Nate Thayer

All of Kim Jong-eun's men By Nate Thayer

WASHINGTON - The top managers of North Korea's clandestine nuclear and ballistic missile program have been methodically promoted and now dominate the inner circle of Kim Jong-eun's new government, confidential foreign government documents and official media reports from Pyongyang show.

The shadowy group of power brokers in the world's most secretive nation emerged in the first military promotions prominently unveiled during recent high-profile ceremonies as the official mourning period for the death of former dictator Kim Jong-il concluded last week.

These same senior officials are known to be behind Pyongyang's missile test launch - scheduled for the middle of April - which has rattled regional nerves and sabotaged a short-lived agreement withWashington designed to slow North Korea's steady march towards a nuclear weaponized state. The United Nations and United States have charged the "earth observation satellite" launch is a thinly disguised cover for testing capabilities for a nuclear armed long-range ballistic missile.

At least 10 senior North Korean officials, now prominent at the core of power behind 29-year-old hereditary successor Kim Jong-eun, have been named by several foreign intelligence services as in charge of Pyongyang's nuclear and ballistic missile development and export program, including enrichment of uranium to weapons grade strength.

They have also been implicated in selling nuclear and missile technology to Iran and Syria, dispatching special operation teams to attack South Korea and assassinate political opponents, coordinating an international criminal network involved in drug trafficking, counterfeit money laundering, and establishing front companies and banks to raise more than a billion US dollars per year to bankroll the privileged lifestyles of the regime's elite.

The 10 are among North Korean officials and government agencies named by at least 31 governments as part of a network that has imported, sold and developed components and technology for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). They have had their assets frozen, been banned from travel outside of North Korea and forbidden from engaging in business with the countries' nationals or companies, according to official documents.

In the first leadership reshuffle following Kim Jong-il's death and in one of his first public acts as the Korean People's Army Supreme Commander, Kim Jong-eun promoted four key officials to the rank of general at ceremonies marking his deceased father's 70th birthday on February 15.

Pak To-chun, Ju Kyu-chang and Paek Se-bong, previously seen only in civilian dress, were never known to have military rank before being made senior generals. Pyongyang's top spy, Kim Yong-chol, was also recently promoted to four-star general rank. In January, another key powerbroker, Kim Jong-eun's uncle Jang Song-thaek, who appeared for the first time in military uniform at the December funeral ceremonies for Kim Jong-il, was appointed to the rank of four-star general.

All five men are named by the United Nations, the US, the European Union (EU) and other government documents as key managers of Pyongyang's illicit ballistic and nuclear development and export programs.

Nuclear aides
Ju Kyu-chang has been at the center of Pyongyang's clandestine nuclear and missile development policies for more than two decades. He "oversees the development of North Korea's ballistic missile and nuclear programs", according to a December 19, 2011 EU document listing North Korean officials designated on its sanction list.

Ju Kyu-chang is also director of the Korean Workers' Party (KWP) Machine-Building Industry Department, former head of the KWP Second Economic Committee and past head of the National Academy of Natural Sciences. All three government agencies are named by US, UN, EU and other governments as deeply involved in covert nuclear and ballistic missile production, research and export.

According to a May 2010 confidential report to the United Nations Security Council, "Ju served as the overall supervisor for North Korea's missile development, including oversight of the April 5, 2009 Taepo Dong-2 (TD-2) missile launch and the failed July 2006 TD-2 launch."

Those two missile launches were the predecessors to the upcoming launch this month of an "earth observation satellite". Both ballistic missile launches immediately preceded Pyongyang's two underground nuclear explosions.

Daniel Pinkston, an analyst with the International Crisis Group (ICG), said Ju Kyu-chang has "technical expertise regarding the SLV [space launch vehicle] and satellite programs and the nuclear weapons program". In its June 2009 report "North Korea's nuclear and missile programs", ICG said Ju Kyu-chang "is believed to be in charge of an independent entity with custody of North Korea's nuclear bombs" and "was in charge of the August 1998 attempted satellite launch and the 2009 launch".

"I would equate Ju with General Leslie Groves, who headed the US Manhattan Project that produced atomic bombs during World War II," said Larry Niksch, a senior associate with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies and former Asian affairs specialist for 43 years with the non-partisan Congressional Research Service. "Ju runs the day-to-day programs to develop missiles and probably nuclear weapons," he said in an e-mail this week.

Niksch wrote that Pyongyang reacted to international sanctions by "fashioning an alternative based on illicit programs: counterfeiting of US currency and products, narcotics smuggling, and selling missiles and other weapons to other 'rogue' nations like Syria, Pakistan, and Iran, and terrorist groups like Hezbollah ... I estimate that North Korean earnings from various forms of collaboration with Iran earns Pyongyang upwards of $2 billion annually. Kim Jong-il distributed much of these earnings to his military and communist elite to keep them satisfied and loyal."

Paek Se-bong is chairman of the government's Second Economic Committee (SEC). A classified May 2010 UN "Report to the Security Council from the Panel of Experts" said, "It is broadly believed that the Second Economic Committee of the National Defense Commission plays the largest and most prominent role in nuclear, other WMD and missile-related development programs as well as in arranging and conducting arms-related exports."

According to 2010 US government documents "The US has reason to believe ... [the Second Economic Committee] has been used for North Korea-Iran proliferation-related transactions." A 2009 UN report to the Security Council said the SEC "is a national-level organization responsible for research and development of North Korea's advanced weapons systems, including missiles and probably nuclear weapons". The same UN report said, "Paek is the chief operating officer of the DPRK's [Democratic People's Republic of Korea's] military industry, the country's largest employer and economic consumer."

Paek Se-bong personifies the mysterious grouping of figures in charge of North Korea's illicit weapons program. Very little biographical data exists on Paek Se-bong, who emerged from obscurity in 2003 when he was appointed to head the SEC and made a member of the National Defense Commission (NDC), the supreme ruling body of the DPRK.

After 2003, Paek Se-bong did not appear for eight years in official North Korean media until April 9, 2009 - four days after the highly publicized launch of the last North Korean "satellite". He was at that time reappointed publicly to his position as head of the SEC and a member of the NDC.

That long-range rocket test scuttled ongoing talks over its nuclear program and was followed weeks later by an underground explosion testing a nuclear bomb, which resulted in harsh UN sanctions. It was shortly thereafter that Paek Se-bong's name was placed on international sanction lists.

His name translates to the "Three peaks of Mt Paektu", a term used in official propaganda to refer to Kim Jong-il and his parents. (It is purported to be the mythical birthplace of Kim Jong-il, but he is known to have been born in a village in Siberia where his parents were in exile during World War II.)

Illicit exports
Pak To-chun was placed under international sanction on December 19, 2011, the same day Kim Jong-il's death was announced. According to the EU, "He is in charge of the arms industry. It is reported that he commands the office for nuclear energy. This institution is decisive for [North Korea's] nuclear and rocket launcher program."


An image of a national report meeting held on February 15, 2012, highlighted are Pak To-chun (2nd row, left), Ju Kyu-chang (2nd row, 2nd left) and Kim Yong-chol (3rd row, right), all of whom were given military promotions on the occasion of Kim Jong-il's recent birthday celebration. (Photo: KBS screen grab)

Pak To-chun, also a member of the powerful NDC, is director of the Military Arms Production Department. According to the May 2010 UN report to the Security Council: "The Military Arms Production Department of the Korea Workers' Party oversees the matters related to the Yongbyon nuclear plant and its nuclear weapons programs."

He succeeded Jon Pyong-ho as head of North Korea's military industries in 2010. Jon Pyong-ho was the primary manager since the 1980s of North Korea's clandestine international network tasked with covertly acquiring components and technology to build a nuclear bomb. He was in charge of trading ballistic missile and nuclear technology with Pakistan's Abdul Qadeer Khan network to build Pyongyang's nuclear and other weapons arsenal.

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AN ATOL INVESTIGATION
All of Kim Jong-eun's men
By Nate Thayer

In 2008, a secret delegation of Myanmar military generals traveled to North Korea on a weapons and technology purchasing trip. A leaked detailed report, complete with pictures, showed Jon Pyong-ho hosting Myanmar military officials, including on a tour of a missile factory.

Jon Pyong-ho continues to serve on the powerful NDC and is named on international sanction lists for running a worldwide network trafficking in nuclear material with Iran, Libya, Pakistan and Syria.

"[He] is in charge of nuclear weapons development," according to a 2009 UN report issued after Pyongyang detonated a second underground nuclear explosion. According to a December 21, 2011 EU report ordering new sanctions, the Machine Building 

Industries Department he headed is "responsible for overseeing activities of North Korea's military industries" including "the development of North Korea's ballistic missile and nuclear programs".

In April 2009, Jon Pyong-ho was one of only two officials named as accompanying Kim Jong-il to witness the purported peaceful "space launch" that scuttled earlier bilateral agreements to halt ballistic and nuclear testing, according to photographs and statements from the official Korean Central News Agency archives. The other was Ju Kyu Chang, who was promoted to four-star general during this year's February ceremonies for the deceased Kim Jong-il. Jon Pyong-ho was given special prominence at the recent mourning period closing ceremonies on 25 March.

Kim Yong-chol, a former bodyguard turned head of North Korea's spy agency, also received his fourth star during the recent Kim Jong-il birthday celebrations. Kim heads the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB). Both he and the RGB are named in UN, US, EU and other international sanctions for their involvement in banned sales of sophisticated weapons systems, including to Iran and Syria, and have been implicated in launching recent military attacks on South Korea.

Kim Yong-chol and the RGB "specializes in the production of maritime military craft and armaments, such as submarines, military boats and missile systems, and has exported torpedoes and technical assistance to Iranian defense-related firms", according to December 2011 United Kingdom and EU sanctions documents.

The same documents name the RGB as "responsible for approximately half of the arms and related material exported by North Korea" and name RGB front companies that in 2007 and 2008 "facilitated transactions involving ... designated Iranian financial institutions, including Bank Melli and Bank Sepah ... for the benefit of North Korea's Reconnaissance General Bureau's (RGB) weapons program."

Kim Yong-chol was first implicated by intelligence agencies in 2010. In August 2010, US President Barack Obama cited the "unprovoked attack that resulted in the sinking of the Republic of Korea Navy ship Cheonan and the deaths of 46 sailors in March 2010" when issuing Executive Order 13551 that placed US sanctions on a single North Korean official, General Kim Yong-chol, the RGB he commanded, and the Green Pine Associated Corporation, a North Korean front company the US and others have identified as acting on the RGB's behalf to sell prohibited arms, including to Iran and Syria.

The day before Kim Yong-chol was promoted to full general, Pyongyang announced the creation of a new medal, the "Order of Kim Jong-il," awarded for services in building a "thriving socialist nation" and for the military defense of the country. The first recipients of the award included Kim Yong-chol.

Kim Yong-chol's direct superior, General O Kuk-ryol, vice chairman of the National Defense Commission, is another prominent figure in the new regime's inner circle. The UN described O Kuk-ryol as "supervising the acquisition abroad of advanced technology for nuclear and ballistics programs" in a list of sanctioned North Korean officials he was placed on in 2009. The EU added him to its list in December of last year.

At this year's March 25 ceremonies closing Kim Jong-il's 100-day mourning period, Minister of People's Armed Forces and Vice-Marshal Kim Yong-chun delivered the keynote speech which said that Kim Jong-eun "has turned North Korea into an invincible country which nobody dares to attack".

United Nations and US documents from 2011 placed Kim Yong-chun, identified as "special adviser to Kim Jong-il on nuclear strategy" on a sanction list that froze his assets and imposed a travel ban. He currently serves as Pyongyang's de facto defense minister and was one of only eight leaders to walk with Kim Jong-eun alongside the hearse during Kim Jong-il's recent funeral procession.

Analysts say that the decision to name Kim Jong-eun as successor to his father was made by early 2009 and subsequent reshuffles made within the party and military have paved the way for a smooth transition. In February 2009, O Kuk-ryol was appointed vice chairman of the NDC and Kim Yong-chun was appointed minister of the People's Armed Forces.

Top commanders
In April 2009, Kim Yong-chun, O Kuk-ryol, Jon Pyong-ho, Paek Se-bong, Jang Song-thaek and Ju Kyu-chang were all elected to North Korea's highest body, the National Defense Commission. All six are also named as key figures in Pyongyang's nuclear and missile program by the UN, US and other governments, and have all been prominent in public appearances with Kim Jong-eun in recent weeks.

Second Economy Commission chairman Paek Se-bong (circled) applauds at the start of a national report meeting for Kim Jong-il's birthday on February 15, 2012. He was given the rank of colonel general (sangjang) in a military promotions list issued on the occasion of Kim Jong-il's 70th birthday. At past national events, Paek Se-bong had been observed wearing business suits (Photo: KCNA-Yonhap)

Prior to the current diplomatic scuffle over the upcoming supposed satellite launch, North Korea was accused of creating nearly identical crises in 2009 when it launched a long-range, multi-stage rocket it referred to as a space satellite. The move was in defiance of a UN ban, broke off then six-nation nuclear disarmament talks and set the stage for a new underground nuclear test, the country's second.

The following year saw North Korea launch an artillery attack on South Korea that claimed the lives of 46 South Koreans and stoked international fears that the Koreas were near war.

In recent weeks, the same North Korean officials known to command these provocative events have been given high-profile promotions as Pyongyang unveils the new core of leaders behind Kim Jong-eun's new regime. In addition to the 10, other senior officials have also been named as key figures in North Korea's illicit nuclear and ballistic missile program.

Pak Jae-gyong and Hyon Chol-hae, both of the Korean People's Army's political department, are named as "military adviser to Kim Jong-il" in UN and other sanctions lists. Head of the Academy of Science, Pyon Yong-rip, is also named as "involved in WMD-related biological research". All three played prominent roles in the ceremonies that followed the death of Kim Jong-il in the carefully orchestrated succession process to crown Kim Jong-eun as North Korea's new dictator.

Several other powerful figures who are not named in international sanctions also play key roles in the new inner power circle. Korean People's Army chief of staff Ri Yong-ho and two NDC members, Generals U Dong-guk and Kim Jong-gak, are also known to be in Kim Jong-eun's inner circle. 

 
Vice Marshal Kim Jong-gak (2nd right) seen at a March 25, 2012, rally ending the 100 days of mourning Kim Jong-il's death. He nominated Kim Jong-eun as one of the Korean People's Army's delegates to the 4th Party Conference in April 2012. Ministry of State Security's General U Tong-chuk (3rd right).

U Dong-guk heads the State Security Department responsible for domestic intelligence while Kim Jong-gak is in charge of ensuring loyalty to the new leader within the armed forces and party. Kim Ki-nam, meanwhile, leads the formidable propaganda operation in charge of molding Kim Jong-eun's image. Another prominent figure is Choe Tae-bok who is involved in Pyongyang's scientific and technological development which concentrates mainly on efforts to build a sophisticated military state.

The coming weeks will see the further unveiling of top advisers who hold the real power in the new regime, say analysts. The 100th anniversary of the birth of the founder of the North Korean state, Kim Il-sung, will take place on April 15. State media have touted the date for several years as a major national turning point, marking the regime's promise to create "a mighty and prosperous nation".

The official Korean Central News Agency said on Monday that a rare Workers' Party conference will be held on April 11, shortly before Kim Il-sung's birthday celebration. At that event, his grandson, Kim Jong-eun, is expected to be named the secretary general of the KWP, the title previously held by his father Kim Jong-il. Kim Il-sung still retains the title of president in death.

North Korea's parliament, the Supreme People's Assembly, is set to hold its annual session on April 13. It is expected Kim Jong-eun will also be promoted to chairman of the NDC, another post held by his now deceased father. Coincident with these transitional events, Pyongyang informed international maritime and space organizations that it will launch its ballistic missile into orbit between April 12 and 16.

Nate Thayer, former Southeast Asia correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, is an investigative reporter specializing in conflict, transnational crime, and Asian affairs. He is currently based in Washington DC and may be reached at [email protected]

(Copyright 2012 Nate Thayer.)

North Korea: A Glimpse at a Simple Criminal Syndicate Posing as a Government By Nate Thayer

North Korea: A Glimpse at a Simple Criminal Syndicate Posing as a Government   

By Nate Thayer

(Copyright Nate Thayer. No republication in part or in whole allowed without prior wirtten permission of the author)      

        After a decade of failed Clinton era diplomacy, the United Nations and both the Bush and Obama administrations shifted to a more confrontational policy regarding the PDRK,  from negotiations on stopping the North Korean program for nuclear and missile development, to increased confrontation over their state sponsored criminal activity and financial sanctions directed to punish the North Koreans for weapons development. This evolved to a collapse of all diplomatic negotiations whatsoever in 2009.      

        The US and its allies have essentially been left bewildered and have little strategic policy towards the PDRK at all. International policy towards North Korea currently is labelled one of "Strategic Patience", a euphamism, after exhausting all obvious paths, since 1985, of engaging the worlds most stark threat to regional and international peace, which has left the world community at a loss of what to do next. And currently having no strategic policy at all.

         Since President Clinton left office in January 2001 until the present, there has been a marked escalation of hostility between the two sides that has reached a complete breakdown in diplomatic negotiations over the development of the PDRK nuclear and other military program. The U.S. and the United Nations, South Korea, Japan, the European Union and a number of other countries have created laws, resolutions, and Presidential Executive Orders to mitigate the effectiveness of some of the North Korean international criminal network and its military programs of acquiring nuclear weapons and exporting sophisticated weapons.

          In September 2005, the Bush administration used provisions of the Patriot Act, which was made law in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attack in the United States, and provisions of the Bank Secrecy Act, an amendment to the Patriot Act, to sanction and seize assets of financial institutions linked with North Korean illegal activities in Macau.

         The North Koreans responded by exploding a nuclear bomb in a test demonstration of its nuclear capablity.

          In October 2006 UN security Council passed unanimously resolution 1718 imposing a series of harsh economic and commercial sanctions on North Korea after the DPRK  conducted tests of a nuclear bomb earlier that month. The UN resolution demanded the DPRK halt its nuclear program and ballistic missile program, authorized the boarding and inspection of all DPRK cargo ships for weapons of mass destruction, banned imports and exports of a wide range of military equipment, deemed that all North Korean companies and individuals engaged in banned DPRK weapons programmers could have their assets frozen, and called for the “return immediately  to the six-party talks without precondition”

          North Korea released an official statement contending it’s   “nuclear test was entirely attributable to the US nuclear threat, sanctions and pressure,” and “was compelled to substantially prove its possession of nukes to protect its sovereignty.” North Korea’s UN Ambassador, Pak Gil Yon, said in reaction “If the United States increases pressure on the Democratic People Republic of Korea, the DPRK will continue to take physical counter measures considering it as an act of war.”

          In June of 2008, Bush declared “a national emergency” saying North Korea threatened U.S. security and interests and issued an executive order based on provisions of the Trading with the Enemy Act and the Patriot Act.  He cited  "the proliferation of weapons usable fissionable material on the Korean peninsula constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

          In September of 2005 the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, an interagency task force under the Department of the Treasury was created to combat DPRK illicit international activities.

          In June of 2009, after North Korea’s long range missile tests and another underground nuclear tests earlier that year, the United Nations Security Council issued more sanctions on the DPRK which “bans all arms transfers from North Korea. The resolution “ targeted not only North Korean financial institutions, but key individuals associated with nuclear, ballistic missile, and other WMD related programs.”

          President Obama’s 2010 executive order was specific and direct saying it  “targets the government of North Korea’s continued involvement in a wide range of proliferation and other illicit activities…for sanction individuals and entities facilitating North Korean Trafficking in arms…and engagement in illicit economic activities, such as money laundering, the counterfeiting of goods and currency, bulk cash smuggling and narcotics trafficking. This new executive order supplements existing sanctions targeting proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and those who support them, under which North Korean entities have been designated to date.”

          The Congressional Research Service has said US policy can help reverse the DPRK dependence on its illicit economy by “balancing US interest where foreign policy goals may conflict with anti crime activities. Congress may also be asked to provide funding for energy and food assistance as part of the resolution to the DPRKs weapons program, because some contend that additional supplies of energy and food could reduce the need to rely on illicit activities in some North Korean quarters.”

Here is a glimpse of what the PDRK has been doing concommitently to the international diplomatic effort;

Drug Trafficking

            Profit estimates vary widely for the North Korean drug trade. Estimates range from 100 million dollars to nearly a billion dollars from the combined production, manufacture, and sale of opium, heroin, and methamphetamines. In 2004, more sober estimates were 200 million dollars from the combined heroin and methamphetamine trade, in addition to 500 million dollars from other criminal organized crime. Lower figures can reach 71 million dollars----59 million for heroin and opium and 12 million from amphetamine.  Counterfeit brand name cigarettes are estimated to have a retail value of between 560 and 720 million dollars annually from their manufacture and export  And some U.S. government figures estimate they make more than 500 million dollars a year in the export of weapons systems and components, including the transfer of nuclear technology and expertise. 

          However, it appears that the extraordinary high profile of DPRK official involvement in narcotics trafficking, particularly with the arrest, detention, and expulsion of diplomatic, military, and intelligence officers and officials connected to the government, has led the North Koreans to seek out middlemen in private organized crime syndicates to help distribute the illicit products. These include Japanese, Chinese, other Asian, Russian, and European crime syndicates that distribute their illicit narcotics, cigarettes, counterfeit currency and pharmaceuticals, and even weapons. 

          For at least the last 35 years, officials of the DPRK and other North Korean government operatives have been apprehended for trafficking in narcotics. Since 1976 there have been at least 50 arrests and drug seizures involving North Korean officials in more than 20 countries around the world, said  William Bach, a U.S State Department official,  in May 2003, “And more recently there have been very clear indications especially in the form of methamphetamine seizures in Japan that North Koreans traffic and probably manufacture methamphetamine drugs.”

          The State Department’s annual International Narcotics Country Report released March, 2003 concludes that ”for years during the 1970s 1980s and 1990s, citizens of the DPRK, many of them diplomatic employees of the government were apprehended abroad while trafficking in narcotics……more recently, police investigation of suspects apprehended making large illicit shipments of heroin and methamphetamine to Taiwan and Japan have revealed a North Korean connection to the drugs."

 

Suspects arrested in several countries revealed to authorities direct links with North Korean officials, military vessels and personnel in drug and other illicit trafficking. Defector accounts also confirm government control over opium production, and the manufacture of heroin and methamphetamine by PDRK state entities. “ The most profitable means of state sponsored illegal business remains drug trafficking, gold smuggling, illegal sale and distribution of endangered species, trafficking in counterfeit us currency, and rare metals,” said Raphael Pearl of the independent Congressional Research Service in 2006, “North Korean officials appear to be increasing their involvement in financing  (these activities)”

          Methamphetamine production in North Korea was said to have started in the mid 1990’s. In the late 1990’s North Korea tried to purchase between 20 and 50 tons of ephedrine—the precursor drug for methamphetamines—from several countries, including an Indian pharmaceutical company. That is enough to treat 135 million colds for a country with a population of 23.9 million people. 

          North Korean officials have been directly linked to possessing or selling heroin, methamphetamines, opium, cocaine, hashish, and Ryhopnol (the ‘date rape drug’) in countries as far afield as Venezeula,  Japan, China, Russia, Taiwan, Egypt, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, India, and Turkey. 

          Japan has been a particular target for North Korean drugs. In 1999, two separate seizure of 100 kilograms and 564 kilograms of methamphetamine was seized. In 2000, 250 kilograms of methamphetamine seized, in 2001 a North Korean military ship was sunk by a Japanese patrol boat suspected of attempting to smuggle in drugs, and in 2002 separate seizures of 150 kilograms and two packages containing 500 pounds of methamphetamine said to be from North Korea discovered floating onshore. And in 2003 the Australian authorities seized a North Korean ship near the coast off Melbourne with 125 kilograms of heroin and arrested it’s North Korean crew. The ship tried to flee Australian navel vessels for four days and was holding no other cargo. Included onboard was a Korean Worker’s Party “political officer” with no  maritime function.

           In Egypt North Korean diplomats have been expelled repeatedly for smuggling large quantaties of drugs over three decades. In 1976 diplomats were expelled for having 400 kilograms of hashish in their luggage, in 1998 diplomats were expelled with a half million tablets of Rohypnol—the so-called ‘date rape’ drug, and in2004, two diplomats in Egypt were expelled with 150,000 tablets of Clonazipam, an anti anxiety drug.  These are just a random list of the broad range of official involvement in narcotics smuggling worldwide.

          The contraband is often smuggled by land from North Korea through China and Russia or by ship to markets in Europe, Asia and the Middle East through private trading companies controlled by Bureau 39, diplomatic pouch, and hidden in cargo labeled legitimate material.

          But North Korea’s state sponsored criminal syndicates have shifted priorities of the type of smuggled goods and the tactics used to transport and deliver them over the last 35 years, seeking to maximize profits and mask the source of origin as they have faced increasing international scrutiny. They have shifted from counterfeit dollars and opium and heroin in the 1970’s and 80’s to a sharp rise in methamphetamine in the 90’s to counterfeit cigarettes and pharmaceuticals and illegal weapons transfers in the last decade. They also have been involved in smuggling illicit elephant ivory, rhinocerous horns, conflict gemstones, fake postage stamps, untaxed liquor, CD’s, cigarettes, gold, vehicles, often through diplomatic pouched declared as innocuous goods. They have smuggled internationally controlled precursor chemicals for drug manufacture, and nuclear and weapons components, through front companies and organized crime groups. And they have increasingly shifted from direct retail delivery, through use of diplomats and state front companies, to wholesalers selling to organized crime syndicates who distribute the illicit goods worldwide. They have created a maze of changing front companies and bank accounts located worldwide, to stifle international scrutiny and disguise violations of national laws and international sanctions that can be directly linked to the North Korean regime. So as seizures of particular commodities ebb and flow, and distribution networks change, their commitment to controlling a worldwide criminal syndicate remains a central feature of state policy and aggregate revenues from illegal goods has remained consistent or increased. One marked shift is partnering with established criminal syndicates to transport and distribute illegal goods. “ DPRK linked illicit trading networks exist on every continent today – increasingly in partnership with organized crime groups,” said David Asher, a former senior U.S. government official in charge of counter North Korean criminal operations until 2005, citing a 2005 indictment of 87 people throughout the United States, “…an expansive network in the US linked to North Korea and Chinese criminal partners was documented. This network, as the unsealed indictments show, was engaged in selling tens of millions of dollars per year of contraband – everything from counterfeit US currency, counterfeit US postage stamps, counterfeit US branded cigarettes and state tax stamps, counterfeit Viagra, ecstasy, methamphetamine, heroin, AK-47s, and even attempting to sell shoulder fired missiles (manpads) and rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) into the US.”

William Newcomb, a former senior U.S. State Department official and North Korea specialist remarked in March 2011 that,” On the other hand, the continuing large-scale traffic in counterfeit cigarettes from DPRK territory suggests that enforcement against notorious organized criminality is lax. It is also possible that a lucrative counterfeit cigarette trade has replaced a riskier drug trafficking business as a generator of revenue for the DPRK state”

          The lower profile, if indeed diminishing involvement, in narcotics trafficking by the North Koreans could be a reflection of the negative consequences of the very high profile criminal seizures, arrests, detentions, and expulsions incontrovertibly linking the regime to state sponsored illegal narcotics smuggling over 30 years since 1976. They have long had dealings with private organized crime from China, Russia, and Japan and appear to have expanded these networks worldwide—along with an estimated 120 shell front corporations—the PDRK increasingly acting as a wholesaler, using them as middlemen for distribution outside the country.

 

Shipping

 

          Dozens of ships linked to North Korea have been seized with counterfeit US dollars and narcotics, as well as weapons,  and cigarette paper, among other things. This exposed the highly unusual arrangement North Korea had entered into with the Cambodian Government to operate a “Flag of Convenience” office in Singapore, controlled and staffed by  North Koreans, for a reportable bribe of millions of dollars and the promise that 30 North Korean ships could be registered under the Cambodian flag.

          The company, the Cambodian Shipping Company, was established in 1994 by a long time North Korean diplomat who had served in Cambodia, and finally shut down under international pressure in 2002 after having numerous ships seized for illegal activity, including those originating from North Korea.

         “Of most concern to the US and indeed to South Korea was the clear evidence that North Korean freighters flying the Cambodian flag or on the Cambodian register were moving ballistic missiles to clients in the Middle East and Africa,” , said Michael Richardson, author of the book “A Time Bomb for Global Trade: Maritime Related Terrorism in the Age of Weapons of Mass Destruction”.

          In 2001 Irish customs found 20 million smuggled cigarettes on a Cambodian-registered ship that arrived from Estonia, its manifest claiming it had timber. The cigarettes concealed in the centre of bales of timber, were liable to tax amounting to about three million Irish pounds. It was the largest seizure of tobacco in Irish history.  Irish officials said they were destined for a terrorist faction called the Real IRA, whose leader Shawn Garland was later indicted by the United States for laundering millions of dollars of counterfeit U.S. dollars he received at the North Korean embassies in Moscow and Minsk, Belarus and distributed throughout Europe. The 2001 cigarette bust was also said to originate in North Korea.

