Four Vietnamese nationals arrested for attempting to transport timbers out of Cambodia

Source: Radio Free Asia
Reported by Khmerization

Officials from Lorm village, O'Yadoa district of Rattanakiri province have said that 4 Vietnamese nationals were arrested on 7th May for attempting to transport timbers out of Cambodia to Vietnam, report Radio Free Asia.
One villager said: "They have entered our territories and cut down a lot of trees. We don't know how many times they did this. We have arrested them once before in that place, but they still come again. The Vietnamese border guards and the Cambodian police from O'Yadao came and they wanted to us to make a compromise (by releasing them)."

Villagers said that the Cambodian police threatened and coerced them to release those 4 Vietnamese, but the villagers refused.

Mr. Souvann Khamvan, deputy police chief of Rattanakiri, said that the crackdown on illegal logging is the duty of the O'Yadao police. He said: "Those 4 Vietnamese nationals were arrested by the villagers."

Mr. Chhay Thy, Adhoc investigator based at O'Yadao said that he is monitoring the issue. He said tha if the 4 Vietnamese illegal loggers were released it will be a conspiracy by the authority. He said: "We are investigating the case of villagers arresting the Vietnamese illagal loggers. And if they were released it would be illegal."

In July 2008, the villagers from Lorm villagers detained 5 Vietnamese trucks and electric saws and 3 motorcylces. They were arrested but the Cambodian border police released them in exchange for a little fine (bribe?).

Villagers knew that Vietnamese loggers have entered to log timbers in the areas since many months ago.

The latest news from RFA broadcast on 10th May reported that the 4 Vietnamese nationals had been released without charge after the Vietnamese authority had intervened.

Official release on Don Bosco Sihanoukville Fire

Last press release

Don Bosco Sihanoukville | 05.09.2009. An electrical storm woke up Sihanoukville this morning and produced a fire within the studios of radio and television of the Don Bosco Technical School of Oupram Street. At about 6:00 a strong lightning struck near the campus of the school that is normally well protected from this kind of natural phenomena. Suddenly, smoke came out from the social communication - IT section. The fire was notices by the more than 100 borders who sleep within the compound, students of the technical and hotel school sections.
Efforts to extinguish the fire were useless, because it was enclosed by the sound proof rooms that, fortunately, avoided the fire to reach other areas of the two-stores building. The Sihanoukville fire-fighters sent two trucks. Two holes were opened on the wall to the destroyed studios. The presence of flames were unseen, giving the idea that the place just melted with the heat and produced a lot of smoke. It is possible that the lightning lit any of the many cables of the TV studio.

Losses
The studios of radio and television were completed destroyed. Inside there were two computers, a projector, audiovisual material like cds, video cassettes, vcds, cables and microphones. According to Fr John Visser, rector of the technical school, the losses can be evaluated in 10 thousand dollars, that were donation from benefactors from the Netherlands.
Other areas of the social communication - IT section were untouched by the fire like the classroom, the computer laboratory, the printing department and the web house. No body was hurt in part because it was early in the morning. With the proximity of the rain some teachers who sleep inside the school went into the building and turned off electricity systems and computers. The second floor dedicated to the secretariat section remained also safe from the flames.

The studios
The studios of radio and television were the most recent project of the technical school of Don Bosco in the Opram Street. They were built last February with the support of some benefactors from Holland to complete the programs of social communication and IT for the students. A technician in audiovisual production from US became the coordinator.

Fr Albeiro Rodas, vice rector of the school and coordinator of the social communication project, said:

"This is a new challenge for our project of Don Bosco in favor of our dear students. I am very happy that nobody was hurt. It would be a real tragedy. We are going to do it better... we believe in the love of Don Bosco, we believe in the young people and we believe in Cambodia. I hope many people will come to encounter this new need. We want the studios to be a center of production for the education and development of this country."

More info at www.donboscosihanoukville.org
In English 097 96 75 042
In Khmer 092 87 96 04

Scene from rural Cambodia

Nuon Say, 68, smiles as she stands amid the chili field in her backyard in Russey Chroy village near the Mekong River, Kandal province about 32 kilometers (20 miles) north of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Friday, May 8, 2009. Say spends her morning time to collect chili pepper during the three-month-long harvest season which starts from May before the Mekong river's flood season. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

Villagers near Preah Vihear protest

Friday, 08 May 2009
Written by Thet Sambath
The Phnom Penh Post

NEAR the disputed Preah Vihear temple complex, 20 people who said they were residents of Ko Muoy village protested their eviction, demanding more compensation and greater government transparency, local villagers said.

