Camboya (Continuación)

MundoAsia

Le gouvernement cambodgien est coupable de meurtres. Certes ils ne sont pas comparables aux massacres génocidaires commis par les Khmers rouges dans les années 1970 ou à ce que l’on voit en Syrie, et leur ampleur n’est pas la même que celle des violences en Ukraine, au Venezuela, en Thaïlande ou au Bangladesh, qui ont fait récemment la une des médias. Mais il s’agit de meurtres de citoyens cambodgiens délibérément visés par les forces de sécurité de leur pays.

Le 3 janvier, cinq personnes ont été tuées par la police à Phnom Penh lors de manifestations pacifiques d’ouvriers du textile qui revendiquaient un salaire minimum décent.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia

El Gobierno de Camboya ha estado disfrutando de impunidad respecto de los asesinatos. No se trata del tipo de matanza genocida llevada a cabo por los jemeres rojos en el decenio de 1970 ni tampoco de la escala de asesinatos que ha estado agitando a Siria o que ha situado últimamente a Ucrania, Venezuela, Tailandia y Bangladesh en los titulares mundiales, pero, aun así, se trata de asesinatos de ciudadanos camboyanos en quienes las fuerzas de seguridad de su país han puesto la mira.

El 3 de enero, cinco trabajadores del sector textil que hacían huelga fueron muertos a tiros en Phnom Penh cuando pedían pacíficamente un salario mínimo con el que poder vivir.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia,

On Dec. 29, more than 100,000 Cambodians — garment workers, teachers, farmers and students from all over the country — marched through the streets of the capital calling for Hun Sen, our long-serving prime minister-dictator, to step down or allow an independent investigation into the flawed national elections that took place in July.

The massive demonstration was the culmination of months of nonviolent rallies and marches led by the Cambodia National Rescue Party (C.N.R.P.). It was also the most significant challenge to Hun Sen’s 28-year reign of exploitation and corruption.

And he could not tolerate it. He would sooner draw blood than enact real reform.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia,

Cambodia is at a standstill. Although the National Election Committee has yet to announce the official results of the July 28 general election, the ruling party has already claimed victory. It announced soon after polling closed that the governing Cambodian People’s Party (C.P.P.) had won 68 seats and the Cambodia National Rescue Party (C.N.R.P.) 55. But the opposition contests the count, alleging massive fraud, and it says it will boycott the new National Assembly if an independent investigation isn’t conducted. Prime Minister Hun Sen opposes any inquiry not overseen by the very election commission the opposition accuses of vote-rigging, and he has threatened to redistribute to the C.P.P.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia

As the U.S. presidential election approaches, Barack Obama is in danger of allowing his good offices to be used as part of an attempt to deny Cambodians the opportunity for self-determination that Americans take for granted.

President Obama is due to visit Cambodia next month as the country holds the presidency of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 2012. Ahead of Cambodian elections in July 2013, Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has been in power since 1985, has been engaging in a familiar pattern of cracking down on the voices of opposition. He knows that it’s an easier and safer way to win elections than allowing democratic debate.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia

There’s a lot of hand-wringing in New York right now about what the United Nations should do to stop brutal, state-looting dictators. A good place to start would be not to consider them as candidates for a seat on the Security Council.

On Thursday, Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen will find out if his country has won the Council’s Asia-Pacific seat. Cambodia is unlikely to beat South Korea’s bid, but it shouldn’t be in the running at all.

Cambodia is in the grip of an unprecedented land-grabbing crisis as an increasingly confident and insatiable elite helps itself to pretty much any natural resource it wants, ignoring its own laws and bulldozing local communities and dissenters out of the way.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia, ,

After months of riveting testimony, a war crimes tribunal in Cambodia is struggling to continue its own Nuremberg-style trial of former senior Khmer Rouge leaders Khieu Samphan, Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary.

It is inconceivable that the international community would imperil this historic trial midstream and undermine justice for the estimated 1.7 million Cambodians who perished under Pol Pot’s rule from 1975 to 1979.

