Excess is the watchword of the ‘Khmer Riche’, writes Sebastian Strangio

Diamond Island, in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh, is serviced by two roads, which snake from the mainland on to the reclaimed island over narrow bridges. On a typical evening, as the Mekong River islet fills up with revellers, both resemble a gleaming river of light, red brake lights flowing one way, white headlights the other. Diamond Island is the playground for Cambodia’s wealthy elite, and the first venue of choice for lavish wedding celebrations.

Cambodian betrothals – like their Indian counterparts – have always been something of an ostentatious affair, but here, in the island’s string of vast hangar-like reception halls, they take on an extra gleam and polish. Luxury cars – Mercedes, Porsches, Lexuses and Escalades – line the fronts of the wedding halls, where wealthy young brides, wreathed in technicolor silks and dripping expensive jewellery, stand alongside their newly-minted husbands, hands pressed together in the traditional gesture of greeting.

Impunity

Devastated by decades of war and upheaval, Cambodia remains a desperately poor country, where human development indices rate among the lowest in the world, and levels of corruption among the highest. Over the past two decades, the country has seen skyrocketing economic growth rates – from 2004 to 2007, its growth rate crept into the double figures, rivalling even that of China – which have spawned a small professional middle-class in Phnom Penh and other urban centres. But much of this growth has taken place in a shadow economy dominated by a tiny ruling elite surrounding Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has maintained a firm grip on power since ousting his rivals in a bloody coup d’état in 1997.

The result, more than a decade after the country’s civil war came to an end, is the emergence of new generation of noveau riche born into vast inherited wealth gleaned from corruption, nepotism and the exploitation of the country’s natural resources. The profligacy of this new demographic is evident everywhere in Phnom Penh, from the fashionable western cafés where wealthy youth chat and joke over iPads and Frappuccinos, to the overpriced nightclubs where bodyguards keep watch as their louche charges ply girlfriends and prostitutes with the pricier brands of imported whisky and cognac.

And then there are the cars: each year, more and more SUVs take to the streets, turning the city’s wide French-built boulevards into growling bottlenecks. No other Asian city can compare with Phnom Penh for the sheer number and variety of luxury vehicles on display, and nowhere else are these juggernauts more prized and fetishised. The country’s 500-riel note even features the miniature image of a Porsche.

A typical Phnom Penh scene features a petite Khmer woman, barely out of her teens, manoeuvring a gold Cadillac Escalade out of a shopping mall’s car park, heedlessly chatting on the phone while traffic backs up behind her. Or the black SUV that roars through Boeung Keng Kang, Phnom Penh’s leafy district, blazing its headlights in contempt at any vehicle that crosses its path.

A key element of this system of laissez faire cronyism is the strong axis linking wealth and impunity. In August 2008, Hun Chea, one of the prime minister’s nephews, ploughed into a motorcyclist in his Escalade, tearing off the man’s arm and leg. He died at the scene. Far from holding Hun Chea to account, local media reported that traffic police avoided the scene, while a squad of military police arrived and removed the car’s number plates. Hun Chea faced no sanction, though he did later pay the motorcyclist’s bereaved family “compensation” of US$4,000 – that apparently being the going price for the life of an ordinary Cambodian.

Late to the party

As with the hedonistic Roaring Twenties, which followed the blood-letting of the Great War, the excesses of the “Khmer Riche” (as one writer has dubbed them) have a reckless, unrestrained quality, as if, having arrived late to the party of emerging Asian nations, they are striving to make up for lost time. They are, after all, the first in several Cambodian generations not to have grown up against a backdrop of poverty, upheaval and war, and they seem determined to make a show of it.

Some hold out hope that these young elites – many, like Hun Sen’s son and heir apparent Hun Manet, educated in the West – will give birth to the country’s next generation of democrats. Or that as new money becomes old, it will be accompanied by a shift in attitudes (in taste of cars, at least, if not in politics). But the excesses and luxuries of the Cambodian high-life may, in the end, prove too much for this generation to resist. Only time will tell whether or not the young and beautiful of Cambodia’s Jazz Age become, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous creations, its damned as well.

[Published in The World Today, February/March 2012]

Comrade Duch at the February 3 tribunal hearing in Phnom Penh. (Courtesy ECCC)

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, and NEW DELHI – A court in Cambodia on Friday rejected an appeal by a notorious Khmer Rouge jailer and extended his prison sentence to life in a decision welcomed by many in the war-torn country.

Kang Kek Ieu, known as Kaing Guek Eav in tribunal filings but more often referred to as Comrade Duch, ran the Tuol Sleng “S-21″ prison where more than 12,000 people were tortured and executed.

“The crimes by Kaing Guek Eav were undoubtedly among the worst in recorded human history,” Judge Kong Srim said as hundreds of survivors gathered outside the court. “They deserve the highest penalty available.”

Duch had filed an appeal last year over his 2010 conviction for crimes against humanity, arguing that he had been a junior official who was only following orders. The legal strategy backfired, however, when the appeals panel of the United Nations-backed war crimes court Friday increased his original 35-year sentence to life.

The gaunt former schoolteacher, 69, showed no emotion at the decision, pressing his hands in a gesture of respect toward the judges before leaving the courtroom.

Many inmates in S-21, a security hub for the regime, were slaughtered in a nearby orchard, part of a particularly brutal period in Cambodia’s history depicted in the 1984 film “The Killing Fields.”

Trials for the regime’s three most senior surviving leaders – ideologue Nuon Chea, former foreign minister Ieng Sary, and ex-head of state Khieu Samphan, all in their 80s – on genocide and crimes-against-humanity charges are ongoing amid concern they may not live long enough to face a verdict.

Pol Pot, the French-educated leader of the agrarian, anti-intellectual movement, died in a jungle camp in 1998 without publicly explaining the rationale for the killing spree, which was also an indictment of an international system that largely stood by as it happened.

Stephen Rapp, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes Issues, said the case against Duch advanced the cause of justice and reconciliation for Cambodia people.

It was also the first trial for crimes against humanity to be successfully completed since the brutal four-year period of Khmer Rouge rule in the late 1970s. An estimated 1.7 million people were executed or died of starvation, disease or overwork under the regime, analysts say.

“It’s an important step to show they can actually get one of these cases out of the way,” said Rupert Abbott, a researcher with human rights watchdog Amnesty International. “This has really been welcomed by the Cambodian people.”

Abbot criticized the court, however, for overturning a lower court judgment recognizing and chastizing the judicial system for Duch’s eight years spent in illegal detention. “That sent a positive message to Cambodia, where illegal pretrial detention is routine,” he said.

The trials have been controversial in Cambodia, where many former Khmer Rouge members serve in senior government positions, including Prime Minister Hun Sen, leading to wrangling over the court’s legitimacy and procedures.

Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which researches Khmer Rouge crimes, said the life sentence would “ease the fears” of many Khmer Rouge victims, but that it was only one stop on the long road toward reconciliation for this conflict-torn nation.

“This must be a reminder that we should come to a day when this cannot happen (again),” he said. WITH MARK MAGNIER

[Published in the Los Angeles Times, February 3, 2012]

Signs that Burma’s economy is opening aren’t just good news for Western firms hoping to make some money – democracy in the country could depend on it.

RANGOON—Nearly a year since his government took office in Burma last March, President Thein Sein’s program of political reforms continues to surprise and win over critics. In January alone, the government concluded a ceasefire with the Karen National Union, one of the country’s main ethnic insurgent groups, released a second batch of political prisoners, and agreed to the full normalization of relations with the United States. In a press conference in Bangkok ahead of his visit to Burma, U.S. Senator John McCain even let slip the regime’s preferred “Myanmar” rather than “Burma” – a subtle signal of just how far things have shifted.

Amid the optimism about this “Burmese Spring,” investors have turned their eyes towards the potential of the Burmese economy – Southeast Asia’s slumbering giant. As others in these pages have noted, interest is gathering in this untapped market of 50 million, stunted for decades by colossal mismanagement and Soviet-style central planning. Recent visits by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and British Foreign Secretary William Hague have raised the prospect that economic sanctions banning Western trade with Burma will soon be scaled back or removed. In the meantime, Asian investors are already making moves into the market, and a Japanese business delegation led by Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Yukio Edano traveled to the country this month.

The country offers massive potential in just about every imaginable sector, from banking, telecommunications, and power generation to agriculture, natural resources, and construction. Douglas Clayton, founder and CEO of Leopard Capital, which operates in emerging markets, wrote recently that “an epic economic catch up marathon seems set to start, and could morph into a sprint if Burma creates the right investment framework.”

Of course, there’s still a long way to go before that framework is firmly in place. As many have pointed out, the country still lacks the foreign investment rules and predictable governing apparatus necessary to attract investors. The banking system is in disarray – most of the country’s overwhelmingly rural population lacks any access to credit – and the local currency, the kyat, is still set artificially at a value more than a hundred times higher than that available on the black market. Import restrictions mean that buying a car – even a battered 1980s Toyota – can still cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Ultimately, however, the health of the Burmese economy should be of interest not just to investors and economists; it could also have a crucial bearing on the country’s political reforms and the long-term sustainability of the “Burmese Spring.” Historically, economic hardship and political unrest have been closely linked in Burma: in September 1987, the government’s decision to demonetize 25-, 35- and 75-kyat notes wiped out the savings of thousands, providing ready kindling for the following year’s seismic anti-government protests. The “Saffron Revolution” of 2007 was similarly sparked, at least in part, by hikes in the price of gas and diesel fuel.

Assuming the government can negotiate the thickets of currency reform and other basic structural changes, the longer-term economic challenges are thorny. Much of the country’s economic dysfunction is a result of the massive fiscal distortions created by the Burmese military, an institutional behemoth that consumes just under a quarter of the national budget, according to official figures. David Scott Mathieson, a Burma researcher for Human Rights Watch, says that while the current political changes have so far been more or less frictionless, few people are willing to discuss this “ultimate reform.”

Military personnel, according to some, are still embedded throughout the country’s governing apparatus. “In the most fundamental way, the state bureaucracy has been thoroughly militarized, that is, run by military officers and ex-officers,” says Maung Zarni, a visiting fellow in the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics. “Honest, capable technocrats and bureaucrats don’t survive in this militarized system of governance.”

Decades of military rule also mean there are relatively few officials with the necessary education and experience to manage such a complex transition. “It’s a mindset problem. These are people who are used to taking orders, used to being part of a command economy,” Turnell says.

And not all mindsets will necessarily be amenable to change. Just as the military continues to consume large portions of the state exchequer, it also retains a strong grip on much of the private economy. The key event here – and a mostly unheralded one – took place in the lead-up to the November 2010 election, when the Burmese government presided over the largest sell-off of state assets in the country’s history. This privatization drive, according to the New York Times, included factories, port facilities, government buildings and a stake in the national airline. One sale by the state Privatization Committee listed 176 assets, many of them historic colonial-era buildings in central Rangoon that were left empty when the government shifted north to the new capital Naypyidaw in 2005.

It’s a mindset problem. These are people who are used to taking orders, used to being part of a command economy.

While privatization of the moribund state-run economy was certainly a necessary step towards reform, most of the lucrative assets went to a small clique of “cronies” – rich tycoons with strong personal or family connections to the old military ruling establishment. One Rangoon-based journalist, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that while the Privatization Commission announced the asset sales publicly, “nobody knows” if they were open to public bidding. Maung Wuntha, editor of the outspoken People’s Age Journal, says that the elite had monopolized the economy since the privatizations, kicking back profits to “shareholders” in government. “New entrepreneurs should be encouraged, and they should be treated equally with the cronies,” he says.

The resulting situation – political reforms blossoming alongside the concentration of wealth in a few well-connected hands – bears some resemblance to Russia in the early 1990s. At that time, Moscow’s unregulated sell-off of state assets spawned a class of powerful “oligarchs” who derailed its own halting steps towards democracy. Turnell says he feared that these military cronies, who grew wealthy through preferential access within a restricted system, could “push back” against any future reforms, economic or political, which threaten their interests. “Liberal reforms that will try to inject competition into markets at some point [are] probably going to confront these vested interests,” he says.

On the other hand, one positive aspect of Burma’s desperate economic situation is that small changes could have big pay-offs. Indeed, basic reforms such as the floating of the kyat, the removal of rationing and import restrictions and land tenure reform could all be of great and immediate benefit to ordinary Burmese. Turnell says these would be “quite integral” to the success of the political opening. “The economic dimension could really reinforce any sort of political reform, could become a real force for creating momentum in that,” he says.

A prosperous economic environment could also facilitate moves towards a solution of one of Burma’s most intractable challenges – a perpetual war with ethnic insurgents. Thant Myint-U, the author of Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia, says a backdrop of economic growth could facilitate the settlement of long-standing disputes with the Karen and Kachin. “That’s an environment that’s much more conductive to people making the kinds of political concessions they’ll have to make on both sides,” he says.

However the economic reforms unfold, political analysts should pay close attention. With democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy hoping to sweep parliamentary by-elections on April 1, the immediate attention will likely be on political developments. But as Burma’s spring of reform continues, we shouldn’t only be asking about its impact on the economic climate, but also the reverse: whether the inertia of a moribund economy could drag Burma back towards dictatorship.

“The economy is burdened by half a century of bad policy,” Thant Myint-U says. “Undoing that, and knowing how to sequence the major structural reforms that will need to take place, won’t be easy.”