But at a press conference on Wednesday, officials at the Council of Ministers said that many of the angry villagers were not actually residents of Ko Muoy, a village that was largely destroyed by Thai rocket fire in April.
"The real problem was caused by those who are not really villagers who live near Preah Vihear temple," said Sous Yara, an undersecretary at the Council of Ministers, adding: "The government won't provide land to those kinds of villagers."

Ros Heng, the deputy governor of Preah Vihear's Chom Ksan district, said the land is controlled by the Preah Vihear Temple Authority and will become a "nature area".

Kong Sorphon, the director of Preah Vihear provinces's Department of Land Management, Urban Planning and Construction, said the 473 families being moved to Sa Em will receive ample compensation in the form of 2 million riels (US$482), a plot of land 50 metres by 100 metres and a new house.

But a police officer from Ko Muoy who says he is being detained at a provincial police station with a colleague for inciting the protests, disagrees. "We actually do not want to leave this place because this place helps make our lives better."

On Monday, more than 100 villagers came to Phnom Penh and delivered a complaint with 209 thumbprints to Prime Minister Hun Sen's Cabinet of Ministers, the National Assembly and the Senate.

Who should bear the responsability for allowing Vietcong bases and the Ho Chi Minh trail inside Cambodia in the 60s? Was Cambodia really neutral then?

An SGGP reporter asks Mr. Seo Go about the section of the Truong Son trail running through O Yadao.

Tracing Truong Son base in Cambodia

Friday ,May 08,2009
Saigon Gia Phong (Vietnamese Communist Party)

A team of SGGP reporters recently made a trip to Cambodia to find traces of a Truong Son troop base in Yadao District, Ratanakiri Province.

We followed the trail ‘14C’ running along Po Ko River to Le Thanh International border gate to Cambodia. From the gate, we traveled some ten kilometers to get to Nu Village of Ia Khai Commune, Gia Lai Province.
In the village, there still exist two wharfs. During the war, a boatman named A Sanh (his real name Puih San) would use his boat to transport North Vietnamese troops across the river to Cambodia.

We went across the river and began to follow the western Truong Son trail (also known as the Ho Chi Minh trail) running along the river to head to O Yadao District.

We were walking on a section of the trail where, between 2000 and 2005, the Kon Tum and Gia Lai Provincial Army Section unearthed more than 100 remains of North Vietnamese soldiers.

On our way to the destination, wild sunflowers were blooming yellow on both the sides of the trail under the brilliant sun. We at last arrived at the place formerly used as a safe base for Truong Son troops 40 years ago. The site is just some ten kilometers from the Vietnamese border and 74 kilometers from the center of Ratanakiri.

We went to border post 721 nearby and asked Commander Phan Dinh Thanh, commanding officer, to ask if he had any idea about the accurate location of the base.

Cdr. Thanh replied, “In 1984, in a patrol, jointly organized by the soldiers of military post 721 and those of Cambodian military post 623, we found a section of the trail and a station for Truong Son troops located at the border landmark of 271 on Cambodian land (or 272 on Vietnamese land). The trail paralleled with the twin stream, which flows into Pako River.”

He added, “On the trail, we still found the chains of tanks, oil pipelines, house frames and cooking stoves. We guessed that such things had belonged to a commo-liaison of the 559 Army Corps.”

We went with first lieutenant Huynh Van Sy of border post 721, who led us to the area where the base was said to have existed. Things have changed with time. Many forests around the site have now been transformed into green paddy fields, but the old Khmer villagers who lived through the war in the region still remembered the base and the North Vietnamese soldiers.

Lt. Sy led us to a house on stilts made from precious wood standing in the center of the village to meet Seo Go, a 65- year old local man. In the 1970’s, he was head of the village.

Seo Go said, “During the war, the troops were garrisoned in the forest, a kilometer from the village to the east. They usually came to the village to give help to the people. Sometimes, they also gave us food. There was also a large hospital for Truong Son soldiers in the forest, about a two day walk from the village.”

What Seo Go said helped us locate the site of Truong Son troops’ base in O Yadao District. We said goodbye to him and followed his directions to the site.

At the site, we could not find any trace of the trail because grass, bushes and trees had grown wildly. We could do nothing, but stand silently to remember thousands of soldiers who had fallen on the western Truong Son road for the cause of independence and freedom.

