturn, what can Cambodia do to boost visitor numbers? Tourism Minister Dr Thong Khon says he is targeting countries that are less affected by the global slump. And he is optimistic that 2009 could yet prove better than last year. But he says Cambodia is not helped by problems in Thailand.

KHON: Because you know Thailand is a main gate to Cambodia. Thirty three percent of total arrivals to Cambodia come from Thailand by air, by water, by land. When Thailand is affected, so it affects Cambodia too.

CARMICHAEL: To minimize that problem, the ministry is trying to boost short-haul flights from within the ten-member ASEAN nation and China, Japan and South Korea. Cambodia has already scrapped visa requirements for nationals within a number of ASEAN states. And he says the private sector must work to make the country more attractive - including using discounts for hotels and restaurants.

But making Cambodia more attractive isn't helped by the trickle of reported crimes against foreign tourists, some of them serious. The most high-profile was that a friend of Britain's Princess Eugenie had her handbag stolen in Phnom Penh recently. What does he think of the incident?

KHON: In Cambodia the whole country is completely safe and secure. But the thing that happened is not everywhere. Sometimes like this or like that. But the case of the princess - we checked with the police, we checked everywhere - they have no information. If the case really happened, why did they not report it to the police?

CARMICHAEL: Dr Thong Khon says the global crisis has seen Cambodia downgrade its estimate of tourist arrivals for 2015 by around one-fifth to 4 million visitors. So what message will he take to the region to try and boost visitor numbers?

KHON: Many tourists come to stay in home-stay, in the countryside, on some islands, for one month, for two weeks with the family. From Scandinavia, from Australia. They come from everywhere. No problem. Come. Come to stay in Cambodia. Read more!

Area students discover Cambodia

By JACK PALMER

palmer@crescent-news.com

Two young alumnae of Defiance College on Thursday shared their experiences in Cambodia with a group of area high school students and Rotarians.

"Despite their poverty, the people of Cambodia were so gracious. I never felt threatened at all," said Renee Chaffee, a 2007 DC graduate. "They just wanted to tell their stories."

"They have the same emotions as we do," added Jennifer Creighton of Evansport, who graduated last weekend. "They still love and care for each other. They were some of the nicest people I've ever met."

Their poignant remarks were made as co-keynote speakers at the grand banquet for the 23rd annual World Community Workshop, which runs through Saturday at Defiance College.

The workshop is sponsored by Defiance Rotary Club, Rotary District 6600 and the McMaster School for Advancing Humanity. It provides young people with an opportunity to learn about history, customs and economic and political issues of a selected area of the world.

Chaffee and Creighton reflected on their experiences in Cambodia as part of the McMaster School for Advancing Humanity program. Chaffee worked at the Cambodian Women's Crisis Center, where she addressed domestic violence as it relates to women and children to assess whether they were receiving adequate services.

"I interviewed women one-on-one," said Chaffee, who will receive her master's of social work degree next week from Case Western Reserve University. "That was the part of my life when I knew I wanted to work with women and children who had been victimized."

Chaffee also discussed "the Killing Fields," a number of sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the totalitarian communist Khmer Rouge regime from 1975-79. These locations were the subject of a 1984 movie of the same name.

"It was very surreal being there," she said. "It's scary to know this happened in my lifetime."

Creighton's project involved the natural forms of birth control, since Cambodia's past unrest has made the use of and methods of obtaining medicinal forms of birth control difficult.

Her research took her to CycleBeads, developed by the Institute for Reproductive Health at Georgetown University.

"I wrote training materials about how to use the beads," said Creighton. "They have a 95 percent effectiveness with correct use and 88 percent effectiveness with typical use."

She said she observed a wide disparity of wealth and poverty in Cambodia, often right next to each other.

"On the streets you would see people pulling carts and others driving Land Rovers. The middle class were the people that had huts with shutters."

The workshop resumes today, when students will break into small groups and develop a presentation covering a certain aspect of Cambodian history, customs, economics and politics.

All presentations will be held Saturday morning.

"Rotary is in many countries and our mission is world peace and understanding," Rotary 6600 district governor David Daugherty told the students.

"I'm glad you are here. Make the most of it."


Read more!

