French navy ship arrives in Cambodia for visit

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

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

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

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

Cambodia: Phnom Penh Empire Win Hun Sen Cup

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

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

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

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

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

Cambodia lifts ban of rice exports for three provinces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thailand, Cambodia reopen talks on disputed waters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more!

Cambodia, Vietnam exchange methods on protecting forests, wildlife

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Xinhua Read more!

Phnom Penh's totem elephant – Sambo – survives

By Suzy Khimm

The Christian Science Monitor (www.csmonitor.com)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cambodia, Vietnam exchange methods on protecting forests, wildlife

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Xinhua Read more!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source:Xinhua Read more!

Cambodia lifts ban of rice exports for three provinces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big lineup expected for Cambodian parade today

By Greg Mellen, staff writer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more!

Survivor recalls horrors of Cambodia genocide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- Dialogue through art --

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more!

Iloilo City inks twinning pact with Phnom Penh, Cambodia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opposition supporters rally in Cambodia

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

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

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

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

Phnom Penh has implemented a number of measures aimed at keeping prices stable, including banning rice exports and allowing pork imports, but observers say basic foodstuff prices remain stubbornly high.
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Not all bliss for take-away Cambodian brides

By Brian McCartan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian McCartan is a Thailand-based freelance journalist.

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Doctors not nearly as diverse as the valley

Southeast Asians and Latinos underserved

By Barbara Anderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making a healthier community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Residency program recruiting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Global rice reserves at lowest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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War reporter Jon Swain pays tribute to Dith Pran

Jon Swain was about to be shot by the Khmer Rouge when Dith Pran intervened. The Sunday Times war reporter pays tribute to the courage of his friend, who died last week

Four years after his enslavement by the Khmer Rouge, an intrepid Cambodian stumbled out of the thickly wooded jungle to freedom. His legs were wobbly. He was weak with malaria. His front teeth were broken. His face was gaunt. He was incredibly thin – but he still retained his lopsided grin.

That grin was still in place – although fading – in the weeks before Dith Pran died last Sunday in a hospital in America, his adopted home, from pancreatic cancer. He was 65. Although wan and thin, he moved on gracefully, loved and mourned by all whose lives he had touched. “This is my path and I must go where it takes me,” he said shortly before the end.

Pran’s harrowing personal tale of enslavement and escape from the Khmer Rouge in 1979 had eventually become the subject of the Oscar-winning film The Killing Fields, directed by Roland Joffé, which focused global attention on one of history’s worst genocides.

Pran was justly famous. Were it not for this former tourist guide to the fabled Angkor temples, who later became interpreter and assistant to Sydney Schanberg, a reporter for The New York Times, in Cambodia, the world’s eyes would probably not have been opened to the monstrous atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge in his native land. In its rush to forge a new society, 2m people died in executions or from starvation, disease and overwork – nearly a third of the population.

However, Pran did more. After his escape he moved to America, where he worked as a photographer for The New York Times and spent the rest of his life speaking out about what his countrymen had been through. He also pushed for war crimes trials for the Khmer Rouge leaders – trials that are finally due to begin this year in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. Pran, alas, will never see them.

“I am a one-person crusade,” he once said. “I must speak for those who did not survive and those who still suffer.”

I owe this honourable Cambodian a debt of gratitude that I can never erase. He saved my life when I was captured by the Khmer Rouge.

At the time the Cambodian war was a sideshow to the war raging next door in Vietnam and some aspects of it seemed comic. Before sallying forth every morning into the countryside to witness the fighting, we reporters would meet at the Groaning Table – an open-air cafe – for a military briefing from a charming colonel called Am Rong, whose unfortunate name was a butt of endless jokes. His military communiqués, I remember, were invariably nonsense.

The seductive wartime capital, with its brothels and opium parlours, encouraged all kinds of indiscretions and we conducted our lives as though we were characters in a Graham Greene novel; or we liked to imagine that we did.

However, the war was deadly serious. So we also took insane risks and witnessed and reported on some of the most appalling human suffering that I have seen.

In the process more than 20 of the tiny foreign press corps of about 60 were killed in a matter of months by the Khmer Rouge, who never took prisoners. And many more Cambodian journalists also died.

We loved the Cambodians, who had a disarming insouciance in the face of danger. The difference between us and the band of local journalists we hired to interpret the language, politics and culture was that they were seeing and reporting on their own country being destroyed. We, on the other hand, were reporting from the privileged position of visitors who could always bail out. For them, there could be nowhere else to go: they and their loved ones were trapped by the war and their survival was dependent on the outcome.

