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The latest report by illegal logging
watchdog Global Witness has received the highest accolade an
investigative NGO's work can receive from the Cambodian
Government: It has been banned.
The reason?
It exposes the country's largest illegal
logging syndicate and its links to senior government officials,
including the prime minister. Plus, it details the way the army has
been used as a log courier service for the secret trade with
Vietnam and China.
Now, as Cambodia's annual pledge-a-thon
approaches, international donors are scrambling to react to
accusations they haven't done enough to protect Cambodia's
forests.
Global Witness, the U.K.-based logging and
blood diamond watchdog, cheekily titled its 95-page report
"Cambodia's Family Trees" and printed a cover with framed pictures
of Prime Minister Hun Sen -- and the logging kingpins related to
him by marriage or political ties -- hanging from a barren
tree.
The study took Global Witness three years
of surveillance and interviews to complete and is perhaps the most
extensive exposé of institutionalized corruption and natural
resources pillaging to date. Among the main targets are Hun Sen's
first cousin, Hun Chouch, Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and
Fisheries Chan Sarun, and Forestry Administration boss Ty
Sokhun.
So it was little surprise the report
ruffled some feathers.
"If they [Global Witness] come to
Cambodia, I will hit them until their heads are broken," was how
the prime ,inister's brother and provincial governor, Hun Neng,
responded to accusations that he and his wife were involved in the
illicit trade.
Cambodia's Ministry of Information
released a statement describing the report as "a personal
accusation . . . to cause political conflicts in the country" and
ordered the confiscation of any copies already in the Southeast
Asian nation.
But the fallout adheres to a long-running
pattern of government behavior that is accurately predicted within
the report.
"Hun Sen responds to even muted criticism
by declaring that attempts to remove him will cause the country to
fall back into conflict and instability," Global Witness wrote
about the leader of a country still traumatized by the killing
frenzy of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s and the bitter civil war
that followed.
It's not the first time Global Witness
has raised the ire of Cambodia's government.
Global Witness was appointed by the
government as the official monitor of illegal logging, but was
fired from the job after its reports uncovered the involvement of
military and political figures. In 2004, copies of the group's
report "Taking a Cut" were confiscated at the airport and several
international staff were refused entry.
Global Witness says the issues of illegal
logging and political power are intertwined, with logging
bankrolling Hun Sen's private armies, which in turn assure
political supremacy for the one-eyed former Khmer Rouge leader,
nicknamed the "Strongman."
Log Laundering
Cambodia's ruling powers have long used
timber to fund their wars and, in more recent times, their
political dominance. In the late 1990s, there was pressure from
international donors to crack down on the plunder; the transport of
logs was banned and illegal cutting slowed.
But lucrative profits and lax laws meant
that the chainsaws never really stopped.
Over the years there have many creative
schemes invented to bypass logging regulations. The funniest
involved logging permits given ostensibly for the purpose of
building a platform so the country's parachute regiment could
practice jumping off. The most shameless would have to be the
tricking of monks into signing documents requesting valuable koki
logs for building dragon boats to represent their temples in the
annual boat racing festival.
The latest Global Witness report focuses
on the use of economic land concessions -- usually plantations --
as a cover for illegal logging. In 2001, Hun Sen inaugurated the
Tumring Rubber Plantation and the country's biggest logging cartel
went to work.
The Seng Keang Import Export company was
owned by Hun Sen's Rolex-wearing cousin Hun Chouch, his ex-wife
Seng Keangg and Khun Thong, brother-in-law of the minister of
forestry, the official ultimately responsible for protecting
Cambodia's trees.
Their "plantation" area was located inside
the Prey Long forest -- the largest lowland evergreen forest still
standing in Southeast Asia. It is home to elephants, tigers and the
Asiatic black bear, as well as burial grounds and resin trees
tapped by locals for a modest income.
But Prey Long's natural blessings are
also its curse: The rich flora includes large amounts of
commercial-grade and luxury timber.
"It is unlikely they could have selected a
more suitable location for their activities and Tumring duly became
the center of the largest illegal logging operation in Cambodia,"
said Global Witness.
The strategy was simple: harvest the most
valuable trees within reach, move the timber inside the
plantation's borders and claim it was felled in clearing. This
neatly avoided various laws and a ban on the transport of freshly
cut logs.
The operation was big. In 2005, community
forestry activists counted 131 chainsaws and 12 mobile sawmills in
the district. Timber was processed at an illegal sawmill at the
appropriately named village of Khaos, or trucked out at night to
another factory in the capital of Phnom Penh, most of it eventually
heading for China.
Between 2003 and 2005, China says it
bought $16.2 million worth of plywood from Cambodia, with Seng
Keang being the principle manufacturer of ply. Strangely,
Cambodia's registered exports, and thus taxes, for that period
were zero.
In November 2005, I accompanied Global
Witness to Tumring and saw work gangs with chainsaws kilometers
outside the plantation boundaries. They told us their boss, a
notorious local thug known by his radio call sign "Mr. 95", paid
$100 a month to the Forestry Administration in Khaos for each
chainsaw in use; just the tip of the corruption iceberg.
