Prasat Preah Vihear
This week brought the news that UNESCO has finally decided to list the country’s Preah Vihear temple as a world heritage site, implicitly recognising Cambodia’s sovereignty over the Angkor-era ruin. The announcement came amidst a wave of mewling and sabre-rattling from the anti-Thaksin People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) party in neighbouring Thailand, where zealots from...
Lon Rith
The nights now are cool and humid, alive with the whisper of insects and the chk-chk of tiny geckos. I am sitting on my balcony after a long spell of wine-induced sloth, staring down at the pin-pricks of moto headlights and the tumult of the fountains in Hun Sen Park. After just sixty days, fragments...
Time running out for Khmer Rouge justice
THE crimes of the Khmer Rouge are well known. Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot’s regime of ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ turned Cambodia into a ‘land of blood and tears’ — a vast agrarian social experiment that enslaved the population and led to the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians. After nearly three decades of legal...
Reading Saigon
I’m sitting in my hotel off Bui Vien Street in central Saigon, exhausted from the early start and aching in the legs from today’s walk. I’m stealing wireless, achingly slow, from somewhere nearby; and my Windows taskbar is in a state of constant excitement, informing me, every few seconds, of connections granted and denied. My...
Cambodia: whose tribunal is it anyway?
The West is turning the trial of surviving members of the Khmer Rouge – its former allies – into a piece of self-promoting political theatre
Windschuttle Redux
To my amusement, a link to my last post about Keith Windschuttle cropped up in an anti-left love-in on Daily Telegraph journalist Tim Blair’s weblog. In between I’m-not-sorry-cos-I-didn’t-do-it screeds, one Windschuttle admirer described me as: …a left-leaning blogger who encountered [Windschuttle’s] work at university and secretly holds respect for [him]. Thus proving that taking the...
'Sorry Day' & Keith Windschuttle
After another late night out at Myer’s Place with the lovely Mary K, I regrettably slept through the whole of Kevin Rudd’s historical (but unconscionably early) ‘sorry’ speech. Rudd’s formal parliamentary motion, penned by the cant-prone Jenny Macklin and her advisors, was straight to the point, if a little syntactically-challenged. But from all accounts, Rudd’s...
REVIEW: ‘Four Classic Quarterly Essays’
How are we to account for the overwhelming successes of the Liberal Party under prime minister John Howard? For a decade he has dominated Australian politics like no other leader in recent memory, using his electoral mandate to forge a new consensus on issues of national security, economic management and climate change. In frustration, some...
