As previewed, Kaing Guek Eav (better known as Duch) the director of the Tuol Sleng extermination centre (known as S-21 during the Pol Pot regime) was sentenced to 35 years imprisonment for crimes against humanity by the judges of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge Tribunal (ECCC) on 26 July.

 The key paragraph of the tribunal's press release recording the sentence is:

KAING Guek Eav was convicted of crimes against humanity (persecution on political grounds) (incorporating various other crimes against humanity, including extermination, imprisonment and torture), as well as numerous grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, for which, by a majority, the Chamber imposed a single, consolidated sentence of 35 (thirty-five) years of imprisonment.

In deciding on an appropriate sentence, the Chamber noted a number of aggravating features, in particular the gravity of the offences, which were perpetrated against at least 12,272 victims over a prolonged period.

But according to news reports, the tribunal has taken account of the eleven years Duch has already spent in custody and of the fact that for a period he was illegally detained before coming under United Nations jurisdiction. As a result of these considerations and his admissions of guilt, the period that Duch is actually condemned to serve is nineteen years.

This means that Duch, currently aged 67, will be due for release in 2029 at the age of 86, should he live that long. There are already Cambodian commentators who are sharply critical of the verdict, not least because there was a widespread belief in the country that Duch would be sentenced to life imprisonment. And it is possible that the prosecution, which had called for a sentence of forty years, might appeal the verdict.

While Duch's sentencing has been a media event with a large foreign press corps present in Phnom Penh, it is worth remembering several important facts that risk being forgotten. read more

Four years after its establishment in July 2006, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (officially the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia) will on 26 July finally bring to a close the trial of the first defendant to appear before it.

This will involve the sentencing of Kaing Guek Euv, better known as Duch, the director of the Tuol Sleng Extermination Centre, where at least 14,000 were killed, mostly after prolonged torture. Duch, who was convicted of crimes against humanity at the end of last year, will probably be sentenced to life imprisonment, despite his final plea to the court for a lesser sentence, based on his time already spent in custody and his admission of guilt, qualified by his claim that he had no other choice than to act on the orders he had been given, since to do otherwise would have led to his own death.

While few will argue against a heavy sentence for Duch, the fact that the sentencing has taken so long makes the court a ready target for criticism.

And to this criticism can be added the doubts held by many, myself included, about the adequacy of a system that is unlikely to bring to trial the other four senior Khmer Rouge figures currently held in custody before 2012, and remains subject to a range of interference from the Cambodian Government.

In the latter regard, efforts by the international prosecutorial team at the tribunal to examine an additional six individuals suspected of having been associated with crimes against humanity during the period of the Khmer Rouge regime have been blocked by the Cambodian Government. This is not surprising given Prime Minister Hun Sen's repeated statements indicating that he wants the tribunal to cease its activities, or at very least to do no more than to try the remaining four defendants held in custody.

Photo by Flickr user SarahFranco, used under a Creative Commons license.

It's not just Charles de Gaulle who is informing the prime minister's utterances on issues bearing on Australia's relations with the outside world. Now it's the late Henry Bolte, longtime premier of Victoria.

As population and migration have become election issues, Ms Gillard is reported as having said on 18 July, 'One of the things Australians often say when we've spent a few days in a crowded, congested city in Europe or the United States: it's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.'

Living in Melbourne as I did many years ago, I well remember the Sir Henry Bolte comment that Julia Gillard now seems to be channeling. Speaking after a visit to Europe, he reflected on the passeggiata, the nightly stroll of people along the streets of Italian cities and towns. This takes place, Bolte said —and here I have to paraphrase since even Google won't find the exact words for me — because unlike us, they don't have backyards in which to spend their time.

Who will Ms Gillard channel next?

 Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

It has taken me a couple of days to realise that, so far as boat arrivals are concerned, Prime Minister Gillard is working from the Charles de Gaulle playbook. Yes, that Charles de Gaulle, French President 1959-69.

Of all the many speeches de Gaulle made over the years, none, including the rightly famous but actually little heard rallying speech from exile in London on 18 June 1940, was more striking for its immediate political effect than that which he delivered at the Forum in Algiers on 4 June 1958.

