Hang Puthea, the head of the poll monitoring group Nicfec, and one of the few independent local political observers, welcomed the peace gesture between the two archrivals. But he said that Sam Rainsy will suffer some "loss of credibility."
| MEET WITH GOD |
PHN@M - P@NH - P@TINS | RENCONTRER DIEU |
Naranhkiri Tith, Kal Man and Kampuchea Krom (2006-Feb-11)
Naranhkiri Tith : About Kal' s interview with Radio
United Khmer Krom. Our future is inexorably linked to all Khmers
(Khmers Leu, Kandal, and Krom). However, Khmer Krom must be singled out
as the most articulate and forceful defenders of the Cambodian people.
As Kal has said in his interview, all Cambodians must and can learn a lot
from our fellow countrymen for Kampuchea. The most remarkable success is
the fact that the Khmers Krom have succeeded in having the United Nations
accept the fact that they [Khmer Krom] are the victims of the Vietnamese.
But the Khmers Kandal have not yet succeeded to have this recognition by
the international community. On the contrary, the Khmers Kandal are mostly
viewed by the international community as the victimizers of the Vietnamese,
thanks to Pol Pot, Sihanouk, and Hun Sen's
behavior and policy to be totally subservient to Vietnam's control and
clever propaganda. I think Kal did a credible job in the interview. I am
very proud of his performance and urge every decent Cambodians to listen
to this inspiring interview by clicking the link below :
http://www.unitedkhmerkrom.org/radio/
Meun Pech Perom : Charles Darwin said "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." Dear fellow Cambodians, can you change? Why not you... why not now?
N.P. : The Cambodian people wants to stay traditionalist, Buddhist and royalist. Jati, Sasna, Maha Ksatr. Y a rien à faire! Niet! Nada! M' haï ah! Hong! Arimasen!
KOULEN
MONORUM : Please international communities,
especially Cambodia's donor countries do not provide anymore financial
support to the CPP/ROYAL CROOKS unless the whole Cambodian government changes
by FREE AND FAIR ELECTION. Please stop thinking that if the international
financial support stops at once all Khmers will die as Hun Sen said, it
will only be the collapse of the CPP/ROYAL CROOKS. Your financial support
is only increasing the power of the CPP/ROYAL CROOKS who are destroying
TRUE Khmer people's lives.
KHMER
LAND IS OURS,
Cambodian politics ready for change, as prime minister, opposition
leader agree to truce (2006-Feb-04)
By KER MUNTHIT , AP , PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - Political observers
on Saturday welcomed an apparent truce between Prime Minister Hun Sen and
opposition leader Sam Rainsy, but said the government's chief critic would
need to work hard to regain his credibility. In a surprise move, the two
bitter rivals on Friday exchanged letters indicating their willingness
to end their long-running war of words against one another.
Sam Rainsy apologized for accusing Hun Sen of
being behind deadly political violence, an about-face for the
sharp-tongued opposition politician. Hun Sen replied that he hoped Sam
Rainsy, currently in exile in France, would be able to return to Cambodian
politics and work with the government. The conciliatory words may help
ease Cambodia's political tensions, some observers said Saturday, but also
raise questions about the credibility of the government's chief critic.
"The time has arrived for us to put an end to personal issues,"
Sam Rainsy said Friday night, confirming
the reconciliation effort by phone from Paris, where he fled to after losing
his parliamentary immunity last year. In his letter to Hun Sen, which
was read out on state television, Sam Rainsy expressed regret "for
behaving inappropriately" toward Hun Sen by accusing him of being behind
a grenade attack and an assassination plot in 1997.
|
Hang Puthea, the head of the poll monitoring group Nicfec, and one of the few independent local political observers, welcomed the peace gesture between the two archrivals. But he said that Sam Rainsy will suffer some "loss of credibility." |
Who is Mrs Ung Boun Hor ? (2006-Jan-28)
Thirty years on, the nightmare of Pol Pot's
terror haunts a widow in a Paris suburb
France faces moment of truth over events that ended embassy siege
in Cambodia
Jon Henley in Paris , The Guardian : The
last time she saw him he was standing on the tarmac at Phnom Penh airport,
waving as the ageing Air Cambodia plane carrying her, her daughter, two
nephews and three suitcases to safety shuddered into the sky, avoiding
by some miracle the constant barrage of Khmer Rouge shells. In truth, she
saw him once more, seven days later, on April 17 1975. But she was in France,
and he was on the television. He was hurrying into the compound of the
French embassy in Phnom Penh with the prime minister and other high-ranking
officials from the former republic, clutching a suitcase she had left him
stuffed with nearly $300,000 of her mother's cash. He is safe, she thought.