We left, pondering about the changing fortunes of life. Truong Son Mountain, the roof of Indochina, still emerges from the forests, the Poko River still flows from Cambodia into Vietnam, but the many historical sites on Truong Son Trail, if not found and restored in time, will be forever taken back by the forests from which it was born.

By staff writers – Translated by Phuong Lan

What lies beneath

Since 1992, almost 1 million mines have been cleared from about 500 square kilometers (193 square miles) of land in Cambodia like this site in Battambang province. (Nicolas Axelrod/GlobalPost)

Due to its troubled past, Cambodia is a leading exporter of demining expertise.

May 8, 2009
By Claire Duffet - Special to GlobalPost

PHNOM PENH — Nuon Sao has laid 11,000 mines across Cambodia.

The 44-year-old, who now works for a non-profit radio station in Phnom Penh, fought for 13 years with the now-ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) during the civil war that followed the fall of the communist Khmer Rouge in 1979.

But when the United Nations took control of Cambodia in 1992 to enforce a shaky peace accord, Nuon Sao defected to its demining unit and began unstitching what he had made. Thousands of other soldiers eventually joined him.

Today, this same ragtag group of militiamen still removes most of the explosives throughout the country. Since 1992, almost 1 million mines have been cleared from about 500 square kilometers (193 square miles) of land. Three non-governmental organizations and Cambodia’s military divide up the work, which is administered by an oversight group funded by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). They estimate that less than 700 square kilometers of mined land remains in Cambodia.

Despite the makeshift start, the U.N. is impressed with the pace of Cambodian demining. In an April speech on the achievement of Cambodia’s U.N. Millennium Development Goals, Cambodia is “now regarded as a world leader in demining," said Douglas Broderick, the country's U.N. resident coordinator.

“Over the past decade, Cambodia has made a remarkable transition from infamously being one of the most mine-affected countries in the world to becoming one of the most innovative countries in addressing the problem,” UNDP Cambodia mine action project manager Melissa Sabatier told GlobalPost.

This unique expertise is now being exported overseas.

In 2007, Prime Minister Hun Sen allowed the U.N. to send 135 Cambodian troops to clear mines in southern Sudan. For three years, Cambodia has maintained troops there on a rotating schedule, with another company set to deploy in June. Of five participating countries, Cambodia has cleared the most mines — more than 2,000 — and is highest rated by the U.N. in terms of both productivity and safety, said Ker Savoeun, director of the military’s peacekeeping division and a former CPP fighter.

In January, the military trained another 400 troops for emergency peacekeeping and demining missions. With 45 days notice, the U.N. can send them anywhere in the world. Sometime this year, the U.N. will also send 20-soldier platoons to both Chad and the Central African Republic to provide airport security. These missions boost Cambodia’s reputation and soldiers’ wallets. While the average troop earns less than $400 annually, the U.N. pays its peacekeepers and deminers $1,000 per month.

Demining expertise proved even more lucrative for Srey Sangha, a former KPNLF member and the chief surveyor for Cambodian Mine Action Center (CMAC), the largest clearance NGO in Cambodia. In May 2007, a Swedish electricity company hired him to identify mined areas in southern Angola where it planned to build a power line. While he earns $800 per month as a department head at CMAC, he was paid $32,000 for four months’ work in Angola.

Along with Afghanistan, Angola and Cambodia are considered the most heavily mined countries in the world. But the demining that Srey Sangha says he encountered in Angola was amateur compared to the work in his home country. Not only did Angola lack modern equipment, the maps he was given hadn’t been updated since 1880.

In CMAC’s clearance fields in Cambodia’s northwest, workers use a mixture of long-tested and high-tech methods. Up to 90 percent of demining is still carried out by individuals equipped with handheld metal detectors and prods, said Pring Panharith, the director of the organization’s Battambang unit and a former Khmer Rouge member. Pairs work in meter-wide rows divided by red yarn. They scan the land and if it’s clear, they unravel the spools 8 centimeters and scan again. If they find a mine, they either diffuse it or blow it up. This process is slow and tedious, but cheap.

In 2000, CMAC began using dogs to speed up its work. It now has the second-largest canine demining program in the world, after Bosnia, with 56 animals sniffing for TNT remnants, Pring Panharith said. For forested terrain and areas with an abundance of anti-tank mines, CMAC uses enormous, Japanese-made machines that dwarf most heavy construction equipment. The swing-type deminer, made by Hitachi, was created and tested in Cambodia.

CMAC is also training its staff to use the Handheld Standoff Mine Detection System, a state-of-the-art device that identifies whether or not a piece of metal under the ground is hollow. Deminers find millions of metal scraps that they must treat as potential explosives. Identifying the harmless fragments will speed up the clearance process immeasurably, said Heng Ratana, the CMAC director-general.