          Spain seized a ship, tracked by U.S. intelligence departing from North Korea in November 2002 allegedly carrying cement to Yemen. In December 2002 it was seized in the Indian Ocean by Spanish and American military vessels. The So San was a Cambodian registered vessel said to be loaded with cement “but an examination revealed 15 Scud missiles with 15 conventional warheads, 23 tanks of nitric acid rocket propellant and 85 drums of unidentified chemicals all hidden beneath the bags of cement.” It was allowed to continue at the time. It’s cargo was later determined to have ended up in Libya. An embarrassed State Department spokesman responded: "At first we couldn't verify the nationality of the ship because the ship's name and the indications on the hull and the funnel were obscured. It was flying no flag." 

       Lloyd’s List, a shipping industry newspaper, said dozens of North Korean ships flew the Cambodian flag. 

       Also in 2002, the French seized the Cambodian registered ship the Winter after a firefight.   They seized one ton of cocaine worth over 100 million dollars. The cargo was registered as scrap destined for Spain.  Greek, French, and Spanish authorities had tracked the vessel.                   

          David Cockroft,  head of the International Transport Workers’ Federation  said: "As long as governments and the UN turn a blind eye to the way FOCs allow criminals to operate anonymously, ships will be used to transport everything from drugs and illegal immigrants to the supplies used by the al-Qaida men who blew up the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania," Adding "The world should join us in demanding that Cambodia shut down this sleazy and pestilent offshore registration."

         Lim In-Yong, a senior North Korean diplomat who had been stationed in Cambodia, owned the CSC , which was awarded the contract as the exclusive Cambodian government representative to register flags of convenience  vessels in 1994. He was, on paper in partnership with the son in law of Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk, Kek Vandy, married to the King’s eldest daughter.  The CSC quickly gained a reputation as a rogue operation.

         The Company, operating under the legal representative of the Cambodian government but operated by North Koreans, rapidly became notorious for illegal activities of the ships it registered. Aside from the above mentioned cases, they were implicated in smuggling oil out of Iraq during the embargo, smuggling cigarettes to Albania and Crete, human trafficking and prostitution to Japan and Crete, as well as other hauling contraband from weapons to drugs.  Intelligence officials suspected North Korea was using CSC vessels to ship ballistic missile technology to Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan.  Under Flags of Convenience vessels, it is difficult to identify who is the real owner of a ship.

          By 2002 the company had registered ships of which 25 had shipwrecked, 41 crashed, nine fires and 45 arrests. Nine CRC registered ships were banned from entering European ports as unfit to sail.

 A Cambodian government official, Ahamed Yahya ,  responded to the public inquiries. “We don’t know or care who owns the ships or whether they’re doing ‘white’ or ‘black’ business … it is not our concern.”

          Under growing international complaints, the Cambodian government withdrew its license to the North Korean controlled CSC. But there are 40 nations that offer flags of convenience services, making it easy to disguise the origin and cargo for the transport of illegal goods.  And making sanctions against interdicting North Korean illicit cargo much harder. “Arms smuggling, the ability to conceal large sums of money, trafficking in goods and people, and other illegal activities can also thrive in the unregulated havens which the flag of convenience system provides,” said Nick Winchester, an analyst in the Seafarers' International Research Centre at Cardiff University in Wales.

Cigarettes

          Since at least the mid-1990s, the DPRK has engaged in the manufacture of counterfeit cigarettes along with packaging and tobacco revenue stamps of various countries. Taiwan law enforcement  seized  20 shipping containers of fake cigarette wrappers destined for North Korea. According to a report from a private investigation launched by a consortium of Tobacco companies targeted by North Korean counterfeiters, “the seized materials could have been used to package cigarettes with a retail value of $1 billion.”

          It reportedly hosts similar foreign-operated counterfeit cigarette ventures. Tobacco industry investigations concluded in 2005 that North Korea operated 10-to-12 active plants and determined that the DPRK military and the “internal security service” operated at least one plant each.

Tobacco industry investigators estimated North Korea could gross between $520 million and $720 million annually. 

Made in North Korea ” counterfeit cigarettes are marketed throughout Asia, especially Taiwan and Indonesia, and in the United States. More recently, North Korea began making counterfeit pharmaceuticals, in particular Viagra, for foreign distribution, mostly Japan and South Korea.

          North Korean factories are reckoned to produce 41 billion fake cigarettes a year, for sale in China, Japan and the US,” according to testimony in front of the U.S. Congress.

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North Korea: A Mafia Crime State By Nate Thayer

North Korea: The World's Only Mafia Crime State

How North Korea Funds their Army, Nuclear Weapons Programme. and Small Group of Elite Cadre in Control

(Excerpts from an unpublished study of the criminal syndicates run by Kim Jong Il as central State policy)

(Copyright Nate Thayer (No republication in full or in part without express written permission of the author)

By Nate Thayer

       North Korea is the only nation where it is central government policy to operate as a systematic criminal syndicate through a myriad of state controlled illicit activities. According to evidence compiled over a recent six month investigation, the North Korean government has, since at least 1974, run a worldwide network of diplomats, intelligence operatives, military, and other government officials, as well as state controlled front companies that use the rights and powers of a sovereign state to manage illegal operations worldwide.

          North Korean government operatives have intentionally violated laws in at least 106 countries in over 500 incidents as it has repeatedly evaded and ignored a series of  multi lateral agreements and increasingly stricter sanctions imposed by the United Nations, as well as the laws of sovereign nations around the world.

         Together these criminal activities, strictly controlled and coordinated by the ruling Korean Workers Party of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK), have used thousands of North Koreans from school children to some of an estimated 200,000 political prisoners as forced labor in the opium poppy fields, to workers in the manufacturing plants processing heroin, methamphetamine, fake pharmaceuticals, counterfeit US currency, counterfeit foreign cigarettes, as well as a sophisticated secret weapons systems and nuclear weapons development program. To oversee the production, manufacture, transport, and export of these products, they have employed the full apparatus of state institutions. These have included the use of military vessels, intelligence officials, diplomats, their foreign embassies, and a complex web of more than a hundred state controlled front companies with networks around the world,

           Increasingly, after years of international scrutiny of North Korean officials abroad and hundreds of seizures in dozens of countries, they are partnering with established international criminal syndicates in China, other Asian countries, Russia, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States to distribute these illicit commodities around the globe. Since at least 1976, dozens of government operatives on official missions out of North Korea, many travelling on formal diplomatic status, have  been apprehended for possession and smuggling of counterfeit cigarettes, counterfeit pharmaceuticals, counterfeit U.S. dollars, narcotics including heroin, hashish, opium, methamphetamine, and cocaine, and large quantities of controlled pharmaceuticals. In addition North Korean diplomats have been arrested, detained, or expelled from numerous countries for other lucrative crimes such as smuggling of endangered species parts, African ivory, counterfeit CD’s, and large amounts of untaxed alcohol and cigarettes hidden in diplomatic pouches, among other illicit goods. The products and their proceeds from these global operations have often moved around the world using officials travelling with diplomatic passports, who, under the Geneva accords of 1961, enjoy immunity from search, arrest, or prosecution.

            As well, North Korean officials, and government controlled front corporations who operate internationally, and international crime syndicates working with the DPRK government, have been implicated in many countries as they  distribute the goods and try to launder the proceeds from their illicit syndicates through international banking systems. Dozens of diplomats have been detained and expelled, some quietly, from countries in Africa, Asia, Russia, China, Europe, and South America. The activities of these state sponsored criminal enterprises have been identified in at least 106 countries on all continents except Antarctica, from 1976 through 2011, according to data compiled.

            Revenue from this network in turn funds the elite of the Korean Workers Party, a repressive regime at home that defies U.S. and UN sanctions as it pursues a hostile foreign policy producing and exporting nuclear and sophisticated military technology that destabilizes countries and regions worldwide.

            North Korea has been formally rebuked repeatedly by unanimous votes of the United Nations Security Council, the United States, and other affected countries for covertly evading a number of international prohibitions imposed on the isolated and secretive nation for developing and exporting sophisticated ballistic missile systems and nuclear technology. Some of the recipient nations, which are also banned from receiving such military technology, include Burma, Libya, Iran, and Syria. As well, North Korea has been exposed for violating repeated U.N sanctions prohibiting them from importing products for use in their programs of developing long range ballistic missiles, and weapons of mass destruction including the purchase of components for building chemical, biological and nuclear weapons systems. 

            It is believed that a substantial amount of the proceeds from their state sponsored criminal syndicates, which are under the direct control of the ruling Korean Workers Party and do not get distributed through the formal government budget, are used to covertly fund their nuclear and military programs . Since the late 1980's, they denied pursueing or possessing such technology, but more recently flaunt these capabilities, threatening to use them against declared enemies such as South Korea and the United States.

          The proceeds from these illicit activities are estimated to equal 35-40% of the total revenue earned by the DPRK. Some estimate the illicit revenue to exceed 1 billion dollars a year. A significant portion of the revenue is  suspected to fund the regimes banned nuclear weapons production and a sophisticated ballistic weapons systems.  It is suspected that the proceeds, which by now may exceed $5 billion in reserves, have been variously shifted between banks in China, Singapore, Macau, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Austria, among other international accounts. 

The criminal enterprises and the North Korean government agencies and officials who carry them out are coordinated by a highly secret unit, Bureau 39, (sometimes translated as ‘Office’ or ‘Room’ 39)  under the authority of the ruling Korean Workers Party that reports directly to Kim Jung Il.  The Bureau was created in 1974 specifically to raise hard currency to fund covert activities and as a source to reward elite party loyalists for continuing allegiance. It has offices throughout North Korea and more than 120 international front companies. It has 17 offices outside the DPRK, including China, Moscow, Macau, and Hong Kong. It’s primary purpose is to coordinate production and distribution of a worldwide network of illegal products and collect the revenue for Kim Jung Il.

          In recent years international organizations and sovereign states, particularly the United Nations and the U.S., have passed resolutions, laws, and executive orders to try to undermine the ability of North Korea to operate its global criminal enterprise, but to little avail.

          It has been argued that aggressively confronting North Korea for it’s criminal conduct as a mafia-like state, while trying to balance the pursuit of the higher international priorities of eliminating their capabilities to become a nuclear weapons power and supplier of nuclear technology, as well as exporter of sophisticated long range missile systems to dubious regimes around the globe, has created a conundrum for international negotiators, who fear that focusing on North Korean criminal enterprises will undermine the greater priority of securing military stability in one of the worlds most volatile and certainly most isolated and impenetrable nations.

          For nearly two decades a series of established negotiating bodies served as a diplomatic forum engaging North Korea with other affected and concerned  nations to provide a diplomatic solution to the threat of nuclear and sophisticated weapons development and proliferation. Although they were repeatedly met with broken promises and slow progress over a myriad of contentious issues, they maintained a dialogue and resulted in channels of verification that many analysts saw as essential in thwarting North Korea’s desires for a nuclear weaponized military capability.

           Those diplomatic efforts came to an abrupt halt in 2001, as the Bush adminstration chose a new course in confronting and pressuring the North Korean government.

          In April 2005, North Korean Vice Minister Kim Kye-gwan warned, “[The United States] should consider the danger that we could transfer nuclear weapons to terrorists, that we have the ability to do so.”  Formal diplomatic talks deteriorated since 2001, coming to a complete halt in 2009. Diplomatic negotiations have been dormant  since, the parties engaged in increasingly hostile and aggressive actions towards each other.

          By 2011, international law enforcement in scores of nations, key affected countries such as the United States, Japan and South Korea, and International bodies such as the United Nations have repeatedly imposed sanctions, held diplomatic negotiations, and passed laws and mandated resolutions attempting to halt North Korea’s role as a destabilizing force in the region and the world. The DPRK reaction has been to continue its illicit covert schemes and ratchet up an aggressive military posture. But the threat of a rogue state, now possessing nuclear weapons capability as well as an aggressive manufacturer and exporter of sophisticated ballistic missile technology, funded by a vast network of covert production and export of illegal goods, has only expanded.

Overview of Illegal Activities

          Among the oldest, key criminal activities controlled by Bureau 39 is the production distribution and laundering of the world’s highest quality counterfeit United States currency. In addition the bureau has managed the production and distribution of opium, heroin, and methamphetamine, billions of counterfeit brand name cigarettes, counterfeit pharmaceuticals, long range ballistic missiles, and the transfer of nuclear technology and expertise to other regimes, and building a nuclear weapons arsenal. Other illicit activities include state sponsored insurance fraud, money laundering, gold smuggling, taxable items smuggled through diplomatic officials, and the trade in protected species such as elephant ivory and Rhinoceros tusks.

          On more than 100 occasions, all of these materials have been seized in the possession of North Korean diplomats or shown to have occurred. They are facilitated by government officials, government controlled ships, planes, and international trading companies that are front organizations controlled by North Korean government clandestine offices. They have resulted in the seizure, detention, expulsion, or arrest of North Korean government officials, or their associates, often using diplomatic passports, or these activities have been verified as occurring in at least 106 countries from 1976 through 2011.

          Revenues from illicit state sponsored organized crime are, by their very nature, speculative at best. Annual revenues from counterfeit US currency are estimated at between 15 and 100 million US dollars, illegal drug manufacture and sale of heroin, opium, and methamphetamine have carried estimates as high as between 100 million to one billion dollars, counterfeit cigarette manufacture and sale at between 560 and 720 million dollars, and weapons, military components, nuclear technology, and missile sales at as much as 560 million dollars.

          In 1976, two years after the creation of  Bureau  39,  North Korean officials began being apprehended around the world for engaging in criminal activity. Sweden, Norway, and Denmark expelled 17 North Korean diplomats, including the entire Norwegian diplomatic staff and two ambassadors, for the sale of drugs, untaxed alcohol and cigarettes. 

          In North Korea, where virtually all economic activity is controlled by the state, Bureau 39 handles all hard currency transactions, including some legal projects such as export of mushrooms, ginseng and proceeds from the handful of hotels where foreign visitors must stay in Pyongyang.

          Travelling mainly under diplomatic passports, their illicit cargo has been seized in dozens of countries at an escalating rate that peaked in the late 1990’s.  Scores of North Korean government  officials have been arrested, detained and expelled, illicit  goods seized 

in hundreds of incidents, occurring on every continent except Antartica for the last 35 years. Such criminal activity directly linked to the North Korean government has been documented in at least 57 countries since 1976.

          Reports from numerous cases of North Korean state sponsored involvement in production, manufacture and distribution of illicit products began in the mid 1970’s and gained momentum into an overwhelming pattern of a DPRK controlled government criminal conspiracy by the late 1990’s. Arguably the most isolated, secretive, and impenetrable nation in the world, firm evidence has proven difficult to gather and more difficult to prove.

          Operating outside the formal government structure, Bureau 39 is an office technically under the structure of the ruling Korean Workers Party Secretariat, which reports to the Central Committee of the Party. Its establishment to operate illicit activities included the purpose of funding the cash starved nation’s military and nuclear development programs.

          “ North Korea’s Central Committee Bureau 39 is an active participant in the criminal economy of the region with tentacles extending well beyond Asia,” according to a study published in March 2010 by the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College. The PDRK operates what “is essentially criminal sovereignty whereby it organizes its illegitimate activities behind the shield of non-intervention while using the tools of the state to perpetrate these schemes abroad."

          While outside the government structure Bureau 39 fully uses the state apparatus including the diplomatic services, intelligence agencies, military, shipping vessels and aircraft, and an estimated 120 foreign front companies, which themselves are constantly renamed or dissolved and their function replaced by another shell company. These companies are used to covertly launder the proceeds from illicit transactions through foreign bank accounts variously reported to be located in China, Macau, Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, and Singapore, according to several studies, including Congressional testimony in March 2011. 

           Its most powerful entity is the Deasung General Bureau, which controls scores of foreign trading front companies and banks, and reports to the ruling KWP Organization and Guidance Department. They, in turn, report to Bureau 39.

          In November 2010 the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Deasung General Bureau stating it “was owned or controlled by Office 39 of the Korean Workers Party. Office 39 is a secretive Branch of the government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea that provides critical support to North Korean leadership through engaging in illicit economic activities and managing slush funds and generating revenue for the leadership.”

          The U.S. Department of Treasury Department determined that the Korean Daesong General Trading Corporation was “ facilitating North Korean trafficking in arms and related materiel; procurement of luxury goods; and engagement in certain illicit economic activities, such as money laundering, the counterfeiting of goods and currency, bulk cash smuggling and narcotics trafficking."

          A confidential November 2010 UN Security Council Panel of Experts report, ordered to study North Korean compliance with UN Security Council resolutions responding to North Korean long range ballistic missile and nuclear bomb testing, had banned, among other things, North Korea from the export or import of nuclear technology and any weapons systems. The secret report was leaked in December 2010.

          The 47 page document said  “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea maintains a wide network of trade offices that work in close conjunction with its diplomatic missions overseas. These offices are charged with both procurement and developing select trade opportunities of interest to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s leadership, including arranging and handling its illicit trade and covert acquisitions,” said the UN confidential report dated 10 November 2010. It continued: “While much of the country’s illicit or covert acquisition activities are handled by these offices, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has also established links with overseas criminal networks to carry out these activities, including the transportation and distribution of illicit and smuggled cargoes. This may also include weapons of mass destruction, sensitive goods and arms and related materiel smuggling.”

          All figures and statistics on the DPRK are highly speculative and are often derived from teams of international and US law enforcement and intelligence analysts and technology. Some information comes from North Korean defectors. Other data has been compiled through the seizure of illicit goods in dozens of countries around the world. And still more evidence is provided by anecdotal press reports from various incidents involving law enforcement in nations spanning the globe. The United States and South Korea have taken the most active role in deciphering what transpires in what is arguably the most isolated, secretive, and impenetrable nation in the world. It is reported to use proceeds of the state sponsored criminal syndicate in its nuclear development program. 

          The North Korean government, through Bureau 39, are increasingly assisted and coordinate with established organized crime syndicates from China, Japan, and Russia, elsewhere in Asia, the United States, and Europe. They have cooperated with non-state terrorist organizations including the IRA, Hezbollah, and insurgencies in Sri Lanka and Nepal. And they have laundered proceeds from illicit activities through banking systems worldwide, including  Macau, China, Switzerland, Austria, Hong Kong, Luxembourg and Singapore, according to US government, United Nations, other governments, and press reports.  

          In 2011, North Korea again faces severe food shortages. An estimated more than one million people died from famine in the 1990’s. United Nations humanitarian agencies report that millions are suffering from malnutrition in 2011. The government provides minimal services to the population, controls all sectors of the economy and is ranked 179th in the world—dead last—in the Index of Economic Freedom, and regularly ranked as having one of the world’s most egregious human rights records. It has refused to meet long standing international debt obligations, and together with sanctions imposed by the United Nations, finds it difficult to meet minimal standards to trade through normal international financial structures. While publicly appealing for international funds to stem another famine, with a population of only 23.9 million people, North Korea finances and maintains the 4th largest standing army in the world, with more than one million active duty soldiers and 4.6 million in reserve.

          Throughout the 1990’s until the US began imposing increasingly harsh sanctions in 2005, Macau served as a hub of laundering criminal proceeds through a series of North Korean front companies and cooperative banks and lax financial security in the gambling Mecca.

Counterfeit U.S. Money

          In 1994, officials from a North Korean front company, Zokwang trading company, a direct subsidiary of  Bureau 39,  travelling on diplomatic passports, attempted to deposit 250,000 dollars in fake US dollars in a Macau bank and were arrested and expelled. It was one of many incidents that led to a September 2005 US Treasury Department action naming and freezing the assets of North Korean front companies, Macau banks, and North Korean officials.

          Kim Jung Il, in his capacity as head of Bureau 39, first ordered counterfeit 100 dollar bills be produced in the 1970’s through bleaching U.S. one dollar bills. The first counterfeit notes paid for covert terror campaigns against South Korea, such as the bomb explosion on a South Korean commercial  plane killing all 155 civilian passengers  in 1987 and the bombing of senior officials of  South Korea, including President Chun Doo-Hwan in Burma in 1983 that killed four cabinet members and 13 other South Koreans .

          The first detection of the North Korean “super note” was by a suspicious bank teller in the Philippines in 1989. 

        Since then hundreds of millions of dollars of the bills have appeared in dozens of countries around the world. Many North Korean officials have been seized in possession of the bills.

In South Korea counterfeit bills have increased there since North Korean fake U.S. dollars appeared in Hong Kong in early 2006.  Days later China ordered banks to “increase vigilance” for fake U.S. bills.

          By the late 1980’s, as the economic crisis in the communist states imploded with the collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea increased the production and sophistication of its counterfeit dollars.

Since the first counterfeit bills were manufactured, US government officials have documented 19 versions of the “super note”, all they allege are improvements that are produced in the PDRK.  It was in the late 1970’s that North Korea purchased its intaglio printing presses from a Swiss company that sells strictly to governments. 

          They also bought special ink from the same Swiss company used by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing nearly exactly the same color used by the US . As well, paper with a nearly identical percentage of cotton fiber as that used on U.S. notes is used in North Korean supernotes. 

          In 2004, a North Korean defector, interviewed by the BBC in South Korea, said.  “We bought the best of everything - the best equipment and the best ink. But we also had the very best people, people who had real expertise and knowledge in the field. ….When government officials or diplomats travelled to south-east Asia they distributed the counterfeit notes mixed in with the real one’s, at a ratio of about 50-50.”

          In October that year the FBI seizure of 300,000 dollars in super notes hidden among cargo on a ship originating in China arrived at the Newark, New Jersey port, marked the first evidence of US fake dollars from North Korea smuggled into the United States.

          In 2005, the US launched a series of countermeasures against North Korea targeting the counterfeit program, money laundering related to drug trafficking and other illicit activities, including criminal indictments in the U.S. and sanctions against North Korean front companies and foreign banks operating in other countries. 

          It signified a change in US policy to avoid public condemnation of North Korea’s government operated criminal syndicates for fear it would thwart the larger national interests of negotiating with the DPRK to halt it’s production, distribution, and export of nuclear technology and sophisticated weaponry that was the ongoing focus priority of US foreign policy for more than a decade.

          In September of 2005, the US imposed sanctions against North Korean front companies, individuals, and a bank in Macau for laundering counterfeit dollars and other proceeds from North Korean criminal enterprises.

           A March 2006 study by the independent Congressional Research Service made a connection between revenues from counterfeit money and other illicit proceeds and the fueling of nuclear proliferation. “The earnings from counterfeiting also could be significant to Pyongyang, and may be used to purchase weapons technology….or even underwrite the DPRK’s nuclear program.” 

          The next month, April 2006, the U.S State Department made public accusations against the DPRK regime that their illicit trade was operating increasingly with networks of international organized crime. North Korean’s “have been apprehended trafficking in narcotics and engaged in other forms of criminal behavior,” concluded the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report released in March 2006, “including passing counterfeit U.S. currency.” 

          That same month a Congressional Research Services report on North Korean Counterfeiting stated: ”These have been carried out in league with criminal organizations around the world."

          It added that revenue from criminal syndicates were essential to keeping the regime in power.

       The United Nations and both the Bush and Obama administrations have shifted to a more confrontational policy regarding the PDRK,  from negotiations on stopping the North Korean program for nuclear and missile development programs, to increased confrontation over their state sponsored criminal activity and financial sanctions directed to punish the North Koreans for weapons development .

       Since President Clinton left office in January 2001 until the present, there has been a marked escalation of hostility between the two sides that has reached a complete breakdown in diplomatic negotiations over the development of the PDRK nuclear and other military program. The U.S. and the United Nations have since created laws, resolutions, and Presidential Executive Orders to mitigate the effectiveness of some of the North Korean international criminal network and its military programs of acquiring nuclear weapons and exporting sophisticated weapons......TO BE CONTINUED

 

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THE CAMBODIAN CONUNDRUM:U.S. drug policy and U.S. foreign policy interests collide By Nate Thayer

THE CAMBODIAN CONUNDRUM

Cambodia represents a case study of what can happen when U.S. drug policy and U.S. foreign policy interests collide

FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL

March 2002

By Nate Thayer

(This article details the way the U.S. war on drugs is actually played out in the real world, the hypocracy betwwen the rhetoric to hunt down and the reality of giving political protection to the powerful narcotics kingpins. U.S. policy is rarely implemented when the high level drug dealers have politcal protection from governments the U.S. has other wise good relations with. While billions are spent going after the small fish, making the U.S. have the highest percentage of people in prison than any other nation in the world--those in charge of narcotics trafficking are not just untouchable, but protected, and, too often,  given the red-carpet treatment by the American government)

On April 8, 1997, Theng Bunma, Cambodia’s most powerful tycoon, upset at “rude” treatment from airline personnel, marched out onto the tarmac of Cambodia’s Poechentong International Airport, pulled out a Russian K-59 automatic pistol and shot out the tires of the Royal Air Cambodge Boeing 737-400 he had just arrived in from Hong Kong.

Bunma complained that the national airline had lost his luggage and refused to adequately reimburse him: “So I said, ‘If you do not pay me that, I will shoot your airplane—for compensation.’” He added: “If they were my employees, I would have shot them in the head.”

Yet Theng Bunma is no bombastic, small-time thug: He is arguably the most powerful man in Cambodia. “In Khmer we say, ‘He makes the rain. He makes the thunder,” said a senior Cambodian official. “Everybody knows that Theng Bunma can do what he wants.”

Theng Bunma intimidates every Cambodian, from noodle vendors to the Prime Minister. As well as, the record shows, the government of the United States.

“We have reliable reporting that he (Theng Bunma) is closely and heavily involved in drug trafficking in Cambodia,” a state department spokesman, Nicholas burns, said in July 1997.

But that public admission by the United States government was years in coming, and came only after an overwhelming and embarrassing mountain of public evidence emerged through the press, forcing Washington to acknowledge the reality it had long tried to suppress: Cambodia has become a classic narco-state.

Theng Bunma is a poster child for the weakness of America’s so-called war on drugs in narco-states like Cambodia. The record shows that the United States government has gone through years of acrobatics to turn a blind eye to Theng Bunma and his benefactors in the Cambodian government.

The U.S. dilemma is simple: successive administrations have been reluctant to implement strict “zero tolerance” policy directives against governments that protect, abet, and benefit from narcotics traffickers. U.S. law requires that they “decertify” these nations as being cooperative in fighting the drug trade, thus cutting off bilateral aid and, potentially, multilateral aid to these governments. But decertification might, officials argue, derail concomitant attempts to develop otherwise good relations with governments they are trying to nurture as “emerging democracies.” So, in Cambodia, the United States has avoided the mandate on the war on drugs.

It’s not that the United States isn’t aware who Bunma is. “Theng Bunma is a well known figure widely reported to be involved in drug trafficking,” a State Department official said in December 2001. But he also noted that Cambodian “cooperation with the Drug Enforcement Administration remains excellent” and said the U.S. government was pleased with “the reorganization of anti-narcotics coordination” within the Cambodian government.

“Cambodia has taken a number of positive steps,” the official said, citing $460,000 that the U.S. government gave in 2001 to the United Nations Drug Control Program to help Cambodian authorities combat drug trafficking.

Still, the U.S. reluctance to recognize the impunity with which Bunma conducts his international criminal enterprises provides a colorful case study of how organized crime, narcotics trafficking and political corruption, when left unchallenged, undermine fundamental tenets of democracy.

By 1997, Bunma represented the height of political and economic legitimacy in Cambodia. He had twice been elected president of the Cambodian Chamber of Commerce. His Cambodian diplomatic passport described him as “economic advisor” to the head of the ruling Cambodian People’s party. And because of his beneficence to royal charities, he held the high honorific title of “Okna,” bestowed upon him by King Sihanouk.

He is also the country’s single biggest taxpayer and landholder and owns its biggest newspaper. His Thai Boon Roong holding company owns banks, airlines, tobacco concessions, logging concessions, shipping fleets, hotels, casinos, and credit card concessions—among many other legitimate businesses.

With offices in Phnom Penh, Bangkok, and Hong Kong, his company is the single biggest corporate entity in Cambodia. Financial records put his net worth in the billions of dollars.

But that is not the source of Theng Bunma’s power. He is a narcotics trafficker. He runs a multi-billion dollar international criminal syndicate that lavishes money and gifts on Cambodia’s leaders. In turn, he is given political protection by the Cambodian government to do just about anything he wants.

Booming Business

Before the 1990’s, Cambodia was not involved in any significant narcotics activity. It was neither a producing country nor a transshipment route. But in 1991, the DEA began noticing—though not yet intercepting—shipments that left Cambodia and headed into a maze of fishing boats. The first drug shipment abroad identified as having originated in Cambodia, according to international investigators, was in 1993.

“In the last two years, we have seen a dramatic increase in Cambodia being used as a heroin smuggling point,” a senior Bangkok-based DEA official said in 1993. “Our intelligence is now picking up four to six shipments a year” of high grade refined heroin with “a minimum of 300 kilograms. The largest we have detected so far is 800 kilos.” (An interception of 300 kilos—660 pounds—of heroin would rank in the top ten drug busts from the Golden Triangle.)

Regarding Cambodian government anti-drug efforts, the DEA official scoffed:” The only thing hampering them is the weather.”

The formula is simple: Criminal syndicates involved in narcotics trafficking seek out week governments that, through the exchange of corruption money for political protection, allow them to conduct their criminal activities. Cambodia in the early 1990’s was just such a case, and organized crime descended to set up shop.

Bunma came to prominence in Cambodia in the late 1980’s. Though born in Cambodia, he carried fake passports and identity cards that identified him as a citizen of Thailand. And he had plenty of money for Cambodia’s political leadership, including both Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh and Second Prime Minister Hun Sen, political enemies who shared power in an uneasy alliance as the result of United Nations-sponsored democratic elections held in 1993.

