Gunfire at the Wat Munisotaram New Year celebrations here in Minnesota. A tragedy. Nobody hurt, and one person in jail as a result.
Rising Cambodian studies scholar Trent Walker recently gave a talk on Smot (ស្មូត្រ) singing with demonstrations and a show. I wish I’d been there. Anyone have recordings of any sort?
Yesterday, I posted about this, indicating that the new trial of Thach Saveth, the patsy accused of the murder of unionist Ros Sovannareth in 2004, might be a sign of improvement. I was premature.
For the second time, the Court of Appeal of Cambodia decided on Wednesday February 18th to uphold the sentenced issued by the Municipal Court in 2005 against Thach Saveth for the premeditated murder of trade unionist Ros Sovannareth. He had been condemned to 15 years in prison following a very criticised trial. A leading member of the Free Trade Union of Workers of the Kingdom of Cambodia (FTUWKC), Ros Sovannareth was shot by two unidentified men on a motorbike on May 7th 2004 in Phnom Penh.
Busy writing dissertation stuff lately, and have been neglecting my blog. Here are a few things that have happened of note in the last few weeks. At any rate, it’s the Cambodia-centered stuff that I’m interested in…
Andy Brouwer is one of Cambodia’s most famous non-Khmer bloggers (some graciously give us foreign bloggers the honorary title of cloggers, but I prefer ‘floggers,’ since it takes the air out of our unearned pretention). Andy’s posts are most commonly on temples, and are extremely fun and worthwhile. But here’s a post which deals with the mummified, displayed body, of murdered monk Sam Bunthoeurn, who figures briefly in my dissertation. Warning – the pictures can be disturbing for those squeamish about bodies and decomposition….
Mandevu is back, with a couple of fantastic posts on current fieldwork in the agricultural sector. Great photos of field inventories, and on the production of roof thatch. Can’t wait to see how this work turns out!
You must read the second part of Ka-Set’s interview with Richard Rechtman, French psychiatrist and anthropologist dealing with trauma, death, and memory. Fascinating stuff. (see also part one).
Economic stuff is looking bleak for 2009. The ILO reports that 500,000 Cambodians have been significantly affected already, with another million to be affected during 2009. More precise numerical predictions can be found in the article itself over at the Phnom Penh Post, along with a nice little factoid sidebar. Yikes.
Chea Mony, president of the Free Trade Union Workers of the Kingdom of Cambodia (FTUWKC), about which I have often written in these pages and elsewhere, has been nominated for the Martin Ennals award in Human Rights. Ennals was the founder and first president of Amnesty International. Mony deserves the recognition, and I hope it accompanies a resurgence in local support and labor activism and solidarity.
Ros Sovannareth was a union official and activist within the FTUWKC, when he was assassinated on May 7, 2004. He worked at the Trinunggal Komara Garment Factory, and was gunned down by two men riding a motorcycle. Just as in the murder of FTUWKC president Chea Vichea months previously (brother of Chea Mony), a patsy was found to take the legal fall. Now, with the accused killers of Chea Mony beginning to possibly receive a new trial, the accused killer of Ros Sovannareth will also receive an appeal. This isn’t justice, but it’s a necessary step forward.
Good news, Dougald O’Reilly, archaeologist, founder of Heritage Watch, and acclaimed scholar (I’m slowly working my way through his engaging book “Early Civilizations of Southeast Asia” in the five minute breaks between getting into bed and falling asleep these days, and am grateful for his work), has received a major award for Heritage Watch’s work. The Archaeological Institute of America’s Conservation and Heritage Management Award, was given to Dougald just a few days ago. Congratulations Dougald!
I haven’t talked much about the tribunal, largely because while I think a good tribunal would be truly beneficial for Cambodia, this tribunal, it is increasingly clear, is little more than another fig leaf for a political regime. The last one was a fig leaf for the recent invading Vietnamese; this one is a fig leaf for the international donor countries, some of who re-armed the Khmer Rouge in the eighties, while allowing their representatives to retain their seat in the UN.
