If you think LOS is extremely corrupt, read this...

[kamui]

Cambodia Profits From Killing Fields and Other Symbols

By SETH MYDANS

The New York Times

November 6, 2005

 

CHEUNG EK, Cambodia - There is little to see here but gaping pits in the ground and a glass-fronted tower that holds some of the 8,000 skulls of people who were slaughtered here.

 

This is the most venerated of the hundreds of killing fields in Cambodia, and over the decades it has become a place to remember the 1.7 million people who died during the brutal rule of the Communist Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979.

 

So many Cambodians were shocked when the government announced last spring that it had leased the Cheung Ek killing field to a Japanese company to manage for a profit. "It is commercializing the memories," Youk Chhang, director of the leading archive of Khmer Rouge materials, said at the time. "Memories cannot be sold, cannot be contracted."

 

But the deal should have come as no surprise. The market is hot now for government assets and prime real estate - universities, courts, hospitals, police stations, ministry buildings - which are being sold or bartered as if Cambodia were somehow going out of business.

 

It is the latest wave in the corruption that, hand in hand with lawlessness and impunity, has thwarted the country's emergence from the destruction of the Khmer Rouge years.

 

This is a land where just about everything seems to be for sale or lease: forests, fisheries, mining concessions, air routes, ship registrations, toxic dumps, weapons, women, girls, boys, babies. Long before the deal for the killing field, just south of the capital, Phnom Penh, the government gave a well-connected private company the concession to earn millions of dollars managing Cambodia's national symbol, Angkor Wat.

 

Land values in Phnom Penh are estimated to have tripled in the past five years, and the market is so rabid that small lakes are being filled to create more prime land to sell.

 

"There seems to be a frenzy, a momentum to grab up anything you can," said Miloon Kothari, a specialist on adequate housing for the United Nations, on a visit here at the end of August. "The decisions seem to be dictated by money and political expediency."

 

The most prominent of the current deals are being accomplished in a stream of land swap agreements with a small number of well-connected private companies.

 

In those swaps, the developer promises to build a replacement on the outskirts or suburbs of the city where land is less valuable, but most details remain secret.

 

In one deal, the Royal University of Fine Arts, near the French Embassy in Phnom Penh, is being swapped for a building to be completed on reclaimed land at a far edge of the city.

 

In another, the municipal police headquarters near the central market has been traded for a new building on the outskirts. Similar deals have been made for police headquarters in Siem Reap and Battambang, according the Licadho, one of Cambodia's leading human rights groups.

 

The main prison, behind the Royal Palace, has been emptied for a developer who has built a prison, also on the outskirts.

 

The Cambodia Daily reported that one developer had acquired the Ministry of Justice, the Supreme Court, the Appeals Court and the Phnom Penh Municipal Court, and was building suburban replacements.

 

"The government sells schools, a hospital, and now a lake," Kek Galabru, who heads Licadho, said last spring. "One day they're going to sell the Mekong - they're going to sell the whole of Phnom Penh."

 

The Cheung Ek killing field was the main execution site for prisoners from Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, about seven miles away.

 

The lease gives the Japanese company, JC Royal Company, a 30-year contract starting at $15,000 a year, with graduated increases.

 

Based on figures provided by an official here, the company stands eventually to earn about $18,000 a month in entrance fees. The profits are to go to a fund that is half owned by Cambodian government officials. The company has agreed to clean up and organize the site. Some fear that will dull the raw immediacy that gives the area its haunted feel.

 

But the killing field has long been a place of commerce as well as of ghosts, surrounded by soft drink and souvenir sellers and filled with the chants of child beggars: "One dollar, one dollar, one dollar," and, "You give me money."

 

The deputy administrator of the memorial, Ros Sophea Ravi, said that even before the Japanese company raised the entrance fee to $2 from 50 cents, the ghosts seemed to have departed.

 

The children, too, said their parents had begun to let them out of their houses at night, feeling less threatened by the wandering souls of the victims of the killing field. The caretaker, Svay Phreung, 70, who lives in a lean-to made of palm leaves, said that like a caterpillar that takes time to mature, the souls of the dead must wait until the time comes for their departure and rebirth.

 

The ghosts of the dead here "have gone to another life," he said, and the spirit world has become quieter, reverting to the control of the local guardian spirit, which has made its home here since long before the Khmer Rouge came.

 

Asked whether local spirits had been able to save any of the victims here, he said: "How could they help? The Khmer Rouge banned religion."

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/international/asia/06cambodia.html

[zanemay]

You know these AH reporters / commentators have to say / write something or they aren't working. Whatever sounds bad flies, and Cambodia and Thailand are easy targets for "reporters."

 

I don't see where the "corruption" comes in to much of anything cited in the article, and if there is some of the lightweight type they refer to, who cares? Notice the slimeball writer reaches out from the granting of a small concession to a Japanese company to the selling of children. Just bash the country with the broadest bat possible!

