Stage set for showdown over Darfur ceremony in Cambodia

Mia Farrow campaigning for the suffering people of Darfur.

AP - Friday, January 18

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - Activists in Cambodia vowed Friday to defy a government ban and hold a mock Olympic-torch lighting ceremony featuring American actress Mia Farrow to bring attention to the crisis in Sudan's Darfur region.
The Cambodian government earlier this week said it would prevent the 62-year-old actress from holding the ceremony Sunday at a former Khmer Rouge prison because the group had "a political agenda against China," which is one of Sudan's key donors.
"Our resolve is still the same, which is to go forward" with the event, said Theary Seng, the director of the advocacy group Center of Social Development which is helping organize it.
"It's really difficult how anyone can be against honoring survivors of genocide, particularly as Cambodians," Theary Seng said.
Theary Seng insisted Farrow would attend Sunday's event.
Neither Farrow nor the group she is working with, the U.S.-based Dream for Darfur, could be reached for comment.
Chey Sopheara, the director of the Khmer Rouge's infamous Tuol Sleng torture center where thousands of Khmer Rouge prisoners were tortured, said he expected the government to deploy police to prevent ceremony organizers from entering the compound.
The Dream for Darfur group has called on China to use its influence to press Sudan to end abuses in Darfur.
The group has taken the torch to countries which have suffered genocide and has so far been lit at the Darfur-Chad border, Rwanda, Armenia, Germany and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Cambodia was to be the last stop before it heads to China.
Dream for Darfur claims China, host of the 2008 Olympics, has protected Khartoum at the U.N. Security Council and sold weapons to the Sudanese government, while making Sudanese oil purchases that have helped fund genocide there.
China was also the biggest backer of the Khmer Rouge's communist regime in the 1970s, which led to the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians.
It is now a major donor to Cambodia, where the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen has strongly advocated a one-China policy. Hun Sen has frequently described China as Cambodia's "most trustworthy friend."
Government spokesman Khieu Kanharith said the event's organizers have a political agenda against China, prompting the ban.
"We do not want to see any trouble or confrontation with them," said Touch Naroth, the police chief for Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh. "But we simply cannot let this group breach the law either."
He said Tuol Sleng genocide museum is a government property that must be protected from any unlawful activity but declined to elaborate on what measures the government was preparing ahead of Sunday's ceremony.