Saturday, September 12, 2009
Finished Reading a Book...
Democracy, Governance and Economic Performance is an interesting book explaining and analyzing the relationship between the three factors experienced in Asian countries: South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong (China), the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Cambodia can learn a lot from this experience...
Cambodia's Trial of the Century, Televised
Time Magazine
By Christopher Shay Friday, Sep. 11, 2009
Like any pair of good TV news hosts, Neth Pheaktra and Ung Chan Sophea deftly play off each other, finishing each other's thoughts and building on each other's ideas. But unlike the playful banter of most local news shows, neither host ever cracks a joke, or even smiles. Instead, the two veteran Cambodian journalists look directly into the camera and talk to viewers every Monday at 1 p.m. about torture, murder and the law.
Neth Pheaktra and Ung Chan Sophea's 24-minute weekly show summarizing and analyzing the trial of Kaing Guek Eav, better known as 'Duch,' the chief of the Khmer Rouge's notorious S-21 interrogation facility also known as Tuol Sleng, has become a sleeper hit in Cambodia. With one in five Cambodians watching the show every week, Duch on Trial has become the main way many young Cambodians, who were not taught about the Khmer Rouge in school, learn about the historic Khmer Rouge tribunal unfolding in Phnom Penh — and, in a lot of cases, hear about this dark chapter of their country's history for the first time.
From 1975 to 1979, the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge emptied Cambodia's cities, abolished money and turned its upper classes into de facto slave laborers in an attempt to form a radical agrarian utopia. More than 30 years later, Cambodia is still rebuilding — both economically and socially. For overseeing the execution of more than 15,000 people during that era, Duch has been charged by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), a hybrid Cambodian-international court backed by the U.N., with war crimes, crimes against humanity, homicide and torture. S-21, the facility that he headed from 1976 until 1979, was a local Phnom Penh high school that the KR transformed into what one scholar later called "the anteroom to death." (See pictures of the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge.)
Not surprisingly, testimonies at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) have been grim since the trial started in February of this year. Duch, a mathematics teacher before joining the Khmer Rouge, admitted that his guards smashed babies against trees. One guard on the stand outlined the process of live blood-letting, and a rare survivor described the pain of having his toenails ripped out.
Despite the gruesome tales, Duch on Trial has attracted up to three million viewers a week in recent months — a whopping 20% of the country's population. The success of the show, which premiered in April, rests on its ability to decode the trial's complex proceedings to a mass audience — no small task in this largely rural, poorly educated country where only about 30% of students who enter school graduate from grade 9. The ECCC was established as a hybrid court after years of negotiation between the U.N. and the Cambodian government, and the result is a complex hodgepodge of international and domestic law.
Matthew Robinson, the British producer of Duch on Trial and executive director of Khmer Mekong Films, took the show's predecessor — a pretrial miniseries about the ECCC — to focus groups around the country, fine tuning the show's language to ensure it could be understood. But while the show may keep it simple, it is still able to highlight complex themes raised in the trial — like mental health and forgiveness — that are relevant to people's daily lives in a nation still suffering from collective post-traumatic stress.
The endeavor was something of a gamble. With the Khmer Rouge only being introduced into the school curriculum this fall, many born after 1979 know little about Cambodia's darkest period. And for those who did, before the Duch trial, over two-thirds of people born after the Khmer Rouge rule said they rarely or never talked about the era. Robinson said before he produced the first episode, he went to his local eatery and asked the staff if they would be interested in a half-hour show about the Duch trial. "They said, 'No, no, no.' But I was there on the Monday [when the show first launched], and all of them were watching. At the end, they gave me a big thumbs up." Now the restaurant shows Duch on Trial every Monday at lunch.
The show, largely funded by the British government, is played on the Cambodian Television Network (CTN), Cambodia's most watched channel. Controlled by Cambodia's richest businessman, Kith Meng, CTN is not playing the show in a prime-time slot as a public service, but because it glues so many Cambodians to the TV screen.
