Khmer Rouge's top lady makes plea for freedom

(Tuesday, May 27, 2008)


Thursday, 22 May 2008

At times appearing confused, 76-year-old Ieng Thirith faced the Extraordinary Chambers on Wednesday to to ask for bail. (Chor Sokunthea/Pool)

Former Khmer Rouge minister Ieng Thirith, who was the regime's top-ranking female member, appeared publicly before Cambodia's genocide tribunal for the first time on May 21 as she appealed against her pre-trial detention at the UN-backed court.Thirith, who served as social affairs minister during the regime's 1975-79 rule over Cambodia, is charged with crimes against humanity. She is one of five former Khmer Rouge leaders, including her husband Ieng Sary, who have been arrested by the court, known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, or ECCC.The diminutive, bespectacled 76-year-old appeared confused at times, failing once to remember how many children she had and refusing to make a final statement following the nearly nine hour hearing, telling the court that she was "unwell.""I have high blood pressure and when I get angry it rises rapidly," said Thirith, who was seized by authorities from her Phnom Penh home in November.Her lawyers argued that Thirith should not be judged by the alleged crimes of her husband, who served as the regime foreign minister and has been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.Thirith's relationship with Sary should "not be used to criminalize the charged party," said her foreign lawyer, British QC Diane Ellis.The court must "consider position of charged person separately from that of the other four accused," Ellis said.
Thirith's Cambodian lawyer, Phat Pouv Seang, has earlier said that his client's deteriorating mental health should be grounds enough for her release, telling the Post that he had Thai-language medical documents proving that she was not fit to stand trial.Both Thirith and her husband traveled frequently to Thailand for medical treatment before their arrest amid rumors that the pair had amassed vast wealth from deals made during the chaotic last days of the Khmer Rouge in the 1990s.But her lawyers denied suggestions that Thirith and her husband had sacked away large amounts of money, telling the court that she did not own property in Cuba, and that her home in the capital belonged to a daughter.Many Cambodians attending the hearing dismissed the defense's claims that Thirith should be treated differently from other regime leaders."I will not be happy if the court releases Thirith or other KR leaders ... because during their time in power they treated Cambodian people very badly like animals," said 60 year-old Sam Soeun, who traveled to the capital from Preah Vihear province.
"I came here in the hopes that the court will find justice for me and for all the other victims," he said.Up to two million people died of starvation, disease and overwork, or were executed as the ultra-communist Khmer Rouge exiled the country's population into vast collective farms in a bid to forge an agrarian utopia in what was to become one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.Tribunal spokeswoman Helen Jarvis told the Post that the hearing had gone smoothly, despite repeated closed sessions that kept the participants in court into the evening."There was a lot to get through and remember we had five civil parties for this case," Jarvis said, explaining that the long hours "did not signal anything." A decision on the appeal is expected in the coming weeks. From Phnom Penh PostWritten by Cheang Sokha and Cat Barton

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Dump closure to uproot thousands

(Monday, May 19, 2008)

Friday, 16 May 2008
Rights groups fear new wave of homeless to hit Phnom Penh streets
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HENG CHIVOAN
Collecting cartloads of cans, cardboard, plastic and glass for recycling can earn scavengers at Stung Meanchey rubbish dump more money than many rural households can make farming, but it is a livelihood set to end when the dump closes next year in favor of a larger, closed-off site near the Choeung Ek killing fields.

Rising in the pre-dawn darkness, Mean Ny is quickly absorbed into the anonymous throng of scavengers in Phnom Penh’s Stung Meanchey dump, a vast wasteland of sodden rotten trash that grows each day as the capital disgorges hundreds of tons of refuse.

Only a few short kilometers distant, but a world away from the city-center’s wide boulevards, dotted with modernist shopping malls or the metal and concrete skeletons of future skyscrapers, the capital’s poorest pick out a grim living, collecting plastic or aluminum – anything that can be sold for a few cents.

“I have to get up at three or four every morning in order to get things for recycling, like plastic, rubber and paper, before the others,” the 50-year-old told the Post, standing knee-deep in a pile of trash.

This existence, however miserable, still carries with it the familiar rhythms that Mean Ny has grown used to during the past 16 years.

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HENG CHIVOAN
About 400 families will be affected by the closure of Stung Meanchey, according to local NGOs’ estimates.

But upheaval is not far away, as authorities plan to start closing the Stung Meanchey tip next year, a move which threatens to uproot thousands of scavengers and create a wave of newly homeless in Phnom Penh’s streets, advocacy groups warn.

“There are more than 1,700 children and about 400 families who will face unemployment and loss of income,” said Sry Chanratha, of Pour un Sourire d’Enfant (PSE), a French NGO set up in 1995 that provides education to children at Stung Meanchey.