China, Australia to Build Final Leg of Asian Railway

Man drives homemade wooden cart on railroad in Kampong Chhnang province some 50 kilometers north of Phnom Penh (2008 file photo)

By Luke Hunt, Phnom Penh

Chinese and Australian engineers are gearing up to build the final stretch of track in the Trans-Asian Railway, which will link Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand with Vietnam and China through Cambodia. The Cambodian government has divided the country's railway system in two. Australia's Toll Holdings takes control of old French-built lines in the east, which run from the capital to the Thai border and south to Sihanoukville, home to one of the largest ports in the Gulf of Siam.

The China Railway Group has the contract to carry out a feasibility study that will link Phnom Penh with Snoul near this country's western border with Vietnam.

This 255-kilometer stretch will complete the Singapore-to-Kunming line, a railway connecting southeast Asia to the heart of China.

Paul Power is an advisor to the Cambodian government and team leader for the Asian Development Bank's involvement in the reconstruction of Cambodia's railways. He says the railway's economic benefit for the region and Cambodia will be enormous.

"It makes Cambodia the hub of transportation between China and Singapore and you would have a port link, you would have a link to Thailand, you'll have a link through to Vietnam," Power said, "and the implications for that, for Cambodia in the region, are that Cambodia becomes the hub."

He says freight will provide the greatest economic benefits, particularly for shipping bulk goods like rice. The railway will be a cheaper alternative to ships and trucks.

However, the contractors first must deal with the thorny issue of resettling people living along the route. In Cambodia, poor landholders often are pushed out with little compensation to make way for commercial developments, causing considerable public anger.

Power says the companies working on the railway are aware of the problems that have afflicted other construction projects and thinks they can avoid similar difficulties.

If the resettlement issues are resolved quickly then authorities hope the first passengers from Singapore to China and beyond as far as London, will start boarding within the next two years.

Read more!

Serial sex offender surfaces in Cambodia

Jack Louis Sporich was living an idyllic retirement, splitting his time between a luxury condo in Sedona, Ariz., and a sprawling home he was having built in a tourist mecca in Cambodia.

The 74-year-old retired engineer appeared to have escaped his past, which included his classification as one of California's most dangerous sex offenders, one who authorities suspect may have molested more than 500 young boys over the years.

Now officials say Sporich -- who won his release from California's Atascadero State Hospital in May 2004 without spending a single day in treatment -- may have struck again.

He has been charged in Cambodia with indecent acts against minors in a case involving four young Cambodian boys, according to an official in Phnom Penh whose organization helped investigate Sporich.

Cambodian news accounts of his arrest indicate Sporich denied the allegations, which included the claim that he lured the children -- ages 9 to 13 -- to his home with toys and candies. The Cambodia Daily reported that he also attracted youngsters by dropping dollar bills in the street.

He was arrested Feb. 2 and remains in custody in the tourist town of Siem Reap, according to Seila Samleang, executive director of Action Pour Les Enfants-Cambodia. APLE-Cambodia is a nongovernmental organization that works closely with Cambodian police to target foreign pedophiles who exploit youngsters in that country, and Sporich had been under investigation by the group.

Samleang said the charges are misdemeanors punishable by a prison sentence of one to three years. Sexual exploitation of children has been a problem for years in Cambodia, where the age of consent is 15.

Todd Melnik, the defense attorney who won Sporich's release in California, said he knew nothing of the Cambodia charges. An e-mail to Sporich this week seeking comment did not receive a response.

Sporich is no stranger to charges of sex with children.

He spent nine years in prison after his conviction in Ventura County, Calif., on seven counts of lewd acts upon children under 14. Then, he was committed to Atascadero State Hospital as a "sexually violent predator" deemed too dangerous to be released upon completion of his sentence.

David Lehr, a Ventura County defense attorney who originally prosecuted Sporich, said he may have had as many as 500 victims, and that he typically befriended boys through their parents and offered to take them on camping trips.

The parents frequently would pay Sporich for his gas and the time he spent on the trips, Lehr said last week.

"If I had to pick from a list of former and current SVPs (sexually violent predators), he would be, by far, the first one I would be most concerned about," Lehr said in an interview for a series of stories in the Sacramento Bee about sexually violent predators.

Sporich was released from Atascadero in May 2004, after two juries were unable to agree on whether he would re-offend, and he immediately moved to Arizona, where the only requirement he faced was that he register as a sex offender once a year.

He is not listed on the current sex-offender registry maintained by the Arizona Department of Public Safety.

Sporich's case was highlighted in the Bee's series, which revealed that it was far easier for offenders to win release from Atascadero by refusing treatment than by undergoing the lengthy treatment program designed to prevent them from reoffending.