Nonetheless, Duch on Trial is helping fulfill one of the Court's central mandates, according to ECCC chief spokesperson Reach Sambath: to educate Cambodians about the Khmer Rouge. In the last seven months, some 23,000 Cambodians have come to the courts to watch the trial, and the Documentation Center of Cambodia has discussed the trials with nearly 100,000 villagers throughout the country. The trial "is an education. It's equal to a professor of history," says Reach Sambath. (Read TIME's 199 cover story about Cambodia's genocide.)
But with its millions of viewers in Cambodia, television has proven to be better positioned to bring the trial into people's homes. "You'll go out to the local little village in the middle of Kampong Speu [a province in Cambodia], and there will be almost nothing there," says Gregory Stanton, the president of the Washington-based NGO Genocide Watch. "Yet there will be a TV set hooked up to set of car batteries, and people watching."
Though the government has not publicly commented on the show, Robinson says he's heard that high-ranking government officials also watch it to keep tabs on the trial. The current government contains many former members of the Khmer Rouge, including Prime Minister Hun Sen, who was a low-level cadre and even lost his eye fighting for the Khmer Rouge during the invasion of Phnom Penh. It was Hun Sen who initially asked the U.N. for help in establishing a tribunal in 1997, but he has since been accused by critics like Human Rights Watch for trying to limit the trial's scope in order to protect members of his own Cambodian People's Party (CPP).
But for Reach Sambath and many other Cambodians, this trial is not just about teaching the public or finding justice but about accelerating a long-overdue healing process. "The witnesses cry. The accused cries. The audience that comes to the court or watches on television cries," Reach Sambath says. "But they cry not to be more painful, but to release their pain that they have been holding for 30 years."
Duch is only the first Khmer Rouge member to sit behind the bulletproof glass at the ECCC. A joint trial of four other defendants will start within the next two years, and on Sept. 8 despite objections from Hun Sen, prosecutors submitted a list of five additional former high-ranking members of the Khmer Rouge who may one day end up at the tribunal. No matter how open Duch is about the horrific details of S-21, he cannot supply all the answers about the Khmer Rouge, as he played no policy role. "The people we've interviewed say, 'We want to know why these educated people did this to our country?'" Robinson said. "And they won't really get this answer through the Duch trial."
The next hearings, however, expected begin in 2010, will include several people who did derive the Khmer Rouge philosophy, like Pol Pot's second-in-command Nuon Chea and the Khmer Rouge's former head of state Khieu Samphan. Robinson is hoping Khmer Mekong Films will be there too, helping give millions of Cambodians the answers they've been waiting three decades to hear.
By Christopher Shay Friday, Sep. 11, 2009
Like any pair of good TV news hosts, Neth Pheaktra and Ung Chan Sophea deftly play off each other, finishing each other's thoughts and building on each other's ideas. But unlike the playful banter of most local news shows, neither host ever cracks a joke, or even smiles. Instead, the two veteran Cambodian journalists look directly into the camera and talk to viewers every Monday at 1 p.m. about torture, murder and the law.
Neth Pheaktra and Ung Chan Sophea's 24-minute weekly show summarizing and analyzing the trial of Kaing Guek Eav, better known as 'Duch,' the chief of the Khmer Rouge's notorious S-21 interrogation facility also known as Tuol Sleng, has become a sleeper hit in Cambodia. With one in five Cambodians watching the show every week, Duch on Trial has become the main way many young Cambodians, who were not taught about the Khmer Rouge in school, learn about the historic Khmer Rouge tribunal unfolding in Phnom Penh — and, in a lot of cases, hear about this dark chapter of their country's history for the first time.
