FOX News : Health

27 January, 2010

Haitian Recovery, Sweatshop Jobs, and the Role of Trade Preferences

Kimberly Ann ElliottSenior fellow at the Center for Global Development
Posted: January 26, 2010 09:19 AM
January 26, 2010
The Huffinton Post

Trade deserves some credit for the small but significant improvements to Haiti's economy before the earthquake. U.S. efforts to help Haitians recover from the disaster should include further improvements in our trade preferences program to promote job growth and better working conditions in Haiti.


The day before the devastating earthquake hit Haiti, PBS's Newshour reported on growing hopes that the country might be turning a corner in terms of political stability and economic growth, in part because of the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement (HOPE) Act, which allows duty-free imports of Haitian apparel products. And, in the days since the quake, various scholars and pundits have noted the need to start planning now for how to shift from humanitarian relief to recovery and reconstruction, with a focus on rapid job creation--something that HOPE could help deliver.


As one of his six important lessons for disaster relief, CGD visiting fellow John Simon noted that, "[e]ven as the relief operation is gearing up, work should commence in parallel ... to plan long-term recovery." Paul Collier called for a Marshall Plan for Haiti, including using U.S. and other trade preference programs to stimulate the quick revival of the garment sector. Similarly, citing an earlier Collier analysis on how to promote economic security in Haiti, Nicolas Kristof called for revival of the garment sector, noting that even so-called "sweatshop" jobs are better than nothing.


So, is the HOPE Act adequate? Or could it be improved to help spur exports, jobs, and recovery? And must the jobs created be sweatshop jobs?
In 2006, Congress passed what came to be known as HOPE I to expand duty-free access for Haitian exports, especially of apparel. But investors did not respond for a number of reasons, including the program's short timeframe (just three years) and rules of origin for determining product eligibility that were complicated and restricted efficient sourcing of inputs (though they were far more flexible than under most other U.S. trade preference programs for developing countries). As shown in the table, despite HOPE I, total Haitian apparel exports to the U.S. stagnated in 2007 and then dropped in 2008.
Haitian Apparel Exports to the United States (million dollars)

Haitian Apparel Exports to the United States (million dollars)

2006 2007 2008 2009*

Total 450 453 412 512

Under CBTPA 392 394 297 342

Under HOPE I, II Not applicable 13 75 125
Share of total U.S. imports 0.6% 0.6% 0.6% 0.8%






* Extrapolated from January-November data.Sources: U.S. Department of Commerce, Office of Textiles and Apparel; U.S. International Trade Commission.


HOPE II, passed less than two years later, extended the program for a decade and further loosened the rules of origin to provide more flexibility to source materials globally. Congress also added requirements for Haiti to beef up monitoring and enforcement of labor standards, with technical and financial assistance from the U.S. and the International Labor Organization (ILO). With these changes, Haitian exports to the U.S. rebounded last year to 13 percent above the 2007 level. While the positive impact of the HOPE II changes is evident in the table, the rules of origin, even now, are restrictive and complex, spanning four and a half pages of single-spaced small print.


In addition, HOPE II excludes t-shirts and sweatshirts, three-quarters of Haiti's exports, with the result that most Haitian apparel exports still come into the U.S. under other preference programs. Those products receive duty-free status under the regional Caribbean Trade partnership Act, but under that program, they must incorporate American yarn, as well as fabric that is either American or locally-produced, a stipulation that raises costs and decreases Haiti's competiveness.


Those rules also create problems for Haitian exporters trying to penetrate the Canadian market. Canada's trade preference program for least-developed countries has generous rules of origin, allowing beneficiaries to source fabric and other inputs from any other developing country. But, because of the American rules that force Haiti to use U.S. inputs, many Haitian apparel exports are not granted duty-free treatment in Canada, even though the yarn or fabric would receive such treatment if exported directly from the U.S. to Canada under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). That combination of rules makes little sense for the United States, Canada, or Haiti.
Finally, what about the quality of the jobs created under the HOPE Act? While apparel assembly pays relatively low wages wherever it is done in the world, these jobs do not have to endanger workers' health or be abusive or force workers to choose between a wage and their fundamental rights, conditions often associated with sweatshops. To ensure Haiti's compliance with HOPE II's requirements, the ILO, with the International Finance Corporation and U.S. financial support, launched a Better Work program in the country last fall. In an earlier post I discussed the Better Work program and a CGD event where preliminary research was presented on the results from a similar program operating in Cambodia. This research suggests that monitoring and focused attention on improving human resource practices in factories leads to both better working conditions and more competitive firms. Effective implementation of this program in Haiti would mean that HOPE II contributes to both more and better jobs for Haitians trying to survive in the wake of this terrible tragedy.

Preliminary reports from the Better Work program manager in Haiti suggest that, while some factories collapsed, others suffered only minor damage or none at all. This sector and program, then, present an ideal opportunity for the public and private sectors to cooperate and to start work on Haiti's longer-term recovery. To maximize the impact, the United States and Canada should also fix the rules in their preference programs to allow the broadest possible sourcing of fabric and other inputs, which would facilitate Haiti's apparel exports and create the jobs that are so desperately needed.

25 January, 2010

Cambodian and Thai troops clash at border near disputed temple

Jan 24, 2010
DPA



Phnom Penh - Cambodian and Thai soldiers exchanged fire early Sunday 20 kilometres from a disputed ancient temple site on Cambodia's northern border, a Defence Ministry spokesman said.

General Chhum Socheat told the German Press Agency dpa that the clash occurred on the morning that Cambodian Foreign Minister Hor Namhong was visiting the 11th-century Preah Vihear temple.

Chhum Socheat said Thai soldiers had crossed 200 metres into Cambodian territory near an abandoned village 20 kilometres from the temple when they encountered Cambodian soldiers.

'When they saw our soldiers they shot at them, and after [our soldiers] shot back there was no more fighting,' he said, adding that the Thai troops subsequently withdrew.

Chhum Socheat said none of the Cambodian soldiers were injured or killed, but he had no information on whether Thai troops had suffered casualties.

He said he did not expect further fighting since senior officers on both sides had since spoken with each other.

'Now it's quiet, they solved the problem by telephone,' he said.

Late Sunday the Foreign Ministry said Hor Namhong was unaware during his visit that the clash had taken place, and had since returned to Phnom Penh.

The relationship between the two nations has been tense for more than a year with sporadic clashes between troops near the disputed area surrounding the temple. Much of the border between the two countries has yet to be demarcated.

Diplomatic relations worsened markedly in October when Cambodia appointed Thailand's fugitive ex-premier Thaksin Shinawatra as a government adviser.

23 January, 2010

Cambodian garment workers threaten week-long strike

Source: Alibaba.com
Published: 22 Jan 2010 00:25:43 PST

PHNOM PENH, Jan 22 - Two of Cambodia's biggest workers' unions on Friday threatened to hold a nationwide garmet-industry strike to protest over low pay and the unsolved murder of the country's most respected union leader.

Two unions said thousands of garment factory workers would halt production for a week to press the government to arrest the killers of top unionist Chea Vichea, as hundreds marched in Phnom Penh to mark the sixth anniversary of his killing.

A workers' strike would represent a rare test for the government of long-serving Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has used a parliament dominated by his Cambodia People's Party (CPP) to push through tough laws to stifle dissent.

It comes at a tricky time for Cambodia as it tries to recover from a sharp economic decline that followed an unprecedented four-year boom before the global financial crisis took its toll.

Garment factories employ 330,000 workers in Cambodia and are vital to the impoverished country's nascent economy. Garments are Cambodia's third-biggest earner behind agriculture and tourism.

It exported $1.95 billion worth of garments in 2008 to its biggest market, the United States, up from $1.27 billion in 2004, according to the Commerce Ministry. Last year's figures are not yet available.

The workers are supporters of Chea Vichea, a vocal critic of Cambodia's business and political elite who was shot dead in January 2004. Two men were sentenced to 20 years in prison for his murder.

'GRAVE INJUSTICE'

The United Nations said their conviction was a "grave injustice" and rights groups said the pair were framed.

The Supreme Court in December 2008 ordered their release on bail pending a review of the case. There have since been no new arrests.

The two unions threatening action were the Free Trade Union (FTU), which represents 78,000 garment workers and the Cambodian Labour Federation (CLF) with 50,000 members from the same sector.

"We send this message to the government that it's time to find the killers, for the family, to make us calm," said Chea Mony, brother of Chea Vichea and president of the FTA.

CLF president Ath Thon said the outspoken Chea Vihea was a "hero" among garment workers because he fought for an increase in their minimum monthly wage from $30 to $45 during the 1990s.

He said workers were having difficulty making ends meet and they would also use the strike to demand a pay increase.

"Our workers don't have enough to spend, their health is getting weaker, they eat less, live in bad places and work hard," Ath Thon added. The unions did not say whether they would stage a protest alongside the strike. Cambodia's parliament approved a law in October banning demonstrations of more than 200 people and requiring five days notice for smaller protests.

That, and a tightening of defamation laws, sparked criticism from opposition lawmakers and rights groups, which said the government was trying to intimidate its critics and crack down on freedom of expression.

Cambodian national police spokesman Kirth Chantharith declined to comment on Chea Vichea's murder investigation but said there would be no attempt to block the strike as long as workers sought permission from the authorities.

"We have laws on demonstrations and police are ready to respect them," he said.

Cambodia reinforces Thailand border amid simmering tensions

Liam Cochrane, Alex Khun and Paul Allen
Australia Network News
Last Updated: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 18:15:00 +1100

Cambodia is reinforcing its border with Thailand, establishing new villages full of soldiers, building roads and buying new equipment.