But he was not. Four days later two French gendarmes dragged Ung
Boun Hor, the former speaker of the Cambodian national assembly,
to the compound gates and delivered him, with six other alleged "traitors",
to a platoon of waiting Khmer Rouge soldiers.
One eyewitness said he was so scared of what awaited him his legs were
"quite literally shaking". After that, no one saw Ung Boun Hor again. Sitting
now in her cramped one-room flat in the Paris suburb of Nogent, Billon
Ung Boun Hor, 66, relates the horrifying events of those few
days three decades ago - portrayed in Roland Joffe's 1984 movie The
Killing Fields - calmly enough. But the years have done nothing to
temper her bitterness.
Shot on the spot
"My life stopped the day my husband was handed over," she said.
"I cannot accept that France, so-called land of justice, cradle of human
rights, did that. If the Khmer Rouge had stormed the embassy, shot him
on the spot ... but the French knew exactly what would happen to him and
they just threw him out. There's a photograph of it happening, here, in
Newsweek, May 19 1975. Look." Her husband's face is a mask of terror.
Now, with her three sons and daughter established in their own homes and
careers, Mrs Ung has engaged one of France's best-known lawyers, William
Bourdon, to sue persons unknown (a French legal tactic to ensure the police
investigation casts its net as wide as possible) for illegal confinement
and acts of torture. She does not necessarily want compensation, she says,
just an acknowledgement that, in the confused early hours of Pol Pot's
brutal regime, the former colonial power could have
made some effort to save a handful of elected officials whose lives were
in great danger and who had sought refuge and political asylum at its embassy.
"We could have done something," said one senior former member of
the French community in Phnom Penh, who asked not to be named. "The
compound was vast; a few helicopters and a few legionnaires and it would
all have been over. The Khmer Rouge were kids, they wouldn't have interfered.
This whole episode has been hushed up in France and it makes me ashamed
to be French."
Contemporary accounts by Sydney Schanberg, the New York Times correspondent
on whose story The Killing Fields was based, Dith Pran, his assistant,
and by the Sunday Times' Jon Swain and Newsweek photographer Al Rockoff,
describe the chaos at the embassy as about 1,000 desperate Cambodians and
300 fearful westerners ran short of food and water.
Fury
According to several reports, the remaining French diplomats and nationals
provoked fury by hogging the few bedrooms, standing on ceremony rather
than cooperating, and dining on steak when the rest of the refugees slept
outside and ate rice gruel, occasionally pork, and, finally, dogs and
cats - the pets they had brought in with them. Jean Dyrac, the vice-consul
left in charge, was plainly out of his depth. The Khmer Rouge refused to
recognise the embassy compound as French soil, calling it a re-groupment
centre for foreigners and demanding the handover of the "war criminals
and traitors" - the seven senior Cambodian officials. Otherwise the food,
water and electricity would be cut off, the communist guerrillas said.
No one knows how the Khmer Rouge knew that Ung Boun Hor and his colleagues,
including the king's cousin Sirik Matak, were in the embassy. Father
François Ponchaud, a French priest who was in the compound,
said recently that he could "only suppose they
were betrayed by a Frenchman, evidently, there was a leak from one of us".
Over the years Mrs Ung has talked to many of the western survivors from
the compound, almost all of whom were brought out in two bus convoys to
Bangkok. Few of the Cambodians who sought refuge in the embassy, tainted
by their obvious ties to Europe, survived: up to 30% of the population
died over the following few years. Mrs Ung lost, at least, 100
members of her family. She has pieced together a picture of what she thinks
happened; of how, supposedly out of concern for the safety of everyone
in the compound, Paris ordered Mr Dyrac to hand over
the men on the Khmer Rouge's wanted list.
