CAMBODIA: Informal Sex Trade Threatens to Undercut Gains in HIV

July 20, 2010 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Irwin Loy

PHNOM PENH, Jul 20, 2010 (IPS) – On a muggy evening, a handful of men in suits were quickly getting drunk in a beer garden here in the Cambodian capital. One man rested his hand on the thigh of a slender woman sitting uncomfortably in a short skirt.

A sign above the table read: "Be responsible. Use a condom."

"The customers play around with us all the time," said Neang, glancing at the scene unfolding at the next table. "They touch my breasts, or put their hands on my thigh while I’m sitting down. I don’t like it, but I have no other choice."

Beer promoters like Neang and others who work in places where Cambodia’s informal sex industry can be found are a growing concern for health experts in this South-east Asian country, as sex work shifts from traditional settings like brothels to informal ones in the entertainment sector.

Women who work in karaoke bars or beer gardens like this one may not identify as sex workers, but some occasionally sell sex to top up their meager earnings.

Neang, who asked that her full name not be used, said she recently decided not to have sex with her customers after she got married. In the past, though, many of the men who propositioned her would refuse to use a condom.

"The NGOs tell us to wear condoms properly to prevent HIV infection," she said. "But in the past, when I slept with customers, some insisted it was not necessary. It is hard to refuse."

Cambodia is seen as a success story in HIV prevention. It has managed to reduce its HIV prevalence rate among adults from a high of two percent in 1998 to an estimated 0.7 percent last year. If this trend continues, Cambodia will be on track to meet its Millennium Development Goals (MDG) for cutting HIV prevalence rates by 2015.

But critics say the government’s drive to stamp out human trafficking has actually exacerbated HIV risks for sex workers because it is forcing many to go underground. Without a renewed emphasis to reach those in the informal sex trade, Cambodia could face a stumbling block in meeting its MDG target on HIV.

Authorities have targeted suspected brothels as part of their crackdown on human trafficking. But advocates say the raids have resulted mainly in the arrest of sex workers, many of whom were driven to the trade by poverty, not trafficking.

The end result has been to push sex workers into hiding – and away from the reach of HIV prevention programmes.

"The more crackdowns, the more people will be pushed underground and disappear," said Tea Phauly, the most at- risk populations adviser with the Joint U.N. Programme on AIDS (UNAIDS) in Cambodia. "And it is very difficult to structure a response to reach these people."

Government studies here have shown that brothel-based sex workers are more likely to use condoms than women who sometimes sell sex in entertainment establishments.

But advocates say they now have difficulty reaching sex workers, many of whom have ended up in beer gardens and karaoke bars. "We can approach them, but not like before. They remain hidden," said Ly Pisey, a technical assistant with the advocacy group Women’s Network for Unity.

Ly says outreach workers used to be able to easily access brothels and talk to sex workers about HIV prevention and health care. "But now if you go … and ask, ‘Are you a sex worker?’ they say no," she said.

In March, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen delivered a speech that was interpreted by police officials as an order to intensify a crackdown on human trafficking. Within two weeks, raids on suspected brothels sent more than 280 sex workers into hiding, according to a local non-government group that tracked the enforcement.

Police actions have eased up in recent weeks, but the raids are a cyclical part of a longer-term trend that has helped change the nature of Cambodia’s sex industry.

Bith Kimhong, director of the Ministry of Interior’s anti- trafficking bureau, said: "We shut down clubs that are related to sex trafficking. We want to eliminate such sayings that Cambodia is a place for sex tourism."

Sex workers, he says, are not the targets of such enforcement. "We know when closing such establishments, there are more people losing their jobs," he said. "We cannot avoid this. The benefit is that we want to guarantee safety and security for our country."

UNAIDS and Cambodian authorities are developing a plan to ensure that sex workers – especially those in entertainment venues like the beer garden Neang works in – are able to access HIV education and health care. Officials hope such a plan will include broad community partnerships, particularly with police officers.

"What we don’t want to see is a second (HIV) epidemic," said Tony Lisle, the UNAIDS country coordinator in Cambodia.

In 1996, the HIV prevalence rate for female sex workers was well above 40 percent. Ten years later, this rate had dropped to around 14 percent, according to the last countrywide survey.

"There’s been an enormous amount of work done in reducing both incidence and prevalence of HIV," Lisle said. "But we have to be mindful that if we don’t continue to roll out innovative, effective, scaled programmes in prevention and continue to normalise condom use, if we don’t keep the pace up and the intensity up with populations at risk for HIV, we could well see a reemergence of an epidemic – which we don’t want."

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This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


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CAMBODIA: Judgment Day Nears for Khmer Rouge Torturer-in-chief

July 9, 2010 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jul 9, 2010 (IPS) – The torturer-in-chief of a notorious prison during the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror in Cambodia will finally learn what price he has to pay for the almost mathematical precision with which he carried out his duty to torment and kill nearly 14,000 people, including babies.

The judgement on Jul. 26, in the first international trial of a surviving Khmer Rouge leader, will be a groundbreaking moment for the South-east Asian nation, coming 31 years after the genocidal regime led by Pol Pot was driven out of power.

The 77-day trial of Kaing Khek Eav, better known as Comrade Duch, at the U.N.-backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) on the outskirts of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, began on Mar. 30, 2009.

The prosecution in this hybrid war crimes tribunal, which includes international and local jurists and lawyers, has pushed for a 45-year sentence for the 67-year-old chief jailer of the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh. Duch faces charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes, murder and torture.

Tuol Sleng, or S-21 as the extremist Maoist group called it, was a former high school where Duch and other jailers interrogated and tortured civilians, including children, who were considered enemies of the Khmer Rouge.

Only 11 people came out alive from the estimated 12,380 to 14,000 people imprisoned in Tuol Sleng. It was one of the nearly 200 detention centres that the Khmer Rouge maintained across the country during its rule from April 1975 to January 1979.

During this period, close to 1.7 million people, or nearly a quarter of that country’s population at the time, were executed or died due to forced labour or from starvation, as the reclusive tyrant Pol Pot pushed to create an agrarian utopia.