After dark we followed convoys of trucks
heading to Phnom Penh. We reached some that had stopped by the side
of the road and we got out to inspect. The owner of the truck told
Global Witness the trucks contained "mango trees." I peeked inside
and saw neatly cut logs a foot in diameter.
As we talked with the nervous driver, a
pickup truck full of armed soldiers escorting the convoy tried to
photograph us as they sped past, a dangerous prospect considering
the death threats and beatings given out to Global Witness staff in
the past.
As Global Witness explains in their
report, the complicity of corrupt police makes this racket
possible, but for the military it's much more -- the profits from
transporting illegally cut logs fund a small army, which in turn
props up Cambodia's authoritarian rulers.
How to Fund a Private Army
Since an attempted coup against Hun Sen in
1994, Southeast Asia's longest serving premier has maintained an
elite Bodyguard Unit of 4,000 well-equipped troops loyal solely to
him.
In addition, Hun Sen has a backup force of
2,000 soldiers, known as Brigade 70. Global Witness says that under
the leadership of business-turned-soldier Brigadier General Hak
Mao, Brigade 70 has developed a lucrative business transporting
logs and other contraband across the country.
Hak Mao personally owns 16 trucks and has
two depots in the capital -- one for commercial grade timber, one
for luxury wood, according to Global Witness.
"According to one timber dealer in Phnom
Penh, Hak Mao is able to deliver logs of all types according to
order," says the report.
The U.K. watchdog estimates that fees from
transporting logs and other smuggled goods such as liquor,
cigarettes and even ice cream -- amounts to somewhere between $2
million and $2.75 million a year.
A cut of this money -- at least $30,000 a
month, says Global Witness -- is used to fund Brigade 70 and the
Bodyguard Unit.
"The Brigade 70 case highlights the direct
linkage between Hun Sen's build up of loyalist military units and
large-scale organized crime," says the Global Witness report, which
was released from the safety of Bangkok on June 1.
Where's the Outrage?
The reaction from the international
community has been muted.
The U.S. and British embassies have said
they share some of the concerns Global Witness has raised, but have
not been drawn into the detail of the report.
Some of Global Witness' strongest
criticisms are directed towards the international donors who last
year spent $601 million underwriting half the Cambodian budget, yet
apply little real pressure for change.
"The donors have failed. They are
basically spineless," Simon Taylor, director of Global Witness,
told the Associated Press. "The message that Hun Sen gets from the
donors is that they don't really give a damn."
Hun Sen, however, does give a damn.
Despite receiving "no-strings-attached"
aid money from the Chinese equal to all other donor contributions
combined, Cambodia continues to seek the legitimacy that can only
come from the support of developed nations.
And despite well-documented corruption and
an increasingly one-party state, the international community --
much to the frustration of many NGOs on the ground -- continues to
give the Cambodian Government that support.
Cambodia's army -- the same force that
transports illegal logs -- is receiving military assistance from
Australia, China, Vietnam, and the United States.
The U.S. suspended military assistance
after the 1997 coup, in which Hun Sen violently unseated his
co-Prime Minister Prince Ranariddh. But after Cambodia recently
signed the "Article 19" agreement, which promises not to send any
U.S. citizens to the International Criminal Court, and began
helping out with the "War on Terror" by some dubious arrests of
Muslims, the United States is once again providing aid for
Cambodia's soldiers.
Ironically, the U.S. embassy says a third
of the $1 million military assistance that was earmarked for 2006
went towards trucks, spare parts and training.
What makes Global Witness' report on
forestry all the more compelling is Cambodia's burgeoning oil
industry. Several companies -- including Chevron -- are currently
exploring oil fields of considerable size just off the southern
coastline.
But many see the sad fate of the forestry
industry as a likely precedent for what will happen to the oil
bonanza: The ruling elite and their cronies will get richer, the
environment will be devastated and the people of Cambodia will
receive next to nothing.
It's the so called "oil curse" that has
afflicted Angola, Chad and Nigeria, among others.
To sound a warning to Cambodia's
"kleptocracy," Global Witness has recommended international donors
link non-humanitarian aid money to reforms and "test cases" to make
an example of the powerful.
"There can be little doubt that a handful
of competently investigated and prosecuted cases against senior
officials, their relatives and associates would have a far greater
impact on abuse of power and corruption than new legislation, as
important as it is," said the report.
The donor community will have to think
fast. The annual meeting at which bilateral donors and the World
Bank will pledge next year's aid and discuss the development of
the nation is scheduled for June 19-20.
No doubt, the issues of illegal logging,
corruption and misuse of the military will be somewhere on the
agenda. The question is where do they go from there?
By Liam Cochrane, a freelance
journalist based in Katmandu, Nepal. He was formerly the managing
editor of the Phnom Penh Post newspaper in Cambodia.
Source: World Politics
Review
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