Capsized ferry tragedy in Chhlong district, Kratie province: Our condolences to the victim families

Searching for the victims (All Photos: Lin Na, Koh Santepheap)
The recovery of the body of a young woman
Another young woman's body was recovered
The recovered bodies of the victims
More recovered bodies
Recovered motorcycles

Moeung Sonn asked journalists to help him

Moeung Sonn, President of the Khmer Civilization Foundation (KCF) who fled to live in France, sent emails to several local news media, asking them to help publish documents and letter he sent to Hun Xen. The content of Moeung Sonn’s letter to Hun Xen is to ask the latter to push for a new trial in his case. Moeung Sonn was sued by the government for misinformation and incitation because he talked about the installation of light bulbs to illuminate the Angkor Wat temple. Moeung Sonn expressed his confidence that if a new trial is conducted in his case, Judge Chhay Kong will rethink his case. Moeung Sonn also asked the journalists to cooperate with the KCF to call on Heng Samrin, the president of the National Assembly, to change Article 62 of the UNTAC era criminal code so that this article of the law will no longer be used to prevent the freedom of expression of Cambodians.

Passion and terrible crimes

Hamish Hamilton Canada, $29

The first of the trials for genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s began this month, 13 years after the establishment of the UN-assisted tribunal, and fully 30 years after the end of the four-year period during which an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians died.

The tribunal has been wracked by procedural delays and charges of corruption. Most recently, its chief judge warned that money is running out. Meanwhile, the first of the defendants, Kaing Guek Eav, who ran a secret torture facility and has confessed to being responsible for 15,000 killings, has expressed remorse for his deeds. It is entirely possible that is as much satisfaction as the world will get.

The impossibility of closure after great crimes, no matter how many tribunals and truth-and-reconciliation commissions we may launch, is the subject of Toronto author Kim Echlin's absorbing new novel, The Disappeared. Echlin, one of Canada's finest prose stylists, approaches her subject with the delicacy and solemnity it deserves. In the end, though, it begs the question: Is a beautiful work of art, which The Disappeared certainly is, the appropriate response to a holocaust?

Echlin's narrator is Anne Greeves, a middle-aged Montreal language instructor remembering her still raw-in-the-mind love affair with a Khmer exile 30 years before. She recalls Serey in the enraptured manner of the 16-year-old she was when she met him: besotted, helpless, aroused. The Disappeared takes its place with such other chronicles of female desire as Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept or Pauline Reage's The Story of O, here yoked to a history that makes it both larger and more keen.

When Serey returns to Cambodia, after the Vietnamese invasion and the fall of Pol Pot's regime, he disappears into a quagmire of political upheaval and continued killing, as the transitional government mimics democracy even while it suppresses dissent. Galvanized by what she is sure is a glimpse of her lover on TV, Anne forsakes "the liberties of the times, music and drugs and separatism," and travels to Phnom Penh to find him. She does, but, like a ghost darting around corners, he is soon gone again, among the missing after a grenade attack at an opposition rally.

"You cannot disappear," she laments, in the second-person voice that gives the novel the intimacy of whispered conversation. "Please do not disappear. No one can mend my sorrow. I love what I lost."

Echlin successfully links the void in Anne's heart with the void left in the lives of millions of mothers, widows and children, as well as with the erasure of cultural memory that was not only the intent of the Khmer Rouge but embraced by those who followed.

"What purpose to revisit the past?" asks an official charged with resisting Anne's effort at answers. Brian Fawcett covered similar territory 20 years ago in his odd duck of an essay/fiction collection, Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow. "Most of the victims of the Khmer Rouge were killed merely because they could remember a different kind of world," he wrote.

Anne remembers a world in which she had love. Because of the circumstances of her childhood, raised by a maid and a distant father after the death of her mother, she is particularly desperate to have it back; love is, for her, a long, cool drink of which she can't have enough. And, unlike those around her on her journey of reclamation, she is not circumspect in the face of violence. Pure eros drives her, in a society that has largely lost its animating will.

The Disappeared is an expert novel which manages to penetrate to the aching core of the Cambodian tragedy. Eventually, though, its solemnity comes to seem more tragic pose than due regard for the dead, especially when it tips over into tendentiousness: "Get past the golden rule. Make the enemy inhuman. Call the enemy dog, snake, kraut, gook, kike, cockroach, slut, all that ugly talk." And there is something odd about a well-wrought treatment of chaos. Dark comedy or silence may be the only vehicles that can contain a genocide without reducing it.

Still, its heroine's sexuality is a force for life not only in the extinguished world in which she finds herself but in the novel itself. The Disappeared presents desire as an antidote to despair. We may need one, if those who committed the crimes that make memorials like this one necessary continue to, all these years later, elude karma.

Frank Moher is a playwright and the editor of backofthebook.ca.

Kim Echlin will appear at the Ottawa International Writers Festival on May 1 at 6:30 p.m.

More than 100 people have been killed in a series of landslides brought about by heavy rain in mountainous provinces of the northern Philippines.

Seventy-five people were confirmed dead with 36 still missing in Benguet province as landslides struck in five towns, said provincial police chief, Superintendent Loreto Espinili.

Officials said the death toll would likely rise.

"Our estimate is that more than 100 people were buried," warned provincial civil defence chief Olive Luces.

"The damage in the region is massive. We have several reports of landslides across the region, especially in Benguet. Bodies are being recovered," she said.

In the mountain resort city of Baguio, 17 people were killed as landslides buried whole houses in different parts of the city, said city administrator and civil defence official Peter Fianza.