Among those who survived Cambodia’s ‘Killing Fields’ is Vann Nath, for whom the Duch trial has been a personal matter. He was among the 11 prisoners of Tuol Sleng who walked out alive. Duch was "the former butcher of Tuol Sleng," Vann Nath wrote in a book about the horrific period he spent in the Khmer Rouge’s most notorious prison.

It was his talent as a painter that kept him alive. Vann Nath was ordered to produce regular portraits of a man he hardly knew but was shown black-and white photographs of – Pol Pot. This order from Duch left him little room for error in making the initial black-and-white, and the subsequent colour portraits, of the Khmer Rouge leader.

"I will go to the court to hear the verdict if my health is good," the now 63- year-old Vann Nath said in a telephone interview from Phnom Penh, where he is recovering from surgery on his left arm. "I hope the court will be fair and provide justice in its verdict."

Other Cambodians like Youk Chhang are more demanding of the judgement for Duch. A long sentence for Duch – spending the rest of his years in a prison where "he will be fed daily" and "do nothing more" – may not "satisfy all the people who followed his trial and learnt of all the horror that took place," Youk told IPS.

"He should be made to read the confessions of what he did to the victims in Tuol Sleng every day in prison as a reminder of his actions," said Youk, director of the Phnom Penh-based Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC- Cam), which has recorded the accounts of nearly one million victims and identified the presence of 20,000 mass graves. "Some people want him to get a life sentence so that he could never be a free man."

Whatever the judgement, the significance of the Duch trial has not been lost on a country still struggling to recover from nearly two decades of conflict, including the Khmer Rouge brutality, from the early 1970s through the mid- 1990s.

After Duch, other more powerful surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge are headed for the tribunal. They include Nuon Chea, who was Pol Pot’s deputy, Khieu Samphan, the country’s president during the Khmer Rouge years, and Ieng Sary, the foreign minister at the time.

Beyond the legal import of its work, the tribunal has also been helping fulfill the broader objective of helping Cambodians reach closure in a painful part of their history. The national broadcasts of its proceedings serve as a court- sanctioned narrative of a dark period that had not been subject to official scrutiny.

"The court’s outreach has had a measure of success in informing the public about what was going on at the Duch trial," says Rupert Abbot, a lawyer at the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights. "The process has had a role in people understanding what happened and why things happened."

"The trial will help bring some closure," he said in an interview from Phnom Penh. "It will help draw a line about a period in Cambodian history, especially since you have a new generation."

More worrying, however, with the upcoming verdicts on the cases of ageing Khmer Rouge leaders, is how much support the tribunal will receive from the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, who used to be a low-ranking Khmer Rouge member.

"The government has not been playing ball," says Abbot. "The Duch trial was easy, because he was willing to admit to what he did, and it was just at S-21. In the next cases, the crime scene is the entire country."

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2010.

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CAMBODIA: Aid Donors Urged to Demand Faster Reforms from Gov’t

June 7, 2010 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Irwin Loy

PHNOM PENH, June 7, 2010 (IPS) – Yuen Mach sat on the floor of her wooden home, her hands nervously twisting a stalk of lemongrass into fibrous strands.

Ever since authorities told her that the plot of land that her family occupies and which overlooks Phnom Penh’s Boeung Kak lake no longer belonged to her, but to a local company that plans to flip the site into a massive real estate development, her days have been filled with worry.

"The government took the land from the poor and gave it to the rich people," she said. "We are the poor people. Now they say we’re living on state property illegally."

Yuen and her relatives are among an estimated 4,000 families that will likely be relocated as part of the sprawling 133-hectare development – the largest real estate project in Cambodia’s rapidly changing capital.

With numerous other land disputes simmering across the country, housing rights advocates here say Boeung Kak lake is just one potent symbol of the worsening problems affecting the landless poor – land tenure, poverty and the cavernous gap between rich and poor.

But with international donors having pledged a record 1.1 billion U.S. dollars this year in aid to the government, some advocates say that those who hold the most influence have failed to use it to urge the government to pursue faster reforms.

"There are donors who give money and then keep quiet. We are sorry for that," said Chhith Sam Ath, executive director of the coalition NGO Forum on Cambodia, which is composed of local and international non-governmental organisations working in the South-east Asian country. "People are crying and they just stay quiet."

The majority of the population in Cambodia lacks legal land titles, a result of the tumultuous Khmer Rouge regime that emptied Phnom Penh of its inhabitants and stripped away private ownership. When the regime fell in 1979, refugees flooded back to the cities from the countryside, many settling in abandoned buildings and squatting on vacant land.

"When we moved here, everybody just emerged from death, from the Khmer Rouge," Yuen said. "We just grabbed it and lived on the land. If the government had told us that living here was illegal, I would never have moved here."

An ambitious donor-funded land titling project begun in 2002 was supposed to have helped people like Yuen. The 28.8-million-dollar Land Management and Administration Project, or LMAP, was designed to create a government- run land management programme and distribute official land titles. Nearly one million land titles were issued as part of LMAP across the country.

But when the Boeung Kak lake residents demanded titles as part of the programme, authorities rejected the requests, claiming the residents were living illegally on state property. The residents soon learned the land had been leased to a private developer, whose plans for new office towers and villas did not include them.

After the project’s proponents raised concerns about evictions with the government, authorities responded by abruptly cancelling the programme in September 2009.

The issue of land rights is just one of many on which critics are urging donors to take a tougher stand. The international watchdog organisation, Global Witness, slammed international donors last week for continuing to hand over huge sums of aid money, "despite evidence of widespread corruption and mismanagement of public funds."

"The Cambodian government has been promising to reform for years, but nothing has changed," Gavin Hayman, the group’s campaigns director, said in a statement.

The government, however, called the accusations part of a "hugely damaging smear campaign" to discredit authorities. "The request from NGOs to put pressure on the government and donors is a bad approach. They insult the government and they insult the donors," said government spokesman Phay Siphan.

"We are all partners here. We respect each other and we respect the partnership. And the country donors respect this nation’s right to be a nation."

