TheCambODIaDaIly

WEEKEND EDITION
The CambODIa DaIly
All the News Without Fear or Favor
Volume 64 issue 43
Saturday-Sunday, May 7-8, 2016
2,000 riel/50 cents
Thousands
Displaced by
Canadian
Wildfire
reuters
ALBerTA, Canada - The 88,000 resi-
dents who fled a wildfire that has
ravaged the Canadian oil town of
Fort McMurray in Alberta will not
be able to return home anytime
soon, officials warned on Thursday,
even as the inferno edged slowly
south.
The out-of-control blaze has consumed entire neighborhoods of
Fort McMurray in Canada’s energy heartland, and officials warn its
spread now threatens two oil sands
sites south of the city.
The wildfire has already forced
precautionary production cuts or
shutdowns at about a dozen major
facilities, eating into a global crude
surplus and supporting oil prices
this week.
“The damage to the community
of Fort McMurray is extensive and
the city is not safe for residents,”
said Alberta Premier rachel Notley in a press briefing late Thursday, as those stranded in camps
and on the roadside to the north of
the city clamored for answers.
“It is simply not possible, nor is
it responsible to speculate on a
time when citizens will be able to
return. We do know that it will not
be a matter of days,” she said.
Continued on page 9
Siv Channa/The Cambodia Daily
CPP spokesman Sok Eysan leaves the Phnom Penh Municipal Court on Friday after being questioned over
the ruling party's defamation complaint against political analyst Ou Virak. (Story page 3)
Lawyers Liken Views of King Sihanouk, KR
B y G eorGe W riGht
the cambodia daily
Attempting to draw parallels
between King Norodom Sihanouk’s attitude toward the Vietnamese and that of the Khmer rouge,
lawyers for Nuon Chea have put
forward letters penned by the late
monarch denouncing Cambodia’s
eastern neighbor.
In a request to the Khmer
rouge tribunal’s Trial Chamber,
submitted on April 8 and released
on Thursday, lawyers for the re-
gime’s second-in-command ask to
admit into evidence letters sent by
King Sihanouk to then-Vietnamese
Prime Minister Pham Van Dong,
decrying the “colonization” of
Cambodia.
The submission, which is accompanied by video and audio recordings, relates to a debate at the tribunal in March over the use of the
word “Yuon” to describe Vietnamese people. Testifying as an expert
witness at the time, researcher Alex
Hinton argued that “in the context
of D.K. [Democratic Kampuchea],
it was an incitement to genocide.”
Victor Koppe, a lawyer for Nuon
Chea—who is on trial for crimes
including genocide alongside
Khmer rouge head of state Khieu
Samphan—then asked Mr. Hinton
if he believed that King Sihanouk
also held a racist view of the Vietnamese. Mr. Koppe cited a
speech the king made to the U.N.
Security Council in January 1979
during which he claimed Vietnam
Continued on page 2
As Fast Food Takes Hold, Health Fears Grow
B y B en P aviour
the cambodia daily
The Cycle of Rice, Part Nine:
Waiting for Rain
Weekend cover story
cambodiadaily.com
As the temperature in Phnom
Penh crested 39 degrees celcius
on Tuesday, a young British couple stepped into the air-conditioned embrace of Burger King.
“Brilliant,” the man whispered.
He entered a scene that would
be familiar in cities from Bristol to
Beijing: a father feeding his son
french fries, a couple silently eating a Whopper, a uniformed at-
tendant tucking errant chairs under a table.
Launh Chhay, a 28-year-old businessman, said he had his first bite
of Burger King about a year ago to
“try a new taste” and now comes
to the outlet on Street 51 five or six
times a month.
“It feels good,” Mr. Chhay said. “I
don’t think it’s very healthy, but I
just drop by and have a quick lunch
so that I can do other things.”
As increasing numbers of Cam-
The Daily Newspaper of Record Since 1993
bodians like Mr. Chhay discover
the quick, rich treats of fast-food
franchises springing up across the
country, health experts warn that
waistlines and rates of related diseases are likely to keep pace.
After establishing an early foothold in Phnom Penh’s foreignerfriendly Boeng Keng Kang 1 commune, many franchises are expanding beyond the neighborhood.
Burger King is adding three new
Continued on page 4
The CambODIa DaIly
2
aNd also
Antisocial Cats in the Rat Race
the Washington post
Unfriendly cats are problems
for animal shelters. They hide,
they hiss, they soil the carpet.
They make lousy pets.
But they also have a strong suit:
They’re often master mouse-catchers. And now, increasingly, they’re
being hired to perform that duty
for life as participants in “working
cat” programs.
The programs are pretty simple:
Sihanouk...
continued from PaGe
1
was “land swallowing” Cambodia,
thereby employing rhetoric similar
to that used by the Pol Pot regime.
Mr. Hinton replied that it would
be inappropriate to draw comparisons between Khmer rouge statements about the Vietnamese and
King Sihanouk’s speech in New
York because the king was “under
the coercive pressure of the Khmer
rouge,” which had been overthrown only a week earlier.
In response, Nuon Chea’s defense team submitted letters that
King Sihanouk sent to Pham Van
Dong in an attempt to prove that
the king’s view of the Vietnamese
was consistent throughout late
1979 and the 1980s.
In his first letter to the Vietnamese premier, dated October 7,
1979, King Sihanouk slams what
he calls the “occupation of the
entire Khmer territory” after the
overthrow of the Khmer rouge.
“In reality, this is colonization,
with the confiscation of land in
favour of your compatriots, the annexation of the strategically important coastal islands, and the appropriation of the natural resources as
well as the artistic and cultural
wealth of my country,” he writes.
