Preah Khan Temple located in Preah Vihear province is vandalized

Fresh sign of vandalism can be clearly seen on these stone sculptures along the Preah Khan Kampong Svay temple (Photo: RFA listener)

14 April 2008
By Sav Yuth
Radio Free Asia
Translated from Khmer by KI-Media

A number of villagers from Preah Vihear province claimed that an ancient temple enclosed in a wall measuring more than one kilometer along each side, located in Sangkum Thmei district, is being vandalized by looters who hacked off the stone sculptures along the temple walls in many places to sell.

On Monday 14 April, one of the many villagers of Sangkum Thmei district who just visited the Bakan Temple which some also call the Preah Khan Kampong Svay Temple (not to be confused with the Preah Khan Temple in Siem Reap province), located in Kanseng village, Ranakse commune, called on the authority to help protect this ancient temple after he saw the large amount of vandalisms that made him concern about the fate of the temple: “They just hacked off the carvings very recently, maybe they took them to sell. Last year, when I went there, it was beautiful, but this year, it’s all different, they hacked off 5, 6, 7 places. It’s regretful that they do this, I feel pity for the loss of our cultural heritage.”

Nevertheless, Son Bun Leang, the cabinet chief of the provincial office, said that he cannot comment about this temple because it is under the administration of the provincial department of culture and fine arts: “Ask the experts at the department of culture, they are the ones who are administering this temple…”

Nouv Sokuna, the deputy director of the Preah Vihear department of culture and fine arts, rejected the information claiming that carvings in the temple were hacked off by looters. He claimed that, currently, his department is taking good care and is protecting this temple by setting up 40 guards, as well as tourist police offices, and royal academicians who are based there also. Nouv Sokuna said: “The province is paying a lot of attention, in particular the department of culture has 40 guards based there, this is one issue. Secondly, there are also tourist police officers and royal academicians staying there also.”

Local police and tourists visiting the temple said that they never saw any temple guards as the department of culture claimed.

An anonymous police officer from the Sangkum Thmei district said that at the Preah Khan Kampong Svay Temple, there are no police guards there, there are only two tourist police officers: “There are two tourist police officers also…”

A tourist from Phnom Penh who visited the temple, indicated that he did not see anybody protecting the temple, and he observed that vandalism took place and the carvings were hacked off: “I didn’t see any (temple guards). I saw fresh hacking of the stone carvings, the debris are still there. They hacked off ancient Khmer sculptures, I don’t know where they take them to, they looted everything. The temple is very beautiful. Please help intervene!”

An official of the Preah Vihear department of culture and fine arts indicated that the Bakan Temple, aka the Preah Khan Kampong Svay temple, is located in the middle of a forest, about 100-kilometer from the Preah Vihear provincial city, and there are not many tourists visiting there.

The temple was built from sandstone, and it is about the same age as the Angkor Wat temple, it could possibly be built around the 13th century.

Preah Vihear Eviction - Action Needed Over Killings and Looting

The day after the eviction,authorities were still in heavy force throughout the area. In the background is a vehicle laden with bicycles and other property looted from the eviction families' homes. (Photo: Licadho)

November 22, 2007
Media Statement
Licadho

The government and courts must take strong action to investigate and punish police and military personnel responsible for serious abuses - including the alleged execution of a woman in front of her children - during the November 15 land eviction in Preah Vihear province.

According to eyewitnesses, the two people shot dead during the eviction, Mr Oeun Eng, 31, and Mrs Toeun Chheng, 29, were unarmed and posing no threat to the authorities at the time of their shootings.

Mr Oeun Eng was shot in the chest, reportedly by a uniformed man hidden in bushes some distance away, and died almost immediately. Another man standing next to him was shot in the shoulder but survived. The two men were standing amidst a group of people, most of whom leapt to the ground by the authorities began shooting; they may have been shot simply because they were too slow to get to the ground. The fact that both men were shot in the upper body indicates the bullets were fired directly at them.

The death of Mrs Toeun Chheng is even more disturbing. According to further investigation by LICADHO, initial reports that she was shot while protesting the arrest of her husband were incorrect. In fact, according to multiple witnesses, she was shot in cold blood by police while she was alone with her four children at her house.