Despite advances, land mines remain a deadly problem in Cambodia. Though the number of mine-related injuries and deaths dropped from 858 in 2000 to 266 in 2008, the latter figure is still unacceptable, Heng Ratana said. The Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention requires Cambodia to eradicate land mines completely by Dec. 31. Within the next few weeks, the government will request to extend the deadline to 2020.

Though a mine-free Cambodia remains distant, individual success stories are more common than ever.

Near a minefield outside Battambang where dogs named Happy and Peanut sniffed for bombs recently, Cheng Pek, 56, sat with his wife outside their bamboo hut feeding chickens. They returned from the Thai border in 1993 when the government offered refugees free plots of mine-filled land. Living in fear, they subsisted on vegetables grown on a half-hectare plot. CMAC cleared their land late last year, uncovering a 5-square-meter stockpile of explosives. This season, the couple will grow corn, mango, tapioca, and coconut across 3 hectares.

“If this land was not cleared by CMAC, we could not grow anything,” Cheng Pek said. “The mines would still be here in a thousand years.”

Structural cracks

Trouble ahead for global house prices

AFP

OUR round-up of house-price indicators (see table) suggests that any crash is far from universal. Only five countries have suffered annual house-price falls in the latest data and two of those—Japan and Germany—have been in the doldrums for a decade.

This relatively rosy picture may reflect the use of annual, rather than monthly, figures. In particular, the impact of the credit crunch, by restricting the availability of mortgage finance, is having a negative effect on demand. It is a fairly safe bet that the data will look less reassuring in six months’ time.

Some markets have been doing extremely well, even if more uncertainty has crept in lately. Singapore and Hong Kong have benefited from the booming Asian economy. DTZ Debenham Tie Leung, an estate agency, found that the number of homes bought by foreigners in Singapore jumped by 71% last year. Both Singapore and Hong Kong manage their exchange rates against the American dollar. Hence they import American monetary policy, which may be too loose for their domestic conditions. The cheaper real cost of finance encourages more property buying.

Similarly, Spanish and Irish housing probably boomed earlier this decade because of their economies’ fringe status in the euro zone. As a result of the “one-size-fits-all” monetary policy, interest rates in both countries were set too low.

Whereas Irish house prices have been falling, the Spanish numbers still show a small annual increase. But Julian Callow of Barclays Capital reckons that may reflect the way the numbers are calculated: by valuers, who may be cautious about cutting their estimates. Even our figure of 3.8% represents a fall in real terms, since the inflation rate is 4.2%.

Spain and Ireland stand out as economies dominated by housing. According to Goldman Sachs, construction and housing-related employment in both countries made up 13% of all private-sector jobs at the end of last year, against 9% in America and 5% in Germany. Nominal residential investment was 11% of GDP in Ireland and 9% in Spain, against 6% in America.

That has caused a glut. More than 4m Spanish dwellings have been built over the past decade, according to Britain’s Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. Its survey of European property suggests that far more Spanish houses were being built last year than are likely to be needed.

Spanish banks are tightening conditions on mortgages as the number of non-performing loans rises, pricing out potential buyers. As a result, house sales are plunging. The number of completed sales in February was 24.4% below the same month last year, according to the National Institute of Statistics.

Both Spain and Ireland have parallels with the American housing market, where the inventory of unsold homes has hit a 20-year high, according to Capital Economics. There the pace of price decline, as measured by the S&P/Case-Shiller indices, has been accelerating.

Britain is something of an exception. Whereas housebuilding grew by 187% in Spain and 177% in Ireland between 1996 and 2006, the British increase was just 12%. Planning restrictions meant fewer homes were built, which may also explain why house prices in the country have almost doubled, in real terms, since 1999.

Some may take this to mean that British house prices are less likely to fall. But potential homebuyers will undoubtedly be hit by the change in lenders’ attitudes; a sizeable deposit is now normally required. Ed Stansfield of Capital Economics reckons prices may fall by at least 20%.

Two other markets at risk are Australia and New Zealand. Since 1997 house prices have risen faster in Australia than New Zealand, but Goldman reckons that the latter is more vulnerable. Real house prices are 82% higher than they were in the last quarter of 1999, and have risen by 70% relative to household income, the biggest increase in all the countries Goldman has surveyed.