[Published by The Diplomat, January 31, 2012]

Scenes from a country in a slow-motion and still uncertain revolution

A souvenir photographer takes his turn in front of the camera at the Uppatasanti Pagoda in Naypyidaw, Burma’s new capital since 2005. (Sebastian Strangio)

NAYPYIDAW, Burma — This “city of magnificent distances” sprawls on a pancake-flat plain four hours north of Burma’s largest city and former capital, Rangoon. On November 6, 2005, at a time apparently chosen by astrologers, Naypyidaw became the country’s new capital, and the first convoy of government workers was dispatched up the highway to the dusty city-in-progress. The official explanation for the move was that British-built Rangoon had become too congested.Some observers, however, suggested the move could be defensive, to forestall a feared attack on Rangoon by the U.S. Navy; others pointed out the long tradition of Burma’s rulers shifting the kingdom’s capital in order to cement (in the most literal sense) the legacy of their rule.

For its first few years of its existence, Naypyidaw was barred to foreign visitors. What images emerged showed luxury hotels, military parade grounds, and empty mega-highways — a project of megalomaniacal scope. Skirting through Naypyidaw’s vast expanses today, you can almost feel the psychology that spawned them: Senior General Than Shwe, the opaque generalissimo who presided over the city’s planning and construction, clearly intended that his brainchild be a prophylactic against the sort of mass protests that shook the nation in 1988, nearly toppling the military dictatorship.

The city lacks any focal point of the sort that might catalyze a spontaneous public gathering. Housing, government offices, hotels, and military barracks are disbursed loosely along miles of eight-lane highways and snaking arterial roads, all — unlike just about every other road in the country — lit around the clock. One observer described Naypyidaw as “the ultimate insurance against regime change,” designed to defeat popular revolts “not by tanks and water cannons, but by geometry and cartography.”

It was something of a surprise, then, when I visited recently and found that Than Shwe’s city, now open to foreign visitors and served by a gleaming new motorway from Rangoon, is finally seeing some stirrings of life. In the two years since my last visit to the city, private gardens have sprung up around the city’s apartment blocks and fashionable shopping malls have opened their doors. At the popular Water Fountain Garden, crowds of local families gather in the evenings to feel the spray from manmade waterfalls and watch fountains quiver to the thump of piped-in dance music. In one part of town I even witnessed something that would have been unthinkable two years ago: a traffic jam.

Naypyidaw’s slow-motion metamorphosis can feel like a metaphor for the revolution now unfolding in Burma itself. In March, a nominally civilian government took office under the former general Thein Sein, who in less than a year has taken the country from hazy tropical despotism to an apparent democracy-in-waiting. The reforms have included the release of high-profile political prisoners, the rehabilitation of the political opposition, and a rapid normalization of relations with the United States. In his annual State of the Union speech this week, U.S. President Barack Obama hailed these recent developments as a “a new beginning” for Burma. Many now anticipate the scaling back or removal of Western sanctions and a scramble of foreign firms eager to cash in on this long-isolated market of 50 million.

This frisson of change is to be felt most in crumbling and neglected Rangoon, Burma’s long-time political epicenter. The first thing you notice is the Lady. She is everywhere. Once an express ticket to arrest (or worse) by the military authorities, locals now proudly display images of democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi on the walls of teashops and monasteries, and roaming street vendors sell them across the city. The new government, as if to symbolize a return to its roots, is even giving the old capital something of a facelift: scaffolding surrounds a number of the derelict colonial hulks downtown, and the state-run New Light of Myanmar newspaper opined recently that “big cities are the image and glory of a nation”.

The atmosphere extends to the daily rhythm of life in Rangoon. Local people eagerly initiate conversations about politics, with a palpable excitement — almost disbelief — that change might finally be in the wind. “Soe”, a former monk from Burma’s second city Mandalay, fled the country after taking part in 2007′s bloody anti-government protests, escaping to Thailand and then to France with the aid of Burmese exile groups. When he returned home around the time of the 2010 election, he said it almost felt like a different country. “Before I never talked with people like this,” he said over small cups of sweet Burmese tea at a streetside teashop in Rangoon’s bustling downtown. “Now they say this is democracy… If people don’t believe it, they can say they don’t believe it.”

The accompanying political shift, though less visible, is more surprising still. The retirement of Than Shwe, whose dislike and jealousy of Aung San Suu Kyi was legendary, has now paved the way for her reconciliation with the government. The 66-year-old activist and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), boycotted the rigged November 2010 poll that brought the new government to power, but have now agreed to run in by-elections scheduled for April 1, which could put a final stamp of legitimacy on Thein Sein’s reforms. “We believe that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi can work with this President,” said 85-year-old Tin Oo, the NLD’s vice-chairman.

A vendor at a market in downtown Rangoon, Burma’s British-built former capital. Since March, the country has experienced a remarkable political opening under the government of President Thein Sein. (Sebastian Strangio)

Most Burmese political activists have a story of how and when disillusionment — or sheer frustration — with the old system first set in. For Dr. Myo Aung, the moment came after his graduation from medical school in 1976, when he was conscripted into the army to work as a field medic. During his service, he tended to the dead and dying on Burma’s Eastern Front — the hilly Thai border country occupied by the Karen National Union (KNU), an ethnic insurgency that has been battling for autonomy since the country’s independence in 1948.

Whether it was the carnage of the Karen conflict that made an activist out of him, or his later expulsion from his job as a civilian doctor, apparently for holding unsuitable political views, he did not say. But, in 1995, Myo Aung joined the NLD, which became a sanctuary for pro-democracy activists after the failed 1988 uprising. The 63-year-old now serves as the party secretary for Rangoon Division and also offers free medical care to the dozens of party volunteers that arrive each day at the NLD’s city headquarters.

Given his past run-ins with the junta, Myo Aung is surprisingly upbeat about his country’s democratic progress, describing Thein Sein as “quite clean and honest” compared to his old military colleagues. “I not only hope — I am quite sure that the political situation is changing,” he told me at the NLD’s crowded office, where large portraits of the Lady share wall space with her famous father, independence hero Aung San.

This government wants to develop the economy, and at the same time they want to be on the winning side in politics.

Many other Burmese, however, are reluctant to abandon their long and finely honed skepticism, or the inclination to sniff out ulterior motives. Many see the recent moves as Burma’s chance to shrug off its international pariah status and encourage foreign investment; democratic reform, they say, is merely a means to an end.

“Their motive is not to be a democratic establishment, just to maintain their power,” said Maung Wuntha, the editor of the outspoken People’s Age Journal, who spent much of the 1990s in and out of prison due to his political work with the NLD. Even “Soe”, the former monk enthusiastic about his new freedom, told me he thought the government was “pretending” in order to attract investment dollars. “This government wants to develop the economy,” another Rangoon-based journalist said, “and at the same time they want to be on the winning side in politics.”

