Family, Activists Vow To Continue Work of Slain Conservationist

Chut Wutty, a prominent Cambodian anti-logging activist who helped expose a secretive state sell-off of national parks was fatally shot on April 25, 2012 in a remote southwestern province, FILE February 21, 2012. (Photo: Reuters)

Tuesday, 01 May 2012
Reporters, VOA Khmer | Kandal province and Washington

“Cambodia’s reputation in the West is already rather poor, and this just adds to it.”

Family members and supporters of Chut Wutty, the conservationist who was shot dead in a remote region of Koh Kong province last week, say they will continue his work and seek to protect what remains of Cambodia’s dwindling forests.

The shooting, which also saw the death of a military police officer, has underscored the dangerous work of activists in the arena of illegal logging and deforestation. And even though the government has put together a committee to investigate the circumstances surrounding it, critics say little else is likely to be done.

Chut Wutty was buried on Monday in Kandal province. His wife, Sam Chanthy, said she was happy that “his death was for the sake of the nation.”

“I want my children to be trained to work like their father,” she said, weeping before his coffin. “He did not sell national territory. He just protected the forest for the people in the country and around the world.”

Inviting You to a Presentati​on on Cambodian issues with Prof. Joel Brinkley & Prof. Tim Sorel

Dear Community,

The below message is forwarded from Khmer Unity for Cambodia inviting you to a presentation on Cambodian issues with Standford Professor Joel Brinkley and University of Florida Professor Tim Sorel

Thursday, April 19, 2012 @ 2:00pm-5:00pm

Stanford University, Communications Department

The Chafee Seminar Room, Room 452

Joel Brinkley spent 23 years as a correspondent for the New York Timesand authored the critically acclaimed Cambodia’s Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land. A generation after the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia shows every sign of having overcome its history--the streets of Phnom Penh are paved; skyscrapers dot the skyline. But under this façade lies a country still haunted by its years of terror. Available at Amazon and other major retailers.

Tim Sorel is an independent filmmaker and three-time EMMY nominee. Sorel will screen his new documentary The Trap of Saving Cambodia. The plight of internally displaced Cambodians represents just one of the harrowing moments in THE TRAP OF SAVING CAMBODIA.The film examines the struggles of NGO workers as they try to help the poor while facing a resistant government that annually receives more than a billion dollars in foreign aid from a host of countries like the United States and China. 26 minutes- This film is not rated.

http://www.savingcambodiamovie.com

For more information email: kuc@khmerunity.org

Cambodia’s Curse

Excerpt from: "Cambodia’s Curse, Mexico’s Manana, Reckless Endangerment Stateside"

August 4th, 2011

By Carola Von Hoffmannstahl-Solomonoff

Blogger News Network

My summer reading this year kicked off with Cambodia’s Curse: the Modern History of a Troubled Land by former New York Times reporter Joel Brinkley. Brinkley won a Pulitzer in 1980 for his coverage (at the Louisville Courier Journal) of the fall of the Khmer Rouge.

The title Cambodia’s Curse bugs me. Though cultures resistant to change create illusions of inevitability, and a genocidal past casts long shadows, no nation or people are truly cursed. Nor do I buy Brinkley’s attempt to place partial blame for Cambodian acceptance of the Khmer Rouge on passivity engendered by the influence of Theravada Buddhism and Hinduism. First, it’s a simplistic take on the two religions, both of which are practiced in numerous countries that never exterminated a quarter of their own people in an effort to create a communist utopia. Second, countries with far different religious heritages have also had totalitarian holocausts. Germany and the Soviet Union most notably, respectively representing the right and the left.

As for Cambodian passivity, it must come and go– judging by the perpetual political turmoil of Cambodia in the 20th Century, and by the recent grass roots resistance to the land grabbing, population displacing, development policies of Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Cambodia's leaders are murderous kleptocrats: author

Stephen Long reported this story on Thursday, July 14, 2011

Listen to MP3 of this story

STEPHEN LONG: Cambodia is one of the world's poorest nations. At least 30 per cent of the population live on less than a dollar a day.

The Australian Government gives over $64 million in aid to Cambodia every year - the world, more than a billion. But how much of that actually gets to the Cambodian people?

Joel Brinkley is the author of a new book called Cambodia's Curse. He says Cambodia's leaders are murderous kleptocrats who pocket most foreign aid, while selling the nation's rice crop for the own gain, and leaving their people to starve, as the world turns a blind eye.