Witnesses say that police officers went to the Toeun Chheng’s house during the eviction, apparently looking for her husband, a community representative named Moeun Chanthon, who was not at home. Toeun Chheng was in front of her house, attempting to shield her four children from the police, when one of the officers moved forward, raised his AK47 rifle and shot her in the chest. The officer then stepped up to her, as she lay bleeding on the ground, and ripped a necklace from her neck to steal it. He also took a motorcycle from the house. Toeun Chheng‘s four children, the youngest a baby and the oldest aged 11, were present during the shooting. Toeun Chheng was taken to a local medical clinic but later died.

Soon after his wife's shooting, Moeun Chanthon was arrested. Police found him at a roadblock which the community had erected to protest the arrests of two people - including Moeun Chanthon's brother, Moeun Chantha - a day earlier. After the arrest, a policeman named Sun Vannak allegedly beat Moeun Chanthon severely, including by hitting him repeatedly on the head with a baton, according to witnesses.

On the orders of police, the body of Oeun Eng was hurriedly cremated and Toeun Chheng’s body was quickly buried after she died.

At least six other people were injured, five of them shot, during the eviction.

In addition to the excessive violence, the police and military officers also looted property of the 317 families who were evicted. During the eviction, hundreds of people were rounded up by police and other authorities and taken away to be detained, while others fled into nearby forest. The authorities then burned down the houses of all of the families, stealing their property - including motorcycles, household items and clothing – beforehand. Most of the detained villagers were later released and, without any possessions except for what they were wearing, told to leave the area permanently.

After the looting and burning of houses, the authorities celebrated by killing a cow, cooking its body to eat and burying its head.

As many as 280 personnel, comprising soldiers, police, military police and Forestry Administration officers, reportedly participated in the eviction, which was carried out on the orders of the provincial governor. According to information received by LICADHO, the eviction was led by deputy provincial governor Sar Sam Ol, Forestry Administration official Pol Kham Narei, Choam Ksan district chief Kao Loung.

The eviction occurred near Sra Em village, Kantuot commune in Choam Ksan district, where the 317 families had recently settled on vacant land after coming to the area in search of land.

At least 15 arrested people remain detained and have been sent to Phnom Penh’s Prey Sar prison, including the Funcinpec-affiliated provincial deputy governor Preah Vihear, Meas Savoeun. Two injured persons, both shot in the leg, are among those still detained.

LICADHO welcomes the reported comment of Ministry of Interior spokesman Lieutenant General Khieu Sopheak (in The Cambodia Daily, Nov 21) that the level of violence used by authorities in the eviction was "unacceptable". LICADHO urges that appropriately strong action be taken by the government, judicial and National Assembly officials, including:

• The suspension of deputy provincial governor Sar Sam Ol, Forestry Administration officer Pol Kham Narei, and Choam Ksan district chief Kao Loung from their positions, until proper investigations into the eviction are completed.
• A high-level judicial investigation into alleged crimes committed during the eviction. This should be led by the Prosecutor-General of the Court of Appeal, who has authority over prosecutors and judicial police nationwide.
• Prosecution of members of the authorities responsible for murder, manslaughter, theft or other crimes during the eviction. Because of provincial government officials' involvement in the eviction, prosecutions should occur in a court other than the Preah Vihear Provincial Court.
• A simultaneous investigation by the National Assembly's Commission on Human Rights into the events, including the actions of local and provincial authorities, before, during and after the eviction.
• The Ministry of Interior should grant immediate access by human rights workers and independent doctors to all of the arrested villagers who are still detained.
• The Phnom Penh Municipal Court should promptly investigate the cases of the detained villagers to establish if there is convincing evidence of crimes committed by them and, if not, they should be immediately released.

The Preah Vihear eviction was the most deadly in Cambodia since the killing of five people in a March 2005 violent eviction by police and military police in Kbal Spean, Banteay Meanchey province. No officers were convicted of committing any crime in that eviction; murder, attempted murder and manslaughter charges initially filed against some officers were later dropped.

LICADHO reiterates its call for the Cambodian government to order a moratorium on all forced mass evictions in the country.

For further information, please contact:
Kek Galabru, LICADHO president, 012-940-645
Am Sam Ath, Monitoring Technical Supervisor, 012-327-770

One Seriously Injured After Cargo Plane Crash-Lands in Rice Paddy

Mean Veasna, VOA Khmer
Original report from Phnom Penh
18 October 2007

A Russian-made cargo plane crash-landed in a rice paddy outside the capital late Wednesday, injuring all five crew members aboard, one of them seriously, authorities said.

One crew member broke his left leg, one sustained a head injury, and three others incurred minor injuries after the plane went down in a muddy field of knee-deep water.

