Cambodian PM meets with governor of Guangxi of China

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia Prime Minister Hun Sen here on Thursday met with Ma Biao, Governor of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China, on beefing up the cooperation between the two sides.

Hun Sen welcomed the Cambodia-Guangxi cooperation and requested Guangxi to focus especially on agriculture, Ieng Sophalet, assistant to the premier, told reporters after the meeting.

In addition, Hun Sen asked Guangxi to consider building a motor-pump factory in Cambodia, said Ieng Sophalet.

The prime minister also expressed his support for opening direct flights from Guilin, Guangxi to Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, he added.

During the meeting, Ma highly praised Cambodia for its development, and reiterated his region's commitment to continuing its cooperation with Cambodia, said Ieng Sophalet.

Ma told the premier that his visit aimed to invite Hun Sen to attend the upcoming China-ASEAN Expo in Nanning, the provincial capital of Guangxi, and to strengthen the cooperation in the fields of trade, agriculture, culture, infrastructure, construction, imports and exports, as well as information technology.

The visit also aimed at opening direct flights from Guilin to Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, and bringing more investment from Guangxi to Cambodia, particularly in the field of industry, Ma said.

The governor also told Hun Sen that his province is willing to contribute to human resource development in Cambodia by providing scholarships for Cambodian students

Ma and his delegation arrived here on Wednesday for a three-day visit.

The governor also met with Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation Hor Namhong on Thursday, Cambodian Commerce Minister Cham Prasidh on Wednesday, and Cambodian Minister of Agriculture, Forests and Fisheries Chan Sarun on Thursday.

Cham Prasidh told Ma that he will lead a delegation to join the China-ASEAN Expo to be held in Nanning in October.

On Friday, Ma and Cham Prasidh will sign a memorandum of understanding on economic and commercial cooperation between Cambodia and Guangxi.

According to official figures, the bilateral trade volume between Cambodia and Guangxi reached 12.39 million U.S. dollars in 2008.

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Japan gives "urgent" funds to Cambodia Khmer trial

PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA - Japan announced an "urgent" US$200,000 ($302,386) donation to the UN-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal Friday, allowing it to pay Cambodian staff after donations dried up following corruption claims.

A leading judge at the war crimes tribunal said earlier this month that the court did not have enough money to pay local staff after accusations of graft made donors wary.

"In response to the request from the royal government of Cambodia, the government of Japan has made an urgent decision to contribute US$200,000...to finance the Cambodian share of the trial budget," said a press statement by the Japanese embassy.

Under the complicated tribunal agreement, Cambodian and international staff have separate budgets funded by countries including Japan, France, Australia, Germany and the United States.
The court's first trial is under way, but the Cambodian side has been hit by claims of political interference and a scandal in which local staff were allegedly forced to pay kickbacks for their jobs.

Japan said it "places emphasis on progress of the Khmer Rouge tribunal, as it believes this process will promote peace, democracy, the rule of law and good governance in Cambodia."

The long-awaited first Khmer Rouge trial began last month when the regime's notorious prison chief, Kaing Guek Eav, better known by the alias Duch, went before the court.

He is one of five former Khmer Rouge leaders scheduled to be tried by the court.

Up to two million people died of starvation and overwork, or were executed by the Khmer Rouge, which dismantled modern Cambodian society in its effort to forge a radical agrarian utopia. --AFP

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Reproductive Health Group In Cambodia Reports Increase In HIV Testing Among Women

A report released on Monday by the Reproductive Health Association of Cambodia found that 40,587 women in the country underwent HIV tests in 2008 -- up from 38,660 who were tested in 2007 -- the Phnom Penh Post reports. Blood tests are offered at no-cost at state and referral hospitals across Cambodia, the Post reports. RHAC said the increase in testing was in part because of an increase in reproductive health awareness campaigns.

Mean Chivoan -- director of the National Centre for HIV and AIDS, Dermatology and STD -- said that the government has distributed information about HIV/AIDS tests since 2001, giving information to community groups and garment factories. He said that the government will continue to promote tests among women -- particularly pregnant women -- because it believes such efforts are "important." Cheat Khemara, senior labor official at the Garment Manufacturers Association of Cambodia, said the increase in testing among women is a reflection of a partnership between community groups and garment factories -- where about 300,000 Cambodian women are employed. He called on "all factories to help provide health facilities and services" at no-cost to employees and to "provide care to employees who have HIV/AIDS so that they have the mental strength to continue their work." Chea Mony, president of the Free Trade Union of Cambodia, reported that most garment factory workers are required to have a health check at the Labor Health Centre. He added, "Usually, women who work for factories do not understand the importance of having blood tests. They only go if they are helped or guided by NGO workers."

Chak Chenda, clinic manager at RHAC, said that the group is planning to publish a "guide book and leaflets on reproductive health to be distributed in communities and also organize a peer group education program" to bring trained volunteers to discuss reproductive health in communities (Leakhana, Phnom Penh Post, 3/18).

Reprinted with kind permission from http://www.kaisernetwork.org. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at http://www.kaisernetwork.org/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork.org, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Read more!

Rare Cambodian vultures recuperate from poisoning

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia: Veterinarians in Cambodia have saved the lives of two vultures from a nearly extinct species, but failed to rescue seven others who feasted on a poisoned water buffalo.

Pech Bunnat of the Wildlife Conservation Society said Friday that the white-rumped vultures were found in December in the northeastern province of Stung Treng.

They had apparently been stricken after eating the carcass of a water buffalo, which itself died after drinking from a poisoned pond. The pond was poisoned in order to catch the fish in it.

The white-rumped vulture — along with three other vulture species — has been listed since 2000 as "critically endangered" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

With a range stretching from Pakistan to Vietnam, the vulture was once considered one of the most abundant large birds of prey in the world. But the bird experienced precipitous population declines beginning in the 1990s largely due to the use of the anti-inflammatory cattle drug diclofenac, according to the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.

The drug proved effective in cattle but caused renal failure and mortality in any vulture that fed on the cow corpses that still retained the drug. Populations of white-rumped vultures dropped a staggering 95 percent and have yet to recover.

There are about 282 vultures in Cambodia, most of them in Stung Treng province and officially treated as protected, said Pech Bunnat, who is project manager of the Cambodia Vulture Conservation Project.

He said the Wildlife Conservation Society has built seven feeding stations in the jungle for vultures, which are supplied once or twice a month with slaughtered cows, so that the vulture population can be more closely monitored. Read more!

After fire, victim renews passion for Cambodia

Kent Davis and his wife, Sophophan, lost everything when their home in Holmes Beach burned down last year. But they have built a new home and Davis has rediscovered his passion for Cambodia.

By VINCENT F. SAFUTO
Correspondent


Published: Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 1:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 1:41 a.m.
HOLMES BEACH - Book publisher Kent Davis and his wife, Sophophan, escaped from their burning Holmes Beach house with only the clothes on their backs and a cell phone.

Lost in the blaze were many prized personal possessions, among them 20,000 photos of Angkor Wat, a giant Cambodian religious temple built in the 12th century and rediscovered by French archaeologists in the 19th century.

But Davis and his family are rebounding from the April 2008 fire, and now his passion for Cambodia, its culture and the Angkor Wat temple have found a new beginning as well.

Davis has had a love affair of sorts with Cambodia and its culture since marrying Sophophan, who is Thai, in the 1990s and touring Cambodia during a visit to see his wife's family.

As he and his wife have struggled to regain their footing, and build a new home, Davis experienced an unexpected rebirth of his relationship with Cambodia in the form of official state gifts given on behalf of the United States to the king of Cambodia.

It came about because Davis' publishing company, DATAsia, produces books about Southeast Asia.

So, when U.S. ambassador to Cambodia Carol Rodley was looking for a gift to present to King Norodom Sihamoni at her formal presentation of diplomatic credentials and gifts in January, she contacted Davis.

"I was looking for a gift that would symbolize the connections between the United States and Cambodia, and ideally for something related to Cambodian culture," Rodley said in an e-mail.

Davis offered Rodley three gifts: An English-language book published in 1924, and republished by him, that opened up Cambodian tourism to the world and a book and a documentary about Cambodian dance made in the early 1960s.

Davis worked in Thailand from 1990 to 1995. He wanted to learn the language and joked that he met Sophophan while looking for people to talk to. He had heard about Angkor Wat in Cambodia, but only as a cool place to visit.

Davis and his wife moved back to Florida, opened and then sold a Thai-themed resort, and in 2005 went to visit Sophophan's family in Thailand. They were looking to go somewhere they had never been before and decided to visit Angkor Wat.

It was a momentous decision.

"From the minute I walked into Angkor Wat, I saw something that just made me ask a question: 'Why is Angkor Wat, the largest religious structure in the world, filled with the images of women?'" Kent Davis said.

Not men, not children, not warriors. Women.

"I found that to be a question I need to answer in this life."

There are 1,780 women carved in the temple, and no two are alike, he said.

"Some of them are very elaborate and have royal crowns; some of them are simpler and have simpler hairstyles; they wear strange jewelries; they're all in specific poses; they're all in very specific locations."

"My theory is that these women represent a hierarchy and that they also embody this culture."

Sophophan Davis grew up in a village near Kalasin, a city in northeastern Thailand that is about 120 miles north of Angkor Wat.

In November, Davis and Sophophan returned to Cambodia, and he took about 7,000 pictures at Angkor Wat, beginning anew his photo collection of the sacred temple.

"I fell in love with the monument, too," Sophophan said.

Read more!

Cambodia's Lake Placid

Buddhist monks from Kampong Khleang village look out on the lake.

Ancient body of water nestles floating villages, gives sanctuary to birds and feeds a nation

John Lander
Special to the Star


Kampong Khleang, Cambodia–Fishermen repair their nets as their wives pound out Cambodian fish paste or prahoc with mortar and pestle beneath houses built on towering 10-metre stilts.

Kids scramble between the stilts in yet another round of hide-and-seek as chickens forage for food. Out on the lake, floating grocers greet their shoppers arriving in tiny boats, as hawkers in other boats prepare steaming bowls of noodles for hungry fishermen.

Farther out on the lake, the market is gearing up for business as masses of fresh fish are displayed in giant buckets. A few hundred metres away floats the barbershop, a health clinic, the school and a church.

Tiny houseboats bob around the floating neighbourhood, sheltered by a thatched roof over makeshift walls – just enough space for a family.

The floating villages are friendly places that receive few visitors, and those who do visit usually make just a brief passing by boat. There is no shortage of parking here, nor is there any road rage – or indeed, any road – only miles of lake, a virtual inland sea.