With chaos threatening in both France and Algeria, de Gaulle had travelled to Algiers where he addressed a huge crowd of both pieds noirs and Muslim Algerians. It took three minutes for the crowd to lapse into silence as de Gaulle took to the microphone. And then he uttered his famous words, 'Je vous ai compris' ('I have understood you').

The crowd, pieds noirs and Muslim Algerians alike, went wild, cheering de Gaulle as if he had, in some Delphic fashion, answered their disparate prayers.

Of course, de Gaulle's masterly oratory was a prelude to his selling the pied noirs down the river. No one is really sure how far he had thought ahead when he chose to begin his speech in such a remarkable fashion, but with all we know of him, it is difficult to believe he had not already recognised that France had no future in Algeria.

Indeed, Alistair Horne, who has written of this period in Algeria with more insight than almost anyone else, suggests that de Gaulle was speaking in two voices, 'one for the elated masses, another for his own clairvoyant pessimism'. And Horne notes that, back in Paris immediately afterwards, de Gaulle commented (in terms that would sit well with the Graham Richardson playbook) 'L'Afrique est foutue et l'Algerie avec' (which for the purposes of this publication I will translate as 'Africa is stuffed and Algeria with it').

Prime Minister Gillard's Lowy Institute speech had all the elements of 'understanding', but one has to doubt whether she had thought matters through in the way it seems de Gaulle had done those many years ago.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

In my 30 June post I speculated on why Vietnamese officials moved from very cautious, not to say obfuscatory, comment on the proposed construction of hydropower dams on the mainstream of the Mekong below China (in Laos, between Laos and Thailand, and in Cambodia) to a vigorous criticism of such plans. Over the past few days, more information has come to hand that makes it clearer why the Vietnamese acted as they did, and why they have been joined by Thailand in this blunt criticism of the proposed dams.

What I was not aware of until 2 July was the fact that the Mekong River Commission (MRC) had released a 'Discussion Draft' at the workshop meeting it convened in Ho Chi Minh City, on 28 and 29 July, to discuss possible dams on the Mekong below China. With the title, 'Impact Assessment (Opportunities and Risks)', this is a weighty document of nearly 250 pages designed to prefigure the final Strategic Environmental Assessment on mainstream dams due out in August.

I can't pretend to have yet absorbed every word, but even a cursory examination of the document makes clear the essentially negative findings of the MRC Secretariat so far as the proposed dams are concerned. While accepting that, if built, the proposed dams would meet domestic needs and produce export income through the generation of electricity, the report lists a series of negative consequences from the construction of the dams. Among the most important are:

• Economic loss of wetland and ecosystems.
• Changes in natural resource availability likely to impact the most vulnerable members of the population.
• Abolition of ecologically important transition systems on the river.  
• Loss of rare and endangered fish species.
• Loss of 600,000 tonnes of fish catch, which would be equivalent to the loss of the inland fish production of the whole of West Africa.
• Negative effects on 23.5 million of the approximately 60 million people in the Lower Mekong Basin, with the loss of employment of up to a million people dependent on fisheries in Cambodia alone.

There is little doubt that this document has already had a major effect on attitudes in Vietnam and Thailand.

A senior Vietnamese official has voiced his Government's concerns about the effect on his country of proposed Mekong River dams in Cambodia and Laos.

Speaking on 29 June at a workshop the environmental and social impacts of proposed dams on the mainstream of the Mekong River below China, Le Duc Trung, Director General of the Vietnam National Mekong Committee, is reported to have said that 'Vietnam has...great concerns over the research results on the projects (the proposed dams), especially impacts on agriculture and fisheries likely caused by their dams'.

This is a substantial departure from the approach previously followed by the Vietnamese Government. While there have been indications of serious concerns within Vietnamese official circles about the proposed dams, I am not aware of critical public comment by officials.

Quite to the contrary, when I interviewed Le Duc Trung in Hanoi in June last year, he discounted the effect the proposed dams would have on fish supplies, citing Vietnam's aquaculture industry as meeting much of Vietnam's demand for fish, and indicating the Vietnamese Government's reluctance to tell its Mekong River Commission (MRC) and ASEAN partners in Cambodia and Laos what they should do.

