A humble request to Hillary Clinton from Sam Rainsy

June 11, 2012

A HUMBLE REQUEST TO HILLARY CLINTON

Since U.S. State Secretary Hillary Clinton is meeting with Cambodia’s Foreign Minister Hor Namhong in Washington D.C. on June 12, 2012, I would like to submit a humble request to the U.S. Secretary of State.

It's very simple. Could she please just tell her visitor that the map the Cambodian government accused me of falsifying, and which formed the basis of a 10-year jail sentence handed down to me in 2010, was in fact issued by the Pentagon some 40 years previously, during the Vietnam war.

As a matter of fact, I discovered that map on the Internet and posted it, without any alteration, along with a number of other border-related documents, on the opposition Sam Rainsy Party website.

The border between Cambodia and Vietnam has been repeatedly redrawn to the detriment of my country since the Vietnamese invasion of 1979. In October 2009, after villagers in Svay Rieng province’s Chantrea district asked for my help, I removed a controversial border post, as a symbolic gesture, to highlight land encroachment from Vietnam.

The charge levied against me by the Cambodian government started from an old French colonial map which, as posted on the SRP website, has drawn the attention of the Phnom Penh authorities because it allegedly has an “unusual” and suspicious grid on it (please click at http://tinyurl.com/75qkcx8).

The Hun Sen government accused me of fraudulently adding the grid to the original map, therefore “falsifying” the document. In fact, it was the U.S. Army which had overprinted the “unusual” grid on the original French map. This is confirmed by Colonel Edward G. Anderson, Jr. of Corps of Engineers, United States Army in "Mapping in Southeast Asia", The Military Engineers, March-April 1969, page 232 (*).

There is irrefutable evidence that the map I used was authentic, objective and unaltered. I hope Mrs. Hillary Clinton will help open Mr. Hor Namhong’s eyes, who in turn will push Prime Minister Hun Sen to open his. This eye-opening process should lead the Cambodian government to drop their criminal lawsuit against me … unless they want to file another one against the Pentagon and the U.S. Administration.

Sam Rainsy

Elected Member of Parliament

(*) Excerpt: "You would notice the Minutes mention the use of UTM (grid) on 1:100,000 French-made maps. The UTM (standard military grid) with marginal data in English was overprinted on the French maps by the U.S. Army since outbreak of WW II. NATO, France included, adopted UTM grid after 1945."