Asia Sentinel
Thursday, 20 December 2012
Obama's not smiling
Under the guise of protecting children, government shuts off an avenue for critics
Cambodia's Ministry of Post and Telecommunications has issued a
circular banning internet cafes within 500 meters of schools or
educational buildings, a move that is regarded by critics as a serious
infringement on freedom of communication in a poverty-stricken country
with few computers.
Although authorities say they want to limit access by children to
internet cafes and by extension pornography, in fact there is almost no
area of Phnom Penh, the country's capital, that doesn't have a school
within a 500-meter radius of an internet cafe, according to the
Cambodian human rights NGO Licadho.
Despite a visit by US President Barack Obama and Chinese premier Wen
Jiabao in November for the meeting of leaders of the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations which momentarily lifted the country's prestige,
Cambodia has hardly been considered a democratic nation by the stretch
of anybody's imagination.
Obama's call for President Hun Sen to hold fair elections and release
political prisoners was ignored, pretty much along with Obama himself as
Wen received the red carpet treatment. Hun Sen, in an exchange
described as strained, said Cambodia's human rights record was fine and
demanded that the US forgive US$370 million in debt owed to the US
government.
The government has grown increasingly irritated by the legions of
western NGOs and United Nations agencies in the country who provide
approximately half of Cambodia's national budget and who continuously
demand that the country adhere to their standards of behavior. The
government, rife with corruption, has tired of the hectoring of the
western agencies and has sought to crack down on them for the last
couple of years and also has begun taking after critics.
In October, for instance, a Cambodian court sentenced Mam Sonando, a
71-year-old journalist and activist to 20 years in prison for allegedly
instigating an anti-government rebellion, a verdict that Rupert Abbott,
of the London-based Amnesty International, called "outrageous," adding
that: "We believe the motivation behind his conviction is because he's
been a prominent government critic. He's seen, I think, as a threat to
the government; someone who's prepared to speak out."
Sonando ran the popular independent radio station Beehive Radio and was
president of Cambodia's Democrat Association. In Cambodia, the media
scene is dominated by outlets that are generally sympathetic to the
ruling party. But Sonando's station often aired stories that were
critical of Hun Sen's governing Cambodian People's Party.
In 2011, the government suspended for five months a German funded NGO,
Sahmakum Teang Tnaut, which advocates for the urban poor, an action that
earned the condemnation of 40 civil society bodies and umbrella groups
who charged that the government intended to use a law restricting NGO
operations "to curb the activities of all associations and NGOs that
advocate for the rights of marginalized groups within Cambodian
society."
The groups, Oxfam, the Cooperation Committee for Cambodia (CCC), and
the NGO Coalition to Address Trafficking & Sexual Exploitation of
Children in Cambodia, demanded an "immediate reversal" of the
suspension.
With relatively few computers in the impoverished country, Internet
cafes have become a crucial outlet for critics who want to go online.
Using proximity to schools appears to serve as a handy method of getting
rid of them.
Accordingly, Phnom Penh internet cafes received the circular on Dec. 15,
signed by the Ministry of Telecommunications and purporting to
establish rules of control over public commercial services. The persons
writing it seemed to compare internet cafes to brothels and apparently
were unable to distinguish internet cafes from video arcades.
And, while Cambodian internet cafes do sometimes resemble arcades where
students and others congregate to play games on computer screens, it is
also where government critics operate.
Said Licadho's Director Naly Pilorge by email: "We don't know the number
of Internet cafes potentially affected by the circular. We are
concerned, however, that this circular is a preview of what is to come
when the government enacts the so-called "Cybercrime law," which has
been rumored for a while – though not made public by the government. All
of the actual crimes that the circular purports to address are already
illegal. The circular's sole purpose seems to be to create unjustifiable
obstacles to Internet access. We believe this is a transparent attempt
to block part of the population's access to independent sources of
information through news sites and social media.
There are few opponents of limiting access to video games on the part of
students, but the comparison of internet cafes with video arcades isn't
correct. In a country where very few children and youth enjoy the
benefits of the Internet and few schools have a computer room, critics
say the order to banish public PCs from the schools' areas is
astonishing and senseless.
A more sound rule could work to integrate those internet cafes to the
schools' educational systems. They are by themselves public computer
rooms and cheap digital libraries where students can find the windows to
science, technology and culture.
(With reporting by Albeiro Rodas, who blogs for Asian Correspondent.)
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