My anger and disappointment about this entire thing is nearly incandescent.
François Bizot, one of the greatest academic authorities on Cambodian Buddhism, has a somewhat more measured statement on the beginning of the trial. One of Duch’s few survivors, Bizot was held in a prison camp by Duch north of Siem Reap prior to the victory of April 17, 1975, and was one of the only prisoners of that camp released. He has told his story in the bestselling book The Gate. His opinion piece in today’s New York Times deals with Duch as his own personal savior (insofar, I suppose, as Duch released him) and as a murderer of tens of thousands, in his capacity as the head of S-21. It’s definitely worth reading.
AFTER 10 years of detention, Kaing Guek Eav, alias Comrade Duch, is to appear today before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was arrested in 1999, after 20 years of living incognito, for crimes committed on his orders as commander of the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh from 1975 to 1979, when the Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia and were responsible for the deaths of more than a million people.
Bizot, “My Savior, Their Killer.”
Also note that finally (FINALLY), a history of the Khmer Rouge period will be returned to the curriculum of Cambodian students, something which has been nonexistent for years (history ended in 1974). I have actually interviewed a man intimately connected with the destruction of the older, early PRK-era textbooks which did discuss the Khmer Rouge. There is no escaping of the fact that all these histories will be imperfect, intended to fit one political agenda or another, but the mere fact that the Khmer Rouge will be discussed in high school curriculum at all is already a major change.
ugh. I haven’t been covering this story, so for background and details, I recommend checking New Mandala. In the meantime, this is a very upsetting video.
[photo by John Vink, taken from Ka-Set page]
The violent eviction of the residents of Dey Krahom in the early hours of Chinese New Year has been well-covered in a number of online fora and publications. It is horrific: the bravery of the residents in their attempts to resist the theft of their land and homes, the destruction of their livelihoods, and their safety was inspiring. The use of impoverished former evictees as workers ordered to violently evict others was tragic.
Dey Krahom was a deeply impoverished area – many called it a slum, though some residents objected to the term, preferring to call the area their home – located in an increasingly valuable part of Phnom Penh. Like previous evictees, the residents were violently intimidated over the course of years, threatened, and told they would be ‘compensated’ with kit homes in an area far outside of Phnom Penh that still lacks running water, sanitation, nearby markets, or anything else that makes life capable of being lived with dignity.
All for the new ‘owner’ of the land, 7NG, a large construction company. The company (or the police?) hired impoverished evictees from previous evictions to do much of the dirtiest and most dangerous work of demolishing the homes of the new evictees.
The entire situation reminds me of a well-known proverb:
ភ្នងដេញខ្មោច
ខ្មែរដេញភ្នង
ចិនដែញខ្មែរThe Pnong chase away the ghosts
The Khmer chase away the Pnong, and
The Chinese chase away the Khmer.
In this proverb, the “Pnong” stand in for every indigenous group living in land newly attractive to the lowland Khmer, who chase them off of the land after the Pnong are supposed to have chased away the spirits of the forests. But the chasing continues, for a stronger group then chases the Khmer off the same land. [I'd love to know more about this proverb - anyone have any ideas?]
You can read more about the evictions ay Dey Krahom in the following links. [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 - See also Flickr page here managed by Jinjadey krahom, ] But in the meantime, read this excerpt from the article in Ka-Set (English, below the fold). Read the rest of this entry »
Thousands of Greek protesters clashed with riot police yet again in Athens today, as police started to run out of tear gas after battling rioters day and night for a whole week.
Police sources said their riot squads had fired 4,600 tear gas canisters this week as rioters torched hundreds of banks and shops and occupied their campuses, where police after forbidden by law from entering.
The police have asked Israel and Germany to send them emergency supplies, while protesters claimed that they had been using old stock from the 1980s in a desperate bid to contain the rioting. They claimed that corroded chemicals were causing some demonstrators to collapse and need medical attention.
“We found tear gas canister dated from 1981,” said one demonstrator, calling himself only GK. “The old chemicals make us sick, people have fainted and have trouble breathing,” he said.