The strengthened military presence is part of an ongoing dispute over land surrounding the Preah Vihear temple on the Cambodia-Thailand border.

The 12th century temple has been the site of numerous violent clashes between the two countries in recent years.

Cambodia's Ministry of Defence made the announcement and said the program was necessary for national protection.

It says the military bulwark is part of a five-year plan, with work already underway on five new villages that will be populated with soldiers.

Preah Vihear program officer for the Wildlife Conservation Society, Tan Setha has witnessed the flurry of new construction activity.

"At the moment I can see the government establish some new village for the army family along the border."

It's believed a total of 14 new villages will eventually be established at a cost of hundreds of millions of US dollars.

A multi-ministerial committee, headed by former Phnom Penh governor and long-time Preah Vihear supporter, Chea Sophara, is driving the development.



Development

Cambodia is clearing land along the heavily-mined border so new infrastructures can be built to sustain the permanent relocation of soldiers and their families.

Heng Ratana, from the Cambodian Center for Mine Action says more than 300 de-miners are clearing land for the first five new villages being built for soldiers and their families.

"In Preah Vihear province, we've deploy more than 300 de-miners there to support demining activity which [has] tasks prioritised by local community and provincial community there."

"Our team is clearing a number of areas for supporting their development activity there, such as building new schools, new roads, irrigation system and so on."

The plan comes amid ongoing tension between Cambodia and Thailand over who owns 4.6 square kilometres of land surrounding the ruins of Preah Vihear.

Since July 2008 there have been several deadly clashes on the border and troops from both sides are prepared for a long standoff.

The paved road that leads from the Thai side to the foot of the temple, gives Thailand a distinct military advantage over Cambodia where dirt roads are full of pot holes, making the movement of troops and equipment difficult.

But that looks set to change, with this major investment to boost the number of Cambodian troops in the area and enhance their capacity to respond to any future incidents.

Thailand's Government says it has no problem with Cambodia constructing new villages along the border of the countries, so long as the buildings are not on disputed land.

Thai Government spokesman Panitan Wattanayakorn says Thailand has no plans to increase troop numbers on the border in response.

"If it's within the Cambodian sovereign areas we have no comment, that's within the rights of Cambodia. But if it's in the disputed areas, we hope that the joint border committee will have a guideline on how to move forward," he said

The troubled relationship between the two countries have been recently inflamed by Cambodia appointing former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra as an economic advisor.

It's understood Mr Thaksin will make his next visit to Cambodia later this month.

Phnom Penh rejects human rights report as "insulting" (Roundup)

Monsters and Critics.com
Jan 22, 2010


Phnom Penh - The Cambodian government Friday rejected the annual report of a prominent human rights organization that warned respect for rights in the country had 'dramatically deteriorated' last year.

In its assessment, also released Friday, Human Rights Watch called on donors to exert pressure on the government to reverse the trend.

But government spokesman Phay Siphan hit back, saying the report was unprofessional, lacked balance and was insulting. He said HRW had ignored the role of Cambodian institutions, and stressed that reform had to come 'little by little.'

'We understand that any government has its flaws - so we are not sleeping on the problem,' Phay Siphan said. 'Criticism is information, and we would have to consider that, but insulting is not [useful] information.'

The report by the US-based organization singled out Phnom Penh's forced return to China in December of 20 asylum seekers belonging to the Uighur ethnic minority as a particular low point.

'Cambodia's deportation of the Uighurs was a glaring example of the government's failure to respect human rights,' said Brad Adams, HRW's Asia director.

The HRW report was released while the UN's special rapporteur on human rights, Surya Subedi, was visiting Cambodia. Subedi is in-country for two weeks to assess national institutions and how well they serve ordinary Cambodians.

Among the institutions Subedi will examine is the judiciary, a body Human Rights Watch said was being misused by the government to silence its critics in politics, the media and civil society.

'As the political space shrinks for human rights and advocacy groups to defend themselves, there are valid concerns that a pending law to increase restrictions on non-governmental organizations will be used to shut down groups critical of the government,' Adams said.

Human Rights Watch complained that Cambodians who tried to defend their homes, jobs and human rights faced 'threats, jail and physical attacks.'

It called on donors, who last year contributed about 1 billion US dollars to the impoverished South-East Asian nation, to pressure the government to respect human rights.

Other subjects covered in the report were the ongoing problem of forced evictions and the use of armed police and soldiers to evict people, as well as poor prison conditions and allegations of torture by police.

Human Rights Watch also condemned new legislation that limits freedom of assembly to fewer than 200 people, for which permission must be gained in advance, and said freedom of association remained under pressure.

The expulsion from Phnom Penh of the 20 Uighurs, who fled China after deadly unrest in the far-western province of Xinjiang in July, preceded a visit to Phnom Penh by Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, during which China signed economic assistance deals worth 1.2 billion dollars.

A torrent of international criticism saw Cambodia hit back at its critics with one government minister deriding the UN refugee agency in Phnom Penh as 'the laziest office' in the country for failing for weeks to begin processing the Uighurs' claims.

Phnom Trop becomes a flashpoint

The Phnom Penh Post
Wednesday, 20 January 2010 15:05 Cheang Sokha

CAMBODIAN and Thai military commanders are scheduled to meet for negotiations today after Thai troops asked Cambodian forces to retreat from a border area near Preah Vihear temple, military officials said.

Yim Phim, the commander of Royal Cambodian Armed Forces Brigade 8, said RCAF General Srey Doek will meet with his Thai counterparts to discuss the disagreement and assert Cambodia’s claim to the Phnom Trop area, located adjacent to the temple in the disputed zone claimed by both Cambodia and Thailand.
“Thai troops are dreaming if they think Cambodian soldiers will move away from that area,” Yim Phim said. “We will not move forward or back.”
Yim Phim said Cambodian and Thai troops at Phnom Trop discussed the potential withdrawal of troops from the area this past weekend for about two hours. Though they did not reach a solution, the situation remains calm, he said.
Colonel Meas Yoeun, RCAF deputy military commander for Preah Vihear province, said Thailand has been repositioning its troops recently, but added that the movements are no cause for alarm.
“We have not been surprised by the movements of the Thai troops,” Meas Yoeun said. “Soldiers on the battlefield are like the boxers in the ring – always moving around.”
Om Yentieng, chairman of the government’s Human Rights Committee, told reporters on Tuesday that at a meeting between Prime Minister Hun Sen and Surya Subedi, the UN’s special rapporteur for human rights in Cambodia, Subedi expressed support for the Kingdom’s protection of its territorial sovereignty.
“[Subedi] assured Samdech Hun Sen that Cambodia is not isolated in this matter,” Om Yentieng said. “The UN will support Cambodia in defending Cambodian territory.”
Subedi also offered his support for Cambodia’s membership in UNESCO, Om Yentieng added.

22 January, 2010

Cambodia largest labour union demands "real killers" be arrested in leader's slaying

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS (CP)
22 January 2010

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Cambodia's largest labour union warned Friday that it would launch a nationwide strike unless authorities arrests those responsible for the slaying of their prominent leader six years ago.

Chea Vichea, 36, founder and president of Free Trade Union of Workers, was fatally shot in front of a newsstand in Phnom Penh on Jan. 22, 2004. He was known for his outspoken efforts to organize garment workers and improve working conditions in Cambodia.

Two men were convicted in the deaths and sentenced to 20-year prison terms, but many people believed they were framed for the crime and the country's Supreme Court has ordered a retrial.

Chea Mony, the slain leader's brother and current leader of the union, marked the sixth anniversary of the killing by leading a march of nearly 100 workers and a dozen opposition legislators to the spot where the shooting took place. The march was held under heavy security but was peaceful and no one was arrested.

"Today, I wish to send a message to the government that it is time to arrest the real murderers," Chea Mony said. "If the government continues to ignore our appeals, then we will hold a one-week, nationwide strike," he said, adding that the strike would come some time this year.

In December 2008, Cambodia's highest court provisionally released the two men convicted in the Chea Vichea slaying - Born Samnang, 24, and Sok Sam Oeun, 36 - and ordered further investigation in preparation for their retrial.

The court did not give a reason, but the decision came after widespread protests over the convictions.

Copyright © 2010 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Demise of garment industry

My Republica-News in Nepal
CHANDAN SAPKOTA
2010-01-19 00:30:05

Few people realized that 2010 began with unfavorable news for the Nepali economy. The garment industry, once the highest foreign exchange earner for Nepal, has almost disappeared. In fact, only one firm still exports readymade garments to the US, once the biggest market for this industry. The growing Indian market has been the focus of attention of the few remaining firms that are struggling to survive. The demise of the garment industry demonstrates the failure of our trade promotion and industrial policy. To avoid recurrence of similar event, it is vital that we assess the causes of the downfall of garment industry and learn lessons from our mistakes.

An article in Republica accurately reflects the importance of the garment industry: “Through the first 16 years of journey, the industry with over 1,200 active production units in 2000 occupied about 7.2 percent share of the total manufacturing sector, earned one-third of the total export income, witnessed investment climb to Rs 6 billion and directly employed 90,000 people, supporting livelihood of 450,000 persons.”

Alas, this glory is now lost. Exports to the US, which previously accounted for more than 80 percent of total garment exports, have been insignificant this year. Less than 10 firms remain in operation. Hundreds of thousands of employees have been laid off. The country has lost a reliable source of revenue. Worse, the failure of this industry has led to the collapse of the whole exports sector.

