Category: Cambodia & Laos

The website of corruption watchdog, the Global Witness, is now blocked in Cambodia after it released a report criticizing its oil and mining industries last week. The site was blocked by ISP company, AngkorNet, although company representatives could not provide reasons for the liited access.

Cambodia’s political elite has captured the country’s oil and mineral wealth, putting its economic future at risk while international donors turn a blind eye, an environmental watchdog said. Impoverished Cambodia has enough natural wealth to wean itself off foreign aid but international donors must do more to ensure the assets are properly managed.

In the report entitled: “Country for Sale,” the group said earnings from oil, gas and minerals were being “jeopardized by high-level corruption, nepotism and patronage” in allocating and managing the assets. “The same political elite that pillaged the country’s timber resources has now gained control of its mineral and petroleum wealth,” said Global Witness Campaigns Director, Gavin Hayman.

The Cambodian government, critics say, is trying to limit the scope of the trials for its own political reasons, a limit that the critics say would compromise justice and could discredit the entire process.

A Cambodian prosecutor said additional indictments could be destabilizing. She said they would cost too much, take too long and violate the spirit of the tribunal, which she said envisioned “only a small number of trials.”

The Cambodian Prime Minister who bargained hard with the United Nations over the shape and scope of the tribunal, has said that trying “four or five people” would be enough, although there is no formal limit on the number.

Chao Soymala Inieum na Jampasak, 67, is selling her collection of royal jewelry and antique silks to pay for the tuition fees of more than 200 monks from Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Bhutan, Nepal and Chiang Tung City studying at the the Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University in Chiang Mai, Thailand. She fled Laos to Thailand after the Laotian revolution of 1975.

Five former leaders of the Khmer Rouge, which caused the death of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979- nearly a quarter of the population – will finally face judgment. A U.N.-backed tribuanl announced that the first hearing, for Kaing Guek Eav, 65, known as Comrade Duch, will begin on February 17. Duch commanded the Toul Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, where at least 14,000 people were tortured, killed or sent to the nearby burial site of Cheong Ek to be executed and disposed of.