Joel Brinkley spoke to me from his home in California.

JOEL BRINKLEY: Cambodia is an oddity in that 80 per cent of people who live in the country live in the countryside with no electricity, no clean water, no radio, not television. They live more or less as they did 1,000 years ago.

Cambodia After Year Zero

Live pigs being transported to a market in Kompong Thom, Cambodia. (Jay Mather)

June 24, 2011
By JOEL WHITNEY
The New York Times

In the preface to “Cambodia’s Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land,” Joel Brink­ley recalls his first encounter with Cambodia. Brinkley was reporting for The Louisville Courier-Journal from a refugee camp near the Thai border in 1979, in the aftermath of Pol Pot’s reign. “As they tell of years of horror and misery,” Brinkley wrote, “their faces are expressionless and dull . . . as if they’re talking about a dull day of work. Their tales end with a nodding acknowledgment of the death of their nation and culture.” Brinkley, who later worked for The New York Times, finds little has changed in the 32 years since then. As the title suggests, his book is an unabashed plea to refocus international aid and diplomacy on a suffering people. It is also an attempt to hold some of those responsible for that suffering accountable — but not all.Cambodia lost a quarter of its population under the Khmer Rouge. For many, survival meant 14-hour days of backbreaking work, often on little more than a cupful of rice or a smattering of gruel. You could be killed on the least suspicion you sympathized with the Vietnamese. The effects of this period have proven hard to shake.

Q & A: Exclusive interview with Professor Joel Brinkley

Monday, 6 June 2011
Originally posted at: http://camwatchblogs.blogspot.com

Introduction:

This is an interview conducted by CambodiaWatch-Australia (CW) team, on 3 June 2011, with Professor Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Standford University, and former journalist of New York Times, and author of recent book titled: “Cambodia’s Curse” – The Modern History of a Troubled Land”, published by Public Affairs, New York, 2011.

Prof. Joel Brinkley

1.

CW: Thank you, Professor Brinkley, for your time. Firstly, you mentioned in the text that your interest in Cambodia dated back in 1979 when you were first assigned to report on Cambodia. What were your roles during this tumultuous year 1979 for Cambodia?

Prof. Brinkley:

My newspaper assigned me to cover the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime and the resulting refugee crisis. I spent a few weeks in the Thai-Cambodia border area and wrote a number of stories.

2.

CW: In the mid-1979, have you heard or covered stories of an atrocity committed by the Thai army? This is documented in CW’s website: http://camwatchblogs.blogspot.com/2011/05/thai-armys-atrocity-at-mount-dangrek.html

Prof. Brinkley:

Yes, I did write a story about this at the time.

3.

CW: In your book, “Cambodia’s Curse” What is it that you see as being the curse for Cambodia: The destruction of Angkor Wat,Territorial disputes with its neighbours, or its internal conflicts?

Prof. Brinkley:

The title is a reflection of the point made throughout the book that many of the problems and habits Cambodia faces today are reflections of barbaric rules and practices from the Angkor period and beyond.

Click here to read the rest of the interview at CamWatchBlog

Misruling Cambodia

Corruption is rife and dissent is stifled, as  "Cambodia's Curse " shows. But entrepreneurs are giving the country some hope.

MAY 19, 2011

By GEOFFREY CAIN

The Wall Street Journal

If schools are a reflection of society, then they show Cambodia to be a limp and defeated nation. On the first day of class, Cambodian children learn they must bribe their teachers to get good grades, a practice that continues for the 3% of them who make it to college. Teachers, struggling on salaries of less than $100 a month, take their cuts and pass the money up to the principals. The principals then pay off local education officials, and so on to higher circles of government. In the end, those who give the largest bribes eventually win promotions—giving them access to even bigger cash flows.

In this system, students learn few useful skills except how to survive under a corrupt regime, writes journalist Joel Brinkley. For the lucky few who pay, and sometimes even murder, their way to the top of the government, life is good. But for the ordinary farmers and laborers, kickbacks are simply an expensive roadblock to economic and social advancement.

"These demands are humiliating. It pushes a lot of smart kids out to the rice fields instead of helping our country," Sok Sopheap, a high school student who was kicked out of class because he didn't pay a bribe, told me. "This is why Cambodia stays poor."