In February 1994, U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia Charles Twining invited Finance Minister Sam Rainsy and another senior government official to a private luncheon at his residence. In his living room, Twining turned up the music and lowered his voice. According to Rainsy, Twining offered this warning:”Please tell Ranariddh not to get involved with Theng Bunma because we Americans have evidence that Theng Bunma is involved in drug trafficking.”

Twining, when asked to confirm the conversation, said through an embassy spokesman: “We don’t comment about confidential conversations with a host government.”

Airplanes and Limousines

The United States had reason to worry about penetration of the highest levels of the Cambodian government. Bunma’s many gifts to officials were legendary. In 1993, he paid $1.8 million for Ranariddh’s personal King Air-200 plane and gave Hun Sen the Mercedes limousines that ferried him to official functions. When the government was low on funds in 1994, Bunma underwrote the state budget with several million dollars interest-free “loans.” He paid the entire salary of the Cambodian army during their 1994 dry-season offensive against the Khmer Rouge.

According to one American narcotics official, Cambodia in 1994 was a place where criminal syndicates were “using government planes, helicopters, military trucks, navy boats and soldiers to transport heroin.”

It was also in February 1994—the same month that Twining warned the Cambodian government o distance themselves from Bunma—that the U.S. embassy did the opposite: Bunma was issued a U.S. visa so he could attend the Congressional Prayer Breakfast, with president Clinton the keynote speaker.

Bunma was accompanied by Interior Minister Sin Song, a former Khmer Rouge officer who eight months earlier has led a coup attempt. The two Cambodians were given the red-carpet treatment in Washington. They asked for and were granted a meeting with U.S. officials.

Attending the meeting at the Pentagon, were officials from the CIA, the State Department, the Department of Defense and other agencies. Sin Song, to the shock of the Americans, asked formally for U.S. support for another coup d’état. Bunma identified himself as the “financier” of the effort, according to three officials at the meeting.

In July 1994, a coup was indeed launched, but it too failed.  Sin Song was arrested. So were 33 Thai officials, connected to powerful figures within Thai military circles, who had flown in from Bangkok. Their airline tickets on Cambodian International Airlines were all booked under the credit card of Bunma’s Thai Boon Roong holding company, according to the head of the airline. While dozens were jailed, no action was taken against Bunma.

In August 1994, the opposition newspaper Voice of Khmer Youth published a front-page profile of Bunma, accusing him, among other things, of having been arrested for drug smuggling in 1972. The report said he bribed his way out of jail and fled to Thailand. Less than a week after the article appeared, men in military uniforms gunned down its editor in broad daylight on a busy Phnom Penh street. No one has ever been arrested.

A Fine Line

In March 1995, the U.S. government issued its Narcotics Control Strategy Report, in which the State Department walked a fine line regarding Bunma and Cambodia: “Involvement (in the drug trade) of some leading businessmen with access to the highest levels of government is a known concern. There are indications that some high-level businessmen who give financial support to politicians are involved in heroin smuggling.” No names were given, however.

The report, ironically, outlined the effectiveness of “public diplomacy” in the U.S. war on drugs: “It is in the drug trade’s interest to remain behind the scenes working through corrupt government officials who can maintain a façade of probity and respectability. One of the best ways of routing out drug corruption is to expose it to public scrutiny. Corruption is a threat to any nation’s security, for it allows criminal elements to undermine the legitimacy of the state from within.”

Despite these concerns, the U.S. embassy issued Bunma another visa the following month, this time to accompany the Cambodian head of state, Chea Sim, and his official delegation to Washington. Chea Sim dined with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord, held talks with National Security Council officials and met—at the personal request of Ambassador. Twining—Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., among others.

The entire Cambodian government delegation’s rooms at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington during this visit were reserved for and paid in the name of Theng Bunma, according to the hotel.

Just prior to the U.S. visit, the State Department formally, but secretly, put Bunma on the visa ban list, according to department documents, but decided to issue a de facto waiver so that Bunma, described in his diplomatic passport as an “economic advisor,” could accompany Chea Sim. “We did not want to create problems at the start of what was an important bilateral visit,” said one embassy official.

Grounds for Exclusion

Placing Bunma on the visa blacklist, according to the U.S. government document, was based on State Department provision P2C, which cites section 212 of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Act: “ Controlled substance traffickers…who the consular or immigration officer knows or has reason to believe (are) or (have) been illicit traffickers…(are) excludable.” Bunma was also banned from entering the United States under another State Department provision (code “00”) covering other unspecified “derogatory information.”

“According to our records he (Bunma) does not hold a U.S. visa,” a State Department official said in December. “No determination regarding his eligibility to enter the U.S. can be made prior to his application, but we would obviously take all relevant facts into account.”

In June 1995, after Bunma and Chea Sim had left the United States, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns reiterated longstanding official U.S. policy toward nations who fail to move against drug traffickers: “Governments that reward corruption and that allow trafficker influence to penetrate the highest levels of authority will have difficult relations with the United States.” But he was referring to events in Columbia, not Cambodia, and U.S. officials continued to avoid confronting the Cambodian authorities.

In November 1995, the Far Eastern Economic Review published a cover package entitled “Cambodia: Asia’s New Narco-State?” It detailed Bunma’s involvement in drug trafficking and criminal syndicates. A few days later, Hun Sen, a primary beneficiary of Bunma’s largesse, threatened that “a million demonstrators” might take to the streets to protest foreign interference in Cambodian affairs.

“Diplomats should stay indoors,” he warned. “I cannot guarantee their safety.” The United States sent a special envoy, Kent Wiederman, to try to calm the situation. Wiederman, then deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, emerged from a private meeting with Hun Sen commending his “commitment to human rights and democracy.” The French ambassador, who had just ordered the destruction of sensitive documents because of Hun Sen’s threat, reacted to Wiederman’s praising of Hun Sen by commenting: “What planet did he arrive from?”

On January 7, 1996—at the dedication of the new “Hun Sen park” on the Mekong River, paid for by Bunma—Hun Sen announced his government would “never abandon “ Bunma, “who has helped our party.” On the VIP dais were both Bunma and U.S. charge d’affaires Robert Porter.

Our Intelligence Was Clear

Several months later, a U.S. government regional drug conference was held in Bangkok, with attendees from State, the CIA, the DEA and other agencies. The Phnom Penh embassy official who supervised narcotics issues argued with representatives from other U.S. embassies and agencies who questioned why the U.S. embassy in Cambodia was refusing to acknowledge—let alone confront—Bunma as a drug trafficker.

“Our intelligence was clear and overwhelming that Bunma was a major player,” said a U.S. government official from another embassy who attended the conference. “We couldn’t understand what the Phnom Penh embassy was doing.”

The Phnom Penh embassy cited “suspicions but no proof.” Other American officials involved in narcotics policy were outraged.

On March 1, 1997, in its required annual report to Congress on narcotics, the State Department noted that “Cambodia made significant efforts towards taking control of the drug trafficking and transit problems” in 1996.

But according to Cambodian and Interpol records, the seizure by foreign law-enforcement authorities of drugs originating in Cambodia increased by more than 1,000 percent in 1996 over 1995.

The State Department report added that promises by the Cambodian government to crack down on officials involved in narcotic trafficking or corruption: have thus far yielded no concrete indictments or results.”

Yet they again officially “waived” Cambodia from being decertified as a nation that failed to move against drug trafficking.

The FBI Investigates

Later that month, a terrorist grenade attack targeting Cambodia’s main opposition leader, Sam Rainsy, killed 19 and wounded more than 120 on a bright Sunday morning in a peaceful gathering outside the parliament building. Rainsy was long a vocal critic of Bunma and Hun Sen, publicly linking them to the narcotics trade.

Because an American citizen, and employee of the congressionally-funded International republican Institute, was wounded in the attack, the FBI sent a team to Cambodia to assist the investigation.

A state Department spokesman told me on April 14, 1997, that with regard to drug money supporting the Cambodian government, “we are actively looking into reports that corrupt elements of the military and government may be facilitating drug trafficking, but we are not in a position to comment on those reports.”

By May, the FBI’s preliminary findings had concluded that the terrorists were linked not only to Bunma but to Hun Sen himself. They informed U.S. ambassador Kenneth Quinn that their investigation pointed to some of the prime minister’s top aides, including the head of his personal bodyguards.

Further, the FBI told Quinn, the grenade throwers appeared to be part of a paramilitary unit of assassins who were on the payroll of both the government and Bunma and operated out of one of Bunma’s hotels.

The next step, the FBI said, was to interview Hun Sen and give him a polygraph test. Quinn was not pleased at the potential diplomatic ramifications. Within days, he ordered the FBI team to leave Cambodia, citing “threats” to their safety from the Khmer Rouge. The source of the threats? Hun Sen.

“There is no question our investigation was halted by the highest levels because it was leading to Hun Sen,” said one American law enforcement official directly involved.

Quinn and others in the U.S. government privately argued that Cambodia’s stability was already teetering on the brink of civil war. To continue the FBI investigation to its logical conclusion would push the country over the edge, they contended. (Quinn did not respond to my request for comment).

The departure of the FBI team from Phnom Penh, didn’t, of course, help calm things down. It further bolstered those in the Cambodian government who felt, correctly, that they were capable of intimidating the United States and could act with impunity without harmful diplomatic consequences.

Between the growing fractious deterioration within the Cambodian coalition government, the rising international scrutiny focused directly on Hun Sen from the high-profile grenade attack on Sam Rainsy, and the very public international calls for increased pressure to stem the influence of organized-crime syndicates and drug traffickers over the corrupt Cambodian government, the pressure mounted—and the government imploded.

A bloody coup d’état occurred in early July 1997. The 2.8 billion dollar U.N peacekeeping effort, which began with the signing of the 1991 Paris Peace Accords and culminated in the 1993 elections, was now formally a failure. Civil war had returned. The winners of the election—Ranariddh and his supporters—were ousted from power and in exile; the losers—backers of Hun Sen—had full control. The Khmer Rouge, now allied with the ousted government leaders, was fighting from the jungle. And parliament, the press, opposition politics, a coalition government, and other tenets of the “emerging fragile democracy” had collapsed.

Perhaps no one was happier than Theng Bunma. In an interview shortly after the coup, he boasted of having given millions of dollars in cash and gold to Hun Sen to finance it. “For the clash of 6 July 1997, I called Mr. Hun Sen and I talked to him. I gave him one million dollars to do whatever the control the situation,” said Bunma. “He asked me whether I had the money in Cambodia….I said I would send one hundred kilograms of gold in a plane to Cambodia.”

“I say what Hun Sen did was correct,” Bunma said. “Why? One reason. Take the example of my hotel.” Hun Sen “put three tanks and soldiers around to protect it.”

No Formal Linkage

A few days after this interview appeared in the Washington Post, the U.S. government publicly stated, for the first time, that Theng Bunma was a drug trafficker. But State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns hastened to add that the United States “does not have evidence that links Hun Sen himself, personally, to these accusations of drug trafficking.”

“We think the Cambodian government can do a lot more to purge itself of obvious corruption in the government, of obvious linkages between…members of the government and narco-traffickers,” Burns said.

Burns careful separation of Bunma from Hun Sen was no coincidence. It allowed the State Department to avoid the conclusion that the Cambodian government itself was involved in drug trafficking. Such a conclusion would require the United States to decertify Cambodia, with all its implications—including cutting off bilateral aid and voting against loans from the IMF, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and other multilateral aid. That would have been the death knell for a government that derived almost half its budget in 1996 from such sources.

It was the same reason the U.S. government refused to label the “events” of July a coup d’état. That also would require a cessation of aid to Hun Sen’s government.

In June 1998, the Thais issued an arrest warrant for Bunma, who was charged with fraud for allegedly providing false information to obtain a Thai identity card and passport under two different names. In 1999, criminal charges were brought against Bunma in Hong Kong for falsifying immigration documents. Later the prosecution dropped all charges after the Cambodian Foreign Minister, Hor Nam Hong, presented a diplomatic note citing Bunma’s “top honors and ranks” to the Hong Kong court. “Mr. Theng Bunma has claimed diplomatic immunity through his lawyers. The Royal Government of Cambodia has claimed diplomatic immunity on his behalf,” the court said, “The administration has carefully considered the claims and has concluded that Mr. Theng is entitled to immunity from criminal jurisdiction. In those circumstances, the prosecution has decided to drop the charges,” said the Hong Kong government spokesman

And while the Thai arrest warrants remain open, Bunma’s connections in powerful circles in Thailand have prevented any movement to touch him.

On June 18, 2000, Bunma’s daughter was married to a Thai army officer in a lavish ceremony in Phnom Penh. It was hardly a quiet affair.

The Thai military’s Supreme Commander, Gen. Mongol Ampornpisit, chartered a military plane from Bangkok full of top army officers. Hun Sen’s wife was guest of honor and a witness to the engagement ceremony. Cambodia’s defense Minister Gen. Tea Banh, served as the bride-to-be’s sponsor. The Interior Minister, Sar Kheng, also attended. The Bangkok Post reported that “diamond jewelry and stacks of cash” were presented to the bride and groom.

A “Transit Route”

After the coup of 1997, under pressure from Congress, the United States suspended most of its bilateral aid to Cambodia. According to the State Department’s Narcotics Control Strategy Report released in March 2001, “U.S.-Cambodia bilateral narcotics cooperation is hampered by restrictions on official assistance to the central government that have remained in place since the political disturbances of 1997” and “remained suspended in 2000.”

“Cambodia’s principal involvement in the international narcotics trade is as a transit route for Southeast Asian heroin to overseas markets, including…the United States,” the report says.

The report cites Cambodia’s National Authority for Combating Drugs (NACD) as “playing a central role, provid(ing) more effective measures” and said the NACD had the potential “to become an effective policy and coordination tool for the government.”

The same report also noted that in 2000 the deputy police commissioner had alleged that four senior Cambodian government officials—including the former and current heads of the NACD and a deputy commander-in-chief of the Cambodian military—had accepted bribed from narcotics traffickers.

Nevertheless, a few months later, President Bush removed Cambodia from the list of “major Drug-Producing or Transit Countries.” According to the White House,” The only change in the list from the previous year is the removal of Cambodia.”

“I have removed Cambodia from the major’s list,” said President Bush in a prepared statement dated November 1, 2001. “Cambodia was added to the Majors List in 1996 as a transit country for heroin destined for the United States. In recent years, there has been no evidence of any heroin transiting Cambodia coming to the United States.”

Could it be that no one really wants to look for evidence?

 

Expat Returnees pose legal questions for the West By Nate Thayer

Expat Returnees pose legal questions for the West

Phnom Penh Post

Friday 10 March 1995

By Nate Thayer

Some come back for the best of reasons, some are "less than altruistic." Expat returnees are posing hard legal questions for their adopted homelands. Nate Thayer reports.

WHEN Sok Chenda Sophea returned to Cambodia in 1992 after nearly two decades in exile in France, he came with a vision of doing his part to help rebuild his shattered homeland. The 38 year old Chenda, now an under secretary of state for the Ministry of Tourism , cuts a sharp figure with his European tailored suits, fluent French and English, and university and professional background in advertising and tourism promotion. His government salary is the equivalent of US$27 a month.

Likewise, Samnang Siv, 39, quit her US$90,000 a year job working for a biotechnology firm in Massachusetts in the US in April 1994 and returned to Cambodia. Leaving behind her husband and 20 year old son, she now serves as an advisor to the Minister of Tourism, and, with fluency in three languages and her dynamic personality, has been instrumental in assisting foreign companies to come to Cambodia and invest.

"I have been given 40 liters of petrol for my car," she says, and no salary yet. "I just want to contribute my knowledge, my skills, and help my government. I think they need people like me."

In a country whose most decimated commodity after decades of warfare is it's human resources, Sok Chenda and Samnang Siv are exactly what Cambodia needs to get back on it's feet. And there are hundreds of Khmers like them who have brought back their technical expertise, leaving behind "the good life" for reasons that are explained in terms little more complicated than a patriotic commitment to their native lands. "I just want to help my country and people," says Chenda.

But along with the good has also come the bad. Cambodia is choc-a-bloc with scores of corrupt and rapacious ethnic Khmers, many holding foreign citizenship and passports, who have returned since the fall of communism and are now officials in the new government. According to many businessmen and other Cambodian officials, the ranks of government are filled with foreign citizens lining their pockets with kickbacks.

"Oh boy," says Chhang Song shaking his head, "We were puritans compared to these guys."

Chhang, a former Minister of Information in the notoriously corrupt, US-backed Lon Nol regime that fell to Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in 1975, is an American citizen from Washington, DC who recently returned to serve as an advisor to the current government.

The recent phenomena of foreign citizens returning to participate in the rebuilding of their countries since the collapse of communism and the cold war has raised a new set of legal and other complexities for the mostly western governments that the returnees hail from. While Cambodia stands out as a particularly stark example, it is also increasingly common in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and the Baltic states.

A recent Prime Minister of Bosnia Herzogovina is an American. And in 1992, when an American citizen was chosen as defence minister of the newly independent Lithuania, the U.S. government forced him to make a choice between his passport or the job. A recent Foreign Minister in Armenia was also an American. A Wisconsin politician, Rudy Perpich, was considering accepting the post of Prime Minister of Croatia in 1991. But when U.S. authorities informed him they could not guarantee that he could maintain his American citizenship, he declined the position, according to U.S. diplomats.

But nothing compares to Cambodia. Senior officials who are citizens of foreign countries include the Queen, the First Prime Minister, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Interior, Education, Agriculture, Rural Development, Women's Affairs, Tourism, Information, and even Culture.

As well, the head of the powerful Cambodian Development Council, at least 30 members of Parliament, numerous provincial governors, secretaries and under secretaries of state, civil servants, ambassadors, and military generals hold foreign citizenships.

The bulk of these officials hold French, American, or Australian passports, but Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and Switzerland are also represented. Most fled on the heels of the communist victory in 1975 or through refugee camps on the Thai border set up after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in late 1978.

"On the one hand we want to encourage them to come back to help reconstruct their country," says a US diplomat, "This is a good thing. But there are complications."

While American law states that a US citizen cannot take an oath of allegiance to a foreign government, the law is rarely enforced. "The policy has shifted over the years since the end of the cold war," said a US government lawyer familiar with the issue. "We now approach these on a case by case basis."

One reason, say diplomats from several governments, is that many of the senior officials in the newly emerging democracies would not return to help reconstruct their homeland if forced to give up their foreign citizenship. " The political situation remains unstable during the transition period in many of these countries. They fled for their lives to exile once before, and they want to keep that option open," said a Phnom Penh based diplomat.

A US government internal cable sent to all embassies in February offered instructions on how to deal with U.S. citizens serving foreign governments. It cited several "potentially expatriating acts" which include "joining another country's armed forces" or "taking an oath of allegiance to another government". Scores of Cambodian-Americans fit that bill. It also requires embassies, under section 349 of the US Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 , to inform Washington of any "high level official in a foreign government in a policy making position" who is an American citizen.

But US diplomats say that the courts have now interpreted that Americans can serve in foreign governments as long as they had "no intent of relinquishing citizenship." In effect, it is largely up to the American citizens, according to current US government legal interpretation, whether they choose to give up their citizenship when they join the ranks of a foreign government.

Indeed, foreign governments find benefits in having their citizens in positions of influence. It does not hurt Australia, for instance, to have the Cambodian Foreign Minister hold Australian citizenship. Nor is it detrimental for Australia-which dominates the telecommunications industry in Cambodia-to have Australian citizens in charge of the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications.

The French, who have campaigned strongly for the reemergence of Francophone in Indochina, can only be pleased to have the Cambodian Minister of Culture a French citizen. And the Americans have used Cambodia's top cop, an American citizen, You Hokry who hails from Maryland and serves as minister of interior, to get US citizens in a pickle extra attention.

But there are numerous potential minefields in this new post cold war phenomena. It is well known that many Cambodian government officials who hold dual nationalities are lining their pockets with kickbacks, and their reasons for returning to Cambodia may be less than altruistic. Some Cambodian officials believe that many are here to cash in and have little interest in remaining in Cambodia.

But if they are US citizens, they must file US taxes. "The law is clear. You must declare all your income, whether illegal or legal," said a spokesman for the United States Internal Revenue Service. The US tax laws are often used to collar bad guys involved in more difficult-to-prove criminal activities, such as drug running. As an example the IRS spokesman cited Al Capone, the famous US gangster of the 1930's, who was ultimately jailed for tax evasion. It is common practice for Cambodian government officials to receive kickbacks, and rumors abound of the millions of dollars being pocketed by various officials.

Current Finance Minister Kiet Chhon, estimated that lost revenues from corruption is about US$100 million a year-or more than one-third of internally generated revenue.

"It is shameful," he said.

Senior government ministers privately grouse about a number of their colleagues who are on the take. One example is over a recent US$1.3 billion contract awarded to a little known Malaysian firm, Ariston, for gambling casinos and related development projects in the seaside resort of Sihanoukville. Two senior government officials say they have "proof" that another senior government official-who holds an American passport-received a US$10 million kickback for awarding the contract to Ariston. They say that other companies, including the American hotel firm Hyatt, who bid for the contract "never had a chance" and the corrupt process did "immeasurable damage to our reputation among investors."

Former Finance Minister Sam Rainsy, sacked last fall, and the country's most aggressive anti-graft fighter, said on March 2: " I have spoken with one of the other bidders which did not win the contract...They have been asked ten million dollars in cash. They (were told ) that 'if you give us 10 million US dollars the contract is for you.'" Senior government sources say the official who received the kickback is an American citizen and the company in question which was denied the contract was an American firm. American companies are prohibited by American law from paying bribes to foreign governments, but it is unclear whether American citizens working for foreign governments can receive them without breaking American law.

"In the last few months, the Royal Government of Cambodia has signed a number of contracts with foreign private companies in circumstances which are, to say the least, dubious. These dubious contracts are seriously harmful to the country, the administration of which has become more chaotic and less transparent," said Rainsy. He himself is a French citizen, an elected Member of Parliament, and regularly rates as one of the Kingdom's most popular politicians in public opinion polls.

Furthermore, it remains untested, say legal experts, whether foreign nationals holding senior government portfolios could be charged under criminal and civil laws that apply to the country they hold citizenship in. Of particular concern could be such positions as Minister of Interior or senior officers in the Ministry of Defence who hold American or other passports and ultimately are responsible for the conduct of their subordinates, human rights lawyers point out.

In Cambodia, both the police and military have been repeatedly implicated in human rights abuses including torture and murder in recent years. Rarely, despite cases with overwhelming evidence, are the offenders arrested or prosecuted. The U.S. Torture Victims Protection Act does allow for American authorities to prosecute American or other citizens implicated in torture overseas.

Amnesty International, in a report to be released on 14 March, a copy of which has been obtained by the Post said "members of the armed forces and police are able to impose their will on the civilian population with impunity, committing acts of violence including deliberate and arbitrary killings and extra judicial executions....the Cambodian authorities appear to lack the political will and ability to bring these violators to justice." The report, and an earlier one released by the United Nations Center for Human Rights, cite numerous cases of torture, including military officers involved in eating the livers and gall bladders of their prisoners, and cutting off the heads of prisoners who are alive and under interrogation. The government has, to date, refused to arrest the officers involved.

"Theoretically, they could be charged with, say, conspiracy to obstruct justice," said one human rights lawyer, citing superior officers - who hold foreign citizenship - of subordinates involved in torture. The Cambodian Co-Minister of Interior and scores of senior officers in both the national police apparatus and the military hold US passports.

But "There would have to be some act committed on American soil," insisted a US government lawyer responsible for analyzing such issues. "In general, U.S. law does not follow them around."

But Cambodia's reputation for political thuggery has even spilled over to American soil. Last year, a Cambodian general-an American citizen- was back in California and allegedly threatened a California-based, Khmer language newspaper editor with arrest and death if he returned to Cambodia because of articles critical of the new government, according to complaints filed with U.S. authorities by the newspaper.

U.S. government sources say the general was back in the U.S. to take care of his annual tax obligations, when he read the articles that offended him.

And last month, when an American relief worker in a remote province suffered a heart attack, an official of the Civil Aviation Authority refused to allow an emergency medical airplane run by a non-profit Christian relief organization to take off from Phnom Penh until "fees" were paid. The Civil Aviation official is an American citizen. Could an American citizen be charged with relevant criminal or civil complaints-such as extortion-committed against another American citizen, even though the criminal act was committed on foreign soil? Such questions are largely, so far, in uncharted territory.

"To tell you the truth, we don't like to talk about it. It's a headache," said one American diplomat.

Thai Border: A Wild West of Anarchy By Nate Thayer

Thai Border: A Wild West of Anarchy

By Nate Thayer

Phnom Penh Post

Friday, 20 November 1992

BANGKOK, Thailand-Thai officials, black market traders, and U.N. workers who have operated on the Thai-Cambodian border for years say U.N. efforts to impose economic sanctions against the Khmer Rouge will be virtually impossible to enforce.

The U.N. hopes to pressure the Khmer Rouge into rejoining the deadlocked peace process, in part by sealing the 830-kilometer border, where Khmer Rouge timber and gem concessions add millions of dollars a year to the coffers of the powerful guerrilla faction.

Except for a strip of only a few kilometers near the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet, the central government is not in control of most of the border, from the Gulf of Thailand to Laos.

Aside from the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian-Thai frontier is home to a powerful plethora of shady businessmen, rebel groups, warlords, fortune seekers, gangsters, and assorted bad guys who have operated without serious hindrance for generations.

Since the days of the anti-French resistance in the 1940s, Khmer rebels and outlaws have used the sanctuary of the mountain and jungle escarpment to fight whoever was in power in Phnom Penh. Scores of other warlords have maintained small armies that control trading routes.

Since 1979 the border has been home to the three Khmer resistance factions. The signing of peace accords in October 1991 resulted in the factions' foreign backers cutting off all supplies, forcing the groups to seek revenue elsewhere.

Now that there is "peace" in Cambodia, some of the rebel armies have embarked on an orgy of lucrative trading. No longer under the control of their nominal commanders, dozens of separate military units are carving out control of their own plots of Cambodia, selling everything from toothpaste to surface-to-air missiles. While some of the trading ends up in the central coffers of these groups, most is controlled by loosely-monitored bands of independent operators.

With the peace plan mandating that the Cambodian armies disarm and turn their weapons over to the United Nations, many of the soldiers have opted for a more profitable alternative. The frontier has turned into one of the biggest arms bazaars in Asia, with thousands of weapons being sold in recent months.

Arms traders recently offered the Phnom Penh Post a selection of SAM-7 surface-to-air missiles at 280,000 Baht (U.S. $11,200) each. Tanks, helicopters, artillery, and assorted light weaponry and ammunition are also available.

Intelligence officials and black market arms dealers say that the border has attracted representatives of a number of groups from around Asia looking for weapons. They say that the notorious Burmese drug warlord Khun Sa recently purchased two surface-to-air missiles, as did anti-Burmese Karen rebels. Anti-government guerrillas from the Philippines and Sri Lanka have also made inquiries, as have representatives from Sikh separatist organizations in India and Muslim separatists from the Burmese-Bangladeshi border.

"I think you should buy them," said the arms dealer with a look of alarm. "Some of the people I am dealing with seem to be very dangerous people. It is better that you have them all.''

Black market traders on the Thai border, who operate easily with Cambodian guerrillas as well as Thai officials, say that processed heroin is available for sale, as are ancient Khmer artifacts looted from temples, and even uranium.

The border has also turned into a freeway for cars stolen in Thailand and slipped over the border, where hundreds of vehicles have showed up in Phnom Penh to be openly sold in the markets. Some are seen with military license plates of the Phnom Penh regime attached to make transport across western Cambodia less difficult at checkpoints.

Across from southeast Thailand, more than a 100,000 Thais and Burmese have crossed the border to seek their fortune in Khmer Rouge-controlled ruby mines, a major source of income for the faction. The miners say that they can carry out handfuls of gems worth millions of baht in their pocket, and they laugh at the thought that the blue-bereted UN peacekeepers will be able to stop them.

Thai Minister of Parliament Thanit Traivut, who represents the border province of Trat adjoining the Khmer Rouge-controlled gem mines, told the Post that 57 Thai companies now operate in the ruby area, with nearly 1,000 earth-moving vehicles. He said that U.N. sanctions could cause the companies, which have invested more than 3 billion Thai baht on equipment, to lose their shirts.

One rai (1,600 square meters) of earth is leased to the mostly small companies at a cost of 2 million baht (U.S. $40,000). Whole divisions of Khmer Rouge fighters have turned into "economic cadre" to provide security, build roads, and check permission papers of the Thai miners. The miners say that no Cambodians are allowed to work in the area.

On the northern borders, controlled by the notorious one-legged Khmer Rouge commander Ta Mok, Thai logging companies said to be linked with senior members of the Thai military have paid millions of dollars for the right to cut logs in Cambodia.

The Thai government has sold the rights to 17 entry points to Thai companies who in turn are given the right to tax logs coming into Thailand. Senior Thai officials are reportedly on the receiving end of some of the profit.

According to traders, the highly-secret Thai intelligence unit known as 838, which was responsible for covert liaison and weapons supplies to the Khmer Rouge during the 13-year war against the Vietnamese, receives 40 baht (U.S. $1.60) for each cubic meter of wood that crosses into Thailand.