“We don’t have the ability to help them yet,” said Chanratha, who directs PSE’s social and external school program.

“But we are trying to find funding from other NGOs in order to assist them to get real jobs and houses.”

Municipal authorities say the Stung Meanchey tip, which opened in 1962 as Phnom Penh’s main dump site, is now a 17-acre (6.9-hectare) blight on the rapidly-expanding capital and needs to be closed.

Stinging clouds of dry-season dust and smoke from smoldering trash heaps give way to deep, stinking mud in the monsoon, as the stench of fumes leaking from deep inside the decades of compacted refuse smother nearby neighborhoods.

According to our plan, we will not allow rubbish collectors to work at the new site and we will build a fence around it. – Sao Kunchhon, waste management dept.

“We’re changing the place where rubbish is dumped because we want to make a good social environment in the city and [Stung Meanchey] is too near,” said Sao Kunchhon, director of the Phnom Penh’s waste management department.

“We can’t keep it like this forever,” he added, saying that it is unclear what will happen to the old dump site, but that the government is in discussions with foreign investors who might construct a power plant on the land that would use the accumulated garbage as fuel.

A new landfill capable of eventually handing 1,500 tons of rubbish a day will be opened in Bakou village, some eight kilometers outside the city near the Choeung Ek killing fields, he said, explaining that unlike Stung Meanchey, the dump will be closed to scavengers.

“According to our plan, we will not allow rubbish collectors to work at the new site and we will build a fence around it,” Kunchhon said.

This leaves people like Ny desperate over their future.

“My family’s income will be worse than today because we’ve been depending on this dump since 1992,” she said.

“I feel like I’m going to suffer a lot when the Stung Meanchey dump moves to another place. I really don’t want it to move, but I can’t stop them,” she added.

Despite the pending closure, impoverished Cambodians continue arriving at Stung Meanchey each day hoping to scavenge enough to feed their families, said Mech Sokha, director of the Center for Children to Happiness (CCH), a local NGO based at the dump that helps orphaned children and those with HIV-positive parents.

Like PSE’s Chanratha, Sokha fears that hundreds, if not thousands will be driven onto the streets when the dump closes, adding to the ranks of destitute families and street children living in ragged clusters near the capital’s main tourist areas.

“I’m worried because they will lose their jobs and there will be more street children and homeless old people in the city,” Sokha told the Post, explaining that families could sometimes earn more scavenging for a day at Stung Meanchey than they could in their rural villages. Written by Mom Kunthear (from Phnom Penh Post)

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Workers find themselves at center of political tug-of-war

Friday, 16 May 2008
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TANG CHHIN SOTHY/ AFP
Prime Minister Hun Sen makes a speech during the inauguration of a mosque in Phnom Penh on May 15. Hun Sen and his political opposition have for the first time targeted Cambodia’s blue-collar workers as key assets in the upcoming national elections scheduled for July 27.
Better pay and working conditions for Cambodia’s industrial workers have become the centerpiece of party platforms ahead of July 27 national polls as the country’s politicians seek for the first time to tap into a vast voter pool they had previously ignored, party officials and election monitors say.

The leaders of the country’s three main political parties all went to the workers on May Day this year, appealing to garment factory employees and dockworkers alike for their ballot.

“If you like my leadership, vote for the CPP,” Prime Minister Hun Sen told hundreds of workers gathered at the Sihanoukville port, promising job security if his ruling Cambodian People’s Party was returned to power and calling on factory owners in the country’s strike-prone garment sector to treat their workers like “partners for life.”

Elsewhere, opposition politicians with the Sam Rainsy, Human Rights and Norodom Ranariddh parties were touting higher wages and labor rights in exchange for support in what many observers say will be a one-sided election favoring the CPP.

But despite being the clear favorites, Hun Sen’s embrace of the working classes signals a change in political strategy and marks the rise of industrial workers as a powerful constituent, observers say.

“This is the first time they’ve done this – they see opportunity in the growing number of workers. Before their numbers were small and the workers did not attract the attention of the political parties,” said Hang Puthea, executive director of the Cambodian election monitor Nicfec.

“It is important for the parties to attract workers because their numbers have increased by so much,” he told the Post.

“Each party believes that if they can attract those workers, the parents of those workers who live in the countryside and their friends will also vote for that party,” he added.

A simple calculation reveals exactly how big the worker vote could be: the garment sector alone employs an estimated 350,000 people, each supporting family at home that could multiply the total voter strength by three, five or even ten times, depending on the size of each employee’s family and circle of friends.

Some 8.1 million voters have been registered so far.

The total number of industrial workers is thought to be more than 500,000, monitors say.

“If 50,000 votes can win a seat in parliament, then half a million votes will swing 10 seats,” Puthea said.