Even if one assumes the government has good motives in their opening, the country still faces some colossal challenges. Psychologically, neoclassical Rangoon remains a long way from the country’s troubled periphery, a semi-lawless zone of ethnic conflict and rampant rights abuses where “reform” remains almost a foreign concept. Though the government this month signed a ceasefire with the KNU, raising hopes of an end to the six-decade-long conflict, fighting continues to flare up between the Burmese army and ethnic Kachin insurgents in the north, displacing thousands of villagers over the border into China. Then there’s the economy, warped and distorted by decades of military oligarchy and Soviet-grade mismanagement. Reforming the economy — and addressing potential future challenges from the rich, military-linked elite that grew fat off the old system — will likely take many years. All providing, of course, there is no lurch backward in the meantime.

Whatever their initial motives, it’s still hard to discern the government’s end-game. Everybody in the new system is “thinking about the future in different ways,” said Thant Myint-U, author and grandson of former UN Secretary General U Thant. “I don’t think there is an ultimate vision, and there’s certainly not an ultimate vision on which there is consensus.”

Still, even many skeptics remain optimistic that by raising local and outside expectations, the reforms might become impossible to reverse, pushing the government faster and further than it intends to go. There are already signs of this, the journalist in Rangoon said, in the way once-gruff ex-military men in the new government are competing to ingratiate themselves among the public, or as the newly emboldened media is pushing the boundaries of censorship. Voters — even the word itself seems out of place here — will have their first chance to head to the polls on April 1, when 48 parliamentary seats will be up for grabs. The NLD is widely expected to sweep the election this time, but the reforms won’t face a stiff test until the next general election in 2015. “I don’t think they intend to turn backward,” said Maung Wuntha. With peoples’ sentiments as they currently are, “there would be no possibility.”

Back in Naypyidaw, I met Monty Redmond, the British manager of the Zabu Thiri Hotel, a six-story concrete edifice that went up in a matter of months in 2010. Over drinks in his hotel’s empty dining room, Redmond, who was born in Burma and returned in 1995, said that for the first time in years he is convinced things are on the right path. The Lady is free again, Western diplomats come and go, and hotels in Rangoon are packed with tourists and businessmen — all signs that Burma’s leaders finally “want to get rid of the old history.” Whether this results in a true democratic outcome is uncertain, but for this long-suffering country the really remarkable thing is in the asking.

“Let’s put it like this,” Redmond said. “You can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but what light, how big, how bright — nobody can say at this point at time. But before there was complete darkness.”

[Published on TheAtlantic.com, January 31, 2012]

Myanmar may be opening to democracy, but just how free is the country’s notoriously closed media?

YANGON, Myanmar – The most visible sign of Myanmar’s recent opening can be seen on the walls of the city’s monasteries and tea shops, on its newsstands and on the dashboards of its battered taxi cabs. Portraits of democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi — once a ticket to arrest and interrogation by the military authorities — are now displayed openly around Yangon, the country’s largest city and former capital.

The appearance of the petite Nobel laureate is a startling reminder of how far controls have been relaxed here since March, when a civilian government under President Thein Sein replaced the old ruling clique of generals. So far, Thein Sein has engineered the country’s opening masterfully: His government’s series of sweeping reforms, including the rapid normalization of ties with the United States, has brought Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), Myanmar’s main opposition party, back to the table. The party boycotted nationwide elections in November 2010, citing unfair electoral rules, but has now announced it will participate in by-elections on April 1, and “The Lady” — as she is affectionately known to her supporters — will stand for elected office for the first time.

As observers debate just how far this “Myanmar Spring” will proceed, the transformation of the country’s media, which has covered the NLD’s return to the fold in previously unthinkable detail, offers some insight into the dynamics of the reform process. Just last year, Freedom House described Myanmar’s press as “among the most tightly restricted in the world.” All daily newspapers and broadcast media — headed by the dour flagship daily, The New Light of Myanmar — were run by the state, and featured bland coverage of official ribbon-cuttings alongside rants against the “spies” working for foreign media organizations. Though Myanmar has a plethora of privately owned weekly and monthly news and lifestyle journals, these were under the close watch of the sinister-sounding Press Scrutiny and Registration Division (PSRD). Editors were forced to submit proofs to the PSRD before publication, and would receive them back with “unsuitable” content scratched out in red ink. This limited news coverage to a narrow range of politically innocuous topics, and publications were often forced to run junta-produced material. Journalists trying to work outside the system were punished harshly. For four consecutive years, the Committee to Protect Journalists has ranked Myanmar among the world’s five worst jailers of the press, claiming, as of September 2011, that at least 14 media workers were languishing in prison for their work.

Since March, however, restrictions have been loosened. The government claims it is replacing the old system of PSRD “pre-censorship” with a new system under which publications will be “reviewed” after they hit the newsstands. Under the new rules, more than half of Myanmar’s publications, including business, lifestyle, and crime journals, have now been made exempt from pre-publication censorship (though those dealing with news, education, and religion remain under the old system). Tint Swe, then-head of the PSRD, even suggested in late 2010 that his own office be abolished in the move away from direct censorship, and officials have promised to extend the rules to cover all remaining genres once a new media law is promulgated later this year.

An editor at the weekly Myanmar Times, which publishes in both Burmese and English, said relaxations on the press are occurring “so quickly that we are publishing articles that would have been censored completely just one or two months previous.” Besides reporting on Suu Kyi, previously off-limit topics included ethnic conflicts, human rights issues, and the controversial Chinese-funded Myitsone Dam project, which Thein Sein suspended in August.

“Obviously there are still limitations, but the difference in press freedom between, for example, early 2010 and late 2011, is like night and day,” said the Myanmar Times editor, who did not wish to be named. On Jan. 13, the government released a fresh batch of political prisoners, including dissident journalists like Zaw Thet Htwe, who was arrested in 2008 for helping mount a private effort to relieve victims of Cyclone Nargis, and blogger Nay Phone Latt, who was slapped with a 12-year prison sentence for writing about the monk-led anti-government protests in 2007. Also among them were 13 journalists imprisoned for working as undercover correspondents for the Democratic Voice of Burma, an exile media organization.

By Myanmar’s lowly benchmark, these changes are drastic; but as always, a gulf remains between relative and absolute measures of the country’s democratic progress. Despite the recent changes to media rules, it remains unclear if Myanmar’s leadership has any interest in creating an unfettered press. Some have argued that the government’s main aim is to re-engage with the West in a bid to balance the influence of China, and to rehabilitate the country’s image as an international pariah.