Mr. Brinkley's depressing book is a mostly illuminating, though sometimes lopsided, chronicle of the politicians and bureaucrats who have plagued Cambodian society for the past 30 years. After the Khmer Rouge regime oversaw the deaths of 1.7 million people and was unseated in 1979, a new group of opportunists took their place. That wily clique, installed by the invading Vietnamese, includes current Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Wages of peace

Cambodia's Curse: The modern history of a troubled land by Joel Brinkley

May 13, 2011
Reviewed by Sebastian Strangio
Asia Times Online

PHNOM PENH - In June 2010, diplomats and donors converged on a conference hall in Cambodia's capital for a meeting with senior government officials. Seated in rows with headphones beaming in live translations, donor representatives listened to key ministers speak about the country's progress on a series of agreed to good governance reforms.

Despite concerns raised about a spate of illegal land grabs, persistent human-rights abuses and legal harassment of government critics - all of which prompted the usual vague assurances from officials that the situation would improve - donors offered development aid totaling an unprecedented US$1.1 billion for fiscal 2010-11.

Aid to Cambodia has increased more or less consistently since the United Nations Transitional Authority's (UNTAC) departure from the country in 1993. A child of the 1991 Paris Peace Accords, UNTAC was designed to bring an end to Cambodia's long civil war, establish a functioning electoral system and eventually usher in economic development.

'Cambodia's Curse,' by Joel Brinkley

Saturday, April 16, 2011
Elizabeth Becker
Special to The San Francisco Chronicle

Cambodia's Curse

The Modern History of a Troubled Land

By Joel Brinkley

(PublicAffairs; 386 pages; $27.99)

This year Arab leaders have been caught off balance by their citizens, who have shown unexpected courage and come out in force to demand democracy and an end to corruption and cruel inequities. Those protests are proof that the truism that Arabs needed "strongmen" to rule them was wrong. In just weeks, the nonviolent demonstrators overthrew the ruling tyrants in Tunisia and Egypt, inspiring other uprisings in Yemen, Bahrain, Libya and Syria. Now, no matter how these revolts play out, Arabs have broken out of racial and cultural stereotypes that said they were unfit for democracy.

In his new book "Cambodia's Curse," the former New York Times journalist Joel Brinkley comes very close to offering a similar dead-end theory to explain why he thinks the people of Cambodia are "cursed" by history to live under abusive tyrants. In his telling, Cambodians are passive Buddhists who have accepted their stern overlords since the days of the Angkor Empire. "Far more than almost any other state, modern Cambodia is a product of customs and practices set in stone a millennium ago," he writes, blaming that history for the ability of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen to squash meaningful dissent against his corrupt regime.

As a young reporter, Brinkley won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for his coverage of the Cambodian refugee crisis. Returning to the region 30 years later, Brinkley - now a professor of journalism at Stanford - chose his subject well. Hun Sen deserves a thorough examination. Along with his cronies, he has amassed extraordinary wealth selling off the country's assets to the highest bidder. Everything is up for grabs - land wrested from peasants to be sold to corporations and turned into plantations or tourist resorts, young girls and boys sold into prostitution, and dense forests cut down and the lumber sold abroad. Corruption is everywhere. Underpaid schoolteachers demand bribes from their students, judges issue rulings based on the amount of money paid on the side or the dictates of the government, businesses flourish by paying handsome bribes for licenses and to avoid unwelcome regulations.

One Nation Under a Hex

Monday, Apr. 11, 2011
By Douglas Gillison
Time Magazine

While the murder and madness of the Pol Pot era have given rise to a vast bibliography of history and memoirs of Cambodia, the past 20 years of that poor but beautiful country have been largely unexamined. And that is why it is welcome that someone of Joel Brinkley's stature should call our attention to contemporary Cambodia's political and social life.

As a young correspondent, Brinkley witnessed Cambodians at their absolute nadir, sharing a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the 1979 Cambodian refugee crisis in Thailand. For his fifth book, Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land, the former New York Times reporter returns to the region. He finds a nation where the law does not matter, which at its highest levels is governed informally by an oligarchy, and where the citizens, he says in a hyperbolic lapse, are "the most abused people in the world."

(See the legacy of Pol Pot.)

Page after page, however, is run through with careless errors: Pol Pot did not die a "a free man" (he died the prisoner of his own movement in 1998); the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers do not meet "north of Phnom Penh" (the famous confluence is opposite the Royal Palace); the Phnom Penh park that was the scene of a 1997 massacre is not named after Prime Minister Hun Sen (it is named for an adjacent pagoda — Hun Sen Park is elsewhere); Cambodia has no national oil company (merely a regulatory body).

