Sunday, 1 May 2011
Sam Rainsy won lawsuit by Hor 5 Hong
By Tin Zakariya
Radio Free Asia
Translated from Khmer by Ossdey
Click here to read the original article in Khmer
Opposition Leader Sam Rainsy indicated on 30 April that he won the lawsuit brought up by Hor 5 Hong, the minister of Foreign Affairs. The lawsuit was dismissed by the French “Cour de Cassation” (the equivalent of the Supreme Court) after Sam Rainsy’s appealed his case against Hor 5 Hong’s 2008 lawsuit.
Sam Rainsy said over the phone from France that his French lawyer told him that the French Supreme Court decided that he won the case over Hor 5 Hong, after Sam Rainsy appealed his case to the French Supreme Court. Hor 5 Hong won the case in the first instance court and in the appeal court. He accused Sam Rainsy of defamation after Sam Rainsy accused him of being the former Boeng Trabek jail chief under the Khmer Rouge regime.
Kar Savuth, Hor 5 Hong’s lawyer, said on 30 April that he did not know about this issue yet.
From a life in rubbish to a life in rugby
Source: The ROAR (Australia)
18,500km into our 18 month bicycle journey, we stumbled across one of the most courageous and heartwrenching stories to date. It comes from a remarkable education and welfare centre in the heart of Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
After the horrific suffering of the Cambodian people throughout the Pol Pot regime (Khmer Rouge), the country was brought to its knees and life for many millions became a daily struggle between life and death.
Thousands of children and families were left to live and feed off the scraps of food at huge rubbish dumps, and to scavange whatever reusables they could find amongst the broken glass, syringes and rotting waste. If there was ever any doubt as to the destruction caused by the regime, you might find suggestion in their radio broadcasts to the people “To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss”.
Many of the estimated 2.5 million victims of the genocide were educated, city dwellers, the brains behind business, and often nutritionally the healthiest sector of society. Over 10 years of slaughter, the national average height dropped by a staggering 10 cm, a difference that takes around 100 years of human evolution to gain back.
We were unsure what rugby story could be found in a country that was effectively born in 1980, the Khmer Rouge’s “Year Zero”? The findings were nothing less than inspirational.
The rugby journey began in 1995 when a French couple visited Phnom Penh in Cambodia. Christian and Marie-France des Pallières witnessed children living and working through the rubbish dump and decided that something needed to be done. Starting only by feeding these children, they returned to France to raise awareness of the situation and began collecting donations to assist with their work.
Saturday, 30 April 2011
Video game teaches Cambodian children to avoid land mines
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| Chhoun Mina, 15, left, Chob Sopheak, 14, and Chamroeun Chanpisey, 11, test a new video game being unveiled in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, called Undercover UXO, designed to teach youths about the dangers of land mines. (Brendan Brady, For The Times / May 1, 2011) |
Undercover UXO, shorthand for unexploded ordnance, uses an engaging platform to educate youths about what to avoid in a nation where decades of fighting left the land filled with hidden explosives.
May 1, 2011
By Brendan Brady, Los Angeles Times
Reporting from Phnom Penh, Cambodia—
"Turn left, turn right, go back!" her friends urge as she leads her avatar, a pet dog, into a lethal trap and the sound of an explosion rings out from the computer.
In the virtual game world, players can always hit restart, but 11-year-old Chamroeun Chanpisey gets the point. "The game is different from real life," she said. "People have only one life."
The video game, called Undercover UXO, shorthand for unexploded ordnance, is a new tool aimed at educating young Cambodians about the dangers of land mines and other explosives across the war-pocked Southeast Asian country.
It's a lesson that could save numerous lives each year in Cambodia and other post-conflict countries, where millions of land mines and unexploded ordnance — sometimes mistaken for toys — lie hidden under earth, rocks and wrecked vehicles, posing a threat to farmers and wandering children.
In Cambodia alone, such war remnants have killed or maimed nearly 64,000 people in the last three decades, including 286 last year, according to the Cambodian Mine/Explosives Remnants of War Victim Information System.
The video game, designed by a team of professors at Michigan State University with a $78,000 grant from the State Department, has been piloted in Cambodia by the Golden West Humanitarian Foundation, a Woodland-Hills nonprofit group. It tested the game on children such as Chanpisey in its Phnom Penh office before introducing it to rural communities.