If house-price weakness does spread more widely, there may be important economic consequences. There is plenty of debate about the size of the “wealth effect” of higher property prices on consumer demand. But it will hardly help that fuel and food prices are soaring at the very moment when the value of bricks and mortar looks about to sag

Asia- more economic troubles ahead

Sunday May 10, 2009
RANDOM THOUGHTS By Neville de Silva
The Sunday Times (Sri Langka)

Asia which overcame the financial crisis of 1997/98 which started here in Thailand, felt it was better equipped to deal with the current global turmoil that has caused havoc in western economies.

Better supervision and regulatory measures over financial institutions, some believed, would cushion this part of the world from the worst features of the meltdown in banking and financial circles in the West where it all started. That, it now seems, was wishful thinking. It does not appear to have taken account of the fact that the financial crisis which began last year came on top of other economic problems which compounded the situation. What it means is that Asia is not out of the woods, not by a long shot and more difficulties lie ahead before it gets better, if it does.


That is the impression gathered, listening to a stimulating discussion I sat through the other day at the 65th Session of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and Pacific (ESCAP), a regional body of the United Nations based in Bangkok. It was a discussion on the financial crisis by a high-level panel that brought together several eminent persons from different disciplines and so provided the breadth of knowledge that an issue of this nature really needs, impinging as it does on every aspect of society and cutting across socio-economic lines. One of the critical factors that do not appear to have been seriously regarded by those who thought that Asia had somehow managed to escape the worst ravages of an economic crisis that has yet to run its course, is the trade relationship between Asia and the western world.

Asia’s trade integration with the economies of the west is relatively high- about 50% of the GDP of this region. Then consider this continent’s financial integration with western economies, particularly so with the US, which amounts to 40% of the region’s GDP. Earnings from tourism, remittances by expatriate workers from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Philippines and others and Official Development Aid also make up a substantial part of the GDP of several of Asia’s less developed countries.

As was pointed out in the course of the discussion, a one percentage point drop in growth in the United States would constitute a 0.6 percentage point decline in Asia’s GDP. As was stated last week the present crisis is different from any that has gone before. It is really a global crisis as it has a much greater impact economically and socially throughout the world than anything previously. It was also stated that this present crisis is likely to be deeper and of a long duration than any in the past. Moreover recovery would be much slower. One reason for this is that the crisis was born at the centre of the system and not on the sidelines and so it is going to be much harder to contain.

As I have already said this crisis was preceded by a food and fuel crisis when food prices skyrocketed and fuel prices reached unprecedented levels. Sri Lankan consumers are well aware of the difficulties that faced them during those hard times. True, food and fuel crisis now seems gone and prices have stabilized at lower levels. But who is to say that it may not happen again. It might be recalled that Asian countries came out of the financial turmoil of a decade or more ago by stimulating their export sector. It was an export-led strategy that helped Asia come out of that particular situation. But obviously that strategy cannot save them this time round for the credit crunch in the west and the significant drop in consumer spending especially on imported goods and what might be considered luxuries or non-essentials would not allow Asian countries to depend once more on increased export earnings for economic recovery.

The World Trade Organisation predicts that the volume of global trade which rose by 6% in 2007 and 2% last year will fall sharply by 9% this year. If so it would be the biggest drop in 40 years. It is said that in recent months exports declined in many Asian countries as import demand contracted in the industrialized economies. So labour-intensive export industries such as garments and textiles, footwear, toys, gems and jewellery were seriously affected.

That drop in exports would affect countries such as Sri Lanka which rely quite heavily on the garment industry for export earnings. If the withdrawal of the GPS Plus trade concession comes on top of this, the country’s import earnings could suffer badly. Sri Lanka is not the only Asian country with labour-intensive industries that face this situation. Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam are some of the others. That is not all. Growth in Asia is also expected to slowdown perceptibly. Growth which recorded 9% in 2007 will drop to 4-5% this year. The prospects for the coming year are uncertain so that a question mark hangs precariously over 2010 as we move inexorably towards the target date for achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

The current prediction is that if one excludes China and India the rest of Asia will show no growth this year. Now here is the crunch. The jobless in Asia rose from 79 million in 2007 to 84 million in 2008. If that increase of 5 million in one year is considered unacceptable, then worse is to follow this year.

Asia’s unemployment this year is estimated at 94 million a jump of 10 million in one year. If that is bad news, worse is to come. Due to the current crisis labour in the informal sector such as tourism, construction industry, textiles and garments, small and medium enterprises, trade and retail are not only likely to lose their jobs but their wages are also expected to decline substantially. For those who still fantasize about achieving most of the Millennium Development Goals in the next five or more years, especially with regard to poverty, here is something to ponder.