In the end, the government said the donors had cumulatively pledged roughly 1.1 billion dollars toward the national budget.

Rafael Dochao Moreno, the chargé d’affaires for the Delegation of the European Union to Cambodia, said he believes the country is making strides toward development.

"It would be impossible for NGOs and development partners to agree 100 per cent," he said. "At the end of the day, nothing is black or white. I think there is a consensus that this country is moving in the right direction.

Still, now that the money has been pledged, some critics believe donors should be acting more aggressively to ensure the funds are well spent.

"The donors should make it clear that if the government is not willing to use the aid effectively, they can find alternative ways to do so," said Ou Virak, president of the non-governmental Cambodian Centre for Human Rights. "The problem is that message has never been clear."

Though donors insist they are urging Cambodian authorities to increase transparency, Ou said their efforts have done little to ensure Cambodians themselves can hold their government to account. Despite the promises, it remains unclear just where all the aid money will go, he said.

"It’s easy to call on the donors to bring about change," he said. "But the fundamental challenge here is how the donors can put conditions in place that will allow the Cambodian population to be able to hold its own government accountable.

"When you ask, has the money been used effectively? I just don’t know. There’s no transparency in this money and what kinds of projects they help to support."

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POLITICS: Thai-Cambodia Tension Gives Rise to Schools with Bunkers

November 24, 2009 by

Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IPS

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BAAN POM-SA-RON, Thailand, Nov 24  (IPS)  – Children at the largest school in this village close to the Thai-Cambodian border have a new regimen to follow besides books and sports. They have drills, practising evacuation, in case their school comes under an artillery attack.

The destination of such flight is visible across Pom-Sa-Ron Widhaya. Spread around the corners of the school’s playing field and behind the only building where 600 students study are 14 bunkers. Each is built with cement, fortified with sandbags and earth and can hold 30 students comfortably.

The bunkers at the school are among the clearest signs of unease that has swept across this area as relations between Thailand and its eastern neighbour Cambodia worsen. Thai authorities have built 340 bunkers in two schools and several villages in three sub-districts in Sri Saket, the province where Baan Pom-Sa-Ron sits.

The bunkers, which have been built over the past three months, cost 40 million baht (1.2 million U.S. dollars)

”They were just finished last week,” says Warunrat Chitruchiphong, the school’s English teacher, of the bunkers. ”It is a way to protect the students in case there is a conflict.”

”Evacuation drills have begun. We want to train the students how to take shelter,” she adds. ”We have had few practises, first by getting the students to leave classes and assemble outside.”

This shift in the rhythm of a school day has begun to shape conversation in the classrooms. ”Students talk about what they have to do if there is an attack,” says Supawadee Chaladyam, a 17-year-old who dreams of a career in nursing. ”I have gone to the bunkers with my classmates when we have free time.”

Parents welcome the protective net spread across this area by the government. ”This area has seen tension before because of border problems. People had to move out of their villages,” says Wichet Buakew, who has a son and a daughter at the school. ”It is good that the government has built these bunkers for the children.”

Bangkok’s reaction stems from the proximity of this village to a 10th century Hindu temple that has fired nationalistic passions in both Thailand and Cambodia. The Preah Vihear temple, which sits on the edge of a steep cliff, is 10 kilometres away from the school.

Anger and fits of patriotic chest-thumping among Thais have followed a decision in July last year by the World Heritage Committee to recognise Preah Vihear as a world heritage site. The committee also recognised a 1962 ruling by the International Court of Justice that the temple was within Cambodian territory.

The tension saw a spike in troop strength along this border area where the Thai and Cambodian military have faced each other down before. In April this year soldiers from both countries exchanged gunfire, leaving three people dead.

A planned sports event over the weekend between the two forces guarding the border aimed to calm tensions was postponed. ”The postponement was initiated by Cambodian authorities, without stating any reasons,” reported ‘The Nation’, an English language daily in Thailand, quoting Prawat Ratthairom, a deputy provincial governor of Si Sa Ket.

Relations between the two South-east Asian kingdoms have plummeted further following the Cambodian government’s ties with former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a nemesis of the current Thai administration under Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. Thaksin, whose popularly elected government was ousted in a 2006 coup and who lives in exile to avoid a two-year jail term for a conflict-of-interest case, was recently appointed as an economic adviser to Phnom Penh.

Thailand’s decision to increase vigilance along the border it shares with Cambodia has come at a price to local communities on the Cambodian side. Sri Saket’s central jail currently holds 40 Cambodians, who were arrested by soldiers in the forests surrounding the Preah Vihear temple.

”They came across the border and violated the forest law,” said Justice Minister Pirapan Salirathavibhaga to a group of foreign journalists who had accompanied him to this border region. ”We have to keep them here.”

The arrested Cambodians were alleged to have been foraging through the forests for bamboo and mushrooms and ”cutting trees.” Such search for food is common among both Thais and Cambodians living along the border.

Some Thais, such as Prayut Wongkamjan, have suffered worse while looking for food in the forests close to the temple. The 37-year-old stepped on a landmine, one of the many buried along the border during the decades that Cambodia was torn apart by conflict.

For now, war between the two countries is not what Thailand wants. ”At this moment, there is a lot of news that might frighten the people,” says Pirapan. ”But we want to assure the people of their security. We don’t need any fighting.”

It is a view echoed by the people and local officials in Sri Saket who have built strong ties with Cambodian communities across the border. ”The locals here and those in Cambodia are like sisters and brothers,” says Nirandon Lumthaisong, secretary to the local village council. ”They speak the same language and have similar culture.”

But such ties cannot be sustained following the Thai government’s decision to close some of the nearby border crossings, Niranond complains. ”That will make no good for anyone. Nowadays the government has already stopped us from visiting each other.”

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2009.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


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POLITICS: Cambodia Raises Stakes, Ties with Thailand Plummet

November 12, 2009 by

Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IPS

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Nov 12 (IPS) – Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen is known for his brash and earthy vocabulary even when, as he did in early April, he talks about himself. "I am neither a gangster nor a gentleman, but a real man," the politician who has led his country for 25 years said in a fit of rage.

