Dear All,

As you all know, Southeast Asia was recently victim of flood causing a lot of economic and social damages. But as it is written by Dr. Michel Chai in his article, there is another kind a “flood” which threatens the existence of the Khmer nation, that the international community (media, politicians, etc...) has decided to ignore.

Please read his article and the short translation below.

Best regards and thank you for your very precious time

Kith Chamroeun

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Colonisation and Settlement of Vietnamese in Cambodia

By Dr. Michel Chai, July 20, 2011

Below is a short translation of the original text in French below:

http://www.box.com/s/mlo0xo9dn64a1tdak4o7

Since 1979 successive influx of foreign population caused a profound upheaval of the Khmer society.The demographic evolution of Cambodia followed the rhythm of population growth of other countries in Southeast Asia, but the systematically organized settlement of Vietnamese would have definitely foreseeable profound impacts on the social and political organization of the Khmer nation.

Today, the Khmer population, submerged by the “demographic flood” of Vietnamese settlers (military, men, women and children) is in the verge of the extinction in terms of national identity and race. Khmer people is following the same tragic path as people of Champa.

….

In January 1979, the offensive of the Vietnamese army had two obvious political objectives: the first was to get the favor from the international community to condemn the atrocities committed by the Democratic Kampuchea Regime, the second was to organize a massive and systematic settlement of Vietnamese population in Cambodia, following the model of land colonization defined and pursued successively by Annam since its early history.

Sacrava's Political Cartoon: ASEAN's 11th Membership

Cartoon by Sacrava (on the web at http://sacrava.blogspot.com)

Gaining independence from France is good ... gaining independence from Vietnam and tyranny is better: Do Cambodians have the will to get them on our own or do we still need Preah Bat Thoammeuk?

Dear Readers,

On this celebration of Cambodia's independence from France, while we are grateful to King-Father for leading the crusade for independence from France in the early 50s, Cambodia is now facing with another danger: the Vietnamese neo-colonization and the free fall of democracy and freedoms in Cambodia.

Some Cambodians are again turning to King-Father to seek his help on this issue, only to be rebuffed for the reason of his old-age. As for Cambodia's current king, the universal answer is, unfortunately, "SILENCE". Asking Mr. Hun Xen on this issue would only earn his standard answer: "I will send you a coffin" and "you don't understand the details in Cambodia."

Now, Cambodia's "Puth Tumneay" (the alleged Buddha's prediction which everybody knows that it was not passed down from Buddha) indicates that the legendary Preah Bat Thoammeuk will one day come and save our country. Regretfully, the elusive Preah Bat Thoammeuk remains just that ... an elusive figure. Nevertheless, in his teaching, Lord Buddha clearly taught us that there is no Buddha bigger than the One residing in each of our house (and our heart). Now taking this teaching to the extreme, what if Preah Bat Thoammeuk is not a single person, but rather an entire people in a nation? What if each one of us represents a small part of Preah Bat Thoammeuk and the sum of all of us represents the legendary Preah Bat Thoammeuk, would we all stand up to save Cambodia? Would we all get rid Cambodia of the current tyranny? Would we be willing to bring democracy and true independence to our people? 

While we clearly understand that such view can be considered as pure heresy from certain quarters, we, at KI-Media, strongly believe that a paradigm shift is necessary regardless of whether that shift resides in a metaphor or a legend.

Please share your thoughts on this issue with all our readers.

Thank you,

KI-Media team

"They kill our people through ignorance and poverty": Sophie from Europe

KI-Media note: We are posting below a translation of a letter written by Sophie from Europe who is of Cambodian descent. Her letter is a reaction to public information distributed over the Internet on the colonization of Cambodia by the Hanoi regime with complicit knowledge of the Hun Xen's regime. We invite our readers to reflect on Sophie's observation.

Translated from French by Tola Ek

Dear Sir,

I thank you for distributing this very just note which reflects well the reality.

I would like to add to your note some of my personal observations made on the spot. After studying Cambodian and Vietnamese at the INALCO [French Oriental Languages and Civilizations University], I visited Cambodia several times to discover the country which I never knew. My parents had regularly informed me about the problems of poverty, of the Phnom Penh government corruption, of the Vietnamese expansionism aim in Cambodia, as well as other topics. All they told me were somewhat abstract, but when I visited on the spot, I was able to see how dramatic the situation is.