From 1975 to 1979, the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge emptied Cambodia's cities, abolished money and turned its upper classes into de facto slave laborers in an attempt to form a radical agrarian utopia. More than 30 years later, Cambodia is still rebuilding — both economically and socially. For overseeing the execution of more than 15,000 people during that era, Duch has been charged by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), a hybrid Cambodian-international court backed by the U.N., with war crimes, crimes against humanity, homicide and torture. S-21, the facility that he headed from 1976 until 1979, was a local Phnom Penh high school that the KR transformed into what one scholar later called "the anteroom to death." (See pictures of the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge.)
Not surprisingly, testimonies at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) have been grim since the trial started in February of this year. Duch, a mathematics teacher before joining the Khmer Rouge, admitted that his guards smashed babies against trees. One guard on the stand outlined the process of live blood-letting, and a rare survivor described the pain of having his toenails ripped out.
Despite the gruesome tales, Duch on Trial has attracted up to three million viewers a week in recent months — a whopping 20% of the country's population. The success of the show, which premiered in April, rests on its ability to decode the trial's complex proceedings to a mass audience — no small task in this largely rural, poorly educated country where only about 30% of students who enter school graduate from grade 9. The ECCC was established as a hybrid court after years of negotiation between the U.N. and the Cambodian government, and the result is a complex hodgepodge of international and domestic law.
Matthew Robinson, the British producer of Duch on Trial and executive director of Khmer Mekong Films, took the show's predecessor — a pretrial miniseries about the ECCC — to focus groups around the country, fine tuning the show's language to ensure it could be understood. But while the show may keep it simple, it is still able to highlight complex themes raised in the trial — like mental health and forgiveness — that are relevant to people's daily lives in a nation still suffering from collective post-traumatic stress.
The endeavor was something of a gamble. With the Khmer Rouge only being introduced into the school curriculum this fall, many born after 1979 know little about Cambodia's darkest period. And for those who did, before the Duch trial, over two-thirds of people born after the Khmer Rouge rule said they rarely or never talked about the era. Robinson said before he produced the first episode, he went to his local eatery and asked the staff if they would be interested in a half-hour show about the Duch trial. "They said, 'No, no, no.' But I was there on the Monday [when the show first launched], and all of them were watching. At the end, they gave me a big thumbs up." Now the restaurant shows Duch on Trial every Monday at lunch.
The show, largely funded by the British government, is played on the Cambodian Television Network (CTN), Cambodia's most watched channel. Controlled by Cambodia's richest businessman, Kith Meng, CTN is not playing the show in a prime-time slot as a public service, but because it glues so many Cambodians to the TV screen.
Nonetheless, Duch on Trial is helping fulfill one of the Court's central mandates, according to ECCC chief spokesperson Reach Sambath: to educate Cambodians about the Khmer Rouge. In the last seven months, some 23,000 Cambodians have come to the courts to watch the trial, and the Documentation Center of Cambodia has discussed the trials with nearly 100,000 villagers throughout the country. The trial "is an education. It's equal to a professor of history," says Reach Sambath. (Read TIME's 199 cover story about Cambodia's genocide.)
But with its millions of viewers in Cambodia, television has proven to be better positioned to bring the trial into people's homes. "You'll go out to the local little village in the middle of Kampong Speu [a province in Cambodia], and there will be almost nothing there," says Gregory Stanton, the president of the Washington-based NGO Genocide Watch. "Yet there will be a TV set hooked up to set of car batteries, and people watching."
Though the government has not publicly commented on the show, Robinson says he's heard that high-ranking government officials also watch it to keep tabs on the trial. The current government contains many former members of the Khmer Rouge, including Prime Minister Hun Sen, who was a low-level cadre and even lost his eye fighting for the Khmer Rouge during the invasion of Phnom Penh. It was Hun Sen who initially asked the U.N. for help in establishing a tribunal in 1997, but he has since been accused by critics like Human Rights Watch for trying to limit the trial's scope in order to protect members of his own Cambodian People's Party (CPP).
But for Reach Sambath and many other Cambodians, this trial is not just about teaching the public or finding justice but about accelerating a long-overdue healing process. "The witnesses cry. The accused cries. The audience that comes to the court or watches on television cries," Reach Sambath says. "But they cry not to be more painful, but to release their pain that they have been holding for 30 years."