Through a complicated procedure of payoffs, Thai loggers pay fees of around 5,000 baht (U.S. $197) per cubic meter for soft wood, and considerably higher for hardwoods. Several Thai companies, known to be controlled by Thai organized-crime groups, are involved in the logging concessions, with the sanction of several well-known Thai political figures.

Thanit Traivut, in an interview with the Post, said that UNTAC officials have asked Thailand to be prepared to close the border by the end of the year. He said that Thailand "will request to postpone [implementation of sanctions] until next year in order to allow Thai companies to recoup their losses.''

Furthermore, the Phnom Penh regime is involved in buying logs from their enemies-the Khmer Rouge-paying fees to the Khmer Rouge in many areas in order to transport logs through Cambodia, often to the port at Kompong Som. This adds further complications to the effectiveness of U.N. sanctions, which are not directed at the Phnom Penh regime.

In case U.N. officials are looking for reference points to study in their effort to impose the sanctions, they need look no further than the Thai border to the west with Burma.

There Khun Sa, reputed to be the world's number one opium trader and with a U.S. arrest warrant à la Manuel Noriega on his head, controls a section of Burma from which he exports the drug through Thailand.

Despite the efforts of hundreds of U.S. drug and intelligence agents, and with the stated support of both the Thai government and military, the flow of opium and its derivative heroin continues virtually unabated.

One Thai weapons trader, reflecting on the reaction of the Khmer Rouge if the United Nations attempts to cut its purse strings, said: "Right now the Khmer Rouge do not hurt the U.N. But if the U.N. does that, they will have to kill them. You know, they don't like foreigners anyway."

Another Thai arms dealer, with long experience running weapons through Thai borders with several neighboring countries, said: "It will be easy to order sanctions, but impossible to enforce. The order just comes from air-conditioned rooms. But in the field, too many people are making money."

POL POT: THE END By Nate Thayer

POL POT: THE END

COVER STORY

Far Eastern Economic Review

By Nate Thayer

August 7, 1997

In a stunning journalistic achievement, REVIEW correspondent Nate Thayer comes face-to-face with the elusive Pol Pot, architect of Cambodia’s killing fields. In a story packed with exclusive photos, Thayer describes Pol Pot’s jungle “trial,” and reveals the turmoil within the Khmer Rouge. Separate stories profile Pol Pot, introduce the new Khmer Rouge leadership, and shed new light on Cambodia’s deadly July coup and the suspected drug baron who financed it.

BROTHER NUMBER ZERO

On Other Pages:

19: Pol Pot Unmasked

21: New Face of the Khmer Rouge

22: Casualties of Hun Sen’s Coup

23: The Money Man Behind the Coup

24: On History’s Front Line

Pol Pot caused the deaths of more than a million Cambodians. But when he turned on his longtime military commander, Ta Mok, that was one Cambodian too many

By Nate Thayer in Anlong Veng, Cambodia

After a series of furtive rendezvous, using coded messages over mobile phones, I slipped into one of the most impenetrable, malarial-ridden and landmine-strewn jungles of the world: Khmer Rouge-controlled northern Cambodia. I was hoping to interview Pol Pot, one of the century’s most notorious and elusive mass murderers.

What I did not fathom, as I entered the Khmer Rouge stronghold of Anlong Veng at 12:12 p.m. on July 25, was that I was about to witness nothing less than history.

“Long live! Long live! Long live the new strategy!” hundreds of voices chanted in unison. The clenched fists of the crowds pumped toward the sky, as a smiling middle-aged Khmer Rouge cadre led me toward an open-air mass meeting hall. Old artillery pieces and a captured Russian tank stood nearby.

“Crush! Crush! Crush! Pol Pot and his clique!” shouted the crowd on cue as we approached, their fists striking down towards the ground.

There, slumped in a simple wooden chair, grasping a long bamboo cane and a rattan fan, an anguished old man,  frail and struggling to maintain his dignity, was watching his life vision crumble in utter, final defeat.

This was how the “people’s tribunal’ began for Pol Pot, reviled around the world for personally orchestrating a reign of terror that left more than a million human beings dead and shattered the lives of many millions more.

The crude podium held a microphone, and crackling loudspeakers—powered by a car battery lying on the earthen floor—began to spew humiliating public denunciations of the long-time Khmer Rouge leader.

A shocking number of participants stood on crude wooden stumps, sat in home-made wheelchairs, or were missing eyes—sacrifices to the revolutionary cause of Pol Pot. Others, their arms blown off by landmines, were unable to join the frequent clapping as speaker after speaker denounced the man once venerated as “Brother Number One.”

“Our ultimate goal today is that the international community should understand that we are no longer Khmer Rouge and we are not Pol Potists!,” roared Ta Neou, the governor of the approximately 60,000 civilians who live in the area, which was under Pol Pot’s control until weeks ago.

The carefully orchestrated performance evoked the image of a grainy, black-and-white film clip from China’s Cultural Revolution. But the message was starkly different. “Long live the emergence of the democracy movement!” shouted individuals in the crowd, periodically interrupting leaders offering carefully crafted speeches at the microphone. A chorus would repeat the slogan, followed by prolonged applause by the roughly 500 participants. “Crush! Crush! Crush! Pol Pot and his murderous clique!”

Pol Pot sat alone, near three other manacled loyalists. Many in the crowd of women, children, and uniformed guerrillas seemed more interested at gazing at the first Westerner they had ever seen than in watching the traumatized old man sitting alone in a chair.

Each speaker, seemingly chosen to represent a sector of society—a farmer, an intellectual, a soldier, a woman—got up to denounce and humiliate Pol Pot “and his clique.”

Pol Pot often seemed close to tears as the vitriol was unleashed. In contrast,  three  younger army commanders put on trial alongside him had menacing, almost arrogant expressions, staring coldly into the eyes of the speakers, the crowd and the visiting reporter.

“We have sacrificed everything for the sake of the movement,” Ta Neou continued, “Our parents and all of us are children of peasants and farmers, we have sacrificed everything for the sake of the movement, but at the end we kill each other.”

Pol Pot, who ruled Cambodia for more than three years and ruled the Khmer Rouge for more than three decades, is genuinely finished. He has been denounced and imprisoned by his own movement. Not for the 1975-1978 Cambodian genocide, but for turning on his own comrades in an attempted purge in June, according to speakers at his trial.

Those commanders, led by longtime military commander Ta Mok, struck back and took Pol Pot prisoner after the purge failed. The tribunal sentenced Pol Pot to life imprisonment, but ruled out turning him over to international courts, where he could face charges of crimes against humanity.

The Khmer Rouge of Anlong Veng have good reason to try and distance themselves from the notorious Pol Pot. They want to attract international support for their struggle to unseat Cambodian premier Hun Sen. That is why they let a foreign reporter witness the show trial, the first time a journalist had entered Anlong Veng and left alive.

Yet lengthy interviews with Khmer Rouge cadre left little doubt that his ouster was authentic. Still, the cadres clearly saw it as a tragedy, and continued to treat the 72-year-old Pol Pot with Gentle respect.

The fall of Pol Pot underlines the view that the Khmer Rouge movement that ruled Cambodia in the 1970’s essentially no longer exists. The original leaders have largely been replaced by younger ones less steeped in communist ideology, and the movement has fractured into numerous factions, many of whom are allied with the mainstream political parties contesting power in Phnom Penh.

“It no longer makes any sense whatsoever to call whatever remains a Khmer Rouge movement,” says Stephen Heder, a Cambodian Scholar at the University of London’s School of Advanced International Studies. “Because of the realignment of forces over the last several years, the concept of a Khmer Rouge movement as we know it no longer has any meaning.”

But that doesn’t mean the Khmer Rouge have become irrelevant in Cambodia. The aggressive courting of Khmer Rouge factions by Cambodia’s rival premiers, Hun Sen and Prince Norodom Ranariddh, was central to the July 5-6 coup in Phnom Penh. In fact, the REVIEW has learned, the Khmer Rouge finalized their alliance with Ranariddh’s Funcinpec party on July 4. Worried that the balance of power would be tipped in his rival’s favour, Hun Sen ousted Ranariddh the next day.

 

Photo: Nate Thayer

Pol Pot also opposed those negotiations, and it led to his downfall, according to Khmer Rouge cadre interviewed in Anlong Veng. Virtually the entire leadership favoured a political deal with the royalist Funcinpec, but Pol Pot was opposed, said Gen. Khmer Nuon, who is now the Khmer Rouge’s army chief of staff.

“Domestically and internationally, Pol Pot has his own personal problems to take care of,” Khem Nuon said, referring to Pol Pot’s blood-soaked reputation. “He has no way out. That is why he keeps dragging this movement toward the darkness.”

The visit to Anlong Veng opened an unprecedented window into the inner workings of one of the world’s most secretive guerrilla movements. The Khmer Rouge have splintered dramatically since July 1996, when forces in western Cambodia, representing almost half the movement, broke with Pol Pot’s northern forces headquartered at Anlong Veng. The western split was headed by Ieng Sary, Pol Pot’s brother-in-law and longtime comrade-in-arms.

Khem Nuon said the western split was aimed against Pol Pot himself, but the 72-year-old leader blamed his top leaders—Ta Mok, Nuon Chea, and Son Sen—for losing the west by failing to heal the rift. “ So Pol Pot asked Mao—over there,” Khem Nuon explained, pointing to a young Khmer Rouge cadre standing listening to the interview,” to shoot Ta Mok and burn him—last October—to leave no evidence.”

The grim-faced young cadre, who looked capable of such a deed, nodded in agreement with his commander. But he didn’t carry out Pol Pot’s order. Because Ta Mok, who is known to the outside world as “The Butcher,” is immensely popular with the troops and civilians under his control. So Much so, Khem Nuon said, that Pol Pot saw him as a threat. “All the combatants here are under Ta Mok and they really like him a lot because he is so helpful to them in terms of standard of living. He built roads, bridges, dams within this area,” Khem Nuon said. “This is the reason Pol Pot wanted to get rid of Ta Mok.”

Pol Pot turned to two senior military field commanders, Gen. Sarouen and Gen. San, and attempted to consolidate power against Ta Mok. He called a mass meeting on February 25 of this year, and had them declared the new political and military leaders, replacing Ta Mok, Khem Nuon said. “What is the main cause that steered our people to rise up against Pol Pot? One, the leadership and the grip on power by Pol Pot was so long. All the power was within his hands,” Khem Nuon said. “Pol pot took decisions without even consulting the top leadership.”

About the same time, according to Cambodian government sources and diplomats, secret negotiations accelerated between envoys of Prince Ranariddh and elements of the Khmer Rouge in Anlong Veng. Most of these efforts were conducted by Ta Mok loyalists—often behind Pol Pot’s back—and the top royalist military commander, Gen. Nyek Bun Chhay. By May, the faction agreed in principle to join in alliance.

Increasingly isolated, Pol Pot launched a desperate attempt on June 9 to scuttle the peace deal by purging Ta Mok and other top leaders. That night, longtime defence minister Son Sen and 14 of his relatives, including a five-year-old child, were shot dead by Sarouen’s men, according to both Khmer Rouge and intelligence sources. “On the 9^th of June at 12:15 a.m., Pol Pot issued a direct order to take two Toyota pick-up trucks loaded with 20-30 soldiers to kill Mr. Son Sen,” said Khem Nuon.

The killings sparked several days of turmoil, with commanders fleeing into the jungle in disarray. But they rallied behind Ta Mok and trapped Pol Pot and his band of 300 remaining supporters on June 15, Khem Nuon said. Four days later, they had surrendered.

With Pol Pot neutralized, the remaining Khmer Rouge leadership moved rapidly forward to finalize a secret, tactical, political and military alliance with Ranariddh’s political faction. The two factions were allies against Hun Sen’s Phnom Penh government in a decade-long guerrilla war before Cambodia’s 1991 peace treaty.

The deal was closed July 4 in Anlong Veng. Hun Sen, learning about Funcinpec’s new alliance through his agents, launched his deadly coup the next morning, according to Cambodian political cadres and Asian intelligence sources. It has tipped Cambodia, which enjoyed four years of relative peace after 1993 United nations-sponsored elections, back into the throes of the warfare that seems to define this nation of 10 million people.

Hun Sen has claimed the entire tribunal was stage-managed by Pol Pot himself. Khem Nuon paints a very different picture, but he did say that Pol Pot had ‘consented’ to having a foreign reporter witness the mass meeting, as a way of acknowledging his guilt for moving against his comrades.

“ Pol Pot did himself confess to me clearly, after his arrest,” Khem Nuon said. “ When I met him the first time, he embraced me and burst into tears and said: ‘It is the right thing comrade that this has happened,’ and then he cried. It was on June 21, 1997, and he told me: ‘I am wrong, comrade, all the mistakes were made by me, alone,’ and then he cried.”

“ Pol Pot told me that this is the end of his life, he has nothing left, but he begged me to allow him to live,” Khem Nuon continued. “ I also want to make clear that if Pol Pot was vested with any credibility or respect, he would not have shown up and let you see him like you just did today.”

: I told him this morning that you were going to be here,” to witness his condemnation, Khem Nuon told the REVIEW. “ I told him that we want to prove to the world that we no longer want to associate ourselves with him. Then he consented.”

As the “People’s Tribunal of Anlong Veng” continued into its second hour, the new leaders somberly paced on the outskirts of the crowd, concerned by the deteriorating health of a now clearly weak and traumatized Pol Pot. Guerrilla officials acknowledged that Pol Pot suffered from serious heart disease and high blood pressure long before the events of recent days.

Khem Nuon said relatives and friends of those killed on June 9-10 wanted the blood of Pol Pot and his co-defendants San, Khon, and Sarouen—said to have carried out the murders on his orders. “ You notice that here today nobody was allowed to carry a weapon to this meeting, otherwise they would have been killed by the mob already,” Khem Nuon said.

But the cadre who overthrew Pol Pot seemed anguished as they watched the white-haired old man, who was dressed in loose cotton clothes with a blue-and-white Cambodian scarf looped around his neck. Confusion and sadness were etched on men who had spent their entire adult lives following Pol Pot from Cambodia’s jungles to its capital and back again.

“ We have put an end to the leadership which has betrayed our organization and the people,” Mak Ben, a bespectacled French-educated economist, dressed in a green Chinese-style military uniform, said from the podium. “ They are completely gone, as of right now, the Pol Pot regime has ended.”

“ Having acknowledged the betrayal of our group in recent months by Pol Pot and his clique,” the loudspeaker roared into the nearby forest, then Pol Pot’s crimes were read out. They included the murder of Son Sen, the attempted murder and ‘detention’ of Ta Mok and Nuon Chea, and “destroying the policy of national reconciliation,” a reference to the attempt to block the Funcinpec deal.

“These are the criminal acts—the betrayal by Pol Pot and his clique—against the people, the armed forces, and our cadre. In conclusion, we all decide to condemn and sentence this clique to life imprisonment.”

He immediately was helped up, unable to walk unassisted, by a guard in Chinese-style military fatigues. “ get someone under his other arm, get him more help,” Khem Nuon ordered. Patting his heart, Khem Nuon added: “ I am worried that he may die from the stress.”

Some people respectfully bowed, as if to royalty, as Pol Pot walked 25 meters to a waiting vehicle. “ I said what I said with a very heavy heart,” said Tep Kunnal, an emerging political leader, as he walked slowly away with his head bowed after denouncing Pol Pot. “ It is very, very difficult for me, but it had to be done. Before there were two dangers for Cambodia. Pol Pot and the Vietnamese puppet Hun Sen. Now there is only one.”

The cadres suggested that I ask Pol Pot questions while he was led away, but balked at translating when told the questions I wanted to pose. “ I cannot ask such a question to the leaders. You must ask them in Khmer yourself. It is better.”

Pol Pot, perhaps never to be seen alive again, was helped into a Toyota Landcruiser with tinted windows—captured booty from UN peacekeeping soldiers prior to the 1993 elections. Seconds after the trial ended, a torrential rain began.

 

POL POT: THE END

COVER STORY

 

POL POT UNMASKED: He was obsessed with secrecy and total control

By Nate Thayer in Bangkok, Thailand

Far Eastern Economic Review

August 7, 1997

Pol Pot, whose name is synonymous with the Cambodian genocide, exercized total control over the Khmer Rouge for more than three decades from behind a wall of impenetrable secrecy.

By putting him on trial, his former comrades-in-arms have unmasked a man who shunned exposure, even when he was premier of Cambodia. They have also broken the vice-like grip on the movement he retained through a combination of charisma and utter ruthlessness.

Born to a peasant family in Kampong Thom on May 18t, 1925, Saloth Sar—Pol Pot’s real name—was educated at a Buddhist monastery before entering technical school in Phnom Penh. His clandestine life began in his teens, when he joined the anti-French resistance movement in Indochina during World War ll.  By 1946, he was a member of the underground Indochinese Communist Party.

In 1949, he won a scholarship to study radio electronics in Paris, where he was active in radical student politics. His studies, apparently, took a back seat and he failed his exams three years in a row. He spent one summer picking grapes in Tito’s Yugoslavia, where he may have acquired his radical communism that challenged Soviet-style orthodoxy.

It was also during his sojourn in France that he charmed Khieu Ponnary, whose sister was married to Ieng Sary, another future Khmer Rouge leader.

Returning to Phnom Penh with no degree, Pol Pot taught at a private secondary school and wrote articles for left-wing publications that he signed, “The Original Khmer.” His underground activities went farther than that, however. He became a senior member of the Cambodian Communist Party at its founding congress in 1960, and was named secretary in 1963 after the mysterious death of Tou Samouth.

It was then that his secret life became his whole life. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, no longer content to belittle the Cambodian communists as “me Khmer Rouges”—“My Red Khmers”—was stepping up police pressure. Pol Pot and his comrades fled into the jungle, leaving no trace. “When a secret is kept secret, 50% of the battle is won,” Pol Pot once said.

Twelve years later, after fighting first Sihanouk’s army and then American-backed troops of Gen. Lon Nol, the battle was won. On April 17, 1975, Pol Pot’s army of peasants, clad in simple black-cotton uniforms, marched into Phnom Penh. Finally, Pol Pot could put his ideas into action.

The result was one of the most brutal and disastrous social experiments in history. After emptying the capital at gunpoint, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge tried to transform Cambodia into a communal agrarian utopia, but instead turned the country into a vast slave-labour camp. More than one million Cambodians—out of a population of some 7 million—were executed, tortured, or starved to death under the Khmer Rouge reign of terror.

The educated were the first to be slain. But later, as the reign of terror turned on itself, waves of purges decimated the ranks of Khmer Rouge cadres. Anyone who could pose a threat to Pol Pot was killed.

Through it all, Pol Pot stayed behind his mask. When it was announced in 1976 that Pol Pot had been named premier of “Democratic Kampuchea,” as the country was renamed, American intelligence officials—who had been fighting the Khmer Rouge for years—could not figure out who he was.

“Secret work is fundamental,” Nuon Chea, the party’s number 2, told a visiting Danish delegation in 1977, the only time Nuon Chea was seen in public.

Nevertheless, a personality cult started to spring up around him in May 1978, pushed by cadres eager to show their loyalty as purges spiraled. Tens of thousands of Khmer Rouge cadres were executed as Pol Pot eliminated competition. His power was clearly growing, Chandler says: whereas he was addressed as ‘Elder Brother Pol” or “Brother Number One” soon after taking power, that gradually changed to “Uncle Secretary” or “party centre” to “Leading Apparatus” to, finally, the “High Organization.”

Pol Pot’s radical ideas were nourished by a five month sojourn in China in 1965-66, when the country was in ferment leading up to the Great proletarian Cultural Revolution. His admiration for the Gang of Four was mutual: Pol Pot went to China after his 1975 victory and met Mao Zedong, who congratulated him on his speedy revolution.

While Pol Pot’s thinking may have been influenced by his foreign experiences, at its root it is deeply Khmer. And in Pol Pot’s case, that means a visceral hatred of Vietnam, the much larger neighbor that seized the Mekong Delta from the medieval Khmer empire. Egged on by that HATRED, Khmer Rouge guerrillas carried out raids into southern Vietnam, triggering the December 1978 Vietnamese invasion.

Pol Pot again fled into the jungle, after ruling for three years, eight months, and 20 days. Reverting to form, he took the code name “81.” Until July 25, 1997, he hadn’t been seen by foreign journalists since 1979, when he was filmed by Naoki Mabuchi, a Japanese photographer with close ties to the Khmer Rouge.

Pol Pot officially retired from his official posts in 1985, but there was never any question that remained in total control of the movement. Cadres who have heard him speak say he is an amazing orator, making speeches so resonant in revolutionary and patriotic spirit that they bring his listeners to tears. Yet he refrained from appearing publicly.

Now, it appears Pol Pot has lost both his mask and his powers. That doesn’t auger well for the movement he helped found, and which is now in danger of segmenting further. As Nuon Chea said in his 1977 interview: “The leadership apparatus must be defended at any price…as long as the leadership is there, the party will not die.”

 

POL POT: THE END

COVER STORY

NEXT GENERATION: Khmer Rouge put on a new face

By Nate Thayer in Anlong Veng, Cambodia

Far Eastern Economic Review

August 7, 1997

A tiger, according to Gen. Khem Nuon, can indeed change its stripes. And if foreigners doubt that the Khmer Rouge movement has  done just that, he said, they should come and see for themselves in the jungles of Northern Cambodia.

That is the message that the movement’s new military chief-of-staff wanted to send in an unprecedented interview at his headquarters of Anlong Veng. “ From now on, we are going to open this area free for foreigners, so they can see the real facts about our movement,” he said.

Anyone who accepts that invitation will find a mixed picture. Clearly, the purge of Pol Pot and a generational transfer of leadership has profoundly changed the secretive movement. In the interview, Khem Nuon spoke with openness about the past “crimes” and future plans, and he showed no interest in communist ideology.

At the same time, however, the group continues to sound the drum of rabid anti-Vietnamese ultra nationalism, and remains bent on the overthrow of Cambodian premier Hun Sen. Some of the older leaders who orchestrated the 1975-78 Cambodian reign of terror still wield influence, and younger cadres talk of “democracy” rang hollow against the backdrop of a Cultural revolution-style show trial.

The movement is opening up for a reason: It wants to build alliances both within the country and overseas for its crusade against Hun Sen and the “Vietnamese aggressors” that it claims are still occupying the country. Specifically, it wants to join forces with Funcinpec—whose leader co-Premier Prince Norodom Ranariddh, was ousted by Hun Sen in a July 5-6 coup—as well as with other political parties opposed to Hun Sen.

But Khem Nuon and other new leaders are aware that if they’re going to have any hope of winning Western support, they have to break with the movement’s blood-soaked past. “ The reason we put an end to the Pol Pot regime is because we want the international community to see and help us in our struggle with other movements in order to fight against Hun Sen and the Vietnamese,” Khem Nuon said.

To an international community that equates the Khmer Rouge with genocide, it’s going to be a hard sell. But Khem Nuon says the Khmer Rouge—or, more precisely, Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea Party—no longer exists. The movement is now called the National Solidarity Party.

“ If they still call me Khmer Rouge they haven’t seen what I have just done. I am the one who destroyed Pol Pot, who has been in power for many years,” he said after the group’s longtime leader was publicly denounced. “ Even the United States and the Vietnamese failed to get rid of him, but I can. So how can you call me the Khmer Rouge?”

In an unprecedented admission, he said that “crimes” had been committed during the Khmer Rouge’s nearly four year rule of Cambodia. But even when pressed, he would not go much farther, Blaming individuals rather than the group. “ We do condemn those who have committed crimes, which were not right,” Khem Nuon said. “ At the time I committed no crimes, only Pol Pot and some of his close people. Now they are gone, while Pol Pot is arrested. Some of them have defected to the Vietnamese side, and the rest I don’t know where they are.”

According to Khem Nuon and other Cadres, the movement is now led by a nine-member standing committee that includes only one member of the old guard: Khieu Samphan, the head of the committee, a diplomat who for years has been the public face of the Khmer Rouge. Khem Nuon, who’s aged about 50, is the second-ranking member, but his power is bolstered by his being the top military figure.

Yet Khem Nuon freely acknowledges that older leaders such as Gen. Ta Mok and Nuon Chea, who were key members of the murderous 1975-78 Khmer Rouge regime, still have a say in “all important matters.” Khem Nuon, who did military training in China, is the right-hand-man of the one-legged Ta Mok. “I’m the one who is in charge of the armed forces right now, but I keep consulting him all the time,” he said.

Once Hun Sen is driven out, the National Solidarity party would be happy to participate in democratic elections, Khem Nuon said. Tep Kunnal, another top-ranking standing committee figure, also spoke of liberal democracy as desirable. It seems that the new generation is driven less by communist ideology than by the ultra nationalism that has long under laid politics in a country squeezed between more powerful neighbors.

Khem Nuon claims there are 10,000 guerrillas and 60,000 civilians loyal to the movement around Anlong Veng. “Our movement is pure and clean,” he said. “ I hope the international community will help us.” For starters, he urged, “ Please ask them to stop calling us ‘Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.’”

 

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POL POT: THE END

COVER STORY

Harrowing Tales: Hun Sen’s forces torture and kill former allies

By Nate Thayer in Samrong, Cambodia and Bangkok

Far Eastern Economic Review

August 7, 1997

 

At the jungle hide-out along the Thai-Cambodian border, Gen. Serei Kosal, stuttering and wide-eyed with fear, relates five-days of flight from Phnom Penh through the Cambodian countryside. He was one of the top military officers targeted for arrest by Hun Sen, Cambodia’s second prime minister, who deposed the first prime minister, prince Norodom Ranariddh, in the July 5-6 coup.

Gen. Serei fled the capital on the morning of July 5 by commandeering a military aircraft to the western city of Battambang. From there, he travelled three days by foot with no food until he reached resistance-controlled zones along the Thai border. Claiming 700 troops under his command, he vowed to organize guerrilla war.

He was lucky to have escaped: The coup left scores dead, including two of his fellow generals, and hundreds arrested. Thousands of others are fleeing or in hiding.

“ We need a safe haven to protect our people from killing and arrest,” said Serei, dressed in borrowed shorts and shoeless. “ Hun Sen is hunting down our people, killing them, arresting them. Why hasn’t the world condemned the coup makers and acted in support of democracy and against the dictators?”

His bewilderment is shared by other Ranariddh loyalists who are flocking to north and northwest Cambodia to seek sanctuary and organize guerrilla resistance. They are joined daily in these jungles and remote villages near the Thai border by opposition-party members, journalists, and other civilians. Many relate harrowing tales of witnessing summary executions, atrocities, and the arrest of anyone suspected of affiliation with Ranariddh’s Funcinpec party.

From their accounts and evidence gathered by human rights officials, a grim picture is emerging of torture and summary execution by Hun Sen and his cohorts, many of whom are former Khmer Rouge soldiers who took part in the “killing fields” of the late 1970’s. Equally disturbing are allegations that foreign embassies refused help to Cambodians who feared for their lives in the first days after the coup when many of the killings occurred.

International human rights officials in Phnom Penh say they had confirmed 36 executions by mid-July and were verifying a dozen others. “ We have had many cases of bodies found, hands tied behind their back, with bullets in the head. But sometimes we arrive too late for the bodies and there are only ashes. They are literally incinerating the evidence,” said a senior Western human rights investigator in Phnom Penh. United Nations officials say they know of another 30 Funcinpec supporters who were tortured and forced to drink sewage.

Investigators say at least 617 people have been detained in Phnom Penh and another 271 are known to have been arrested outside the capital. They say the evidence beginning to trickle in is “only the tip of the iceberg,” but includes specific information linking Hun Sen’s top lieutenants to unspeakable acts of torture and murder.

Gen. Chau Sambath, a military advisor to Ranariddh, was captured while trying to flee the capital by motorcycle. According to human rights officials and Cambodian intelligence officers, Sambath was taken to Hun Sen’s personal compound on July 8 where he was tortured, then executed. The sources say his fingernails were pulled off and his tongue ripped out before he was killed by Gen. Him Bun Heang, chief of security for Hun Sen and head of his personal bodyguard. “ They wanted to know the military radio frequencies of Funcinpec leaders, so they tortured him at Hun Sen’s house,” said a senior Cambodian military intelligence officer. “ They pulled his tongue out of his head with pliers when he wouldn’t talk.”

Another Funcinpec general, secretary of state at the Ministry of Interior Ho Sok, was executed on the grounds of the ministry by the bodyguards of National Police Chief Gen. Hok Lundy, a loyalist of Hun Sen. According to Amnesty International, Ho Sok was arrested “ while attempting to find a country that would give him asylum.” He had taken refuge at the embassy of an Asean country, but was expelled at the request of Hun Sen’s aides and arrested as he drove to the luxury Cambodiana hotel, where many foreigners and Funcinpec officials had fled in the days after the coup. A Ministry of Interior spokesman confirmed the killing, saying it was done by “people who were angry with him.”

At least five bodyguards of Gen. Nyek Bun Chhay, the commander of Funcinpec forces, had their eyes gouged out while they were under interrogation, then executed, according to Western human rights officials and Cambodian military sources. After 14 days of flight through the countryside Nyek Bun Chhay has since arrived at the jungle headquarters and commands the resistance army.

Hundreds have already arrived in Thailand, including scores of Funcinpec officials, at least 24 members of parliament, journalists associated with independent newspapers, and officials of other political parties.

