A Canadian Man Detained for Debauchery

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Sihanoukville: A 68-year-old Canadian man, who was suspected of committing debauchery, was detained Monday. Police charged Daniel Lavigne with having sex with four boys, who are under 15 years old in GST quest house in Cheu Teal zone, Buon village, Buon commune, Sihanoukville’s Mittapheap district, Kampongsom province. Local police said that the accused was detained at the anti-human trafficking office in Sihanoukville.

FM: Thai new gov't ready to rebuild its world image

BANGKOK, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- As part of PR efforts for Thailand' s new government led by Abhisit Vejjajiva, Thailand's Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya said on Thursday that he is confident the government is ready to rebuild the country's image in the world stage.
Kasit made the remarks in a speech "Thailand's Image in the World" as part of the Post Forum 2009, organized by Bangkok Post, Post Today and Business Radio 98.0 at a Bangkok hotel on Thursday.

Kasit emphasized that the transition between the previous government and the Abhisit-led government is democratic, peaceful and stable.

"This is the selling point," said Kasit, adding that this government has listened to all sections in the society.

Kasit said that the government will continue to follow the rule of law in order to rebuild the country's creditability in the international community.

Also, Thailand hopes that holding the forthcoming Association of Southeast Asian Nations' (ASEAN summit will provide an opportunity to rebuild the international confidence on the country.

The ASEAN summit is planned to be held in the central resort town in Hua Hin of Prachuab Khirikhan province from Feb. 27 to March 1.

As the ASEAN chairmanship, Thailand will work to enhance the role of ASEAN in the United Nations (UN) and World Trade organization (WTO), such as to contribute to the solution of the pirate issue under the UN charter and humanitarian projects, Kasit said.

Meanwhile, Kasit believes that the government's economic measures will also contribute to restoration of the international confidence on the country, amid the challenges of global economic crisis.

The forum also starred Finance Minister Korn Chatikavanij, who gave a speech on "Finance Policy in the Recession" to inform audience the government' readiness to boost the country's economy by taking stimulus measures.

The Thai government plans to inject the supplementary spending budget worth 115 billion baht (3.3 billion U.S. dollars) to boost the domestic economy.

The 115-billion-baht economic stimulus package covering totally 18 projects, which will be implemented in mid-March, includes a plan to allocate around 19 billion baht (540 million U.S. dollars) to finance a 2,000 baht (57 U.S. dollar) allowance to 8 million employees under the Social Security Fund and 1.4 million civil servants earning less than 14,000 baht (400 U.S. dollars) a month.

Korn said in light of the stimulus measure the government estimates that the country's GDP for 2009 will grow at least 2 percent, with the unemployed is estimated to be up to 2.5 per

Khmer Rouge trials to start soon

AM - Friday, 16 January , 2009
Reporter: Karen Percy
ABC Radio Australia

BRENDAN TREMBATH: In Cambodia the long awaited prosecutions of former Khmer Rouge officials accused of genocide in the 1970s are reaching a crucial stage. Lawyers are due to meet today to thrash out how the first trial will be run.
While some victims are keen to see justice done, many ordinary Cambodians would rather see the time and money spent improving their lives.

South East Asia correspondent Karen Percy reports.

KAREN PERCY: This month marks 30 years since the Khmer Rouge, the red communist Cambodians, were driven from power in Cambodia.

During their four year reign well over and half-a-million people died, accused of being spies for their country or for refusing to embrace the changes forced upon them by Pol Pot, the cold-blooded leader of the movement who wanted to build an agrarian utopia free of Western influence and meddling.

Today tourists flock to the killing field sites in Phnom Penh and elsewhere to view piles of skulls and bones and to walk among the dusty graves and soon they'll be able to see the Khmer Rouge accused.

In December the Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan was in court for a procedural hearing. He's now 77 and is ailing. But he maintains his innocence.