Duch is only the first Khmer Rouge member to sit behind the bulletproof glass at the ECCC. A joint trial of four other defendants will start within the next two years, and on Sept. 8 despite objections from Hun Sen, prosecutors submitted a list of five additional former high-ranking members of the Khmer Rouge who may one day end up at the tribunal. No matter how open Duch is about the horrific details of S-21, he cannot supply all the answers about the Khmer Rouge, as he played no policy role. "The people we've interviewed say, 'We want to know why these educated people did this to our country?'" Robinson said. "And they won't really get this answer through the Duch trial."
The next hearings, however, expected begin in 2010, will include several people who did derive the Khmer Rouge philosophy, like Pol Pot's second-in-command Nuon Chea and the Khmer Rouge's former head of state Khieu Samphan. Robinson is hoping Khmer Mekong Films will be there too, helping give millions of Cambodians the answers they've been waiting three decades to hear.
Centenarians in Japan top 40,000 mark
Fri Sep 11, 12:07 pm ET
TOKYO (AFP) – The number of centenarians in Japan has topped 40,000 for the first time, a government survey showed Friday, amid fears of a looming demographic crisis in the world's number two economy.
There are expected to be 40,399 people aged 100 and older in Japan by mid-September, up 11 percent from a year earlier, the health ministry said.
Nearly 35,000, or 87 percent, of the group are women, the survey showed.
The oldest person in Japan is a 114-year-old woman living in southern Okinawa, famous for having Japan's highest concentration of centenarians. That longevity has been attributed to the island's warm climate and a vegetable-based diet.
Okinawa counts roughly 67 centenarians for every 100,000 people, while Japan's urban areas have the lowest concentration of 100-year-olds and over.
A 112-year-old hailing from the western prefecture of Kyoto is the country's oldest man. With more than 36 descendants, he has previously said his secrets to longevity are spending hours reading the newspaper and not being a fussy eater.
Japan has one of the world's oldest populations, with many young people putting off starting a family because of the burden on their lifestyles and careers.
The government is struggling to find ways to boost Japan's birthrate trend to avert a future crisis as a shrinking number of workers is asked to support a growing mass of pensioners.
The fertility rate edged up to 1.37 children per woman in 2008, but the population is on an overall downward trend because the number of women has steadily fallen and fewer people are marrying, the government has said.
TOKYO (AFP) – The number of centenarians in Japan has topped 40,000 for the first time, a government survey showed Friday, amid fears of a looming demographic crisis in the world's number two economy.
There are expected to be 40,399 people aged 100 and older in Japan by mid-September, up 11 percent from a year earlier, the health ministry said.
Nearly 35,000, or 87 percent, of the group are women, the survey showed.
The oldest person in Japan is a 114-year-old woman living in southern Okinawa, famous for having Japan's highest concentration of centenarians. That longevity has been attributed to the island's warm climate and a vegetable-based diet.
Okinawa counts roughly 67 centenarians for every 100,000 people, while Japan's urban areas have the lowest concentration of 100-year-olds and over.
A 112-year-old hailing from the western prefecture of Kyoto is the country's oldest man. With more than 36 descendants, he has previously said his secrets to longevity are spending hours reading the newspaper and not being a fussy eater.
Japan has one of the world's oldest populations, with many young people putting off starting a family because of the burden on their lifestyles and careers.
The government is struggling to find ways to boost Japan's birthrate trend to avert a future crisis as a shrinking number of workers is asked to support a growing mass of pensioners.
The fertility rate edged up to 1.37 children per woman in 2008, but the population is on an overall downward trend because the number of women has steadily fallen and fewer people are marrying, the government has said.
Corn plant to begin exporting by year's end
The Phnom Penh Post
May Kunmakara
Friday, 11 September 2009 15:00
HLH Agriculure Cambodia Co Ltd, a Singaporean-owned company that this year invested US$15 million in a corn-processing factory in Kampong Speu province, told the Post Thursday it would begin exporting by the end of the year.