With the running street battles showing no sign of letting up, a march by students, anarchists and youths in masks ran into immediate trouble as rioters hurled rocks, fruit and chairs from street cafes at police trying to contain the latest rally.
Police responded by firing stun grenades and snatching rock-throwers who approached too close, at one point knocking down a Greek journalist with their plastic shields. As the masses approached parliament and challenged the police ranks, officers used remaining supplies of tear gas to drive them from the square before the assembly building.
via Greek police run out of tear gas as rioting continues for a seventh day – Times Online.
More bad monk news from Cambodia: a seventeen-year-old novice monk (samanera, សមណេរះ, នេន) in Cambodia’s northwestern Battambang province has confessed to attacking and raping a British tourist on the famous mountain of Phnom Sampov (“Boat Mountain.”) Phnom Sampov is a famed mountain just outside of Battambang town, and a major tourist site: with lots of caves, a burgeoning set of shrines, a temple (sometimes considered as two separate temples), there’s a lot to see. But in the recent past, most foreign tourists went up to see the site of one of Cambodia’s ‘killing fields.’ No field here, really: instead, during the Khmer Rouge period, the mountain was in part used as a prison and execution site, and victims were killed and then dropped down into a deep cave.
My thoughts are with this woman as she recovers from this horrible act of violence. I confess to having anger as well, at the ‘natural’ tendency of the international press to cover the endemic sexual violence in Cambodia, or anywhere, only when it affects tourists from powerful countries. As the article itself notes, monks are often accused of such crimes (not nearly as often as non-monks, a point not made in the article).
The fact of such crimes perpetrated by monks takes outside observers by surprise. While Cambodians often feel such immoral behavior as an affront to religion and morality, they are not usually surprised by it. The article hints at some of the reasons: in Cambodia, as in Thailand and Laos, most monks are not bhikkhus (ភិក្ខុ), intent on remaining in robes for life, but are novice monks, ordained for varying lengths of time.
Novice monks may ordain for as short a period as a few hours (usually this brevity is limited to ordinations ‘in front of the fire’ – បួសមុខភ្លើង) to a few years. Lengthier ordinations, which were more common in the past, tended to be ordinations in pursuit of education, while shorter ordinations are more often about the merit created by the act of ordination, rather than the morality of the period in robes.
Given that background, it is perhaps easier to understand why novice monks may be seen with some suspicion, and prone to acting out, like other young men, sometimes even in brutal and criminal ways.
There is also noted in the article the issue of ‘fake monks,’ which do indeed exist in some numbers in Cambodia. On occasion, these young men dress in robes to facilitate their thieving (it’s difficult for a shopkeeper to shout ‘thief’ and get an immediate response when she appears to be pointing at a small group of monks, for instance), and more commonly they beg for alms. ‘Fake monks’ is a term that can be applied variously to impostors and to ‘bad monks.’
The article from the Telegraph after the jump… Read the rest of this entry »
Via the Stimulator. For more information on that ‘poor, unarmored’ police officer shown being ‘harassed’ dragging an unresisting protester along the ground, see here, with multiple videos of the citizens’ unarrest.
Independent media has begun releasing longer, more in-depth accounts of what went down here in September, when they – along with tens of thousands of peaceful citizens – suddenly found themselves in a repressive police state that resembled fabled Minnesota Nice not at all. Independent media was specifically targeted, along with folks from the RNC Welcoming Committee.
Sometime today, the good folks from Twin Cities Indymedia and the Glass Bead Collective will release a hi-definition downloadable (and burnable to dvd) version of their documentary, “Terrorizing Dissent.” There will be public showings in various locations [check the web site]. In the meantime, here’s the trailer.
Tom Hayden, one of the Chicago 8 forty years ago, has been a good egg, making the parallels explicit. He was on Macalester’s campus last week, talking up this point, the fact that police adhere to a ’scare the sh*t out of the public’ script in these cases, and that
As long as the pubic is dumb and the politicians cowardly, they won’t have to send out agents. But I don’t see how this pulling the wool over the eyes of people can go on forever.
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