With something closer to a whimper than a bang, the first summit meeting of the Mekong River Commission (MRC) concluded in Hua Hin, Thailand, on Monday 5 April.

As I predicted, none of the MRC leaders chose to confront China over its repeated claims that dams in China have nothing to do with the prolonged and serious drought that has led to the lowest recorded water levels in the river in the past fifty years. These claims of no responsibility were repeated at the meeting by China's Vice Foreign Minister, Song Tao, who was present as an observer and who said that the drought 'has nothing to do with the (Chinese) hydropower development'.

Nevertheless, the MRC leaders did call for greater cooperation with China in managing the Mekong, with the Thai Prime Minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, saying '(t)his summit is sending a message that all countries in the Mekong Region, both its upper and lower parts, are stakeholders, and we all have to take joint responsibility for its long-term sustainability.'

This may have been a coded reference to concerns that the cause of the river's low water levels is to be found in the fact that China in the process of impounding (filling) its giant dam at Xiaowan. If so, Abhisit did not receive support from Cambodian Prime Minister, Hun Sen, who absolved China from blame and put the condition of the river firmly down to climate change.

For those who might have wondered, the reason you have not heard of any developments since last December involving the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (officially the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia, or ECCC) is because another three months have passed without anything of note having taken place.

That is, until last week.

The new international prosecutor, Englishman Andrew Cayley, who was appointed in December 2009, announced on 28 March that the ECCC is moving towards bringing to trial in 2011 the four senior Khmer Rouge defendants currently held in custody.

The defendants are: Khieu Samphan, former Democratic Kampuchea head of state, 79 years-old; Nuon Chea, known as Brother Number Two and the DK regime's chief ideologist, 78 years-old; Ieng Sary, the regime's foreign minister, 86 years-old; and Khieu (or Ieng) Thirith, Ieng Sary's wife and minister for social affairs under Pol Pot, 80 years-old. All four are in poor health.

In an apparently serious comment, Cayley said, 'I am accelerating, along with my colleague, the work as much as I can.' Stating that the trials would continue even if some of the defendants die, Cayley added that '(t)his trial will come to a conclusion. But the best way to do this work is not quickly but efficiently.'

With China set to attend (as an observer) a Mekong River Commission meeting in Thailand in the first week of April to discuss the drought affecting the Mekong's water levels, New Mandala is carrying an analysis by Alan Potkin, of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University, suggesting that the impoundment of China's Xiaowan dam in the upper reaches of the Mekong could be contributing to the low levels of water flowing down the Mekong.

Xiaowan is a very large dam with a dam wall rising nearly 300 metres and a planned reservoir stretching 170 kilometres upstream. When fully in commission it will be the second biggest dam in China.

We will probably never be able to make a satisfactory judgment on whether or not what is happening at Xiaowan is playing a part in the current low flow pattern of water down the Mekong. The reason is simple, as Potkin's own analysis indicates: we do not have the hydrological data that would allow us to make a judgment. We do not have data for the period before the dam was constructed, for the time when it has been under construction, and for the current period of pervasive drought.

And given the official Chinese statement that allegations that its dams are contributing to the current low levels of water flow are 'baseless', it seems very unlikely that we will have access to the data that, ideally, might help us decide on what role Xiaowan might be playing, one way or another. 

As the drought I previously reported on in The Interpreter tightens its grip on mainland Southeast Asia and in Yunnan and Guangxi provinces in southwestern China, the level of water in the Mekong River continues to fall. It is now below the previous all-time low reached in 1993 after the worst drought on record in 1992.

With this development have come increasingly vocal calls by NGOs for the Mekong River Commission (MRC) to persuade China to release water which, they claim, is being held back in the hydropower dams it has built on the Mekong in Yunnan province. Rather overshadowed by other political developments in Thailand, civil society groups from northern Thailand have been lobbying for action against what they claim is China's selfish behaviour.