That is no small number for Cambodia’s opposition trying to claw back some power from the CPP, which looks set to be able to form a government on its own this year, shedding a coalition government agreement that has been in place since the early 1990s.

All three minor parties are trading on Cambodia’s rising cost of living to give them the leverage they need to swing the workers’ vote.

Double-digit inflation has hurt most the country’s urban workers who during the past year have found themselves priced out of many staple goods.

Aside from promised wage hikes, the opposition has vowed to end pricing monopolies over fuel and curb living costs.

“If you vote for the CPP, you will get only one sarong, but if you vote for Sam Rainsy you will get another $20 [wage] increase,” Sam Rainsy, leader of his self-named party, told some 3,000 garment workers gathered at his party’s headquarters in Phnom Penh on International Labor Day.

Meanwhile, Norodom Ranariddh’s party spokesman Muth Chantha reminded workers that the prince, who remains in exile amid a host of legal problems, attracted investment to Cambodia, creating jobs.

All the pre-election wooing, however, has done nothing to convince labor activists that party leaders have their interests at heart.

Chea Mony, who took over the reins of Cambodia’s largest labor group, the Free Trade Union, in 2004, told the Post that “political parties have been cheating workers since 1993.”

“Every song they sing is sweet,” he said, urging workers not to be lured into a false sense of hope by the rhetoric.

“Consider each party’s policy platform on labor issues before deciding which one to support in the elections,” he said.

Nicfec’s Puthea also said trying to win the workers’ vote was a bit of shrewd international spin-making on the part of the parties.

“If any party can convince the workers to vote for them, it shows that the party supports international labor rights and raises its profile” outside of Cambodia,” he said. (from Phnom Penh Post)

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Child labor surges with building boom

Friday, 16 May 2008
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TRACEY SHELTON
A girl stacks unfired bricks in a kiln at the state-run Prey Konkhla brick factory in Battambang, May 9.
B ATTAMBANG – Sy Oeur was 12 years old when she dropped out of school in a desperate bid to keep her impoverished family afloat. Despite her age, she quickly found a job working ten-hour shifts in a brick factory for which she is paid 6,000 riels a day.

She says she doesn’t mind the long hours or dangerous work as she’s happy to be able to help her family.

Behind the glitz and glamour of Cambodia’s recent construction boom is an army of under-aged, under-paid workers such as Oeur. The surge in demand for cheap labor has prompted thousands of children, some as young as six, to abandon their schooling and accept hazardous work in factories or on construction sites.

A new research study released May 8 by local rights NGO Licadho and World Vision draws attention to the gross child rights violations that underpin Cambodia’s latest burst of economic development.

The study was launched in Battambang where an estimated 500 children are currently employed in the province’s 26 brick factories.

“Most of these children are forced to work at the brick kilns because of poverty,” Vann Sophath, deputy director of communication and advocacy for Licadho, told the Post at the launch.

Conditions in the brick factories meet the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) criteria for the “worst forms of child labor,” the report claims. Factory work hinders education opportunities – around 74 percent of child workers do not attend school – and carries health risks ranging from third degree burns from the kilns to respiratory problems from brick dust.

Factory owners “never pay for treatment” when their workers are injured on the job and very few factories have any safety procedures in place, said Sophath.

Protective glasses, helmets and work shoes were almost unheard of among the children interviewed, less than half of whom were wearing gloves, hats or masks during work. Fewer than 20 percent of the children interviewed in the report said they had received work safety information from their employers.

The most common tasks performed by children in brick factories include loading bricks to and from kilns, extracting and grinding clay, and operating machinery. Brick making machines are hazardous as hands or arms can be easily caught in the constantly grinding moving parts.

Children working at the brick kiln receive an average wage of 5,000 to 6,000 riel per day with children under ten years old receiving 1,000 riels.

“Work in the brick factory is quite hard but I do not have any choice because my family needs the money,” said Kouch Chantha, 14, who, like all his siblings, works weekend shifts at the factory.

“I actually do not want to come but I am forced to work here by my mother because if I don’t come here I will have nothing to eat,” he said.

Most children, particularly those of a very young age, begin work alongside their parents and 30 percent said they lived at the factory in which they worked with either their parents or other relatives.

Pressure from parents who rely on their children’s wages to provide for the family means many child brick factory workers are resigned to their fate, said Chea Ravy, a child welfare worker at World Vision’s drop-in center for child workers in Battambang.

“They have only known one thing their whole lives: How can they build a dream?” Ravy asked.

Many factories in Battambang are taking on more child workers due to the recent constriction boom, said Eng Soeur, the owner of Ponlok Thmey Brick Factory which currently employs 50 workers. February and March were particularly busy months this year as brick prices rose to 400 riel per brick and his factory reported average sales of 150,000 bricks per month.