One Yangon-based local journalist, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said changes to the media were a subordinate “by-product” of this wider process of reform. Unlike the old generals, who feared independent press scrutiny, the new breed of politicians have discovered that engaging the media — for example, by holding press conferences and taking unscripted questions from the audience — can be used to bolster their own popularity. “They have started to enjoy using the media for their own interests,” the journalist said. And as living standards rise, the government’s plan is that people “will keep their mouths shut and not say anything about politics,” an approach that mirrors those in countries like China, Vietnam, and Singapore — hardly paragons of press freedom.

Newspapers and magazines for sale in Rangoon (Sebastian Strangio)

“The end-game here is not some kind of rapid transition to a genuine democracy, but an evolution of a more sophisticated authoritarian structure,” said David Scott Mathieson, a Myanmar researcher for Human Rights Watch.

Indeed, the new system of censorship-after-the-fact still gives the authorities a great deal of control over what hits the stands. While certain sensitive topics can now be covered freely, the president of the Norway-based Myanmar Media Association, Maung Maung Myint, said the onus for regulating content has now been put on the media itself, which has been “warned to take ‘responsibilities’ that come with these new freedoms.”

The issue was highlighted — unintentionally, perhaps — by the new head of the PSRD  at a meeting on Dec. 6, when he hailed the move of shifting the burden of censorship onto editors and publishers. The official said authorities had so far issued 86 warnings to journals and 37 to magazines, mostly over the publications of “sexy” photos by entertainment publications, but that on the whole, “editors can do self-censorship very well.”

As the new media regime is extended to more sensitive news journals, observers predicted journalists and editors would have difficulty second-guessing limits that were previously set by the PSRD, leaving them open to sanction. “Publishers are also more cautious,” said the Yangon journalist, “because they have to pay a big fine if they publish something wrong.”

Aung Zaw, founding editor of The Irrawaddy magazine, a Thailand-based exile publication, said that while an increase in self-censorship — both “consciously and unconsciously” — was better than direct censorship, it could not be described as a great leap forward for press freedoms. “Besides [printing] Aung San Suu Kyi’s photo… how deeply can investigators write about the change of political landscape in Myanmar?” he said. “It’s a brief moment of freedom, and then they tighten the screw again.”

Myanmar’s best hope may lie with those journalists and editors inside the country who are willing to test the limits of the new rules — whatever the sanction. One such publication is the Burmese journal Weekly Eleven News, which last month received the Best Media Organization prize from Reporters Without Borders. In announcing the award, the Paris-based watchdog wrote that the publication had used “extraordinary ingenuity to slip through the censorship net and inform the Burmese public” and will play a “key role” in the new era of reforms.

Maung Wuntha, a veteran Burmese journalist and editor of The People’s Age Journal, said that whatever the motivation for the current reforms, he and other journalists would continue to push the envelope. He told me that he recently submitted to the PSRD an article criticizing the government’s designation of political prisoners as “criminals,” something that would have previously ended up on the censors’ cutting-room floor. Surprisingly, nothing happened, and the controversial phrase appeared in print. “Now I write very daring paragraphs and daring sentences, and very rarely my lines are cut,” he said.

It may be too optimistic to predict that the carefully calibrated reform process will take on an inevitable momentum of its own, uncorking a democratic genie that the authorities will find hard to put back in the bottle, but there are signs that the Myanmar Spring is having unexpected outcomes. It would be no small irony if one of the world’s most repressive states attained democracy and a free press not by design, but in the manner that John Robert Seeley famously described the British acquisition of their overseas empire — in a fit of absence of mind.

Whatever happens next, Maung Wuntha, who began his journalistic career under the military regime in 1964 and spent much of the 1990s in and out of prison, said the world will be watching closely. “I want to fight it,” he said of his country’s media restrictions. “If they take action against me I will tell the world.”

[Published by Foreign Policy, January 20, 2012]

My upcoming stories on the “Burmese Spring” will be available when they are published here.

A vendor at Yae Kyaw Market, in downtown Rangoon.

A man sells snacks at the foot of the Uppatasanti Pagoda in Naypyidaw, a full-size replica of Rangoon’s Shwedagon Pagoda.

A woman and her child pose for a photo at the Water Fountain Garden, a key fixture of Naypyidaw’s nightlife.

A Burmese family poses for a photo in front of a fountain at the Naypyidaw Zoological Gardens.

Early morning in downtown Rangoon.

Resident in downtown Rangoon, close to Botataung Pagoda.

A sidewalk shrine in Rangoon.

Workers at a chapati stand in Rangoon’s Chinatown district.

Rangoon’s City Hall by night, from the edge of Sule Pagoda.

Commuters on a municipal bus in central Rangoon, close to Sule Pagoda.

A monk watches on as dusk falls at the Shwedagon Pagoda, Rangoon.

A young girl at Botataung Pagoda in central Rangoon.

A fish market in Rangoon’s Chinatown district.

Fish for sale on the streets of central Rangoon.

Burmese schoolgirl, photographed in downtown Rangoon.

Buying dried shrimp at dusk, downtown Rangoon.

A volunteer for the National League for Democracy works at the party’s headquarters in Rangoon.

Naypyidaw’s Uppatasanti Pagoda by night.

“A city of magnificent distances”: a vista of Naypyidaw, as seen from the terrace of the Uppatasanti Pagoda.

DHAKA—In August, Bangladeshi police broke up a ring of human organ dealers operating in Joypurhat, a district in the north of the country. Investigators say that three local “brokers” preyed on a large pool of indebted farmers, who agreed to part with a kidney or a chunk of their liver for a couple thousand dollars—enough for them to pay down their debts. Mosammat Rebeca and her husband sold their kidneys to help pay back 180,000 taka ($2,358) owed to five separate lenders—a massive sum in a country where the per capita annual income hovers around $1,700. Rebeca’s husband was paid 135,000 taka ($1,768) for selling his kidney last year, but it wasn’t quite enough. “We were about 65,000 taka short, so I had to donate my kidney as well,” she told me in a recent interview.

Rural indebtedness is as old as the earth in South Asia, but what was notable in this case was its source. Instead of the usurious village moneylenders of old, many organ sellers say they were victims of a new, apparently virtuous, engine of economic empowerment—microfinance. While such micro-loan programs have been widely touted as a ladder out of poverty, they had become a crushing burden for many in Joypurhat, who spoke to me of entangling webs of debt and the aggressive tactics of NGO debt collectors. Indeed, stories like the ones I heard in Bangladesh speak to a larger backlash, both on the ground and in the academy, against the practice of offering micro-loans as a tool for international development. While the majority of microcredit institutions are doubtless well-intentioned, in many places an unregulated and overzealous lending market has led to rashes of personal indebtedness and desperation that are a far cry from the development outcomes originally envisioned by experts and donors.