Classified
She has seen the classified files containing the 25 or so telegrams between
the embassy and the foreign ministry, the contents of which, she says,
"confirm absolutely" that she was right to bring her case. She even
knows the names of the five French nationals who shared the $300,000 of
her family's money put in her husband's suitcase. Bernard Hamel,
who reported from Phnom Penh for Reuters until a few days before the Khmer
Rouge entered the city, interviewed embassy survivors as they got off the
buses in Bangkok, and has written three books on the period, told the Guardian
it was "perfectly clear" from what the fleeing westerners said - and what
they did not say - that something "shocking and appalling" had happened
in the compound. "There can be no doubt the 'super-traitors' handed
over were executed, probably the same day. 'Ordinary' Cambodians were forced
to join the mass exodus to the fields - it is harder to know their fate,
though you can make a good guess," Mr Hamel said. "I spent 12 years
trying to find out what happened to my Cambodian assistant, only to discover,
in 1987, that he and his family were massacred in September 1975."
Mrs Ung, who was born into one of Cambodia's
wealthiest families, enjoyed a gilded childhood, went to school in France
and lived the first 30 years of her life in great luxury (her
husband, 13 years her senior, was a minister, an ambassador and MP before
he became speaker). She landed in Paris in 1975 with $20,000
and some jewellery. Her parents and three sons had fled there in 1973,
when the nature of the Khmer Rouge threat became plain. For 25 years she
supported her family, working as a bank clerk. Every night still, she burns
incense in front of her husband's photo and tells him about her day.
"The foreign ministry has never wanted to have anything to do with me,
not even to receive me. For France, it's like I and my husband have never
existed. It can no longer behave like that." Who exactly, in Paris,
took the decision to surrender Ung Boun Hor and his colleagues, and why?
Was it really the only option? The League of Human
Rights is backing Mrs Ung's case, which some experts believe
could, when it comes to court, rapidly escalate
into a veritable affaire d'etat.
Backstory
Part of French-ruled Indochina and occupied by the Japanese in the second
world war, Cambodia gained full independence in 1953. Its ruler, Norodom
Sihanouk, was deposed in 1970 and the country became the Khmer
Republic - against which the Communist Khmer Rouge waged a brutal five-year
civil war that ended with the capture of Phnom Penh in 1975. Pol Pot became
prime minister and, under massive collectivisation, forced urban residents
back to the countryside. Maybe three million of the eight million-strong
population died, through forced labour and starvation, or were massacred
- a terror later brought to public attention by Roland Joffé's acclaimed
1984 film The Killing Fields. In 1978 invading Vietnamese troops overthrew
the regime. The Khmer Rouge continued fighting a sporadic guerilla war
until the late 1990s.
Cambodia Releases 4 Political Dissidents (2006-Jan-18)
 |
By Sopheng Cheang , Associated Press : PHNOM PENH -- The Cambodian
government on Tuesday released four imprisoned government critics -- a
union leader, a radio journalist and two social activists -- in a gesture
to the United States, which had condemned the arrests. Prime Minister Hun
Sen had met with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill
earlier in the day and promised to ask a Cambodian court to free the four
on bail. The government said the released activists would still face defamation
charges. Hill, who was in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, for the opening
of a new embassy, welcomed the release. |
"I think it's a positive
step, but I'd like to see it followed up by other steps," he said at
a news conference at the embassy. "Clearly, our interest would be to
see that this judicial process not go forward and that these people can
be free to go about their lives." Om Yentieng, an adviser to Hun Sen,
quoted the prime minister as saying he had made the bail request as "a
gift for Mr. Christopher Hill on the inauguration of the new U.S. Embassy."
Hun Sen "is doing this with his heart, as a Cambodian
helping other Cambodians" like himself, Om Yentieng said after
the meeting between the prime minister and the U.S. envoy.
Later in the day, radio journalist Mom Sonando, union leader Rong Chhun
and social activists Kem Sokha and Pa Nguon Tieng, both of the U.S.-funded
Cambodian Center for Human Rights, walked out of prison hand in hand and
were greeted by more than 100 supporters. |
L to R : Rong Chhun, Kem Sokha, Yeng Virak, Mam Sonando, Pa Nguon Teang receiving monks' blessing. |
 |
"I thank the Cambodian people for supporting me," Kem Sokha said
with a smile, raising his clenched fists in the air as the crowd responded
with cries of "Long live democracy!" Hun
Sen has sued the four for criticizing a border demarcation pact he signed
with neighboring Vietnam in October. The activists allegedly implied that
the deal ceded Cambodian land to Vietnam.
The United States had condemned their arrests as part of a government campaign
to neutralize opponents. Hill said he had a "good give-and-take" talk with
Hun Sen about the overall situation in Cambodia. "Obviously there's
some expression of concern in various places about the course of democracy.
Cambodia needs to make progress in this area," he said. [Photos Kohsantepheap] |
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