The survivors have not forgotten what they endured. An astounding 150,000 Cambodians have visited the trials of the tribunal in Phnom Penh — a number that exceeds the public spectators of all of the other war-crimes tribunals combined.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia,

An anti-logging activist is murdered, a teenage girl is shot and killed by police during a forcible eviction, 13 women are sentenced to up to two-and-a-half years in prison simply for holding a protest on land from which they’ve been expropriated. These are recent examples of the all-too-familiar human rights abuses that result from the Cambodian government’s disastrous land policy.

Investment in Cambodia’s agriculture sector is long overdue. But instead of passing reforms that would help the country’s many farmers and villagers better use their land — 80 percent of the total population is rural — the government has signed off almost 11,600 square miles of Cambodia’s arable land to investors, including major Chinese and Vietnamese companies and local firms with ties to the governing Cambodian People’s Party (C.P.P.).…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia,

“I not only weaken the opposition, I’m going to make them dead ... and if anyone is strong enough to try to hold a demonstration, I will beat all those dogs and put them in a cage.”

No, this was not Muammar el-Qaddafi in his infamous “cockroach” speech in 2011, when he urged his supporters to go “house to house” to kill the opposition. The speaker was Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia, responding with typically threatening language to the suggestion by a Cambodian critic that he should be worried about the overthrow of a dictator in Tunisia.

Often overlooked in discussions about the world’s most notorious autocrats, on Friday Hun Sen will join the “10,000 Club,” a group of strongmen who through politically motivated violence, control of the security forces, massive corruption and the tacit support of foreign powers have been able to remain in power for 10,000 days.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia, ,

During the Cambodian civil war from 1970 to 1998, the Khmer Rouge and other paramilitary groups began decimating that country's ancient sites in search of treasures to sell on the international art market. Along with arms dealing and drug smuggling, the looting and trafficking of artifacts became organized industries, which helped finance one of the 20th century's most notorious regimes.

My colleagues and I have documented the painful scars from this plunder — desecrated tombs, beheaded statues and ransacked temples — at archaeological sites throughout Cambodia. We've spoken with looters, middlemen and dealers, and have even posed as collectors. The exact path of pillaged objects is admittedly difficult to trace.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia, ,

Las grandes matanzas del siglo XX han suscitado un enorme volumen de publicaciones en las que se relatan historias individuales, en su inmensa mayoría las de las víctimas y los supervivientes. Los libros como Desde aquella oscuridad, en el que la periodista Gitta Sereny refleja sus entrevistas detalladas con Franz Stangl, el antiguo responsable de Treblinka, son excepción. Y todavía más infrecuente, e incluso imposible, es encontrar documentales que nos muestren a los autores de esos crímenes de masas comprometidos con la búsqueda de la verdad. Pero su interés salta a la vista. Oír hablar a las víctimas es desgarrador, provoca emoción y compasión, pero no nos enseña nada: las víctimas no son las responsables de esos hechos, sino quienes han sufrido, impotentes, la voluntad de otros.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia, , ,

International criminal courts usually begin their work with a mid-ranking defendant and impose a heavy sentence after their first conviction. The war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia were the first to do so.

On Friday, the appeals chamber of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia — a mixed tribunal based in Phnom Penh and tasked with trying the worst offenders of the Pol Pot regime — followed in their footsteps: it imposed a life sentence on Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch, the 69-year-old former commander of the Khmer Rouge’s infamous S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, where between 1975 and 1979 more than 12,000 people were detained, tortured and sent for execution.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia, ,

A few hours outside of Cambodia’s capital, 58-year-old Taing Kim, a delicate woman who spent several years as a nun, lives in a gray concrete house in the middle of a quiet village amid a sea of rice paddies. She settled in Kampong Chhnang nearly 30 years ago and makes her living by farming and selling firewood. She was married in 1980 but says her husband left her when he learned of her past.

