An icon fades in Cambodia
PHNOM PENH – BY uprooting six wooden border markers last October along the Vietnamese border, Cambodia’s opposition leader Sam Rainsy again cast himself in the familiar role of a thorn in the flesh of authority. Earlier this year, a court sentenced Rainsy to two years in prison in absentia for uprooting the posts. He now...
Armed Forces Day
Occasionally, a copy of the New Light of Myanmar — the Burmese government’s official mouthpiece — winds up in our office and gets passed around for laughs. The paper on March 25, commemorating Armed Forces Day, which marks the start of the Burmese army’s resistance to the Japanese occupation in 1945, was particularly amusing. In...
A city in the Burmese junta’s image
BURMA’S new capital city lies about 10 hours’ drive – or a short, white-knuckled flight on an ageing Fokker-27 – from Rangoon, the country’s largest city and former capital. A vast, empty plain of snaking arterial roads and low-density development, Naypyidaw is unlikely to experience anything approaching the so-called “Saffron Revolution” that brought central Rangoon...
Revisiting Lon Nol’s Cambodia
Forty years on, former participants reflect on the country’s star-crossed republican experiment
Ashkenazy in Cambodia
This was a bit of a change from the normal routine. Last week, I had the opportunity to interview pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy, in Phnom Penh as part of an initiative of the Vienna-based International Peace Foundation. Currently, Ashkenazy is the chief conductor and artistic director of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and he had...