Cambodia's Curse: Struggling to Shed the Khmer Rouge's Legacy

Theary Seng (Photo: Kay Kimsong, The Phnom Penh Post)

By Joel Brinkley Foreign Affairs
March/April

Download a PDF of the article here

Theary Seng often thinks of that April morning in 1975 when she watched her parents cheering on the Khmer Rouge as its soldiers marched into Phnom Penh. She was four years old. Within days, Pol Pot's foot soldiers had killed her father; three years after that, her mother died in a prison compound. Today, Theary Seng runs a nonprofit legal-advocacy group in Phnom Penh. She is eager to move on. But the rest of Cambodia, and much of the world, remains mired in the nation's sorrowful past. During its four-year reign, the Khmer Rouge killed as many as two million people. Nowadays, the venal government of Prime Minister Hun Sen may take "ten lives or even a hundred lives," she told me in August, "but what's that compared to two million? That's still the Cambodian standard, and that's the international standard."

The devastation Pol Pot wreaked on his country remains hard to comprehend, even three decades later. His goal, as he put it, was to return Cambodia to "year zero" and transform it into an agrarian utopia. To that end, he purged his nation of educated city dwellers, monks, and minorities, while imposing a draconian resettlement program that uprooted almost everyone else. These measures led to the deaths of one-quarter of the country's population.

The Khmer Rouge fell in 1979, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia and replaced the regime with a puppet government, in which Hun Sen became the foreign minister. When Vietnamese forces pulled out ten years later, they left behind several Cambodian factions battling for control. Then, in 1991, these groups' leaders signed a UN-sponsored peace accord, giving Cambodia the extraordinary opportunity to start over. Before Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and even the Balkans, Cambodia was the international community's grand nation-building project. The country's new constitution awarded Cambodians the human rights, personal freedoms, and other protections of a modern democratic state. And in 1993, the United Nations staged a national election to select a democratic government. After the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia would remake itself at last, and its people would have a chance to thrive.

But in the 16 years since that election, the government has squandered that opportunity. Hun Sen came in second in the 1993 election but muscled his way into the government nonetheless. Four years later, he staged a coup. Since then, his government has been looting Cambodia's natural resources, jailing political opponents, kicking thousands of the weakest out of their homes, and fostering an expansive system of corruption, all the while ignoring any challenges or complaints from organizations and governments around the world.

"People in America, all they know of Cambodia is the Khmer Rouge," Joseph Mussomeli, then U.S. ambassador to Cambodia, told me in August. "Cambodia is trying to make it in the twenty-first century, but Washington is still stuck in the 1970s." Its perception skewed by this outdated vision, most of the world barely seems to notice that the Hun Sen government is destroying the nation.

This is the first 500 of 3,837 words of the article. Click here to download a PDF copy of the entire article.

JOEL BRINKLEY: In Cambodia, government watches as developers evict poor from their land

August 28, 2008
By JOEL BRINKLEY
McClatchy-Tribune News Service (USA)

Well past the city limits, beyond the sign that says "Bon Voyage; See You Again," after the paved roads end, down a rutted dirt track, Un Thea sits in the mud outside her shanty house, peeling bamboo shoots - and seething.

Two years ago, soldiers and police showed up in the middle of the night to throw her family and more than 1,000 others out of their homes on a plot in central Phnom Penh. The soldiers torched the crude houses before Un and the others had time even to retrieve their meager belongings. Then all of the residents were herded onto buses and ferried out here, about 15 miles away, and dumped in a rice paddy without so much as a bottle of water or a tarp for cover.

Then the soldiers left - though a few stayed behind to turn away the aid groups that came out to drop off emergency rations. Un's case is among several thousands more or less similar land seizures across Cambodia in the last three years.

"Out here, it is hard making business," Un complains with considerable understatement. She is 25 but already looks decades older. "They dumped us here and gave us no money, no land title. Nothing."

Cambodia is a democracy. The modern state grew out of a U.N. peace conference in 1991 intended to create a free nation from the rubble the Khmer Rouge left behind. Since then, the government has purported to manage the country according to the rule of law.