Since the treatment program began 13 years ago, 17 offenders have won release by undergoing all or some of the required programs, and none has reoffended, the state says.

By contrast, 155 others -- including Sporich -- have been released through court orders.

After the Bee's series, lawmakers introduced a number of proposed improvements to the system and voters later overwhelmingly approved Proposition 83. That measure increased prison sentences for habitual and violent offenders and did away with the requirement that sexually violent predators be allowed a trial every two years. Instead, they now can petition annually for a hearing, but the burden of proof is on them to convince a court they no longer pose a threat.

In an interview for the Bee's 2006 series, Sporich said he felt remorse for his actions and complained that California had violated his civil rights by committing him to Atascadero for 39 months after he had completed his prison sentence.

Family members say that in recent years Sporich married a 23-year-old Southeast Asian woman with several small children and that he had begun building a large home in Cambodia.

June Caine, Sporich's older sister, said he met the woman, a waitress, overseas after leaving her a $100 tip. Caine said the family had known for years of Sporich's past and had hoped he would seek treatment.

"I don't want him out anymore," she said. "I think he's sick, and he's never going to get well. I don't want this to go on."

(E-mail Sam Stanton at sstanton(at)sacbee.com.)

Read more!

French school evicts Cambodian locals

By Guy De Launey
BBC News, Phnom Penh


San Limsreang knew it was over when the "green screen of death" arrived.

These corrugated metal fences are a common sight in Phnom Penh, encircling communities destined for eviction.

At least two dozen police officers accompanied the workmen sent by City Hall as they dug holes, banged in fence-posts and erected the screen in front of the grocery stalls and coffee shops at the rear of the Lycee Rene Descartes.

Limsreang and his neighbours looked on fearfully as their homes were cut off from the street. They knew all too well what usually happened to communities marked in such a manner.

The 68-year-old had been hoping for a peaceful retirement after a varied working life.

He had worked as a banker, a vet and a civil servant - and for 30 years his ever-expanding family had made their home on the fourth floor of a building behind what is now one of Cambodia's elite schools.

Now the Lycee Rene Descartes wants to expand.

And along with its landlord, the French embassy, it has asked the local authorities to clear Limsreang's building so that it can be used for the school.

The lycee insists that the building belonged to the school before the Khmer Rouge arrived in 1975; now it is merely taking back its rightful property.

The residents, however, say they were ordered to live behind the lycee after Vietnamese-backed forces ousted Pol Pot's government in 1979.

Labelled 'squatters'

"We wanted to go back to my old house but other people were occupying it," Limsreang says.

"After 1979 everyone ended up living in different houses. At that time all the houses belonged to the government - that's why we had to do that."

The new regime did not allow much flexibility. As well as being directed to live in the building behind the lycee, many were told to work in the school which took over the site.

Later the residents took jobs with the local government or the civil service.

They lived rent-free, but were officially registered by the authorities, and took their right to live in their homes for granted.

That turned out to be overly-optimistic. When peace returned to Cambodia in the 1990s, so did the Lycee Rene Descartes.

At first the school co-existed with the residents, but an expanding demand prompted the lycee to seek the removal of the community.

"This site belonging to the embassy must go back to the school," says Pierre Olivieri, the co-ordinator of a parents' committee pressing for the move.

"We're the only French school in the world with a squat - even nations at war like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sudan don't have that.

"It's not good for the image of France or Cambodia."

The residents resent being labelled as "squatters", and they were unwilling to leave for the compensation on offer - a few thousand dollars and a plot of undeveloped land on a reclaimed lake on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.

Limsreang says that City Hall made a series of threats to evict his community - and said it would give them nothing if they did not accept the terms.

Fearing the worst, some families signed the deal and moved out.

The only ray of hope for the residents was the support of some of the students at the Lycee.

'Regularly criticised'

A student demonstration before Khmer New Year in April brought much-needed publicity to the community's plight.

"It's a horrible feeling because they say they're doing this for us - for us the students," says a 17-year-old protester, Raimondo Pictet.

"For security reasons and for our well-being, these people are being evicted. Well they're human beings too - and they also have a well-being.

They have children who are also going to school - and if they're evicted they won't be able to finish their school year."

Raimondo's efforts have not been appreciated universally.

He says he has been insulted by some students' parents, and a local newspaper published a disparaging comment from the school principal.

But the residents behind the lycee say they are grateful for the students' involvement.