“The soldiers came to my house with rocket launchers looking for my steering committee members, putting their pictures on TV and posted in military offices,” said Sam Rainsy, Cambodia’s most prominent opposition politician and head of the Khmer Nation party. “ There is a campaign to destroy the KNP. The soldiers told people at my office ‘ We will not even let a baby asleep in a hammock stay alive.’ This is real Khmer Rouge language We cannot operate anymore. Democracy is finished.” More than 1000 of his party workers are now amassed at a jungle encampment along the Thai border under the protection of Funcinpec troops still loyal to Ranariddh.

“Killing and repression are going on on a very large scale. Hun Sen is a murderous prime minister,” Ranariddh told the REVIEW in Bangkok on July 20. “ I hope that the U.S. congress will call for a cessation of all aid to Hun Sen.”

But international condemnation of the coup has been decidedly muted, with the major donor countries still considering whether to support a government controlled by Hun Sen. If he maintains a credible coalition by co-opting ministers from Ranariddh’s Funcinpec party, he may win that support.

The ambivalence of major Western governments was foreshadowed by the reaction of their embassies in Phnom Penh during the coup—a response that has been criticized bitterly by Cambodian and human rights officials. They say the American and Australian embassies refused entry to Cambodian government officials who sought refuge on embassy grounds. The U.S. embassy also “flatly refused” requests of political asylum for some members of parliament or to issue them with emergency visas.

“We begged visas from Western embassies. We begged them to open their gates for people who were clearly targeted for persecution, and the Americans, the Australians, flatly said no,” said a foreign human rights official in Phnom Penh. “ These are the embassies who have pushed people to exercise their rights, have said they supported human rights and free expression and opposition politics, but when these very values are trampled upon and those who exercised their  rights were targeted, they did nothing to help.”

American embassy sources said they had no clearance from Washington to offer political asylum and claim they were not approached directly by any Cambodians for sanctuary on embassy grounds.

The U.S. also set up a sanctuary on the grounds of the Cambodiana hotel in downtown Phnom Penh during the fighting that raged in the city. Some Cambodian parliamentarians who have since fled the country said they were denied access to the sanctuary in the hotel’s ballroom. The correspondent for Voice of America, Cambodian citizen Som Sattana, was refused access to the ballroom by embassy personnel, despite having received death threats, according to human rights workers. He has since left the country.

“We set up a U.S. embassy reception centre at the Cambodiana hotel early on Sunday (July 6) for American citizens,” said an embassy spokeswoman, who added: “ We were not open for visas during the fighting.”

The able to flee are regrouping in newly formed resistance zones in northern Cambodia. Several thousand heavily armed troops backed by tanks and artillery control a swath of territory across several provinces abutting the Thai border, including the contested northwestern provincial capital of Samrong.

Hundreds of Funcinpec members, exhausted from days of trekking across the country to reach Funcinpec-controlled areas, spoke of being hunted by Hun Sen’s forces. “ They are arresting people in their houses, in the jungle, along the road—anybody they think works for Funcinpec,” said Sok Nuon, a policeman who fled from Kampong Chhnang province.

Gen. Long Sereirath, formerly deputy commander of the 5th Military Region in the north, fought his way out of Siem Riep city four days after the coup. He said he went without food for three days before reaching Samrong. “ We will blow up key bridges to keep them from coming north with artillery,” he said, but added that his forces were desperately low on ammunition.

His commander, Lt. Gen. Khan Savouen, who is now leading resistance forces, appealed for foreign assistance from his front-line command post near national Route 6 in Siem Riep province.” We will fight even if we don’t get foreign assistance,” he said, surrounded by Russian T-54 tanks, armoured personnel carriers, heavy artillery and anti-aircraft guns. Heavy fighting raged a few kilometers away and his position was overrun the day after the REVIEW interviewed him.

 

POL POT: THE END

COVER STORY

DUBIOUS DONOR

Money man: Theng Bunma sent cash and gold for Hun Sen’s coup

By Nate Thayer

Far Eastern Economic Review

August 7, 1997

How much does it take to buy a coup? In Cambodia, the going rate seems to be $1 million. Suspected drug baron Theng Bunma said he gave that much in cash and gold to Second Prime Minister Hun Sen to fund the putsch which toppled co-premier Norodom Ranariddh.

“For the clash of 6^th of July, 1997, I called Mr. Hun Sen and I talked to him. I gave him $1 million dollars to do whatever to control the situation,” said Bunma in an interview with Australian Channel 7 television.” He asked me if I had the money. I said no, but I would send 100 kilograms of gold in a plane into Cambodia.’ In return for his generosity, Bunma, reputed to be Cambodia’s richest businessman, enjoyed a perk of being a big-time coup financier: More than 300 hundred of Hun Sen’s troops, backed by tanks, were dispatched to protect Bunma’s property during the coup.

“ I say what the second prime minister did was correct. Why? One reason, take the example of my hotel. The other side wanted to destroy it, the government put three tanks and soldiers around to protect it,” he said. Asked whether Bunma had given the government the money, Cambodian Secretary of State for Information Khieu Kanharith replied:” Why would he give us a million dollars? I do not know what we are supposed to do with this money—it’s nothing, we need $100 million to finance the redevelopment of the whole country.”

Bunma also said he gave $50,000 dollars each to three leaders of a renegade faction of Ranariddh’s Funcinpec party “to encourage them”—Siem Riep governor Toan Chhay, Banteay Meanchey provincial governor Duong Khem and Minister of State Ung Phan.

The tycoon has denied allegations by the United States that he is involved in heroin trafficking.

Cambodia: Asia’s New Narco-State? Medellin on the Mekong By Nate Thayer

Cambodia: Asia’s New Narco-State?

Far Eastern Economic Review

COVER STORY (Three story package below)

 23 Nov 1995

Has Cambodia become a mafia state? Nate Thayer reports that in the two years since UN-run elections, criminal syndicates protected by high-ranking have turned the country into a major centre for heroin trafficking and money laundering. Doubly disturbing, some of the same military units accused of killing government opponents are implicated in drug smuggling and other crimes. Western aid donor countries are alarmed. Also: A profile of Theng Bunma, a businessman who has bestowed millions of dollars on the Cambodian regime.

(Authors note: The Review and I were sued by Theng Bunma for this story and I was forced to leave Cambodia for a short while because of serious threats to my life as a consequence of its publication. The U.S, government refused to go on the record that they had identified Bunma as an organized crime figure and drug trafficker, despite innumerable U.S. sources privately, in detail, saying he was. Thailand and Hong Kong, after publication of the below stories, both banned him from entry to their countries and issues criminal warrants for his arrest. Over drinks one night, in what will remain an unnamed remote Asian country, I was expressing frustration to a resident American diplomat at the U.S. refusal to acknowledge publicly Bunma’s status as banned from entry to the U.S. having been formally designated a drug trafficker. I was being sued by Bunma at the time causing considerable distraction. The diplomat responded: “Fuck that. Come to the embassy tomorrow morning. I’ll give you the documents.” I told him I wanted them to give to the Hong Kong court and he—the diplomat-- would be technically committing treason by giving me the classified documents. “Fuck it. You are a U.S. citizen. It is my job to protect American citizens.” I carried with me at the time a copy of Bunma’s Cambodian diplomat and civilian passport as well as his Thai passport under an alias. The next morning, I arrived at the embassy and the very accommodating American diplomat took the passport numbers, punched them into a computer, and up came Bunma’s classified designation as banned from entry to the U.S. based on his designation under two U.S. Immigration criminal classifications: (1) drug trafficker, and (2) “Undesirable person”—which often refers to an organized crime figure. “Which documents would you like?” asked the diplomat. “All of them,” I answered. He pushed print and out spit a U.S. government document, on embassy letterhead, stating Bunma was banned from entry to the U.S. that would appear on any immigration computer on entry to the United States. I turned it over to my lawyers, who turned it over to the Hong Kong court, who turned it over to Bunma’s lawyers. They dropped the lawsuit. I then wrote a follow up story based on the document and the Review printed a graphic photocopy of the official U.S. government document to emphasize the point.  End of story)

CAMBODIA: Medellin on the Mekong:

 

The UN spent $3 billion to lay the foundation for peace and democracy in Cambodia. Now the country's fragile democratic institutions are being subverted by the wealth of drug lords. The REVIEW's Phnom Penh correspondent, Nate Thayer, researched these stories over a four-month period in Cambodia, Thailand, Hong Kong, France and the United States.

It wasn't your typical diplomatic luncheon. In February 1994, U.S. Ambassador Charles Twining invited Cambodian Finance Minister Sam Rainsy and another senior official to dine at his residence in Phnom Penh. Leading them into the living room, Twining turned up the music and lowered his voice.

Then, according to Rainsy, Twining asked him to convey a message to Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh: "Please tell Ranariddh not to get involved with Theng Bunma because we Americans have evidence that Theng Bunma is involved in drug trafficking." The other Cambodian official confirms the account.

The United States ambassador had just named Cambodia's wealthiest businessman, but the allegation didn't shock his listeners. Western governments, international law-enforcement officials and Cambodian sources say businessmen engaged in criminal activities have amassed immense power in Cambodia in the two-and-a-half years since United Nations-run elections. Protected by senior government officials, they've turned Cambodia into a major centre for drug trafficking, money laundering and smuggling.

Although Theng Bunma denies any wrongdoing (see story on page 27), his company has been fined at least twice since 1993 for attempting to smuggle gold and other goods into Cambodia. Yet Bunma holds a Cambodian diplomatic passport issued in January that identifies him as special adviser to National Assembly President Chea Sim. He's a benefactor of both prime ministers: He paid $1.8 million in August 1993 for Ranariddh's Kingair-200 plane and gave Second Prime Minister Hun Sen the Mercedes limousine that ferries him to official functions. He even helped underwrite the 1994 state budget with interest-free loans of several million
dollars--effectively funding the dry-season offensive against the Khmer Rouge, the REVIEW has learned.

Cambodia is a place where, one American official charges, criminal syndicates "are using government planes, helicopters, military trucks, navy boats, and soldiers to transport heroin." Doubly disturbing, some of the same military units involved in drug trafficking have been implicated in political violence, pointing to dangerously close links between crime syndicates and political figures.

The allegations have far-reaching implications for Cambodia, which receives 44% of its $410 million annual budget in aid from Western donor countries. U.S. officials told the REVIEW that Cambodia will join 29 other countries on the Major Narcotics Country list in coming weeks, which could lead to a cut-off of aid.

France has already put Phnom Penh on notice that unless top officers it believes are involved in crime syndicates are removed from the national military police it will stop aiding the force. Australia, meanwhile, is worried by evidence that the navy--which it is assisting--is directly
involved in shipping heroin.

The revelations could cause additional embarrassment to U.S. diplomats, whose government has officially made the fight against drug trafficking a top foreign-policy priority. In late April, Twining's embassy issued a visa to Theng Bunma--the same businessman the ambassador had alleged to be a drug smuggler. Bunma visited the U.S. as part of a delegation headed by Chea Sim, who was acting head of state.

Asked whether he had informed Rainsy of U.S. suspicions about Theng Bunma, Twining said: "We don't comment about confidential conversations with a host government." But his employer, the U.S. State Department, has publicly voiced its worries about Cambodia. In a report on narcotics and Cambodia issued in March, it said "involvement of some leading businessmen with access to the highest levels of government is a known concern. We are not aware of any prosecutions for narcotics-related corruption. There are indications that some high-level military officials and powerful businessmen who give financial support to politicians are
involved in heroin smuggling."

Cambodian sources, international law-enforcement officials and diplomats say numerous senior military and police officers are involved in transporting heroin through Cambodia or protecting the traffic. The drug, originating in the Burmese segment of the Golden Triangle, arrives by
land from Thailand and Laos, or aboard small boats from Thailand. Then most of it is shipped out of Cambodia through ports in the southwestern province of Koh Kong, destined mainly for the U.S. About a third departs through Phnom Penh's Pochentong airport, often destined for Europe.

"It is clear that Cambodia is a new and rapidly increasing trafficking route," says Bengt Juhlin, deputy head of the UN International Drug Control Project regional office in Bangkok. He points to the absence of an effective legal system, lack of resources to combat drug smuggling, and
official corruption. "The presence of the three makes Cambodia very vulnerable."

An added attraction for international criminals is the ease of laundering money in Cambodia. A confidential report prepared this year for the Interior Ministry says that 19 of Phnom Penh's 29 banks are suspected of being fronts for cleaning tainted cash. As the BCCI scandal showed a
few years ago, crooked banks pose a special risk to the international financial system. But it doesn't take a bank to launder--in Cambodia's cash economy, it's easy to unload dirty dollars at restaurants, nightclubs, luxury-goods dealerships and the casino.

"Cambodia is now a mafia state because there are a group of businessmen who consider themselves above the law, who have infiltrated all spheres, all aspects of government, the judiciary, the parliament," says Rainsy, who was sacked from his government post in September 1994 and has just formed an opposition political party. "These people--these politicians--are at least protecting and at worst working for the mafia."

It's a sinister symbiosis. When the influence of crime bosses permeates the apparatus of state, then elements of the security forces can become their tools. Critics say that's happening in Cambodia, compounding the climate of fear created by the government's increasingly heavy-handed treatment of its political opponents. In fact, the two units most frequently cited in connection with political violence and other human-rights abuses--the Defence Ministry's intelligence force and the national military police--are also deeply implicated in smuggling and other crimes, according to international law-enforcement officials and diplomats (see
story on page 30).

That means those who highlight the links between crime bosses and government officials are doubly at risk. In August, after Phnom Penh's popular Morning News published reports about military complicity in heroin smuggling, a hand grenade was thrown in the house of the paper's publisher.

A year earlier, the editor of The Voice of Khmer Youth was shot dead at midday at a busy Phnom Penh intersection. The attack came just days after the newspaper published a detailed biography of Theng Bunma, accusing him of heading a large criminal syndicate whose activities included drug trafficking.

"Cambodia is now like Noriega in Panama. Nobody dares to speak out because they will be killed," says a senior officer in one of Cambodia's security services.

Police Gen. Nouen Souer, the former head of the national police anti-drug unit, is one of the few Cambodian officials to have spoken out publicly about government corruption and the drug trade. After his remarks were published in an August newspaper interview, he received death threats. He has been silent since then.

In the August interview, though, Souer claimed that 600 kilograms of heroin a week were coming through Phnom Penh. "I knew about this, but I couldn't do anything," he said. "The smugglers are rich and have high-ranking officials behind them." Asked who the high-ranking officials were, he replied: "I can't tell you or I will die."

Cambodian sources, international law-enforcement officials and diplomats name several wealthy and well-connected Cambodian businessmen as suspected heads of criminal syndicates. But none is better connected than Theng Bunma, a master at playing both sides of the fence.

In addition to bestowing gifts on the prime ministers, the magnate was linked to a failed July 1994 coup that attempted to shore up the power of some former communist officials who were being marginalized under the new regime. Cambodian and Thai officials say the 33 Thai nationals implicated in the coup plot arrived in Phnom Penh on air tickets booked by Bunma's holding company, the Thai Boon Roong Group. The invoice remains unpaid, however, and Bunma contends the order was unauthorized.

Until this year, Bunma seemed to be content to operate from behind a veil of enforced silence. But on October 15, he was elected president of the Cambodian Chamber of Commerce by a vote of 21-1. That shocked Western donor countries, who were well aware of Bunma's unsavory reputation. "This time they went too far," one Western ambassador in Phnom Penh quoted his U.S. colleague, Twining, as saying.

Twining's discomfort was understandable. His embassy had issued Bunma a visa so he could visit the U.S. in May as part of Chea Sim's delegation. That was 15 months after Twining's warning to Rainsy.

Twining and other U.S. officials refused to comment publicly on why suspected drug traffickers were issued visas, but one U.S. embassy source defends the decision: "We had no firm proof, only suspicions," he says.

But other U.S. government sources close to the issue reject that defence. "The decision was mainly political. We did not want to force a confrontation with a government that we have good relations with," says one official.

When several Thai MPs were put on the U.S. immigration "watch list" last year, barring them from entering the country because of suspected links to drug trafficking, the diplomatic and political fallout was heavy. Yet this time, the effort by diplomats to avoid controversy may have backfired.

To start with, letting suspected Cambodian drug traffickers into the U.S. appears to directly contradict post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy, which calls for "public diplomacy" to expose foreign officials who participate in or protect international crimes such as drug trafficking.

"It is in the drug trade's interest to remain behind the scenes working through corrupt government officials who can maintain a facade of probity and respectability. One of the best ways to routing out drug corruption is to expose it to public scrutiny," says the U.S. Government Narcotics Control Strategy report released by the State Department in March. "Corruption is a threat to any nation's security, for it allows criminal elements to undermine the legitimacy of the State from within."

When Chea Sim came to the U.S., his delegation's rooms at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington on May 8-10 were reserved and paid for in the name of Theng Bunma.

Chea Sim dined with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord, had talks with National Security Council officials, and met Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California, according to his official schedule prepared by the State Department. Teng Bunma didn't accompany Chea Sim on his official rounds in Washington, but Rohrabacher was incensed when he learned afterwards that U.S. officials suspected a member of the Cambodian delegation of involvement in the drug trade.

"If Chea Sim was accompanied to the United States by major drug dealers, I would be very upset. Not only upset with the drug dealers, but upset with my own government for not tipping me off," says the congressman, who met Chea Sim on May 10. "The Cold War is over. We have no more excuse to turn a blind eye to this kind of behavior by governments."

President Bill Clinton seems to agree. In a speech marking the 50th anniversary of the UN, he announced that the U.S. was identifying and putting on notice countries that tolerate laundering of drug money, and threatened economic sanctions against governments that failed to crack down.

"President Clinton's speech . . . represents a significant new conception of U.S. foreign policy," Zoe Baird, a member of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, wrote on October 25. "The U.S. may stop supporting a leader who is tolerant of a drug cartel though it
previously supported him because he was a staunch anti-communist. The U.S. may risk embarrassing or destabilizing a government that is weak in rooting out--or protects--terrorists or organized crime."

The Cambodian government protests that it is doing what it can to fight crime. On September 15, it set up a special committee chaired by the prime ministers to combat drug-related crimes. Already, it says it's "closely cooperating with international organizations--such as the UN and  Interpol and with countries such as the U.S. and France--in implementing measure aimed at ferreting out and apprehending criminals, seizing drugs and sending them to the court."

But unless concrete results are visible soon, it may be too late to protect U.S. aid to Cambodia. American officials say it's only a matter of weeks before Cambodia is placed on the Major Narcotics Country list. Once that happens, U.S. law will require that Phnom Penh demonstrate that it has "taken legal and law-enforcement measures to prevent and punish public corruption--especially by senior government officials--that facilitates the production, processing or shipment of narcotic drugs, or that discourages investigation or prosecution of such acts."

If Cambodia cannot satisfy these terms, the U.S. is obliged to consider halting most forms of bilateral assistance, and voting against multilateral assistance programmes such as those of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank--the financial lifeblood of the Cambodian government.

In several cases, countries that failed to meet the criteria were issued U.S. "national-interest waivers" by the White House, sparing them from the full force of sanctions. But Cambodia, which lacks the strategic importance of a country like Pakistan, could conceivably end up on a short list of the countries that have been "decertified" by the U.S: Afghanistan, Burma, Iran, Syria and Nigeria. That would give it virtual outlaw status.

"You don't want to be on that list," says one U.S. official. "Its significance is the loss of assistance, but it's also political. It's like being on the terrorist list."

 

 (Story two)

Sugar Daddy

Businessman emerges as pillar of the regime

 

His name is a household word to Cambodians, from noodle vendors to civil servants. It is synonymous with wealth and power on the streets of Phnom Penh. “In Khmer, we say ‘He makes the rain, he makes the thunder’,” says a senior Cambodian official. “Everybody knows that Theng Bun Ma can do what he wants.”

Theng Bun Ma, a 54-year-old ethnic Chinese, is Cambodia’s richest businessman. But his aura of power doesn’t come from his October 15 election as president of the Cambodian Chamber of Commerce—it comes from his close connection to the country’s political and military elite.

With interests ranging from cigarette distributorship to a casino, Bunma’s company, the Thai Boon Roong Group, is Cambodia’s biggest taxpayer. But he has also showered the leadership with gifts and even helped underwrite the military budget.

Clearly, Bunma has come a long way from the eastern province of Kampong Cham, where he started out as a driver’s assistant on a rural bus line and moved into small trading. “I was young, then I traded rice and ran buses,” he said in a rare interview with a Phnom Penh journalist, “I had contact with Thai’s selling beans, sugar, cement.”

That wasn’t all he traded, according to a detailed biography published in a Phnom Penh newspaper in August 1994. The Voice of Khmer Youth alleges that in 1972, Bunma was arrested in the western city of Battambang, when he tried to smuggle 20 kilos of opium in from Thailand under the hood of his car.

Sentenced to twenty years in prison, Bunma bribed a guard and escaped, it charged. “Using a bamboo stalk as a ladder, he crawled out a prison window (and)…hid in a rice loft. The court issued an arrest warrant for Bunma. From this point on, Bunma took refuge at the Khmer-Thai border,” the newspaper said.

Less than a week after the newspaper printed the biography, its editor was gunned down by men in military uniform in broad daylight on a busy Phnom Penh street. No one has been arrested for the murder.

Bunma said he moved to Thailand in 1972 simply because Khmer Rouge guerrillas were disrupting trade. Whatever the reason for the move, Bunma received a Thai citizenship card on July 8, 1975. The next month he registered Thai Boon Roong as an import-export company with capital of $100,000. “I did business through waterways using ships to transport goods to sell in Vietnam,” Bunma said in the interview.

It was a tumultuous time to be trading with Vietnam, where the south had just fallen to the communists. The Voice of Khmer Youth report said that Bunma used boats to smuggle everything from palm oil to tobacco into the country, returning with Vietnamese girls and well-off Sino-Vietnamese refugees.

Smuggling made Bunma a rich man, the newspaper said. That charge incenses the tycoon, who prepared for the October interview by having an aide tape a patch of traditional Chinese medicine to his chest. “You’ll be asking questions so I am putting this patch on for fear that my energy is not strong enough,” he said. “My heart is not strong.”

Then he lashed out at public accusation that “I am mafia, that I deal in drugs.” Bunma said he made his fortune during the Thai property boon of the 1980’s. “Can the people who do dirty business be equal to me? I sold a piece of land on Sukhumvit (in Bangkok), which I’d bought for $400 million, and I sold it for than $800 million. I bought another piece of land, also in Thailand, for $100 million and I sold it for $470 million. Do people dealing in drugs make that much money?”

Bunma didn’t explain, however, where the initial capital came from. Nor did Thai Boon Roong’s move into real-estate mean an end to smuggling: Cambodian customs officers have fined the company at least twice in recent years for illegally importing goods: One incident in 1993 involved 104 kilograms of gold.

Bunma, who is managing director of the Thai Boon Roong group, said it was a desire to “reconstruct the Khmer nation” that made him one of the first major investors in Cambodia after the country started opening up in 1992. Actually, Bunma was already trading with Cambodia on a massive scale by the late 1980’s, and he helped the army meet its payroll when Soviet and Vietnamese aid ended.

In the early 1990’s, he snapped up hundreds of hectares of property in Phnom Penh and the deep-water port of Sihanoukville. When the government began privatizing its assets, He became a major contributor to the formerly communist ruling party, the Cambodian People’s Party, in the run-up to the 1993 UN-run elections.

Bunma now has major stakes in a wide range of legitimate businesses in Cambodia, including the Mekong bank, the Holiday International casino, the Regency Park hotel-office complex, a daily newspaper and a plywood factory. Thai Boon Roong is partnered with Intercontinental Hotels in building Phnom Penh” first five-star hotel. It also has exclusive distribution rights for Jet brand Indonesian cigarettes in Indochina; business associates say the monopoly nets at least $4 million a month on sales of 100,000 cases.

In the interview, Bunma also talked about owning three Boeing 737 aircraft and “49 pieces of land in Thailand, but I have not had time to construct.”

Bunma’s business skills have earned him his share of admirers. Says one Overseas Chinese Businessman in Phnom Penh: “he keeps his word. There is not a lot of paperwork in the traditional Chinese way of doing business, and he always pays his bills.”

Says another associate: “He is a very shy person, quiet, dignified. There is a physical presence, but he doesn’t swagger. For what it is worth, he is a very doting grandfather.”

One Asian intelligence agency, which has an extensive file on Bunma, mentions that he suffers from diabetes. He speaks Khmer, Thai, and Chinese, but no European languages.

“He is very demanding—he only eats dishes prepared by his wife,” said the newspaper biography. He has been married twice and has ten children—eight sons and two daughters. One son is the director of the Mekong bank; the other runs Sharaton Hotel in Phnom Penh, which houses the casino.

The casino business is perhaps most emblematic of the man, who used to spend his free time gambling on card games even as a small-time trader in sleepy Battambang. Now, according to an Asian intelligence official, “every time he gambles it’s not less than $1 million.”

 

(Story three)

The Storm Troopers

Abuses prompt donor countries to reconsider aid

It wasn’t exactly a clean getaway. When confronted by Phnom Penh’s anti-drug squad early this year, a gang of suspected heroin traffickers opened fire on police and to sanctuary inside a compound belonging to military intelligence on the western edge of the capital.

Was that a sign that the Cambodian Defence Ministry’s feared intelligence force was abandoning its security role for more lucrative pursuits? No, apparently it was just diversifying: On July 13, dissident politician Sam Rainsy’s bodyguards were dragged to the same compound, where they were beaten and threatened.

Diplomats, international law-enforcement officials and human-rights advocates who monitor Cambodia say a disturbing pattern has emerged: The same military and police units responsible for violence against opponents of the government are also the most deeply implicated in criminal activities. These include military intelligence and the national military police, or gendarmerie.

The way crime permeates the apparatus of state is problematic for Western aid donors. It is particularly awkward for France, which is aiding the military police. French officials say they notified the Phnom Penh government in October that unless the commander of the military police—Gen. Kien Savuth—is purged, France will halt its multimillion- dollar programme to train and equipt the force.

Formed during the 1979-1989 Vietnamese occupation and still essentially controlled by the same men, military intelligence and the military police both adapted quickly to life after communism after the signing of the 1991 Cambodian peace agreement. “From the very beginning, these people, in addition to arresting, held people for ransom,” says a former top official of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (Untac), which organized the 1993 elections. “They have been involved in both extortion arrests and political arrests.”

Untac documents implicate the current head of military intelligence, Maj-Gen. Chhum Socheat, in a number of incidents of political intimidation and violence during the run-up to the 1993 election, including the abduction and execution of four opposition-party activists in Battambang, in western Cambodia.

Military intelligence troops have been enforcing a reign of terror in western Cambodia since at least 1991, according to a 1994 report from the UN Centre for Human Rights. The confidential UN report said intelligence units were “making use of wide and uncontrolled powers they enjoy in the province to arrest, detain, interrogate, torture, and execute to carry out, concurrently to their military intelligence work, more lucrative activities.”

Socheat was responsible for the 5^th military region, which covers western Cambodia, at the time.

One UN official assigned to investigate a murder committed by senior military intelligence officers, vented his frustration with their impunity in a March 13, 1993 memo to his superiors: “Is someone going to escape going to trial for cold-blooded murder merely because he is a high-level military figure?” he said. “If so, this Human Rights Officer would prefer someone else tell the sister of the victim.”

The record of the military police, which answers directly to the two prime Ministers, isn’t much better. From 1985 through 1993, Gen. Kien Savuth’s 820-man unit was responsible for Phnom Penh’s security. It was called in by the Prime Minister to put down anti-corruption demonstrations in December 1991. According to the former top Untac official, the unit was directly “implicated in the killings of unarmed demonstrators during the unrest” and “was responsible for numerous cases of ill-treatment of peasants” during other operations.

“because of its record, recommendations were made during the Untac period that it be made among the first units to be demobilized because its very existence was antithetical to the creation of a neutral political environment,” the former official says.

Instead, the unit survived the Untac period and was transformed into a military police force after the election. In October, the gendarmes were used to break up an opposition-party meeting that had been banned by Hun Sen. Earlier, grenades were thrown and more than 30 opposition officials and supporters were hurt.

The nationwide networks of military intelligence and military police give them the means to traffic contraband, Nguon Pen, deputy governor of Stung Treng province, charged in September that planes controlled by the military were flying heroin from the province, which borders Laos, to Phnom Penh. “Who can fight them if some of the crimes are committed by those in the army themselves,” he said.

Military intelligence’s Gen. Socheat and the gendarmerie’s Gen. Savuth have something else in common: links to powerful businessmen. Uniformed and plainclothes gendarmes guard Theng Bunma’s residence in Phnom Penh, and also handle security at the Holiday International casino, which Bunma controls.

In February 1994, gendarmes forcibly evicted hundreds of families from a property owned by Bunma near Phnom Penh and slated for development. Gen. Savuth personally directed the operation, during which scores of villagers were beaten, one child shot to death, and one man taken into custody and executed, according to foreign human-rights investigators.

A record like that has made France balk. “We have officially told the Cambodian government already that if Gen. Kien Savuth is not dismissed, removed as head of the military police, we will not support them anymore. We will be forced to halt our gendarme programme,” a senior French official in Phnom Penh told the REVIEW. “We know very well the truth about this man. We cannot continue to support him.”