Taing Kim is one of thousands of victims who have filed to be heard in the trial of three of the surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge, the murderous party in power from 1975 to 1979 that tried to forcibly create an agrarian utopia in Cambodia — and killed some 1.7 million people along the way.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia,

This past Monday, Siegfried Blunk, the international co-investigating judge at the United Nations-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal in Cambodia, resigned. As Judge Blunk explained, repeated demands by senior Cambodian officials to end all ongoing investigations have been “perceived as attempted interference” and “call in doubt the integrity of the whole proceedings.”

For months, civil society organizations, including my own, have warned that the Cambodian government’s public opposition to the two remaining cases under investigation (“003” and “004” in the parlance of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia) threatened the very independence of the court. Judge Blunk has now, sadly, confirmed our greatest fears.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia

This year is the 20th anniversary of the Paris peace accords that ended the Cambodian war and any further threat from the murderous Khmer Rouge. It required all the major powers — the United States, leading European countries, the former Soviet Union and China — as well as most Asian nations to come up with an accord, a rare achievement. In a speech last week, Gareth Evans said that during his eight years as the Australian foreign minister “nothing has given me more pleasure and pride than the Paris peace agreement concluded in 1991.”

I reported from Paris on the negotiations, which took several years of convoluted diplomacy since few countries or political parties had clean hands in the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia,

The trial of surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge will begin in Phnom Penh on Monday. The fact that the case has even made it this far is a minor miracle to those of us who were in Cambodia during the 1990s, when the defendants’ amnesties seemed secure.

The court — the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (E.C.C.C.), better known as the “mixed tribunal” — has charged, with various counts of war crimes, the former head of state, Khieu Samphan; Nuon Chea, described as the movement’s ideologue; Ieng Sary, the foreign minister; and his wife, Ieng Thirith, who was minister of social affairs.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia, ,

Las escaramuzas militares entre Tailandia y Camboya, que desde febrero se han cobrado más de dos decenas de vidas, causaron numerosos heridos y desplazaron a decenas de miles de personas se pueden atribuir principalmente a la política interna en ambos países. Con raíces en antiguas enemistades y el legado de la época colonial, la lucha está perjudicando a toda la región. Tan virulenta es la controversia que incluso una solución a corto plazo requerirá la mediación de terceros. Una paz segura dependerá principalmente de cuál sea el desenlace de la crisis política interna de Tailandia en los próximos meses y de la voluntad de Camboya de mantenerse al margen de este proceso.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia, ,

More than 30 years after the murderous Khmer Rouge were driven from power in Cambodia, the U.N.-backed effort to bring justice to the victims of the killing fields stands on the brink of ignominious failure due to political interference from the Cambodian government and the indifference of the international community.

A hybrid court, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, has spent over $200 million since it was set up in 2003 with both international and local judges and prosecutors. It has tried only one person: Kang Kech Eav, or Duch, the head of the notorious Tuol Sleng prison complex, who is appealing his conviction for crimes against humanity, murder and torture.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia, ,

Peter Klashorst says it was just another regular day of heat, hawkers and honking in Cambodia’s capital when his walking paintings caused a stir on the street.

Portraits more than six and a half feet high and nearly four feet wide floated by — the large canvases cloaking the men carrying them — leaving pedestrians befuddled and even distressed.

The Dutch artist thinks some people recognized the iconic faces he had rendered: Those of prisoners tortured in the Khmer Rouge’s infamous S-21 prison. Memories of this death machine and its victims remain among the most indelible images of Cambodia’s nightmare revolution in the late 1970s, in which an estimated 1.7 million people perished.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia,

Representatives of more than 3,000 governments and donor organizations are meeting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on Wednesday. If past experience is indicative, they will pledge to provide hundreds of millions in aid.

Most of these donors should simply stay home.

Year after year, smiling Cambodian government leaders attend these pledge conferences, holding out their hands. But first they have to listen as ambassadors and aid officers stand at the podium, look them in the eye, and lambast them for corruption and jaw-dropping human rights abuses.

Each year Prime Minister Hun Sen promises to reform. The donors nod and make their pledges — $1.1 billion last year.…  Seguir leyendo »