Everywhere, the Vietnamese are controlling restaurants, hotels and even small shops. In the mid-80s, their government sent them in large number to Cambodia to settle everywhere in the country. They made up and are still made up of Hanoi spies. Right now, several of them speak fluently Cambodia with a slight accent and they represent the building blocks of the annexation policy of Cambodia by Hanoi. They now become the masters of the Cambodian economy. At the beginning, they were working as bicycle repair mechanics, car repair mechanics and construction workers. But now, they don’t have to work anymore. In restaurants or hotels, they remain in the background. Cambodians, and mainly Cambodian women work for them. One day, as I went to the bathroom located in the courtyard of one of the large restaurants in Phnom Penh, I heard their talk in Vietnamese. They said: “the Cambodians (those who work for us) must not eat at the same time as we do. They will eat the leftover of what we will eat. Their place is the same as that for dogs. They do not deserve any better and they will be our slaves for generations to come.”

This conversation was extremely shocking to me, and they allow me to become conscious to the fact that the colonization of Cambodia by Vietnam is an undeniable reality, a reality which still remains not well understood by some of the Cambodians in the Diaspora. I invite these Cambodians to observe closely during their trip to Cambodia. As long as they understand the gravity of these facts and they understand that it is no longer acceptable to remain indifferent to such dramatic perspective for the Cambodian people and nation.

I am 28 and I hope that people of my age would be more interested about our country. We have almost all that we want here [in Europe], thus, let us give some time for our brothers and sisters in the country while it is still time. I am not involved in politics, but I insist that the situation is severe. They kill our people through ignorance and poverty.

Sophie

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Cher Monsieur,

Je vous remercie d’avoir diffusé cette remarque si juste qui traduit bien la réalité.

J’ajouterais à cette remarque à partir de mon observation personnelle sur place. Après avoir étudié les langues cambodgienne et vietnamienne à l’INALCO, je me suis rendue à plusieurs reprises au Cambodge pour découvrir le pays que je n’ai jamais connu. Mes parents m’ont sensibilisé régulièrement sur des problèmes de pauvreté, de la corruption du gouvernement de Phnom Penh, la visée expansionniste du Vietnam sur le Cambodge, et bien d’autres sujets. Tout ceci était un peu abstrait pour moi, mais lorsque j’étais sur place, j’ai pu me rendre compte à quel point la situation est dramatique.

Partout les vietnamiens détiennent le contrôle des restaurants, des hôtels, même des petits commerces. Au milieu des années 80, leur gouvernement les ont fait venir massivement au Cambodge pour s’installer partout dans le pays. Ils constituaient et constituent encore les agents de liaison du service secret de Hanoi. Aujourd’hui, beaucoup d’entre eux parlent couramment le cambodgien avec un certain accent et représentent les piliers de la politique d’annexion du Cambodge par Hanoi. Ils deviennent le maître de l’économie cambodgienne. Au départ, ils travaillaient en tant que réparateurs de vélos, de mécaniciens d’autos et constructeurs de maisons. Mais aujourd’hui, ils n’ont plus besoin de travailler. Dans les restaurants ou dans les hôtels, ils restent derrière la façade. Ce sont les Cambodgiens et surtout des Cambodgiennes qui travaillent pour eux. Un jour en allant aux toilettes au fond de la cour d’un des grands restaurants de la capitale, j’ai surpris leur conversation en vietnamien. Ils disaient que : « les Cambodgiens (ceux qui travaillent pour eux) ne doivent pas manger en même temps que nous. Ils mangeront le reste de ce qu’on aura mangé. Leur place c’est auprès des chiens. Ils ne méritent pas mieux et seront nos esclaves pour des générations à venir».

Ces propos m’ont choqué sans commune mesure et m’ont fait prendre conscience que la colonisation du Cambodge par le Vietnam est une réalité indéniable mais qui reste encore imperceptible pour certains Cambodgiens de la diaspora. Je les invite à bien observer lors de leur voyage au pays. Pourvu qu’ils prennent conscience de la gravité des choses et qu’ils comprennent qu’il n’est plus permis de rester indifférents devant une telle perspective dramatique pour le peuple et la nation khmers.

J’ai 28 ans et espère que les jeunes de mon âge s’intéressent un peu plus à notre pays. Nous avons pratiquement tout ce qu’il nous faut ici, alors donnons un peu de notre temps à nos frères et sœurs et à notre pays tant qu’il est encore temps. Je ne connais pas la politique mais j’insiste que l’heure est grave. On tue notre peuple par l'ignorance et par la pauvreté.

Sophie

Vietnam, Go Home!: Human Rights Watch Laos

Human Rights Watch Laos requests the attention of H.E. Mr Joseph Deiss

2010-10-04
(Caymanmama.com - News Providers News)

Human Rights Watch Laos requests the attention of H.E. Mr Joseph Deiss, President of General Assembly of 65th session and H.E. Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary-General of the United Nation to persuade:

1.The Lao PDR to implement a free and fair and multiparty election scheduled to be held in 2012 by requesting a “fully democratic electoral system” under international monitoring with a focus on national reconciliation.