The problems of the drought and its effect on the Mekong have also received frequent coverage in the government-controlled Lao press. And in Vietnam the Thanh Nien newspaper, the journal of the Ho Chi Minh City Communist Youth Federation, has given wide coverage to complaints that China's dams are playing a role in the drought. The 15 March issue of Thanh Nien even had a sub-heading in its report entitled 'Damn those dams'. Only in Cambodia, where China is, in Prime Minister Hun Sen's words 'Cambodia's most trusted friend', has coverage been minimal.

You wouldn't know it from the Australian press, but there is a major drought in southeastern China producing devastating effects in three provinces: Yunnan, Guangxi and Guzhou.

Described as the worst drought in 60 years, its effects are most serious in Yunnan, where there has been no worthwhile rain since July 2009, drinking water is running short for nearly 5 million people and the economic loss in the agricultural sector is already close to A$1 billion. There is no expectation of relief rains until May at the earliest.

The drought is having a striking effect on the Mekong River (known in China as the Lancang Jiang), with its level in China reported to be at a 50-year low.

International shipping between southern Yunnan and the northern Thai river port at Chiang Saen has been interrupted, with no fewer than 21 boats having been been stranded. While I have not seen any extended commentary on the effect of the drought on the capacity of the three completed Chinese dams on the Mekong in Yunnan province to function in current circumstances, an official has said low water levels 'might effect the electronic plant' of the hydro-power dams. In Thailand there are reports of a sharp and unseasonable drop in the Mekong's level.

As I said in my recent Lowy Paper, 'The Mekong: River Under Threat', the Mekong does not figure much in broader discussion in Thailand except at times of drought. Current developments validate this view. Not only have Thai NGOs called for their government to ask the Chinese authorities in Yunnan about the level of water being held in their Mekong dams, the issue has now been taken up by the Bangkok press. And Thai authorities have indeed taken action, with the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Natural Resources, Saksit Tridech, asking the Mekong River Commission to negotiate with China to release water from dams in Yunnan.

Much has been made recently of the IPCC's unsubstantiated prediction that Himalayan glaciers will disappear by the year 2035.

I referred to this claim in my recent Lowy Paper, 'The Mekong: River Under Threat', published in November 2009, which was essentially concerned with dams on the Mekong but dealt briefly with climate change. In relation to the 2035 date I observed that 'this estimate may be excessively pessimistic', going on to say that 'the fact of the glaciers declining size cannot be disputed'.

In the various press reports seizing on the IPCC's error there have also been suggestions that what was involved was a transposition of digits, so that what had really been predicted was the suggestion the Himalayan glaciers would all be gone by 2350.

The person to whom the 2035 claim was linked, Indian glaciologist Professor Syed Iqbai Husnain, has now stated that he never made such a prediction. Instead, he says, as reported by Bloomberg, 'I had simply told the New Scientist in an interview that the mass of the glaciers will decline in 40 years...The date (2035) was their invention. I was misquoted in the report.'

Several points need to be made. First and foremost is the fact that a very large number of well-regarded scientists and organisations are unequivocal in their statements that the Himalayan glaciers are, indeed, retreating. There is a very much smaller number who reject this claim.

The break between Christmas and the New Year is a wonderful opportunity for reading both in relation to and outside one's research interests. These are some of the books I sampled over this period.

Last year brought the publication of the final volume in Richard J. Evans' trilogy dealing with the rise and fall of the Third Reich, 'The Third Reich At War'. Like the two previous volumes, it is a meticulous analysis of a terrible period in 20th century history, made the more fascinating by Evans' ability to retail the thoughts and concerns of Germans, both prominent and otherwise, about the the war's meaning. The term 'magisterial' is often misused, but it deserves to be applied to this book.

One of the reasons for my fascination with the German state's actions during the Second World War is my concern to try and understand another 'final solution' applied in very different circumstances: the 'autogenocide' as Jean Lacouture called it, in Pol Pot's Cambodia. No single book is ever enough to provide all answers on this grim subject, whether in relation to Germany or Cambodia, and analogy is never more than a partial help to understanding, but Evans is marvellous guide to how and why events took place in Germany.

Given that the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, officially the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), has now been in formal operation for three and a half years, observers with only a casual interest in Cambodia may be surprised to learn that no verdict has yet been brought down against any of the five defendants in custody.