Australia, another key donor country in Cambodia, is faced with a similar dilemma. Much of Australia’s military assistance programme is focused on helping Cambodia rebuild its navy. But law enforcement officials say some elements at the navy are deeply involved in criminal syndicates, using naval vessels to transport or protect shipments of heroin and marijuana. “We are very disturbed by some of what we know,” says an Australian official in Phnom Penh.

Cambodia’s main drug export route is the southwestern coastal province of Koh Kong, where former navy chief Adm. Tea Vinh, the younger brother of Defence Minister Tea Banh, wields immense influence. A foreign narcotics official says that since 1991 “our intelligence began picking up four to six shipments a year” of high-grade refined heroin through Koh Kong, with each shipment weighing at least 300 kilograms. That is probably just the tip of the iceberg, he adds. “The only thing hampering them is the weather.”

Not that there isn’t the occasional raid. A combined force of police and customs officials swooped down on a speedboat off Koh Kong on August 11, seizing 71 kilograms of heroin. But two of the arrested smugglers were cops, who quickly fingered their superior officer. “The province of Koh Kong is completely under the control of the mafia,” charges a senior Cambodian government official. “Virtually the entire political structure is involved in illegal activities.’

 

Refugees con Americans with MIA information: AP by Nate Thayer

Refugees con Americans with MIA information

Editor's note: The writer has lived for more than two years along the Thai-Cambodian border, and has been offered numerous artifacts and data about alleged American MlAs in Indochina.

By Nate Thayer

July 21, 1991

Associated Press Writer

BANGKOK, Thailand -"I have bones from dead American pilots," the Cambodian refugee whispered to this reporter, handing over a small packet of teeth, bone chips and a serviceman's identification number. "Is it true I can get $1 million from the Americans?" he asked.

The episode took place recently at a refugee camp along Thailand's eastern border with Cambodia, and the identification turned out not to belong to any of the 2,274 U.S. serviceman missing in action, or MIA, from the Vietnam War. But the offer illustrates the rumors —some based in fact — that have spread for years through rebel-held camps bordering Communist Laos and Cambodia, of huge rewards awaiting those who can show that U.S. servicemen are imprisoned in Indochina or those who can lead to their bodies.

The release of a photo this week purporting to show three U.S. prisoners of war has renewed debate over whether Americans are still held 16 years after the Vietnam War. Families of the three missing men say the men are in the photo. The three countries strongly deny they are holding prisoners. Numerous refugees and guerrillas have emerged from the jungles carrying bones, maps, letters purported to be from U.S. prisoners, and "dogtags" — military identification neckchains. They also talk of foreign captives in jungle hideouts. Refugees are often keen to provide stories about Americans in hopes of enhancing their chances of being resettled in the United States. Guerrillas are eager for cash.

The information is usually passed through relief officials or other foreigners to the U.S. Joint Casualty Resolution Center office at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok. Most is immediately dismissed as fraudulent or irrelevant. The packet which the reporter received at Site 2 was sent to the center, but the identification number did not belong to anyone on the Pentagon's list of Americans missing in action.

Most of the "evidence" turns out to be scams engineered by hucksters and conmen, although some is credible. But none has been proven. No prisoners have been brought out.

Still, many remain convinced that Americans remain captive. Teams of privately funded Americans have offered huge rewards, set up safe houses along the Thai border, and sent agents into remote jungles in efforts to obtain remains or bring back Americans alive.

Billionaire H. Ross Perot in 1986 offered $4.2 million to obtain a videotape purportedly showing POWs in Laos. Many of the private American teams' investigating reports accuse their government of dragging its feet, ignoring. evidence and conspiring to stifle efforts to bring back prisoners.

Cambodia: Doing Its Best to Stop Drugs - Letter to the Editor:The Washington Post

Cambodia: Doing Its Best to Stop Drugs

The Washington Post

August 4, 1997

(What the Ambassador failed to mention was that the United States had banned Theng Bun Ma from entry to the U.S. based on evidence they had gathered he was a drug trafficker. And that in the same statement he reference U.S. State Department spokeseman Nicholas Burns said " We have credible evidence that Theng Bun Ma is heavily involved in drug trafficking.' And that in the days before the Ambassador's letter Bunma had publicly stated that he had been requested and paid Hun Sen $1 million dollars to finance his coup detat weeks earlier on July 5, 1997. And that Hun Sen's official limousines, airplanes, and salary of the Cambodian army was paid for by Theng Bun Ma. And that  Bunma held a diplomat passport as 'economic advisor' to the Ambassador's political Party the CPP, and had paid for the entire official Cambodian state delegation's trip to Washington where CPP party chief Chea Sim met with congressmen, senator's, the State department, and the Pentagon)

Letter to the Editor from Cambodian Ambassador to the United States: Washington Post

 

The Post's July 22 front-page article on Cambodia {"Drug Suspects Bankroll Cambodian Coup Leader"} was biased, defamatory and focuses on the weaknesses of Cambodia's drug enforcement program while ignoring the giant steps forward Cambodia has taken to eradicate drug trafficking. Tying Second Prime Minister Hun Sen to drug trafficking is nonsense.

Even U.S. State Department spokesman Nicolas Burns said recently, "We have no direct evidence that Hun Sen is involved in drug trafficking."

Cambodia is located in an area where drugs from other countries can pass through it by road, river, sea and air. Its border and police agencies are not equipped or fully trained to stop drug movement, but the government does its best to halt this activity with the limited resources it possesses.

Since Cambodia formed its government in late 1993, it has passed a tough, new drug law, reorganized its drug-enforcement unit pursuant to international recommendations, equipped a lab for testing substances for drug content and conducted extensive training for its police and port officials. Cambodia's drug law provides a minimum sentence of 10 years in prison for possession or use of any quantity of any illegal drug.

More than 100 drug traffickers have been arrested and convicted in Cambodia. Last year, roughly 450 acres of marijuana were found and destroyed, and 40 kilos of heroin were seized in transit. Further, 71 kilos of heroin were burned under international supervision.

America, with all its resources, has not wiped out its drug problem or stopped drug entry at its ports. On April 7, 1996, President Clinton said, "The United States government is deeply appreciative of the efforts of the Royal Government of Cambodia to combat illicit narcotics trafficking." After a review of drug transit, he certified that the Cambodian government was fully cooperating with the United States or had taken adequate steps to achieve full compliance with appropriate international laws and programs.

Nate Thayer, the author of The Post's piece on Cambodia, published a version of this article in the Far Eastern Economic Review in November of 1995. At that time an investigation was initiated, and no evidence of official corruption was found. H. E. VAR HUOTH Ambassador Embassy of Cambodia Washington

Nate Thayer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nate Thayer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Nate Thayer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nate Thayer (born April 21, 1960) is a journalist who interviewed Pol Pot. He was the Cambodia correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, a respected investigative publication that published from 1946 to 2009. His journalism has focused on international organized crime, narcotics trafficking, human rights, and areas of military conflict.

Nate Thayer discussing Pol Pot's trial, July 1997.

Contents  [hide]  1 Publications, honors and awards 2 Career 2.1 Thayer at Pol Pot's Trial 2.2 Nightline controversy 2.3 Interview with Pol Pot 2.4 Thayer and the death of Pol Pot 2.5 Interview with Kang Kek Iew 2.6 Subsequent work 3 References 4 External links

[edit] Publications, honors and awards

Thayer has written for Jane's Defence Weekly, Soldier of Fortune, The Associated Press and for more than 40 other publications, including The Cambodia Daily and The Phnom Penh Post. Thayer’s reporting earned him The World Press Award, the 1997 “Scoop of the Year” British press award, and the 1998 Francis Frost Wood Award for Courage in Journalism, given by Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York to a journalist "judged to best exemplify physical or moral courage in the practice of his or her craft."^[1] He was a visiting scholar at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University^[2] as well as the first recipient of the Center for Public Integrity's ICIJ (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists) Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting in November, 1998.^[3] Upon awarding Thayer the ICIJ Award, the judges noted:

"He illuminated a page of history that would have been lost to the world had he not spent years in the Cambodian jungle, in a truly extraordinary quest for first-hand knowledge of the Khmer Rouge and their murderous leader. His investigations of the Cambodian political world required not only great risk and physical hardship but also mastery of an ever-changing cast of factional characters."^[4]

According to Vaudine England of the BBC, "Many of the region's greatest names in reporting made their mark in the pages of the Review, from the legendary Richard Hughes of Korean War fame, to Nate Thayer, the journalist who found Cambodia's Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot."^[5]

Thayer was also the first person in 57 years to turn down a prestigious Peabody Award, because he did not want to share it with ABC News' Nightline whom he believed stole his story and deprived him and the Far Eastern Economic Review of income.^[6][7]

Since 1999 Hofstra University's Department of Journalism and Mass Media Studies in the School of Communication has awarded the Nate Thayer Scholarship to a qualified student with the best foreign story idea. Winners are selected on the basis of scholastic achievement or potential as well as economic need.^[8]

[edit] Career

Thayer was born in 1960^[9] in Massachusetts, the son of Harry E. T. Thayer who was United States Ambassador to Singapore from 1980 to 1985. He studied at the University of Massachusetts Boston. From 1980 to 1982 he was involved with the Boston-based Clamshell Alliance, acting as spokesman during protest events at the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant^{[10][11][12][13]} as well as anti-draft protests.^[14]

He began his career in Southeast Asia on the Thai-Cambodian border, taking part in an academic research project in which he interviewed 50 Cham survivors of Khmer Rouge atrocities at Nong Samet Refugee Camp in 1984.^[15][16] He then returned to Massachusetts where he worked briefly as the Transportation Director for the state Office of Handicapped Affairs.^[17][18] Thayer himself noted, "I got fired. I was a really bad bureaucrat."^[19]

He later worked for Soldier of Fortune Magazine reporting on guerrilla combat in Burma,^[20] and in 1989 he began reporting for the Associated Press from the Thai-Cambodian border.^[21] In October 1989 he was nearly killed when an anti-tank mine exploded under a truck he was riding in.^[22] In 1991 he moved to Cambodia where he began writing for the Far Eastern Economic Review.^[23][24]

In August 1992 Thayer traveled to Mondulkiri Province and visited the last of the FULRO Montagnard guerrillas who had remained loyal to their former American commanders.^[25] Thayer informed the group that FULRO's president Y Bham Enuol had been executed by the Khmer Rouge seventeen years previously.^[26] The FULRO troops surrendered their weapons in October 1992; many of this group were given asylum in the United States.^[27][28]

In April 1994 Thayer participated in (and funded) the Cambodian Kouprey Research Project, a $30,000, two-week, 150 km field survey to find the rare Cambodian bovine known as the kouprey.^[29] Thayer later wrote: "After compiling a team of expert jungle trackers, scientists, security troops, elephant mahouts and one of the most motley and ridiculous looking groups of armed journalists in recent memory, we marched cluelessly into Khmer Rouge-controlled jungles along the old Ho Chi Minh trail."^[30]

On July 3, 1994 Thayer was asked help negotiate Prince Norodom Chakrapong's release and safe passage to the airport after the prince had been accused by Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh of plotting a coup d'etat.^[31][32] Thayer was subsequently expelled from Cambodia by Prince Ranariddh, but he returned anyway.^[33]

In early 1997 he was again expelled from Cambodia for exposing connections between Prime Minister Hun Sen and heroin traffickers.^[34][35] Thayer then decided to pursue a fellowship at Johns Hopkins University.

[edit] Thayer at Pol Pot's Trial

Pol Pot´s trial, reported by Nate Thayer, August 2, 1997

Nate Thayer became world famous in July 1997 when he and Asiaworks Television cameraman David McKaige managed to visit the Anlong Veng Khmer Rouge jungle camp inside Cambodia where Pol Pot was being tried for treason.^[36] Thayer had hoped for an interview but was disappointed:

"Pol Pot said nothing. They made it clear and I believed them, that I was to interview Pol Pot after the trial. Pol Pot literally had to be carried away from the trial--he was unable to walk--and I was not able to talk to him. I did try to talk to him... he did not answer any questions, and he did not speak during the trial.^[37]"

Thayer noted, "Every ounce of his being was struggling to maintain some last vestige of dignity."^[38]

Thayer believed that the trial had been staged by the Khmer Rouge for him and McKaige:

"It was put on specifically for us, to take the message to the world that Pol Pot has been denounced. They had reported on their radio, on June 19, that Pol Pot had been purged. No one believed them. After five years of lying over their radio, there was no reason anyone should take what they say credibly. It was clear to them that they needed an independent, credible witness to show what was happening."^[39]

[edit] Nightline controversy

According to Thayer, Ted Koppel of ABC News made a verbal agreement with Thayer to use footage from the trial on Nightline, then violated that agreement:^[40]

"[Koppel] returned home with a copy of my videotape. I gave it to him in exchange for his strict promise that its only use would be on Nightline. However, once he had the copy of the tape, ABC News released video, still pictures, and even transcripts of my interviews to news organizations throughout the world. Protected by its formidable legal and public relations department, ABC News made still photographs from the video, slapped the “ABC News Exclusive” logo on them, and hand delivered them to newspapers, wire services, and television...All of these pictures demanded that photo credit be given to ABC News... The story won a British Press Award for “Scoop of the Year” for a British paper I didn’t even know had published it...I even won a Peabody Award as a “correspondent for Nightline." But I turned it down—-the first time anyone had rejected a Peabody in its 57-year history."^[41]

ABC News responded that they had "agreed to pay Nate Thayer the sizable sum of $350,000 for the rights to use his footage of former Cambodian dictator Pol Pot. Despite the fact that ABC provided prominent and repeated credit and generous remuneration for his work, Mr. Thayer initiated a five-year barrage of complaints coupled with repeated demands for more money."^[42] In 2002 Thayer sued Koppel and ABC News for $30 million in punitive damages and unspecified compensatory damages.

[edit] Interview with Pol Pot

In October 1997, Thayer returned to Anlong Veng and became only the second western journalist (after Elizabeth Becker in 1978) ever to be granted an interview with the former dictator^[43][44] and, along with McKaige, was certainly the last outsider to see him alive.^[45] Thayer recounted the story of his interview with Pol Pot in his book Sympathy for the Devil: Living Dangerously in Cambodia - A Foreign Correspondent's Story.^[46] Pol Pot told Thayer:

"First, I want to let you know that I came to join the revolution, not to kill the Cambodian people. Look at me now. Do you think ... am I a violent person? No. So, as far as my conscience and my mission were concerned, there was no problem. This needs to be clarified...My experience was the same as that of my movement. We were new and inexperienced and events kept occurring one after the other which we had to deal with. In doing that, we made mistakes as I told you. I admit it now and I admitted it in the notes I have written. Whoever wishes to blame or attack me is entitled to do so. I regret I didn't have enough experience to totally control the movement. On the other hand, with our constant struggle, this had to be done together with others in the communist world to stop Kampuchea becoming Vietnamese. For the love of the nation and the people it was the right thing to do but in the course of our actions we made mistakes.^[47]"

[edit] Thayer and the death of Pol Pot

Thayer visited Anlong Veng again on April 16, 1998, only a day after Pol Pot had died. After photographing the corpse he briefly interviewed Ta Mok and Pol Pot's second wife Muon, who told Thayer, "What I would like the world to know is that he was a good man, a patriot, a good father."^[48] Thayer was then asked to transport Pol Pot's body in his pickup truck to the site a short distance away^[49] where it was later cremated.^[50]

[edit] Interview with Kang Kek Iew

In April 1999 Thayer, alongside photojournalist Nic Dunlop, interviewed Kang Kek Iew (Comrade Duch) for the Far Eastern Economic Review after Dunlop had tracked Duch to Samlaut and suspected strongly that he was the former director of the notorious S-21 security prison.^[51] Dunlop wanted Duch to provide clues that would reveal his identity, and Thayer began probing Duch's story that he was Hang Pin, an aid worker and a born-again Christian:

"Then Nate said, 'I believe that you also worked with the security services during the Khmer Rouge Period?' Duch appeared startled and avoided our eyes...Again Nate put the question to him...He looked unsettled and his eyes darted about...He then glanced at Nate's business card...'I believe, Nic, that your friend has interviewed Monsieur Ta Mok and Monsieur Pol Pot?'...He sat back down...and inhaled deeply. 'It is God's will that you are here,' he said."^[52]

Duch surrendered to the authorities in Phnom Penh following the publication of this interview.^[53][54] Dunlop and Thayer were first runners-up for the 1999 SAIS-Novartis Prize for Excellence in International Journalism, presented by the The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, for "exposing the inside story of the Khmer Rouge killing machine."^[55]

[edit] Subsequent work

Nate Thayer has also covered Albania,^[56] Indonesia,^[57] Mongolia^[58] and the Philippines.^[59] In 2003 he reported on the Iraq War in a five-part series for Slate Magazine.^{[60][61][62][63][64]} He also covered the Bangkok 2010 Redshirt riots.^[65][66] He has recently worked for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' Center for Public Integrity writing a three month investigation on North Korea as a rogue state financed by criminal activity.^[67]

[edit] References

1. ^ "Hofstra forms journalism award selection committee." Long Island Business News, 04/06/98, Vol. 45 Issue 14, p. 19.
2. ^ Dale Keiger, "In Search of Brother Number One," Johns Hopkins Magazine, November 1997
3. ^ ICIJ Journalists: Nate Thayer
4. ^ Maud S. Beelman, "Reporting Across Borders," The Public i: Newsletter of the Center for Public Integrity, Vol 7, no. 2, Mar 1999.
5. ^ Vaudine England, "Leading Asian Magazine to Close," BBC Asia-Pacific News, September 22, 2009.
6. ^ "Your scoop? Nah. It's ours if we want it." The Independent, May 25 1998.
7. ^ Richard Linnett and Wayne Friedman, "Marketing the News: The Selling of Pol Pot," Advertising Age, 11/18/2002, Vol. 73, Issue 46.
8. ^ Hofstra University Student Information Package, Financial Aid Section, p. 45.
9. ^ Philip Gourevitch, The Talk of the Town, “Ink,” The New Yorker, August 18, 1997, p. 25.
10. ^ Randy Shipp, "Antinuclear coalition set for fresh assault on Seabrook," The Christian Science Monitor, May 22, 1980, p. 7.
11. ^ Michael Knight, "1,500 Repulsed at Seabrook Trying to Take Nuclear Site; Two Officers Injured On Easy Ground," New York Times, May 25, 1980, p. 22.
12. ^ "Clamshell Plan to Protest Reactor Move to Seabrook," Boston Globe, Feb 18, 1981, p. 1
13. ^ "250 Protest at Seabrook Nuclear Site," The Harvard Crimson, Wednesday, March 04, 1981.
14. ^ Edward Quill and Richard H. Stewart, "Draft Foes Partly Padlock Post Office," Boston Globe, Jul 23, 1980, p. 1.
15. ^ Ben Kiernan, "Orphans of Genocide: the Cham Muslims of Kampuchea Under Pol Pot," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Volume 20, Issue 4, 1988, p. 2.
16. ^ Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79. New Haven: Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0300144345, 1996, p. 264.
17. ^ Frances Robles, "Many Who Depend on The Ride Say They Can't," Boston Globe, Aug 21, 1988 p. 33, Metro Section.
18. ^ Joe Ferson, "Handicapped Criticize MBTA on Van Service: Frequent Delays, Faulty Equipment Cited." Boston Globe, Sep 16, 1988, p. 82.
19. ^ Nate Thayer, "Finding Pol Pot: Nate Thayer's Story-Behind-the-Story." The Public i: Newsletter of the Center for Public Integrity, Vol 7, no. 2, Mar 1999.
20. ^ Thayer, "Finding Pol Pot," 1999.
21. ^ Nate Thayer, "Aid Workers Flee as Cambodia Fighting Intensifies," The Associated Press, 13 September 1989.
22. ^ "U.S. Reporter Injured, One Killed by Mine in Cambodia," 16 October 1989, Reuters.
23. ^ Nate Thayer, "Rubies are Rouge." Far Eastern Economic Review, Feb 7 1991, pp. 29-30.
24. ^ Andrew Sherry, "Nate Thayer vs. Pol Pot," April 5, 2005
25. ^ Nate Thayer, “Montagnard Army Seeks UN Help,” Phnom Penh Post, Sept. 12, 1992.
26. ^ Nate Thayer, "Forgotten Army: The Rebels Time Forgot," Far Eastern Economic Review, Sept 10, 1992, pp. 16-22.
27. ^ Nate Thayer and Leo Dobbs, “Tribal Fighters Head for Refuge in USA,” Phnom Penh Post, October 23 1992.
28. ^ Nate Thayer, "Trail of tears: 'Lost' Montagnard Army Vows to Fight On," Far Eastern Economic Review, Sept 10 1992, pp. 18-22.
29. ^ "Search for the kouprey: trail runs cold for Cambodia’s national animal". Phnom Penh Post, April 2006.
30. ^ Nate Thayer, "Motley crew moves out on jungle mission impossible," Phnom Penh Post, April 22, 1994.
31. ^ Nate Thayer, "Frantic calls from Regent's Rm 406," Phnom Penh Post, National News, 15 Jul 1994.
32. ^ Nate Thayer, "As It happened..." Far Eastern Economic Review, July 14, 1994, pp. 15-16.
33. ^ Philip Gourevitch, "Guns 'N Deadlines," HQ Magazine, Nov/Dec 1997, pp. 116-119.
34. ^ Nate Thayer, "Narco-nexus." Far Eastern Economic Review, April 24 1997, Vol. 160 Issue 17, p. 20.
35. ^ Nate Thayer, “Drug Suspects Bankroll Cambodian Coup Leader,” Washington Post, July 22, 1997.
36. ^ Nate Thayer, “Pol Pot, I Presume,”. Wall Street Journal, August 1, 1997.
37. ^ *"Cambodia: Trial of Pol Pot," interview with Gareth Evans and Tep Kunnal.
38. ^ Philip Gourevitch, The Talk of the Town, “Ink,” The New Yorker, August 18, 1997, p. 25.
39. ^ Keiger, 1997.
40. ^ Kelly Heyboer, "A Journalistic Coup Turns Sour," American Journalism Review, September 1997, pp. 10-11.
41. ^ Nate Thayer, "Freelancers’ Vital Role in International Reporting With the rise of media conglomerates, foreign news has been shoved aside." Nieman Reports, Dec 2001.
42. ^ Jeffrey Schneider, VP, ABC News, quoted in Richard Linnett and Wayne Friedman, "Marketing the news: the selling of Pol Pot." Advertising Age, 11/18/2002, Vol. 73, Issue 46; Section: Briefs.
43. ^ Nate Thayer, "Dying Breath The inside story of Pol Pot's last days and the disintegration of the movement he created," Far Eastern Economic Review, April 30, 1998
44. ^ Becker E. When the War was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution. 1st PublicAffairs ed. New York: PublicAffairs, 1998, ISBN 978-1891620003, p. 516.
45. ^ Nate Thayer, "Finding Pol Pot: Nate Thayer's Story-Behind-the-Story." The Public i: Newsletter of the Center for Public Integrity, Vol 7, no. 2, Mar 1999.
46. ^ Nate Thayer, Sympathy for the Devil: Living Dangerously in Cambodia - A Foreign Correspondent's Story. Penguin Putnam Inc., New York 1999, ISBN 978-0670885763
47. ^ Nate Thayer, "Day of Reckoning." Far Eastern Economic Review, 30 October 1997: pp. 14-20.
48. ^ Thayer, "Dying Breath," April 30, 1998.
49. ^ Gordon Sharpless "Anlong Veng: Normalcy returns to the former Khmer Rouge stronghold," Tales of Asia, July 2000
50. ^ Nury Vittachi, "A brief history of FEER," October 1, 2009.
51. ^ Nic Dunlop, The Lost Executioner: A Journey to the Heart of the Killing Fields. New York: Walker & Company, 2006.
52. ^ Dunlop, 2006, pp. 271-72.
53. ^ Stan Alcorn, "Photography in the Killing Fields," DART Center for Journalism and Trauma, March 2008.
54. ^ Nic Dunlop and Nate Thayer, "Duch Confesses," Far Eastern Economic Review, May 6, 1999; vol 170, no. 3:, p. 76.
55. ^ "Associated Press Team Wins ’99 SAIS-Novartis Prize," SAIS Reports, Johns Hopkins University, April/May 2000, p. 2.
56. ^ S. Jayasankaran, Nate Thayer, "From Logs to Lotus," Far Eastern Economic Review, 12 December 1996, cover story.
57. ^ Syamsul Indrapatra, Nate Thayer, Bertil Lintner, John McBeth, "Worse to come," Far Eastern Economic Review, 162.30 (Jul 29, 1999): 16-18.
58. ^ Nate Thayer, “Forward Steppes,” Far Eastern Economic Review, March 27, 1997, p. 20.
59. ^ Rigoberto Tiglao, Andrew Sherry, Nate Thayer, Michael Vatikoitis, "'Tis the season," Far Eastern Economic Review, 161:52, Dec 24, 1998: 18-20.
60. ^ Nate Thayer, "Live From Baghdad," Slate, March 19, 2003
61. ^ Nate Thayer, "The Bombing of Baghdad," Slate, March 22, 2003
62. ^ Nate Thayer, "Baghdad Gets Scarier," Slate, March 24, 2003
63. ^ Nate Thayer, "More American Bombs, and More Iraqi Defiance," Slate, March 24, 2003
64. ^ Nate Thayer, "The Road From Baghdad," Slate, March 28, 2003
65. ^ "Thai crisis : CTV News Channel: Nate Thayer in Bangkok."
66. ^ Michael Sheridan and Nate Thayer, "Vengeful redshirts threaten tourism: The Thai protest has spawned an underground militant wing in Bangkok," The Sunday Times, May 23, 2010
67. ^ Nate Thayer, profile

[edit] External links

• "Journalist Nate Thayer was on the scene in Cambodia recently when Pol Pot, the leader of the guerrilla force, the Khmer Rouge, was sentenced to life imprisonment in a show trial," NPR Interview, August 7, 1997
• "Continuing Unrest," PBS Interview with Sydney Schanberg and Nate Thayer, June 18, 1997.
• "Cambodia: Trial of Pol Pot," interview with Gareth Evans and Tep Kunnal.
• "Your scoop? Nah. It's ours if we want it," The Independent, 25 May 1998
• "Killing Fields Leader 'killed himself'," BBC News, January 21, 1999
• "70's Torturer in Cambodia Now 'Doing God's Work'," The New York Times, May 2, 1999
• "Former Khmer Rouge leader arrested," The New York Times, Sept 19, 2007
• "Alternative Wasn't There For Hun Sen," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Jan 5, 1999
• Nate Thayer, "Dying Breath: The inside story of Pol Pot's last days and the disintegration of the movement he created," Far Eastern Economic Review, April 30, 1998
• Nate Thayer, "The Road From Baghdad," Slate, March 28, 2003
• Nate Thayer's Interview with Pol Pot on YouTube, Part 1
• Nate Thayer's Interview with Pol Pot on YouTube, Part 2
• Dirck Halstead, "Rewind: Wars and Memories (PART I)" October 17, 1997
• "Educating Nate Thayer by Al Rockoff and Project Pineapple," June 9, 2010
• Andrew Drummond, "The Rebel Who Caught Pol Pot," The Times, July 30, 1997.

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Uneasy boom in Cambodia

 

Uneasy boom in Cambodia

New Straits Times

February 13, 2000 | Zainon Ahmad

Uneasy boom in Cambodia
Byline: Zainon Ahmad
Edition: New Sunday Times; 2*
Section: Opinion
Memo: (STF) - There is now peace in Cambodia but the general view is that stability will only be achieved when all the institutions of the state have been properly established and strengthened, reports Zainon Ahmad, who was in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap last week.

"ALL is not what it seems in Cambodia," said an Asean diplomat. Most foreigners stationed in Phnom Penh say the same thing when a visitor observes that the capital is booming and that tourists are once again flocking to the country.

Government leaders tell visitors that there is peace in the country following the UN-sponsored general election of 1993, that democracy has taken root and the Press is free. Others, including opposition leader Sam Rainsy and some non-governmental organisations agree that all is not what it seems in Cambodia. They say the peace is uneasy, the economy is a sham and there is no democracy.
"Cambodia is a dictatorship under the control of Hun Sen - make no mistake about that," said jounalist Nate Thayer of the Far Eastern Economic Review magazine to a group of Asian and German editors in Siem Reap last week.

Sam Rainsy of the opposition Sam Rainsy Party said there was no rule of law and as a result, mafia elements from Hong Kong and Macau had flocked to Cambodia.

But everyone agrees that there is now peace in the country, beginning with the election victory of strongman Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party in the 1998 election.

People are finding employment in the small factories that have mushroomed in and around Phnom Penh in recent years. Shops are stocked with goods and restaurants are well patronised. They are also employed in the scores of hotels.

When asked about the state of things, government officials are quick to say that the economy is growing again after the so-called Asian flu. And they have figures at their fingertips.

They admit that Cambodia is still one of the poorest countries in the world but say that the one year of peace has attracted many investors and that the future looks good.

The economy is the Government's priority, they say. It has called itself "the economic government" as a strategy to convince prospective investors that it is business-friendly.

"The gross domestic product growth has been fairly consistent with our projections and we hope to achieve at least six per cent growth this year," said Kong Vibol of the Ministry of Economy and Finance at a Konrad Adenauer Foundation-sponsored meeting of Asian and German editors in Phnom Penh last week.

He and other economists spewed statistics to convince the editors that the economy is doing well and that the investment climate in the country is never better.