THE PRACTICE OF OFFERING micro-loans as a tool for poverty alleviation has a long and multifaceted history, but most popular accounts begin with Mohammad Yunus’s decision to establish the Grameen Bank in 1976, handing out small loans to impoverished households in rural Bangladesh. In the view of Yunus and other early boosters, access to credit was directly linked to poverty reduction: Granting access to funds at reasonable interest rates would allow the poor to avoid the usurious rates of traditional moneylenders and use the funds to start small businesses and cottage enterprises. In addition, one of Grameen’s key innovations was to target its financial services at women, who bear a disproportionate burden of poverty and are thought to be more reliable financial clients than men. Given the chance, Yunus came to believe, Bangladesh’s rural women could form self-reinforcing networks of trust that would guard against defaults. In short, the poor could be made “bankable.”

Since then, microfinance institutions (MFIs) have revolutionized the field of development, and the global clients of these organizations number in the hundreds of millions. From a narrow focus on credit, MFIs have expanded to encompass a wide range of “micro” financial services, including savings accounts, insurance policies, and skills training programs. Yunus’s Grameen Bank has become an institutional behemoth supporting MFI operations on three continents and hawking everything from mobile phones and knitwear to software and business development plans. In awarding the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize to Yunus and Grameen, the Nobel committee stated that the bank had become “a source of ideas and models for the many institutions in the field of micro-credit that have sprung up around the world.”

But in recent years, microfinance has developed a macro-image problem. Anger has exploded in Andhra Pradesh, India, where journalists and politicians have linked MFIs, including SKS Microfinance, one of India’s largest, to dozens of rural suicides. Opposition came to a head there in October of 2010, when the state government approved an ordinance designed to prevent the “harassment” of small borrowers by debt collectors. Caught in Micro debt, a 2010 documentary by Norwegian journalist Tom Heinemann, turned the spotlight on Yunus and the Grameen Bank, accusing the Nobel laureate of tax evasion—an allegation that was partly used to justify Yunus’ removal as head of Grameen by the Bangladeshi government in March. (Yunus and his supporters deny the film’s allegations.)

Bangladeshi critics say that MFIs have simply acquired too much power and made far too many irresponsible loans, constituting an unregulated shadow state within the country which, far from alleviating poverty, has worsened the situation of the rural poor. “Microcredit is discrimination against the poor, it doesn’t empower. It’s total nonsense,” said Farhad Mazhar, the managing director of UBINIG, a Dhaka-based alternative development organization. According to unpublished research conducted by UBINIG, only around 8 percent of the micro-borrowers surveyed ended up using their loans to build wealth. Even then, Mazhar said, individual success owed more to pre-existing entrepreneurial skills and family support than to the credit itself. “Most of them became poorer,” Mazhar contends.

Skepticism of microfinance and its benefits, meanwhile, has migrated to the academy as well. Lamia Karim, an anthropologist at the University of Oregon and the author of Microfinance and Its Discontents, has questioned the claim that offering small loans directly to Bangladeshi women has been empowering. On the contrary, she has found women are often pressured to hand over loans to their husbands or male relatives. At the same time, microcredit agencies have created what she terms an “economy of shame,” in which the traditional role of women as bearers of “family honor” is used to leverage repayments—a key yardstick of MFIs’ success. (Grameen, for instance, proudly trumpets a loan recovery rate of close to 97 percent). To avoid the public shame of default, many women take out additional loans from different lenders, and quickly find themselves mired in a quicksand of debt.

A heavy emphasis on measuring loan recovery rates also tends to obscure whether borrowers are actually using the loans for productive activities, as opposed to mere survival. When it comes to quantifying the latter variable, one recent report commissioned by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development and released in August concluded that “almost all impact evaluations of microfinance suffer from weak methodologies and inadequate data.” Given this vacuum of quality research, Maren Duvendack, a research fellow at the University of East Anglia and one of the report’s authors, says the verdict on microfinance is still out. “I’m surprised microfinance has been hyped up so much,” she told me, “because good impact evaluations are still pretty scarce.”

This dearth of evidence can be explained partly by the challenges researchers face in isolating the effects of microfinance operations, but it also demonstrates a tendency for international donors to see what they wanted to see. Indeed, microfinance has a seductive logic on paper: Unlike the older “hand-out” model of international development, MFIs promised to be self-sustaining engines of micro-development, and Yunus—an urbane globetrotter backed by a strong lobby of international supporters—was the perfect salesman. “People were looking for some sort of silver bullet that alleviates poverty and empowers women, and they thought credit was the answer,” Duvendack said.

The ensuing explosion of popularity has arguably pushed aside developmental alternatives, including programs to boost agricultural productivity and skills training, that could have contributed to the fight against poverty. While admitting that access to credit is a handy tool, Mazhar of UBINIG argues that microfinance had been elevated into a shibboleth of market-based theories of development that encourages the withdrawal of the state from rural development in favor of the “village entrepreneur.” Taken on their own, MFIs have failed to alter the feudal economic structures in rural Bangladesh, something that can only be achieved by boosting agricultural productivity. “The machine that produces the poverty—you’re not trying to change it,” Mazhar said.

BUT IF MICROFINANCE has doubtless been oversold, other experts say the growing backlash is in danger of overcorrecting. Dean Karlan, an economist at Yale and the author of More Than Good Intentions: How a New Economics Is Helping to Solve Global Poverty, observed that much of the opposition has stemmed from an “irrational exuberance” about the importance of credit, but that microfinance can still offer the poor a range of valuable economic tools. In the course of his research, for instance, Karlan said many low-income clients had shown a strong interest in micro-savings accounts. “The fact is not everybody always needs a loan,” he said. “The microfinance community needs to be more client-focused, so to speak, and more focused on what people actually need.” The negative impacts of credit, meanwhile, could be partly ameliorated by giving micro-borrowers a means of taking action against over-zealous debt collectors, or establishing credit bureaus so lenders can prevent the poor from taking on too much debt. “The right answer is not to shut down the market,” Karlan said.

Of course, this won’t satisfy farmers in Joypurhat who sold their body parts to pay down mountains of micro-debt, but it does demonstrate a strong role for the state as an overseer and regulator of rural credit markets. Simply expecting that the invisible hands of microfinance will elevate the poor without outside safeguards is to court further misfortunes for those who can least afford them. Microfinance services should be part of a balanced diet of development, one that incorporates skills training and agricultural strategies. In this sense, the backlash might actually be a good thing for the industry, helping sheer away some of the exuberance that has led to such negative outcomes. Provided that the lessons of overreach are internalized, there’s even some reason to be cautiously optimistic. “It does work in certain contexts for certain people,” Duvendack said of microfinance, “and maybe that’s good enough.”