The Tonle Sap may, on the surface, appear to be just a nice big lake but this body of water sets the rhythm of Cambodia, if not its very heartbeat.

One of the most abundant sources of fish in Asia, the lake feeds a hungry nation. With its unique connections between lake and river, plant and animal, man and nature – life on the lake and on its shores has not changed much in centuries. Apart from scattered floating trading centres, families live in isolation as they have always done, moving their stilt houses further inland with changing water levels on the lake's shifting shores or, if they are completely water-borne, merely pulling up anchor and moving elsewhere.

Be it a lone fisherman checking his bamboo fish traps or an old woman boiling soup on her tiny canoe, lifestyles here have remained unchanged by the passage of time. Despite the playful kids, friendly waves and smiles of the people here, life has always been hard work.

Kampong Khleang, one of the largest villages on the lake is made up of mostly stilt houses – some as high as 10 metres, about eight metres of which are submerged during the rainy season. One of the few structures that remains dry all-year-round is the local Buddhist temple, with its rather terrifying mosaic of heaven and hell on its outer wall – belied by the friendly resident monks and novices who are happy to show visitors around. On the other side of the lake lies the Tonle Sap Biosphere Reserve and adjacent Prek Toal Bird Sanctuary, home to hundreds of species of birds. The best time of year for birdwatching here is during the dry season, December and January. The government maintains a research station at Prek Toal.

Connected to both the Tonle Sap and Mekong rivers, the lake has a unique flood cycle. During the monsoon season, starting in May, the Mekong floods and reverses its flow, increasing the size of the lake fourfold. At its highest point in November, the nation celebrates with the Water Festival — fiercely competitive boat races are held, feasts are given and after three days of revelry the king of Cambodia cuts a ribbon to symbolically invite the water to flow back to sea. When the water recedes, the locals trade in their boats for trucks and motorbikes and farm the land during the dry season. Once the water level drops, the nutrients left behind create fruitful shores of fertile soil teeming with wildlife – terrapins, ibis, cormorants, and kingfishers.

It has been said that the Age of Angkor would never have happened without the Tonle Sap. Traces of civilization along the lakeshore and riverbank date from more than 1,000 years ago, notably from India which brought irrigation, farming techniques, Hinduism and its architecture – out of which rose Angkor. The lack of stone quarries in what is now Siem Reap suggests the massive stones that make up the vast complex of Angkor were transported from far away. Henri Mouhat, who rediscovered Angkor Wat hidden in the jungle in 1859, may have described the Tonle Sap best: "Here is a world of water. It is a territory of immensity, of loneliness, of the silence from the beginning of time."

John Lander is a Tokyo-based freelance writer.

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Cambodia Showing Signs of 'Oil Curse'

By Geoffrey Cain


Up to $1.7 billion a year in oil money is set to flow into impoverished Cambodia, where 35 percent of the population lives under $1 a day and where this year's national budget is only $1.8 billion. Yet in a country ranking a dismal 166 out of 180 on Transparency International's annual corruption rankings, allegations of nepotism and cronyism are already surfacing around the country's nascent oil sector, set to start production in 2012. Critics, like London-based watchdog Global Witness, claim the makings of a "resource curse" are in place, wherein a political elite will siphon profits that should be used to address poverty.

The International Monetary Fund initially estimated the newly found oil reserves, discovered in 2005, at 2 billion barrels, while energy giant Chevron forecast a more modest 400 million barrels. Amendments to a 1991 oil law subsequently placed the fields under the jurisdiction of the Cambodian National Petroleum Authority (CNPA), controlled directly by Prime Minister Hun Sen and his deputy, Sok An, with little parliamentary oversight. Global Witness claims the CNPA is rife with secrecy, its administrators regularly withholding documents and denying telephone usage to employees. That's in addition to millions of dollars, paid by companies to secure oil blocks, that aren't showing up in the government's revenue reports.

The developments follow a pattern that has emerged in other countries that have fallen prey to oil curses, such as Nigeria, Venezuela, and Iraq. Ou Virak, head of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, argues that Cambodia has much in common with those three countries, in particular the fact that all government bodies and revenues are under the control of a few people. One Asian Development Bank consultant even labeled the CNPA a part of Sok An's "empire" (which also includes the corruption-rankled genocide tribunal).

The diversification into pillaging the oil and mining sectors comes after the country's ruling elites exhausted Cambodia's logging resources to fund their civil war in the 1990s. International donors largely remained silent at the time, said Eleanor Nichols of Global Witness. Now she says they must demand reform to keep Cambodian leaders from plundering oil and mining resources with impunity as well. The government allegedly said in October it would not endorse the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a global coalition of businesses and governments that require disclosure of revenues, according to a Global Witness report. But Nichols said EITI is back on the table, with donors urging more transparency in Cambodia's oil find.

With foreign aid contributions totaling half of the government's $1.8 billion budget, donors can easily exert far-reaching influence upon Cambodia's ruling elite. But new donors with new agendas are courting Phnom Penh as well, and they don't attach the same conditions of democratic reform that Western governments do. In January, Sen finished his first-ever tour through Kuwait, which offered $546 million in soft loans for agriculture -- destined for Cambodia's vast rice fields -- as a means of securing its own food supplies.

China, facing staggering demand for minerals and timber to support its rapid growth, is also counteracting longstanding Western influence in the mineral-rich country. In exchange for access to resource supplies, China is powering the Cambodian countryside -- which faces some of the highest energy costs in the world -- by building $1 billion worth of hydroelectric dams. All of Beijing's soft loans come with no strings attached.

Whether Middle Eastern countries and China will hold Sen to international transparency standards remains to be seen, but transparency has so far not been high on their list of priorities. With Cambodia now hurtling headlong into an oil disaster, donor pressure will prove crucial to resisting the resource curse pattern plaguing developing countries.

Geoffrey Cain has covered Asia for the Economist, Far Eastern Economic Review, and .net Magazine. His personal Web site can be found here. Read more!

Cambodian court sentences Michigan man to 13 years on charges of sexually abusing girl

A Michigan man was sentenced Thursday to 13 years in prison on charges of sexually abusing a 13-year-old girl, a Cambodian court official said.

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia —

A Michigan man was sentenced Thursday to 13 years in prison on charges of sexually abusing a 13-year-old girl, a Cambodian court official said.

Jason Todd Bambauch, 40, also was ordered to pay 20 million riel ($5,000) as compensation to the girl's family, Judge Chan Madina said.

Bambauch, a designer whose hometown was not immediately known, was arrested last September. Police charged he had sexual relations with the girl for more than a year, paying her $100 a month for her school fees as well as other money.

Bambauch's lawyer, Chap Keo, said his client never had sex with the girl and that her parents promised that he could marry her when she turned 18. The lawyer said Bambauch would appeal the verdict.

Lax law enforcement and poverty have made Cambodia a prime destination for foreigners seeking sex with minors. But police recently have stepped up efforts to fight the crime, and several foreigners are serving lengthy prison terms. Read more!

Cambodia's coming Oil Economy

(This map, prepared by U.K. nonprofit Global Witness, reveals the offshore Cambodian territory U.S. energy firm Chevron plans to drill for petroleum. Source: Global Witness)

Analysis: What might oil drilling do to a poor country, its people, and its government?

By Patrick Winn - GlobalPost

BANGKOK – Haunted by war, and wracked by poverty, Cambodia has had little opportunity to enjoy one its few blessings.

The nation of 14 million people, sandwiched between Thailand and Vietnam, is flush with natural resources. Veins of iron and gold run beneath its soil. Natural forests offer a wealth of timber. Most promising of all are Cambodia’s deposits of oil and gas, believed to snake offshore all the way through the kingdom’s lush interior.

As Cambodia’s leaders begin to parlay these natural blessings into wealth, selling off drilling rights to firms across the globe, American oil companies are taking notice.

So, too, are the watchdogs.

Foreign aid, in large part from U.S. tax dollars, accounts for half of Cambodia’s national budget. Much of this is aimed at the more than one-third of Cambodians living on roughly 50 cents per day.

While Cambodia’s ruling party could use the coming resource wealth to wean the country off foreign aid — and potentially lift millions out of poverty — leaders already appear to be hording this money for themselves, watchdogs say.

According to Global Witness — the U.K.-based non-profit that helped expose the West African “blood diamonds” trade — the coming oil wealth will likely just entrench Cambodia’s ruling cabal in corruption.

“In a couple of years, the elites will be so wealthy it will be hard to rewind the tape,” said Global Witness Director Gavin Hayman during a business trip in Bangkok. The non-profit recently published an investigative report on Cambodia’s growing oil wealth.

According to International Monetary Fund forecasts, Cambodia’s annual oil revenue should begin at about $174 million in 2011 and climb to $1.7 billion by 2021 — and plunge thereafter as resources are sucked dry.

This oil future has grabbed the attention of the global oil industry.

Just this past weekend, U.S. oil industry representatives invited Cambodian energy leaders to observe drilling operations near the Gulf of Mexico, home to dozens of major offshore oil rigs.

“Cambodia is on the verge of an oil and minerals windfall,” said Eleanor Nichol, a Global Witness campaigner. “The stakes are very, very high.”

A global fuel chase has led many foreign firms to cut deals with Cambodia’s ruling party. They’ve since carved the nation into 20-odd oil-and-gas districts that will be developed.

Most firms with Cambodian oil concessions are Chinese, some with little experience in the energy sector. Various South Korean, Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern companies round out the concession holders.

But the best-known energy firm with Cambodian drilling rights is the California-based Chevron Corporation.

Chevron is preparing as many as nine wells for what it calls a “complex reservoir” off Cambodia’s coast. The firm is now “working closely with the Royal Government of Cambodia to complete the fiscal and legal framework that will be required for the development of petroleum resources in Cambodia,” said Gareth Johnstone, Chevron’s Asia-Pacific media director.

Chevron is a high-profile member of the Extracative Industries Transparency Initiative — an anti-corruption movement devoted to “full publication and verification of company payments and government revenues from oil, gas and mining.”

No allegations of corrupton have been made against the company, though the oil giant has come under pressure from watchdog groups to be more transparent in its dealings here.

Chevron will not reveal its payments to Cambodia nor its start-up drilling dates, said Johnstone, who is based in Singapore.

Cambodia is rated the world’s 18th most-corrupt country by Transparency International, which publishes the world’s leading corruption measure. Chevron also operates in Burma, run by an oppressive military junta.