It was Pran who was the unacknowledged dean of this Cambodian press corps, not because of the status that his job with the venerable New York Times gave him, but because he was so unusually acute and resourceful and had unassailable integrity.

The horrors of the war had made morality a luxury that many of his fellow countrymen had long since discarded. Yet, unlike so many of the politicians and generals for whom survival and money were the ultimate objectives, Pran remained faithful to his principles. He believed passionately that the story of the destruction of his beautiful homeland needed to be told. And to that end he risked his life time after time.

I first met Pran in 1972. Although his loyalty was always to Schanberg, he was ready to give help and advice to me and all the other journalists. Never more so than on April 17, 1975 – the day of the fall of Phnom Penh.

On that same day Schanberg, Al Rockoff, an American photographer, and I were captured by the Khmer Rouge.

A squad of teenage soldiers with hate-filled eyes forced us into a captured armoured personnel carrier (APC). Pran, realising we were going to be executed, selflessly argued to be allowed to join us inside, knowing full well that without his communication skills we were doomed.

It is this story that is told in The Killing Fields. And it was Dith Pran himself, by the way, who coined the phrase “killing fields” after seeing the grim piles of corpses and skeletal remains on his desperate trek to freedom.

That was in the future. Back when Pran volunteered himself as a prisoner, there seemed little hope of escape for any of us. First we were taken to the banks of the Mekong river; then the rear door of the APC opened and a pair of Khmer Rouge soldiers, pointing rifles, beckoned us out. We knew they were going to shoot us.

Pran got out first and began to talk softly and firmly, as he always did. He told the Khmer Rouge that we were neutral journalists who had come to report on their historic “liberation”; and, after a while, our would-be killers began to calm down. The tension suddenly evaporated and we were freed.

A few days later we tried to doctor one of my two British passports for Pran so that he could be evacuated with us to Thailand as a foreigner – but we failed.

The Khmer Rouge forced him to go into the countryside – by now becoming a giant labour camp – where he somehow survived torture, starvation and a life of unremitting hard toil.

When he emerged four years later, 50 members of his family had perished. Mercifully, Schanberg had evacuated Pran’s wife, Ser Moeun, and his four beloved children before Phnom Penh fell and they were safely in America.

The first I knew of his freedom was when I received a telegram from Schanberg, who had been tortured by guilt about Pran’s disappearance and had led his own one-man crusade to trace his helper and friend.

The telegram included a personal message from Pran, patterned on a Cambodian proverb: “Hi Jon. The world is round. Now I meet you again. Pran was in bad shape, but the life is remained. Love Pran.”

I still have it. In subsequent years I saw him several times back in Cambodia.

It is a place that takes over the soul, and those who have known it at its worst are irresistibly drawn back. We revisited old spots – including, once, the place on the riverbank where, blinking in the sunlight, we had stood facing the rifles of the Khmer Rouge peasant boys, waiting for the volley of shots that would kill us.

The slight man I had known had put on weight; he had adopted American food and habits and had a New Jersey twang. Beneath all that he was still the same Pran: warm and attentive, with that peculiarly Cambodian joie de vivre and a mischievous sense of humour.

His business card announced simply: “Dith Pran – photographer”. On the other side, however, it listed information about how the Khmer Rouge had ruined his beloved homeland.

Using his survival as a tool against injustice and genocide, he became a good-will ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, founded a holocaust awareness project and compiled a book of children’s accounts of growing up under the Khmer Rouge.

It is given to few journalists to make a real difference to people’s lives. Once safe in America, Pran could have retreated into the background. Countless Cambodians did. But he saw it as his duty to stop the memory of what had happened to his country fading away. That and his courage and loyalty are what made Pran magnificent.

Latterly, friends said, he had become disappointed with the way Cambodia was becoming rotten again with corruption and cruelty. His marriage to Ser Moeun had broken up and another marriage had failed.

Despite personal setbacks, he bore his public role gracefully. Right to the end he always thought there was more that he could do, according to Schanberg, who spent many days attending to his dying friend.

“Pran was a true reporter – a fighter for the truth and for his people,” Schanberg said. “When the cancer struck, he fought for his life again. And he did it with the same Buddhist calm and courage and positive spirit that made [him] so special.”

Having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer too late for much hope of survival, Pran urged others to undergo early testing. “I want to save lives, including my own,” he said.

He had triumphed over the Khmer Rouge and outlived their leader, Pol Pot, who had turned Cambodia into a madhouse. But Pran knew deep down that the battle against cancer was one he could not win.

“Cambodians believe we just rent this body,” he said not long before he died. “It is just a house for the spirit; and if the house is full of termites, it is time to leave.”

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