[Published by The New Republic, December 14, 2011]

A new law legalizes the use of prison labor by private companies, putting Cambodia’s “sweatshop-free” reputation on the line.

PHNOM PENH — Take a look at what you’re wearing. If any of your clothes bear a “Made in Cambodia” label, it’s a safe bet they were produced under decent conditions, by relatively well-paid workers. The Cambodian garment industry is small by global standards, but it has one big thing going for it: as Western clothing brands have become increasingly sensitive to the conditions in their supply chains, Cambodia has set itself up as a “sweatshop-free” alternative to garment giants like China and Bangladesh.

Though such standards are not always upheld in practice, the country has become something of a boutique destination for foreign brands concerned about corporate social responsibility.

But all this could be about to change. Human rights groups say the country’s hard-won reputation is on the line following the passage of a new law that legalizes the use of prison labor by private companies — including garment contractors. The law, approved by Cambodia’s Senate late last month, gives the general director of prisons the power “to enter into a contract to allow prisoners to work for any organization or individual” in industry or farming.

Rights groups say the new rules fly in the face of both Cambodian and international labor laws, such as Convention 29 of the International Labor Organization. It also puts the country’s trade partners — which include US firms — at risk of importing garments and footwear unlawfully produced by prisoners.

“What they’ve done with this new law is open Pandora’s Box,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW). “All of a sudden [prison officials] are going to have a captive prison workforce that they can use to contract labor production for a fraction of what a normal company would pay to a free person.”

There are good reasons to worry. For a start, Cambodian prisoners live in appalling conditions. According to the local rights group Licadho, the government allots just 2,800 riels (about $0.70) per day to feed each prisoner, and inmates are packed like sardines into overcrowded cells. In these conditions, exploitation is rife. “Inside prison walls, life is dominated by corruption,” Licadho reports. “There is a price tag attached to every amenity imaginable, from sleeping space to recreation time. Those who can’t afford to pay are forced to endure the most squalid conditions.”

Since 2009, according to information shared by HRW, Prey Sar, Phnom Penh’s main correctional facility, as well as jails in Kandal, Takeo, Battambang, Svay Rieng and Preah Sihanouk provinces, have set up small-scale prison labor programs. While nominally producing goods for the domestic market, there is some evidence that prisoners have produced goods for export, including to the US.

Photos obtained by GlobalPost appear to show female prisoners at Prey Sar working on garments bearing the Croft & Barrow and Sonoma brands, both owned by the Wisconsin-based Kohl’s Department Stores. The 1930 Tariff Act bans the import to the US of any goods that have been produced with forced labor. The photo attached to this story is one such photo, and below is another. The source of the photos wished to remain unidentified.

The contents of the photos, dating from late 2009 and early 2010, could not be independently verified. But rights activists say the corruption and squalor of the Cambodian prison system mean that the passage of the new law could trigger a steady leak of for-export garment work into prisons.

Already, local media have reported that prisons in Battambang, Kandal and Takeo are planning to establish for-profit garment schemes under the new law. Cambodian prison officials say the programs are voluntary, with profits being split among inmates, prison management and reinvestment in raw materials.

At the same time, the government also claims it is taking a strong line against the use of prison laborers in export production.

In July, the Commerce Minister Cham Prasidh rose the issue in a letter to the head of the Garment Manufacturers Association of Cambodia (GMAC), which represents the apparel industry, writing that the use of “impure” sources of labor could “cause the buyers in main import countries to cancel their buying agreements” and result in “a disaster” for an industry that employs around 300,000 Cambodians.

Ken Loo, GMAC’s secretary general, said similarly that his organization opposed the use of prisoners to assemble for-export garments, and would investigate any allegations. “The fact that it’s legal here doesn’t change things for other countries where we export,” he told GlobalPost.

Vicki Shamion, a spokesperson for Kohl’s Department Stores, said her company was unaware that any of its products had been or were being manufactured in Cambodian jails, but that its vendor guidelines “expressly forbid the use of bonded labor, indentured labor, prison labor or forced labor in the manufacture or finishing of products ordered by Kohl’s.” “We take allegations related to violation of these terms very seriously,” Shamion said. She added that recent allegations would be investigated.

Whether or not government checks succeed remains an open question. HRW says turning Cambodia’s ramshackle prisons into ad hoc garment factories — for domestic production or otherwise — has the potential to call into question the standards of the entire industry.

“I have no confidence whatsoever that the government of Cambodia has either the political will or the capacity to prevent prison production for profit from ending up in the export stream,” Robertson said.

Adam Hutchinson, executive director of the Prison Fellowship Cambodia, which provides services in 24 Cambodian prisons, said it was important to distinguish between the use of prison labor for producing export goods, and inmate labor programs in general.

“Prison work schemes, if used well, can be of great benefit for both prisoners and prisons,” he said. But the “inefficiency and inconsistency” in monitoring capacity meant that prison labor systems were “open for abuse.”

“There seems to be no clearly defined process at the present moment,” Hutchinson said.

[Published by GlobalPost, December 11, 2011]

Protecting the buildings of bygone eras is no easy task in rapidly changing Old Dhaka.

DHAKA—Walking through the centre of Dhaka’s old city, Taimur Islam stops to lament the loss of another historical building. From a plastic binder, the architect produces pictures of a stately colonial mansion, built around the turn of the 1900s, that has recently been reduced to a pile of rubble. In the shaded lot where the building once stood, a few walls remain, their cream-coloured stucco work standing out proudly from piles of shattered brickwork.

“A lot of old buildings have been destroyed over the last year,” Islam says, shaking his head.

Such scenes are common in the old parts of Bangladesh’s capital, a rapidly growing megacity of 15 million people. As the city swells with poor rural migrants, developers eager for land have targeted Old Dhaka – a sprawling suburb of Mughal-era relics, noble colonial buildings and the improvised add-ons of more recent times.

Old Dhaka’s rich architectural legacy dates from the 1600s, when the city was founded as the Mughal capital of Bengal. After 1793, when the British East India Company took control of the region, the city prospered and many fortunes were made. Armenian and Hindu merchants built ornate palaces and mansions across the city, many commanding views over the Buriganga River, which runs through its heart.

As the city fell into decline following the Partition of 1947, most wealthy Bengalis abandoned Old Dhaka’s bazaars for less-crowded areas with better amenities, leaving behind an eclectic feast of architectural styles.

At the dizzying centre of the old city is the iconic Shankaria Bazaar, an area named after the shankari – or Hindu artisans – whose ancestors still operate from the cramped workshops in the surrounding alleys, filling the narrow byways with kites, brasswork, engravings and technicolour posters of Hindu deities. Hindu Street, as it is known locally, remains the epicentre of Bangladesh’s Hindu community, coming vibrantly alive during the annual festivals of Diwali and Durga Puja.