The target of his ire at the time was Thai Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya, following comments the latter had made during a parliamentary debate in the Thai capital.

Hun Sen criticised Kasit for calling him a "gangster" during that debate, but Kasit shot back, saying his description of Hun Sen in Thai had got lost in translation. The actual words were "Nak Leng," Kasit had explained, which in Thai means "a person who is lion-hearted, a courageous and magnanimous gentleman."

It was Kasit’s second run-in with the Cambodian leader in under a year. In late 2008, when the former veteran Thai diplomat was in the political wilderness as a speaker for a conservative, right-wing protest movement, he had called Hun Sen a "thug" during a speech at a public rally.

If the new Thai government, formed under a cloud of controversy last December, was hoping that Hun Sen would move on from such moments, then the current war of words between the two countries suggests otherwise.

"The Thais seem to have forgotten that Hun Sen has a very good memory. He does not forget easily," a South-east Asian diplomat from a regional capital told IPS on the condition of anonymity. "He unearths details and history he knows well to go after those who criticise him."

But the current war of words between Cambodia and Thailand has degenerated into personal insults and a trading of charges about interfering into each country’s judicial and domestic affairs.

Hun Sen raised the stakes this week in an increasingly volatile relationship between the two South-east Asian kingdoms by targeting his Thai counterpart, Abhisit Vejjajiva, in a verbal barrage.

"I would not be surprised if there was a link here with comments made by political allies of Abhisit," the diplomat added. "It is Hun Sen getting back."

Besides words, Phnom Penh also rejected a request by Bangkok on Wednesday for the extradition of ousted Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who arrived in Cambodia on Tuesday to begin his new role as Hun Sen’s economic advisor.

Thaksin, whose popular elected government was turfed out of power in a 2006 military coup, has been living in exile to avoid a two-year jail term after a Thai court found him guilty in a conflict-of-interest case.

To goad the Abhisit administration, Hun Sen welcomed Thaksin with warm hugs and handshakes, and offered his own villa in Phnom Penh for the fugitive former Thai premier to stay in.

Bangkok has not fallen for Phnom Penh’s bait, for now. Even though it bristles at such hospitality and the verbal salvos fired by Hun Sen, the Thai government is trying to stay above the fray, offering statements that appear calm and diplomatic.

"The government is stressing that the problem between both countries is still a bilateral issue," Thani Thongphakdi, Thai foreign ministry’s deputy spokesman, told IPS. "We want to see a positive sign from Cambodia that gives precedence to bilateral ties over personal relationships."

Yet at the same time, the Thai government is taking a tougher line towards the range of ties it maintains with its eastern neighbour. "We are reviewing existing agreements, existing cooperation and future cooperation between the two countries," Thani revealed. "Everything is on the table."

Bangkok’s unilateral actions against Cambodia has already seen the Thai ambassador in Phnom Penh withdrawn and Thailand revoking a memorandum of understanding between the two countries to explore oil and gas reserves in the Gulf of Thailand.

It followed Hun Sen’s tongue-lashing that targeted Abhisit. "People should know that when I was starting my political career, the Thai prime minister (Abhisit) was still a child running around, playing," Hun Sen told Cambodian journalists on Sunday, the transcripts of which IPS has seen.

"If Abhisit is so sure of himself, then he should call an election. ‘What are you afraid of? Is it that you are afraid you will not be the prime minister?’" Hun Sen continued, driving home his current achievement as South-east Asia’s longest-standing premier, as opposed to Abhisit, who has been in office for less than a year.

"I am prime minister of Cambodia who has received two-thirds of the vote in the Cambodian parliament. How many votes does Abhisit have? ‘You have chosen somebody else’s chair to seat yourself in’," goaded Hun Sen, referring to the question of legitimacy that has dogged the Abhisit government. "You claim other people’s property as your own. How can we respect that?"

The 57-year-old Hun Sen has been Cambodia’s premier for 25 years, a period where he has not shied from revealing his authoritarian streak, using a mix of violence, intrigue and verbal attacks to cling to power. His journey to power began on the economic and social fringes of the poorer Cambodia, including a short stint when still a teenager as a soldier for the genocidal Khmer Rouge in the later 1970s.

The 45-year-old Abhisit hails from the opposite end, being born into wealth, enjoying a British education and feeling at home among Thailand’s patricians. He formed a coalition government after a controversial court ruling last December saw the collapse of the elected government, paving the way— through a combination of military influence and cash enticements to broker a deal—to secure a parliamentary vote than a win at a general election. Hun Sen’s penchant for dipping into his country’s history to take on the Abhisit administration is also threatening to expose a darker side of Thailand’s relationship with its poorer and weaker eastern neighbour.

To counter Bangkok’s current charges that Phnom Penh is interfering in Thailand’s internal politics and judicial system by rolling out the welcome mat for Thaksin, Hun Sen retorts by reminding the Thais about the hospitality they offered to Khmer Rouge leaders like Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, now about to face justice in a United Nations war crimes tribunal.

"The Thai judiciary has not much value to be respected," Hun Sen said during his weekend encounter with Cambodian journalists. "Khmer Rouge leaders Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea were living in Thailand for years. This was a violation of international law that Thailand had signed."

"Hun Sen is absolutely correct," said Tom Fawthrop, co-author of ‘Getting away with Genocide? Elusive Justice and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal’. "In fact after 1979, when the Khmer Rouge were driven out of Cambodia by Vietnam, (Khmer Rouge leader) Pol Pot and other leaders all fled to Thailand."

"The Khmer Rouge’s fight to regain power was aided by logistics and weapons that flowed through Thailand, even tanks," Fawthrop, a regional expert who spends time in Phnom Penh, told IPS. "The Thais violated the international law after the 1991 Paris peace accord by letting the Khmer Rouge operate along its border, which was not the case along the Vietnamese and Laotian borders."

Hun Sen’s current anti-Abhisit rhetoric may not be the isolated views of Cambodia’s leader but may find resonance among its people, added Fawthrop. "The Thai-Cambodian relationship has to be looked at in a historical context. The Cambodians feel a huge sense of grievance."