When resource-rich areas are ready for excavation, Cambodia’s government is suspected of dispatching soldiers and police to forcibly remove residents. According to Human Rights Watch, armed government militants have torched homes and pushed out hundreds of families. Once excavation begins, soldiers are believed to stand watch over the sites as international firms do their work.

Global Witness’ work in Cambodia has brought death threats and a promise from one senior official to hit investigators “until their heads are broken,” Nichol said.

Repeated inquiries to the Cambodia’s National Petroleum Authority were ignored. With no explanation, some emails to the entity’s listed addresses were automatically routed to Petroleum Geo-Services, a Norwegian firm specializing in finding oil and gas reserves.

Cambodia’s U.K. ambassador, Hor Nambora, issued one of Cambodia’s more public rebuttals to corruption claims. “It is naive for Global Witness to imagine that Cambodia’s international donors are not fully aware of the way the Royal Cambodian Government’s (sic) conducts its affairs,” Nambora wrote in a release.

His response included an odd, mocking parody of a Global Witness document called “Rubbish Report by Global Witness.” It features an image of a comically upright baby sea lion saying, “I shall not tolerate such rubbish. Good day, sir.”

Last year, Cambodia absorbed roughly $1 billion in foreign aid. Even as major donors acknowledge Cambodia’s corruption, money continues to pour in.

In 2008, U.S. Agency for International Development offered $54,994,000 to Cambodia in various programs targeted at health, education, human rights and more. The agency, in a corruption assessment, expressed frustration that “donor resources are being wasted and diverted.”

Many Cambodian bureaucrats, the USAID report stated, are “masters of spin” and “… most reform efforts have had limited impact on a persistent, less-than-scrupulous opponent.”

Many donors decide that, even if aid is filtered through corrupt bureaucrats, pulling back funding will only deprive the poor, Hayman said. And further, Western powers and their donation arms now worry that strained relations will push Cambodia dangerously close to China.

Still, analysts say the Cambodian government craves something China can’t offer — legitimacy in the Western world. American aid, and ties to giant firms like Chevron, supply much of this esteem.

The Western world, however, can only use this leverage for so long. Once Cambodia’s rulers hit the oil-and-gas jackpot, Hayman said, they’ll be too rich to reign in.

“They’ll have so much money from oil and mining,” he said, “that they’ll be untouchable."

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A coming of age for Cambodian artists

"Prison Guard," by Leang Seckon is one of the works on display in a Hong Kong exhibition of contemporary Cambodian art at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery. (10 Chancery Lane Gallery)


By Alexandra A. Seno


HONG KONG: In this crucial year for Cambodia, a show in Hong Kong — entitled "Forever Until Now: Contemporary Art from Cambodia," and running until April 25 — is a rare and thoughtful cultural survey exploring the country's journey from tragedy to hope, seen through the evolution of its art.

The show, at the 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, along with several other events, mark a turning point for an international affirmation of Cambodian artistic life today. In December Cambodian artists will be represented for the first time at the sixth Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Australia, and a few weeks before, the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial in Japan will again showcase the Southeast Asian nation.

As the United Nations conducts its trials in Phnom Penh to seek justice for atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge, it seemed fitting — though it was not deliberately timed — that the international art world should be giving special recognition and visibility to Cambodia now. Under Pol Pot's rule in the 1970s, up to a fifth of the population of eight million perished — including 90 percent of the country's artists.

Because organizers are playing down the commercial side of the art, the Hong Kong show is left to focus more on the themes present in Cambodia life.

The gallery's owner, Katie de Tilly, worked as a fund-raiser with Médécins Sans Frontières and visited Thai refugee camps holding Cambodians in the 1990s.

The exhibit takes over the Chancery's Central District gallery and a space in the Chai Wan factory building, 25 minutes away by taxi. "Forever" features video, photography, painting, sculpture and installations by 14 of Cambodia's most important artists. It has something for everyone: decorative, serious, escapist and sophisticated.

"When I went to visit in June, I could feel Cambodian art was at the beginning of something," said de Tilly, and so she decided to document it. A longtime Hong Kong resident, she represents luminaries like Huang Rui, a leader of China's 1980s avant-garde movement, and the American painter Julian Schnabel.

At about the same time Russell Storer, the contemporary Asian art curator at the Queensland Art Gallery, a government museum that organizes the Asia Pacific Triennial, took his own research trip to Cambodia, and came back "very excited about the artists," he had met, he said. "Forever" includes the three artists selected by Mr. Storer for Brisbane.

Erin Gleeson, an American historian of Asian art who lives in Cambodia, curated the Chancery exhibit, conscious that it needed to go beyond what she called "the two Ts" — temples and trauma — that most people reflexively associate with the nation. Though those themes provide a starting point for some of the pieces, making them accessible, Ms. Gleeson keeps it all interesting by highlighting the merit and context of each work.

At the entrance of the main gallery, to set the mood, she hung "Pray for Peace," an eerie but optimistic 2008 oil-on-canvas by Vann Nath portraying Cambodians worshiping under a stormy sky. Now very ill and in his 60s, Mr. Vann Nath is one of only seven survivors of Tuol Sleng, the notorious camp where Pol Pot's functionaries killed up to 20,000 people.

Next to the piece, on a continuous loop, is "S-21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine," the 2003 multi-award-winning documentary on Tuol Sleng, by a film festival favorite, Rithy Panh. The painting is for sale for 55,000 Hong Kong dollars, or about $7,100; the video is not, though it is widely available from DVD retailers.

Seven paintings by the late Svay Ken (from 75,000 to 100,000 Hong Kong dollars) occupy a place of honor in the Chai Wan gallery. They are scenes from daily life, made in the naïve, folk style for which he became known. Mr. Storer, who chose him for the triennial, said that "Svay Ken was a senior painter, self-taught, who lived through the turbulent history of the country and represented it through his work." He died in December at age 75. "Forever" also includes three amateurly rendered canvases by his 25-year-old granddaughter, Ouk Sochivy, who only began painting last year.

Back in Central, four colorful collages by Leang Seckon, who was born in 1974, are memorable for their crowd-pleasing appeal. Leang Seckon is the best-known artist of his generation, and Cambodians recognize him for his art collaborations with a 1960s pop icon named Dy Saveth, as well as for his solitary work. In "Prison Guard," he narrates the life of Duch, the man in charge of Tuol Sleng who, while awaiting trial, converted to Christianity and became the only Khmer Rouge leader to publicly repent.

Perhaps the Hong Kong show's most intriguing work — though not for sale — is by Than Sok, born in 1984. He constructs houses out of bright yellow incense sticks as installations, and then burns them, a commentary on how people become disposable commodities — once to the Khmer Rouge, now to eviction enforcers and factories.

Ms. Gleeson estimates that there are only 40 working artists in Cambodia and that this is a special, nearly innocent, moment in time because they seem to make things almost purely out of a need to express themselves. "There is no art market because this is just the beginning. Artists do not produce for the market," she said.

Yet validation happens. Sopheap Pich was born in Battambang in 1969 and left Cambodia after 1975, passing through a Thai refugee camp. His family resettled in the United States, and he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, finishing a Master of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999.

Returning to Cambodia in 2003, he switched to sculpture. His rattan and bamboo pieces made an impact among the video and high-concept installations at the prestigious Best of Discovery section at Shanghai's "SHContemporary" art fair in 2008. Mr. Sopheap Pich was chosen for Fukuoka and Brisbane this year. He is also finishing a commission for a university in Saudi Arabia and preparing for a November solo exhibit at the Tyler Rollins Fine Art gallery in New York.

Ms. Gleeson credits him for helping raise international interest in Cambodian culture. "Sopheap is an icon for the younger artists," she said. Childhood memories of woven local baskets and handcrafted toys inspire works made out of natural materials, like "Cycle" and "The Duel." Yet he employs a very contemporary approach Storer called a "highly sophisticated yet a deeply grounded response to place and personal experience."

Vandy Rattana, another artist in the show, has a series of large, documentary photographs of a Phnom Penh slum as it burned down last April. Of his art, he said simply, "I need to tell a story."

Before financial bubbles and busts, this was the reason artists lived — for art's sake. Read more!

Official: U.S. not to interfere in Cambodian-Thai border dispute

PHNOM PENH, The U.S. has affirmed that it will not interfere in the Cambodia-Thailand border dispute, said official news agency the Agence Kampuchea Presse (AKP) on Wednesday.

"The U.S. has never intervened in the border issues between the two neighboring countries," Stephen Blake, director of the Mainland Southeast Asia Bureau Office of the U.S. State Department, was quoted as saying.

The U.S. is instead encouraging both sides to solve their conflict peacefully, he said during a lecture named "Southeast Asia Politics and U.S. Policy in the Region," which was held here on Tuesday.

The Cambodian-Thai border conflict started on July 15, 2008, when Thai troops encroached on the Cambodian territory in the area near the disputed centuries-old Preah Vihear temple.

Rounds of high-level talks have been held since then, and both sides decided to withhold armed conflicts and stick to peaceful solutions.
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Cambodia’s Garment Exports Fall as Demand Drops in U.S., Europe

By Daniel Ten Kate and Carole Zimmer


March 18 (Bloomberg) -- Cambodia’s garment exports are declining as a global recession crimps demand in the U.S. and Europe, cutting into an industry that supports a 10th of the Southeast Asian country’s population.

In January, garment exports plunged 25 percent from a year earlier to $185 million, said Mean Sophea, who heads the Commerce Ministry’s Trade Preferences System Department. Over the past decade, they grew at an average pace of 28 percent per year, according to the World Bank.

“I’ve never seen garment exports drop this much,” Mean Sophea said by phone from Phnom Penh, the capital. “The government is trying to reduce expenses for exporters, but we have seen a lack of demand from the U.S. and Europe.”

The U.S. and Europe take more than 90 percent of clothes made in Cambodia. Southeast Asia’s second-smallest economy may shrink 0.5 percent in 2009, the International Monetary Fund said March 6, revising down its 4.8 percent growth projection made a month earlier.

The proportion of garment shipments to total exports is higher in Cambodia than any country except Bangladesh and Haiti, according to World Trade Organization data. Some 70 percent of the country’s clothes were shipped to the U.S., where it was the eighth-largest supplier in 2007, the World Bank has said.

Lost Jobs

About 30,000 Cambodian garment workers, or a 10th of the total, lost their jobs in the past year as factories closed, the World Bank said in a March 8 report. The industry accounted for 17 percent of Cambodia’s gross domestic product in 2007.

The garment industry took off 10 years ago after Cambodia signed a trade deal with the U.S. that linked market access with improved labor standards in its factories. Exports went from almost nothing in 1994 to $2.7 billion two years ago.