"I'm really excited that teenage students understand about human rights," says Limsreang, before he is interrupted by his son Vichet, a medical student.

"Yes, but it's not good for the French government. Maybe they don't give a damn about human rights issues in Cambodia.

"But we're living here legitimately, and we want to leave here with a fair amount of compensation. We don't want to get rich or anything."

The French embassy did not respond to several requests for an interview.

After weeks of pressure, the remaining residents have now agreed to go.

They say they are sympathetic to the needs of the school, but frightened that their relocation might turn into another forced eviction in which they could lose everything.

Read more!

Cambodia praised for sand ban

PHNOM PENH - AN ENVIRONMENTAL watchdog group praised Cambodia on Wednesday for banning the export of sand, the dredging of which the group says degrades coastlines and depletes fish populations.

The London-based group Global Witness said it was pleased that Prime Minister Hun Sen's government responded to its concerns over the potentially devastating impacts of sand dredging.

Hun Sen announced a partial ban on the practice and a total ban on exports on May 8.

Most sand exports have gone to Singapore, which has an ambitious land reclamation project, the group said.

Indonesia had been Singapore's main supplier of sand until January 2007, when the government in Jakarta banned its export.

The group - which has been critical of the country's attitude toward the exploitation of natural resources - said the ban was a positive first step.

In a report issued three months ago, Global Witness said that 'a huge sand dredging operation' began in Cambodia's Koh Kong province last year.

The group estimated the activity to be worth at least US$8.6 million per year in Cambodia. -- AP


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Cambodia actively preparing to deal with A/H1N1 flu

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia is actively preparing to prevent and deal with the possibly appearance of influenza A/H1N1, Health Minister Mam Bun Heng said on Wednesday.

"It is the require of Prime Minister Hun Sen," Mam stressed when he inspected the Calmette Hospital on Wednesday afternoon which was preparing for isolation wards and other facilities to accept the possible influenza virus infected patients. Mam also inspected the Phnom Penh International Airport to check out the use of temperature detectors and other relevant prevention and control measures.

Mam said that the Cambodian government has attached great importance to the prevention of the disease since the confirmation of the first influenza A/H1N1 in Mexico, adding that Prime Minister Hun Sen, on many occasions, also reminded the relevant government departments to remain on full alert in dealing with the disease.

Fifty sets of medical protective clothing, special-purpose vehicles, and related drugs have been ready in Phnom Penh and the tourism city of Siem Reap, Mam added.

Cambodia installed thermal scanners at its international airports and tightened supervision at its checkpoints with neighboring countries, while the Ministry of Health used the existing equipment and system nationwide for combating bird flu to monitor the A/H1N1 flu.

Thirty countries have reported 5,251 cases of influenza A/H1N1 as of May 12 and sixty-one deaths have been confirmed worldwide, according to WHO's website.

Last week health ministers from the ASEAN and their counterparts from China, Japan, and South Korea met in Bangkok pledging to cooperate in the face of the threat from the virus and to boost stockpiles of antiviral.

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Torture Survivors in Cambodia to Testify at Khmer Rouge Trial

By SETH MYDANS


PHNOM PENH — Looking across the courtroom where he is on trial for crimes against humanity, the chief Khmer Rouge torturer cannot avoid seeing an artist and mechanic who sit together side by side, watching him but mostly avoiding his gaze.

One short and forceful, his feet dangling just above the floor, the other melancholy and drooping a bit, the men are rare survivors of the torture house he commanded, Tuol Sleng, where at least 14,000 people were sent to their deaths three decades ago.

In the weeks ahead, the two survivors will take the stand to testify against their torturer, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, and both have terrible stories to tell about a place of horror from which almost no one emerged alive.

Bou Meng, 68, the short one, survived because he was a painter and was singled out from a row of shackled prisoners to produce portraits of the Khmer Rouge chief, Pol Pot.

The other, Chum Mey, 78, was a mechanic and was spared because the torturers needed him to repair machines including the typewriters used to record the confessions — very often false — that they extracted from prisoners like himself.

Mr. Bou Meng and Mr. Chum Mey are living exhibits from the Khmer Rouge years — tangible evidence like the skulls that have been preserved at some former killing fields, or like hundreds of portraits of their fellow prisoners that are displayed on the walls of Tuol Sleng.

The photographs were taken at the moment detainees were delivered to the prison, before they were stripped and fettered and tortured and sent to a killing field.

