Forever in Transit

UN human rights envoy cancels Cambodia visit.

UN rights envoy cancels Cambodia visit after scathing report

PHNOM PENH (AFP) – The United Nations rights envoy to Cambodia has cancelled a visit to the country, officials said Monday, just days after the release of his scathing report on the government’s rights record.

The visit, which was to begin Tuesday, would have been special representative Yash Ghai’s third to Cambodia, where he has been repeatedly attacked by government officials for his unusually blunt assessments on rights violations.“Yash Ghai unfortunately had to postpone his mission for reasons unrelated to Cambodia,” said Margo Picken of the Office for the High Commissioner on Human Rights in Cambodia.Prime Minister Hun Sen has demanded that Ghai, a lawyer living in Hong Kong, be sacked after his criticism last year of the government’s failure to protect basic liberties.Other senior officials have also lashed out at Ghai, with government spokesman Khieu Kanharith calling him the “laziest staffer of the United Nations” when asked about the report last week, according to media reports.

The report said the government was using systematic rights violations to remain in power, accusing it of refusing to improve its rights record.

Relations between the government and UN rights envoys have historically been poor, with Hun Sen calling Ghai’s predecessor Peter Leuprecht “stupid” — a term he also used to describe Ghai, along with “rude” and a “god without virtue.”

Other government officials say Ghai is simply bitter because the government does not value his work.

Add comment March 14, 2007

Sokimex order a dredging machine to be used in the Mekong River to accomodate vessel traffic

March 12, 2007
Dredge/booster barge shipped to Cambodia

www.marinelog.com

Logistics specialist John S. Connor, Inc., Glen Burnie, Md., has recently completed the shipment of a dredge/booster barge for Sokimex Group, based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Sokimex will use the equipment for dredging operations in the Mekong River so that the river can accommodate more vessel traffic.

Sokimex acquired the dredge/booster barge from Renda Dredging Company.

The equipment weighed 1,135 tons, making it the heaviest shipment ever handled by John S. Connor in its 90 year history. It was so large and heavy that the dredge and barge had to be separated into two sections so it could be shipped.

After the equipment was separated, the dredge alone weighed 610 metric tons and was enormously bulky; 107-ft. long, 51-ft. high, and 43-ft. wide. The booster barge as a separate lift weighed an additional 525 metric tons.

John S. Connor made all the logistics arrangements for the shipment of the equipment.

In order to accomplish the loading of the dredge and barge onto the MV WIEBKE, a specialized heavy-lift ship, the shippers utilized the services of a naval architect and an engineering firm to ascertain lift points, weight, and the center of gravity of the dredge and the booster barge.

The loading of the two large pieces, work boats and other equipment onto the MV WIEBKE in Port Manatee, Florida, required five days. The ship has two cranes with lifting capacity of 340 tons each, plus a third crane with a lifting capacity of 220 tons. Two of the ships heavy lift cranes were married together in order to generate enough lifting capacity to load these heavy pieces.

The dredge and barge had to be lifted onto the ship directly from the water at Port Manatee. Because of the excessive weight and size of the equipment, four lifting cradles, two for each heavy piece, had to be fabricated, each one weighing 18 tons. A diver was utilized to be sure the cradles were positioned properly to lift the equipment.

“The Master and crew of the MV WIEBKE, along with their port captain, performed extremely well in completing this complicated heavy lift operation,” says William Settle, bulk manager at John S. Connor.

The MV WIEBKE left port with the dredge, barge, and other additional work boats and equipment safely on board and sailed via the Suez Canal, arriving five weeks later in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. From there, the equipment was discharged and towed up the Mekong River to Phnom Penh. It will take another six months to reassemble the equipment and get it in place to begin the dredging project.

Sokimex Group, established in 1990, has over 2,000 employees and annual revenues in excess of $100 million.

John S. Connor is a full service logistics firm based in Glen Burnie, Md. The company is a leading provider of ocean freight and air freight, customs brokerage, domestic transportation, and steamship agency services. Connor has an extensive network of agents worldwide, and is a licensed NVOCC.

More here…

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Is that mean that Sokimex will own the Mekong River too?

Add comment March 14, 2007

Kem Sokha to resume politics – good candidate, good idea, but not a good time

Kem Sokha to resign from CCHR presidency to resume politics

Cambodian Press Review

Kem Sokha, president of prominent NGO the Cambodian Center for Human Rights (CCHR) and former senator of co-ruling Funcinpec, has unveiled a plan to retire from the center and resume political life, newspapers reported yesterday and today.

“I submitted a resignation from the center to the CCHR’s Governance Council, but the Governance Council has yet to make a decision because it has not found someone to substitute me,” Kampuchea Thmey quoted him as saying Friday.

He said that he expects the council to officially accept his resignation in April, during which he will send the Ministry of Interior an application form requesting it sanction the establishment of a political party to join the 2008 national election as he has won over hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country, according the newspaper. However, The Cambodia Daily reports Kem Sokha will leave his CCHR office as of May 1.