The money earned every month by those who sew and stitch jeans and T-shirts for retailers such as Gap Inc. and Stockholm- based Hennes & Mauritz AB supports as many as 1.5 million Cambodians, said Douglas Broderick, resident representative of the United Nations Development Fund in Phnom Penh.

“There’s a whole community around the garment sector, little vendors, landlords, food stalls,” he said. “All those people will get hit.”

Sary Muong, a Cambodian garment worker earning less than $2 per day, has struggled to provide her family basic goods like food and clothing. The 34-year-old single mother makes a monthly salary of $55 that supports her parents and 8-year-old daughter.

“Just look at the factories,” Sary Muong said from a one- room shack with no running water or toilet in Phnom Penh where she lives with her sister. “They’re closing. The living standards get worse and worse.”

Labor Standards

Cambodia’s garment industry has built a reputation for good labor standards over the past decade that the Commerce Ministry says contributed to its growth. In 2001, the government, garment factories, labor unions and the International Labor Organization, a UN agency, agreed to set up a monitoring agency called Better Factories Cambodia.

It files semi-annual reports on working conditions in factories that go to buyers like Nike Inc., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Adidas AG. Still, the higher labor standards haven’t stopped retailers from demanding ever lower prices, said Roger Tan, a factory manager and secretary-general of the Garment Manufacturers’ Association of Cambodia.

“Every factory is cutting costs now whether they like it or not,” he said. “The whole world is in deep trouble. Nothing should surprise anyone now.”

The government, reliant on overseas aid to finance a quarter of the national budget, has said it will extend tax breaks for clothing manufacturers to help reduce costs. Even so, Cambodia remains “increasingly affected” by the global slowdown, the IMF said, adding that its 2009 growth forecast may be revised again.

The world economy will shrink this year in a slump that is the worst “in most of our lifetimes,” Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF’s managing director, said March 10. The World Bank, which also expects a contraction, said two days earlier that global trade would decline by the most in 80 years.

To contact the reporter on this story: Daniel Ten Kate in Bangkok at dtenkate@bloomberg.net; Carole Zimmer in New York at czimmer2@bloomberg.net.


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Once isolated from outside world, Cambodia jumps online

Several decades ago under the communist Khmer Rouge, Cambodia was isolated and cut off from much of the outside world. While the Internet has since expanded the range of global communication, most Cambodians still lack Internet access — only about 70,000 people are online.

Tharum Bun is the information technology manager at The Asia Foundation in Cambodia and writes at the “In Asia” blog that while Internet access may be scarce, those who have embraced the Web — including a former king — have used blogs to engage in dynamic and open dialogue.

Cambodians Embrace Online Dialogue

Cambodia has over 13 million people, but currently, less than 2 percent have regular access to the Internet. Cambodia’s official language is Khmer, but these Cambodians who chat, e-mail, and blog on the Internet – and the approximately 23 percent of Cambodians who text with their mobile phones – find it easier to use English. While low Internet penetration, language barriers, and technical issues with using the Khmer scripts limit the amount of Cambodians who can engage in online dialogue, those Cambodians who are entering the international blogosphere are breaking a pattern of devastating silence and isolation.

The former King (or King Father), Norodom Sihanouk, now 86, makes regular postings about Cambodia’s past and present on his website. The former Prince – fluent in Khmer, French, and English – posts communiqués and reactions to media reports regularly. Originally launched in 2002, the King’s website became a new digital medium for global visitors. Cambodian media largely use their websites as a source for information, taking the King’s comments and those of his critics, and translating them into Khmer. The King’s online conversation and personal digital medium is inspiring young Cambodians to engage the Internet as a forum for discussion and debate, and to learn English as a second language.

After the Khmer Rouge fell in the 1980s, Cambodia experienced a big baby boom; today 60 percent of the population qualifies as youth. Because of their English language skills and affinity for technology, Cambodian youth make up the largest number of Internet users in the country and are, like the King, engaging in online debate. This group of active Internet users writes mostly in English, given both the technical difficulties of inputting Khmer characters, as well as the widespread use of English among their audience: their own peers and the international online community.

This dynamic online dialogue has helped pave the way for a more open discussion in a country torn by civil wars in recent decades. The trauma inflicted by the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979) is still a major point of discussion in Cambodia. Cambodian intellectuals, who were once the target of mass killings, and their surviving children, use their knowledge of the English language and technology to express their opinions and views. To move Cambodia past years of silence, this is essential. The King has used his website to post his thoughts on social order and past politics, encouraging today’s Cambodian youth to use online forums, chat rooms, and blogs to discuss issues from everyday life to larger, social issues.

While this new emergence of online voices, in a language other than their own, doesn’t necessarily reflect the progressive thinking of the entire nation, it is a starting point of voiced, diversified opinions.

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Cambodia launches $11 mln project to fight bird flu

PHNOM PENH, The Cambodia government here on Tuesday launched an emergency project of 11 million U.S. dollars for avian and human influenza control and preparedness.

"We have to prevent bird flu and educate our people about it regularly before it break out and kill people and poultry," said Prime Minister Hun Sen, who is also the chairman of the National Committee for Disaster Management (NCDM).

We should not say we were successful in preventing bird flu after we only culled large amounts of sick poultry, he said.

Fortunately, we have good cooperation with the neighboring countries, who exchange information with us to prevent avian influenza outbreak, he told the launching ceremony.

"We have to join together to prevent deadly diseases which could ruin the social order and affect the economic development," he said, adding that effective prevention will help reduce poverty and promote sustainable development.

According to NCDM, the project will be funded by the International Development Association (IDA) with 6 million U.S. dollars, the Japanese government with 3 million U.S. dollars and the European Union with 2 million U.S. dollars.

Details of the project have not been publicized yet.

Since 2003, 28,428 poultry were culled during the anti-bird flu campaign in Cambodia and seven people died of the disease so far.
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Couple with local ties pushes Cambodia school project

Courtesy Photo MIKE AND NOELLE Magluilo stand in front of one of sights in Cambodia where they are helping to build a school. Noelle Magluilo grew up and attended schools in Laconia says her educational experience was part of what inspired the couple to embrace this project.


By JOHN KOZIOL


Inspired during a recent trip abroad by her educational experiences years earlier as a student in Laconia, Noelle Magluilo and her husband Mike are helping build a school in rural Cambodia.

The daughter of Mary and the late Peter Bourgault, Magluilo graduated from Laconia High School in 1991 and in 1995 obtained her bachelor's degree in Health Management and Policy from the University of New Hampshire.

For the past seven years, she and her husband have lived in London where Magluilo helped hospitals implement and manage software systems and her husband worked for a branch of an American bank.

The coupe traveled extensively and in 2008, they planned a trip to Asia. A neighbor of theirs in the Battersea neighborhood of London who was Thai suggested they visit his homeland but advised that if at all possible, they should also make a side journey to Cambodia.

That advice has transformed Magluilo's life and as she and her husband get ready to resettle in the U.S., Magluilo has devoted herself full time to a project she and Mike have named "Classrooms for Cambodia."

Working through an "on-the-ground" charity called American Assistance for Cambodia (AAfC), Classrooms for Cambodia is working to raise $19,000, which will be matched by the Asian Development Fund and the World Bank to cover the full $50,000 construction cost of a school for 140 students.

The Magluilos have raised $4,000 so far and hope to have the balance by the end of the year. They are motivated by two philosophies: teach a many how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime, and with knowledge, comes responsibility.

The former, said Magluilo, she learned in Laconia's public schools and her husband acquired through his own experiences in higher education. Mike Magluilo earned a scholarship to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he obtained his degree and had inculcated in him the values of hard work, team play and charity, said his wife.

The Magluilos learned the true meaning of the second philosophy following their January trip to Cambodia, when they visited the historic Angkor Wat temple complex but also got a behind-the-scenes look at how many Cambodians live.

"We were humbled to see firsthand the tragedy the country has suffered and the poverty that continues to hamper progress," said Magluilo, referring to the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime that between 1975 -1979 was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 20 percent of the population.

Intellectuals, especially teachers, were killed as the Khmer Rouge attempted to root out all foreign "capitalist" influences and to create a communist, agrarian society.

Thirty years later, Cambodia is still suffering from the policies of the Khmer Rouge, said Magluilo, but thanks to the efforts of the AAFC, 300 schools have been built and with Classrooms for Cambodia, at least one more is in the works.

"Despite all the poverty there, you have never seen people smile so much," Magluilo said of the Cambodian people. "They're very humble, very modest, very hard working and everything they do they do with a smile."

"It was very inspiring to us to be surrounded by these people who just had this great energy about them and I think in many places they don't understand the extent of the poverty themselves but they really just have a beautiful spirit and we were really touched by that. When we came back, we knew we wanted to help somehow and I knew it was within my means to help."

The Magluilos thought about starting their own charity to build schools but in researching the matter further, decided to work with the AAFC after learning that it already had years of experience building schools in Cambodia. The AAFC is also training many Khmer Rouge orphans to be teachers, added Magluilo, whose mother was a teacher in the Alton, Gilford and Plymouth school districts.

"The trip to Cambodia made me even more grateful for the education I had in Laconia. This is a way for me to pay that forward," said Magluilo, who was in Laconia last week and stopped by her alma mater where she made a point to say hello to Gary Liptak, who has taught chemistry and physics at LHS for 25 years.

"This is where a lot of it started for me. It was even more challenging than my university studies. I got a great education and had excellent teachers and in listening to Mr. Liptak it cemented for me the value of the education I received and of wanting other people to have an opportunity like I had."

Liptak remembered Magluilo as "an academic standout" and a "marvelous kid who came off as unafraid of challenges."

"It doesn't surprise me a bit that she ended up doing this sort of work in Cambodia," said Liptak, adding that "as an educator, I'm just thrilled when I see one of our kids do wonderful things in general but specifically great things in education."

When fundraising for Classrooms in Cambodia reaches the $5,000 mark, AAFC will announce exactly where in Cambodia the money will be used to build a new school.

"It's important to me and Mike that the impact of donations is transparent," said Magluilo, and as important to her and her husband is that the students who study there know that the money came from all over the world, including a far away place called Laconia, New Hampshire where an education is a cherished thing.

For more information about Classrooms for Cambodia or to make a tax-deductible contribution to it through American Assistance for Cambodia, visit www.classroomsforcambodia.com or call Noellef and Mike Magluilo at (970) 372-2209.