Where and how did it go horribly wrong? The answer lies in an inability to foresee the changes brought about by globalization. Policymakers and garment investors failed to notice the quite obvious signs of change in the international market. They failed to design corrective policies to restructure the outdated domestic garment industry. Instead of addressing the constraints that were making the garment industry uncompetitive, they basked on the already secured preferential agreements and wasted valuable time and resources in securing more of them.

Where and how did it go horribly wrong? The answer lies in an inability to foresee the changes brought about by globalization.
In 1990, the WTO’s member countries signed the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (also known as the Multi-Fiber Agreement), which eliminated quotas on the trade of textiles and clothing. This was to be implemented in four phases; commencing with 16 percent reduction in quota of 1990’s imports. Thus, it was known two decades ago that all quotas in this sector would be abolished. There was ample time to invest and restructure the Nepali garment industry. However, both investors and policymakers turned a blind eye to the necessity for the reorganization of this industry.

Traditionally, the Nepali garment industry grew not because its products were competitive and superior, but because it got preferential access to the markets in the US and the EU. The guaranteed market access for Nepali garments and the imposition of quota on exports from countries that had advanced capital and competitive production mechanism meant that even if our products were not competitive in terms of price and quality, they were still exported without any restriction on quantity.

Prior to the first phase of quota elimination in 1995, Nepal had five years to upgrade its production structure so that firms could expand their size and tap synergies to exploit economies of scale, i.e. as you produce more of the same good, the average cost would decline. This would, in principle, improve price competitiveness of Nepali garments. Unfortunately, it never happened. Meanwhile, garment investors in countries such as China, India, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka, with the help of their governments, were already working to ensure the competitiveness of their products and the consolidation of their production. They were already preparing for the competitive international garment market after 2005.

The first phase of quota elimination in 1995 was followed by further quota eliminations of 17 percent in 1998, 18 percent in 2002, and finally 49 percent at the end 2004. The second phase of quota elimination hit the Nepali garment industry and the overall exports very hard, leading to a collapse of total exports, which have not recovered to the level reached in 1997. Though this was a catastrophic blow to the whole export-based sector, it was not appropriately heeded by investors and government. During the 10-year transition phase of MFA, the production structure in Nepali garment industry hardly changed. Most of the firms had small-scale production units with little cost advantage in production. Some of the intermediate goods that were used to produce final output were simply imported from third countries whose garments’ exports were subjected to quota restrictions, marginally redesigned, and stamped with ‘Made in Nepal’ tag for export. This meant that producers were merely acting as distributors to earn quick profits, often by gimmickry. There was very little creativity used in enhancing productivity, efficiency, marketing and distribution. Meanwhile, the investors paid little attention to product diversification and eroding competitiveness of their products.

While other governments actively engaged in upgrading their garment industry by establishing Garment Processing Zones, Export Promotion Zones, increasing consultancy for better management, and extending capital and credit to their garment investors, the Nepali government ignored the aggressive steps taken by other countries and did pretty much nothing. It simply requested more preferential agreements. It also failed to encourage and help investors find niche markets abroad. In addition, the government was unable to ensure the security of investors and the smooth flow of goods across the Nepali border. Frequent strikes along the main highways led to an increase in transportation cost. This also increased the risk of delivery problems, leading to an escalation in the final price of garments. It further eroded the price competitiveness of Nepali garments. To make matters worse, trade unions and militant youth wings made a mockery of property rights by occupying and confiscating private property, and forced an increase in wages and allowances, irrespective of labor productivity. The lack of a regular power supply also aggravated the situation.

The downfall of the Nepali garment industry illustrates some important lessons, which could be used to avoid a similar fate befalling other export-based industries. The Nepali government should not be hankering after preferential export terms; it should be investing and ensuring that domestic firms are competitive in terms of price and quality and are constantly innovating to keep up with cut-throat competition in the international market. Meanwhile, it is imperative that the government keep investors and supply chains away from the clutches of the militant youth wings and the unions. An industrial policy and trade promotion policy designed to address these issues is a need of the hour to keep our industrial base intact.

schandan@gmail.com

Lost in Cambodia

guardian.com.uk
* Andrew Anthony
* The Observer, Sunday 10 January 2010



Why did a radical British professor become a cheer-leader for Pol Pot? And why was he murdered on the very day he'd met the brutal dictator? Andrew Anthony on the extraordinary life and death of Malcolm Caldwell


The name of Malcolm Caldwell is remembered now by very few people: some friends, family, colleagues, and students of utopian folly. In the 1970s, though, Caldwell was a major figure in protest politics. He was chair of CND for two years, a leading voice in the anti-Vietnam war campaign, a regular contributor to Peace News, and a stalwart supporter of liberation movements in the developing world. He spoke at meetings all over the country, wrote books and articles, and engaged in public spats with such celebrated opponents as Bernard Levin.

The name of Kaing Guek Eav is, arguably, known by even fewer people, at least outside of Cambodia. Instead it is by his revolutionary pseudonym "Duch" that Kaing is usually referred to in the press. Duch is the only man ever to stand trial in a UN-sanctioned court for the mass murder perpetrated by the Cambodian communist party, or the Khmer Rouge, in the late 1970s. His trial on charges of crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and homicide and torture concerning thousands of victims, drew to a close in November. Justice has taken more than 30 years, but a verdict and sentence are expected sometime in the next few weeks.

Although their paths crossed only incidentally, the two men shared two main interests. They both had a pedagogic background: Caldwell was a history lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, while Duch, like many senior Khmer Rouge cadres, started out as a schoolteacher. And they both maintained an unbending belief in Saloth Sar, the leader of the Khmer Rouge revolution, who went under the Orwellian party title of Brother Number One, but was known more infamously to the world as Pol Pot. It was an ideological commitment that would shape the fate of both men and they held on to it right up until the moment of death – in Caldwell's case, his own, for Duch, the many thousands whose slaughter he organised.

In each circumstance, the question that reverberates down the years, growing louder rather than dimmer, is: why? Why were they in thrall to a system based on mass extermination? It's estimated that around two million Cambodians, more than a quarter of the population, lost their lives during the four catastrophic years of Khmer Rouge rule. What could have led these two individuals, worlds apart, to embrace a regime that has persuasive claim, in a viciously competitive field, to be the most monstrous of the 20th century?

When Caldwell appeared at SOAS for an interview in the late 1950s, the senior faculty thought that they had landed one of the academic stars of the future. Caldwell, who took his PhD at Nottingham University, had gained a reputation as a bright young talent and, according to college legend, he presented himself as a sober scholar.

"So they hired him," recalls Merle Ricklefs, a former SOAS colleague and now a history professor at the National University of Singapore. "Then he showed up for lectures and suddenly he was this Scottish radical with long hair, looking unkempt, and they felt as though they'd been betrayed.

"I thought he was actually a very good economic historian," says Ricklefs, who remembers "an extraordinary character… very ideologically committed". He was also struck by his warmth and good manners. As a young American, who dressed in conservative fashion, arriving in England during the height of the Vietnam war, Ricklefs expected to be greeted with a certain amount of antipathy, but he found Caldwell to be "always cordial. Always looking slightly dishevelled and revolutionary, but never the slightest hint of discourtesy."

The picture of a friendly, if rather unconventional character, is confirmed by others who knew him. Professor Ian Brown was Caldwell's successor at SOAS and he was also his former student. "He was well liked – I suspect not by the SOAS hierarchy," says Brown, "but certainly loved by students and colleagues."

He describes a "skinny, somewhat emaciated, rather scruffy character who, bizarrely, always used to wear a suit – though it was clearly a suit that had been bought in the 1950s equivalent of Oxfam and not seen too many dry cleaners." Caldwell never hid his politics from his students, indeed he made a point of proselytising to them. One of his protégés was Walter Easey, who, according to Easey's obituarist, Caldwell converted to "a fierce and angry communism". But to Professor Brown, "he was a gentle person, quietly spoken, and very tolerant of opposing views. He treated everyone well. He was very encouraging and a really inspiring teacher."

Both Brown and Ricklefs use the same word to describe this well-travelled, extremely well-read and highly intelligent man: naive. SOAS, says Brown, was a college whose standing and ethos rested upon sound empirical study. "Everyone else in the history department went off every summer to the archives in Rangoon, Baghdad, etc, and got deep inside the data. Malcolm didn't. He was a man with very clear theoretical and ideological views and the empirical basis didn't seem to worry him hugely."

It's not that Caldwell was lost in bookish abstraction, for he did visit the various communist regimes he extolled. It was more that when he got there he was all too willing to accept state propaganda as verified fact. For example, he praised the "magnitude of the economic achievements" of Kim Il-Sung's impoverished North Korea and, returning from a trip to the highly secretive state, he wrote that the country was "an astonishing tribute not only to the energy, initiative and creativeness of the Korean people, but also to the essential correctness of the Juche line". "Juche" was the mixture of ultra-nationalism and self-reliance on which Kim built his monumental personality cult. About the totalitarian surveillance and ruthless political repression, Caldwell said nothing.

Although academic traditionalists may have disapproved of Caldwell's slanted scholarship, many idealistic students were inspired by his lectures. Tariq Ali, who became famous as a 1968 student leader, recalls going to see him talk on southeast Asia when Ali was at Oxford. They soon got to know each other and in the summer of 1965 went to a peace conference together in Helsinki. "We had to fly to Moscow," says Ali, "then there was a train, via Leningrad as it was then, to Helsinki. We talked a lot and became very friendly. It was later on that his Cambodian deviation was a bit off-putting. And he could never completely explain it."