He's one of five former members of the KR who are set to face trial under the extraordinary chambers in the courts of Cambodia, a United Nations backed process more commonly known as the KR or genocide tribunal.

It is proving to be a laborious process, running several years and more than $100-million over budget. It's been dogged by funding shortfalls, internal bickering, and allegations of corruption.

But within a matter of months the first trial should begin.

BRUNO CARETTE: When the Khmer Rouge took power I was 20 years old. I was very impressed by this story...

KAREN PERCY: Bruno Carette is a Paris-based film maker who's released a feature on the genocide tribunals. He believes the role China and the US played in the region at that time needs to be addressed. The filmmaker says there is little popular support for the tribunal process.

BRUNO CARETTE: Nowadays Cambodia is trying to join the world. You know, they have been in war for 30 years, with this terrible story and most of the people are very poor and living with less than $1 per day, especially the farmers which are 90 per cent of the population. And they don't think this trial is necessary.

KAREN PERCY: Cambodia has come a long way since the Khmer Rouge time. It has one of the fastest growing economies in South-East Asia and it's rapidly changing.

But the tribunal is now getting down to the serious end of business and regardless of the critics it will deal with the country's dark past.

This is Karen Percy in Bangkok reporting for AM.

Traffickers prey on Cambodian men

Thursday, January 15, 2009
By Jon Gorvett
International Herald Tribune (Paris, France)

POPOK, Cambodia: "They killed one crewman for something very simple," said Thung Yeap. "He just wanted to go home. He kept asking. So in the end, the captain shot him dead."

Thung Yeap is one of the lucky survivors of a journey that starts in some of Cambodia's poorest villages and sometimes ends, fatally, in the waters of the South China Sea.
According to local law enforcers and international agencies, hundreds like Thung Yeap, mostly Cambodian farmers, have fallen victim in recent years to traffickers who turn them over to crews on Thai fishing boats, where they work without pay and often at gunpoint.

"It is an issue that needs urgent attention," said Lim Tith, national project coordinator for the United Nations' Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking, or Uniap, in Phnom Penh. "It really is a kind of descent into hell."

Kept at sea sometimes for years, these men, who have typically paid to be smuggled into Thailand with the promise of good factory jobs, are often treated brutally, subjected to beatings and even death for any attempted escape.

Until recently their plight fell under the radar of regional law enforcement agencies. Far from shore, the abuse they suffer evades detection, and legal jurisdiction is murky. The victims themselves have often hesitated to seek help, fearing they could be prosecuted as illegal immigrants.

Only in the past year have Thailand and Cambodia expanded trafficking laws written to protect women and children who were sold or tricked into prostitution or other forms of forced labor to explicitly include men. The hope is that men who find themselves in another country as a result of trafficking will be more likely to approach the authorities and be given assistance, because they will be recognized as victims rather than illegal migrants.

Cambodia and Malaysia also recently signed a memorandum of understanding on combating trafficking, as many of the Thai fishing boats operate in Malaysian waters.

Thung Yeap was able to return home to Popok village in Kampong Thom Province last month because he escaped when his fishing boat made a rare stop in port in Sarawak, in the Malaysian part of the island of Borneo. The Malaysian authorities detained him as an illegal immigrant before sending him back to Cambodia.

He and Dorn Chenda, who is from Steung Saen village in Kampong Thom, ended up in the same detention center in Sarawak, and Uniap worked with the Cambodian human rights group Licadho to have them repatriated to Cambodia.

Kampong Thom is one of the country's poorest districts, blighted until just 10 years ago by fighting between Cambodian government troops and Khmer Rouge guerrillas.

"People live hand to mouth round here," said Prak Phanna, village headman of Anlong Kranh, a village near Popok. "We used to make some money cutting and burning trees for charcoal, but the government made this illegal recently, so we have nothing. I'd say most people maybe make $20 to $30 a month around here. So, when the young men can't make ends meet, they go to Thailand."