Cambodia remains one of the world's most explosives-littered countries, a hangover of extensive bloodshed in the 1970s to the 1990s. This period included civil war, a genocidal communist regime and a secret American bombing campaign in the eastern part of the country to root out suspected Viet Cong fighters.
The United States dropped 2.75 million tons of bombs and warring factions placed millions of mines.
In 1992, a United Nations peacekeeping mission initiated a cleanup. But turning back such a deadly legacy is slow and costly; 4 million to 6 million explosive devices remain, according to the government-run Cambodian Mine Action Center. The government recently said it would need a dozen more years and tens of millions more aid dollars to complete the job.
Meanwhile, traditional efforts to warn to children about the danger involve dry presentations using printed materials, "which is of limited appeal to children, and most people, actually," said Allen Tan, who manages Golden West's work in Cambodia.
Tan, an American whose Cambodian father immigrated to the U.S. after surviving the Khmer Rouge's bloody rule in the late 1970s, said his own experience as an infantryman in Afghanistan and as a bomb-disposal technician in Iraq taught him how easily child's play can turn deadly.
"If you're a kid and you see something shiny in an environment where things are mostly wooden, you're going to want to pick it up," he said.
The video game uses an engaging platform to turn such mistakes into lessons, he said. Players instruct their pet dog to find food while dodging hidden dangers. They increase their scores by recognizing explicit cues, such as a skull-and-bones sign, or less obvious tip-offs, such as a barbed-wire fence, to save their avatar's life.
When an explosion is triggered, a mine specialist character appears onscreen to explain what happened and how to avoid repeating the mistake.
Corey Bohil, a visiting assistant professor at Michigan State University and part of the team that developed the game, said a digital template is being completed that could be tailored to other languages and imagery for a few thousand dollars. In Arab countries where many consider dogs to be unclean, for instance, the avatar could be a goat. And in Afghanistan, roadside bombs could be added to the repertoire of hazards, he said.
The project follows growing popular interest in "serious games" designed to develop life skills and inform players about real-world problems. Michigan State's addition is primitive, with very modest graphics. But its target audience — youngsters in post-conflict countries who are unlikely to have been spoiled by high-tech games — is likely to be forgiving
"I think it's fun, and it teaches me to be more careful," said Chob Sopheak, 14, a tester in Phnom Penh whose neighbor was left maimed and deaf by an exploding mine. Like the two other girls playing that day, Sopheak had never used a computer but quickly adapted to the controls.
Distribution is a significant hurdle for the project, however. The game was originally designed for the XO-1 computer, the "$100 laptop" that actually costs nearly $200 and hasn't really caught on globally. The version of the game that's just been released can be used on PCs and the XO-1. In coming months, plans call for making it available for Macs and Linux, and further down the road, for smartphones and the Web.
This first version benefits from an unlikely boost: narration in Khmer provided by the silky voiced Chhom Nimol, the Khmer lead singer of the popular Silver Lake-based Cambodian-style rock band Dengue Fever.
Brady is a special correspondent. Times staff writer Mark Magnier in New Delhi contributed to this report.
Cambodian New Year celebration enjoys some sun [in West Seattle]
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| Merchants offered a variety of clothing and other items at the Cambodian New Year Festival in White Center April 30. (Kimberly Robinson) |
By Patrick Robinson
2011-04-30
West Seattle Herald (Washington, USA)
The Cambodian New Year Festival came back to White Center on April 30 taking place on the block between 15th and 16th s.w. on 98th Street s.w.
Sopha Dahn with the White Center Community Development Association in charge of the event spoke and served as the host for the event. 22 booths offering food, information and neighborhood interaction and goods for sale plus cultural dances, music, poetry and performances and demonstrations rounded out the event.
Included in the program were traditional dances, a banana eating contest, and a kickboxing demonstration.
The festival is the work of the Cambodian Cultural Alliance of Washington (CCAW), a locally founded and locally based organization in White Center.
"Our mission is to create opportunities for diverse communities to understand and appreciate traditional Cambodian art through events and other cultural activities. Our goal is to provide learning opportunities for youths about traditional Cambodian arts and culture. Our vision is to foster unity and generate interest in showcasing traditional arts and culture of Cambodia."
In addition to grants, the festival is made possible with sponsorships and donations from local businesses and individuals.
This festival is a celebration of the Cambodian New Year and to showcases one of the many unique cultures in White Center.