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2009.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


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POLITICS: Thai-Cambodia Diplomatic Row Bares Decades-Long Rift

November 7, 2009 by

Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IPS

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Nov 7 (IPS) – Thailand’s swift and strong response to Cambodia’s decision to appoint ousted Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra as an economic adviser exposed an emotional faultline rooted in decades of mutual suspicion and hatred.

By the weekend, Bangkok had delivered its second blow to an already tense relationship between the two South-east Asian kingdoms. The Thai government announced it was revoking a memorandum of understanding between the two countries on developing an overlapping maritime area rich in oil and gas reserves in the Gulf of Thailand.

It was inevitable, said the Thai government, after Phnom Penh’s appointment of Thaksin, who was ousted in a 2006 military coup and lives in exile to evade a two-year jail term after being found guilty in a conflict of interest case. Thaksin’s new role in Cambodia "will directly affect negotiations" between the two countries, states the Thai foreign ministry, since Thaksin "was directly involved in the negotiation process" in 2001 when he was Thailand’s prime minister.

The tone for such a tough response by the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva was set on Thursday. Bangkok withdrew its ambassador in Cambodia in protest against the Thaksin appointment. Phnom Penh reciprocated by Friday.

"We view the appointment of Thaksin as an interference in Thailand’s domestic affairs and disregard for Thailand’s judicial system," Thani Thongphakdi, Thai foreign ministry’s deputy spokesman, told IPS. "Our reaction has been commensurate with the action of Cambodia."

Thaksin’s appointment as the new economic advisor to Cambodia was announced Wednesday night on the country’s state television station. He was appointed by a royal decree as a "personal advisor to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen and the adviser to the Cambodian government in charge of economy," a statement from Phnom Penh revealed.

Hun Sen’s choice of the fugitive former Thai premier, who became a billionaire telecommunications tycoon before he was elected as Thailand’s leader in 2001, is in keeping with a practice known in Cambodia for years— of the government and the royal family appointing foreign nationals to help them as advisors.

Prior to Thaksin, Hun Sen’s economic advisor was South Korea’s current president, Lee Myung-bak. The latter served in that advisory role from 2000 till 2007, resigning ahead of the 2008 presidential poll.

"Cambodia views the appointment of Mr. Thaksin as an internal affair. We have had economic advisors to our prime minister before, like the current president of South Korea from 2000 till 2007," said Koy Kuong, spokesman for the Cambodian foreign ministry. "The Thai government is trying to mix things up."

"It is up to the Thai side to clarify the status of our relationship," Koy added during a telephone interview from Phnom Penh. "Cambodia wants to have good relations with Thailand."

Hun Sen’s fiery rhetoric towards Thailand betrays such sentiments. He is on record saying that Phnom Penh would not extradite Thaksin if he moved to Cambodia. That followed a statement that Cambodia would offer Thaksin a new home.

The recent war of words between Cambodia and Thailand threatened to overshadow a summit of South-east Asian leaders held last month in a Thai resort town south of Bangkok. "Don’t allow anybody to use you as a pawn," Abhisit told the media in a comment targeted at Hun Sen.

The current tension between the two countries has grown since July last year over a 10th century Hindu temple, Preah Vihear, perched on top of a steep cliff on the Thai-Cambodian border.

The World Heritage Committee ruled that month that the Preah Vihear would be recognised as a world heritage site. It also recognised a 1962 ruling by the International Court of Justice that the temple was within Cambodian territory.

Thai nationalists responded with rage, prompting a troop build-up by both sides. In April this year the soldiers from both countries exchanged gunfire, leaving three people dead.

The relationship between the richer Thailand and the poorer Cambodia hit a low point in 2003, when the Thai embassy in Phnom Penh was burned down by rioters angered by a remark made by a Thai actress that allegedly questioned Cambodia’s ownership of another landmark temple. Thaksin was the Thai premier at the time.

"What we are witnessing is the love-hate relationship between the Thai and Cambodians. The problem has deep roots, going back to the Second World War period," said Charnvit Kasetsri, a historian at Bangkok’s Thammasat University. "Anti-French feelings that Thais had towards the French when they were colonial rulers of Cambodia were transferred to anti-Cambodian feelings after Cambodia got independence."

Thailand’s elites also fed this feeling in later years, Charnvit explained in an interview. "Bangkok’s educated people look down upon Cambodians as less educated and people that cannot be trusted and are unreliable."

The United States government’s war in Indo-China saw the two countries on either side of the battle lines. The Thai government, under a military dictatorship and a strong U.S. ally, was peeved at Cambodia’s neutral stance over the war during the 1960s.

Through the 1980s, after Cambodians were freed from the genocidal Khmer Rouge by the invading Vietnamese military, Thailand opened its eastern borders for the Khmer Rouge to survive. Bangkok, in fact, was the gateway for Khmer Rouge leaders to interact with the international community. Cambodia’s present attitude towards Thailand, on the other hand, reflects a trend that has evolved over the past 20 years.

"For years Thailand was an important investor in Cambodia and was always welcome, but now its predominant role has been replaced by China, Japan and others," said Punagthong Pawakapan, assistant professor in international relations at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University. "They do not have to depend on Thailand unlike before."

China, with over 3,000 companies and with investments valued at over 1.5 billion U.S. dollars, is the largest investor in Cambodia. South Korea follows, with 1.2 billion dollars in investment. And Japan, with over 1.2 billion U.S. dollars, has been Cambodia’s top donor since 1992.

Thailand’s investments are valued at 226 million U.S. dollars. Its major investments are in hotels and the agro-industry. China has poured money into large infrastructure projects while South Korea has invested in the information technology sector.

"Thailand’s relationship with its other neighbours like Burma, Laos and Malaysia do not compare with the relationship with Cambodia," Punagthong told IPS. "Disagreements do not result in the same kind of tension and trouble."