At one time, the pair discussed opening a Vietnamese restaurant as a sort of act of antiwar gastro-prop. "He would say that after a few drams," Ali recalls. "He was a great whisky drinker. He was also a great cricket fan and an early Scottish nationalist."

Cricket is mostly followed in Scotland by the upper classes, but Ali got the impression that his old friend came from a middle-class background. His Wikipedia entry states that he was the son of a miner. "You know," says Ali, "we never bothered about these things. We were so totally immersed in politics and the state of the world, we never really talked about each other, our personal lives or social backgrounds."

In seeking to understand why this idealistic Scotsman became a cheerleader for Pol Pot, it would be wrong to consign him to the maverick margins. A member of the Labour Party, he stood as a candidate in the 1977 local elections in Bexley. John Cox, who followed in Caldwell's footsteps as chair of CND, is adamant that there was nothing out of the ordinary about his predecessor's politics. "He was well in the mainstream of what I would call generally progressive liberal thinking," says Cox.

This idea that support for the most illiberal systems of government is all part of the liberal tradition is one of the more bemusing aspects of progressive politics. But the missing factor in the equation is the view that the United States of America is the ultimate villain. The background to the brutality visited on Cambodia was the brutality visited on Vietnam by US forces.

Although the Vietnam war was more complex than is often acknowledged (the tensions between North and South, for example, long predated the war), the Americans essentially inherited France's colonial conflict. But they fought it in the context of the Cold War. As much as US administrations may have seen the battle as one between communism and the free world, to the majority of Vietnamese it was a liberation struggle.

In an effort to close down North Vietnamese supply lines to the South, the US also launched a devastating bombing campaign on neighbouring Cambodia. Instead of winning the war in the former, it served only to destabilise the latter. To make matters worse, an American-supported coup put in place the corrupt government of Lon Nol in Phnom Penh. So there was a tendency among many anti-war protesters to see the Khmer Rouge as just another national liberation movement, fighting to escape from under the American yoke.

One man who observed the truth up close, four years before the Khmer Rouge came to power, was a French ethnologist called François Bizot. In 1971, while out researching Buddhist practices, he was captured in the Cambodian countryside by Khmer Rouge insurgents. He was held captive with scores of Cambodian prisoners at the M-13 prison camp, a precursor to the 196 santebal (secret police) offices that were set up after the Khmer Rouge seized power. The head of the camp, and the Frenchman's tireless interrogator, was Duch.

Bizot wrote about the encounter in a remarkable memoir called The Gate. After three months, during which he was shackled and repeatedly accused of being an American spy, he was suddenly released – all the other prisoners were executed. So relieved was the Frenchman that he asked Duch if he would like a gift. His jailer thought for a while and then replied, "with the look of a child writing to Father Christmas, 'The complete collection of Das Kapital by Marx.'"

Three days before Christmas in 1978, Malcolm Caldwell received an early present. On the final day of a two-week tour of Cambodia, he was told that he would meet Pol Pot. This was indeed a rare privilege. Unlike most other communist leaders, Pol had not created a personality cult. There were no posters of him. He was seldom seen or quoted. Many Cambodians had not even heard of him. Only seven westerners were ever invited to what had been renamed Democratic Kampuchea. And Caldwell was the first and only Briton.

There were several reasons why Caldwell had been received in Phnom Penh. He was on good terms with China, Cambodia's main ally in the region. There were also growing tensions between Cambodia and its larger neighbour Vietnam and, fearful of an invasion, Pol Pot was belatedly attempting to improve Kampuchea's image abroad. Most of all, while other supporters had wavered, Caldwell had remained steadfast. Only months before, he had written an article in the Guardian, rubbishing reports of a Khmer Rouge genocide. He cited Hu Nim, the Kampuchean Information Minister, who blamed the deaths on America. Caldwell was unaware that Hu had himself already been tortured to death in one of Pol Pot's execution centres. Such killings that the Khmer Rouge had committed, argued the peace activist, were of "arch-Quislings who well knew what their fate would be were they to linger in Kampuchea".

Travelling with Caldwell were two American journalists, Elizabeth Becker and Richard Dudman. Becker had been a foreign reporter in Phnom Penh during the civil war that brought the Khmer Rouge to power. She knew the terrain, and had been to Thailand to talk to refugees. She and Caldwell argued endlessly about the true nature of the situation.

"He didn't want to know about problems with the Khmer Rouge," she says. "And that carried over to not wanting to know about problems between Cambodia and Vietnam. He was stuck in '68 or something."

Yet for all their disagreements, she liked Caldwell. "He was a lovely man, very funny, very charming," she says. "A real sweetie. He was also very homesick for his family and he said he'd never spend another Christmas away from them."

According to Becker, Caldwell had not read François Ponchaud's Cambodia: Year Zero, the book that first catalogued the Khmer Rouge genocide. A friend of François Bizot, Ponchaud was a Catholic missionary who was in Phnom Penh when the victorious Khmer Rouge army marched into town. His book became required reading for anyone interested in what was happening in Cambodia. "The fact that Malcolm, a professor, had not read it before he went, that I couldn't believe," says Becker. "I think it was almost ideological that he didn't read it."

It's perhaps not that strange that Caldwell had neglected to read Ponchaud, given that he had already dismissed the Frenchman's credibility in print. He based his damning opinion on a brief extract of Year Zero which the Guardian had published and a critique of the book by the American academic, Noam Chomsky. An icon of radical dissent who continues to command a fanatical following, Chomsky had questioned the legitimacy of refugee testimony that provided much of Ponchaud's research. Chomsky believed that their stories were exaggerations or fabrications, designed for a western media involved in a "vast and unprecedented propaganda campaign" against the Khmer Rouge government, "including systematic distortion of the truth".

He compared Ponchaud's work unfavourably with another book, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, written by George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter, which cravenly rehashed the Khmer Rouge's most outlandish lies to produce a picture of a kind of radical bucolic idyll. At the same time Chomsky excoriated a book entitled Murder of A Gentle Land, by two Reader's Digest writers, John Barron and Anthony Paul, which was a flawed but nonetheless accurate documentation of the genocide taking place.

We can never know if Caldwell would have taken Ponchaud more seriously had Chomsky not been so sceptical, but it's reasonable to surmise that the Scotsman, who greatly admired Chomsky, was reassured by the American's contempt. In any case, the 47-year-old Caldwell arrived in Cambodia untroubled by the story that Ponchaud and others had to tell. In fact, he had just completed a book himself that would be posthumously published as Kampuchea: A Rationale for a Rural Policy, in which he wrote that the Khmer Rouge revolution "opens vistas of hope not only for the people of Cambodia but also for the peoples of all other poor third world countries".

With Dudman and Becker, Caldwell was escorted around the country to a series of staged scenes. Alarmed by the changes she saw and frustrated by what she was not allowed to see, Becker grew increasingly combative with her hosts. "It was so clearly awful," says Becker. "One of the problems was the absence of what I saw. The absence of people. And that's a different kind of proof to 'I don't see any people being executed.'"

Caldwell was not unduly bothered. "He preferred to stay in the car and laugh at the clumsy photo opportunities prepared for us," Becker wrote in her book on Cambodia, When The War Was Over.

"He'd travelled to other communist countries," she tells me now, "and he knew exactly what the PR routine was and he thought that all governments do PR. He did not know Cambodia, and he didn't speak the language. If you don't speak the language, don't know the country, you can edit out a little more easily."

At the end of the tour, the party returned to Phnom Penh, which Dudman described as "a Hiroshima without the destruction, a Pompeii without the ashes". They stayed at a guest house near the centre of Monivong Boulevard, one of the empty city's main thoroughfares. Close by was the secret facility of Tuol Sleng, a former school that had been turned into an interrogation centre. Known as S-21, Tuol Sleng specialised in gaining confessions through torture. Between 14,000 and 16,000 prisoners – men, women and, most hauntingly, children – passed through its gates, including Hu Nim. Only seven survived. It was run by Duch.

Nowadays Tuol Sleng is a genocide museum, and an established part of the southeast Asian tourist trail. Although they were intent on erasing history, Pol Pot and his senior cadres were obsessed with the accomplishments of the 12th-century Hindu dynasty that built the temple complex of Angkor Wat and constructed elaborate dam and irrigation systems. They considered their own contribution to Khmer culture to be of a similar, if not greater, significance. It speaks eloquently of the Khmer Rouge's achievements that, while Angkor Wat remains the country's main tourist attraction, the next most popular sights for visitors are Tuol Sleng and the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek, where the prisoners from S-21 were taken to be "smashed" – usually with an ox-cart axle. A ghost town under the Khmer Rouge, Phnom Penh is now a bustling, sprawling city, dense with people and commercial activity. In May 1975, one month after the Khmer Rouge evacuated the capital, the Swedish author Per Olov Enquist wrote: "The brothel has been emptied and the clean-up is in progress. Only pimps can regret what is happening."

If that was blatant wishful thinking, it's an unpalatable truth that the pimps have returned. A potent mix of Developing World poverty, cheap flights and sexual licence has made Cambodia a magnet for sex tourists and paedophiles. The upmarket hotels around the riverside are full of western and Japanese businessmen, and a certain kind of furtive middle-aged traveller, stubble-chinned and plump-stomached, is a conspicuous presence in the bars and clubs frequented by young and under-age prostitutes.