Rescue teams took three hours to remove the crew, whose plane experienced difficulties after take-off from Phnom Penh International Airport en route to Singapore, authorities said.

The Antonov-12, operated by Imtrec Aviation Company, was carrying garments that were either damaged or looted by villagers following the landing, Agence France-Presse reported.

This is the second Antonov to crash in Cambodia in four months, following the June crash of a tourist charter in coastal mountains that killed all 22 aboard.

By Thursday afternoon, rescue teams had transported the remains of the looting to a Phnom Penh warehouse. Authorities said they planned to move the severely damaged plane back to the airport for subsequent removal by its operator.

Gods on display

Hevajra, a Buddhist deity, graces Berlin

Khmer art

Jun 7th 2007
The Economist

An exciting exhibition in Berlin awakes a plea for the return of stolen treasures

FOR many, the word Angkor evokes a single temple packed with tourists eager to see what's left of a corner of Asia's ancient past. “Angkor: Sacred Heritage of Cambodia”, an exhibition in Berlin, corrects this impression. Spanning more than 1,000 years of Hindu- and Buddhist-inspired art—stone sculptures, a handful of stunning bronzes and a coda of wooden statues—the show makes clear that Angkor was a sophisticated complex led by a succession of kings who held sway over the Khmer people and hundreds of square miles of land studded with beautiful art created for the glory of the gods.

There are two stories that unfold in the cool lofty rooms of Berlin's 19th-century Martin-Gropius-Bau museum—a far cry from the sweaty heat of the National Museum of Phnom Penh, which has lent many of the exhibits. First, are the splendid sculptures dominated by a procession of the Hindu deities, Vishnu and Shiva, plus Harihara, who represents a mixture of both. One of the most striking is the serene face and upper body of Vishnu in a sleeping pose, an 11th-century fragment of what is believed to have been the largest bronze statue ever cast in Cambodia.

The second story is less obvious and probably unintended by the show's organisers. It is to do with the wholesale looting of the temples that began when the French swept into Angkor 150 years ago. In the style of European colonisers of the period, acquisitive French explorers strapped prize statues onto the backs of locals for the trip out of the jungle, then loaded them onto rafts for the journey down the Mekong river for dispatch to Paris. Many ended up as the core of the collection of Asian art at Paris's Musée Guimet.

More shocking has been the rape of Khmer art since Cambodia's independence. Little free-standing statuary is left at the temples. Cambodian and Thai soldiers, acting for well-organised rings, have hacked at much of it leaving pedestals empty, walls with holes and, in some cases, headless and armless torsos.

Unfortunately, as a star statue in Berlin shows, possessions of the National Museum in Phnom Penh were not always safe, either. A well-girthed Shiva, clasping a lotus in one outstretched hand, and his diminutive wife, Uma, in the other is placed prominently in one of the Berlin rooms. But Uma's head is missing. The Berlin curators don't say so on their description, but her head was stolen—literally hacked off—when the piece was on show at the Phnom Penh museum in the 1970s.

Security, upkeep and finance have all greatly improved at the museum since then. Indeed, the sculptures look a little lost away from their usual habitat in the more informal setting of Phnom Penh. There, the galleries open on to a courtyard filled with coconut palms and vermillion flowers, allowing a visitor to daydream about the landscape where the original artists of Angkor worked.

In their temporary home in Berlin, the sculptures are given descriptions that are a little thin. A visitor would do well to invest in “Art and Architecture of Cambodia”, a history by Helen Ibbitson Jessup, the curator of the blockbuster Khmer exhibition that took place at Washington's National Gallery of Art in 1997, which is available at the museum bookstore.

With the Phnom Penh collection now recognised as a great repository of Khmer art, might some collectors consider repatriating at least part of their booty to its rightful place? Many possessors of stolen Khmer art argue that it is safer in their hands than it would be in Cambodia, but this may no longer be the case. Where, for a start, is Uma's head?

Ghosts Wail as Cambodians Plunder Killing Field Graves

May 20, 2007
By SETH MYDANS
The New York Times (US)

SRE LEAV, Cambodia — Researchers are examining a long-unknown killing field in Cambodia with the graves of thousands of victims of the Khmer Rouge from the 1970s.

But local villagers found it first. By the time the researchers arrived in early May, some 200 graves had been dug up and the bones scattered through the woods by hundreds of people hunting for jewelry.

