March 27, 2010
The text below is a Letter from parliamentary opposition leader Sam Rainsy to the Editor of The Cambodia Daily, which published it today.
SRP Did Nothing To Provoke a Charge of Racial Discrimination
In your article “Rainsy says ‘Definitive’ Maps Point to Innocence” (March 26, page 23) you wrote, “In January, Mr Rainsy, who is living in France, was sentenced in absentia to two years in prison for incitement to racial discrimination and destruction of public property after he uprooted six wooden stakes at a temporary border marking with Vietnam in Svay Rieng in October.”
I don’t need to add anything regarding the second charge (“destruction of public property”) because there was no public property involved that could be associated with any real and legal border line, and the legitimate owner of a private land has the right to dispose of anything that has been put on, or planted in, his land without his consent. In our case, we are talking about six commercially worthless wooden stakes.
But regarding the first charge against me of “Incitement to racial discrimination” which Article 61 of the 1992 UNTAC Law relates to “any person that provokes national, racial, or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence,” I can say that it is totally groundless and politically motivated.
All I said and did on that day (October 25) in Svay Rieng province while meeting with villagers in the concerned border area, has been videotaped and can be viewed at http://tinyurl.com/yhwf289 and at http://tinyurl.com/yfmakb5. In the first document, I essentially listened to villagers’ grievances in the compound of a pagoda. In the second document, after following villagers to their nearby rice fields and analyzing with them the situation on the spot, we pulled out the “six wooden stakes at a temporary border marking with Vietnam.”
I challenge any government or court official to seriously prove, with concrete evidence, that I have said or done anything that could be related to “incitement to racial discrimination.”
[As reflected in my March 24 statement “Decisive evidence of border encroachment” http://tinyurl.com/y8jxq9s, I have been mainly blaming “the current government in Phnom Penh” for its “negligence and/or incompetence when it comes to dealing with the defense of Cambodia’s territorial integrity as enshrined in the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements and in the Kingdom’s Constitution.”]
Sam Rainsy
Member of Parliament
Paris
“INCITEMENT TO RACIAL DISCRIMINATION”: A POLITICALLY MOTIVATED AND GROUNDLESS ACCUSATION AGAINST SAM RAINSY
The text below is a Letter from parliamentary opposition leader Sam Rainsy to the Editor of The Cambodia Daily, which published it today.
SRP Did Nothing To Provoke a Charge of Racial Discrimination
In your article “Rainsy says ‘Definitive’ Maps Point to Innocence” (March 26, page 23) you wrote, “In January, Mr Rainsy, who is living in France, was sentenced in absentia to two years in prison for incitement to racial discrimination and destruction of public property after he uprooted six wooden stakes at a temporary border marking with Vietnam in Svay Rieng in October.”
I don’t need to add anything regarding the second charge (“destruction of public property”) because there was no public property involved that could be associated with any real and legal border line, and the legitimate owner of a private land has the right to dispose of anything that has been put on, or planted in, his land without his consent. In our case, we are talking about six commercially worthless wooden stakes.
But regarding the first charge against me of “Incitement to racial discrimination” which Article 61 of the 1992 UNTAC Law relates to “any person that provokes national, racial, or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence,” I can say that it is totally groundless and politically motivated.
All I said and did on that day (October 25) in Svay Rieng province while meeting with villagers in the concerned border area, has been videotaped and can be viewed at http://tinyurl.com/yhwf289 and at http://tinyurl.com/yfmakb5. In the first document, I essentially listened to villagers’ grievances in the compound of a pagoda. In the second document, after following villagers to their nearby rice fields and analyzing with them the situation on the spot, we pulled out the “six wooden stakes at a temporary border marking with Vietnam.”
I challenge any government or court official to seriously prove, with concrete evidence, that I have said or done anything that could be related to “incitement to racial discrimination.”
[As reflected in my March 24 statement “Decisive evidence of border encroachment” http://tinyurl.com/y8jxq9s, I have been mainly blaming “the current government in Phnom Penh” for its “negligence and/or incompetence when it comes to dealing with the defense of Cambodia’s territorial integrity as enshrined in the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements and in the Kingdom’s Constitution.”]
Sam Rainsy
Member of Parliament
No comments:
Post a Comment