2.The Socialist Republic of Vietnam government to withdraw the 80,000 Vietnamese soldiers from Laos. The Vietnamese government’s plan to establish a “greater” Vietnam by influencing and controlling its neighbouring countries is seen as a violation of Laos’ national sovereignty and integrity as a nation. This plan is believed to be in action as it is currently being carried out by the existing “puppet” Lao party leaders to the Hanoi government as noted in the paper presented at the National Conference in 2007 by Michael Mike, “Vietnam’s Tay Tien expansion into Laos and Cambodia” , which outlined the neo-colonizing of Laos.

3.The Lao PDR to cease the ethnic cleansing of the country as stated by the Lao Hmong Human Rights Council in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The office representative, Vaughn Vang, reported that “… another hunter-killer unit of the LPA has been ambushing and attacking Hmong groups in-hiding in Phoua Da Phao area daily. [The] Lao Government troops are using ethnic cleansing and mass starvation strategies against Lao and Hmong civilian and dissident groups in-hiding and have destroyed much of the food storage and many of the mountain villages. Currently there are few places to hide and little or no food available to these Lao Hmong groups in-hiding; and the LPDR regime in Laos and LPA are seeking to continue to starve to death many thousands of Lao and Hmong civilians and religious and political dissidents.”

Best Regards,

Bounkhong Arounsavat
President of Human Rights Watch Laos

Canberra 2 October 2010

Food security or economic slavery?

Monday, 01 June 2009
Ogho Okiti
Business Day

In the last edition of The Economist, the magazine reported a new and growing form of foreign agricultural investment. National governments of rich but limited land resources are now undertaking agriculture investment in foreign countries but the produce meant specifically and only for the home country.

For instance, the report mentioned that Saudi Arabia, earlier this year, received the first imported rice of its agriculture investment in Ethiopia. South Korea, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Egypt have made similar investments in Sudan, Africa’s largest country by size. China has joined, making its investments in Congo, just as Kuwait has the same type of arrangement with Zambia and Cambodia.

Though the details of these agriculture investments may differ, the core feature is that national governments are negotiating with national governments of some poor developing countries for hectares of land for agriculture use in exchange for some forms of benefits to the country.

These transactions constitute movement of capital from the rich country to the poor country for the purpose of food production accompanied by improvements in agriculture technology and seedling. The end result is an improvement in yields in places that these have been carried out so far, compared to the average in Africa. As the report rightly claimed, it is a case of “countries that export capital but import food are outsourcing farm production to countries that need capital but have land to spare”.

The practice has proved very contentious. Those that support the arrangement do so on the basis that it provides poor countries with new seeds, techniques and money for agriculture. Opponents call it “land grabs”, because the lands are insulated from host countries and argue that poor farmers are pushed off the lands they have farmed for generations.

This growing phenomena raises some serious fundamental issues about the future relationship between rich and poor countries. Though foreign agriculture investment is not new, they have been conducted much the same way as other investments, before now. The present form is initiated at the government level, introducing cross border political dimensions to agriculture investment. Because of the seriousness of food security, this measure will introduce or escalate political instability in the countries in question. Such arrangements give the most visible political interest, rather than solely commercial. Indeed, it is not surprising that, besides Zambia, many of the countries that have accepted such arrangements have some level of political instability. It is a roll call of potential time bombs waiting to explode and that include countries such as Sudan, Ethiopia, Congo, and the arrangement has already consumed a government in Madagascar.

It is disingenuous to see the growing type of foreign investment as another form of outsourcing. In its purest and natural form, outsourcing consists of the “shipment of jobs” abroad to areas that same services can be provided with lower costs, due mainly to improvement in technology. With outsourcing, the host country benefits in terms of improvement in income, knowledge, training and expertise.

This is not the case with this arrangement as the farmers are completely insulated from the local dynamic economy. This arrangement is also peculiar such that all the produce are specifically meant for the home country. Effectively, the international trade process on food is being circumvented. This can only be regarded as the height of neo colonialism because these countries are poor, some of them being fed by the World Food Programme (WFP). These countries have not got enough food, mainly because they cannot muster the capital requirements for improving their food production. A rich country now engages in some kind of cosy arrangement with dubious political leadership to guarantee food for its own people. The least acceptable, is for the home country and the investing country to share the produce.

Another ingredient of neo colonialism in this arrangement is the lack of any form of control by the home nation. The produce, the quantity of the produce, the method, and the destination of the produce are all decided outside the host country. It is also possible that the payments made to host countries are shrouded in secrecy, raising serious questions about taxes, tariffs, and duties and their applicability in such instances. The only benefit I see for now is the domestic jobs in these farms, but it is possible that existing jobs are displayed, anyway. And in the case of China’s investment, the report suggests the workers will be Chinese.