Every democratic country, including the United States, fails at times to live up to its democratic ideals. But the cruelty the Cambodian government visits upon its weakest citizens can be breathtaking. You expect this in North Korea, or Zimbabwe. But Cambodia? In late July Cambodians voted in national elections that were generally peaceful with scattered complaints. Government leaders tolerate human rights groups that regularly castigate them and, within limits, critical stories in the news media.

Still, stories like Un's can overwhelm the positive developments here.

Chum Bon Rong is secretary of state in the National Land Authority, which is supposed to arbitrate land disputes like the Andoung case. Last week he told me that his agency has received more than 3,000 land-seizure appeals in the last two and one-half years. Of those, he acknowledged, only about 50 have been judged in favor of plaintiffs, the impoverished people whose land was seized. Even among those 50, he acknowledged with a rueful grin, "sometimes the cases disappear" after referral to another agency that is supposed to implement the Land Authority's findings.

In 2001, under pressure from the West, Cambodia enacted a Land Law that was supposed to set clear rules for property disputes. Seven years later, the government has yet to write the regulations implementing that law. Meantime, the seizures continue unabated. Phnom Penh is booming, and when a developer spots a choice piece of land, he simply pays off the proper official to win a newly minted land title. All that's left is rid the property of its pesky residents - almost always poor, uneducated people like Un.

Once the residents have been disposed of, they are forgotten. Licadho, a local human rights group, noted in a new report that Un and the others dumped out here suffer from "malnutrition, typhoid, dengue fever, hepatitis A or B, hypertension, respiratory tract infections, gastro-intestinal illnesses including stress-related ulcers, depression," and last in this litany, "anger management problems." Um and her husband built a one-room shelter on stilts from scrap wood, bamboo matting and plastic tarps. Ten people now live in and under the house. She has no electricity or running water. No one in this community has a phone; there's not a single toilet.

"We have to buy water from the water seller," she says, nodding toward an earthen cistern beside the house. Mosquito larvae seem to roil the water surface. Tacked to her shelter's front wall, a poster warns of dengue fever, a mosquito-borne illness.

Um says she can make about 5,000 riel selling her peeled bamboo shoots at market. That's $1.22. She sends her young sons into Phnom Penh "to shine shoes for the people. They go and stay for a month."

A few months ago, the United Nations issued a report saying the government here always "tilts in favor of businesses" that want to develop land, "pitting poor farmers against developers." Even though his own agency's numbers show the very same thing, Chum says complaints like that from abroad are "a case of propaganda."

Khieu Kanharith blasts Joel Brinkley’s article on corruption in Cambodia

An indignant Khieu Kanharith blasted Joel Brinkley's article on corruption in Cambodia (Photo: Chantha, Koh Santepheap)

Click here to read Joel Brinkley's excellent article
which hits the CPP where it hurts them the most

24 August 2008
By L.D. and A.L.G.
Cambodge Soir Hebdo
Translated from French by Luc Sâr
Click here to read the original article in French

Khieu Kanharith, the government spokesman, called for a press conference in the morning of Sunday 24 August to protest against an article on corruption in Cambodia written by a US reporter.

Khieu Kanharith, the minister of Information and government spokesman, accused Joel Brinkley, a Pulitzer prize author, of being “biased” in his article titled: “The world leader in corruption is – Cambodia” published by the “Modesto Bee” in California on 21 August.

“Joel Brinkley came to visit me on 14 August to tell me that he wished to write articles on education, the economy, land dispute problems, and the government political vision,” Khieu Kanharith said. “I proposed to him to put him in contact with Say Chhum, the CPP secretary-general, with Im Chhunlim, the minister of Land Management, with Im Sothy, the state secretary of Education, with Chum Bunrong, the spokesman for the National Authority for Resolution of Land Disputes, and with Phay Siphan, the spokesman of the Council of Ministers.”

“Joel Brinkley told me that he was Pulitzer prize winner, and that he wished to meet high-ranking VIPs,” Khieu Kanharith claimed. “He considered me as an assistant (level official).”

The article – which was posted on KI-Media, a website close to the SRP [KI-Media note: KI-Media is not affiliated with the SRP]– cited the “Phnom Penh Post” article about the accident involving Hun Chea, Hun Sen’s nephew, in which a motorcycle driver was killed.

According to the “Phnom Penh Post,” the victim’s family would have received $4,000 in exchange for their silence, and the military police supported Hun Chea’s version.

Joel Brinkley’s article also cited Joseph Mussomeli, the US Ambassador to Cambodia, as saying "This goes to the whole culture of impunity here. Who you are, who you know, is more important than following the law.”

