Cambodia balances East and West
PHNOM PENH – AT a ceremony last month marking the construction of the US$128 million Cambodia-China Prek Kdam Friendship Bridge in Kandal province, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said the growth in aid and investment from China was boosting economic development and strengthening his country’s “political independence”. “China respects the political decisions of Cambodia,” he...
Cambodia’s monarchy quietly evolves
PHNOM PENH–FIVE years on from King Norodom Sihanouk’s intricately-scripted departure from the political stage, Cambodia’s new monarch Norodom Sihamoni is quietly and finally emerging from his father’s shadow. Enthroned by French colonial authorities in 1941, Sihanouk grew into a national symbol and wily political operator, entrenching himself at the center of the country’s political life...
Adjusting to life in China’s shadow
As the government accepts millions of Chinese aid and investment dollars, observers remain divided on whether Beijing’s meteoric rise will help or hinder the country over the long term.
REVIEW: ‘The Golden Triangle’, by Ko-Lin Chin
BURMA’S United Wa State Army is seen by many Western law enforcement agencies as one of the most powerful drug-trafficking organizations in the world. Since signing a cease-fire agreement with the Burmese government in 1989, the 20,000-strong UWSA has been granted control of Wa Special State—an isolated and mountainous region of Shan State in Burma’s...
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...
Censorship of Farrago
‘A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged . . . [it is] the skin of a living thought that may vary in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.’ — US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. I’ve been dismayed to hear, even amongst the distractions...
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...
Porn: Why Censorship Won’t Work
While I was in Saigon I found the time to write an opinion piece about censorship of internet pornography, which has now been published at Online Opinion and has sparked some interesting debate that has helped me to clarify my views on the issue. My article — which has also cropped up in The Nation,...
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
'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...
The Moralities of Socialism
Recently, my good friend Jess sent me the link to an excellent essay from the New York Times magazine about evolutionary psychology and its possible link to the origins of human morality. Harvard professor Steven Pinker argues that humans may have a biologically-determined compass that underpins all of our moral and ethical impulses. Drawing on...
Why I’m For Obama
If hypocrisy, as one writer claims, is an unavoidable — even integral — part of democratic politics, then the two remaining Democratic nominees for president are locked in a dead heat. Both stridently oppose a war that they once supported as members of Congress, and both employ a high-minded liberal rhetoric littered with non-partisan clichés...