Cambodia has just two seasons: wet and dry. It either rains or it doesn't, a binary climate that may have helped shape the Khmer Rouge Manichean view of the world – revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, insider or outsider, good or bad. It was the dry season when I visited in late November, and a cooling wind blew through the hot, polluted streets. At first sight, Tuol Sleng's large courtyard, lined with coconut palms, provides welcome respite from the noise beyond. A respectful silence is maintained by visitors, including groups of western backpackers, with their cameras and guidebook glaze. The three-storey buildings have been left pretty much as they were abandoned in 1979, slightly dilapidated with jerry-built cells, barbed-wire fences and medieval instruments of torture. The effect is to transport the visitor not just back in time, but also into the reptilian depths of the imagination, a merciless place of zero compassion.

In the courtyard of the prison is a poster listing the rules of the camp. None of them makes for pleasant reading. For example, number 2 states in an imperfect translation: "Don't try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that. You are strictly prohibited to contest me." It vividly articulates the mentality that shaped S-21, and indeed Kampuchea beyond, the relentless determination to remove every option from the prisoner – and citizen – to reduce them to absolute compliance. But perhaps the most disturbing is number 6: "While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry out at all." Denied every human and judicial right, the inmates were also refused the one prerogative of the tortured: the right to express pain.

I visited the archive on the second floor of the building, where some of the 4,000 files the Vietnamese discovered are housed. Here, I was brought the "confession" of John Dewhirst, a 26-year-old teacher from Newcastle who was captured in 1978, while sailing with friends through the Gulf of Thailand. Intercepted by a Khmer Rouge patrol boat, they were placed in S-21 and tortured over the course of a month. As the weeks passed, Dewhirst made a series of ever more bleakly surreal confessions. They start out as straightforward biography – he explains that he had studied at Loughborough University. Then he admits to being a CIA agent, recruited at Loughborough where the CIA, he is made to say, maintains one of its covert training bases. It "was housed in a building disguised as the Loughborough Town Council Highways Department Surveyor's Office". He also reveals that his father is another CIA agent, using the cover of "headmaster of Benton Road secondary school". Dewhirst was murdered by the Khmer Rouge in 1978.

S-21 was not concerned with the truth. Its only aim was to derive the fullest possible confession in accordance with party requirements. In his book Voices From S-21, the historian David Chandler quotes Milan Kundera's phrase (used to describe the Soviet bloc secret police) of "punishment seeking the crime" to sum up the prison's project. To this end, the most depraved techniques – electric shocks, rape, the forced eating of excrement, medical experimentation, flaying, and lethal blood extraction – were employed. It's hard to comprehend that these agonies were not just formalities, they were preliminaries. It wasn't a question, on arriving at the prison, that an inmate would be lucky to get out alive. He or she would be lucky to get out just dead. A guidebook for interrogators clarified the issue: "The enemies can't escape from torture; the only difference is whether they receive a little or a lot."

The precise level of punishment was decided upon by Duch. If the confession was not sufficiently elaborate, the punishment was increased. In these situations Duch impressed upon his staff that "kindness is misplaced". Some interrogators were more disposed to brutality than others. And some were simply demented sadists. The most sadistic of them all went by the name of Toy, a pitch-black irony that his English-speaking victims were in no position to appreciate. In recent testimony, a prison guard recalled that one of Dewhirst's party (either the young teacher himself or the New Zealander or Canadian travelling with him) was burned alive in the street. The order that they be incinerated came directly from Pol Pot.

Just a few months after that grisly murder, Caldwell prepared himself to meet the man who commissioned it. The Scotsman knew little or nothing of Dewhirst's fate. Instead his mind was on agrarian revolution. Caldwell believed that the world was accelerating towards a global famine and that the answer was Developing World self-sufficiency. But Cambodia was a strange place to test his theory. As Professor Ian Brown notes: "This is a part of the world that historically had not been a food-deficient area, so you wouldn't go looking for a crisis there. Again, that seems to indicate a more fundamental flaw in his approach: he comes at it with a theoretical position. And therefore he'd search for an argument, not necessarily evidence, that will sustain that."

In Pol Pot, Caldwell found someone with an argument that suited his purposes. Pol's plan was a massive increase in rice production to finance Cambodia's reconstruction. It required collectivisation and slave labour, though Caldwell preferred to see the effort in terms of spontaneous revolutionary spirit. In the event, owing to the shortage of technicians and experts (who were killed as class enemies) and lack of peasant support, production fell well short of targets. But terrified of underperforming, regional commanders still sent their designated contribution to be exported. The result was the opposite of self-sufficiency: famine. Unable to accept the shortcomings in his plans, Pol instead blamed spies and counter-revolutionaries, and that meant that, in the absence of rice, spies and counter revolutionaries had to be produced. The network of torture camps was the only area of Democratic Kampuchea's infrastructure that met its targets.

Of these dreadful facts, Caldwell remained ignorant on the Friday morning in Phnom Penh that he was taken in a Mercedes limousine to see Pol Pot. The setting for the meeting was the former Governor's Palace on the waterfront, built during the French colonial period. In a grand reception room replete with fans and billowing white curtains, the two men sat down and discussed revolutionary economic theory.

Becker had met Pol Pot earlier the same day, and in When the War Was Over she writes: "He was actually elegant, with a pleasing face, not handsome but attractive. His features were delicate and alert and his smile nearly endearing."

The perennially shabby academic and the fastidious dictator must have made for an odd couple. In any case, Caldwell left the meeting a happy man. He returned to the guest house he was sharing with Becker and Dudman, full of praise for Pol Pot and his political outlook. "We went over stuff," says Becker. "He thought he had had a good conversation. He had avoided at all costs any discussion of Vietnam. And he was looking forward to going home."

That night they all had dinner together and afterwards Dudman went to his room. Becker and Caldwell "stayed at the table to have our last argument about Cambodia". He took the longer view and said that the revolution deserved support. She, on the contrary, was even more convinced of the refugees' testimonies. "That night," she writes, "Caldwell tried once more to get me to change my mind."

Becker went to bed at 11pm and was woken a few hours later by the sound of what she took to be dustbins. Coming to her senses, she realised there were no dustbins in Phnom Penh. What she had heard was gunfire. She opened her bedroom door to see a young man pointing a pistol at her. He was wearing two bands of ammunition and carrying an automatic rifle over his shoulder. She begged him not to shoot and locked herself in her bathroom.

Meanwhile Dudman had woken up and, looking out of his window, saw a file of men running along the street. He knocked on Caldwell's door. The two men spoke briefly and then a heavily armed man approached. The man shot at the floor and Dudman ran into his room. Two shots were fired through his door. The two Americans remained hiding in their rooms for the next hour before an aide arrived and told Becker to stay where she was. Almost another hour passed before she was allowed to come out. Caldwell, she was told, had been shot. He was dead.

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) are located in a large, purpose-built court on the dusty outskirts of Phnom Penh. During the course of last year, hundreds of Cambodians made the trip out from the city and in from the countryside to bear witness to a long-overdue reckoning.

The lone defendant in the trial is a slim, well-preserved 67-year-old with small, sensitive eyes. With his thick grey hair and concentrated expression, he looks like a sprightly grandfather, a little stiff and formal, but sufficiently attuned to the contemporary world as to be smartly dressed in a Ralph Lauren shirt or, on another occasion, a cream cashmere roll-neck sweater. A giant bullet-proof glass screen divides the court from the auditorium, where 500 or more people sit watching the proceedings. Centre stage is Duch (pronounced "Doik" in Khmer), seated with his back to the audience. To his left is a bank of lawyers, and behind them in the corner the relatives of victims. In front of the defendant sit the judges, on an imposing two-tier stand. Ten years, some 400 staff, a dozen judges, a battery of international lawyers, an ongoing legal wrangle, and many millions of pounds is what it has taken to put Duch on trial.

Following Caldwell's murder, four guards assigned to the tourist's protection team were arrested and taken to S-21. Owing to the importance of their alleged crime, the commandant of the prison was instructed to head their interrogation. So the stories of Caldwell and Duch came together at the inevitable point of a torture camp. Here, amid bestial squalor, is where the liberation dream ended.

Two of the "confessions" made by guards referred to in their S-21 files as "the Contemptible Met" and "the Contemptible Chhaan", outline a baroque conspiracy involving many other people. The Contemptible Chhaan gives an explanation for the murder: "First, we were attacking to ruin the Party's policy, to prevent the Party from gathering friends in the world… And in attacking the guests on this occasion, we would not attack them all. It would be enough to attack the English guest, because the English guest had written in support of our Party and the Kampuchean people for a long period of time already… Therefore, we must absolutely succeed in attacking this English guest, in order that the American guests would write about it."

Whether this was yet another example of innocent men implicating other innocent men, it's impossible to know. Certainly there must have been some kind of in-house involvement, as the guests were guarded. But who instructed the guards, and why they did so, remains a subject of speculation. Some argue that the Vietnamese were behind the killing, others that it was a function of an internal party struggle.

Caldwell's brother, David, wrote a letter to the Guardian, expressing his belief that "Mal" had "discovered the truth about the Pol Pot regime" but "dared not admit this to either Becker or Dudman". This seems unlikely. David Chandler told me that he once met the translator of the meeting between Caldwell and Pol Pot, who remembered a very pleasant exchange conducted in a spirit of enthusiastic agreement. If that anecdote suggests Caldwell died a dedicated Pol Potist, it tells us little about Pol, a man for whom the word "inscrutable" might have been invented. As his deputy, Ieng Sary, later recalled: "Pol Pot, even when he was very angry, you could never tell. His face… his face was always smooth. He never used bad language. You could not tell from his face what he was feeling. Many people misunderstood that – he would smile his unruffled smile, and then they would be taken away and executed."