“Everyone was running up there to dig for gold, so I went too,” said Srey Net, 50, describing what seems to have been a communal frenzy that seized this poor and isolated village. “If they can dig for gold, why can’t I?”

It was the first such raid the researchers had recorded in the thousands of burial grounds they have documented around the country. Altogether 1.7 million people died from 1975 to 1979 from starvation, overwork and disease as well as torture and execution.

“People said, ‘This goose has no owner,’ ” said Ouk Souk, 60, a farmer. Few valuables were in the graves, but villagers took whatever they could find.

The invasion of what has been almost sacred ground suggests that past traumas are starting to fade even as Cambodia prepares to begin a long-delayed trial of some Khmer Rouge leaders, said Youk Chhang, a leading expert on the period.

“I think it has become a memory, rather than a physical thing any longer,” he said, speaking of the pain of the past. “There will be no more tears. There are no more feelings to express. Only a flash of memory when you see a piece of bone.”

For younger Cambodians, who know remarkably little about the Khmer Rouge period, he said, “It’s just a dead person.”

Youk Chhang heads the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which has researched the killing fields and amassed a huge archive on the Khmer Rouge years. Visiting here on Thursday, two of his investigators said there could be as many as 9,000 bodies buried in the woods behind this village 100 miles south of Phnom Penh.

Though the pain of the past may have faded, the bones and the ghosts of Khmer Rouge victims still terrify many rural people. After the assault on the burial ground, this little village seemed filled with remorse and dread.

The digging has stopped and several people said they had been awakened at night by screams from the graves.

“People heard voices calling out, ‘Help me! Help me!’ ” said Svay Saroeun, 50, a deputy village chief. “Maybe they are angry at the villagers for digging up their graves. Or maybe they were tortured to death, and now they are being tortured again by people who are disturbing their sleep.”

Srey Noeun, 47, a farmer with four small children, said she could not sleep for three nights after digging two small gold earrings out of a grave.

“I’m afraid that the owner will take revenge on me because she died with nothing but her earrings and now I have taken them,” Srey Noeun said. “She’ll say, ‘Please give them back. They are all I had.’ ”

Ms. Srey Noeun said she sold the earrings as quickly as she could and bought things that she really needed: four pounds of pork, a sack of rice, oil for cooking and for oil lamps, salt, pepper, seasoning and milk powder for her youngest child.

“We never have enough rice,” she said. “Normally we can’t afford to buy pork.”

The buried treasure seemed paltry after nearly a week of digging: one gold necklace and 27 small gold earrings. But it was dazzling to people who live without electricity or running water, far from the nearest clinic, school or paved road.

The luckiest villager was Pen Chia, 27, who recovered the necklace and sold it to buy a cow. But most people found nothing but shattered skulls, bits of bone that looked like broken sticks and scraps of moldering clothing.

“I dug all day without eating,” said Pron Sythoeun, 36, a farmer. “I dug for four days. And I got nothing.”

He has gone back to poke through the scraps with a stick, but few other villagers have returned except to light incense and pray for forgiveness from the restless souls.

The killing field sits empty now in the pouring rain, cratered with shallow pits and mounds of freshly turned red mud, silent under the trees except for the lowing of thin white cattle in a nearby field.

Some villagers said they had not known it was there, although its existence had not been a secret. It was beside them through the decades, like the suppressed traumas of the past, a blank spot in their minds.

They rediscovered it by chance, when Vietnamese soldiers came by searching for the remains of their own missing men. The Vietnamese Army drove the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979, then occupied Cambodia for a decade.

Helping the soldiers dig, Pon Khlaut, a farmer, saw the glint of an earring in a pit. When he showed it to his neighbors, they abandoned their homes and fields and rushed to the woods to dig.

Among them was Srey Net, who knew the graveyard well. As a teenager, she said, she had been enlisted to bury the bodies of people who had died in labor gangs building one of the huge irrigation dikes that were a particular folly of the Khmer Rouge.

Nearly 20,000 killing fields, holding anywhere from a few bodies to hundreds, served as burial grounds for Khmer Rouge victims as well as execution sites.

Like many of the victims, Ms. Srey Net said, the people here died from accidents, exhaustion and starvation as well as fevers, malaria and an epidemic of diarrhea. Many of them were sent to a small, crude clinic nearby from which she said few emerged alive.

“Whenever a patient died, they would ring a gong or blow a whistle,” she said. “Even in the middle of the night, I had to run up there to help carry away the bodies.”