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Cambodia to ask UN to list 1,400-year-old temple as world heritage site

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia will ask UN to list the Sambo Prey Kuk temple, which was built from 615 A.D. to 650 A.D., located in the Kompong Thom province, as a world heritage site, Khmer-language daily newspaper the Rasmei Kampuchea reported on Monday.

"We are preparing the proposal for UN to register the temple, which was built during the rule of Khmer King Isanverman I, with the Committee of World Heritage," the newspaper quoted Som Sokhun, secretary of state at the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, as saying.

The government has to organize a master plan for development and conservation of the temple, he said.

It was even older than the world-renowned Angkor Wat in Siem Reap province, which has been the hottest sightseeing spot of the kingdom, he said.

It was built with clay, but not stones, with which the Angkor Wat was constructed, he said.

The Sambo Prey Kuk temple is expected to become a place for people to study and research Khmer culture, construction, arts and history, he added.

The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) already listed the Angkor Wat and the Preah Vihear temple in Preah Vihear province as World Heritage Sites.
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Cambodian government rejects U.S. human rights report

PHNOM PENH, The Cambodian government has condemned that a human rights report recently issued by the U.S. State Department didn't reflect the reality of Cambodia, said official news agency AKP on Monday.

"The 2008 Country Report on Human Rights Practices on Cambodia issued by the U.S. State Department seems to be a routine that has nothing to do with human rights reality in Cambodia, and appears to be almost a carbon copy of the reports of the previous years with a few cosmetic changes here and there," the Agence Kampuchea Presse quoted a spokesman of the Cambodian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation as saying in a statement.

The report contains a number of unsubstantiated assertions which appear to rely on misleading information supplied by certain organizations, which are monitored and financially supported by certain foreign countries, said the spokesman.

He clarified that "it is very normal in democratic countries that political party which wins landslide victory in democratic elections has to lead the country, and there is nothing unusual about such democratic practice everywhere in the world."

"There is simply never 'extra-judicial killing' by security forces in Cambodia as mentioned in the report. This is only vulgarlie," he said.

"With regard to the freedom of speech and press in Cambodia, one only needs to read and see how the ubiquitous opposition newspapers attack the Royal Government of Cambodia. Even the newspapers written in foreign languages, financed and managed by foreigners do not have the slightest reservation or hesitation in criticizing the Royal Government of Cambodia," he added.

The spokesman also explained the so-called "unlawful forced eviction," saying that "one must ponder whether there is any country in the world which allows squatters to take over possession of or occupy permanently private properties or public areas such as public gardens, sidewalk and streets."

"Finally, if enforcing rules to maintain public order is construed as human rights violation, then what does one have to say in terms of human rights respect on the condition in the secret prisons of a certain country where torture of prisoners is practiced as reported in the media?" added the spokesman in the statement.
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Family unearths clues to missing Texas soldier's fate in Cambodia

By GREGG JONES / The Dallas Morning News


McKinley Nolan's letters from South Vietnam to his wife in Texas hinted at his anguish. He wrote of playing dead to survive on the battlefield and the suffering of Vietnamese civilians.

"He was just telling me how bad it was over there, all the fighting, all the killing," said Mary Nolan.

There was no clue of what was to come.

On Nov. 9, 1967, weeks from completing a two-year hitch in the Army, McKinley Nolan disappeared from his First Infantry Division unit. Communist Viet Cong propaganda broadcasts and leaflets later featured Nolan urging fellow black soldiers to lay down their weapons. The Army branded the missing Texan as one of the war's two confirmed defectors, but offered no explanation as to why Nolan deserted or what happened to him.

Now, McKinley's younger brother, Michael, has joined forces with a New Jersey journalist, a Vietnam War veteran, a New York City filmmaker, a Hollywood star and a Houston congresswoman in hopes of finally unraveling the mystery.

Their combined efforts last month pushed the Pentagon's MIA search unit, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, to act on an eyewitness account and dig for McKinley Nolan's remains in a Cambodian village.

Michael Nolan, an Austin wood pallet manufacturer, flew to Cambodia to watch the U.S. team chip away at the hard Cambodian clay. It was the latest stop in a long journey to find his missing brother and understand who he was: a deserter who turned his back on his country and his family, or a hero who stood up to the Viet Cong and Khmer Rouge and paid with his life.

•

The Nolan case has long fascinated POW-MIA aficionados. It has spawned such varied tales as Nolan quietly slipping back home to the Brazos River bottomlands of Washington County, Texas, to him living the high life in Cuba as a guest of Fidel Castro.

"In the world of the conspiratorial POW-MIA guys, McKinley Nolan is like Bigfoot," said journalist Richard Linnett, who has spent years tracking missing Americans in Cambodia. "He's spotted everywhere."

As a rifleman in the Army's 16th Infantry Regiment, Nolan was based in Tay Ninh province, near the border with Cambodia. His veiled references to haunting battlefield experiences are supported by a Pentagon document that shows Nolan earned a Purple Heart and a Combat Infantry Badge. Linnett made the document available to The Dallas Morning News.

The Army didn't respond to questions submitted by The News.

By November 1967, Nolan was one of about 500,000 U.S. military personnel in Vietnam. A poll that autumn found that 46 percent of Americans believed U.S. military involvement in Vietnam was a mistake. Black GIs openly questioned why they should die for South Vietnamese freedom when they were denied equal rights at home.

If McKinley Nolan shared those sentiments, he didn't tell his wife.

"If he had a job, he did it," she said.

But Nolan's commitment to the Army was flagging. He was AWOL – absent without leave – from Sept. 7 to Nov. 6, 1967, according to the Pentagon document.

He was jailed for two days. And then, on Nov. 9, the 22-year-old disappeared.

•

Mary Nolan said the Army revealed little about her husband's disappearance. Months passed before she received a letter stating that Nolan had defected to communist Viet Cong forces, she said. In January 1975, three months before the war ended, the Army notified her that her husband had been seen alive in Cambodia.

In 1992, a U.S. military team thought they had found McKinley Nolan's remains in Cambodia. DNA tests, however, proved negative.

Eight years later, Linnett, a journalist in Newark, N.J., stumbled onto Nolan's trail. Linnett was working on a book about a 1970 mutiny carried out by two crew members of an American freighter transporting napalm to U.S. forces in Thailand. One of the mutineers, Clyde McKay, sought refuge with Khmer Rouge guerrillas and was later executed by the communist group.

Linnett was searching for McKay's grave site in eastern Cambodia when a local resident pulled him aside. "Are you talking about the black man?" the villager asked. He told Linnett an intriguing story about an American GI who supposedly lived in the area during the time of the Khmer Rouge.

Back in the United States, a Pentagon investigator revealed to Linnett that the Cambodian man was talking about a missing soldier named McKinley Nolan.

"I thought this story was truly amazing," Linnett said. "This guy had lived with the Viet Cong and the Khmer Rouge."

Working sources in the U.S. and Cambodia, Linnett pried loose U.S. military intelligence documents and began sharing information with Michael and Mary Nolan.

•

In 2006, Michael Nolan phoned Linnett with incredible news.

"He said, 'Richard, someone saw McKinley in Vietnam,' " Linnett recalled.

That someone was a Vietnam veteran named Dan Smith, and he had contacted the Washington County sheriff in search of Nolan's family.

Linnett was skeptical. He phoned Smith.

A retired 911 operator in the Pacific Northwest, Smith said he had lost a leg serving with the First Infantry Division in Vietnam. In 2005, he made one of his periodic trips to Vietnam to deliver medical supplies.

In the city of Tay Ninh, near the Cambodian border, Smith encountered a black man, about 60 years of age, with rotted teeth and jaundiced eyes. The man told Smith that he had served with the First Infantry Division in Vietnam in 1967.

When Smith mentioned that he was going home soon, the stranger sighed.

"Man, I wish I could go home," he said.

"Where's home?" Smith asked.

"Washington, Texas," the man replied.

Smith reported the encounter to U.S. officials in Vietnam. After he returned home, the Pentagon MIA search unit sent an investigator to his home. Smith said he picked two photographs of McKinley Nolan out of a mugshot book.

Afterward, Smith said the investigator refused to take his calls. So did the MIA unit.

But Linnett heard him out, and he arranged for Smith to tell his story in person to the Nolans.

In the meantime, Linnett had piqued the curiosity of New York City documentary filmmaker Henry Corra. When Smith arrived in Washington-on-the-Brazos, Texas, to meet the Nolans, Corra's camera was rolling.

After a tearful meeting with the Nolan family, Smith vowed to return to Southeast Asia to find the missing GI.

A series of trips to Cambodia followed, first Smith alone, and then together with Michael Nolan, Linnett and Corra. What they learned convinced Smith that the man he encountered in Tay Ninh was another U.S. deserter who had assumed Nolan's identity.

But the search continued, financed in part by actor Danny Glover, who agreed to produce Corra's documentary on the search for McKinley Nolan after seeing footage from Texas and Cambodia.

The group tracked the missing GI to a village outside the town of Memot, in eastern Cambodia, where a man named Cham Son recalled Nolan's life during the tumult of war and Khmer Rouge genocide.

McKinley Nolan's missing years emerged from the mists.

•

When he arrived in Vietnam in 1966, Nolan was happily married, the proud father of a 2-year-old son. He was a friendly, muscular guy who loved baseball and horses.

By the time he disappeared in 1967, he had grown disillusioned with the war, said Linnett, citing interviews with Nolan's friends in Vietnam and Cambodia.

A Vietnamese girlfriend "convinced him to go with her," said Linnett.

It's unclear whether Nolan willingly worked with the Viet Cong, Linnett said. In any event, Nolan grew disenchanted with the group and in 1973 slipped into Cambodia with his Vietnamese wife and their baby, Linnett said.

In eastern Cambodia, Nolan drove a truck and farmed, local residents told Linnett and Smith. When the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975 and emptied cities to return Cambodia to "Year Zero," Nolan was forced to move to a village deeper in the jungle.

"Because of his size and strength, they made him pull an oxcart loaded with people being taken to an interrogation center," Smith said. "Villagers said he would beg for their forgiveness."

Nolan told jokes and sang songs in pidgin Cambodian to lift people's spirits.

"He would literally step in front of guards to keep them from beating people," Smith said. "McKinley was a hero. Everybody there loved him."

In 1977, the villager Cham Son recounted, Khmer Rouge soldiers took Nolan away.

"He saw McKinley being marched off," said Linnett, "and knew when the soldiers came back without him that he had been killed."