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2009.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Diplomacy, Politics, Report Tagged With: , ,

CAMBODIA: Global Crisis Mostly Bypassing the Young – For Now

October 28, 2009 by

Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IPS

Robert Carmichael*

PHNOM PENH, Oct 28  (IPS)  – Mey Chamnan has learned the hard way about the global economic crisis. Both she and her husband were fired from their 50 U.S.-dollar a month jobs in a local garment factory after declining overseas orders caused huge job losses across Cambodia’s garment industry.

They were not the only ones in their family to be affected. As neither of them had an income, they were forced to send their eight-year-old son back to the province to live with her parents while they tried to find other work. So far they have not succeeded.

”It is so hard for me – I’m so disappointed right now,” she says. ”I don’t know what to do.”

There are plenty of anecdotal stories like Mey Chamnan’s that show the global economic downturn has affected Cambodians. But anecdotes do not provide wider answers: how the country’s youth – those under the age of 18 like her son – have been affected by the global economic crisis.

On one key measure – education – the surprising answer seems to be: Not that much. On another – nutrition – the experts say it is too early to say.

The worldwide financial crisis has caused huge damage to Cambodia’s tourism, garment manufacturing and construction sectors. Those sectors comprise three of the South-east Asian kingdom’s four economic pillars and the bulk of its economic growth over the past decade. Tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs in the past 16 months or are not earning as much.

Less money means families must either spend less or try to earn more, possibly by pulling their children out of school and putting them to work. The key concern for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) was whether the education and nutrition rates of Cambodian children were affected.

To check the effect on education, UNICEF undertook two assessments of children in vulnerable areas in six provinces in which it operates. Peter Leth, a monitoring and evaluation specialist at the U.N. agency, says the results indicate the global financial meltdown has not caused children to be pulled out of school.

”The children who were identified as being regularly absent from these schools were not absent because of the food crisis or [the global economic crisis],” says Leth. ”It was more a chronic situation – you could say it’s more attributable to chronic poverty or chronic issues in the family.”

UNICEF’s findings chime with figures from the Ministry of Education. They show the percentage of children quitting school in Grades 10 to 12 – those aged between 15 and 18 and therefore most likely to be put to work – has hardly changed over the past three academic years.

During the academic year 2006-2007, around 10,600 children dropped out between Grades 10 and 12. That equates to 4.8 percent of the total number of 222,000 who were enrolled at the start of that academic year.

Although the actual number of children who quit school across those three grades increased to 14,000 in the most recent academic year, 2008-2009, the percentage remained at 4.8 percent – since the number enrolled in those three years rose to 292,000.

Primary school education has not been affected either, says Phan Sokim, the director-general of the department of youth at the Ministry of Education. Overall, he thinks that the global economic crisis has not affected youth education.

That seems accurate on a national level, but on an individual level it has certainly affected some, as 18-year-old garment factory worker Mor Kim knows. A year ago she came to Phnom Penh from Kampong Thom province in central Cambodia to work at a garment factory – one of more than 300,000 people once employed in the sector.

Mor Kim rents a house with three friends. She says the rent recently increased from 40 to 50 U.S. dollars a month, which added 2.50 U.S. dollars to her outgoings. That may not sound like much, but she only earns 50 U.S. dollars each month, and on top of that food prices rose sharply last year, catching her in an economic vice.

The result was that she could no longer afford to send money to her home province to support her parents and 16-year-old brother who had recently finished Grade 9.

”Because of the effects of the global economic crisis I couldn’t afford to pay for myself and my family, so I had to ask my brother to come to Phnom Penh and work with me in the factory,” she says. ”He has been working here now for a fortnight.”

Phan Sokim of the Ministry of Education maintains that such decisions generally have little to do with the economic crisis. ”Don’t blame the global economic crisis – the young people want to come to Phnom Penh because they want to enjoy life,” he says. ”It is different from how life is in the countryside.”

While there is some truth in the attraction of the bright lights of the capital – Mor Kim admits her brother was not particularly upset about starting work – the unwelcome end of his formal education will probably harm his future prospects.

At the office of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Phnom Penh, chief technical adviser M.P. Joseph says there are good reasons why school enrolment numbers are largely unaltered. A recent ILO study found Cambodians are culturally highly aware of the importance of education and are very reluctant to pull their children out of school.

”Ordinary poor people … respect education [and] they respect learning,” says Joseph. ”Therefore one of the last acts in coping with an economic crisis when it starts directly hitting their family is to pull the child out of school if the child is already in school.”

But Joseph sounds a note of caution.

”Just because there is no impact now, it doesn’t mean there won’t be an impact [in the future] if the crisis continues,” he says. ”So if the impact continues and the negatives of that start impinging on the family, this will happen. The fact that it has not happened now is certainly not a guarantee it won’t happen in the future.”

If the effect on education is so far unremarkable, what of the impact on nutrition?

UNICEF’s Leth says the situation with nutrition is more complicated. Child nutrition measures three factors: underweight, where the weight for age is too low; stunting, where the child’s height for age is too low; and finally wasting, where the weight for height is too low.

”Wasting – which is your weight for your height – is a very short-term indicator, because you can imagine if you don’t eat for one week or two weeks, your weight might go down, but of course your height will be about the same,” says Leth. ”So wasting can fluctuate very quickly. Stunting and underweight are more long-term, or what we call ‘chronic measurements of malnutrition’.”

Looking at the possible effects of the global economic crisis on wasting, UNICEF found that progress on reducing the prevalence of wasting had stagnated between 2005 and 2008, when the last measure was taken, at around 8.5 percent. That came despite progress made in the first half of the decade when the rate was cut in half.

But Leth says the reasons behind that stagnation are unclear.

”I would say that is a concern, but we cannot say that it is attributable to the economic crisis,” he says. ”It is a concern that it [has come] at the same time as the crisis, and therefore it’s possible that there’s some link, but really we need more data – a more qualitative understanding of the situation in order to find out the direct cause of this trend.”

Leth adds that data will be gathered next year when the country’s five-yearly Cambodian Demographic Health Survey is compiled. If the survey shows that the trends are continuing to improve, then, says Leth, ”there is not very much to be worried about”. But only then will the experts know for sure whether the global economic crisis has had a significant impact.

