PHNOM PENH – On April 26, a prominent Cambodian anti-logging campaigner was shot and killed by military police in the Cardamom Mountains in the country’s southwest. Chut Wutty, the director of the Natural Resources Protection Group, was reportedly escorting two local journalists through a densely-forested part of Koh Kong province when his car was stopped by military police. An altercation broke out as the officers attempted to confiscate the memory card from the activist’s camera and shots were fired, leaving Wutty and In Rattana, a 32-year-old military policeman, dead.

Wutty, 46, is the highest-profile activist to have been killed in Cambodia since union leader Chea Vichea was gunned down in 2004. Over the past decade, the former soldier had built a reputation for his tireless grassroots campaigns and daring raids on logging operations in national parks and wildlife sanctuaries. Patrick Alley, director of London-based watchdog Global Witness, described Wutty as “one of the few remaining activists willing to speak out against the rapid escalation of illegal logging and land grabbing” in Cambodia.

“The national government and international donor countries must publicly condemn his murder and take swift action to bring the perpetrators to justice,” he said in a statement.

The tragic incident highlights the extreme risks run by those who go up against the powerful interests that control Cambodia’s illegal timber trade. In its explosive 2007 report “Family Trees”, Global Witness alleged that the country’s ruling and business elite, including officials closely linked to Prime Minister Hun Sen, were systematically stripping the country’s once-bountiful forests for personal profit, deploying state security forces including the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF) to guard their operations.

In recent years, Wutty had become a particular thorn in the side of Cambodia’s timber mafia. Late last year, he and a large band of villagers clashed with around 500 police and military police after burning stockpiles of illegal timber in Prey Lang, a swathe of threatened lowland rainforest in northern Cambodia. Wutty had also worked closely with local and international media to produce a recent series of exposes on the axis of government, business and military interests cashing in on Cambodia’s rapidly-diminishing forests.

“People at the grassroots had been taking action, had been conscious of the importance of the forest to the nation, to their livelihoods, to the ecology,” said Lao Mong Hay, an independent human-rights activist based in Phnom Penh. “All these actions hurt the interests of a group of people.” He added that the killing was clearly intended to “send a signal” to others opposing the illicit trade in timber.

Journalists covering land issues – especially illegal logging – have also been subject to intimidation and threats. The Cambodia Daily journalists accompanying Wutty on his ill-fated trip to Koh Kong last week were forced to surrender their cameras; after the shooting they also recalled overhearing a soldier instructing his colleagues to “just kill them both”. In December, a reporter and photographer investigating illegal logging for the Phnom Penh Post were similarly stopped and forced to delete photos from their cameras, and were chased in their car by military police.

Though it’s still unclear whether Wutty’s killing was premeditated, the official response has raised some thorny questions. After a 24-hour investigation, military police announced that the man responsible for the shooting was in fact the dead military police officer, In Rattana. After gunning down the forestry activist with an assault rifle, officials claim, he then shot himself twice in remorse – once in the stomach and then, when that failed to do the job, in the chest.

“The military police officer fatally shot Chut Wutty and when he realized he had made a mistake and could not flee from the law, he decided to kill himself,” national military police spokesman Kheng Tito told Agence France-Presse.

The claim was greeted with incredulity by rights activists and opposition politicians, who said it was implausible that the officer would have been able to shoot himself twice in succession and that the “suicide” was being used as cover for the real culprit.

“It is impossible to call it closure, impossible to call it suicide,” said Mu Sochua, a lawmaker for the opposition Sam Rainsy Party (SRP), who said she was “alarmed” how little was done to investigate the killing. “The more they say it, the more you get suspicious.” In particular, Sochua said, four other military police on the scene were not taken in for questioning, suggesting that the responsible officers were in the pay of senior government officials.

“There were other people involved and they were around. They were very much part of the story and what led to the killings,” she said, adding that only a full and independent investigation would allay her suspicions. (The two Cambodia Daily journalists who were in Wutty’s car at the time of the incident reported that they did not see who fired the lethal shots).

Cycle of impunity

Government critics say the shooting – and the perfunctory investigation conducted by the military police – follows a familiar pattern of impunity in Cambodia, under which the murder and assault of anti-government critics goes largely unpunished. Lao Mong Hay drew a comparison between Wutty’s killing and the high-profile assassination of Chea Vichea, a popular union leader who had rallied Cambodia’s garment workers and spoken out strongly against labor abuses. After he was shot at a Phnom Penh newspaper stand in January 2004, police quickly framed two innocent bystanders for the crime, a story told in the 2011 Who Killed Chea Vichea? documentary.

The two were released by the Supreme Court in 2009, which was eventually forced to recognize the lack of evidence linking them to the murder. The real killers, alleged to be in the pay of powerful officials, remain at large.

This pattern has also been seen in a recent spate of shootings of activists and protesters working to expose land-related corruption and other abuses. In the past six months, Licadho, a local rights group, has documented five shooting incidents specifically involving land activists, causing 19 injuries. These included an incident in January in which security guards employed by the TTY rubber firm shot and injured four villagers protesting the company’s clearing of their land in Kratie province.

On February 20, a government official allegedly shot his handgun into a crowd of protesting garment workers at the Kaoway Sports factory in Bavet near the Vietnamese border, injuring three young women. After several unsuccessful attempts to buy the victims’ silence (local media reported sums ranging from $500 to $1,000), the alleged shooter, Bavet district governor Chhouk Bandith, was removed from his post.

In mid-April, the provincial court in Svay Rieng eventually caved to outside pressure and charged Bandith in mid-April with causing “unintentional injury”, a charge rights groups said was excessively lenient. The outcome was a familiar one. “One cannot help but conclude that Chhouk Bandith belonged to a certain powerful faction in the government,” said Lao Mong Hay. “He must have been protected somewhere.”

Rupert Abbott, Cambodia researcher for rights group Amnesty International, said the only thing that will stem the tide of violent incidents is if Cambodia’s leadership finds the political will to reform Cambodia’s pliant judiciary. “In none of these cases has anyone senior been held accountable,” Abbott said of the spate of recent shootings. “If you reform [the judiciary] and make people realize they can’t get away with murder and that there won’t be impunity, there will likely be a decrease in violence.”

But without concerted action to end impunity and investigate Wutty’s tragic killing, it’s possible that Cambodia’s annus mirabilis of 2012 – a year in which it is chairing the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and campaigning for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council – could be marked instead by an escalating cycle of abuses, protests and state violence.

“This is going down as a bit of a dark chapter,” Abbott said. “And the story of this violence isn’t going away because the violence isn’t going away.”

[Published by Asia Times Online, April 30, 2012]