•

In April 2008, after hearing Cham Son's account, Linnett and his comrades gave the Pentagon's MIA search unit precise information on the suspected grave site. The agency still didn't seem interested, Linnett said.

Last month, after the Nolans enlisted the help of U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston, a JPAC team began excavating the site identified by Cham Son.

The team completed two weeks of digging in late February without finding any remains, said Air Force Lt. Col. Wayne Perry, JPAC spokesman. Cham Son told the team as it was wrapping up that the terrain had changed, and he wasn't sure of the precise burial spot, Perry said.

The Nolan family and Linnett, with Lee's help, are trying to force the Pentagon to release McKinley Nolan's personnel file and classified documents on the case. Linnett and Corra are tracking leads that they believe will lead to Nolan's remains in eastern Cambodia.

Mary Nolan, now 62, has never remarried. She believes the government should compensate her for her husband's loss, regardless of the circumstances.

"I should have been given a good explanation as to what happened, when, why," she said.

After years of anger at "the system" for taking his brother away, Michael Nolan said he found peace retracing McKinley's footsteps and seeing him through the eyes of Cambodian villagers who revered him.

"Whether he's dead or alive," said Nolan, "I feel he would be happy that we're bringing the truth to light."

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Banishing the Ghosts in Cambodia

By HENRY ALFORD


IN Kep, a tiny town on Cambodia’s southern coast on the Gulf of Thailand, two British women are staring at the ghostly remains of a bombed-out seaside villa. Originally called La Perle de la Côte d’Agathe, Kep was founded in the 1920s and was the resort of choice for French Cambodia’s jet set. But the Khmer Rouge had particular distaste for Kep and its sybaritic pleasures, and all but razed the town in the 1970s.

One of the women points out a trail of wetness on the villa’s walls and floor where a dog has peed. “Oh, dear,” she tut-tuts. “It looks like the building is crying.”

Less than a mile down the road, rising from the ashes of Kep like an extravagant bird-of-paradise, is the chic 11-room seaside hotel, Knai Bang Chatt, designed in the ’70s by a protégé of Le Corbusier. No one is crying here. All is luxury and escapism; lush plantings and an infinity pool are combined in a way that fairly screams “James Bond love lair.” Sprawled poolside is a muscular young Belgian gentleman engrossed in his Ian McEwan. The man idly smoothes out the waistband of his black designer swimsuit, the greatest irritation he will face all day. Tonight he will dine under a gorgeous palapa-style structure by the sea, and perhaps join other guests for a midnight swim in the Gulf of Thailand.

To many Americans, Cambodia means only two things — the majestic temples of Angkor Wat and the Killing Fields of Phnom Penh. But there’s another Cambodia — the southern coast — that is beginning to emerge as a popular alternative to the heavily trafficked beaches of Thailand. Here, in towns like Sihanoukville — which, in its heyday in the 1960s, used to draw visitors like Jackie Kennedy and Catherine Deneuve — travelers are exploring the unusual pleasures that occur at the intersection of the luxurious present and the ravaged past.

When my boyfriend, Greg, and I spent a week on the coast this November, we experienced two firsts, both involving tiny bubbles. First, we went swimming one night in Kep among phosphorescent plankton (it’s as if thousands of underwater fireflies are doing a nonstadium version of “the wave”). Later we went into a pharmacy in Sihanoukville and, for $2.80 for 20 tablets (U.S. dollars are accepted everywhere), bought one of the unheralded marvels of modern life: effervescent codeine.

This was not the Cambodia I expected — the tiny bubbles Cambodia. I’d had a sneaking suspicion that my first trip to the land of Angkor Wat and ancestor worship and rampant friendliness might somehow change me, but I expected this change to be triggered by the fact that about one fifth of this country’s population, including most anyone educated, was wiped out by Pol Pot in the 1970s, or that the United States probably dropped more bombs on Cambodia during Richard Nixon’s presidency than it dropped on Japan in World War II.

Y OU’D be hard-pressed to find a town center, let alone a bricks-and-mortar store, in Kep’s bucolic center, but there’s a buzz of activity at the series of shacks along the water that form the crab market. Here fresh crabs are pulled out of wooden cages that you can see just offshore, and, for $7, cooked with curry and stalks of local Kampot peppercorns to produce an exciting variation of everything I’d ever eaten while wearing a lobster bib. Kep is also, oddly, without a decent beach — the sienna-colored sand at the half-mile-long town beach is clearly the world’s largest accumulation of Cajun rub — but you can take a 20-minute boat ride out to Rabbit Island, where a scattering of pale, tubby Britons and gorgeous Danish girls laze on good sand or on the porch of rented huts and sunning platforms, all amid a scrum of mangrove trees, chickens and slightly confused cows. We set ourselves beachside and Greg pulled out a cigarette pack emblazoned with the name of France’s handsomest-ever movie star — Alain Delon — which he’d bought for 30 cents in town. I thought, I am surrounded by at least three kinds of beauty.

We also took day trips from Kep to a temple cave and to Bokor Mountain. Although taxis, motorbikes and tuk-tuks are plentiful and cheap in Cambodia, we’d decided to hire, at $45 a day, a kind and shy 28-year-old Phnom Penh driver named Toun Bon Thim to take us around in his car, including our subsequent nine-hour drive from the coast up to Siem Reap to visit Angkor Wat.

When Bon Thim and Greg and I stepped out of the car near the trail to the cave temple, we were greeted by a small band of giddy and adorable Cambodian children who wanted to guide us. The kids — led by a hilarious 14-year-old boy in a T-shirt emblazoned “Parental Advisory” — led us through a muddy rice field to a steep set of wooden stairs (“203 steps. Easy!,” Parental Advisory coached me. “Easy for Mr. New York City!”). Soon we were peering down in a stalactite-dripping cave in which sat a very well-preserved seventh-century brick temple, about the size of four phone booths. Parental Advisory looked at my popped eyes and, aping the helium-pitched voice of a flip teenage girl, he exclaimed, “Ohmygod!” Suddenly I wanted to revoke every sarcastic comment I’d ever made about Angelina Jolie and her Cambodian child; I longed to take Parental Advisory back to New York with us, and turn him into America’s next comedy sensation.

Although most of the two-lane roads that link Cambodia’s bigger cities have been improved and repaved in the past 10 years or so, anyone who jiggles his way in a Jeep up the 19-mile road that is being built on Bokor Mountain in nearby Kampot is vividly, if not violently, reminded of earlier road-based pittedness: by journey’s end you realize that if you were a gallon of paint, not only would you be thoroughly mixed, you would now be a solid. (Loung Ung, a Cambodian writer and land mine activist who has returned to Cambodia some 30 times since escaping in 1980 and moving to Cleveland, told me that before the roads got better, she always packed sports bras for her trips back there.) The top of Bokor Mountain is the site of an abandoned hill station, including an eerie, burned-out palace hotel and a Catholic church where sometimes the fog sneaks up on you so thick that you can’t see your hand in front of you. The site was the setting for the climax of the 2002 Matt Dillon crime thriller, “City of Ghosts.”

“Almost every place in Cambodia has a ghost story attached to it,” Ms. Ung said. “I think it’s because we practice Theravada Buddhism: our gods are able to cross between the borders of the world. And we believe that our ancestors are always with us. When so many people died in our country in the ’70s, we ended up with a lot of haunted, unresolved lives. It’s not fear, it’s respect.”

Indeed, Greg and I got our own taste of unresolved living one afternoon in Kep. We were staying at a place called the Veranda — a series of funky bamboo and wood treehouses, many with terrific views of the Gulf of Thailand and the Vietnamese island Pho Quoc. Greg was lying in the hammock on our porch when he heard a series of mewling, feline cries coming from above him, followed by a soft thump. When he went into our bungalow, he saw first the air vent over our bathroom ceiling and then something more unusual: a kitten had landed in our shower. That night over drinks I told a fellow guest, “I think it’s a message from on high.” The man concurred: “Yes. And the message is: a kitten has landed in your shower.”

The theme of untethered animals is one that reasserts itself not infrequently in Cambodia. After Kep, we spent a relaxed day in sleepy Kampot — a placid riverfront lined with colonial-era buildings increasingly being renovated by expatriates — pottering around the second-hand bookstore and taking in the view of Bokor Mountain.

From Kampot we drove three hours to the coast’s most developed town, Sihanoukville, a drive during which we dodged cows, dogs and a monkey that had parked in the road in the manner of an irritable and recently deposed dictator. But the more common life-threateners were other human drivers, whose conception of the word “lane” can only be described as elastic. I asked Bon Thim if most Cambodians believed in reincarnation, and he said yes. I posited, “This may explain why they drive this way.” Equally thrilling to behold were the loads that we saw heaped onto motorbikes — huge, jodhpur-shaped bundles of firewood or morning glories; a bureau and a desk; four twin mattresses; an IV drip; a family of four. Bon Thim told us: “On New Year’s, when workers travel home, there is even more stacking. Sometimes 20 people stacked on the roof of cars or trucks. Sometimes driver has someone seated between him and his door.”

In Sihanoukville, we reveled in the pleasures that the rest of the coast, however lovely, had denied us: white sand beaches, shopping, non-restaurant-based night life. The beaches ranged from the utterly pristine and private one at our hotel, the Independence — where Jackie Kennedy and Ms. Deneuve are said to have stayed and which earned the nickname the Ghost Hotel after the Khmer Rouge used it as a redoubt during their occupation of Sihanoukville — to the very crowded Occheuteal, lined with food shacks and vendors. During our visit to Occheuteal, I bought a bunch of litchis for a dollar from a woman carrying them on her head, but passed up requests to rent an inner tube (50 cents an hour), be massaged in my chair ($6 an hour), have my back hair “threaded” ($5), or hear a blind man sing (unspecified). Greg and I parked ourselves at one of the food shacks and started people-watching; we rewarded ourselves with mango shakes (mango ice and sweetened condensed milk are put in a blender and frothed to a fare-thee-well).

To shop in a country where the average daily wage is less than a dollar a day is to suddenly want to pay retail. Some of the arenas of this strange inclination are more direct than others: both of the shopping haunts that drew our attention were charity-based. On the muddy, trash-flecked dirt road that leads to Serendipity Beach, the northwestern end of Occheuteal Beach, we found the Cambodian Children’s Painting Project, where kids who are kept out of school and forced into selling wares or themselves on the beach are given free language classes and painting lessons. We each bought a painting ($4 each, plus $1.50 each for frames). A few hours later we found ourselves at Rajana, a gift shop whose proceeds go to teaching young Cambodians handicraft skills. We marveled over the jewelry made from recycled bomb shells ($28 to $32) and key rings made from recycled bullets (95 cents), prior to buying lots of silk scarves ($6 to $30) and lemon-grass candles in bamboo holders ($1.75).

