Gold Tower 42
Like Saigon, Phnom Penh is booming, and the Cambodian nouveau riche — as nouveaux riches are wont to do — is busily casting about for new ways to flaunt its wealth. To service this new demographic, an old government hospital at the intersection of Sihanouk and Norodom Boulevards has recently been flattened to make way...
Chamkarmon district
Phnom Penh is about two hours from the Vietnamese border, a trip broken only by a ubiquitous half-hour lunch stop and a short break at Neak Loung, where cars, buses, motos and pedestrians are borne across the Mekong on rusting ferries. Due to the abundance of foreign aid the highways here are well-sealed and, excepting...
More Thoughts on International Justice
After getting myself up to date with the slow progress of the Khmer Rouge trials, I’ve put together a new article for the London-based libertarian magazine Spiked Online, which has since been published and ‘syndicated’ (i.e. copied and pasted) to a number of Cambodian news blogs. In my piece, I take a critical look at...
Cambodia: whose tribunal is it anyway?
The West is turning the trial of surviving members of the Khmer Rouge – its former allies – into a piece of self-promoting political theatre
Trying the Khmer Rouge
In between lounging in the backyard and assaulting Robert Fisk’s brick-like The Great War For Civilisation, I’ve been immersing myself in readings about the Khmer Rouge Tribunal — scheduled, after nearly two decades of diplomatic evasion and acrimonious negotiations, to begin operation sometime in 2008. But after again reading about the tribunal’s tortuous gestation, I’m...
Bhutto's Assassination
I was shocked yesterday to hear of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, news of which stared up at me from the morning paper with 9/11-like gravitas. I haven’t followed Pakistani politics closely since I was studying in Edinburgh, but my suspicion — and that of most major news organisations, if not the rampaging Sindhi mobs — is...
