Eye on Phnom Penh

Case Closed? Officials says the officer killed him during a shouting match. (AP)

The Cambodian military said Friday it was closing its investigation into a shooting that occurred in a forest rife with illegal logging, concluding one of its own police officers killed a prominent environmentalist then took his own life. Chut Wutty had been taking photographs in a forest where a Chinese company is building a hydropower dam, and he refused to stop when officer In Ratana asked him to, military police spokesman Kheng Tito said. The two men then started arguing and cursing each other, until In Ratana shot Chut Wutty with his AK-47 assault rifle. ”When he learned that Chut Wutty died, he killed himself with his own weapon,” the spokesman said.The death of Chut Wutty, the director of the National Resources Protection Group, had outraged human rights and environmental groups. A Cambodian rights group, the Center for Cambodian Civic Education, described it as “cold-blooded murder.”

The activist’s wife dismisses this gov’t finding (Phnom Penh Post)

The wife of slain environmental activist Chut Wutty today rejected early police accounts of the circumstances around his shooting death, saying she believed he had been targeted for death for his work in protecting Cambodia’s endangered forests. Speaking to the Post by phone, 40-year-old Sam Chanthy, said that her husband had been at the exact site of his death in Koh Kong province little more than a month ago, where he had been in conflict with military police officers as he attempted to examine a cache of illegally logged timber. “I think there were third persons involved with my husband’s killing. They prepared a plot to kill him because his work was affecting their interests. “Those people were not happy with my husband and his work …so they planned to kill him when he went there again,” she said, referring to Veal Bei Point in Mondul Seima district’s Bak Khlang commune. In Kong Chit, Koh Kong-based coordinator for rights group Licahdo, said that according to a copy of the police report he had seen, military police officer In Rattana shot Chut Wutty, then committed suicide by shooting himself twice with his own AK-47 rifle, first in the stomach and then the chest. “I think this report is unbelievable. We will continue to investigate and research about it,” he said. 

(Via AFP)

From PPPost:

A father was on the run from the authorities in Battambang town after he beat his teenage son and chained him to a power pole on Tuesday afternoon, police said. Deputy provincial police chief Colonel Cheth Vanny said 40-year-old motodop Sok Thoeun was upset with his son Sok Khorn, 13, for playing video games, and forcibly removed him from an internet café where he was gaming. “He caught him and beat him very brutally,” Cheth Vanny said.

(Photo via VOA)

Another good Hookway analysis from the Wall Street Journal:

Tiny Cambodia is emerging as a key pawn in the diplomatic struggle over one of the world’s busiest stretches of water: the potentially energy-rich South China Sea.The country of 15 million people is this year hosting a series of regional summits in which China’s claims to the waters could loom large. Its sea tussles with countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines has raised security fears in an already jittery region. The U.S. has further angered China by saying it wants to keep the South China Sea, which carries around half the world’s total trade, free and open to navigation.

Read More

(Photo: Asiaweek Magazine)

Human Rights Watch says the Cambodian government has made “no effort” to bring justice to those responsible for a deadly grenade attack on an opposition rally 15 years ago.In a report issued Thursday, the U.S.-based group says there is “substantial evidence of government involvement” in the March 30, 1997 attack, which killed 16 people and left more than 150 injured. (Via VOA)

Fifteen years after a grisly grenade attack on an opposition party rally in Phnom Penh left at least 16 dead and more than 150 injured, the Cambodian government has made no progress in bringing the perpetrators to justice, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch urged the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to reopen its investigation of the attack, which the US government deemed an “act of terrorism.” On March 30, 1997, a crowd of approximately 200 supporters of the opposition Khmer Nation Party (KNP), led by former Finance Minister Sam Rainsy, gathered in a park across the street from the National Assembly to denounce the judiciary’s lack of independence and judicial corruption. In a well-planned attack, four grenades were thrown into the crowd, killing protestors and bystanders, including children, and blowing limbs off street vendors.

Many contend the ruling party was actively involved.