Last week she was among the graves again, whacking at the ground with a hoe, unearthing what may have been some of the same bodies she had buried years ago. And then, finding no gold, she reverted to her former role, retrieving and reburying some of the bones.

“I felt pity for them, that’s why I collected the bones,” she said. “They were scattered all over the place.”

Ms. Srey Noeun, the farmer who sold two earrings to buy food, also had a connection with the bodies in the graves. Like many of them, she had been a member of a work brigade here, but unlike them she had survived.

“I went to see what was happening but I didn’t have a hoe,” she said of the raid on the burial ground. “I said to someone, ‘Give me your hoe, I want to dig too.’ ”

The first thing she found was clothing, she said, then bones, then gold.

“I dug downwards to the feet, and then I started upwards,” she said. “I found the teeth and the skull. I moved them down around the feet and I cleared the ground around them with my hands. I saw the earrings, first on the left and then on the right.”

She said they were exactly like the small gold rings she had worn in her ears as a girl until they were taken from her when she was forced to join a work brigade.

Ms. Srey Noeun said she had no idea whether she had ever met the woman whose grave she raided, and she said she did not know why the Khmer Rouge had let the woman keep her earrings.

'Killing fields' ghosts offer treasure to destitute Cambodian peasants

Saturday, May 19, 2007
The Associated Press

"The pillaging highlighted the extreme poverty faced by many Cambodians — so poor that they would disturb a burial ground"

SRÉ LIEV, Cambodia: Pheng Chea was just another poor Cambodian peasant until a ghost came to his rescue.

In a recent dream, he recalls, the spirit of a long-dead Khmer Rouge victim showed him a gold necklace and instructed him to dig it out from her grave.

"The ghost told me her grave was near a dead big tree stump, so I dug down half a meter (1.6 feet) and found the gold," he says.

The 29-year-old man is now known as the luckiest man in Sré Liev village. He found US$240 (€177) worth of gold chains earlier this month when he and other villagers ransacked one of Cambodia's many "killing fields," the mass graves where the Khmer Rouge government dumped victims during its brutal rule from 1975 to 1979.

The pillaging highlighted the extreme poverty faced by many Cambodians — so poor that they would disturb a burial ground — as well as the role of ghosts and superstition in their lives.

The incident also worried researchers trying to preserve a historical record of the Khmer Rouge, blamed for the death of 1.7 million people through hunger, illnesses, overwork and execution. By the time the researchers learned about Sré Liev, the bones had already been piled up in the open.

Cambodia's mass graves could be useful evidence for planned genocide trials of Khmer Rouge leaders, though it remains unclear whether the Sré Liev killing field would have played a part.

Srey Noeurn, who took a pair of earrings from the skeletal remains of what appeared to have been a woman, had other concerns.

"When I arrived home, I did not keep them in the house because I was afraid the ghost would come to ask for them back," the 48-year-old mother of four said. "So, I rolled them in a plastic bag and hid them in a tree in front of the house."

She organized a Buddhist ceremony to show her gratitude to the original owner of the earrings and lit incense sticks to pray to the owner and ask for forgiveness. She sold one of the earrings for 150,000 riel (US$37.50; €28), a big sum in a country where 35 percent the people survive on less than 50 U.S. cents (€37 cents) a day.

Pheng Chea, the "luckiest man," had more worldly fears. Other villagers told him that local police were looking for him to demand a cut from his gains. And he hid for three days at his mother's house 20 kilometers (12 miles) away because he feared robbers.

The farmer sold the gold for one million riel (US$240; €177), which he used to purchase his first-ever cow. At a recent Buddhist ceremony, he offered a bowl of rice noodles to the female ghost of his lucky dream and asked for her forgiveness.

"I thanked the spirit for giving me the gold," Pheng Chea said.

Not all the villagers raided the grave.

"I told the grave diggers we ought to feel pity for (the dead)," Srey Bouy, 51, said. "They died painfully through execution and starvation."

Located in Kampot province, about 130 kilometers (80 miles) southwest of the capital of Phnom Penh, Sré Liev village is tucked away in a forest. The 100 residents live in ramshackle thatched houses and eke out a living planting rice or cutting wood for sale.

For years, the villagers left the nearby grave site alone. But recently, a team of Vietnamese soldiers mistakenly excavated the site looking for the remains of comrades who had died after Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979 and drove the Khmer Rouge from power.

