Is U.S. Training Cambodian Troops Linked to Abuses?

A U.S. Army sergeant, left, talks to Cambodian troops during a U.S.-led military exercise outside Phnom Penh in June 2007 (Photo: Tang Chhin Sothy / AFP / Getty Images)

Military police used in forced eviction in Spean Chhes (Photo: Licadho)

Scene from the 2008 eviction in Kampot as described in this story (Photo: Licadho)

Scene from the 2008 eviction in Kampot as described in this story (Photo: Licadho)

House burnt down during eviction in Kampot in 2008 (Photo Licadho)

House burnt down during eviction in Kampot in 2008 (Photo: Hallam Goad)

Phnom Penh Friday, Nov. 19, 2010
By Douglas Gillison
Time Magazine (USA)

But State Department records released under the Freedom of Information Act appear to give credence to a long-standing complaint from congressional staff and human-rights workers: that, to get around the frustrations of the military vetting law, American embassies around the world sometimes vet individual foreign soldiers and sailors, but not the units they are drawn from. By law, assistance is barred "to any unit" of a foreign military suspected of abuses, but State Department records show that U.S. foreign-service officers in Cambodia may have read unit as meaning individual soldiers.

The U.S. State Department was watching closely two years ago when Cambodian troops were called for evictions in two of coastal Kampot province's villages. According to accounts by human-rights workers and reporting by the U.S. embassy in Phnom Penh, naval infantry sealed off one village and refused to allow in food when residents resisted the dismantling of their homes, 100 of which had been burned down by forestry officials to make way for soldier housing. Though military officials denied this, the State Department reported that several inhabitants were arrested and badly beaten by troops who denied them immediate medical care. Hundreds of families were evicted and some were carted off in military cargo trucks supplied by the U.S.

Ugly as that scene may have been, in June of this year the same unit, the 31st Naval Infantry Brigade of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces, which according to Human Rights Watch has a history of human-rights abuses including the summary executions of political enemies in 1997, participated in a week of training staged in Cambodia by the U.S. Two platoons of U.S. Marines taught the Cambodians, among other things, about military operations in urban terrain, detainee handling and martial arts.

Since 1997, federal law has barred U.S. forces from offering assistance to foreign military units if there is evidence that they have gone unpunished after committing human-rights violations. But the question of how Washington should interpret that law is far from settled. The U.S. has been frequently accused of violating or undermining this law around the world in its eagerness to pursue security cooperation in Africa, South America and Asia.

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