But why would he seek international support by killing one of his few remaining friends from abroad? It makes no sense. "Don't apply rational thinking to the situation," Becker cautions. "It was crazy. Crazy. Malcolm's murder was no less rational than the tens of thousands of other murders." The journalist Wilfred Burchett claimed to have seen a Cambodian report not long after Caldwell's death, which stated that he "was murdered by members of the National Security Force personnel on the instructions of the Pol Pot government". Burchett theorised that Caldwell had changed his mind about the regime, but all the available evidence indicates otherwise. In the end, Becker's conclusion seems to be the most satisfactory: "Malcolm Caldwell's death was caused by the madness of the regime he openly admired."

The confessions of Caldwell's alleged killers were completed on 5 January 1979. Either that day or the following one, the four men were bayoneted to death in the prison itself. They were very possibly the last killings to take place at S-21. On 7 January, the Vietnamese army arrived in Phnom Penh, and Pol Pot and his associates fled into the jungle.

The contrast between the care taken to observe Duch's legal and human rights and the indifference with which he dispatched his victims is lost on no one. But as Philippe Canonne, one of the lawyers representing the relatives of the victims, said of the urge to inflict on Duch what he had meted out to his prisoners: "We must give voice to this sentiment, but then have the strength to transcend it."

It's this sort of resolution that has made the trial a legal landmark in a nation that has had little experience of the rule of law. That it was ever staged at all is a major accomplishment. For 20 years after the Vietnamese invasion, Duch lived at liberty. At first he followed the bulk of the Khmer Rouge into exile on the border with Thailand. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the US and China refused to accept the Vietnamese puppet government installed in Phnom Penh. In a shameful version of the principle that my enemy's enemy is my friend, they instead persuaded the UN to recognise a coalition resistance movement, of which the Khmer Rouge formed the major player. Thus Pol Pot was afforded the support of China, the protection of Thailand, and the indirect recognition of the United States.

For two decades the Khmer Rouge waged guerrilla warfare against the government in Phnom Penh. Then, in 1997, Pol Pot was placed under house arrest by his fellow Khmers Rouges. He died peacefully in his sleep on 15 April 1998. A year later the photojournalist Nic Dunlop found Duch working for a Christian relief agency. An interview was duly published and Duch handed himself in to the Phnom Penh authorities.

In theory, the trial is a joint effort between the UN and Cambodia, but the effort has been all the UN's. The Cambodian People's Party, which has ruled since Pol Pot was overthrown, is led by onetime Khmer Rouge members who, under threat of purging, had defected to Vietnam. One of these is Hun Sen, a former revolutionary soldier, who has been prime minister since 1985. His government was accused by Amnesty International of widespread torture of political prisoners, using "electric shock, hot irons and near suffocation with plastic bags". And for many years, senior former members of Pol Pot's government lived under protection in Cambodia, some with family links to the government. So there were several reasons why a major trial with international media coverage was potentially embarrassing or inconvenient.

After much pressure, in November 2007 the Cambodians finally arrested the four most senior surviving Khmer Rouge leaders: Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Ieng Thirith and Khieu Samphan. Their trial is scheduled to start in 2011, though few observers will be surprised if it is indefinitely delayed. All of them claim ignorance of any wrong-doing. Perhaps the most galling example is a long letter of evasion and self-justification that Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot's chief ideologue, wrote to Cambodian newspapers in 2001. "I do not see any importance in bringing up this tragic past. We would be better off to let everyone be at peace so that all of us can carry on our daily tasks… I tried my best for the sake of our nation's survival, so that we might enjoy development and prosperity like other nations. I am so surprised that this turned out to be mass murder."

In one form or another, this exculpation has been used over and again by the supporters of communist revolutions, from the Russian via the Chinese through to the Cambodian. Each new manifestation commanded the fervent advocacy of a new generation of radicals. Sooner or later the grim reality was revealed, which, paradoxically, only raised the hope that the next version would get it right. As the French philosopher Jean-François Revel has remarked: "Utopia is not under the slightest obligation to produce results: its sole function is to allow its devotees to condemn what exists in the name of what does not."

Somehow the link between Marxist-Leninist ideology and communist terror has never been firmly established in the way, for instance, that we understand Nazi ideology to have led inexorably to Auschwitz. As if to illustrate the point, earlier last year the ECCC announced that Helen Jarvis, its chief of public affairs, was to become head of the victims unit, responsible for dealing with the survivors, and relatives of the dead, of S-21.

Jarvis is an Australian academic with a longterm interest in the region, who was recently awarded Cambodian citizenship. She is also a member of the Leninist Party Faction in Australia. In 2006 she signed a party letter that included this passage: "We too are Marxists and believe that 'the ends justify the means'. But for the means to be justifiable, the ends must also be held to account. In time of revolution and civil war, the most extreme measures will sometimes become necessary and justified. Against the bourgeoisie and their state agencies we don't respect their laws and their fake moral principles."

Jarvis refused to speak to me about these matters. But Knut Rosandhaug, the UN's deputy administrator for the tribunal, said that the administration "fully supports" her. In this sense, although she was never a Pol Potist herself, Jarvis shows that the spirit of Malcolm Caldwell has survived the last century. It lives on in the conviction that the ends justify the means, and in the manner that liberal institutions can house the most illiberal outlooks.

The means, of course, always become the ends. Duch or someone like him is the method and the madness, the process and the final product. At least the man himself claims to grasp what continues to elude too many who should by now know better. In his deposition to the court, he said: "I clearly understand that any theory or ideology which mentions love for the people in a class-based concept is definitely driving us into endless tragedy and misery."

The following day, his lawyer, Kar Savuth, asked that Duch be acquitted and set free.

Caldwell didn't trouble himself with the means in Cambodia. He was too focused on an imaginary end, which meant that he never glimpsed the deadly real one approaching.

"He may have been starry eyed," says John Cox. "But we all do that. Even my local football team I support long after they've been destroyed match after match. It's a human failing."

A few days after Caldwell's murder, a testimonial was published in the Guardian.

"Caldwell," the writer said, "was an irreplaceable teacher and comrade whose work will undoubtedly suffer the customary fate of being better appreciated after his death."

As it turned out, history has forgotten Caldwell. But the amiable apologist for tyranny should be remembered, if only so that we don't forget history.★

Is your work killing you?

CSR Asia
Vol.6 Week 3
20/01/2010
by Jimmy Huen jhuen@csr-asia.com

Suicide from overwork is probably a little addressed issue in most businesses. But in many parts of Asia where there are high concentrations of economic activities, the problem of working long hours has created enormous stress for the working population, which contributes to depression and a host of mental disorders. Wincy Chan of the HKJC Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention, The University of Hong Kong, has said, “There is a strong link between depression and suicide. As many as 80% of people who have killed or have attempted to kill themselves have suffered from depression.” Suicide, mental wellbeing and more broadly, work-life balance issues are worth incorporating into a company’s CSR programme therefore.

Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. There have been more than 30,000 suicides every year since 1998. In 2007, five times more people killed themselves than died in traffic accidents.

"Karoshi", or death by overwork, is a phenomenon in which workers suddenly die because of physical ailment such as heart attack and stroke induced by accumulated stress. "Karojisatsu", or suicide by overwork, is another phenomenon induced by extraordinarily stressful work situations. In 2007, more than 2,200 Japanese committed suicide due to work conditions.

Japanese workers have the highest average working hours in the world. A recent survey conducted by the Japanese Trade Union Confederation found that one in 30 male workers in their early 30s worked over 3,000 hours a year. This works out at over 58 hours a week, which the government considers a level that threatens health.

The problem can be attributed to a number of reasons, particularly the Japanese work philosophy. In the workplace, Japanese are expected to have a good cooperative attitude by willingly and sincerely trying to work and assist others. One way to achieve this is to willingly take more work than is stated in one’s job description. The more he extends the boundary of his work for others, the higher he is evaluated at his workplace.

As a developed country, Japanese workers are supposedly protected by the labour law which stipulates basic working hours and additional pay for overtime work. But the actual number of hours worked could be far greater than what is seen in the official statistics. The hidden working hours is called “service overtime”, which is overtime labour without pay and is not recorded officially. Employees with a higher level of discretionary powers do not necessarily have less workload. Many managers would choose to work longer hours due to this work ethic, and suffer from stress as a result of a performance-based evaluation system, which was introduced in recent years in opposition to the traditional seniority-based salary system.

Suicide by overwork in other Asian countries may not be as serious as in Japan. But many Asians do suffer from long working hours. In Cambodia, where the garment industry is booming with an estimate of over 355,000 garment factory workers, the problem of excessive overtime work is rampant. Cambodian law stipulates that overtime work should be voluntary and limited to only two hours per day. However, as a 2006 ILO report revealed, of 44 factories inspected, just over half ensured that overtime was voluntary while the rest made it compulsory. Workers commonly voiced complaints of being forced to work on Sundays or public holidays and receiving threats from employers that their declining one day of overtime work would result in never being offered overtime work again. As a result, even pregnant or sick women find it difficult to refuse overtime work in the garment industry. It is not difficult to imagine similar situations in other developing Asian nations, such as China, where labour laws are often not strictly enforced.

As the “city that never sleeps”, Hong Kong is famous for not just its night activities but also its super long working hours, which is only second to Seoul among all Asian cities. The phenomenon extends across different sectors, affecting the lives of many. A normal work day for some of my friends in the accounting/auditing profession would be to start at 9am and work until 9pm. It is highly common for them carry on until midnight and beyond when it is peak season, and return to the office at the official time the next morning. Many people are afraid to leave the office on time and before their bosses do, as that would imply that you are not working hard enough. Although many would condemn this unhealthy culture privately, people are often afraid to go against the norm or fight for their rights.