Outside of the tinkly piano-bar womb of Sihanoukville’s two high-end hotels — the Independence and the Sokha — the town’s night life caters mostly to backpackers and beach bunnies, some of them just in from party capitals like Phuket or Vang Vieng, and eager to shimmer and effloresce over cocktails. A stroll down Serendipity Beach will bring you in contact with fire throwers, mystics, British Vogue photographers, sex tourists and many, many opportunities to indulge in something called a “vodka bucket.” Here is the youth of the world, working hard to forget the inequities of working for an understaffed and poorly run N.G.O.; here is the youth of the world, working hard to remember the name of the French dude they just made out with. The signs of these revelers’ impact on the local economy are not hard to find — certain beach bar/guesthouses offer a free night’s lodging to those of their young customers willing to hand out fliers on the beach for an hour; the business card for one local bar included a map which pinpointed the locations of 1) the bar 2) an A.T.M. and 3) the hospital.

Once Greg and I had been home for two weeks, I contemplated whether my day-to-day life had been changed by the trip. I’d stopped e-mailing Bon Thim by then; I’d also burned through our lemon-grass candles, and distributed all our scarves and effervescent codeine and Alain Delon cigarettes. I’d given up trying to recreate the fabulousness of the mango shake that I’d had on the beach. I’d even — was it possible? — stared at our sunset-at-Knai Bang Chatt pictures so long that I had robbed them of their power. Things seemed fairly ... status quo. A wonderful status quo — but a status quo nevertheless.

And then I remembered. We’re adopting a cat.

THE LUXURIOUS PRESENT MEETS THE RAVAGED PAST

GETTING THERE AND AROUND

Any leg of the triangle that is Phnom Penh-Sihanoukville-Kep will take about three and a half hours by taxi and cost $30 to $60, depending on your negotiation skills. A tuk-tuk to Kampot or Bokor Mountain and back will run about $25. The ever-reliable Toun Bon Thim can be reached at bonthim@yahoo.com. Several airlines, including Cathay Pacific (with a stop in Hong Kong) and Korean Air (with a stop in Seoul), have flights from Kennedy Airport in New York, with round-trip fares in April starting at about $1,300, based on a recent Web search.

WHERE TO STAY

Knai Bang Chatt (Phum Thmey Sangat Prey, Thom Khan Kep; 855-12-879-486; www.knaibangchatt.com) serves breakfast at a rough-hewn 24-foot-long table under a palapa overlooking the sea, where dinner (about $38 for two) is also served. Guests have use of Hobie Cat sailboats. Doubles from $150 — U.S. dollars are accepted at hotels, restaurants and shops — in the high season (October through March); otherwise from $110.

At the Veranda (Kep Mountain Hillside Road; 855-12-888-619; www.veranda-resort.com) doubles start at $25. The resort’s bar and restaurant, with the sight of gorgeous sunsets, is quite good, and serves mostly Western food (dinner for two, about $26). Doubles from $25.

The Independence (Street 2 Thnou, Sangkat No. 3; 855-34-943-3003; www.independencehotel.net), stylishly refurbished in 2007, is, along with the Sokha, Sihanoukville’s most luxurious beachfront property. You’ll need to take a tuk-tuk (about $5 one way) if you want to go into town or to the public beaches. Doubles from $140.

WHERE TO EAT

At Kimly (to the left of the restaurants at the crab market along the waterfront in Kep; 855-12-435-096), the crab with Kampot pepper is the local specialty. The shrimp tom yum soup and the shrimp with Kampot pepper are also worth trying. Dinner for two, about $20.

Rikitikitavi (River Road, Kampot; 855-12-235-102; www.rikitikitavi-kampot.com) is on a balcony overlooking the river. A delicious fish amok — a kind of Cambodian curry that is steamed instead of boiled — is served in a banana leaf. The cook is a former sous-chef at the InterContinental in Phnom Penh. Lunch for two, about $15.

Chhner Molop Chrey (Krong Street, Mondul 3, along the waterfront of Victory Beach in Sihanoukville; 855-34-933-708) is a long-established seafood restaurant, serving fresh fish, shrimp and crabs along the waterfront. Dinner for two, about $16.

WHAT TO DO

At Massage (Champey Inn, 25 Avenue de la Plage, Kep), the setting (under a palapa, and not too far from the sea) is especially nice. Expect to pay $10 for traditional hourlong massage; $15 for oil massage.

Bokor Mountain. Visits to the top of the mountain are in a state of flux while the road is being built. You may be required to go with a ranger in his Jeep ($40, plus $5 park entrance; ask at the park entrance), or you may be able to go in a group tour (try Sok Lim Tours, 855-12-719-872; www.soklimtours.com) for $10, plus admission fee.

Rajana (down the alley at 62 7 Makara Street; 855-23-993-642; www.rajanacrafts.org) in Sihanoukville is one of a chain of nonprofit stores, with wonderful textiles, and some clothing and knickknacks. The N.G.O.-run garden cafe downstairs serves good light meals, and is a fine place to cool off. Read more!

Curing Cambodia’s children with music

By Ben Bland


In a concert hall not far from Cambodia’s majestic Angkor temples, a Swiss paediatrician is playing the cello. Beat Richner squeezes his eyes shut and breathes audibly, a picture of concentration. He has chosen one of Bach’s complicated cello suites, and the sound of his unaccompanied instrument is both intimate and haunting. The audience of 200 is transfixed, apart from one girl wrapping herself in her mother’s shawl to keep warm; the air-conditioning in the auditorium is on full blast – this must be the coldest place in Cambodia.

As Richner finishes the piece the audience, mostly composed of middle-aged European tourists visiting the Angkor temples, applauds warmly. With his cello resting against his burgeoning waist, Richner reaches for a microphone and, after a polite greeting and a quip about Barack Obama, shatters the atmosphere of pleasant indulgence. “Without our hospitals, 90,000 children a year would die in a passive genocide,” he announces. “The creed of the World Health Organisation and Unicef is that medical treatment must correspond to the economic reality of each country – but the economic reality of most Cambodians is zero.”

Richner, aged 61, has built five hospitals that meet international standards for cleanliness and quality and that provide free care to 85 per cent of Cambodia’s children. Now, sitting at the cello, he points his finger in accusation. “If we followed the advice of the international community” – by which he means the intergovernmental organisations he has just cited – “which travels the world telling people what to do, we could not save one single child infected with dengue fever or tuberculosis.”

Richner also built this concert hall, a simple construction of brick and bamboo nestled around several elegant ponds. It is part of the Jayavarman VII hospital in Siem Reap – a rapidly growing city of 140,000 people in the north of Cambodia. Richner’s foundation, Kantha Bopha, completed the hospital in 1999. Tonight’s concert is one of two Richner performs weekly; the money he raises by playing helps generate the $25m a year he needs to run the foundation.

He intersperses Bach cello suites with further lecturing and hectoring: “We only had 7,000 cases of dengue this year compared to last year’s epidemic, when we had 22,000. But we still need blood to treat them.” Sweat beads on his balding pate as he becomes more animated. “I ask the younger guests for blood, especially type B and O. I ask the older guests for money. So, blood or money: that is the question.”

One in three Cambodians lives on less than a dollar a day, and even in a country riven by war, corruption and political infighting, medical expenses remain one of the biggest causes of poverty. Richner first came to Cambodia in 1974 as a young Red Cross doctor. He worked at the Kantha Bopha hospital in the capital, Phnom Penh, which had been set up by King Norodom Sihanouk. But in April 1975, Richner was forced to flee ahead of the murderous Khmer Rouge entering the city. Most of the doctors he worked with then were killed – only 50 out of 950 survived as Pol Pot’s regime closed hospitals as well as banks and schools and targeted anyone with an education as an enemy of the state.

Richner compares this experience with that of a concentration camp survivor: he feels guilty for making it out alive. It’s that guilt, coupled with his humanitarian convictions, that brought him back to Cambodia. After a chance meeting in Paris in 1991, Sihanouk asked him to rebuild the ruined hospital he’d fled almost two decades earlier. (The king was in the French capital for the negotiations that would eventually bring peace to Cambodia; Richner was there to see a friend star in an opera.) He accepted the invitation and, though he initially planned to stay only for a year or two, he has been here ever since.

On the night of the concert Richner was worn down, suffering from a fever. He has locked himself into a seemingly endless struggle to find money, and this has taken its toll on a man who was once best known in Switzerland as an entertainer, singing comical songs in his stage guise as “Beatocello”, part musician, part clown. At the end of his performance, however, the entertainer is nowhere in sight: after a few cursory bows before a standing ovation, Richner flees to his office.

Half an hour later he appears in the lobby to greet lingering supporters, donors and medical students. But he appears awkward. “Sometimes it’s difficult for me to talk with my audience,” he admits later. “They are from a different world. But it’s my mistake. I’m alone here and all I do is work. I go to Switzerland two or three times a year for concerts but I’ve had no holiday in 17 years and never really have a day off.”

. . .

Twelve hours earlier, at seven o’clock on Friday morning, all 650 seats in the concert hall are full, but with doctors, nurses and cleaners at the hospital’s main daily conference. Richner sits at a table in front of the stage, flanked by his two key lieutenants in Siem Reap, Yay Chantana, the hospital’s 41-year-old medical director, and Keo Sokha, the 39-year-old head of surgery. As the staff shift about in their seats – wearing flip-flops and sandals, they find the intense cold even more uncomfortable than the tourists will – the heads of department update Richner on the previous day’s events. “Were there any deaths overnight?” asks Richner. Luckily not, Chantana responds. After a brief teaching session, Chantana calls the meeting to an end and escorts his boss out of the hall.

Richner strides into the intensive care ward, followed by Chantana and a gaggle of junior doctors. As he walks up to the first patient, an 11-year-old girl suffering from severe pain in her right hip, the other physicians manoeuvre to get out of his way – no easy task in the cramped ward. Richner refuses to turn away sick children, so when the beds run out, patients are treated on mats on the floor.

Chantana explains that the girl has advanced tuberculosis, which has already destroyed much of her hip. Her family lives more than 100 miles away, and like many other Cambodians who cannot afford time away from work, they put off coming to the hospital. “She walked with a wooden stick for five months before coming here,” says Chantana. “Because of the late presentation, she needs surgery to save her hip. It’s a two-hour operation and she will have to remain in hospital for eight weeks afterwards.” Using an MRI scanner that is part of the new $12m wing opened by the Cambodian king in December, the doctors have been able to ascertain exactly how much of her hip has been destroyed, allowing them to save the rest.