The trial of Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, the director of the S-21 Tuol Sleng extermination centre where more than 14,000 'enemies' of the Khmer Rouge regime were executed after prolonged torture, and which began in March, finally came to an end in November. But it will not be until early 2010 that a verdict is handed down.

This leaves four other defendants awaiting trial: Nuon Chea, the Pol Pot regime's chief ideologue; Khieu Samphan, the regime's chief of state; Ieng Sary, the regime's foreign minister; and Ieng Thirith, Ieng Sary's wife and minister for social affairs. These defendants are to be tried for crimes against humanity. And now it has been announced by the ECCC that Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan will also be indicted for genocide in relation to the persecution of Cambodia's Muslim Cham community and the resident Vietnamese community.

So it could be argued that there has been progress of a sort, but this glacial pattern should probably be judged against other facts that have received far too little attention.

Only because I was told by a friend from Bangkok on 16 December did I learn of the destruction by fire of the venerable Siam Society buildings in Bangkok.

Founded in 1904 and operating under royal patronage, the Siam Society has a claim to be the most most active learned society in contemporary Southeast Asia, though members of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society might dispute this. The once very active Burma Research Society has long since ceased to function, never recovering from its eclipse under the regime of Ne Win.

For scholars concerned with the humanities and social sciences in mainland Southeast Asia, and not just Thailand, the Siam Society has been a focal point with its excellent library in Soi Asoke and because of its outstanding Journal. No doubt it will literally rise from the ashes, but it's difficult not to conclude that the loss of its premises will handicap its activities for some time to come.

Meanwhile, all who have benefited from its existence as a scholarly port of call will hope that this major set-back can be rapidly overcome.

Photo by Flickr user matana, used under a Creative Commons license.

Readers who have consulted my recent Lowy Paper, 'The Mekong: River Under Threat', will be interested to learn of the publication of a joint report by the Australian Mekong Resource Centre (AMRC) of the University of Sydney and Oxfam Australia. With the title, 'Power and Responsibility: The Mekong River Commission and Lower Mekong mainstream dams',  it addresses in greater detail than is the case in my own paper the much-debated issue of the Mekong's governance.

With the Mekong River Commission (MRC) still to produce its own study of the possible effects of projected mainstream dams on the river after it flows out of China, this new paper is timely and realistic.

As I have argued for nearly a decade, many advocacy groups have unfairly criticised the MRC for what it is not. And in this AMRC-Oxfam paper, the limits of the MRC's role are clearly stated. The MRC, the paper notes, is not:

• a supranational organisation with regulatory power;
• an organisation that can make decisions to intervene in its own right; or
• accountable directly to the public.

So the question remains: how is it possible to mandate decisions in the broader interest of all countries through which the Mekong flows if individual states continue to take decisions solely in their perceived national interest?

Given the need to consider this issue against the strong likelihood that mainstream dams will dramatically reduce fish stocks in the Mekong, the AMRC-Oxfam paper repays study.

And it leads to a conclusion which I have argued is beyond dispute: if governance of the Mekong is ever to be achieved in the broad interests of all riparian countries it will only come as the result of commitment at the level of the governments of those countries. It will not be achieved through impassioned criticism of the MRC.

Photo by Flickr user Tobym, used under a Creative Commons license.

The Economist does many things well, not least its regular obituary page, but the offering from Banyan in its latest issue, with the excruciatingly twee pun as the lead, 'Without FEER or favour' to mark the demise of the 'Far Eastern Economic Review' fails signally to meet the mark.

There is little in Banyan's bloodless prose to capture the excitement that hung around the FEER in the sixties through the eighties, and indeed before.

It's fair enough to mention Eric Halpern as the founding editor, but to mark the end of the magazine without a mention of later editors such as David Wilson, or even more so Derek Davies, suggests the author is of a generation that has no sense of the scoops for which the FEER was famous or the rollicking atmosphere of the magazine's newsroom and even more the multi-martini lunches over which Davies presided. (A declaration of interest: I was an occasional contributor to the magazine, a beneficiary of Davies' hospitality more than once, and of the magazine's photo library for illustrations in one of my books.)

