A funeral wreath and photograph of a bespectacled middle-aged man
adorns the cover of a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on
extrajudicial killings in Cambodia, and what the group says is a
pervading culture of impunity under the government of Prime Minister Hun
Sen.
The man on the cover of the report is Om Radsady, a senior Funcinpec
official, who was gunned down in broad daylight while eating lunch with
friends at a packed restaurant on a busy Phnom Penh street in the run-up
to the 2003 national elections.
Witnesses at the time told how the gunman shot Om Radsady at
pointblank range and then ran to a waiting motorcycle but then doubled
back to the dying Om Radsady to belatedly snatch a cheap mobile phone
from the restaurant table.
Taking the Funcinpec adviser’s old phone was an obvious afterthought for the assassin. But the killing of Om Radsady was not.
The authorities said the robbery was the motive, and police arrested
two men, both of whom were quickly tried and sentenced to 20 years in
jail.
The two, both Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF) paratroopers, said
they killed the politician for his phone, which for some inexplicable
reason they then threw into a river.
None in the royalist party believed the “official” story at the time.
Om Radsady was a mild-mannered man who was much admired for his keen
intellect and political strategizing. At the time of his murder, he had
been assisting Funcinpec navigate a dispute between the royalist party’s
outspoken Princess Norodom Vacheara, a member of Parliament, and Mr.
Hun Sen.
Princess Vacheara had threatened to sue Mr. Hun Sen for defamation
for allegedly threatening to throw her in prison at a weekly Cabinet
meeting. In retaliation, Mr. Hun Sen said that he was planning to
counter sue the princess.
Something of a rarity in Cambodian politics, Om Radsady was never
tainted by allegations of corruption or self-enrichment. His murder had a
chilling effect on opposition politics at the time, and the memory of
his murder still stands testament to the culture of
politically-motivated killings in Cambodia.
But Om Radsady is just one example among hundreds of extrajudicial
killings that have been carried out since the 1991 signing of the Paris
Peace Agreement, according to the encyclopedic 68-page HRW report,
titled Tell Them That I Want to Kill Them—Two Decades of Impunity in Hun
Sen’s Cambodia.
“More than 300 people have been killed in politically motivated
attacks since the Paris Agreements,” HRW said in the report. “Almost no
progress has been made in tackling impunity over the past two decades.
Instead, perpetrators have been promoted and protected.”
Journalists, union leaders, opposition politicians, environmental
activists, and even teenage karaoke singers have all fallen victim to
government-sanctioned killings or attempted killings, HRW alleges in the
report, and the courts have consistently failed to investigate and
prosecute the real perpetrators, the group states.
“Abuses such as extrajudicial executions, torture, arbitrary arrest,
and land grabs almost never result in successful criminal prosecutions
and commensurate prison terms if the perpetrator is in the military,
police, or is politically connected,” the report states.
On his visit to Phnom Penh next week for the Asean and East Asia
summits, U.S. President Barack Obama should call on the government “to
publicly demand systematic reforms and an end to impunity for abusive
officials,” HRW said in a statement launching the report yesterday.
Many senior CPP security officials are named by HRW in the report,
including Mok Chito, now a three-star general at the Ministry of
Interior, Sok Phal, a three-star general at the ministry and member of
the CPP Central Committee, and General Hing Bun Heang, head of Mr. Hun
Sen’s personal bodyguard unit.
Contacted by telephone yesterday, all three men denied the allegations of wrongdoing contained in the report.
“I haven’t read the report yet, but maybe it’s not right,” Lieutenant General Phal said. “I never killed anyone.”
“Even though they wrote this, I don’t care,” Gen. Bun Heang said.
The title of the report, Tell Them That I Want to Kill Them, is
reportedly named after a comment made by Gen. Bun Heang to journalists
following the 1997 grenade attack in Phnom Penh. Gen. Bun Heang was
addressing his threat to journalists who had written articles linking
the prime minister’s bodyguard unit, which he commands, to the grenade
attack that year on a peaceful rally, which killed 16 people and left
more than 100 injured.
To this day, no one has ever been held to account for the 1997
grenade attack, which is considered one of the worst atrocities in
post-Khmer Rouge regime Cambodia.
Lieutenant General Chito declined to comment on the report.
Taking a number of cases as examples of impunity over the past 20
years, the report argues that the promise of the 1991 Paris
agreement—which was essentially meant to usher in a new era of peace and
respect for human rights after years of war and communist rule—has been
continually undermined by Mr. Hun Sen’s long-ruling Cambodian People’s
Party.
Examples cited in the HRW report include the murder of journalists
Thun Bun Ly in 1996 and Khim Sambo in 2008, the 1997 grenade attack, the
2004 assassination of union leader Chea Vichea, and two of his Free
Trade Union colleagues, the disfiguring 1999 acid attack on 16-year-old
Tat Marina by the then-wife of Secretary of State Svay Sitha, and most
recently, the murder in Koh Kong province of environmentalist Chut
Wutty.
“The message to Cambodians is that even the most well-known killers
are above the law, so long as they have protection from the country’s
political and military leaders,” HRW said.
In the case of union leader Chea Vichea, who was assassinated while
buying a newspaper in central Phnom Penh in 2004, two men were arrested
and sentenced to 20 years each. But mirroring Om Radsady’s case, the
pair is widely believed to have been scapegoats.
Even the police official that arrested the pair, Heng Pov, later told
a French newspaper that he was told to frame them by then National
Police Commissioner Hok Lundy. Heng Pov, a long-time CPP security
apparatus stalwart and former undersecretary of state at the Interior
Ministry, has since fallen from grace and is now serving almost 100
years in prison for a reign of crime while a senior police official,
including the assassination of a municipal court judge.
The government yesterday was dismissive of the report, saying it was false and timed for the arrival of Mr. Obama.
“This is propaganda only…to persuade the world, especially Barack
Obama,” said Phay Siphan, spokesman for the Council of Ministers.
“It doesn’t represent the facts…. A number of high-ranking officials have been jailed…from advisers to judges,” Mr. Siphan said.
Mr. Siphan also maintained that there is no impunity in Cambodia.
“Those people [HRW] don’t know well about Cambodia,” he added.
The report, while damning of Mr. Hun Sen’s government and the
country’s judicial institutions, is also critical of international
donors, saying that some foreign governments and international funders
have often downplayed or ignored the culture of extrajudicial killing
and impunity in order to avoid confronting senior government officials.
HRW, which is based in New York, took specific aim at U.S. involvement with the government.
“Since 2006, the United States has provided more than $4.5 million
worth of military equipment and training to Cambodia,” the report
states, adding that some of Washington’s largess has gone to military
units, including the prime minister’s personal bodyguard unit, which
have track records of abusing human rights.
The U.S. Embassy did not respond to a question regarding the call
from HRW for Mr. Obama to address the issue of impunity during his visit
to Phnom Penh. However, human rights are a core principal, the embassy
said.
“We raise these human rights concerns, have raised these concerns,
and will continue to raise these concerns with the Royal Government of
Cambodia,” said U.S. Embassy spokesman Sean McIntosh.
“The U.S. government seeks to promote the professionalization of
Cambodian armed forces. Human rights vetting for participants in these
efforts is conducted in full accordance with U.S. law and Department of
State regulations,” Mr. McIntosh added.
(Additional reporting by Khy Sovuthy)
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