When the Vietnamese soldiers left, curiosity among the villagers turned into wild speculation that the pits held jewelry. The onslaught of the graves began.

The villagers acted out of desperate poverty, says Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, an independent group collecting evidence of the regime's atrocities.

The looting of the killing fields was common shortly after the Khmer Rouge lost power, he said. His center has documented about 20,000 mass graves across Cambodia; the vast majority of them have been disturbed, mostly by poor rural people, he said.

Peter Foster, a spokesman for a United Nations-backed tribunal created to conduct genocide trials, described the looting of the Sré Liev graves as "unfortunate." He suggested that Cambodian authorities try to protect such sites in the future.

The trials have yet to start. Years of negotiations to form the tribunal, including bickering over procedures and legal fees for foreign lawyers, have delayed them for so long that many of the potential defendants have died. Three decades after the Khmer Rouge's terrifying rule, many Cambodians wonder whether they will ever see justice done.

The seemingly endless wait may have influenced the villagers too, Youk Chhang said. "When we see a piece of bone now," he said, "we have no more tears to drop."

Angkor Wat relics for sale on eBay

PM - Thursday, 17 May , 2007
Reporter: Timothy McDonald
Australian Broadcasting Corporation

This is a transcript from PM. The program is broadcast around Australia at 5:10pm on Radio National and 6:10pm on ABC Local Radio.

MARK COLVIN: Angkor Wat is a huge and ancient city of palaces and temples that rise out of the Cambodian forests and whose history gives it a prised position on the world heritage-list.

Now, a vendor on the Internet auction site eBay says you can have your very own piece of it.

Invaders and treasure hunters have looted Angkor Wat extensively since the Khmer kings abandoned it hundreds of years ago.

Although it's been illegal to remove relics from Cambodia for the last decade, heritage workers say those laws are very difficult to enforce.

Timothy McDonald reports.

TIMOTHY MCDONALD: For just under $6,000 you can have your own relief sculpture or statue to sit on the mantelpiece or next to the water feature in the back yard.

There's just one problem, it's quite possibly illegal to buy or sell the goods.

So eBay immediately started an investigation when PM informed the company about the seller.

eBay spokesman Daniel Feiler says it may be rare example of an unwanted item slipping past the site's monitors.

DANIEL FEILER: While we do have systems and tools in place, as well as over 2,000 trust and safety personnel who monitor the site and look out for things that might infringe our policies, or just shouldn't be on our site, there is the occasional thing that might slip through the cracks.

TIMOTHY MCDONALD: The seller is based in Thailand but says his products are housed in Singapore and he insists the statues are the real thing.

There is a market in fakes and it's possible that these items aren't what the seller says they are.

Similar items that are sold legally through auction houses often sell for more than double the price.

If the sale is fraudulent, Mr Feiler says the seller's likely to be caught.

DANIEL FEILER: On a site like eBay that has close cooperation with law enforcement agencies all around the world, or certainly in all the 35 markets in which it operates, then you're running a high risk of getting caught.

TIMOTHY MCDONALD: Heritage workers say they're worried that if the items are genuine, they may have been stolen.

Heritage Watch is a non-government organisation that's working to preserve Cambodia's rich cultural heritage.

The Director Dr Dougald O'Reilly says people have been plundering the site for hundreds of years.

DOUGALD O'REILLY: Looting in Cambodia has a very long history. It goes back to the time of wars with Thailand when booty was taken back to Thailand and materials actually found in Burma today, dating back to several hundred years ago.

So it's not a new problem. It was current under the French Colonial regime there, it continues today.

TIMOTHY MCDONALD: New laws came into effect in 1994 which made it illegal to remove historic relics from Cambodia, but the looting continued.

One of the worst examples was in 1999, when the Cambodian Military spent weeks using circular saws to remove sandstone blocks, which then made their way to Thailand.

They've since been returned.

Dr O'Reilly says the situation has gotten significantly better in recent years, but the illegal trade still persists.

DOUGALD O'REILLY: There are people who are dealing in antiquities that are stolen recently from Cambodia and other countries around the world and it is illegal frankly to deal with these and to take them into possession.

So you need to be very careful because these things can be repossessed and you can lose significant amounts of money if you're dealing with an unscrupulous dealer.

TIMOTHY MCDONALD: While it's illegal to sell any relic removed from Cambodia after 1994, the rule has proven difficult to enforce.

Often it's the Cambodian Government that's had to prove that any questionable relic was removed after the law came into effect.