The accompanying problems with excessive working hours are not just deaths by overwork, but also deterioration of both physical and mental health, poor family life, unstable relationships and a lack of personal development, all of which are compelling reasons for companies to address the issue. If our society has an unhealthy workforce, productivity would be low, let alone a lack of motivation to perform well. At a time where the Generation Y is emerging, the imperative for addressing work-life balance is even greater. Numerous research studies have shown that members of Gen Y would consider leaving their current employers for better work-life balance.

In recent years, there has been growing interest in the concept of a healthy work-life balance. In July 2006, the Hong Kong government introduced the five-day week arrangement into the civil service, and encouraged employers to follow suit. In December 2007, the Japanese government laid out a charter and an action plan to promote harmony between work and leisure.

There are lots of things companies can do to alleviate the problem of ill health due to overwork, even during an economic downturn. Statistics show that there is a strong relationship between unemployment and suicide. So one obvious way companies can do is to avoid slashing their staff even during an economic downturn. Last year, there were some good examples led by companies in the financial and professional services sectors, which offered their employees a no-pay leave option in lieu of lay-offs. For instance, CIMB was the first Malaysian bank to try to get around the economic downturn by offering an added employee “benefit”. All of the company’s 36,000 employees were offered the opportunity to take unpaid leave of 1-6 months. The programme was voluntary, and staff were guaranteed to return to the same position and pay grade.

Setting up help lines for employees at risk, putting in place an employee grievance system, partnering with external partners to conduct stress relief courses, adopting flexible working hours, providing more paid leave are just some other proactive ways to engage with the issue. The most critical step is that senior management would lead by example – do not expect your staff will leave the office on time if you never do.

Suicide and illness from overtime work is itself a complex problem and brings about a string of problems which require collaboration from government, social workers and businesses. But rather than treating this as a problem, I reckon that companies should view the engagement process as a valid business move to retain talent, bolster staff morale and enhance productivity – one that would breathe life into your business. ■

20 January, 2010

The Language of Human Rights

The Wall Street Journal
JANUARY 19, 2010, 5:13 P.M. ET

The very grammar of justice has fallen into the wrong hands.
By ROBERT AMSTERDAM

Human rights are under attack, and language is the weapon. The very grammar of justice has fallen into the wrong hands, instrumentalized in the elaborate and sensational theaters of due process. A trial without any rights of defense is still called a "trial," a conviction ordered down from an autocratic president rather than a judge is still called a "conviction," and there continues to exist an overwhelming and damaging perception that the law and courts work just fine—an assumption eagerly embraced by the financial community looking to toss heaps of capital into subprime judicial environments.

When Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Russian political prisoner whose case I am involved in, was put on trial for the first time in 2004, the government applied all its media powers to project the language of justice: They held him in shackles, placed him in a cage on television, and put on a good show trial where a judge pretends to listen to the defense as though the verdict would not arrive via a call from the Kremlin. This is what the Russians call "telephone justice."

It looks like a trial; to detached observers it might even smell something like due process; but underneath all the familiar language, there is the rot of corruption, political fiat and arbitrariness. We have seen it with China's 11-year sentence handed down to the dissident Liu Xiaobo, which was met by stone silence in the White House. We can read the borrowed grammar in the mysterious death of Dr. Ramin Pourandarjani in Iran, who was arrested after testifying before parliament that he refused pressure to sign false death certificates of fatally tortured protesters. Even the Burmese junta has become a master of bureaucratic process, extending Aung San Suu Kyi's house arrest after a sham trial.

In another case I am involved with in Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez goes on national television to attack a recently released political prisoner, Eligio Cedeño, and then demand a 30-year sentence for the judge who ordered his conditional release, which was supported by international expert opinion. Chávez called both Mr. Cedeño and the judge "bandits," despite the fact that neither of these individuals had committed any crime nor ever been convicted of any offense. For these countries' leaders, it is much more important that the media adopt their narrative and language to portray their enemies as criminals than it is to administer actual justice or prove a real case.

When the vocabulary of criminal justice is hijacked, we rarely can get the media to present an unbiased account of events that considers the fact that the charges may be incoherent, or the evidence nonexistent, or that the procedural games of prosecutors might be completely outside the law. For these governments, the application of the charge is more of a goal than any conviction, because they can count upon their authority to erase the presumption of innocence in a trial. They know that by simply labeling dissidents or dissenters as criminals, the public will come to see them as such.

Once someone is charged, very few observers are interested in the possible motivations of those bringing the charges. All processes are deemed regular and included within the same grammar, whether or not the investigation has been independent or the prosecution politically motivated.

My self-help remedy is a very simple one. I propose that journalists reconsider their liberal use of the word "trial," unless it is used to describe a process of relative equality of arms between defense and prosecution, before a fair and independent tribunal as envisioned by a plethora of international conventions and treaties. In other words, the processes being administered by the Chinese leadership against its dissidents, by the Iranian regime against its protesters, or by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela against the opposition, should no longer be described as trials. I say this because the presumption of innocence is also enshrined in these same conventions. This concept alone is something that autocratic leaders, in particular, fail to comprehend and regularly abuse.

So why should we provide these leaders with the presumption of regularity by trusting that their institutions operate in an independent and legitimate manner? Why should we not claw back the vocabulary and grammar of human rights, so that we become less fixated on a given government's narrative of events and more focused on their motivation for bringing the charges described?

Stokley Carmichael, the famous 1960s civil-rights activist, once wrote, "We have to fight for the right to invent the terms which allow ourselves to define our relations to society, and we have to fight that these terms will be accepted. This is the first need of a free people, and the first right refused by every oppressor."

In human rights, language is everything, and it's time that we take it back.

Mr. Amsterdam is an international lawyer specializing in the politics of business and the rule of law in emerging markets.

UN rapporteur sees progress in Cambodian rights

Source: My Sinchew.com
2010-01-19 17:07
PHNOM PENH, Jan 19 (AFP) - The UN special rapporteur for human rights to Cambodia said he held "constructive" talks with Prime Minister Hun Sen Tuesday in his controversial position.

Surya Subedi, who was appointed to the job last year after his predecessor Yash Ghai resigned under a war of words with the Cambodian government, said he discussed a wide range of rights issues in a two-hour meeting with the premier.

"It was very constructive dialogue," Surya, who arrived in the country on Monday for a 13-day visit to the kingdom, told reporters after the meeting.

"I discussed the issue of land evictions, freedom of expression and better cooperation between the civil society sector and the government," Surya said.

"We are looking at the total picture of human rights situation in Cambodia," he added. "I think some progress has been made even this morning. So I am very pleased with the outcome."

Om Yentieng, a top adviser to Hun Sen and the chief of government's human rights committee, urged UN officials to give up "old ways" criticising the Cambodian government on rights issues.

"We are not a hell, like UN reports have mentioned, and we have not yet become a heaven of human rights," Om Yentieng told reporters.

Yash Ghai, a Kenyan lawyer, resigned as special representative for human rights to Cambodia in September in 2008 after government officials refused to meet him and Hun Sen called the envoy rude, stupid and a "god without virtue".

Last month UN rights experts called Cambodia's expulsion of 20 Chinese Muslim Uighur asylum seekers "a blatant violation" of anti-torture rules.

The Cambodian government has faced mounting criticism for a spate of forced evictions throughout the country over the past few years at the hands of army and police.

The Cambodian administration has also been heavily criticised by rights groups over the past year for launching a number of defamation and disinformation lawsuits against critics and opposition members.

18 January, 2010

Rights watchdog visits today

Monday, 18 January 2010 15:03 Vong Sokheng and Irwin Loy
The Phnom Penh Post

THE UN’s special rapporteur for human rights in Cambodia is scheduled to begin his second official mission to the Kingdom today – a visit that marks a pivotal period in the rights watchdog’s relationship with government officials, observers say.

The visit of Surya Subedi is expected to last for nearly two weeks. Whereas his first mission last June was billed as a fact-finding trip intended to re-establish “conditions for a fruitful dialogue with the government on human rights issues”, this second visit will see the special rapporteur examining key state institutions that lead straight to the top of political power in Cambodia.

Subedi “intends to use the visit to examine the functioning of the National Assembly and judiciary, including the Supreme Council of Magistracy and the Constitutional Council”, according to a press statement released by the UN on Friday.

“His objective is to conduct an analysis of how these institutions work and the extent to which they provide citizens recourse and remedy for breaches of their rights.”

One rights advocate called Subedi’s planned visit “crucial” because he is expected to address the issue of judicial independence.

“These are some of the most important institutions in Cambodia,” said Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights.

“Independence of the court has always been a core issue in Cambodia. Until now, unfortunately, it remains a problem area.”

The courts are currently under the direction of the Ministry of Justice, meaning that judicial officials are overseen by government officials, Ou Virak said. “Putting the court under the executive body is not going to help the court achieve independence,” he said.

Other rights advocates said they hoped Subedi would use his visit to hold authorities to account after a year in which critics slammed continued evictions of the poor and a spate of defamation suits against opposition lawmakers.

“We have not seen any progress on human rights in the last year,” said Sok Sam Oeun, executive director of the Cambodian Defenders Project.

“It’s important for Subedi to push the government to strengthen the judicial system.”

Retreading old ground
Subedi’s visit won’t be the first time a UN watchdog has tried to tackle the issue of judicial independence. His predecessor, Kenyan lawyer Yash Ghai, raised questions over a series of judicial appointments in August 2007.