So, these arrangements are reminiscent of “banana republics” when many African countries served as plantations for European countries, but even those did not come with such explicit restrictions and rigidities.

But, what can we learn from this? First, it is the most concrete evidence yet that food security remains a political issue, and should remain a number one political goal. Nations that have no much land will have to use their vast capital to ensure food security, even if it means another neo colonialism. Second, this is mostly in response to the 1997 and 1998 global food shortages that drove up food prices. In the context of these two issues, the response of the federal government is to provide access to N200 billion to commercial farmers. Third, it demonstrates that commercial agriculture value chain remains the best option for African counties such as ours to improve on agriculture produce. And finally, these rich nations realize that any measure of food insecurity is a return of poverty. Effectively, food insecurity is poverty!

Rich countries launch great land grab to safeguard food supply

• States and companies target developing nations
• Small farmers at risk from industrial-scale deals

Saturday November 22 2008
Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
The Guardian (UK)

Rich governments and corporations are triggering alarm for the poor as they buy up the rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in developing countries in an effort to secure their own long-term food supplies.

The head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf, has warned that the controversial rise in land deals could create a form of "neo-colonialism", with poor states producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people.

Rising food prices have already set off a second "scramble for Africa". This week, the South Korean firm Daewoo Logistics announced plans to buy a 99-year lease on a million hectares in Madagascar. Its aim is to grow 5m tonnes of corn a year by 2023, and produce palm oil from a further lease of 120,000 hectares (296,000 acres), relying on a largely South African workforce. Production would be mainly earmarked for South Korea, which wants to lessen dependence on imports.

"These deals can be purely commercial ventures on one level, but sitting behind it is often a food security imperative backed by a government," said Carl Atkin, a consultant at Bidwells Agribusiness, a Cambridge firm helping to arrange some of the big international land deals.

Madagascar's government said that an environmental impact assessment would have to be carried out before the Daewoo deal could be approved, but it welcomed the investment. The massive lease is the largest so far in an accelerating number of land deals that have been arranged since the surge in food prices late last year.

"In the context of arable land sales, this is unprecedented," Atkin said. "We're used to seeing 100,000-hectare sales. This is more than 10 times as much."

At a food security summit in Rome, in June, there was agreement to channel more investment and development aid to African farmers to help them respond to higher prices by producing more. But governments and corporations in some cash-rich but land-poor states, mostly in the Middle East, have opted not to wait for world markets to respond and are trying to guarantee their own long-term access to food by buying up land in poorer countries.

According to diplomats, the Saudi Binladin Group is planning an investment in Indonesia to grow basmati rice, while tens of thousands of hectares in Pakistan have been sold to Abu Dhabi investors.

Arab investors, including the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, have also bought direct stakes in Sudanese agriculture. The president of the UEA, Khalifa bin Zayed, has said his country was considering large-scale agricultural projects in Kazakhstan to ensure a stable food supply.

Even China, which has plenty of land but is now getting short of water as it pursues breakneck industrialisation, has begun to explore land deals in south-east Asia. Laos, meanwhile, has signed away between 2m-3m hectares, or 15% of its viable farmland. Libya has secured 250,000 hectares of Ukrainian farmland, and Egypt is believed to want similar access. Kuwait and Qatar have been chasing deals for prime tracts of Cambodia rice fields.

Eager buyers generally have been welcomed by sellers in developing world governments desperate for capital in a recession. Madagascar's land reform minister said revenue would go to infrastructure and development in flood-prone areas.

Sudan is trying to attract investors for almost 900,000 hectares of its land, and the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, has been courting would-be Saudi investors.

"If this was a negotiation between equals, it could be a good thing. It could bring investment, stable prices and predictability to the market," said Duncan Green, Oxfam's head of research. "But the problem is, [in] this scramble for soil I don't see any place for the small farmers."

Alex Evans, at the Centre on International Cooperation, at New York University, said: "The small farmers are losing out already. People without solid title are likely to be turfed off the land."

Details of land deals have been kept secret so it is unknown whether they have built-in safeguards for local populations.

Steve Wiggins, a rural development expert at the Overseas Development Institute, said: "There are very few economies of scale in most agriculture above the level of family farm because managing [the] labour is extremely difficult." Investors might also have to contend with hostility. "If I was a political-risk adviser to [investors] I'd say 'you are taking a very big risk'. Land is an extremely sensitive thing. This could go horribly wrong if you don't learn the lessons of history."