It was not by chance that some of the best reporting of what was happening in Indochina was to be found in the Review, particularly by Nayan Chanda, both before and after the Communist victories of 1975. When the Khmer Rouge were ousted from Cambodia in 1979 Chanda was one of the first journalists to report on what was happening in a devastated Phnom Penh.

With Morgan Chua as its principal cartoonist, the FEER could be cheeky visually as well as in prose, a cheekiness that regularly led to its being in trouble with the Singapore government.

Whether or not there was any truth to the story that in its early days the Review was partially backed by money from the British SIS, this was just another aspect of the rich memory that will be left by the magazine in its prime, a prime that sadly disappeared some years ago.

Although receiving minimal coverage in the international press, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (formally the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia) grinds on at a glacial pace since beginning the trial of its first defendant in February of this year, and having so far cost some US$150 million.

Allegations of corruption among the Tribunal's Cambodian personnel continue to be made and have not been convincingly refuted. Changes at the administrative level have been vigorously criticised by outsiders. And the fact that it is now over three years since the tribunal was formally established has raised justifiable fears about the denial of delayed justice.

Now Prime Minister Hun Sen has again entered the discussion as to whether the tribunal should try more than the existing five defendants currently indicted, sharply denouncing such a possibility as reflecting a wish by outside powers to see 'civil war' in Cambodia.

The first defendant to have come before the court is Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, the chief of the notorious extermination centre at Tuol Sleng, designated by the Khmer Rouge as S-21, where at least 14,000 people were executed, often after months of torture.

There is no doubt about Duch's role, and guilt, as the head of S-21. He has repeatedly admitted to his part in most of what took place there. His lawyers have so far developed two defences: that he acted as he did because to have done otherwise would have led to his own death, and that he did not participate in the executions himself. So far, neither of these issues has been fully resolved.

While attention is focused on the formal legal process that has now begun against Duch, the head of the Tuol Sleng Extermination Centre, far too little attention has been paid to concerns of the Cambodian Government, and in particular Prime Minister Hun Sen, to limit the scope of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (The Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia or ECCC.).

Any doubt that the Government is opposed to extending the tribunal's reach beyond the five former Khmer Rouge figures currently in custody — Duch, now on trial; Nuon Chea, or Brother Number Two; Khieu Samphan, Chief of State; Ieng Sary, Foreign Minister; and Ieng Thirith, Minister for Social Affairs — was dispelled in a speech by Hun Sen on 28 February at Sihanoukville.

The question of whether there should be an effort to try more former Khmer Rouge figures became an issue before the ECCC in December of last year when the UN Co-prosecutor, Robert Petit, sought to extend the reach of the tribunal beyond the five former Khmer Rouge figures now in custody. A motion filed by his Cambodian counterpart, Chea Leang, opposing such a development and stating that to take such action would threaten 'national stability' was made public in January.

Given Chea Leng's close links to the government — she is the niece of Deputy Prime Minister Sok An — there was a presumption among foreign observers that she would not have acted without approval at the highest level. Now, to reinforce that point of view, Prime Minister Hun Sen has warned that putting more Khmer Rouge cadres on trial for crimes committed during Pol Pot's 1975-79 reign of terror could plunge the country back into civil war.

'I would prefer to see this tribunal fail instead of seeing war return to my country,' Hun Sen, himself a former Khmer Rouge commander, said a day after the joint U.N.-Cambodian court resumed its trial of Pol Pot's chief torturer. 'If as many as 20 Khmer Rouge are indicted to stand trial and war returns to Cambodia, who will be responsible for that?,' Hun Sen added.

If nothing else, Hun Sen has been consistent in his wish to have the issue of the Khmer rouge period and those associated with it relegated to the past. As he said as long ago as 1998, Cambodia and its population 'should dig a hole and bury the past'.

Many observers see this as a self-interested desire, given Hun Sen's own links to the Pol Pot regime before he defected to Vietnam in 1977. But since no evidence has ever been found to link Hun Sen to Khmer Rouge atrocities it is probably more correct to surmise that he is concerned about the many other former Khmer Rouge figures at large in contemporary Cambodia, some in positions of considerable influence.

