Cambodia

Source: www.cambodia-roads.fr Sebastian Strangio, In the Dragon’s Shadow – Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2022. Peter PeverelliTFF Associate This text is a combination of a book review and a report of a visit to Cambodia in January 2023. Both texts were published earlier in Dutch on Chinasquare. It seems justified to compare the value of the ASEAN countries to China with that of South America to the US. Turned around, one could expect that the ASEAN countries regard China as a Big Brother that you cannot ignore, even if you want to. This book confirms that expectation, but also shows that any ASEAN member can build a win-win relationship with China in its own specific way. The author, an academic who has been stationed as a journalist in various ASEAN countries for years, builds his arguments on a solid historical foundation, combined...

  How can Saudi Arabia be brought low? If the King won’t remove from power his 33 old son, Prince Mohammad bin Salman, there may be no alternative but to do battle (non-violently) with its regime. There seems to be no doubt that it was bin Salman who gave the order to murder Saudi Arabia’s dissident journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. This is not the only reason to take up (non-violent) arms against Saudi Arabia. Others are its massive buying of Western military hardware. Another is its war in Yemen where it has killed tens of thousands of civilians. Another is that it still follows the intolerant strictures of the Wahabi sect of Islam. In 2015 the German vice-chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, publicly accused Saudi Arabia of financing Islamic extremism in the West and warned that it must stop. He said that the Saudi regime was funding extremist mosques and communities that pose...

  Finally, finally, the over-long, ten year trials of the leaders of the murderous Khmer Rouge leadership of Cambodia, are over. The two defendants, Nuon Chea, and Khieu Samphan, were each given a life sentence at the end of the first trial in August 2015 for crimes against humanity. Now last week they were convicted of genocide. Of the other three that were tried, one, the ex-foreign minister, Ieng Sary died in 2013, one, Ieng Thirith, the wife of Ieng Sary, was too ill with Alzheimer’s to appear and one, Kaing Guek Eav (“Duch”), voluntarily confessed three years ago and was sent to jail for 35 years. In the twentieth century, two massacres of hundreds of thousands people compete for second place after Hitler’s extermination of the Jews, Poles, homosexuals and gypsies. One is Cambodia and the other is Rwanda. But Cambodia, where the deaths were between a million and...

a pro-American military junta led by Lon Nol deposed King Sihanouk, who had succeeded in keeping his country out of the Vietnam War.

The two American presidential candidates give the impression of being rather hostile towards China. This is counterproductive. “The US should not adopt confrontation as a strategy of choice. In China, the US would encounter an adversary skilled over the centuries in using prolonged conflict as a strategy and whose doctrine emphasizes the psychological exhaustion of the opponent. In an actual conflict both sides possess the capabilities and ingenuity to inflict catastrophic damage on each other. By the time any such hypothetical conflagration drew to a close, all participants would be left exhausted and debilitated. They would then be obliged to face anew the very task that confronts them today: the construction of an international order in which both counties are significant components”. Henry Kissinger who wrote this four years’ ago, was the architect, along with his boss, President Richard Nixon, of the US’s rapprochement with China which led to Communist...

China is changing world geography, or at least trying to do so. Not in the sense of land and water like the Netherlands, but in the sense of weaving new infrastructures on land, on water, in the air, and on the web. It is not surprising that a country with some Marxist orientation would focus politics on infrastructure–but as means of transportation-communication, not as means of production. Nor is it surprising that a country with a Daoist worldview focuses politics on totalities, on holons and dialectics, forces and counter-forces, trying to tilt balances in China’s favor. How this will work depends on the background, and its implications. Two recent books, Valerie Hansen, Silk Road: A New History (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Knopf, 2015) see them as arteries connecting the world, globalization, before that term became a la mode....

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Finally, finally the over-long, seven year trial of the leaders of the murderous Khmer Rouge leadership of Cambodia, is over. The two defendants, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, were each given a life sentence. Of the other three that were tried, one, the ex-foreign minister, Ieng Sary died in 2013, one, Ieng Thirith, the wife of Ieng Sary, was too ill with Alzheimer’s to appear and one, Kaing Guek Eav (“Duch”), voluntarily confessed three years ago and was sent to jail for 35 years.

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Dateline: Phnom Penh, Cambodia, March 5th 2013 Cambodia has lain for too long under the black umbrella of its past. But Cambodia is waking up, has looked the evil one in its eye and, re-born, found its strength. Cambodia has been to hell and back – 2 million of its people killed out of population of 8 million, with 500,000 of them executed, the consequence of a fanatical communist movement, the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot and a group of henchmen now being tried in the UN War Crimes Court. (Pol Pot himself is dead.) The Khmer Rouge violently took power in 1975 and fell in 1979. They wanted a classless society. They abolished money, property and religious practices. Family relationships were criticised and people were forbidden from even showing the slightest affection. The work day in the fields was 12 hours long without pause. Torture and the...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Dateline: Phnom Penh, Cambodia. At the end of World War 2, when the three allies, Britain, the US and the Soviet Union, were considering what to do with the top German political and military leaders, Winston Churchill had no compunction in saying they should be taken out of their cells and shot. Franklin Roosevelt persuaded him that a trial was more in order. Stalin went along with this. A trial it was with judges from the three powers – the first war crimes’ trial in history. It tried 23 of the German hierarchy and it took only 13 months to complete the trial. The trial in Cambodia, organised jointly by the UN and the Cambodian government, has had only five people in the dock but has taken 7 years and is not likely to finish before the end of the summer or even early next year. (One was convicted...

LONDON – “The moral arm of the universe is long”, Martin Luther King once said in one of his memorable speeches. “It bends towards justice”. But it is doubtful if the people of Cambodia, the site of the original “Killing Fields”, feel that this is likely. Yet their understandable cynicism may about to be confounded. Cambodia‚” National Assembly is poised to approve a government decision to ratify a treaty, over a decade in the making, that will empower a special court to try surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge, the communist movement that was seized with a mission to refashion the social and economic structure of their country by the sword and the bullet. Cambodia incarnates the worst horrors of being caught in the crossfires of war. It was heavily bombed in secret by the Nixon administration. Then when the Vietnamese invaded in 1979 Washington had the audacity to line up...

LONDON- “The arm of the moral universe is long it bends towards justice”. So said Martin Luther King. And indeed, since Nuremberg and the first international court for war crimes to try Nazi leaders, the development of international human rights law has steadily improved. Justice, even if it’s often two steps forward, one step back, is by the decade reaching further. The case of ex-dictator General Augusto Pinochet is now back before the law lords in London and the betting here is that they will confirm their earlier ruling that he does not have sovereign immunity. But even if the decision goes the other way it will have pushed the British and other governments to clarify the standing of international law–the treaties on genocide, torture, hostage-taking and the supression of terrorism in particular–in domestic law. In any event the ruling ought to be overshadowed by the debate now coming to a...

LONDON– Those who sweated blood and tears to bring peace to Cambodia six years ago can be forgiven if they now say they see very little causal relationship between the magnitude of their efforts and the result now at hand–the coup d’etat by Hun Sen and the effective suspension of civil liberties. The Cambodian veterans and the rest of those who labor wearily in the vineyard of peacemaking are manifestly at a loss what to do next. It is somewhat of a cruel irony that the Secretary-General of the United Nations has deployed as his envoy to Cambodia Thomas Hammarberg who for years, as a brilliantly effective secretary-general of Amnesty International, did much to focus the spotlight of global attention on the gruesome details of the Cambodian genocide. Now it is if, in a perverse retribution for those days, he has to pay personal penance and go back and watch, perhaps,...