Rort Veasna, purchasing officer at HLH, said his company would export about 300 tonnes of processed red corn to Singapore in November.
"It is our first phase of exports to foreign markets," he said, adding that the corn would be sold at $200 a tonne.
HLH has recently produced 800 tonnes of corn on its 450-hectare farm in Omlaing commune in Thpong district, Kampong Speu, he said, adding that it purchased an additional 1,000 tonnes from local companies and farmers.
An additional 10,000 hectares are being planted in nearby Oral district, he added.
Rort Veasna said that demand from the region had reached 50,000 tonnes for the last quarter of this year, but that HLH had so far not been able to keep up with demand.
"We have not had sufficient capacity for this huge amount because my business plan has only just been completed and some of our crop was sold on the domestic market," he said, adding that HLH had completed sales to CP Group and SCF Company to produce pet food.
Overall, the company has invested $30 million, he said, and plans to spend more - current capacity is 300 tonnes a day with two Chinese-made corn-drying machines and five planting machines.
"Although we cannot currently meet market demand, we will keep trying to purchase domestically and from overseas to enlarge and improve our plantation for exporting not only to Asia, but also European markets," said Rort Veasna.
Cambodia last year exported more than half a million tonnes of red corn within the region, said Mao Thora, secretary of state at the Ministry of Commerce.
Last year Cambodia planted 141,264 hectares of corn, according to official figures, and the Kingdom produced 561,584 tonnes in 2008.
Government promotes exports
"We welcome more foreign investors in the sector to export abroad," adding that Cambodian operations had consistently produced high-quality corn for overseas markets.
The ministry would be ready to assist farmers in exporting the crop, said Mao Thora.
"If a company wants to raise sufficient quantities for export, they should cooperate [with the ministry]," he said.
May Kunmakara
Friday, 11 September 2009 15:00
HLH Agriculure Cambodia Co Ltd, a Singaporean-owned company that this year invested US$15 million in a corn-processing factory in Kampong Speu province, told the Post Thursday it would begin exporting by the end of the year.
Rort Veasna, purchasing officer at HLH, said his company would export about 300 tonnes of processed red corn to Singapore in November.
"It is our first phase of exports to foreign markets," he said, adding that the corn would be sold at $200 a tonne.
HLH has recently produced 800 tonnes of corn on its 450-hectare farm in Omlaing commune in Thpong district, Kampong Speu, he said, adding that it purchased an additional 1,000 tonnes from local companies and farmers.
An additional 10,000 hectares are being planted in nearby Oral district, he added.
Rort Veasna said that demand from the region had reached 50,000 tonnes for the last quarter of this year, but that HLH had so far not been able to keep up with demand.
"We have not had sufficient capacity for this huge amount because my business plan has only just been completed and some of our crop was sold on the domestic market," he said, adding that HLH had completed sales to CP Group and SCF Company to produce pet food.
Overall, the company has invested $30 million, he said, and plans to spend more - current capacity is 300 tonnes a day with two Chinese-made corn-drying machines and five planting machines.
"Although we cannot currently meet market demand, we will keep trying to purchase domestically and from overseas to enlarge and improve our plantation for exporting not only to Asia, but also European markets," said Rort Veasna.
Cambodia last year exported more than half a million tonnes of red corn within the region, said Mao Thora, secretary of state at the Ministry of Commerce.
Last year Cambodia planted 141,264 hectares of corn, according to official figures, and the Kingdom produced 561,584 tonnes in 2008.
Government promotes exports
"We welcome more foreign investors in the sector to export abroad," adding that Cambodian operations had consistently produced high-quality corn for overseas markets.
The ministry would be ready to assist farmers in exporting the crop, said Mao Thora.
"If a company wants to raise sufficient quantities for export, they should cooperate [with the ministry]," he said.
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