A 100 million people will be pushed into poverty. That is in a region that still has 900 million people living under conditions of extreme poverty. There is more bad news. But I think this is sufficient for one morning.

The writer is a serving Sri Lankan diplomat.

Asean Summit: Fears of 'Scary Army Presence'

Too scary for tourists? Phuket police in riot practice today (Photo by phuketwan.com)

Saturday, May 9, 2009
By Chutima Sidasathian and Alan Morison
Phuket Wan (Thailand)

CONCERNS are being expressed that a large-scale military presence during the Asean Plus Six summit in June could damage Phuket's image as a popular, peaceful tourist destination.
Members of Thailand's Internal Security Operations Command and top generals met with local officials on Phuket today and decided that there will be stringent checks around the summit centre in the western beach resort of Karon.

Tourists and residents will face checks at a five-kilometre cordon, and again at a three kilometre cordon, Phuketwan has learned.

More than one resort owner fears that television footage of soldiers and police on virtually every street corner will alarm travellers as much as the red shirt protest invasion of the Pattaya summit resort did in April.

Phuket's police were showing off their new skills with riot sticks and shields on a parade ground today, and they will be reinforced by thousands more men in uniform for the summit replay.

While Phuket authorities at all levels have guaranteed the behavior of local people and are clearly committed to prevent disturbances, Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva is talking of imposing the Internal Security Act.

This could make many normal gatherings on the island, possibly including weddings and parties, especially those close to the centre of the summit, illegal.

Is this an over reaction?

Local businessman Adisak Auksintawakul believes that sensitive Chinese and Japanese tourists will be turned off Phuket if a large-scale demonstration of military presence is on display.

In any case, he believes it is unnecessary to put Phuket's reputation as a peaceful tourist destination at risk.

''This year Phuket has hosted the Asean Plus Three Finance Ministers' meeting and an Asean Education Ministers' Meeting,'' he told Phuketwan.

''These were peaceful gatherings. There is no cause for alarm about any summit on Phuket.

''To impose the Security Act is not far short of declaring a State of Emergency.

''Instead of encouraging tourists to visit, having too much unnecessary protection could discourage tourists, which is just what the island does not need.

''It is a two-edged sword.''

Phuket is normally thinly policed with just 1100 officers to protect up to one million residents and visitors in high season months.

Local island police will be reinforced by 2850 more, just for the weekend summit on June 13-14.

But these officers will all be on the perimeter, with an unknown number of military personnel guarding a five-kilometre ''cordon sanitaire'' around the summit central meeting point, the Hilton Arcadia Phuket Resort and Spa in Karon.

What this will mean for people going about their normal business within the five-kilometre zone, and for tourists, has yet to be made plain by local and national authorities.

The island's best known holiday town, Patong, all of Karon itself and Kata, all fall within five kilometres of the summit.

Maitree Narukatpichai, owner of the Hilton Arcadia Phuket and Villa Zolitude and a past President of the Phuket Tourist Association, has previously urged an increase in local police numbers to guard the safety tourists.

He is pleased the summit is being held on Phuket and not worried about security being overplayed.

''The Government needs to ensure that leaders are safe,'' he told Phuketwan. ''We don't want a repeat of Pattaya.''

Local Tourism Association of Thailand director Setthapan Putthani is delighted that the Asean summit is coming to Phuket and not concerned about the security, which he says is well short of a declaration of a state of emergency.

Phuket is a Democrat yellow shirt stronghold, and any invading protesters would have to get past a checkpoint near the bridge that connects the only road from the island to the mainland.

In any event, a repetition of the Pattaya invasion seems unlikely for one simple reason: it did the red shirts' cause great harm.

On Phuket, preparations for the Asean summit have begun in earnest, with median strip garden beds on the road from the airport freshly planted and unsightly tree stumps being removed.

The Asean Plus Six Summit has a troubled history. First scheduled for Bangkok, it was postponed because of the invasion of the capital's airports by yellow shirt protesters in November.

Then it was to be Phuket's turn, but sufficient accommodation could not be found during the Songkran-Easter break, so it went to Pattaya.

Poor security led to red shirt protesters invading the resort on the day the summit was to begin, triggering an emergency airlift to safety for some national leaders.

The 10-member Asean grouping of Thailand, Brunei, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Laos and the Philippines is to be bolstered by China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and India.

In the context of the global downturn, this makes Asean Plus Six the most important conference in the Asia-Pacific for many years.