“Recent judicial appointments appear not to have been made in accordance with the constitution, casting doubt on whether the constitutionally guaranteed principle of judicial independence is being fully respected in Cambodia,” read a 2007 statement released on behalf of Ghai, then the special representative of the secretary general for human rights in Cambodia.

Ghai faced public attacks from Cambodian officials for his blunt critiques.

By the time he quit in anger in September 2008, government officials had become outspoken critics of the rights watchdog, and Prime Minister Hun Sen was refusing to meet with him.

During his visit last June, Subedi seemed intent on mending bridges with government officials who had been at the heart of the tense back-and-forth with Ghai.

At the time, Subedi described his first visit as “constructive and cordial”, and Cambodian officials struck an optimistic tone.

Already, however, some cracks in the relationship have appeared.

In October, a lawmaker with the ruling Cambodian People’s Party reacted sternly after Subedi reported to the Human Rights Council in Geneva that Cambodia suffered from a weak rule of law, and that the judiciary was “not as independent as it should be”.

“Based on my observations, Mr Subedi is not different from Yash Ghai,” senior CPP lawmaker Cheam Yeap told the Post at the time.

Reached for comment Sunday, Cheam Yeap accused Subedi of listening only to the government’s critics.

“He listened to one-sided information from civil society groups and opposition parties,” said Cheam Yeap.

“We acknowledged that there are loopholes in some small areas of the government’s enforcement of human rights, but we have been … trying to improve.”

Cheam Yeap said he hoped for “fair” treatment this time around.

“I think that [Subedi] should come and collect a fair report,” he said. “He should not listen to just the one side from NGOs and opposition parties.”

Subedi, who has already met twice with Hun Sen, including once during a July visit from the prime minister during a trip to the United Kingdom, is scheduled to meet with him again during this visit, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights confirmed Sunday.

This second official mission, then, could be important in setting the tone for his future dealings with the government, Ou Virak said.

“I think he’s walking a very fine line. We don’t know how the government is going to receive him this time,” Ou Virak said.

Subedi, he said, will have to decide how he wants the relationship to proceed.

“Does he build up his credit with the government and then use it in the future to have some impact? It’s one thing to walk a fine line and still have a good relationship. It’s another thing to use your power” as a UN-appointed rights watchdog, Ou Virak said.

U.N. special rapporteur to make second visit to Cambodia

www.chinaview.cn 2010-01-16 21:16:00

PHNOM PENH, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- A special rapporteur of the United Nations is planned to make his second visit to Cambodia next week, according to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on Saturday.

In a statement released on Saturday, the OHCHR said Surya Prasad Subedi, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Cambodia, will visit Cambodia on Jan. 18-30.

This is his second mission to Cambodia. "He intends to use the visit to examine the functioning of the National Assembly and judiciary, including the Supreme Council of Magistracy and the Constitutional Council," the statement said.

His objective is to conduct an analysis of how these institutions work, and the extent to which they provide citizens recourse and remedy for breaches of their rights.

The Special Rapporteur is an independent expert appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council to follow and report on the human rights situation in Cambodia.

His task is to assess the human rights situation, report publicly about it, and work with the Government, civil society and others to foster international cooperation in this field.

17 January, 2010

NGOs urge boosting border employment to deter illegal logging

The Phnom Penh Post
Friday, 15 January 2010 15:02 Sam Rith


Nongovernmental organisations on Thursday called on the government to increase employment opportunities for poor villagers in Oddar Meanchey province to discourage them from crossing the border into Thailand on illegal logging excursions, one day after Foreign Affairs Minister Hor Namhong said recent attacks on Cambodian loggers, allegedly by Thai soldiers, constituted major human rights violations.

Rong Chhun, president of the Cambodian Independent Teachers Association, said the government should not bother sending notes to Thailand after each reported attack and should instead try to provide villagers with more appealing income-generation opportunities.

“The government should implement its strategy of eliminating poverty by establishing as many workplaces as possible in local areas,” he said, adding that he believes Cambodians would not seek out work in other countries – legally or illegally – if there were sufficient job opportunities at home.

Srey Naren, the Oddar Meanchey coordinator for the rights group Adhoc, said this week that nine villagers were killed in 2009 and three in the early days of 2010 after they entered Thailand illegally to log in Sisaket province.

Chan Soveth, a researcher for Adhoc, said Thursday that the government should offer vacant land to impoverished villagers so they have something to farm.

Officials have recently taken steps to crack down on illegal logging in Thailand. In December, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent a note to the Interior Ministry instructing it to urge villagers not to risk crossing into Thailand illegally. Last week, soldiers in the Oddar Meanchey province ramped up their presence along the Thai border to prevent Cambodians from crossing over.

On Thursday, senior Cambodian People’s Party lawmaker Cheam Yeap said the government had ordered officials in Oddar Meanchey, Banteay Meanchey, Koh Kong, Pailin and Preah Vihear to “strongly educate” people not to cross the border illegally. He also said the government was looking into establishing microfinance handicraft projects in all five localities.

But opposition Sam Rainsy Party spokesman Yim Sovann accused the government of failing to provide for villagers in border provinces.

“They have no jobs, and it is the government’s fault because they are responsible for job creation,” he said.

Senate backs draft law on seizures

The Phnom Penh Post
Friday, 15 January 2010 15:03 Meas Sokchea


CAMBODIA’S Senate has rubber-stamped a proposed new law regulating property seizures, senior Cambodian People’s Party lawmaker Cheam Yeap said Thursday, sending the controversial legislation one step closer to being formally adopted and stoking fears it could be used to justify future evictions.

The Senate approved the draft Law on Expropriation Thursday in a debate that lasted less than 20 minutes, according to a senator from the opposition Sam Rainsy Party.

“This expropriation law will continue to make people suffer,” said Senator Kong Korm, who argued that the law would make it too easy for authorities to seize land deemed to be in the “public interest”.

Critics worry the law’s wording is too vague to protect citizens living under the threat of eviction – particularly those who do not hold land titles but have lived on their land for years.

Lawmakers with the ruling CPP, however, say the proposed law protects private ownership by defining the circumstances in which land may be seized.

“To have a law is better than having no law at all,” Cheam Yeap said.

In December, the National Assembly voted to approve the draft law while ignoring amendments proposed by opposition parties.

Rights groups remain wary that the law will deal an additional blow to tenure security in the Kingdom.

“I am very concerned about how this law will be applied,” said Yeng Virak, executive director of the Community Legal Education Centre.

The proposed law extends protection to those who have obtained titles for their land.

It does not, however, explicitly recognise residents who lack titles but have lived on their property continuously for at least five years – a factor that gives them ownership under the 2001 Land Law.

“For villagers who possess land under the old law, many of them do not have land titles. According to [the draft law], they are vulnerable for the taking,” Yeng Virak said. “Frankly, this could be seen as legalising evictions.”

Other observers, however, are more optimistic about how the law will be applied.

“I see a need for such a law,” said Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights. “Prior to this, the government could do whatever they wanted, including evicting people at will. Having a law will set out guidelines about what can be done and what cannot be done.”

Still, Ou Virak said he is concerned about the draft law’s vague wording and its definition of ownership.

“Having titles is not common in Cambodia,” he said. “A law that only looks at titles as the only form of ownership is not good enough. Civil society must pay attention to how this law will be interpreted.”

The draft legislation must be approved by King Norodom Sihamoni before it becomes law. Cheam Yeap said that would happen “soon”, though he declined to offer a specific date.

16 January, 2010

Shoe factory protesters turn up heat

The Phnom Penh Post
Friday, 15 January 2010 15:04 May Titthara

WORKERS from the Tage shoe factory in Choam Chao district on Thursday set fire to tyres after being excluded from a meeting between the factory owner and a district official held to help end an employee walkout over the firing of three union leaders.

Factory employees said that they were angry about being prevented from attending the meeting between the factory owner and a Meanchey district deputy governor that they had previously received permission to participate in.

“We didn’t get anything from the meeting this morning because we weren’t allowed in, and after the meeting they returned to their offices without telling us anything,” said Khin Sakhorn, a Tage factory employee. Company officials were unavailable for comment on Thursday.

One of the three union leaders whose dismissal led to the factory protest last week said demonstrators had ignited the tyres to convince the owner to begin negotiating directly with workers.

“Today we burned the tyres to threaten him and try to force him to come and negotiate with us, but staff that remain loyal to the factory owner put the fires out and threw rubbish at us. Luckily nobody was injured,” said 25-year-old Svay Phorn Sipha.

Workers charged earlier this week that the factory had violated numerous articles of Cambodia’s Labour Law and fired the three union leaders because they wanted to establish a new union that better served the interests of the workers.

Workers also threatened to take their protest to Prime Minister Hun Sen’s Takhmao home.

“We will not go back to work if the factory owner does not back down and negotiate with us. We have not stopped the protest, and we will continue to protest every day,” said Sem Vuthy, 24.

Chhum Veasna, president of the Cambodian Federation of Workers, said Thursday that direct negotiations were essential to ending the protest.

“The factory owner should back down and talk face to face with the workers because they just want their three union leaders to be allowed to return to work,” he said.

Koy Tepdaravuth, director of the Labour Disputes Department at the Ministry of Labour, said Thursday that the failure of both sides to resolve the matter would lead to government arbitration.

“Our duty is to encourage the workers and the factory owner to let us help settle their problem if they can’t find the resolution themselves. They still haven’t found a resolution, so I have passed this case to the Arbitration Council.”
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