And that often requires photographic or documentary evidence.

Dr O'Reilly says that's slowed the number of items returned to Cambodia to a trickle.

MARK COLVIN: Timothy McDonald.

Villagers find and loot Cambodian killing field

Srei Noeun, 47, a farmer who dug up two gold earrings from a killing field and sold them to buy food, with her children. (Seth Mydans for the IHT)

Tuesday, May 15, 2007
By Seth Mydans
The International Herald Tribune (Paris, France)

SRE LEAV, Cambodia: Researchers are investigating a long unknown killing field in Cambodia with the graves of thousands of Khmer Rouge victims from the 1970s.

But local villagers found it first. By the time the researchers arrived last week, some 200 graves had been dug open and the bones scattered through the woods by hundreds of people hunting for jewelry.

"Everyone was running up there to dig for gold, so I went too," said Srey Net, 50, describing what seems to have been a communal frenzy that seized this poor and isolated village. "If they can dig for gold, why can't I?"

It was the first such raid the researchers had recorded in the thousands of burial grounds they have documented around the country. Altogether 1.7 million people died under Khmer Rouge rule from 1975 to 1979 from starvation, overwork and disease as well as torture and execution.

"People said, 'This goose has no owner,' " said Ouk Souk, 60, a farmer. There were few valuables in the graves, but they took whatever they could find.

The invasion of what has been almost sacred ground suggests that past traumas are beginning to fade even as Cambodia prepares to open a long-delayed trial of some Khmer Rouge leaders, said Youk Chhang, a leading expert on the period.

"I think it has become a memory, rather than a physical thing any longer," he said, speaking of the pain of the past. "There will be no more tears. There are no more feelings to express - only a flash of memory when you see a piece of bone."

For younger Cambodians, who know remarkably little about the Khmer Rouge period, he said, "It's just a dead person."

Youk Chhang heads the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which has researched the killing fields and amassed a huge archive on the Khmer Rouge years. Visiting here on Thursday, two of his investigators said there could be as many as 9,000 bodies buried in the woods behind this village about 150 kilometers, or about 100 miles, south of Phnom Penh.

Though the pain of the past may have faded, the bones and the ghosts of Khmer Rouge victims still terrify many rural people. After the assault on the burial ground, this village seemed filled with remorse and dread. The digging has stopped and several people said they had been awakened at night by screams from the graves.

"People heard voices calling out, 'Help me! Help me!' " said Svay Saroeun, 50, a deputy village chief. "Maybe they are angry at the villagers for digging up their graves. Or maybe they were tortured to death and now they are being tortured again by people who are disturbing their sleep."

Srey Noeun, 47, a farmer with four small children, said she was unable to sleep for three nights after she dug two small gold earrings out of a grave.

"I'm afraid that the owner will take revenge on me because she died with nothing but her earrings and now I have taken them," Srey Noeun said. "She'll say, 'Please give them back. They are all I had.' "

Srey Noeun said she sold the earrings as quickly as she could and bought things she needed: two kilograms, or 4.4 pounds, of pork, a sack of rice, oil for cooking and for lamps, salt, pepper, seasoning and milk powder for her youngest child.

"We never have enough rice," Srey Noeun said. "Normally we can't afford to buy pork."

The treasure unearthed after nearly a week of digging seemed paltry: one gold necklace and 27 small gold earrings. But it was dazzling to people who live without electricity or running water, far from the nearest clinic, school or paved road.

The luckiest villager was Pen Chia, 27, who recovered the necklace and sold it to buy a cow. But most people found nothing but shattered skulls, bits of bone that looked like broken sticks and scraps of moldering clothing.

"I dug all day without eating," said Pron Sythoeun, 36, a farmer. "I dug for four days. And I got nothing."

He has gone back to poke through the scraps with a stick, but few other villagers have returned except to light incense and pray for forgiveness from the restless souls.

The killing field sits empty now in the pouring rain, cratered with shallow pits and mounds of freshly turned red mud, silent under the trees except for the lowing of thin white cattle in a nearby field.

Some villagers said they had not known it was there, although its existence had not been a secret. It had lain there beside them through the decades, like the suppressed traumas of the past, a blank spot in their minds.

They rediscovered it by chance a week ago, when a team of Vietnamese soldiers came by, searching for the remains of their own missing men. The Vietnamese Army drove the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979 and then occupied Cambodia for a decade.