(*This feature was produced by IPS Asia-Pacific under a series on the impact of the global economic crisis on children and young people, in partnership with UNICEF East Asia and the Pacific.)

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2009.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Development, Economic Crisis, Report Tagged With: , ,

POLITICS: Thai-Cambodian Tension Tests Claims of Regional Peace

October 28, 2009 by

Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IPS

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 28  (IPS)  – The relationship between South-east Asian neighbours Thailand and Cambodia enters another uneasy stretch following a round of verbal salvoes fired before and during a just concluded regional summit, where much is made of strides in achieving unity.

The Thai media had also stepped into the fray to take on the comments made by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen that appeared to get under the skin of the Thai government, host of the 15th summit of the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN), which ran from Oct. 23-25.

On Tuesday, one Thai commentator described Hun Sen as a ”big bully” for the remarks he made just before flying into Cha-am, the resort town south of Bangkok where the ASEAN summit was held, and soon after he landed.

”Hun Sen Shows Lack of Class and Tact,” declared the headline of an editorial in a Sunday newspaper. It seethed with anger about the Cambodian leader’s ”provocative remarks.”

Hun Sen, the region’s longest-serving premier, upset the Thais by publicly throwing his weight behind Thaksin Shinawatra, the former Thai premier who was ousted in a 2006 military coup and now living in exile to avoid arrest after being found guilty of violating conflict of interest laws.

Cambodia will offer Thaksin a home, Hun Sen said, before arriving in Cha-am, and then added that Phnom Penh would not extradite the fugitive ex-Thai leader if Bangkok made a request. The increasingly authoritarian Cambodian leader also revealed a role he had for the like-minded Thaksin in the future Cambodia ? as an economic advisor.

Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva shot back. ”Don’t allow anybody to use you as a pawn,” he said at a press conference toward the end of the summit, where the outcome of the 10-member regional bloc was to have been the focus.

”If former prime minister Thaksin moves to Cambodia, it will have an effect on our relationship,” said Kasit Piromya, Thai foreign minister, in another press conference.

Both Abhisit and Kasit belong to a coalition government that was formed last year with the backing of Thailand’s powerful military. It followed a controversial court verdict that resulted in the collapse of a coalition government of Thaksin’s allies, who were elected at a December 2007 poll, the first since the 2006 putsch.

Thaksin has been making desperate bids to return to Thailand or to live in a country closer to home than in the Middle East, where he often resides. But he has made little headway with the members of the 42-year-old ASEAN due to the principle of non-interference in the domestic affairs of a member country that binds this 10-member bloc.

ASEAN, which has just become a new rules-based unified entity, includes Brunei. Burma (or Myanmar), Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam, in addition to Thailand and Cambodia.

The war of words that overshadowed the ASEAN summit added a new twist to an already testy relationship between the two countries that share an 800-kilometre border, much of it being disputed and not clearly marked because Thais and Cambodia use different maps.

The most visible symbol of the underlying tension between the two South-east Asian kingdoms is a 10th century Hindu temple, Preah Vihear, that sits atop a steep cliff on the Thai-Cambodian border.

The temple was claimed by the French colonists who ruled Cambodia using a disputed 1907 map. After the French left, the Thai troops took over the temple but handed it back to Phnom Penh following a 1962 ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague. Since then troops from both countries have faced each other along the heavily mined border.

Since July last year, Preah Vihear has become a flashpoint, stoked by deep-seated nationalism on both sides. It followed a ruling by the World Heritage Committee that month that recognised the temple as a world heritage site and concurred with the ICJ’s ruling that the temple belonged to Cambodia.

Thai nationalists were enraged, prompting both Cambodian and Thailand to reinforce their military strength in the still contested land ? some 4.6 square kilometres ?surrounding the temple. In April, the soldiers from both countries exchanged gunfire, leaving three people dead.

Over a month before the recent summit, Hun Sen had ordered Cambodian troops to fire if any Thais crossed the border illegally. Around the same time, in September, members of a right-wing conservative Thai political movement marched to the disputed site to flex their patriotic stripes.

Thailand was put on notice by Cambodian Foreign Minister Hor Namhong that Phnom Penh wanted the border dispute placed on the agenda of the 15th ASEAN summit. But Bangkok rejected the call, insisting that the dispute be addressed through bilateral negotiations than have this issue ”internationalised or raised within the ASEAN framework.”

This verbal tit-for-tat even drew Cambodia’s envoy in Thailand to comment in the ‘Bangkok Post’ newspaper on the eve of the summit. ”No peace-loving nation on earth like Cambodia wants to make political gains by provoking armed conflict with its neighbours,” wrote ambassador You Ay. ”The recent tension between the two countries began with the yellow-shirt protesters from Thailand who wanted to enter our Preah Vihear temple.”

The simmering tensions between the two South-eastern nations has not gone down well with the rest of ASEAN, given the bloc’s habit of saying it does not need a regional dispute-settling mechanism because the region’s leaders are committed to regional peace through local solutions.

Cambodia broke with this tradition last year when the Preah Vihear issue flared up. It reported the dispute to the United Nations Security Council without getting a nod from its ASEAN allies, prompting Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to warn of the regional bloc’s credibility being at stake.

Thai officials are hoping that a quieter approach will help calm tensions between the two countries. ”We want people along the border to live peacefully,” said Kasit, the Thai foreign minister. ”There is a need for civility to forge a relationship and build a relationship as much as possible.”

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2009.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


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CAMBODIA: Climate Fight an Uphill Battle, But All’s Not Lost

October 25, 2009 by

Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IPS

By Robert Carmichael

PHNOM PENH, Oct 25 (IPS) – As one of the world’s poorest nations, Cambodia is by definition one of those least able to protect itself from the effects of climate change. As an agrarian society, it is one of those most susceptible to climate change.

To compound the problem further, Cambodia is unlikely to get sufficient assistance from the rest of the world to meet those challenges.