Joel Brinkley, who received the Pulitzer prize for reporting overseas in 1980 and publishing several articles on Cambodia, wrote “I have worked in many corrupt states - Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, among others. But in none of them is the corruption so pervasive, even pandemic.”

During the press conference, Khieu Kanharith rejected the information published by the Phnom Penh Post and he indicated that the accident involving Hun Sen’s nephew was “a private affair.”

When asked whether he would ask for an entry ban to Cambodia for Joel Brinkley, Khieu Kanharith answered: “the journalist could return to Cambodia whenever he wishes.”

JOEL BRINKLEY: The world leader in corruption is - Cambodia

The Cambodian godfather (center) and his family

August 21, 2008
Joel Brinkley
Modesto Bee (California USA)

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Hun Chea, a nephew of Cambodia's prime minster, was speeding along a busy downtown street a few days ago when he ran down a man on a motorbike.

Phnom Penh's streets are teeming with motorbikes, hundreds of them, criss-crossing busy traffic without seeming to look or care where they are going. Collisions are inevitable. But that's not the point of this story.

Hun was tearing down the street at high speed when he hit the biker, witnesses reported, and his car ripped off an arm and a leg. The biker, Sam Sabo, was killed. Hun began to drive off, but running over the motorbike had shredded a tire. He had to pull over, so there he sat in his big black Cadillac Escalade SUV.

Now, listen to how the Phnom Penh Post newspaper described the events that followed.

"Numerous traffic police were seen avoiding the accident scene, but armed military police arrived. They removed the SUV's license plates and comforted Hun Chea" while Sam Sabo lay bleeding to death in the street. A military policeman was overheard telling Hun: "'Don't worry. It wasn't your mistake. It was the motorbike driver's mistake.'" A few days later, Hun gave the dead man's family $4,000 in hush money, the paper reported. Case closed.

It's no secret that Cambodia is thoroughly corrupt. As an indirect result, the rich and the powerful can commit, well, murder and face few if any repercussions.

A primary rule of foreign correspondence is to avoid applying the values of your own country on the nation you are covering. But then, some events appear so outrageous that the rule does not apply. Police actually removed the car's license plates, to conceal the driver's identity? So I asked Khieu Kanarith, Cambodia's information minister, about the case. He fumbled about for a moment and then explained, "I understand he had his wife in the car, and I don't think he was paying attention to what he was doing." OK, but the police removed the license plates? Khieu had to think about that for a moment but finally managed to say, "You try to cover the plates because it's harder to sell a car if it's been in an accident." As a reporter, sometimes it's hard to keep a straight face. But then, being Cambodia's information minister is a tough job.

Later I asked Joseph Mussomeli, the U.S. ambassador, about this, and he shook his head.

"This goes to the whole culture of impunity here. Who you are, who you know, is more important than following the law. And the police are too intimidated, too deferential, to the wealthy and powerful." Why else would the traffic police assertively avoid the scene of the accident, even with a dying man lying in the street? They knew full well that the owner of a Cadillac Escalade SUV in this exceedingly poor country is quite likely to be well connected.

Impunity is a word that comes up over and over in Cambodia. Last month, two men speeding by on a motorbike shot and killed Khim Sambor and his 21-year-old son as they walked down the street. Khim was a reporter for Khmer Conscience, an opposition newspaper, and not surprisingly the paper had been writing critically about the government.

No one has been arrested. That is true for dozens of apparent contract killings in recent years just like that one. No one has proved that government officials are behind them. But then, why else would the police make no effort to solve any of these crimes? Cambodia has come a long way in the last several years. Phnom Penh is teeming with tourists. The economy is growing. The nation has been stable for more than a decade now, which is no small accomplishment.

Over the years, I have worked in many corrupt states - Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, among others. But in none of them is the corruption so pervasive, even pandemic. Prime Minister Hun Sen just won re-election to a new five-year term. For a decade, the United States and many other countries have been pressing him to pass a comprehensive anti-corruption law. Hun continually promises but never delivers.

Cambodians deserve better. If Cambodia hopes to join the ranks of the world's prosperous and respected nations, it must enact - and enforce - an anti-corruption law. With that, in time, the shiny mantle of impunity resting softly on the shoulders of the rich and well-connected will begin to fall away.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University. Readers may send him e-mail at: brinkley@foreign-matters.com