Chorn Theong Ly, also from Anlong Kranh, was among them.

"One day a middleman came to our village," he recalled. "He said he would take us to Thailand, where we could have an easy life, working in factories. He said we'd earn 4,000 baht a month there," an amount equal to $115. "So, we each paid him 3,000 to smuggle us across the border."

What followed was a nightmare.

"When we got to Thailand we were taken to a house in Samut Prakan" - a seaside province south of Bangkok - "and locked up there. We began to realize then that something was wrong. At 4 a.m. they came for us, the traffickers, and took us straight to the boats. It was then we realized we had been sold to a fishing captain. And by then it was too late to act."

Forced to work under the supervision of an armed Thai crew, the Cambodians - some of whom had never been afloat before - suffered terribly.

"We were all seasick, and I remember vomiting blood," said Chorn Theong Ly. "The captain beat me, too, using an octopus tentacle as a whip. I was beaten almost unconscious. I also saw other crew members killed, twice - one shot, the other beaten to death, when he refused to work."

The promised wages never arrived.

"After four months at sea," said Dorn Chenda. "I started demanding my wages. They told me they had sent them to my wife back in Cambodia. But it turned out they'd never paid her a penny."

The boats typically operate out of ports like the one in Samut Prakan.

"That is one place where there are many houses where the traffickers can lock up the new arrivals," said Manfred Hornung, monitoring consultant with Licadho. "They are brought there illegally, so have no papers, and are totally at the mercy of the traffickers."

The Thai police say they are aware of the practice but say that enforcement is difficult.

"When some do escape, they usually don't want to talk to the police," said Lieutenant Colonel Thakoon Nimsombun of the Thai Justice Ministry's Department of Special Investigations Anti-Trafficking Center, often referred to as DSI. "When they go back to Cambodia, they just disappear, and it's difficult to find them again."

Lisa Rende Taylor, chief technical adviser at the Bangkok office of Uniap, said that until the anti-trafficking laws were extended to cover men, there was little incentive for victims to cooperate.

"In one case, when a boat had put out to sea and run out of gas, many of the trafficked crew had died, with the bodies thrown overboard," she said. "When the boat was finally brought back to port, there was a big question as to what law to prosecute them under. The crew were classed as illegal immigrants, so how could they testify without being arrested?"

Another problem, said Police Colonel Akarapol Punyopashtambha of the DSI, "When the crimes are committed, they are out at sea, and there are a lot of jurisdictional problems there. They may be at sea for years, too, so it's hard to get to them."

Meanwhile, in Kampong Thom, the survivors of this ordeal at sea are now trying to come to terms with their experience.

"We were always thinking of escaping," recalled Thung Yeap. "There was no way, though. We were powerless. The sea itself was our prison."

Cambodia's GDP drop by 3% in 2008 due to dependence on exports to industrialized countries

East Asian growth to drop to 6 per cent in 2009, says UN report

Thu, 15 Jan 2009
DPA

Bangkok - Battered by the crisis in developed economies, East Asian economic growth is expected to drop to 6 per cent in 2009, down from 6.9 per cent last year and 9.0 per cent in 2007, the United Nations' World Economic Situation Prospects report predicted Thursday. In South Asia, the UN's WESP report is forecasting 6.4 per cent gross domestic product (GDP) growth in 2009 compared with 7.0 per cent last year.

South Asia faces a serious problem with outflows of foreign exchange, it warned.
During the first two weeks of October last year, foreign exchange reserves fell by more than 17 billion dollars and in Pakistan, during the same period, foreign exchange reserves fell from 16.5 billion dollars to 7 billion dollars.

East Asian countries also face the prospect of declining foreign exchange reserves as their exports are affected by the financial crisis and recessions in major markets - the US, Europe and Japan.

"There is no such thing as decoupling. There is growing evidence that the economies in the region will be hard hit," said Raj Kumar, a senior advisor for the report's Asia-Pacific section.