Although Soeur himself does not allow children to work fulltime at his factory, he does now allow child workers on weekends and holidays.

The construction boom has also resulted in a higher percentage of females working in brick factories.

Sok Seth, director of the Ministry of Labors’ Prey Konkhla Vocational Training Center – which includes a state-run brick factory which employs children – estimates that 70 percent of child brick workers are girls as boys are needed for heavier work on construction sites.

“The regulation in my center is not to hire children to work but we cannot enforce it 100 percent because the children sometimes come along for work with the mother,” Seth told the Post during a visit to the center on May 9.

Seth stressed that parents, as well as the brick factory owners, need to consider more carefully the future of their children and the dangers they face in this kind of work.

However, he added that if factory owners ceased hiring children the earnings of many families would decrease markedly, which is why many parents are not happy with the work of NGOs who are trying to combat child labor.

An estimated 1.4 million Cambodian children between the ages of seven and 14, or more than 50 percent, are engaged in some for of labor, mostly in the agricultural sector, according to international agencies.
Written by Cheang Sokha and Tracey Shelton, from Phnom Penh Post.

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◘Coalition offers reveal opposition in disarray

(Tuesday, May 6, 2008)


Friday, 02 May 2008
TANG CHHIN SOTHY/ AFP SRP leader Sam Rainsy says he wants a mass coalition of all political parties who oppose the ruling CPP, but analysts say the pride of party leaders could hamper any potential merger. It was only moments after his return on April 29 from a campaign sweep through Canada and the US that political leader Sam Rainsy declared his readiness to merge with Cambodia’s two other major opposition parties as the country races towards national elections in July.

Only such a marriage would have a chance at diminishing the power of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodian People’s Party’s (CPP), which observers expect will become absolute in the absence of the coalition government deals which have resulted from previous polls.

But Rainsy’s offer was not without conditions and accusations aimed at the very partners he is seeking, something analysts say reveals an opposition hopelessly at odds with itself and unlikely to loosen the CPP’s stranglehold over Cambodia’s political affairs.

“They do not have confidence in each other,” said Chea Vannath, the former director of the Center for Social Development who is now an independent analyst.

“They must merge together to compete with the CPP, but ... they cannot call for a coalition only as the election arrives,” she told the Post on April 30.

“A coalition is a very important force, but each (party leader) is too proud and will not agree to work together.”

Corruption, legal problems and even messy personal lives have come into play and Rainsy and leaders of the Human Rights Party (HRP), headed by former activist Kem Sokha, and Prince Norodom Ranariddh’s self-named political organization point fingers at each other, while at the same time pledging to support a coalition.

Upon returning to Cambodia, Rainsy demanded that the “weak points” of both of his potential allies be addressed or all three risked being “held hostage” by the CPP.

Kem Sokha, who has been at the center of a vicious whisper campaign over alleged graft, needed to sort out corruption allegations made by his former employees at the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, according to Rainsy.

The Prince, in self-imposed exile since he was ousted as head of the royalist Funcinpec party amid a flurry of legal assaults, including one for adultery, must tidy up his private affairs, Rainsy said.

“No one else can help him with that,” he told the Post.

These comments have not gone down well, with Kem Sokha shooting back that Rainsy – the long-time darling of foreign pro-democracy campaigners – has no real commitment to form a coalition, as well as legal problems of his own that could jeopardize the opposition’s election chances.

The HRP has long pushed for a coalition with the two other opposition parties, but the plan is still “a failure,” Sokha said, adding that while he would unconditionally join Rainsy, he did not know if he could merge with the Prince’s Norodom Ranariddh Party, or NRP.

“He (Ranariddh) is different from me,” he said, accusing the NRP of shamelessly using a joint meeting with his own group to encourage defections to the NRP.

“This is a divide and rule policy it does not demonstrate the good will you need to form a democratic coalition,” Sokha said.
The disarray is, however, just more evidence of the CPP’s pending election landslide, according to government spokesman Khieu Kanharith.

“This is five riels being divided between three people,” he told the Post on May 1.

The opposition “merged many times before but those mergers were always broken – it is no worry to the CPP,” he said.

Officials at the NRP, while professing to want a coalition, claim that the two other parties simply waited until it was too close to the July 27 elections to realistically merge.

Registration for parties ends on May 12, and NRP spokesman Muth Chantha said, “When the election will arrive so soon why … hold press conferences about coalitions?

“We cannot merge now into one big party, it is too late. It is very deceptive to claim we can.”

Credibility remains elusive for the fractious opposition, said Koul Panha, executive director of the Cambodian election monitor Committee for Free and Fair Elections, and the most recent bickering does not help.

“The merger must be sincere … but do these three leaders have the will to do this?” he said.
Written by Meas Sokchea from Phnom Penh Post.

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