Helping them dig, Pon Khlaut, a farmer, saw the glint of an earring in a pit. When he showed it to his neighbors, they abandoned their homes and fields and rushed to the woods to dig.

Among them was Srey Net, who knew the graveyard well. As a teenager, she said, she was enlisted to bury the bodies of people who died in labor gangs building one of the huge irrigation dikes that were a particular folly of the Khmer Rouge.

Nearly 20,000 killing fields, holding anywhere from a few bodies to thousands, served as burial grounds for Khmer Rouge victims as well as execution sites.

Like many of the victims, Srey Net said, the people here died from accidents, exhaustion and starvation as well as fevers, malaria and an epidemic of diarrhea. Many of them were sent to a small, crude clinic nearby from which she said few emerged alive.

"Whenever a patient died, they would ring a gong or blow a whistle," she said. "Even in the middle of the night, I had to run up there to help carry away the bodies."

Last week she was among the graves again, whacking at the ground with a hoe, unearthing what may have been some of the same bodies she had buried years ago. And then, finding no gold, she reverted to her former role, retrieving and reburying some of the bones.

"I felt pity for them, that's why I collected the bones," she said. "They were scattered all over the place."

Srey Noeun, the farmer who sold two earrings to buy food, also had a connection with the bodies in the graves. Like many of them, she had been a member of a work brigade here, but unlike them she had survived.

"I went to see what was happening but I didn't have a hoe," she said of the raid on the burial ground. "I said to someone, 'Give me your hoe, I want to dig too.' "

The first thing she found was clothing, she said, then bones, then gold.

"I dug downward to the feet and then I started upward," she said. "I found the teeth and the skull. I moved them down around the feet and I cleared the ground around them with my hands. I saw the earrings, first on the left and then on the right."

She said they were exactly like the small gold rings she wore in her ears as a girl until they were taken from her when she was forced to join a work brigade.

Srey Noeun said she had no idea whether she had ever met the woman whose grave she raided and she said she did not know why the Khmer Rouge had let the woman keep her earrings.

Poverty leaves no room for human dignity

Villagers dig for jewellery at Sre Leave village, in Trapaing Khlaing commune, in Kamport province, 120 km (75 miles) southwest of Phnom Penh, May 8, 2007. Hundreds of villagers from Kamport province flocked to a gravesite in Chhuk district, where many bodies of Khmer Rouge victims were buried during the Khmer Rouge regime, to dig for jewellery and other valuables, police said on Monday, reported Cambodia Daily News. REUTERS/Chor Sokunthea

Ngeth Thea (R), 31, examines a piece of clothing after digging at Sre Leave village, in Trapaing Khlaing commune, in Kamport province, 120 km (75 miles) southwest of Phnom Penh, May 8, 2007. Hundreds of villagers from Kamport province flocked to a gravesite in Chhuk district, where many bodies of Khmer Rouge victims were buried during the Khmer Rouge regime, to dig for jewellery and other valuables, police said on Monday, reported Cambodia Daily News. REUTERS/Chor Sokunthea

Duk Veth, 42, holds up a gold earring after digging at Sre Leave village, in Trapaing Khlaing commune, in Kamport province, 120 km (75 miles) southwest of Phnom Penh, May 8, 2007. Hundreds of villagers from Kamport province flocked to a gravesite in Chhuk district, where many bodies of Khmer Rouge victims were buried during the Khmer Rouge regime, to dig for jewellery and other valuables, police said on Monday, reported Cambodia Daily News. REUTERS/Chor Sokunthea

A Cambodian man piles up skulls, bones and clothes that were dug up at Sre Leave village, in Trapaing Khlaing commune, in Kamport province, 120 km (75 miles) southwest of Phnom Penh, May 8, 2007. Hundreds of villagers from Kamport province flocked to a gravesite in Chhuk district, where many bodies of Khmer Rouge victims were buried during the Khmer Rouge regime, to dig for jewellery and other valuables, police said on Monday, reported Cambodia Daily News. REUTERS/Chor Sokunthea

A Cambodian boy look at skull and bones that were dug up at Sre Leave village, in Trapaing Khlaing commune, in Kamport province, 120 km (75 miles) southwest of Phnom Penh, May 8, 2007. Hundreds of villagers from Kamport province flocked to a gravesite in Chhuk district, where many bodies of Khmer Rouge victims were buried during the Khmer Rouge regime, to dig for jewellery and other valuables, police said on Monday, reported Cambodia Daily News. REUTERS/Chor Sokunthea