“The idea [to form the political party] is from the people….The people want me, need me,” he said, writes The Cambodia Daily. “In Cambodia we have many political parties…(and) every party says they’re democratic. I want to establish the model of democratic political party,” where total control does not only go to its leader,” he added.

The party’s president will be allowed to remain in office for only two terms, he said, adding that his friends living overseas will back the party and that he has not received financial support from any countries for its creation, according to Kampuchea Thmey. Kem Sokha said that he and supporters have yet to name the planned party, noted Samleng Yuvechun Khmer.

According to an unnamed source, the party will be called “Khmer Freedom” with a logo bearing the picture of white dove in flight with a black background, reports Rasmey Angkor. The source added that those who will join the party are mostly former members of the defunct Khmer National Liberation Front Party (KNLFP) and others will come from officials from the Sam Rainsy Party.

Heng Samrin, chairman of the National Assembly and honorary president of the ruling CPP, told The Cambodia Daily that Kem Sokha’s announcement failed to surprise him. “If there are people that he can convince, let him convince them….There are only a few people who work with him,” said Heng Samrin.

Add comment March 14, 2007

Pre – election debate in 2008 – good idea

VS

Democracy Advocates Push for Debate in 2008

Reasey Poch
VOA Khmer
Washington
13/03/2007

Cambodian democracy would benefit from head-to-head debates as the country heads toward general elections next year, leading party activists told VOA Monday.

Public debates would allow candidates to showcase their platforms for voters, strengthening the democratic process, Mu Sochua, secretary-general for the Sam Rainsy Party said by phone from Phnom Penh.

Debates are a hallmark of democratic countries, such as those televised debates among presidential candidates in the United States, Pok Than vice secretary-general for the newly formed Norodom Ranariddh Party said. CPP lawmaker Cheam Yeap said he personally agrees with debates. It’s important for party leaders to explain their positions to voters, he said, but he was waiting to see a formal request from the Sam Rainsy Party before he would decide what to do.Information on parties’ agendas is especially useful for voters, but the challenge is to convince every leader to participate in debates, Jerome Cheung, Cambodia director of the National Democratic Institute, told VOA. However, he said, not all parties are likely to agree because not all of them would come out looking good in a debate.Cambodia is heading into local elections next month, where leaders for each of the country’s 1,621 communes will be chosen. National leaders will be chosen next year.

Add comment March 14, 2007

New Theory: Climate change killed ancient city at Angkor

Climate change killed ancient city

March 14, 2007
The Daily Telegraph (Australia)

CLIMATE change was a key factor in the abandonment of Cambodia’s ancient city of Angkor, Australian archaeologists said today.

The city, home to more than 700,000 people and capital of the Khmer empire from about 900AD, was mysteriously abandoned about 500 years ago.

It has long been believed the Khmers deserted the city after a Thai army ransacked it, but University of Sydney archaeologists working at the site say a water crisis was the real reason it was left to crumble.

“It now appears the city was abandoned during the transition from the medieval warm period to the little ice age,” Associate Professor of Archaeology Roland Fletcher said.Prof Fletcher said that to sustain a population of 750,000, the Khmers had a meticulously organised water management system.

But blockages found in two large structures that controlled the water system in central Angkor suggested the network had begun to break down late in the city’s history.

Prof Fletcher said the discoveries complemented previous field work that had led his team to conclude the city was abandoned when new monsoon patterns, brought about by climate change, had made the site unsustainable.

Add comment March 14, 2007

Maha Ghosananda died yesterday.

Maha Ghosananda, Cambodian Buddhist leader and peace prize nominee, dies

March 13, 2007
AP

NORTHAMPTON, Mass. –Maha Ghosananda, a Nobel Peace Prize-nominated monk who rebuilt Buddhism in Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, has died.

Ghosananda, who lived in Leverett and Providence, R.I., was believed to be in his late 70s. He died Monday at Cooley Dickinson Hospital, said Christina Trinchero, a hospital spokeswoman. Trinchero did not know the cause of death or his age.

The Cambodian monk lived in exile between 1975 and 1979, when the Khmer Rouge denounced Buddhism and caused the deaths of nearly two million people through starvation, disease, overwork and execution.Ghosananda was one of the first monks to return to Cambodia and train new Buddhist leaders after Pol Pot’s regime was toppled by the Vietnamese in 1979.

“He did everything he could to restore Buddhism to Cambodia,” Jim Perkins, pastor of the Leverett Congregational Church and a friend of the religious leader, told the Daily Hampshire Gazette of Northampton.

Ghosananda was elected a Supreme Cambodian Buddhist Patriarch by fellow Buddhist monks in 1988 for restoring Buddhism in the war-torn country.

During the 1990s, he lead the Dhamma Yatra movement to rebuild religious life in Cambodia.

He moved to western Massachusetts in the late 1980s at the invitation of the Nipponzan Myohoji Buddhist order in Leverett, which seeks a complete elimination of weapons, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times in the mid-1990s.

He split his time between the Buddhist temple in Leverett and Providence, R.I., Perkins said.

Add comment March 14, 2007