Those killed at Tuol Sleng are among 1.7 million people who died during the Communist Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979 from starvation, disease and overwork as well as from torture and execution.

Duch, now 66, is the first of five arrested Khmer Rouge figures to go on trial in the U.N.-backed tribunal.

He is accused of ordering the beatings, whippings, electric shocks and removal of toenails that Mr. Bou Meng and Mr. Chum Mey describe — indeed he has admitted in the courtroom to ordering the beating of Mr. Chum Mey.

Both men endured torture that continued for days, and Mr. Chum Mey said, “At that time I wished I could die rather than survive.”

But both men did survive, and today they are describing scenes that none of their fellow prisoners lived to recount.

“Every night I looked out at the moon,” Mr. Bou Meng recalled. “I heard people crying and sighing around the building. I heard people calling out, ‘Mother help me, mother help me!”’

It was at night that prisoners were trucked out to a killing field, and every night, he said, he feared that his moment had come. “But by midnight or 1 a.m. I realized that I would live another day.”

Though many Cambodians have tried to bury their traumatic memories, Mr. Bou Meng and Mr. Chum Mey have continued to return to the scene of their imprisonment and torture, as if their souls remain trapped there together with the souls of the dead.

During the first few years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, Mr. Bou Meng returned to work in an office at Tuol Sleng, which was converted into a museum of genocide. Now he uses it as a convenient rest stop, spending the night there on a cot when he visits the capital, Phnom Penh, from the countryside, where he paints Buddhist murals in temples.

Mr. Chum Mey, retired now from his work as a mechanic, spends much of his time wandering among the portraits, telling and retelling his story to tourists and their guides, as if one of the victims on the walls had come to life.

An eager and passionate storyteller, he will show a visitor how he was shoved, blindfolded, up the stairs during 12 days of torture, and he will drop to the floor inside a small brick cubicle where he was held in chains.

“As you can see, this was my condition,” he said recently as he sat on the hard concrete floor holding up a metal ammunition box that was used as a toilet. “It upsets me to see Duch sitting in the courtroom talking with his lawyers as if he were a guest of the court.”

Apart from their survival, both men’s stories are similar to those of many Tuol Sleng prisoners — country people who joined the Communist revolution during the Indochina war to liberate their nation from what they saw as foreign domination.

They were swept up in Khmer Rouge purges, like many others in Tuol Sleng, and they were tortured until they admitted being members of the C.I.A. or K.G.B., organizations they had barely heard of.

Both men lost their wives and children in the Khmer Rouge years, and although both have rebuilt their families, the past still holds them in its grip.

Mr. Bou Meng does not wander like his friend among the Tuol Sleng pictures, but he does keep one in his wallet — a snapshot-sized reproduction of the portrait of his wife, Ma Yoeun, who was arrested together with him but did not survive.

The picture shows a small woman, dressed in black like the others, looking forlorn and lost, her hair tousled — a record of the last time her husband saw her alive.

“Sometimes when I sit at home I look at the picture and everything seems fresh,” he said. “I think of the suffering she endured, and I wonder how long she stayed alive.”

The photograph reminds him of those most terrible moments of his life, but also of the happiest.

“We were still young, a boy and a girl together,” he said. “It’s my best memory. It was the day of our honeymoon. We slept together. It was a perfect day.”

Mr. Bou Meng has since remarried twice, but he remains shackled to his memories.

“I know I should forget her,” he said, “but I can’t.”

She visits him, he said, in visions that are something more than dreams, looking just as she did at that final moment — still 28 years old, leaving Mr. Bou Meng to live on and grow old without her.
Sometimes she appears together with the spirits of others who were killed, he said. They stand together, a crowd of ghosts in black, and she tells him, “Only you, Bou Meng, can find justice for us.”

Mr. Bou Meng said he hoped that the trial would cauterize his wounds, that testifying against Duch and seeing him convicted would free him from the restless ghosts and let him live what is left of his life in peace.

“I don’t want to be a victim,” Mr. Bou Meng said. “I want to be like everybody else, a normal person.”

But he said he knows that this may be asking too much of life.

“Maybe not completely normal,” he said. “But at least 50 percent.” Read more!