Already in 2008, East Asia's export-oriented economies showed signs of slowing.

According to the UN report, last year China's gross domestic product (GDP) growth dropped from 11.9 per cent in 2007 to 9.1 per cent in 2008, while the economies of Cambodia, the Philippines and Singapore - all highly dependent of exports of manufactured good to industrialised countries - all saw their GDP growth decline by 3 per cent last year.

"In contrast, record high prices of export commodities, including rice, palm oil and energy, in the first half of 2008 allowed countries such as Thailand, Indonesia and, to a lesser extent, Malaysia, to sustain growth rates in 2008 at a level similar to those in 2007," said a summary of the report.

Commodity prices, however, have since started to fall and offer little hope for optimism in 2009.

In fact, the UN concludes that there is little hope for optimism from any sector or country this year.

"Today, one of the main problems is that we do not have any visible engine of growth," said Kumar.

He and other authors of the report have urged East Asian economies to use the downturn to push through economic and financial reforms.

"When times are good nobody wants to change," said Kumar. "Now is the right time."

For instance, he urged the Association of South-East Asian Nations and its three main Asian partners - China, Japan and South Korea - to push through the "Chiang Mai Initiative," an effort to form an Asian equivalent to the IMF, at the forthcoming ASEAN-Plus 3 meeting in April, in Thailand.

The UN is also urging the region to lower its trade barriers to one another and push through economic stimulus packages as means of spurring domestic and regional growth.

Cambodia aims to roll out forest preservation program [-Can the govt be trusted to maintain such program?]

PHNOM PENH, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- The Forestry Administration of Cambodia hopes to implement by September a program designed to prevent development projects from decimating Cambodia's forests, national media reported Thursday.
The program would prioritize the use of law enforcement to crack down on illegal loggers, the identification and demarcation of forest areas, increased community participation in forest conservation, and investment in research projects related to the country's forests, Ty Sokhun, director of the administration, was quoted by the Phnom Penh Post as saying.

Currently, the administration has completed 30 percent of a draft document detailing the program, Ty Sokhun said, adding that they hope to hold forums for public discussion of the program in May and to implement it in September.

"We strongly believe that this program will not only make forests in Cambodia more abundant but also improve the lives of people living in rural communities and reduce poverty throughout the country," he said.

Meanwhile, Keng Pou, a member of the Phnong minority group living in Ratanakkiri province, called for the government to assist local efforts to encourage forest preservation.

"We need the government to encourage us, and support and protect us when we are fighting against illegal loggers," he told the Post.

He said some members of his village have sustained serious injuries while fighting off illegal loggers.

Sam Rainsy and Kem Sokha inspired by Barack Obama

Sam Rainsy (R) and Kem Sokha (L) sign the agreement giving birth to the Democratic Movement for Change (DMC) (Photo: AN, Cambodge Soir Hebdo)

15 Jan 2009
By Leang Delux and Alain Ney
Cambodge Soir Hebdo
Translated from French by Luc Sâr
Click here to read the article in French

Just like the US president-elect, Cambodia’s two politicians promote change to launch their new movement.

On Thursday morning, Sam Rainsy and Kem Sokha officially announced the birth of the Democratic Movement for Change (DMC), borne out of the alliance of their respective political parties. The event took place at the SRP headquarters, under the presence of about 20 MPs, party activists and numerous journalists.

Answering to question about the type of change this alliance wish to bring in, Sam Rainsy explained that this word should be understood “in a broad sense, recalling that Barack Obama’s slogan during the last US presidential election was: ‘The change we need’, we want to change society which, currently, is filled with injustice and corruption.”

“Our ambition is to propose an alternative choice to the citizens, either they want the communist party where [state] lands are being sold and deforestation takes place, or the democrats and freedom,” Kem Sokha, HRP President, summarized.

Kem Sokha and Sam Rainsy called on their respective party activists to start collaborating with each other in view of the upcoming election.