The editors were told that "the real GDP growth of Cambodia is based on the following: a forcast 3.8 per cent growth in agriculture premising on three factors - a 5.1 per cent increase in rice production, a six per cent expansion in production of other cereals and a 14.8 per cent growth in fisheries products.

Kong Vibol also said: "The goals of the Government's reform programme are poverty alleviation and the achievement of sustainable economic growth. This programme is premised on strengthening the rule of law and governance and tackling corruption."

To which Sam Rainsy said all the glossy statements were presented to convince the donor community that the necessary reforms were taking place and corruption was being eradicated.

An official of one of the European NGOs (there are almost a hundred of them from Europe, America, Japan, Australia and other countries spending money on projects in Cambodia) said because of corruption, Australia was pulling out from extending a helping hand to the Royal Cambodian Navy.

Most of the government economists said Cambodia had benefited tremendously from being admitted as the 10th member of Asean in 1998. But they were quite unsuccessful in explaining how. They would not even admit that it was another bid for legitimacy.

Some NGO officials said government ministers and officials were not used to explaining things to their people. And because of the obsequious nature of the Cambodians in general, they saw no need to do so. "And this perhaps explain why some leaders commit all sorts of criminal acts with such impunity," said an NGO representative from Europe.

In the 1998 general election, Hun Sen's party failed to win two- thirds of the seats in the National Assembly, necessary for any move to amend the constitution. The CPP (the former Cambodian Communist Party) had no choice but to coalesce with the party it ousted in a bloody coup in 1997 - Prince Norodom Ranariddh's Funcinpec.

Ranariddh, son of King Norodom Sihanouk, is now content to play his role as speaker of the country's Parliament - the National Assembly.

This gives rise to speculation that some form of a deal had been worked out which would lead Ranariddh to be the next king of Cambodia. But only Sam Rainsy dared to speak out. Or, as some put it, was foolhardy or crazy enough to speak out.

He told the meeting of editors it was one of the reasons why he wanted the procedure of selecting the next king to be made public. The people should learn to break free from the feudal mentality under which they had lived for hundreds of years.

In his new millennium message, he lambasted the ruling regime. He said: "The superficially revamped communist regime - under a thin veneer of monarchy which is nothing else than a facade of legality and democracy for an illegal and dictatorial regime - preserves and promotes this type of mentality which forms the moral foundation of the unacceptable present status quo."

When leaders of the CCP and Funcinpec appeared on radio and television to blast him, Sam Rainsy appealed to some foreign embassies to protect him.

Asked by the editors why he made such extreme statements, he said the message was meant to shake up the thinking of the Cambodian leaders and people.

But peace does not mean that no more murders and killings are taking place. Cases of extrajudicial killings abound. Other killings and murders continue with impunity.

Nate Thayer cited examples of impunity, including the failure of the Government to arrest anyone for the 1997 grenade attack that killed at least 17 people and injured more than 100, for the more than 100 extrajudicial killings of Funcinpec security officials following the 1997 factional fighting, and for the lack of action following the December acid attack against a 16-year-old girl police said was led by the wife of a Council of Minister's official.

"People with money are able to buy off people with power, and people with guns are able to buy off people with power," the journalist charged. He said Cambodian officials' links to criminal syndicates were key to understanding why institutions were as weak as they were now in Cambodia.

Nate Thayer blasted the business practises of Teng Bunma, who directs the Thai Boon Roong Group and heads the country's Chamber of Commerce. The tycoon has been barred from entering the United States because of suspected links to drug-trafficking. Teng Bunma has denied the allegations.

One government senior official agreed with much of what Nate Thayer said. "Someone has to say the truth," said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

There were also Cambodians at the talk who disagreed. National Television of Kampuchea deputy director-general Kem Gunawadh said: "Nate Thayer knows well about my country, but he doesn't understand the differences now compared to before. What he said was true before 1998, but not now."

Lao Mong Hay, the executive director of the Khmer Institute for Democracy and regular government critic, said: "He might have gone too far."

Despite the bleak picture of Cambodia as painted by Thayer, some visitors to Phnom Penh get a sense that the country is enjoying prosperity especially at night when the city is all lighted up.

Neon signs proclaim the numerous casinos and nightclubs. Far greater number of casinos and nightclubs, said one diplomat, had mushroomed on the western strip of the country bordering Thailand, which does not allow casinos on its soil. Thais and others cross the border in hordes to enjoy themselves there while Cambodians flock there to work.

While Cambodians have no money to gamble they are certainly doing it with their soul, remarked the diplomat.

(Copyright 2000)

COPYRIGHT 1999 The New Straits Times Press (M) Bhd. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All inquiries regarding rights or concerns about this content should be directed to Customer Service. For permission to reuse this article, contact Copyright Clearance Center.

Cambodian Peace Was Just a Day Away; Hun Sen's Coup Derailed Ceremony to Announce Truce With Khmer Rouge

Cambodian Peace Was Just a Day Away; Hun Sen's Coup Derailed Ceremony to Announce Truce With Khmer Rouge

The Washington Post

August 17, 1997 | Nate Thayer

2

After six weeks of secret meetings and a violent power struggle here in the jungles of northern Cambodia, a watershed moment in this country's tortured history was at hand.

The last holdouts of the Khmer Rouge, the radical Communist guerrillas who had killed more than 1 million people when they ruled Cambodia in the late 1970s and thousands more after their ouster, were giving up. They had deposed their notorious leader Pol Pot, effectively abandoned their war against Cambodia's government and had agreed to a formal "surrender" ceremony in which their forces would join the Cambodian army.

As a result of negotiations that Pol Pot violently opposed, but ultimately failed to prevent, it seemed that the end of the 35-year-old guerrilla movement was near -- and with it a termination of the civil war that has gripped the country for most of that time. Plans were made to announce the deal in a ceremony scheduled for July 6. The ceremony never took place. On that day, Second Prime Minister Hun Sen declared himself in full control of the government and announced the overthrow of his rival, First Prime Minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh. Apparently fearing that the peace agreement was a ploy to weaken him politically and militarily, Hun Sen had launched a coup July 5 to scuttle it. Now, Hun Sen's political opponents are waging armed resistance to his authoritarian rule, and there are signs that the Khmer Rouge remnants -- minus Pol Pot -- are reuniting to help them. In the tragic logic of Cambodian politics, an initiative that seemed only a day away from bringing long-awaited peace has instead brought more war. The story of the ill-fated peace initiative, played out in this Khmer Rouge jungle stronghold surrounded by land mines, emerges from documents and interviews with the government and Khmer Rouge negotiators involved in the talks. The Khmer Rouge officials were interviewed at the time of an extraordinary July 25 show trial in which an ailing Pol Pot was sentenced to "life imprisonment" by a tribunal made up of younger guerrilla leaders, who had revolted against him in June. Frail, white-haired and visibly traumatized, the former dictator hobbled on a bamboo cane as he was escorted away to house arrest. Government documents obtained by The Washington Post, signed by both the government and Khmer Rouge negotiators, show that on July 4 the guerrillas finally had agreed to integrate their troops into the army and recognize the government. The agreement, principally between Ranariddh and the Khmer Rouge's nominal leader Khieu Samphan, was the culmination of a score of secret meetings between Khmer Rouge leaders and government military negotiators. The talks proceeded against a backdrop of bitter divisions within both the government and the Khmer Rouge. Ranariddh and Hun Sen, steadfast political opponents, coexisted uneasily as co-prime ministers. The Khmer Rouge, meanwhile, had split a year ago when about half its fighters, followers of former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary in the western gem-mining center of Pailin, agreed to join the government army in a deal brokered by Hun Sen. Pol Pot, in firm control of the rest of the organization in its northern redoubt of Anlong Veng, bitterly opposed any peace negotiations. But many of his top commanders, seeing continued warfare as futile if they played no political role, wanted to strike a deal like the one agreed to in Pailin. Pol Pot's notoriety made him a major obstacle to such an accord. Between April 1975 and January 1979, when he ruled the country as head of a Khmer Rouge government, Pol Pot orchestrated a campaign of terror and mass murder that left more than 1 million Cambodians dead and the country in ruins. Formal negotiations with the Khmer Rouge were attempted last February, but Pol Pot loyalists ambushed a government team of 15 emissaries when its helicopter landed in Khmer Rouge territory. Ten of the government officials were executed and the rest were taken prisoner. Negotiations resumed on May 16, when a government military delegation met with Khmer Rouge officials led by Tep Kunnal, a senior political figure. A government negotiator who was at the meeting quoted Tep Kunnal as saying "he was in favor of national reconciliation and wanted a permanent cease-fire . . . to study whether we could work together to allow their territory and army to join the government." Tep Kunnal, a French-educated engineer and longtime Khmer Rouge diplomat and political strategist who joined the group in the early 1970s, has emerged as a top new leader. He served more than a decade in New York in the U.N. mission of the former Khmer Rouge government-in-exile and is knowledgeable about U.S. politics. A series of talks continued through the end of May and into early June, with government army negotiators repeatedly traveling by helicopter to Anlong Veng. "Pol Pot was informed of the negotiations," said a government negotiator. "At first Pol Pot said he was in favor of negotiations. But our side insisted strongly that Pol Pot must be completely out. So we discussed secretly with the new {Khmer Rouge} military leaders. So that was why Pol Pot was getting mad. We asked to exclude him." The guerrillas agreed in principle to integrate their army into the government armed forces, recognize the Cambodian constitution and formally disband their "provisional government," according to Khmer Rouge and government sources. On June 1, Ranariddh met Khieu Samphan, the nominal leader, secretly near the Thai border, according to Ranariddh. On June 5, the two sides met at the historic temples at Preah Vihear, where the guerrillas were preparing a site to announce the agreement. But that evening, Im Nguon, chief military representative on the negotiating team and chief of staff of the new Khmer Rouge army, called a senior government negotiator by mobile telephone "and asked me to work carefully on the issue secretly, because the negotiations were very sensitive," the government negotiator said. "I realized that this was a signal that there was a split within the Khmer Rouge. I realized that within the Khmer Rouge there was a split on negotiations. I didn't know who it was between, but {Im} Nguon was warning me." The next meeting was scheduled on June 10, "but there was a big problem," one of the government negotiators said. Khmer Rouge defense minister Son Sen and 12 members of his family and inner circle had been found murdered. It was the beginning of Pol Pot's attempt to scuttle the political negotiations through a violent purge of Khmer Rouge ranks. On June 12, top government military commander Gen. Nhek Bun Chhay and one other government colonel arrived by helicopter in Anlong Veng to find a Khmer Rouge at war with itself. Most of the Khmer Rouge negotiating team, including Tep Kunnal and Khieu Samphan, had been taken hostage by Pol Pot and his loyalists. Heavy fighting, involving mortars, artillery and small arms, could be heard just a couple of miles away, as the Khmer Rouge factions battled for control. Pol Pot's Hostages The Khmer Rouge negotiator, Im Nguon, reported that Pol Pot was holding hostage "all those who were in favor of national reconciliation." The Khmer Rouge said the situation was critical, and asked for immediate military support "to help liberate the hostages," according to one of the government negotiators. "After that we immediately took the helicopter to {the nearby government military base at} Samrong to bring ammunition -- mainly AK-47 ammunition but also heavier ammunition," including helicopters loaded with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and other heavy munitions, the government negotiator said. With Pol Pot and his loyalists on the run and the entire political leadership held hostage in nearby jungles, government negotiators moved fast. Nhek Bun Chhay flew in from Phnom Penh on June 12 and shuttled back and forth delivering ammunition before returning to the capital. It was that day, while fighting raged in the surrounding jungle, that Nhek Bun Chhay first met Khmer Rouge strongman Ta Mok, the 72-year-old, one-legged overall commander of the new Khmer Rouge who had joined the revolution in 1963 with Pol Pot -- and now had turned against him. "I place all my hope on you," he reportedly told Nhek Bun Chhay. "Please continue the negotiations for national reconciliation in order to bring trust between our two groups. I want to see peace in Cambodia and to not see any more killing," he was quoted as saying. The next day, June 13, the government team returned by helicopter. "It was a very tense meeting because the fighting was still going on, and they asked us to postpone the meeting because they had to solve their internal problems first," one of the negotiators said. The team left after four hours. When they returned four days later, they were told that "the situation had calmed down" and that some of the hostages had been rescued. "They said that Tep Kunnal and the others had been liberated and they would arrive back the next day, but political leader Khieu Samphan was still held and Pol Pot had not yet been captured," one of the negotiators said. On the next day, they returned and met with Tep Kunnal, who "expressed fear for his group because Khieu Samphan, their leader, was missing with Pol Pot," according to the government negotiator. Tep Kunnal said that Pol Pot's battle slogan was, "Fight! Fight! Fight! Struggle! Struggle! Struggle!" Meanwhile, back in Phnom Penh, there was another developing issue: the attitude of Cambodia's other prime minister, Hun Sen. Nhek Bun Chhay and other government military officials say Hun Sen was kept informed of daily developments by a committee of senior military and political officials, formed earlier this year to ease tensions between the two government camps headed by Ranariddh and Hun Sen. "Tep Kunnal . . . asked about Hun Sen's stance. What did Hun Sen say about the groups returning back to join the society?" recalled a government negotiator. The team replied that there "was no problem provided that he abandon Pol Pot, accept the constitution, and integrate their army." Strongman's Downfall As the days went on, Pol Pot's remaining loyalists, who had numbered only about 300, began to abandon him one by one. He had fled northeast toward the Thai border, and by June 19 was surrounded. When the man who had once wielded absolute power over 7 million people was finally captured, two of his soldiers were carrying him through the jungle in a green Chinese military hammock strung on a bamboo pole. With him were his wife, a woman in her 30s, their 12-year-old daughter, a niece, three other loyalists and Khieu Samphan as hostage. A witness to his capture said he was given oxygen immediately and seemed near death from exhaustion and trauma, which were exacerbating his serious heart disease and high blood pressure. A white Toyota Land Cruiser that the Khmer Rouge had seized from U.N. peacekeepers years earlier was sent to bring him back to Anlong Veng. On June 21, government negotiators returned to Anlong Veng, where they met a tired and drained Khieu Samphan. Nearby was a very sick 72-year-old man hooked to an intravenous drip with an oxygen mask over his face. When asked by government negotiators if they could take a picture of Pol Pot to prove to the world that he was alive and captured, Ta Mok erupted: "Let me throw the contemptible Pol Pot in a cage first, and then you can take his photograph!" "He was very angry," said a witness. Ta Mok reportedly told negotiators they could take Pol Pot away if they could find a suitable place in exile for him, but no specific country was mentioned. From that point, the peace negotiations moved more quickly. On June 20, during an official visit by Thai Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh to Phnom Penh, Ranariddh announced that Pol Pot was under arrest and Khieu Samphan would agree to surrender. The comments were met with widespread skepticism by diplomats and others, coming on the heels of similar claims over recent months that had proved unfounded. A military subcommittee was formed to hammer out the details of integrating the guerrillas into the government army. Nhek Bun Chhay demanded that the Khmer Rouge announce its support of the Cambodian constitution over their clandestine radio broadcasts. The Khmer Rouge prepared a draft statement agreeing to support the constitution, turn over their army and territory to formal central government command and recognize the role of King Norodom Sihanouk as sovereign of the nation. But the government negotiators spent days hammering out wording and demanding the deletion of vitriolic language condemning Hun Sen -- particularly frequent references to the second prime minister as "contemptible" and a "puppet" of Vietnam. Hun Sen defected from the Khmer Rouge in 1977. Vietnam installed him as Cambodia's foreign minister after its invasion toppled Pol Pot in 1979 and later elevated him to prime minister. "We said to them to you must stop using these words. . . . We asked specifically to stop using `puppet' . . . in their language on the draft announcement to surrender to the government," said one of the chief government negotiators. On June 22, the Khmer Rouge reiterated a request for assurances that they be allowed to keep the same military arrangement in Anlong Veng that was given to earlier defectors. In those cases, the military units changed into government uniforms and pledged allegiance to the king, government and constitution, but were not forced to disperse from their territory. Nhek Bun Chhay agreed. And it was agreed that the former Khmer Rouge, who now called themselves the National Unity Party, could join the National United Front coalition of anti-Hun Sen political opposition parties, which had been formed earlier this year in preparation for elections scheduled for 1998. Request for Amnesty On June 29, Khmer Rouge leader Ta Mok met the government negotiators over lunch at Anlong Veng. Ta Mok complained about attempts to bring him to an international court on charges of crimes against humanity, citing the royal amnesty granted to former Khmer Rouge official Ieng Sary after his defection last year. "Now Ieng Sary has already been given amnesty by the king, and Ieng Sary was number three in the command structure of the Khmer Rouge. But I was number five. So if the number three is amnestied, why not me who was less powerful?" complained the commander who has been accused of leading major purges of political enemies during the Khmer Rouge's years in power. "From the very beginning of the struggle to now I have never issued an order to kill anyone," Ta Mok contended, according to sources who were present. "All orders were decided by Pol Pot alone. Pol Pot made all decisions with absolute dictatorship!" The question of Ta Mok's fate was left unresolved. A formal surrender ceremony was tentatively set for June 30, "but the problem was lack of helicopter transportation for all the journalists and diplomats" to the remote jungle base, which is surrounded by thousands of land mines and is unreachable by road. In any event, a few small issues remained. By July 3 both sides had hammered out all details of the agreements, "and we flew back to Phnom Penh to report to the prime minister that everything was finished," one of the government negotiators said. A statement that was to be announced on the radio and read by Khieu Samphan at a press conference on July 6 was signed by both sides, including Ranariddh on behalf of the government. "On 4 July we flew back to Anlong Veng and we informed the Khmer Rouge to proceed because we got the final agreement from Prime Minister Ranariddh," said one of the chief government negotiators. The surrender ceremony was to be held at the Preah Vihear temple site, with diplomats and journalists flown in to witness the historic occasion. It never happened. Early on the morning of July 5, Hun Sen launched his coup d'etat in Phnom Penh, targeting Nhek Bun Chhay and inflicting a total military and political defeat on Ranariddh's forces in the capital within 48 hours. The chance for a negotiated peace, only 24 hours away, was gone. Back to Square One Ranariddh's forces are now holed up in jungle sanctuaries, and Hun Sen, in control of the government, is sending thousands of troops and heavy weapons to the areas in an attempt to subdue them. The forces loyal to Ranariddh have begun to form a military coalition with former Khmer Rouge fighters, both from Anlong Veng and from the other faction that surrendered last year. "I hope that ASEAN {the Association of Southeast Asian Nations} and the international community will be aware that our government was not able to take Anlong Veng militarily, in a series of major offensives since 1993," Ranariddh said in an interview in Bangkok last week. "Now it is Hun Sen alone. My priority is diplomatic and political struggle, but I have clearly warned the U.S. if you do not help me put pressure on Hun Sen, you will have civil war, a bloody civil war, and you cannot avoid having the participation of the Khmer Rouge." He added, "The Khmer Rouge are coming back, but they are coming back as nationalists, patriots, not as killers. It is not fair that they accuse Ranariddh. It is Hun Sen who has brought back the war."

Cambodian Peace Was Just a Day Away; Hun Sen's Coup Derailed Ceremony to Announce Truce With Khmer Rouge

Cambodian Peace Was Just a Day Away; Hun Sen's Coup Derailed Ceremony to Announce Truce With Khmer Rouge

The Washington Post

August 17, 1997

By Nate Thayer 

After six weeks of secret meetings and a violent power struggle here in the jungles of northern Cambodia, a watershed moment in this country's tortured history was at hand.

The last holdouts of the Khmer Rouge, the radical Communist guerrillas who had killed more than 1 million people when they ruled Cambodia in the late 1970s and thousands more after their ouster, were giving up. They had deposed their notorious leader Pol Pot, effectively abandoned their war against Cambodia's government and had agreed to a formal "surrender" ceremony in which their forces would join the Cambodian army.

As a result of negotiations that Pol Pot violently opposed, but ultimately failed to prevent, it seemed that the end of the 35-year-old guerrilla movement was near -- and with it a termination of the civil war that has gripped the country for most of that time. Plans were made to announce the deal in a ceremony scheduled for July 6. The ceremony never took place. On that day, Second Prime Minister Hun Sen declared himself in full control of the government and announced the overthrow of his rival, First Prime Minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh. Apparently fearing that the peace agreement was a ploy to weaken him politically and militarily, Hun Sen had launched a coup July 5 to scuttle it. Now, Hun Sen's political opponents are waging armed resistance to his authoritarian rule, and there are signs that the Khmer Rouge remnants -- minus Pol Pot -- are reuniting to help them. In the tragic logic of Cambodian politics, an initiative that seemed only a day away from bringing long-awaited peace has instead brought more war. The story of the ill-fated peace initiative, played out in this Khmer Rouge jungle stronghold surrounded by land mines, emerges from documents and interviews with the government and Khmer Rouge negotiators involved in the talks. The Khmer Rouge officials were interviewed at the time of an extraordinary July 25 show trial in which an ailing Pol Pot was sentenced to "life imprisonment" by a tribunal made up of younger guerrilla leaders, who had revolted against him in June. Frail, white-haired and visibly traumatized, the former dictator hobbled on a bamboo cane as he was escorted away to house arrest. Government documents obtained by The Washington Post, signed by both the government and Khmer Rouge negotiators, show that on July 4 the guerrillas finally had agreed to integrate their troops into the army and recognize the government. The agreement, principally between Ranariddh and the Khmer Rouge's nominal leader Khieu Samphan, was the culmination of a score of secret meetings between Khmer Rouge leaders and government military negotiators. The talks proceeded against a backdrop of bitter divisions within both the government and the Khmer Rouge. Ranariddh and Hun Sen, steadfast political opponents, coexisted uneasily as co-prime ministers. The Khmer Rouge, meanwhile, had split a year ago when about half its fighters, followers of former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary in the western gem-mining center of Pailin, agreed to join the government army in a deal brokered by Hun Sen. Pol Pot, in firm control of the rest of the organization in its northern redoubt of Anlong Veng, bitterly opposed any peace negotiations. But many of his top commanders, seeing continued warfare as futile if they played no political role, wanted to strike a deal like the one agreed to in Pailin. Pol Pot's notoriety made him a major obstacle to such an accord. Between April 1975 and January 1979, when he ruled the country as head of a Khmer Rouge government, Pol Pot orchestrated a campaign of terror and mass murder that left more than 1 million Cambodians dead and the country in ruins. Formal negotiations with the Khmer Rouge were attempted last February, but Pol Pot loyalists ambushed a government team of 15 emissaries when its helicopter landed in Khmer Rouge territory. Ten of the government officials were executed and the rest were taken prisoner. Negotiations resumed on May 16, when a government military delegation met with Khmer Rouge officials led by Tep Kunnal, a senior political figure. A government negotiator who was at the meeting quoted Tep Kunnal as saying "he was in favor of national reconciliation and wanted a permanent cease-fire . . . to study whether we could work together to allow their territory and army to join the government." Tep Kunnal, a French-educated engineer and longtime Khmer Rouge diplomat and political strategist who joined the group in the early 1970s, has emerged as a top new leader. He served more than a decade in New York in the U.N. mission of the former Khmer Rouge government-in-exile and is knowledgeable about U.S. politics. A series of talks continued through the end of May and into early June, with government army negotiators repeatedly traveling by helicopter to Anlong Veng. "Pol Pot was informed of the negotiations," said a government negotiator. "At first Pol Pot said he was in favor of negotiations. But our side insisted strongly that Pol Pot must be completely out. So we discussed secretly with the new {Khmer Rouge} military leaders. So that was why Pol Pot was getting mad. We asked to exclude him." The guerrillas agreed in principle to integrate their army into the government armed forces, recognize the Cambodian constitution and formally disband their "provisional government," according to Khmer Rouge and government sources. On June 1, Ranariddh met Khieu Samphan, the nominal leader, secretly near the Thai border, according to Ranariddh. On June 5, the two sides met at the historic temples at Preah Vihear, where the guerrillas were preparing a site to announce the agreement. But that evening, Im Nguon, chief military representative on the negotiating team and chief of staff of the new Khmer Rouge army, called a senior government negotiator by mobile telephone "and asked me to work carefully on the issue secretly, because the negotiations were very sensitive," the government negotiator said. "I realized that this was a signal that there was a split within the Khmer Rouge. I realized that within the Khmer Rouge there was a split on negotiations. I didn't know who it was between, but {Im} Nguon was warning me." The next meeting was scheduled on June 10, "but there was a big problem," one of the government negotiators said. Khmer Rouge defense minister Son Sen and 12 members of his family and inner circle had been found murdered. It was the beginning of Pol Pot's attempt to scuttle the political negotiations through a violent purge of Khmer Rouge ranks. On June 12, top government military commander Gen. Nhek Bun Chhay and one other government colonel arrived by helicopter in Anlong Veng to find a Khmer Rouge at war with itself. Most of the Khmer Rouge negotiating team, including Tep Kunnal and Khieu Samphan, had been taken hostage by Pol Pot and his loyalists. Heavy fighting, involving mortars, artillery and small arms, could be heard just a couple of miles away, as the Khmer Rouge factions battled for control. Pol Pot's Hostages The Khmer Rouge negotiator, Im Nguon, reported that Pol Pot was holding hostage "all those who were in favor of national reconciliation." The Khmer Rouge said the situation was critical, and asked for immediate military support "to help liberate the hostages," according to one of the government negotiators. "After that we immediately took the helicopter to {the nearby government military base at} Samrong to bring ammunition -- mainly AK-47 ammunition but also heavier ammunition," including helicopters loaded with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and other heavy munitions, the government negotiator said. With Pol Pot and his loyalists on the run and the entire political leadership held hostage in nearby jungles, government negotiators moved fast. Nhek Bun Chhay flew in from Phnom Penh on June 12 and shuttled back and forth delivering ammunition before returning to the capital. It was that day, while fighting raged in the surrounding jungle, that Nhek Bun Chhay first met Khmer Rouge strongman Ta Mok, the 72-year-old, one-legged overall commander of the new Khmer Rouge who had joined the revolution in 1963 with Pol Pot -- and now had turned against him. "I place all my hope on you," he reportedly told Nhek Bun Chhay. "Please continue the negotiations for national reconciliation in order to bring trust between our two groups. I want to see peace in Cambodia and to not see any more killing," he was quoted as saying. The next day, June 13, the government team returned by helicopter. "It was a very tense meeting because the fighting was still going on, and they asked us to postpone the meeting because they had to solve their internal problems first," one of the negotiators said. The team left after four hours. When they returned four days later, they were told that "the situation had calmed down" and that some of the hostages had been rescued. "They said that Tep Kunnal and the others had been liberated and they would arrive back the next day, but political leader Khieu Samphan was still held and Pol Pot had not yet been captured," one of the negotiators said. On the next day, they returned and met with Tep Kunnal, who "expressed fear for his group because Khieu Samphan, their leader, was missing with Pol Pot," according to the government negotiator. Tep Kunnal said that Pol Pot's battle slogan was, "Fight! Fight! Fight! Struggle! Struggle! Struggle!" Meanwhile, back in Phnom Penh, there was another developing issue: the attitude of Cambodia's other prime minister, Hun Sen. Nhek Bun Chhay and other government military officials say Hun Sen was kept informed of daily developments by a committee of senior military and political officials, formed earlier this year to ease tensions between the two government camps headed by Ranariddh and Hun Sen. "Tep Kunnal . . . asked about Hun Sen's stance. What did Hun Sen say about the groups returning back to join the society?" recalled a government negotiator. The team replied that there "was no problem provided that he abandon Pol Pot, accept the constitution, and integrate their army." Strongman's Downfall As the days went on, Pol Pot's remaining loyalists, who had numbered only about 300, began to abandon him one by one. He had fled northeast toward the Thai border, and by June 19 was surrounded. When the man who had once wielded absolute power over 7 million people was finally captured, two of his soldiers were carrying him through the jungle in a green Chinese military hammock strung on a bamboo pole. With him were his wife, a woman in her 30s, their 12-year-old daughter, a niece, three other loyalists and Khieu Samphan as hostage. A witness to his capture said he was given oxygen immediately and seemed near death from exhaustion and trauma, which were exacerbating his serious heart disease and high blood pressure. A white Toyota Land Cruiser that the Khmer Rouge had seized from U.N. peacekeepers years earlier was sent to bring him back to Anlong Veng. On June 21, government negotiators returned to Anlong Veng, where they met a tired and drained Khieu Samphan. Nearby was a very sick 72-year-old man hooked to an intravenous drip with an oxygen mask over his face. When asked by government negotiators if they could take a picture of Pol Pot to prove to the world that he was alive and captured, Ta Mok erupted: "Let me throw the contemptible Pol Pot in a cage first, and then you can take his photograph!" "He was very angry," said a witness. Ta Mok reportedly told negotiators they could take Pol Pot away if they could find a suitable place in exile for him, but no specific country was mentioned. From that point, the peace negotiations moved more quickly. On June 20, during an official visit by Thai Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh to Phnom Penh, Ranariddh announced that Pol Pot was under arrest and Khieu Samphan would agree to surrender. The comments were met with widespread skepticism by diplomats and others, coming on the heels of similar claims over recent months that had proved unfounded. A military subcommittee was formed to hammer out the details of integrating the guerrillas into the government army. Nhek Bun Chhay demanded that the Khmer Rouge announce its support of the Cambodian constitution over their clandestine radio broadcasts. The Khmer Rouge prepared a draft statement agreeing to support the constitution, turn over their army and territory to formal central government command and recognize the role of King Norodom Sihanouk as sovereign of the nation. But the government negotiators spent days hammering out wording and demanding the deletion of vitriolic language condemning Hun Sen -- particularly frequent references to the second prime minister as "contemptible" and a "puppet" of Vietnam. Hun Sen defected from the Khmer Rouge in 1977. Vietnam installed him as Cambodia's foreign minister after its invasion toppled Pol Pot in 1979 and later elevated him to prime minister. "We said to them to you must stop using these words. . . . We asked specifically to stop using `puppet' . . . in their language on the draft announcement to surrender to the government," said one of the chief government negotiators. On June 22, the Khmer Rouge reiterated a request for assurances that they be allowed to keep the same military arrangement in Anlong Veng that was given to earlier defectors. In those cases, the military units changed into government uniforms and pledged allegiance to the king, government and constitution, but were not forced to disperse from their territory. Nhek Bun Chhay agreed. And it was agreed that the former Khmer Rouge, who now called themselves the National Unity Party, could join the National United Front coalition of anti-Hun Sen political opposition parties, which had been formed earlier this year in preparation for elections scheduled for 1998. Request for Amnesty On June 29, Khmer Rouge leader Ta Mok met the government negotiators over lunch at Anlong Veng. Ta Mok complained about attempts to bring him to an international court on charges of crimes against humanity, citing the royal amnesty granted to former Khmer Rouge official Ieng Sary after his defection last year. "Now Ieng Sary has already been given amnesty by the king, and Ieng Sary was number three in the command structure of the Khmer Rouge. But I was number five. So if the number three is amnestied, why not me who was less powerful?" complained the commander who has been accused of leading major purges of political enemies during the Khmer Rouge's years in power. "From the very beginning of the struggle to now I have never issued an order to kill anyone," Ta Mok contended, according to sources who were present. "All orders were decided by Pol Pot alone. Pol Pot made all decisions with absolute dictatorship!" The question of Ta Mok's fate was left unresolved. A formal surrender ceremony was tentatively set for June 30, "but the problem was lack of helicopter transportation for all the journalists and diplomats" to the remote jungle base, which is surrounded by thousands of land mines and is unreachable by road. In any event, a few small issues remained. By July 3 both sides had hammered out all details of the agreements, "and we flew back to Phnom Penh to report to the prime minister that everything was finished," one of the government negotiators said. A statement that was to be announced on the radio and read by Khieu Samphan at a press conference on July 6 was signed by both sides, including Ranariddh on behalf of the government. "On 4 July we flew back to Anlong Veng and we informed the Khmer Rouge to proceed because we got the final agreement from Prime Minister Ranariddh," said one of the chief government negotiators. The surrender ceremony was to be held at the Preah Vihear temple site, with diplomats and journalists flown in to witness the historic occasion. It never happened. Early on the morning of July 5, Hun Sen launched his coup d'etat in Phnom Penh, targeting Nhek Bun Chhay and inflicting a total military and political defeat on Ranariddh's forces in the capital within 48 hours. The chance for a negotiated peace, only 24 hours away, was gone. Back to Square One Ranariddh's forces are now holed up in jungle sanctuaries, and Hun Sen, in control of the government, is sending thousands of troops and heavy weapons to the areas in an attempt to subdue them. The forces loyal to Ranariddh have begun to form a military coalition with former Khmer Rouge fighters, both from Anlong Veng and from the other faction that surrendered last year. "I hope that ASEAN {the Association of Southeast Asian Nations} and the international community will be aware that our government was not able to take Anlong Veng militarily, in a series of major offensives since 1993," Ranariddh said in an interview in Bangkok last week. "Now it is Hun Sen alone. My priority is diplomatic and political struggle, but I have clearly warned the U.S. if you do not help me put pressure on Hun Sen, you will have civil war, a bloody civil war, and you cannot avoid having the participation of the Khmer Rouge." He added, "The Khmer Rouge are coming back, but they are coming back as nationalists, patriots, not as killers. It is not fair that they accuse Ranariddh. It is Hun Sen who has brought back the war."