“Vietnam preferred to install, in
Phnom Penh, a small team of
Khmer Communists who had
changed sides to serve you and
Shelters match people who have
rodent problems with antisocial
cats. The felines are expected to
keep the pests at bay; the people
compensate them with food, water
and shelter from the elements.
Working cat programs are growing increasingly popular as animal
shelters around the U.S. look for
ways to keep more cats alive.
About 1.4 million cats are euthanized in U.S. shelters each year.
were, in an authoritative manner,
made into the ‘Government of
People’s Kampuchea’ by you.”
Two weeks later, after receiving
no reply, King Sihanouk sent a second letter to Pham Van Dong, accusing the Vietnamese-installed
Cambodian government of being a
puppet of Hanoi.
“Mr. Heng Samrin’s crew only
exists through you and has no opinion other than your own,” he writes,
referring to current National Assembly President Heng Samrin,
then the leader of the People’s republic of Kampuchea.
After a second snub, the monarch sent a third missive stating
that “the Vietnamese government
cannot any longer pretend that
their only aim was to ‘punish’ the
red Khmers for their provocations against the Vietnamese people and to rid Cambodia of their
cruel domination.”
The request submitted by Nuon
Chea’s lawyers argues that “despite
the absence of the precise expression of ‘land-swallowing,’ the three
letters clearly demonstrate that the
late King Father held exactly the
same position in this regard as he
did before the [U.N. Security
Council] in January 1979.”
Along with the letters, the defense team also submitted a video
clip of a speech delivered by King
Sihanouk sometime in the 1980s
during which he argues that
although the “Yuon” did not kill any
of his children or grandchildren, he
The late King Norodom Sihanouk addresses the UN Security Council
in 1979, in a photograph provided by his biographer, Julio Jeldres.
saturday-sunday, may 7-8, 2016
Newsmakers
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leader roBert ‘rZa’ diGGs for stealing his illustrations for a one-of-a-kind
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NY LLC, which auctioned the “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” album to
Shkreli in November. In 2014, it was auctioned off to the highest bidder.
“The idea that music is art has been something we advocated for years,”
Wu-Tang Clan member rZA said preceding the album’s release. “And
yet it doesn’t receive the same treatment as art in the sense of the value
of what it is, especially nowadays when it’s been devalued and diminished to almost the point that it has to be given away for free.” (Reuters)
feared them more than he feared
Pol Pot.
Finally, they submitted an audio
clip in which the king can be heard
explaining how he told current
Prime Minister Hun Sen of his contempt for the Vietnamese.
“I used to remind His excellency
Hun Sen that I helped Yuon until I
lost my throne.... Yuon is a crocodile, they are ungrateful, blasphemous and they mock me every
day,” he says, according to a transcript of the recording.
Mr. Koppe said in an email on
Friday that the documents helped
illustrate the real threat that Vietnam posed to Cambodia during
the period, and that the Khmer
rouge’s suspicion of its neighbor
was more than paranoia.
“The letters, video and audio
show that the ‘Khmer rouge’ were
not alone or paranoid in perceiving
the “land-swallowing Yuon” as
Cambodia’s biggest threat—Prince
Sihanouk did too,” he said.
“This bolsters our argument that
Vietnam was indeed an existential
threat to Cambodia, which in turn
casts a totally different light on the
‘Khmer rouge’s’ treatment of issues related to Vietnam.”
The Dutch lawyer argued that
the submissions also demonstrated
that use of the word “Yuon” did not
imply genocidal intent, as the term
was widely employed in propaganda discourse at the time.
“We say that using the word in
propaganda statements is a normal
political response to a genuine
threat, and that jumping from the
use of the word “Yuon” straight to
genocidal intent is too far of a leap.”
The prosecution’s response to
the request, dated April 26, refutes
the claims and says the documents
are of no probative value.
“Due to the different context,
purpose and time in which the late
King Father’s speeches were given,
they have no probative value in determining whether the Accused
and other CPK [Communist Party
of Kampuchea] leaders used the
word ‘Yuon’ in conjunction with
other language and policies during
the DK period to incite racial hatred
and violence against the Vietnamese,” it reads
David Chandler, a prominent historian of Cambodia, said he was not
impressed by the attempt to draw
parallels between King Sihanouk’s
rhetoric and that of the Khmer
rouge.
“The Kr were closely allied to
the Vietnamese, while perhaps disliking them, until 1973, when
Vietnam withdrew its troops from
Cambodia as part of a cease fire the
Kr refused to take part in. China
supported DK in the anti-Vietnam
war that broke out in 1976 and
1977,” he said in an email.
“By provoking these attacks, the
Kr drew Vietnam into a war which
made [them] a genuine menace to
Cambodia and intensified the generally latent racism of DK.”
Julio Jeldres, King Sihanouk’s
official biographer and former private secretary, said—like Mr.
Hinton—that the monarch was under pressure from the Khmer
rouge leadership when he addressed the Security Council.
“When on 5 January 1979 Pol
Pot summoned him to Government House [it] was to ask him to
go to the United Nations to plead
the case of Cambodia because Sihanouk was the only Cambodian
well known and highly respected in
international circles, at the UN and
the Non-Aligned Movement,” Mr.
Jeldres said in an email.
He noted that three senior
Khmer rouge officials accompanied the king to New York for the
speech. “There was no other person that could plead Cambodia’s
case against Vietnam’s invasion.”
Mr. Jeldres also dismissed the
arguments laid out in the request
by Nuon Chea’s lawyers.
“I think the Nuon Chea defence
team needs to get a good lesson in
Cambodian contemporary history.
They keep raising issues without
studying the background of events
and the historical record,” he said.
“Sihanouk was critical of Vietnam’s actions in Cambodia after
January 1979 but never racist.”