EDITORIAL: Suddenly, a Thailand-Cambodia
Friday, April 29, 2011
By The Manila Times, Philippines
April 29--Israeli leaders expectedly condemned the unity announced in Cairo, where the two Palestinian factions were holding talks. The Israelis' initial reaction was to say that Fatah-Hamas unification would harm chances for peace between them and the Palestinians. President Abbas, however, said unity in Palestine would pave the way for peace.
The announcement in Cairo said the Palestine Authority and the Hamas Islamists controlling Gaza have agreed to form a transitional government of the future Palestine state, ahead of elections to be held within a year.
Why did the sudden "outbreak of peace" come about? The Fatah and Hamas officials engaged in the Cairo negotiations both said it was a result of the freeze in peace talks between the Palestine Authority and Israel and the upheavals going on in the Arab countries.
President Abbas (quoted by Agence France-Presse) said on Thursday he hoped the unity agreement achieved between his Fatah party and Hamas would promote revival of negotiations with Israel. He said, "We hope that it will bring all the factions of the Palestinians to accept the Quartet conditions." The Quartet is the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia. One of its demands is that any Palestinian government must accept previous agreements, recognize Israel and renounce violence.
Of greater and immediate importance to us in the Philippines and our fellow members of the Association of Asian Nations (Asean) is the also "surprise" ceasefire agreement that Thailand and Cambodia made yesterday.
The two neighbors had been fighting on their common border for seven days. The clashes resulted in 15 deaths.
Until last Wednesday, it did not appear that the fierce fighting would soon stop, and it looked like the Thai-Cambodian conflict was surely going to get worse because talks that had previously been set to take place in Phnom Penh on Wednesday were called off at the last minute by Thailand's defense minister.
The armed forces of both countries have been shooting at each other since February, when their dispute about an ancient temple erupted in an actual war. There was a ceasefire but this ended last week when shooting began again.
Both Bangkok and Phnom Penh say it is the other's fault that war has broken out over two contested temples in the jungle between the two countries. This conflict has caused 75,000 civilians to be displaced. Scores of soldiers on both sides have been killed.
This episode in this decades-long war has been the bloodiest so far. Six Thai soldiers and a civilian and eight Cambodian soldiers were killed.
In February, the European Union foreign policy secretary echoed an earlier call from the United Nations Security Council for a permanent ceasefire.
And the American Ambassador to Thailand, Kristie Kinney (whose previous posting is the Philippines) on Thursday called on both countries to return to the negotiating table.
Asean leaders have also been appealing to Thailand and Cambodia to stop fighting.
The Thai-Cambodian border has never been fully demarcated. Part of the reason is because the jungles are littered with landmines left over from the years when Cambodia was ruled by the Communist Khmer Rouge (which was, of course, the enemy of democratic monarchy Thailand) at war with non-communists as well as with a faction of Cambodian communists supported by Vietnam.
On Tuesday, the fighting briefly spread to the 900-year-old Preah Vihear temple. This temple has been the focus of the conflict between the neighbors since the United Nations gave it UN World Heritage status in 2008.
The clashes that began last week were however centered not in Preah Vihear temple but in two other ancient temples that are 150 kilometers away to the east.
In late February, both countries agreed to let monitors from Indonesia observe the grounds near Preah Vihear. But the Thai military later withdrew its approval of the foreign observers' arrival.
In 1962, the World Court ruled that the temple belonged to Cambodia. But Thailand, as Cambodia does, claims ownership of a 4.6-square-kilometer surrounding area.
Cambodia accuses Thailand of having used spy planes and poison gas in the recent fighting. Thailand denies this allegation.
It is not just the two countries' concern for territorial integrity that is causing the border war.
Domestic politics in both Thailand and Cambodia also appears to be a reason why clashes suddenly erupt. The Abhisit government in Thailand must not appear weak against Cambodia. And the ruling party in Cambodia has retained Prime Minister Abhisit's rival, ousted and exiled former Thai PM Thaksin, as an adviser.
This war is a test of Asean's effectiveness as an organization. Thailand does not want to internationalize the conflict and insists that there are enough bilateral mechanisms to solve the problem.
A major next step for Asean is to become a united economy. That is obviously put into question if war persists--if only a border one--between two members.
Asean is also seen as a region--just as China and East Asia and India and South Asia--in which global economic growth depends.
Asean must grow into a regional grouping that exercises a more effective say on the behavior of its members than it does now.