Watching Richner stomp around the wards, you wouldn’t guess it, but his donor-reliant model, which aims for excellence over affordability, and his stance on Cambodia’s medical priorities have put him on a collision course with the international health establishment. One development consultant who works for the WHO in Cambodia, but asked not to be named, explains: “My main concern is the sustainability of his operation. Richner is nothing if not an excellent fundraiser – he’s got a lot of charisma – but what happens when he dies? Who will raise the money then?”

Richner’s critics also accuse him of failing to provide value for money by not making enough use of cheaper, generic drugs and by relying on the most expensive medical supplies. “It’s wonderful that he uses such sophisticated equipment but even in his own country, much of this stuff would only be available in private hospitals,” says a doctor who recently toured one of Richner’s hospitals but also asked not to be named. People within Cambodia’s NGO community are reluctant to speak publicly against Richner, for fear of escalating the clash. They are also eager not to generate adverse publicity at a time when Cambodia’s Prime Minister, Hun Sen, is pushing ahead with a new NGO law that some feel is designed to restrict their ability to operate in the country. Some NGOs are also concerned that Richner’s focus on child medicine could be diverting money, doctors and attention from other severe health challenges, such as the high rate of maternal mortality and the growing HIV epidemic.

The received wisdom among international public health experts is that development aid is best spent on education and the provision of basic rural clinics. But Richner argues that all people have the same fundamental right to good healthcare. He characterises the other approach as “poor medicine for poor people”. “When I got my first CT machine in Cambodia 10 years ago, there was an outcry from the WHO and Unicef,” he says. “They said it was stupid to spend so much money on this machine. But you need a CT scan to diagnose and treat TB.”

He is fond of recounting anecdotes that demonstrate the idiocy and hypocrisy – as he sees it – of his critics. “Princess Anne came here a few years ago as president of Save the Children,” he says. “I showed her our laboratory and she said that we must not have such hi-tech machines in such a poor country. ‘You must work on the base and Cambodian people must learn how to wash their hands first,’ she said. “Then, when I showed her our new maternity ward, she told me it’s better to offer birth control than maternity care – but this was stupid. There was a genocide here so there’s no problem with overpopulation.”

This open antagonism to the mainstream NGO community is extremely unhelpful, his critics argue. “He’s merely building up a host of enemies so the fact that no one wants to work with him becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says the WHO consultant. “But there’s always a tension between innovators doing good things on a small scale and the more sluggish public health systems.” The clashes between competing humanitarian organisations can be as bitter as corporate rivalries. Richner’s insistence that Kantha Bopha remain independent of the public health system and his refusal to bow to the prevailing corruption in Cambodia has put many noses out of joint, and even led to his receiving death threats. And in 1995, the health ministry tried to close the first Kantha Bopha hospital because health officials and their international advisers believed it was undermining attempts to build a national health system. Only the personal intervention of the king saved it. In 2002, Richner threatened to close the foundation himself unless the health minister stopped criticising his work.

The king eventually brought about another truce and although relations with the health ministry have improved since then, the small amount of funding that Richner receives from the Cambodian government is still paid directly to his foundation, bypassing the ministry.

. . .

No one disagrees about one fact: that many of the children in intensive care at Richner’s hospitals would die without the treatment they receive there. As Chantana and Sokha observe an operation to remove a nine-year-old girl’s appendix, they talk about what her options would be without Richner. Sokha explains that this girl would not have been able to obtain proper treatment anywhere else in Cambodia, let alone in a state-of-the-art operating theatre. “In a government hospital,” he says, “you have to pay under the table to see the doctor, you have to pay for an X-ray, you have to pay for the surgeon and the anaesthetist and then you have to find a doctor to look after the follow-up. Altogether, it would probably cost $400 and there’s no way her family could afford this.”

In a private hospital, the situation would be even worse. “If you complain of abdominal pain, they’ll just remove your appendix for the money without properly diagnosing the problem, and the patient will still suffer from the same untreated pain.”

When Richner stepped on to one of the last US flights out of Cambodia in 1975, it was with the expectation that he would be back in three weeks. He was doing important work in extremely difficult circumstances: half of the children treated at the Kantha Bopha hospital did not survive. In the spring of that year, a tired-looking 28-year-old Richner told a British TV journalist: “Last week, I cannot say how many children were dying as they didn’t come to the hospital because rockets were falling down all around. At the moment, it’s very dangerous to bring the children here and it can only get worse. Worse and worse.”

Within days it became obvious that Phnom Penh would fall to Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge fighters and the hospital was abandoned. And yet no one at that stage envisaged the terror and suffering that was about to be unleashed as Pol Pot proclaimed “Year Zero” and launched a brutal, all-encompassing Maoist revolution. It would lead to the deaths of as many as two million Cambodians.

Given the destruction that was wrought, the scale of what Richner has built is impressive. Since 1991, the Kantha Bopha foundation has raised and spent more than $370m, with the vast majority of his funding coming from private donors, many of whom live in Switzerland. All five hospitals constantly operate at capacity, with around 300 admissions of seriously ill children every day, 60 operations, 3,000 outpatients, 1,500 vaccinations and 50 deliveries at the maternity unit in Siem Reap. Meanwhile, Richner’s drive to cut the rate of transmission between HIV-infected mothers and their newborn children has met with huge success: the normal mother-to-child HIV transmission rate in Cambodia is 40 per cent, but at Jayavarman VII they have reduced it to less than 5 per cent by performing caesarean sections, treating the mother and child with anti-retroviral drugs and insisting that they stop breast-feeding.

Victories like these make a case for the argument that one committed person can achieve more than scores of bureaucracy-laden NGOs. Richner employs 2,100 people but spends just 5 per cent of his annual budget on administration (his 180 doctors take a central role in running the hospitals; they earn about $1,000 a month compared with the $40 they would get from a state hospital). Richner imports all his drugs and medical supplies directly from Thailand to avoid the counterfeit pharmaceutical products flooding Cambodia. The head nurses personally distribute the medicines every day, to ensure no thefts. This vigilance goes for the patients as well as the staff. Chantana points out a young girl who is being treated for TB with a nine-month course of drugs. Like every other patient, she has returned to the hospital for her check-up carrying the empty blister packets to prove that she has taken her medication rather than sold it to a back-street pharmacist.

The problem, then, is not the medicine but the money. Richner only has five months’ funding left in the kitty and, unlike many charitable foundations, he has no endowments other than a commitment from the Swiss and Cambodian governments to cover 8 per cent of his annual budget each. He spends everything he gets on new buildings, machinery and drugs, as well as day-to-day expenses. In the past three years he has spent $34m on new construction projects. “The hospitals are working well and everything can continue without me, but the ongoing nightmare is the money,” he discloses as he puffs on a Davidoff mini cigarillo, well away from the main hospital buildings. “I can only start to think of my [succession] plan when I get the money – this $200m I need to save Kantha Bopha for 20 years. Then I will be a free man.”

It is this attitude that disturbs Richner’s critics at the WHO and other international health organisations in Cambodia. They have seen countless maverick humanitarians fall by the wayside when the funding for their donor-heavy projects ran out. “I can think of at least three or four other great individual initiatives in Cambodia that have atrophied when donor funding has dropped off,” says one long-standing NGO worker in Phnom Penh. “It would be nice to think that someone else would come in to the fill the gap if funding drops off, but you can’t just assume that.”

. . .

As he’s showing me the hospital, Chantana at one point confides: “We don’t have to look for God as we consider Dr Richner a god.” Richner was named “Swiss of the Year” in 2003 but his work remains little known outside his homeland – where his name often comes cloaked in controversy. Last year, he was criticised in a number of newspapers for turning down a $91,000 donation because it had been raised from the sale of the infamous nude portrait of Carla Bruni, the French first lady, by the Swiss photographer Michel Comte. Although he needed the money, Richner said that nudity offended Cambodian sensibilities and he dismissed the offer as a publicity stunt.

This incident and a number of more serious clashes with the media have left their mark on Richner. In 1997, he was accused of breaking his Hippocratic oath by failing to treat some of the more than 150 people injured in a lethal grenade attack on an opposition political rally – a charge he dismisses. He has since been the subject of highly critical documentaries in Switzerland. He very rarely grants interviews these days.

Last year, about $7m of the foundation’s annual budget came from concert donations, with one anonymous Californian couple giving $1m after seeing Richner perform in Siem Reap. But his love of music has withered in recent years. “I don’t have the mood to sing songs now,” Richner explains as he taps away at the keyboard in his small office. On top of all his medical, administrative and fundraising duties, he is busy writing another book (his first, Kantha Bopha: A Children’s Doctor in Cambodia, outlined his philosophy of medicine and his early clashes with the health establishment). Richner’s two large desks are overflowing with papers, books, DVDs and videos. Gifts, many of them still unopened, are piled on the floor: statues of Buddhas still in their boxes, bottles of champagne and chocolates. The obligatory kitsch painting of Angkor Wat fills almost the entire length of one wall.

Richner’s 200-year-old Italian cello rests on the floor in its blue soft case. As he talks, he gets up to close the door, anxious to ensure that the air-conditioned room stays cool and dry so that “his wife”, as he calls it (Richner is single and lives alone), does not deteriorate in the sticky climate. “The cello has a very human voice, like the saxophone,” he says. “You can express better what’s going on with the cello than by talking. It’s not aggressive or accusatory, like me.”

Although his protracted struggles have darkened his character, he remains determined to continue. “When I’m frustrated and angry with the government and the evolution of health policy in the poor world, I visit the wards with my colleagues and then I don’t doubt that what I’m doing makes sense.”

While the future of Kantha Bopha in Cambodia is far from secure, Richner still hopes to take his model to other damaged nations, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burma. He is launching a new academy to train young paediatricians from Asia and Africa in his methods, so they can recreate what he has achieved in their own countries. “I want to show people that it’s possible to do this elsewhere,” he says. “After Cyclone Nargis, I went to Burma and got a visa even though the NGOs did not. The hospitals are very poor, they have no equipment and a lot of dengue fever, but we could do the same there that we did here.”

He is not put off by the rampant corruption in Burma or the malign influence of the military junta. “It was difficult here, too, but it would be possible in Burma,” he says. “The only condition is that Bill Gates, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama gives me $200m, because if I leave Cambodia, it will be harder to keep raising money.”

Ben Bland is a freelance journalist based in Singapore

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