So says Dr Tin Ponlok, the national project coordinator in the Ministry of Environment’s climate change office. But that does not make Cambodia special, he says: That is how things are for most developing countries.

"Poor nations suffer, but they are not the cause of the problem – so what?" he asks, referring to former United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan’s comments about the developing world picking up the bill for the rich nations. "How much power do [poor countries] have? Not much. How much commitment [is there in the developed world]? How much do they give and how much do they support? Not much."

Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen made a similar point at the country’s first National Forum on Climate Change on Oct. 19, when he said that developed nations must do more for their poorer cousins.

"The rich countries should be more responsible, as they have more resources to settle this matter," Hun Sen said. "Cambodia is not the country responsible for climate change, but is the victim."

On the final day of the forum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia issued its draft position ahead of December’s Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. As a developing country, Cambodia said it would do "its utmost" to reduce greenhouse gases; in return the rich world must provide cash and technology.

But Cambodia is not just a victim. It is also one of those most at risk from climate change. That was the finding in September by a British research consultancy, Maplecroft, which said the South-east Asian kingdom was the 27th nation most vulnerable to climate change out of 166 countries surveyed.

The index assessed nations on their current vulnerability and their preparedness to deal with climate change. Cambodia fared badly — it is the only country within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations that is in the bottom 30 states on the index, and its vulnerability is rated as ‘extreme’. Laos is the next closest at 37. Of those lowest-placed 30 states, 23 are in Africa.

Dr Tin says that Cambodia’s problems in respect of climate change are many, varied and in some cases unique. Firstly, it is a post-conflict society in which perhaps one-quarter of its population died under the Khmer Rouge rule of the late 1970s. That has had knock-on effects in many areas, including in terms of the number of skilled people able to deal with climate change.

"Also, this is an agrarian country where 80 percent of people live in the rural areas, and most of them depend on agriculture," says Dr Tin. "That leaves Cambodia quite exposed to climate change."

He says Typhoon Ketsana, which recently swept through the Philippines and Vietnam before devastating parts of northern Cambodia, highlighted the dangers associated with climate change.

"I don’t say there is an absolute correlation [between Ketsana and climate change], but there is some link between what happened," he says. "I think there is a scientific basis – we have never seen that kind of thing before."

He says that until Ketsana, which killed 43 people here, Cambodia was protected from the worst effects of typhoons by the Cardamom Mountain range in the southwest and the Dalat plateau in central Vietnam.

"That is not enough to protect us any more," he says.

Other risks for Cambodia include increasing frequency and severity of extreme climate events, such as floods, drought, windstorms and seawater surges.

These are all problems in search of a solution. In late 2006 the government released its National Adaptation Programme of Action to Climate Change, or NAPA, which lays out the approach to dealing with climate change in the areas of agriculture, water resources, coastal zone effects and human health.

Among the items on the list of 20 high-priority projects are rehabilitating dams and waterways, planting vegetation to protect from floods and storms, aquaculture, and improving disaster response preparedness in communities.

But three years on, just two of the 39 projects in the NAPA have received funding. Dr Tin says that is standard for developing countries, since rich nations that pledged money to a central fund have failed to deliver.

"The most important thing is that so little funding is available from the international community for those projects," he says.

Despite the lack of progress, Cambodia’s NAPA did elicit some important findings. One was that villagers in almost every province told researchers they suffered from both floods and droughts. That explains the mixed (and as yet unmet) focus on the NAPA’s high-priority projects.

Flooding presents the more significant problem in terms of food security. It caused 70 percent of the loss of rice production between 1998 and 2002.

And although drought was responsible for just 20 percent of the loss, it still affects many Cambodians: Four-fifths of people interviewed suffered from a lack of water for farming during the year, and slightly more than half lacked enough water for personal use. Coping mechanisms were intriguingly mixed – the government paper notes that one in four people "simply organise religious ceremonies in the hope that these will bring rain".

The Cambodian Center for Study and Development in Agriculture (CEDAC), the country’s main non-governmental agricultural organisation, is helping to raise awareness of climate change. It is running a project that has trained 80,000 rural families across the country on ways to adapt to the expected increasing severity of droughts, floods and higher numbers of agricultural pests.

Kim Than, CEDAC’s director of field programmes, says the NGO decided to add a pilot module to raise awareness about climate change among around 1,000 of those 80,000 families when teaching them how to adapt to the expected challenges they will face. He found that awareness levels were low.

"I have been running the climate change project [to educate people] for two years now – so it is a new thing," he says. "But I find that people rarely know about this climate change problem, so I always make sure to educate them about it and to encourage them."

The project teaches people how to mitigate the effects of climate change and to improve their livelihoods by diversifying away from relying on one crop, typically rice. Kim Than says the looming threat of climate change means that educating farmers about rice intensification – growing more rice on the same amount of land with less water – is key, as is creating multi-purpose farms.

"In that way people won’t just plant rice, they’ll also raise some chickens, or a pig and some fish, and they can plant a vegetable garden," Kim Than says. "We also teach them how to dig a channel that can hold water as well as fish when there is a drought."

He also tells them about techniques on disaster reduction as well as the importance of planting trees, "because it’s important to reduce greenhouse gases," referring to gases that trap heat in the atmosphere.

It all sounds ideal for a mainly rural, developing country, but there is not enough money to roll it out across the country. If and when the funding comes, Kim Than hopes to reach the approximately three million families across Cambodia.

CEDAC’s experience reinforces Dr Tin’s point about a lack of cash to implement solutions. But he admits that is not the only problem. Dr Tin says that three years after the country signed off on its NAPA, other challenges remain.

"Coordination needs to be improved," he says. "Climate change is a cross- sectoral issue, so we have to work together. It’s not just a lack of funding and support from the international community – we need to respond better at a national level."

It seems an almost insurmountable challenge for a country like Cambodia, given the lack of funding, a lack of awareness in rural areas, high vulnerability and few technical skills, among other things. But Dr Tin maintains he is not pessimistic.

"We need to be optimistic – even if sometimes you know you’re fighting a losing battle, you still have to fight," he says.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2009.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Environment, Report Tagged With: ,
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