 

This kind of "story" is like the one they came up with immediately after the tsunami about "Swedish child stolen from hospital probably sold into sex slavery" when a Thai doctor got confused by farang names and thought he may have treated a boy with the name of a missing child. He didn't, the child was never in the hospital, never kidnapped, (probably killed by the wave) but that didn't stop the European and American media from running story after story about child slavery in the Tsunami effected countries and the sudden vulnerability of orphaned children. They just conjectured, imagined and projected a lot of baseless sleaze that pulls ratings.

 

And when they couldn't dig up anything of substance to support any of their bullshit, they jumped their reports to Cambodia for good measure, even though it was completely untouched by the tsunami.

 

Meanwhile there was no apology whatsoever for trashing the character of Thailand as a country full of orphan child slave traders.

 

These "writers" or whatever they are, have to put words on paper. They do so to keep their jobs, build their reputations and sell advertising. They are the ones who are corrupt and doing the exploiting. They feed the white readers prediliction to xenophobia and cultural superiority for their own purposes.

 

ZM

[kamui]

I agree, that a part of this paragraph:

This is a land where just about everything seems to be for sale or lease: forests, fisheries, mining concessions, air routes, ship registrations, toxic dumps, weapons, women, girls, boys, babies. Long before the deal for the killing field, just south of the capital, Phnom Penh, the government gave a well-connected private company the concession to earn millions of dollars managing Cambodia's national symbol, Angkor Wat.

is the typical negative stereotype on Cambodia repeated since years in international media - especially the hints on paedophilia, for which for I have not seen recent statistic which support this claims. This is the standard negative exaggeration which seems to be part of every media report on Cambodia. Unfortunately the current government doesn't do anything against it and even more worse most of the rest in the paragraph is true.

 

That National assets like Angkor, the Killing Fields, the Royal Academy of Arts or police stations have been sold (or leased for decades) is a fact and was more or less openly reported in national Cambodian media. It is a fact that a private company runs Angkor, but doesn't do anything for the religious site except maintaining basic security. The recent sale of the Killing Fields to a private partnership (half Japanese, half held by an influential minister) has been reportedly widely and the result will be same...

I don't how to call this sales, if not corruption: a Khmer official sells/leases a part of the Khmer heritage (this would be unthinkable I any other country I know) and he is the buyer at the same time. First he receive huge amounts of (bribe) money for the sale and later has a huge monthly income as part of the private company.

 

Moreover, WTO statistics show that Cambodia is even more corrupt than Vietnam and Laos (not to speak of Thailand). Currently half of the governmental budget is comes from foreign governments/institutions and a large part of the funds ends in the pockets of the oligarchs, bureaucrats and military (if I remember right, it is around 50%). Encroaching of the forests is very worse, e.g. The latest hot topic is that the PM Hun Sen gave (sold?) a part of Cambodia to Vietnam...

A highly visible example of corruption is the inability of the Khmer government to build a decent road between Siem Reap and Poipet at the Thai border. This is the main road between the two countries and I have read that money for the project was distributed a few years ago....

 

Cambodia is in a very bad state and the Khmer leaders are the worst scammers of all unfortunately. They use every means to exploit there own country and people, there was even a rumour that a Thai official sold a part of the Royal Palace recently.

[zanemay]

Okay and thanks for the additional details. Yes there is plenty of official corruption in Asia.

 

ZM

[kamui]

Oh, I made a severe mistake in my last sentence. I meant to say a Khmer official is said to have sold a part of the Royal Palace in PP.

 

Last year it just needed a (absolutely wrong) report in Cambo about an Thai actor/singer that Angkor belongs to Thailand to spark riots in PP with burnt houses etc....

[paul101]

kamui said:

I agree, that a part of this paragraph:

This is a land where just about everything seems to be for sale or lease: forests, fisheries, mining concessions, air routes, ship registrations, toxic dumps, weapons, women, girls, boys, babies. Long before the deal for the killing field, just south of the capital, Phnom Penh, the government gave a well-connected private company the concession to earn millions of dollars managing Cambodia's national symbol, Angkor Wat.

is the typical negative stereotype on Cambodia repeated since years in international media - especially the hints on paedophilia, for which for I have not seen recent statistic which support this claims.

 

To imply the sexual abuse of children in cambodia is not a significant problem is about as odd as claiming the hollocaust never happened. I have seen Pol Pots number 2 being interveiwed and he claims few people were ever murdered under the KR, wonder who killed over a million then?

People will often claim lack of evidence, or that things are improving but arrests for child abuse in cambodia appear to be on the rise year on year so how can that mean less child abuse? This article http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/10/27/news/pedophile.php

gives only 18 westerners out of 401 arrests in Cambodia last year for abusing children. Lets wait and see what the figures are for this year. I am convinced cambodia and vietnam are still destinations for westerners determined to abuse kids, there other places for sure.