On the day of the attack, for the first time co-Prime Minister Hun Sen’s personal bodyguard unit was deployed at a demonstration. Photographs show them there in full riot gear. The police force, which had previously maintained a high-profile presence at opposition demonstrations in an effort to discourage public participation, had an unusually low profile on this day, grouped around the corner from the park…. Witnesses told investigators from the United Nations and the FBI that the bodyguards opened the line to allow the grenade-throwers to pass into the compound, and that members of the crowd pursuing the grenade-throwers were stopped at gunpoint and threatened with being shot if they did not retreat.

After the attack the government threatened journalists and demonstrators.

In a June 1997 interview with the Phnom Penh Post, Hing Bun Heang, deputy commander of Hun Sen’s bodyguard unit, threatened to kill journalists who alleged that Hun Sen’s bodyguards were involved…Instead of launching a serious investigation, Hun Sen immediately called for the arrest of the demonstration’s organizers and instructed police not to allow them to leave the country… A bloody coup by Hun Sen’s forces followed in July 1997, killing more than 100 and sending politicians and activists into exile in fear for their lives

Hu probably coming to discuss the South China Sea issue. (Via VOA)

Political analysts say Cambodia should take advantage of its chairmanship of Asean this year in disputes over the South China Sea, but the country is reluctant to do so for fear of a damaging its relationship with China. Arata Mahapatra, the director of the Center for Asian Strategic Studies in India, told VOA Khmer Thursday that playing the role of neutral mediator would help raise Cambodia’s international prestige at a time when it is seeking a non-permanent seat at the UN Security Council. “Half of Asean’s members are involved in the South China Sea conflict,” he said. “If Cambodia wants to ignore that, OK,” he said, but “it’s not good for Cambodia’s interests because other members will not be happy.” Cambodia is preparing to host an Asean summit in Phnom Penh later this week, but it has said the South China Sea will not be on the agenda. Maritime ownership over portions of the sea are contested by several Asean nations and Taiwan, while the entire sea is claimed by China, making it a complicated regional issue.

Reuters reporter: Okay. Big story. Ju Jintao is coming. Regional editor is yelling at me. Office editor is yelling at me. Need to interview. Someone. Anyone. (Via Reuters) 

“They have the money, so they have the power,” said Sem On, a motorbike taxi driver sitting on a railing near the 2nd Chroy Changvar bridge, funded by $27.5 million in Chinese soft loans.

Safe!

Francois Ponchaud publicly denounces Tribunal (an opinion he does not hide). Ponchaud witnessed the fall of Phnom Penh and was one of the first to document the mass evacuation and deaths during the Khmer Rouge regime. (AFP)

Cambodia’s landmark trial against ex-Khmer Rouge leaders is “a monumental mistake”, says the French priest who 35 years ago became the first person to expose the horrors of the regime. “I deny the United Nations the right to judge the Khmer Rouge,” said 73-year-old Francois Ponchaud, who was forced to leave Phnom Penh when the hardline communists took power in 1975. “The UN backed the Khmer Rouge for 14 years for geo-political reasons during the Cold War. I don’t see why the UN would now give itself the right to judge those it supported,” he said in an interview with AFP. In what is considered an embarrassing chapter in UN history, the Khmer Rouge was allowed to retain its seat in the General Assembly even after the regime was ousted by Vietnamese troops in 1979 and its blood-stained revolution was exposed to the world. In 2006, the Cambodian government and the UN set up a tribunal in Phnom Penh to try to find justice for up to two million people who died under the regime’s 1975-1979 reign…Ponchaud, who has spent years living alongside rural Cambodians, believes the country has its own way of resolving conflicts, and “it’s not through court verdicts”. Many survivors and former Khmer Rouge perpetrators have already found a way to “live together”, often side by side in the same village, he said, trusting that karma will set things right in the next life. “The concept of human rights is a very Judeo-Christian concept,” according to the clergyman. “For a Buddhist, the human person doesn’t exist. When you die, you will be reincarnated.”