Ousted Cambodian Prince Seeks Foreign Supporters; Ranariddh Criticizes U.S. Response to Coup

Ousted Cambodian Prince Seeks Foreign Supporters; Ranariddh Criticizes U.S. Response to Coup

The Washington Post

August 15, 1997

By Nate Thayer

As Cambodian leader Hun Sen consolidates his power in Phnom Penh following a successful coup there last month, the rival he ousted is stepping up efforts to rally international opposition to the takeover and is openly criticizing the Clinton administration's response.

Prince Norodom Ranariddh, whom Hun Sen deposed as first prime minister in the coup on July 5 and 6, called on the United States to take a tougher stand on Cambodia and reveal what it knows about possible terrorism, drug trafficking and human rights violations by Hun Sen's supporters.

In an interview here on Monday, Ranariddh said Hun Sen's takeover of the shaky coalition government will not lead to greater stability in Cambodia, as some U.S. officials have theorized, but to a renewal of that nation's long-running civil war and a new lease on life for the notorious Khmer Rouge guerrillas. "I have clearly warned the U.S. if you do not help me put pressure on Hun Sen, you will have civil war -- a bloody civil war -- and you cannot help but have the participation of the Khmer Rouge," Ranariddh said at the house of Cambodia's ambassador to Thailand, a member of the prince's royalist party, known as Funcinpec. "The Khmer Rouge are coming back, but they are coming back as nationalists, as patriots, not as killers." While Hun Sen's coup was aimed at scuttling a political alliance between Funcinpec and remnants of the Khmer Rouge, it has driven the royalists and the rebels together militarily as they try to defend territory in northwestern Cambodia from attack by Hun Sen's forces. In response to the coup, the Khmer Rouge has stepped up its condemnation of Hun Sen as a "puppet" of neighboring Vietnam, which installed him in power after the Vietnamese invaded in 1979, ending nearly four years of bloody Khmer Rouge rule under Pol Pot. Because of Cambodians' widespread fear and resentment of Vietnam, a historical adversary, the Khmer Rouge propaganda appears likely to strike a more responsive chord in the wake of the coup, particularly since the group formally broke with Pol Pot in a show trial on July 25. In the interview, an emotional Ranariddh accused Washington of ignoring human rights violations by Hun Sen, notably a March 30 grenade attack that killed at least 17 people and wounded more than 100 at an opposition political rally in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. Because the injured included an American, Ron Abney of the Washington-based International Republican Institute, an FBI team was sent to investigate. It has produced an internal report that implicates a bodyguard unit loyal to Hun Sen, government sources have said. However, according to other sources close to the investigation, the report is not being released because of U.S. concerns that it would upset internal political stability in Cambodia. "We have to talk about the grenade attack," Ranariddh said. "President Clinton must release the FBI investigation. They know Hun Sen is a terrorist, but why are the Americans hiding the information, protecting Hun Sen?" Ranariddh also accused Washington of concealing connections between Hun Sen and suspected drug traffickers who have bankrolled his projects and helped fund last month's coup. "We should bring Hun Sen to an international trial," Ranariddh said. "They are terrorists, they are drug traffickers, and they have committed crimes against humanity." At least 41 of Ranariddh's supporters were tortured and executed following the coup, and hundreds more are missing, according to international human rights groups. Soldiers have taken scores of bodies to Buddhist temples and incinerated them, the groups say. "My priority is a political struggle, but the people will not let such a regime last," Ranariddh said. "With or without Ranariddh, Cambodia will have a resistance. It is not a problem between Hun Sen and Ranariddh. It is a problem between dictatorship and democracy." He added, "It will be a big mistake if the world community thinks strengthening Hun Sen will mean stability." Ranariddh's Funcinpec party "is now in the process of reorganizing militarily and politically," he said. Facing an arrest order by Hun Sen if he returns to Cambodia, Ranariddh vowed to go to Funcinpec-held territory in the country's northern jungles if the fighting continues. When his military commanders call him, he said, "I will not hesitate for one second to go back to lead the resistance."

Cambodia: Doing Its Best to Stop Drugs: Letters to the Editor; Washington Post

Cambodia: Doing Its Best to Stop Drugs

The Washington Post

August 4, 1997

The Post's July 22 front-page article on Cambodia {"Drug Suspects Bankroll Cambodian Coup Leader"} was biased, defamatory and focuses on the weaknesses of Cambodia's drug enforcement program while ignoring the giant steps forward Cambodia has taken to eradicate drug trafficking. Tying Second Prime Minister Hun Sen to drug trafficking is nonsense.

Even U.S. State Department spokesman Nicolas Burns said recently, "We have no direct evidence that Hun Sen is involved in drug trafficking."

Cambodia is located in an area where drugs from other countries can pass through it by road, river, sea and air. Its border and police agencies are not equipped or fully trained to stop drug movement, but the government does its best to halt this activity with the limited resources it possesses.

Since Cambodia formed its government in late 1993, it has passed a tough, new drug law, reorganized its drug-enforcement unit pursuant to international recommendations, equipped a lab for testing substances for drug content and conducted extensive training for its police and port officials. Cambodia's drug law provides a minimum sentence of 10 years in prison for possession or use of any quantity of any illegal drug.

More than 100 drug traffickers have been arrested and convicted in Cambodia. Last year, roughly 450 acres of marijuana were found and destroyed, and 40 kilos of heroin were seized in transit. Further, 71 kilos of heroin were burned under international supervision.

America, with all its resources, has not wiped out its drug problem or stopped drug entry at its ports. On April 7, 1996, President Clinton said, "The United States government is deeply appreciative of the efforts of the Royal Government of Cambodia to combat illicit narcotics trafficking." After a review of drug transit, he certified that the Cambodian government was fully cooperating with the United States or had taken adequate steps to achieve full compliance with appropriate international laws and programs.

Nate Thayer, the author of The Post's piece on Cambodia, published a version of this article in the Far Eastern Economic Review in November of 1995. At that time an investigation was initiated, and no evidence of official corruption was found.

H. E. VAR HUOTH

Ambassador Embassy of Cambodia Washington

Copyright 2009 The Washington Post. All inquiries regarding rights or concerns about this content should be directed to Customer Service. For permission to reuse this article, contact Copyright Clearance Center.

Tycoon Says He Financed Hun Sen Coup; $1 Million Underwrote Cambodian Takeover

Tycoon Says He Financed Hun Sen Coup; $1 Million Underwrote Cambodian Takeover

The Washington Post

July 24, 1997

By Nate Thayer

A powerful Cambodian businessman and suspected drug kingpin says he gave more than $1 million in cash and gold to co-prime minister Hun Sen and his allies to fund a coup that ousted rival government leader Prince Norodom Ranariddh this month.

Theng Bunma, reputedly Cambodia's wealthiest man and a staunch supporter of Hun Sen, told Western journalists in an interview in Phnom Penh last week that he had called Hun Sen during the July 5-6 coup to offer his support. Among those present at the interview was an Australian television news crew, which made a tape available to The Washington Post.

"I gave him {Hun Sen} $1 million to do whatever to control the situation," Bunma told the reporters. "He asked me if I had the money in Cambodia. I said no, but I would send 100 kilograms {220 pounds} of gold in a plane into Cambodia." That amount of gold is worth about $860,000. Bunma, who is president of the Cambodian Chamber of Commerce and owns holdings worth an estimated $400 million in Cambodia, also said he paid three renegade members of Ranariddh's Funcinpec party $50,000 each to support Hun Sen's coup. The tycoon made it clear that he saw the takeover as good for his business interests, but he did not explain why he was revealing a role in bankrolling it. The U.S. government believes that Bunma, in addition to owning a hotel, a bank and an import-export company in Cambodia, is the country's biggest heroin trafficker. In the interview, Bunma reiterated his previous denials of involvement in drug trafficking. "I was accused of being a drug trafficker, and I am telling you, drug trafficking, I really hate that," he said. "I have never done it." In a briefing in Washington Tuesday, however, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said, "We have reliable reporting that he {Theng Bunma} is closely and heavily involved in drug trafficking in Cambodia." He said the United States "does not have evidence that links Hun Sen himself, personally, to these accusations of narcotics trafficking" but that "we think the Cambodian government can do a lot more to purge itself of obvious corruption in the government, of obvious linkages between . . . members of the government and narco-traffickers." In an interview with The Washington Post in Bangkok Saturday, Ranariddh charged that Bunma and another wealthy suspected drug trafficker, Mong Rethy, have long been bankrolling Hun Sen. "He gets money from them, and they are drug traffickers," Ranariddh said. "I ask now that President Clinton . . . make public the investigation of the {Drug Enforcement Administration} on drug trafficking in Cambodia," Ranariddh added. "The DEA knows clearly." "The mafia is now in charge in Cambodia," Ranariddh declared, saying he was referring to "people like Theng Bunma, who is very, very powerful." During the coup, more than 300 of Hun Sen's troops, backed by tanks, were dispatched to protect Bunma's property. In the interview last week, Bunma expressed appreciation for that action and support for Ranariddh's ouster. "I say what {Hun Sen} did was correct," Bunma said. "Why? One reason. Take the example of my hotel." Ranariddh's troops wanted to destroy it, he said, but Hun Sen "put three tanks and soldiers around to protect it." Bunma said that he gave $50,000 each to three Funcinpec politicians opposed to Ranariddh -- provincial governors Toan Chhay and Duong Khem and minister of state Ung Phan -- to "encourage them" and cement their support for Hun Sen's coup. According to Western military sources in Phnom Penh, Bunma also has provided Hun Sen in recent days with Russian-made Mi-26 transport helicopters to ferry troops to front-line positions in northwestern Cambodia to battle Funcinpec loyalists. The helicopters are owned by Bunma and piloted by hired Russian crews. Intelligence sources say the helicopters also have been used to carry Southeast Asian heroin to Cambodian ports as part of international smuggling operations.

Drug Suspects Bankroll Cambodian Coup Leader; Narcotics Traffic Booms as Loans, Gifts Flow - The Washington Post | HighBeam Research

Drug Suspects Bankroll Cambodian Coup Leader; Narcotics Traffic Booms as Loans, Gifts Flow

The Washington Post

July 22, 1997 | Nate Thayer

When a prominent businessman and senior adviser to Cambodian co-prime minister Hun Sen was implicated in an attempt to smuggle seven tons of marijuana out of the country recently, a top official in the government's royalist faction vowed to seek his arrest.

"The court is preparing documents to arrest him now," Ho Sok, the secretary of state for the interior, said of the businessman, Mong Rethy. Hun Sen responded with a blunt warning: Anyone trying to arrest Mong Rethy, who had contributed more than $45 million to Hun Sen's development projects, should "wear a steel helmet," he said.

The warning turned out to be prophetic. During a coup two weeks ago in which Hun Sen ousted his rival co-prime minister, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, Ho Sok was hunted down by Hun Sen's forces and killed with a bullet to the head. According to Western anti-narcotics officials and Cambodian sources, Hun Sen has surrounded himself with suspected drug traffickers who bankroll his projects, lavish gifts on him and other leaders and seem bent on turning this country of 10 million people into an Asian narco-state. In recent years, Cambodia has grown into a major transshipment center for Southeast Asian heroin, a significant exporter of home-grown marijuana and a haven for money laundering. At least 120 tons of Cambodian marijuana were seized in Europe last year, and hundreds of tons more are believed to have gotten through, anti-narcotics agents say. Cambodia has become "the single fastest-growing narcotics transshipment point in the world," three U.S. senators complained in a letter to Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright last month. Calling the drug trade a "critical threat" to Cambodia's government, people and future development, they said Phnom Penh "must take decisive action to halt the flow of narcotics through its borders and prosecute all government officials involved in narcotics trafficking." So far, however, the traffickers and corrupt officials have operated in Cambodia with near impunity. Of particular concern to the United States lately have been the activities of Theng Bunma, Cambodia's most powerful tycoon and president of its Chamber of Commerce. His Cambodian investments, which include a bank, hotel and import-export business, are estimated to be worth more than $400 million. He also owns a major holding company in neighboring Thailand, the Thai Boon Rong Group. Bunma has showered Cambodia's leaders with cash and gifts, including black Mercedes limousines, an airplane and helicopters used by Hun Sen and other top officials. And, according to a confidential U.S. government document, Washington believes Bunma is also involved in drug trafficking and has banned him from entering the United States. Bunma denies any such involvement. In a recent interview with Fortune magazine, he challenged accusers to produce evidence and arrest him. He also warned that he is a man of his word. "If I say I will shoot you, I'll really shoot you!" the magazine quoted him as saying. Mong Rethy also denies being a drug trafficker. "Many people have tried to harm me in this way before," he said. "They have alleged I and Theng Bunma have provided {Hun Sen} funds to construct schools, temples, roads and bridges through smuggling of drugs. This is untrue." He added, however, that he was sure he would not be arrested, because then "the school construction couldn't be finished." In an interview with The Washington Post on Saturday, Ranariddh said Hun Sen gets "millions of dollars" from Bunma and Mong Rethy. "They are drug traffickers," he asserted. "The Americans know well. Now the administration doesn't seem to care." A close ally and financier of Hun Sen, whom he often accompanies on trips abroad, Bunma travels on a diplomatic passport and holds the title of economic adviser to Chea Sim, the acting head of state and chairman of the ruling Cambodian People's Party. In 1994, Bunma gave $3 million in no-interest "loans" to the government to pay for military expenditures, according to Finance Ministry documents. He has funded the repair of Mao Zedong Boulevard, one of the capital's main thoroughfares, and has paid the salaries of much of the Cambodian armed forces since early 1997, diplomats and Cambodian officials say. A 1995 U.S. State Department report on Cambodia said: "There are indications that some high-level military officials and powerful businessmen who give financial support to politicians are involved in heroin smuggling." A U.S. official familiar with that report said it referred to Bunma. "We consider him a major trafficker," said another senior U.S. anti-narcotics official, "We have followed him for a long time." But despite State Department warnings that drug-corrupted governments would have "difficult relations" with Washington, the U.S. government has appeared ambivalent about confronting Cambodian authorities on their relationship with drug syndicates. In February 1994, then-U.S. ambassador Charles Twining warned a Cambodian cabinet minister that Bunma was a drug trafficker and asked that the government distance itself from the tycoon, Cambodian officials said. The same month, however, the U.S. Embassy issued Bunma a visa to attend the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, an event organized at Congress and presided over by President Clinton. Mother Teresa was the keynote speaker. After hearing Clinton's speech, Bunma was granted a meeting with U.S. officials at the Pentagon. In May 1995, Bunma was again issued a U.S. visa as a member of Chea Sim's delegation on an official visit to Washington. Bunma paid the large delegation's bills at the posh Willard Hotel, according to hotel sources and Cambodian diplomats. Since then, Bunma has been barred from returning to the United States, but he seems to have grown even more influential in Cambodia. On Jan. 7, 1996, at the dedication of a new "Hun Sen Park" that the tycoon financed in Phnom Penh, Hun Sen declared that he would "never abandon" Bunma, "who has helped our party." On the VIP dais to observe the ceremony were both Bunma and the U.S. Embassy's charge d'affaires. Var Huoth, Cambodia's ambassador in Washington and an ally of Hun Sen, called Bunma "a big trader in Cambodia" but someone about whom "nobody knows" very much. He acknowledged rumors about Bunma's involvement in drug-running, but declined to respond to the allegation. "We are the victim of trafficking from abroad," he said. In a report to Congress in March, the State Department praised Cambodia for "significant efforts in 1996 toward addressing its drug trafficking and transit problems." The report certified the Cambodian government as "fully cooperating" on counter-narcotics efforts. But according to Interpol documents, the seizure by foreign law enforcement authorities of drugs originating in Cambodia increased in 1996 by more than 1,000 percent over 1995. Foreign authorities are especially concerned about large shipments of heroin that cross from Laos and Thailand to Cambodia's long seacoast. The traffickers "are using government planes, helicopters, military trucks, navy boats and soldiers to transport heroin," said a U.S. official who tracks the Cambodian drug trade. "There are definitely more drugs coming through Cambodia this year than before, but what can I do?" said Police Gen. Skadavy M. Ly Roun, who heads Cambodia's national anti-drug force. He said serious enforcement is next to impossible because of political infighting, corruption and the involvement of powerful figures. Staff writers William Branigin and R. Jeffrey Smith in Washington contributed to this report.

Heat on govt to act on military murders

Heat on Govt to Act on Military Murders

Phnom Penh Post

Friday, 10 March 1995

By Nate Thayer

H UMAN rights organizations in Cambodia and abroad have been closely monitoring what they say is a clear case of local police and military officers brazenly murdering two civilians in Battambang province.

The incident is being seen as a clear test of whether the government has the political will to arrest officials involved in gross human rights violations.

On the afternoon of Feb 5, farmer Neth Thong, 28, and Mov Ving, 28, a Funcinpec militiaman, were playing volleyball in Mong Russei district when approximately 30 government soldiers, police, and militia surrounded them at gun point, took them into custody, and later executed them at point blank range, according to numerous witnesses and family members.

The Cambodian human rights organizations LICAHDO and ADHOC have been instrumental in collecting information on the cases.

Gunshots were heard less than an hour after the arrest. The bodies were found the next morning in a nearby field. They had been handcuffed, and shot in the head and elsewhere with assault rifles. Evidence indicated they were also severely beaten.

Both victims were Funcinpec party members, according to family members.

Numerous witnesses were present at the arrest which was carried out without a warrant. Witnesses said the soldiers and police were led by Chhoun Ka'th, a militia chief in nearby Mong Kal commune.

Also present at the arrest were Khan, the district military chief; Vy, the Mong commune military chief; the district police chief and others.

Human rights officials say it is a clear test of whether Cambodia's judiciary - designed to be independent under the terms of the constitution and the Paris Agreements - is able to take action against other government officials who have political power but are involved in crime.

The Ministries of Interior, Defence and Justice were all officially informed in February of the details of the case by human rights organizations, as were the military court in Phnom Penh, the Battambang provincial court, the chief of military police in Battambang and the chief of the civilian police in the province.

The United Nations Center of Human Rights is also investigating. To date, no action has been taken to arrest the suspects or interview the witnesses. A government prosecutor has, however, asked local human rights organiztions not to publicize their findings.

The courts, through local prosecutors, and the Justice Ministry are responsible to take action in such cases. But, says one foreign Human Rights lawyer here: "The problem is there is a sense of impunity among the military so there is no authority willing to take action against members of the police or military who commit serious abuses."

When family members attempted to intervene, one of the armed men said: "If you ask for their release, I will kill you too," according to one witness interviewed by rights workers.

At the funeral of the victims, local authorities interrogated the family members and asked them: "Why are you having a funeral for the Khmer Rouge?" according to human rights workers.

Despite what investigators say is overwhelming evidence, no arrests have been made. Numerous witnesses and family members of the victims have been intimidated and threatened with death, human rights investigators say. Several witnesses have fled their homes and some are now living in an area pagoda.

The police report on the killings was allegedly written by Chhoun Ka'th, the head of the Mong Kal commune militia who is alleged to be the leader of the gang of armed government officials who arrested and executed the two.

On Feb 20 Amnesty International released an Urgent Action, one of their highest forms of international appeal.

"Relatives of two men recently killed by members of the Cambodian security forces are now in fear for their own safety," the Amnesty appeal said. "Local authorities seem to be unwilling to investigate these killings on the grounds that these men were alleged to be members of the outlawed Partie of Democratic Kampuchea. A police report on the incident alleges that Neth Thong and Mov Ving were PDK members, but it is believed that the report was written by one of the 30 armed men."

The Amnesty report continued: "The villagers and relatives insist that the men did not belong to the Khmer Rouge but were members of the legal, Royalist FUNCINPEC party. Relatives believe that the two men may have been killed for personal reasons, by people in positions of authority within the province of Battambang who are using the political situation as a smoke screen for illegal acts."

But villagers and other witnesses say the real reason for the killings appear to be a personal dispute involving the commune militia chief Chhoun Ka'th. In Jan 94, Chhoun Ka'th's brother, Chhoun Chherth, was involved in a dispute in which he physically assaulted a man named Vannak. Vannak was then said to join the Khmer Rouge. Chhoun Chherth was later abducted and murdered by the Khmer Rouge. Chhoun Ka'th believed that the two victims were involved in the killing of his brother and had threatened to murder them previously, according to villagers.

Political manipulation of the the "Khmer Rouge Outlaw Law", passed last July, continues to remain a major concern among Cambodian opposition politicians and human rights organizations who say the potential for abuse is immense.

Editor's death rattles press

Editor's Death rattles Press

Phnom Penh Post

Friday, 23 September 1994

By Nate Thayer

T HE Sept 7 assassination of Non Chan, a well-known editor of a popular Khmer newspaper, came as little surprise to local journalists and human rights groups.

The newspaper's staff, which had been openly critical of the government, had received numerous death threats in recent months. Its previous editor resigned in late July after being warned he would be killed. The newspaper, Samleng Yuvachun Khmer (voice of Khmer youth), had been officially warned by the government on at least three occasions since June, and its journalists threatened with arrest, lawsuits, and confiscation of their equipment if they continued writing articles critical of the government and its leaders.

The newspaper, formerly sympathetic to the ruling Funcinpec party, had been openly critical of Funcinpec leader Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh in recent months, accused high officials of corruption, and called for a political solution with the Khmer Rouge to end the civil war.

Investigators say that the broad daylight killing near Wat Phnom by uniformed men on a motorcycle remains unsolved, but comes amidst a general crackdown against critics of the government, particularly human rights groups and journalists.

Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh has ordered his government to put a stop to criticism he says is harming its image and the ability of the country to attract foreign investment, tourism, and vital military and other aid from donor countries.

Two high level US delegations arrived last week to discuss military and other support to Cambodia, which the government views as critical to waging a fight against the Khmer Rouge and strengthening the government, which is still wracked with internal disputes after an aborted coup attempt in July.

The Post has learned that Prime Minister Ranariddh and Second Prime Minister Hun Sen have drawn up plans for a major government reshuffle expected to be announced in coming weeks. The final details of the reshuffle have yet to be decided but it could affect more than two dozen ministers, governors, and military commanders in a shake up designed to strengthen the hand of the two Prime Ministers after the coup attempt and to reorganize a military that has proved ineffectual in dealing with the Khmer Rouge on the battlefield.

But many of the changes are opposed by the Cambodian People's Party leadership, which is now deeply split between Hun Sen loyalists and a strong faction loyal to Party boss Chea Sim and Interior Minister Sar Kheng.

Government sources say that Foreign Minister Prince Norodom Sirivudh, Finance Minister Sam Rainsy, and the commanders of all five military regions are targeted for removal from their current positions. A number of other ministers may also be shifted, senior government sources say.

But all sides agree that any shifts will have to be approached delicately and with some degree of prior consensus between the factions that make up the government to avoid provoking another coup attempt.

While Ranariddh and Hun Sen are attempting to construct a formula to consolidate power and ease tension within government ranks, they are also threatening key foreign support by cracking down on government critics.

"The question of the murder of this journalist is something which shocked us and we deplore it. It's been the topic of meetings I've had here from the top to the bottom," US Deputy Assistant secretary of State Peter Tomsen said on Sept 14. His visit came on the eve of a senior US military delegation which is tasked with recomending the nature of US military support now under consideration by Washington.

" A free press is absolutely essential to a democracy. If you don't have a free press then a democratic process is just not possible," Tomsen said.

Another editor was killed under mysterious circumstances in June, a further eight papers have been warned by the government, one editor jailed for writing articles "causing social unrest" and "dissension that threatens the solidarity of the leadership", and the government says it is now preparing lawsuits against five others.

Minister of State for Information Khieu Kanharith said the day after Chan's murder: "If he hadn't been killed, we would have sued him."

Amnesty International had a different response in a Sept 9 statement. "The unexplained death of this man, and other acts of intimidation, add to the pressures on journalists to exercise self censorship. The right to freedom of expression is at stake in Cambodia, as journalists have come under increasing pressure in recent months not to criticize the government." It added that Non Chan "apparently had no enemies, personal or financial disputes, [and] might have bean killed because of the articles he printed in his publication."

Four newspapers have elected to stop printing since the killing and many of their staff have gone into hiding. "In this country now, you cannot say the truth. If you say the truth you are the enemy," said one journalist with Samleng Yuvachun Khmer. "The government is afraid of the truth."

Two well-known human rights groups have been threatened by the government with closure or legal action since the killing of the editor for insinuating that the killing may have been politically motivated.

A letter this week signed by the chief of cabinet of Prime Minister Ranariddh, Ly Thuch threatened to take action against the Cambodian League for Defence and Promotion of Human Rights, Licadho.

The group had signed a joint statement by local human rights organizations calling for an investigation on whether the assassins were connected with the government.

" Your action can be brought to court as it can be considered an inducement to public disorder and to provoke anarchy," Prince Ranariddh's office said.

Last week, another well-known human rights group, the Khmer Institute for Democracy, was threatened with closure after it released a statement calling for an end to harassment of local journalists in the wake of the killing.

Two days after the murder of Non Chan, the five-year-old daughter of an official of the United Nations Center for Human Rights was kidnapped, shot, and dumped in the street near Phnom Penh's Royal Palace.

Investigators say that the act may have been a simple car robbery, but privately UN officials have their doubts.

They say that the center had been receiving threats for recent investigations over military human rights abuses and were actively investigating the murder of local journalists.

They say that the girl Marica Oliveros, a Spanish national, was shot point blank through the thigh, without any obvious motive or provocation, after she was kidnapped.