Vietnam, Cambodia & the riches of the Mekong

(Forimmediaterelease.net) CHATSWORTH, CA - The wonders of south east Asia hold a unique allure for travelers, and now, AMAWATERWAYS has combined the region’s most fabled sights into one spectacular new program. “Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Riches of the Mekong” launches in September 2009; an exclusive 15-day itinerary highlighting the region’s historical and cultural riches, ancient ways of life, and traditions. Of course, passengers can rely upon the same award-winning philosophy, service, and attention to detail that has made AMAWATERWAYS the premier river cruise operator in Europe.

A glossy new brochure, “Vietnam, Cambodia and the Riches of the Mekong 2009-2011” sets forth sailing dates, prices, and other details, and is available now. The brochure sets forth complete itineraries for the 15-day program, as well as an optional 8-day Central Vietnam pre-extension and an optional 4-day Hong Kong post-extension.

Program Highlights:

- 2 nights in Vietnam’s bustling capital of Hanoi, famous for its graceful colonial architecture, verdant parks, tranquil lakes, and ancient temples

- An overnight cruise onboard a luxurious traditional junk in Vietnam’s Ha Long Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site renowned for its spectacular limestone cliffs

- 3 nights in Siem Reap,Cambodia, gateway to the Angkor Archeological Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and home to the legendary Angkor Wat

- An unforgettable 7-night cruise on the Mekong River aboard the luxurious, new 92-passenger MS La Marguerite, the most deluxe vessel on the Mekong

- An overnight in historic Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam

About AMAWATERWAYS

AMAWATERWAYS has redefined European river cruising since its founding in 2002 by river cruise industry pioneer, Rudi Schreiner, cruise industry executive Kristin Karst, and former owner of Brendan Worldwide Vacations, Jimmy Murphy. In 2009, two brand-new 148-passenger vessels, MS Amalyra and MS Amadolce, joined the luxurious AMAWATERWAYS fleet in Europe, which consists of the MS Amacello and MS Amadante (2008), MS Amalegro (2007), and MS Amadagio (2006). In 2010, AMAWATERWAYS will welcome MS Amabella and continue to offer popular itineraries on the historic Danube, Main, Rhine, and Mosel rivers, as well as the Douro River in Portugal, the Rhône in France, and the Volga-Baltic waterways in Russia.

For brochures or more information on the new “Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Riches of the Mekong” program - or any of AMAWATERWAYS’ exciting river cruise itineraries - log on to www.amawaterways.com or call 800-626-0126.

Ana Figueroa Phone: 800-626-0126 Email: Ana@amawaterways.com . Read more!

Israel sends first economic attaché to Cambodia

Navit Zomer, Israel Money

Mission to facilitate economic cooperation between Israel, Southeast Asian country

The Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor has opened Israel's first economic mission in Cambodia's capital of Phnom Penh, under the charge of the economic attaché in Thailand, Tzahi Selzer.

During May a first Israeli delegation of telecommunications companies visited the Southeastern Asian country. Some 15 companies took part in the delegation, including such high profile names as ECI, Gilat and Comverse, whose representatives met with top local government officials.

Simultaneously, a Cambodian agricultural delegation came to Israel last week to participate in the Agritech agricultural exhibition in Tel Aviv.

According to Selzer, Cambodia is mainly interested in Israeli companies involved in irrigation technologies, agriculture, infrastructure and medical devices. Read more!

Royal oxen signal worry for Cambodian rice farmers

PHNOM PENH (AFP) — Cambodia's royal oxen performed an ancient ceremony to predict the country's agriculture fortunes -- and raised fears of a low rice harvest by refusing to eat any of the grain.

King Norodom Sihamoni presided over the ceremony in a park outside the palace where thousands of people watched royal astrologers observing the animals' behaviour.

After a symbolic ploughing of a portion of the field, a pair of royal oxen were led to seven dishes -- rice, corn, beans, sesame, grass, water and alcohol -- laid out on trays.

They were seen eating only beans and corn, allowing the palace's chief astrologer Kang Ken to declare that this year "beans and corn harvests will be bountiful."

The astrologer did not spell out to the crowd what it meant for the rice harvest -- but he later told reporters that it would be only about 30 percent of the expected amount.

"I am extremely worried. As the oxen did not eat the rice, I fear that I cannot have (a) good harvest of rice," said farmer Vong Sak, 53, after the ceremony, which marks the start of Cambodia's planting season.

While still taken seriously by many rural Cambodians in this deeply superstitious country, ploughing ceremony predictions have been called into question in recent years.

Prime Minister Hun Sen, who did not attend the ceremony, rebuked the royal astrologers for failing to predict deadly floods in 2001 that claimed 59 lives.

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