For the Khmer Rouge tribunal to embark on a new search for persons who might be brought to trial might not lead to 'civil war', as Hun Sen suggests, but it could lead to embarrassment for a regime that has chosen to draw a veil over the past.

Photo by Flickr user willposh, used under a Creative Commons license. 

As the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, or ECCC) moves at glacial pace to bring the five defendants held in custody to trial, there has been a development that many commentators had envisaged as likely but which has only now become a reality.

Lawyers for Nuon Chea, known as Brother Number Two and the Khmer Rouge regime's chief ideologue, have now filed documents with the ECCC calling for the appearance before the tribunal of Prime Minister Hun Sen, President of the Senate and Chairman of the Cambodian People's Party Chea Sim, and former king and briefly Head of State of Democratic Kampuchea (DK), the now King Father Norodom Sihanouk.

The intention of this action is clear enough, with Nuon Chea's lawyers seeking to gain advantage from the fact that both Hun Sen and Chea Sim worked with the Khmer Rouge before they defected to Vietnam, in 1977 and 1978 respectively. Sihanouk's association with the Pol Pot regime was much more complicated, as he sought revenge for having been ousted by the coup d'etat of March 1970 and resigned from his powerless position as Head of State in April 1976 a year after Pol Pot and his associates gained power.

Why, the defence lawyers are likely to ask, have individuals such as Nuon Chea been put on trial when at the highest level of the Cambodian Government there are men who also served the Khmer Rouge regime? More...

Yesterday's announcement that Thai Foreign Minister Tej Bunnag has resigned is an important development in the confrontation between Thailand's elected government and a disparate group of opponents united under the title of the People's Alliance for Democracy.

Historian, diplomat and a member of the prominent Bunnag family that has played a role in Thai politics over many decades dating back to the nineteenth century, Tej Bunnag rose to be permanent head of the Thai Foreign Service before moving on to be one of King Bhumibol's closest advisers.

Unexpectedly, he was seconded from his position in the royal court to become foreign minister at the beginning of August at a time when relations between Thailand and Cambodia were deteriorating because of a dispute over territory associated with the Angkorian-period temple of Preah Vihear, a temple for which Cambodia was awarded sovereignty by a decision of the ICJ in 1962, but which is located at the edge of an escarpment that otherwise falls within Thai jurisdiction.

It's reasonable to suppose that Bunnag's appointment had the backing of the king, and it seems that Bunnag played an important part in lowering the temperature of the dispute between the two countries in meetings with the Cambodian foreign minister, Hor Namhong. But he has now resigned 'for personal reasons' associated  with his wife's health and it is impossible to believe that he would have done so without the approval of the palace.

Bunnag's resignation shows that Prime Minister Sama Sundaravej's tenure has become increasingly shaky, as the army is showing little inclination to enforce the state of emergency the prime minister has sought to impose. For his departure has all the elements of a signal that the king wants a rapid end to the uncertainty that grips Thailand.

Photo of Bangkok protests by flickr user johnjan99ca, used under a Creative Commons license.

Cambodia goes to the polls this coming Sunday, 27 July, in what will be the fourth general election since the country returned to something approaching normality in 1993. There is no uncertainty about the result.

Prime Minister Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) will be returned to office, almost certainly with an increased majority and in a result that will sound the political death knell for FUNCINPEC, the party originally associated with former king Norodom Sihanouk but led for most of its existence by Sihanouk’s son, Norodom Ranariddh. Over the past year and a half FUNCINPEC has engaged in self-destructive behaviour marked by the ouster of Ranariddh as the result of his erratic personal life and the tendency of parliamentary party members to defect to the CPP. More...

The near-completion of a new road linking Kunming, the provincial capital of China’s Yunnan province, with Bangkok is the latest step in China’s steadily developing policy of closer physical ties with its southern neighbours. Running for a distance of 1800 km, the event was marked by a ceremony on 31 March attended by the prime ministers of China, Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. The one remaining obstacle to be overcome in the completion of this route is the construction of a bridge across the Mekong River near the Lao town of Huay Xai and the Thai town of Chiang Khong. It is expected to be completed by 2011. More...