Across the city, crumbling mansions stand in various states of picturesque decay, dwarfed by a new generation of concrete apartment blocks. In Armanitola – once home to the city’s Armenians – grand old houses sit behind high brick walls, their iron gates slumping resignedly inwards. Families camp inside the empty shells, setting bright saris to dry in the sun on rusted balcony railings. A small Armenian church, built in the 1760s, acts as a rare sanctuary from the noise and bustle of the city outside; its weathered marble headstones bearing the names of long-departed merchants and notables.

Many structures in Old Dhaka have been repurposed as warehouses and machine works. In one century-old building, a man works a grinding machine in near darkness; nearby rooms, lit by fluorescent lights and strung with jerry-rigged electrical wiring, act as kitchens, break rooms and sleeping quarters for the workshop staff.

In the Chowk Bazaar district, two brick caravanserais stand amid the colour and cacophony of the marketplace. Originally constructed in the 1700s as way stations for travelling merchants, their cavernous interiors are now used as flour mills and storage warehouses.

The Buriganga takes centre stage in the drama of renewal and change that has Dhaka in its grip. Riding a boat on its dark churning waters, along with thousands of merchants and cross-river commuters, is a hair-raising experience.

A fruit-seller in Old Dhaka. (Sebastian Strangio)

According to Islam, the city is nearing a point of no return in the preservation of its architectural history. The pace of development in the area – one of the most densely populated regions on Earth – is rapid. “It has not only destroyed the urban fabric, it has also destroyed the environment,” Islam says. “Most of these places, they don’t function as proper neighbourhoods any more.”

In 2004, Islam and his wife – also an architect – formed the Urban Study Group (USG), an organisation campaigning for the preservation of the city’s old buildings. To raise awareness of the issue, Islam conducts twice-weekly walking tours of Old Dhaka, guiding visitors through the winding back lanes, walled gardens and dilapidated buildings of the former Mughal capital. The proceeds from the tours go to fund the USG’s campaign to have sections of the old city listed as protected areas, and to restore historically significant buildings.

The couple were moved to start their campaign after a building collapse in Shankaria Bazaar killed 19 people, leading the government to propose levelling a strip of old structures. Since then, the USG has created an inventory of about 3,000 historical buildings in Old Dhaka that it claims are under threat. With a dense population in the old city, public safety has often been a handy justification for pulling down buildings.

“You know the Chinese saying,” says Islam, “if you want to kill a dog, give it a bad name.”

The issue came to a head in June last year, when a raging fire tore through the Nimtoli district of Old Dhaka, killing at least 125 people. Police described it as the worst blaze in the country’s history and, even though Nimtoli is an area of new multistorey apartment blocks, it has given developers fresh pretexts for the removal of old buildings.

“The developers have become absolutely restless. They want to go ahead with the demolition of everything,” Islam says.

There are some positive signs, however. The United States embassy in Dhaka has provided funds for the restoration of one historic building in the old city and the Asian Development Bank has promised to bankroll the restoration of five structures in Shankaria Bazaar. Islam says he received support from government officials when he suggested a scheme to create a market for development rights. Under the plan, owners of historical properties could “sell” their right to develop as compensation for preserving their old buildings.

It’s too soon to say whether such an approach will be adopted, but Islam remains hopeful that parts of central Dhaka – like many European capitals – will see a gradual renewal and that restaurants, hotels and other businesses will give new life to the city’s colonial relics.

“There are no reasons why we can’t make these buildings safe for continuous use,” he says.

[Published in the South China Morning Post, November 20, 2011]

Nuon Chea, the deputy leader of the Khmer Rouge regime blamed for 1.7 million deaths in Cambodia’s ‘killing fields’ told the tribunal today that he carried out its policies to protect the country.

Nuon Chea, also known as Brother No. 2, the former deputy leader of the Khmer Rouge regime, attends the second day of a trial of the former Khmer Rouge top leaders in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Tuesday. (Mark Peters/ECCC)

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia–The second-in-command of Cambodia’s brutal Khmer Rouge regime told a war crimes tribunal today that he was a patriot who fought to free his country from colonialism and foreign invasion, giving insight to his role in the death of 1.7 million people in the 1970s.

In Nuon Chea’s first public comments since his trial opened at the UN-backed court on Monday, the regime’s chief ideologue pinned most of the country’s problems on neighboring Vietnam.

“I had to leave my family behind to liberate my motherland from colonialism and aggression and oppression by the thieves who wish to steal our land and wipe Cambodia off the face of the earth,” Nuon Chea told the court.

“We wanted to free Cambodia from being a servant of other countries and we wanted to build Cambodia as a society that is clean and independent without any killing of people or genocide.”

The frail octogenarian, who is accused of involvement in the deaths of at least 1.7 million people during the Khmer Rouge’s 1975-79 rule, addressed his hour-long speech to “my beloved Cambodian people.”

Nuon Chea is being tried alongside Khieu Samphan, the former Khmer Rouge head of state, and ex-foreign minister Ieng Sary. The three octogenarians face a raft of charges, including genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. A fourth defendant, Ieng Thirith, the former minister of social affairs, has been ruled unfit to stand trial.

Nuon Chea’s address came after prosecutors gave a grisly and vividly detailed summary of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, describing it as “a massive slave camp.” In his opening statements today, international co-prosecutor Andrew Cayley told the court not be tempted by feelings of sympathy for the old men who had “murdered, tortured, and terrorized” their own people.

After toppling a US-based regime on April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge – led by “Brother No 1” Pol Pot – forcibly evacuated the capital Phnom Penh and put Cambodians to work in vast rural labor communes.

Hundreds of thousands died from overwork, starvation, and summary execution as the regime embarked on a series of brutal internal purges. The Khmer Rouge were eventually toppled by a Vietnamese invasion in early 1979.

During his remarks, Chea repeatedly accused Vietnam of plotting to “swallow” Cambodia. He also turned his blame on the protracted US bombing of eastern Cambodia in the early 1970s, saying Washington tried to “suppress the movement of struggle of the Indochinese people.”

Anne Heindel, a legal adviser at the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which researches Khmer Rouge atrocities, says Nuon Chea’s comments offered a fascinating insight into the mind of the aged ideologue. “In his view he was defending the nation from the Vietnamese… This is the way he sees the world.”

Though there was a glaring lack of reference to the human suffering brought on by his regime’s policies, Ms. Heindel says it was vital the frail leader broke his silence and addressed survivors in person. “It’s a tremendously important part of the process,” she says.

The trial continues tomorrow with opening statements from defence lawyers. The first section of the trial, focusing on the establishment of the Khmer Rouge regime and the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh, begins next month.

[Published by the Christian Science Monitor, November 22, 2011]