A landslide also left five dead and 32 missing in Mountain Province, said provincial governor Maximo Dalog.

The northern Philippines has been pounded by heavy rain since Typhoon Parma hit the country on Saturday.

Parma weakened into a tropical depression but has lingered over the north of the Philippines' main island of Luzon.

The National Disaster Coordinating Council's death toll from Parma on Friday morning was 25, however council administrator Glen Rabonza said the latest fatalities from landslides in the north were not yet included in that tally.

Parma hit the Philippines exactly one week after tropical storm Ketsana pounded Manila to the south on Luzon, killing at least 337 people.

Split between asean leaders and civil society groups widens

THAILAND'S LONG STANDING plan to institutionalise the interface between Asean leaders and representatives of the more than 70 Asean civil society organisations (CSO) are crumbling. The noble objective of establishing a people-oriented Asean community will remain a pipe dream for the time being.

Last week, at the Asean Joint Coordinating Meeting in Bangkok, aa land locked member proposed any such meeting in the future, including the forthcoming Cha-Am summit (15th Asean summit), should be optional.

Asean senior officials quickly took up Vientiane's idea which reflected readily the high anxiety held by their leaders since the historic event last February during the 14th Asean summit.

With strong support from the majority of Asean members, Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand decided to go with the flow. After all, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak would not be able to make it to the scheduled meeting with the CSO. Without them, the numbers of Asean leaders attending the event could further dwindle.

It is highly likely new Asean members (Laos, Cambodia, Burma) would be abstaining given unpleasant encounters in the past. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, who almost boycotted the function, was much disturbed by the way the first interface was conducted including the selection process of CSO representatives, especially from his own country. Hun Sen wanted to have his hand-picked CSO representative, not a person chosen among the group.

So too did Burma object to the CSO representative from the Burmese in exile. In the wee hours, to save the interface, Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya decided to hold a separate meeting with the Burmese group led by Khin Omar, a coordinator of the Burmese Partnership Network and Cambodian representatives, and Pen Somony, programme coordinator for the Cambodia Volunteers for Civil Society.

The attitude of the incoming Asean chair, Vietnam, to the upcoming interface remained to be seen. Hanoi's absence would certainly spell a death knell to promotion of the nascent dialogue process. At first encounter, Vietnam was forthcoming.

Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung made news headlines by welcoming the idea of listing the interface between the Asean leaders and civil society into the Asean framework. He pointed out there must be a guideline governing such relations as stated in the Asean Charter.

Both Brunei and Singapore are not enthusiastic about the interface as their authorities have constantly questioned the legitimacy of CSO representatives and their mandates as non-state actors. In the 13th Asean summit held in Singapore, there was no such interface, only the CSO reports sent to the leaders via chosen representatives. At earlier summits in Kuala Lumpur and Cebu, there were brief face-to-face meetings between the Asean leaders and CSO members.

At the first interface, the CSO called on the Asean leaders to treat them as partners and institutionalise the interface to ensure the full implementation of the Asean Charter and people-oriented community. They urged the leaders to view them as partners in the grouping's planned integration.

To prevent any possible embarrassment this time, all nominated CSO names must be submitted in advance for approval by Asean senior officials. Each country can only submit one delegate, not two as originally proposed by Thailand. The scheduled informal summits with representatives of the Asean Inter-Parliamentary Assembly and the Asean Youth are less controversial and will proceed as planned.

The CSO, comprising more than 70 organisations based in Southeast Asia, will hold a two-day people's forum beginning Sunday in Bangkok to prepare its input for the Asean leaders during the interface. In past months, the CSO has been critical of the terms of reference of the Asean Inter-governmental Commission for Human Rights.

Asean-based human rights activists would like to see the Asean rights mechanism focus on protection as well as promotion and maintain the same universal standards. For instance, the Asean members rejected strongly the idea endorsed by the CSO for periodic review and reporting on the human rights situation in all member countries.

Some Asean senior officials have blamed the CSO for moving far too fast instead of taking an incremental step by step. After all, it would take a long lead time for the Asean leaders before they came to accept the CSO's regular presence and views. Quite a few criticised the host for failure to rein in the CSO during the first interface.

Sad but true, on 23rd October from 11.50 am to 12.20 pm, it is possible less than half the Asean leaders will be attending the scheduled 30-minute meeting with the selective CSO members unless there are seismic changes in the leaders' mindsets. If the other half does not show up, the future of interface is doomed. Vietnam, as the next Asean chair, will certainly work closely with its successor Brunei in 2011 and Cambodia in 2012 to clip the CSO's ever expanding wings of progressive ideas

Happy 10 years Anniversary for the Auckland Cambodian Youth and Recreation Trust

Leader of The Auckland Cambodian Youth and Recreation Trust

Join by the singers from Cambodia Mr. York Doung DAra and Miss Chea Channy

The Cambodian Association Auckland Inc. would like to congratulates the Auckland Cambodian Youth and Recreation Trust for their successful event of celebrating its 10 years anniversary at Carol Reef Chinese restaurant on the evening of Saturday the 10th October 2009.

At least 17 people were missing and presumed drowned in Cambodia after an overloaded ferry, similar to the one pictured, sank in the Mekong river

Cambodians ride a ferry across the Mekong River towards the city of Phnom Penh October 11, 2009. At least 17 people were missing and presumed drowned in Cambodia after an overloaded ferry, similar to the one pictured, sank in the Mekong river, officials said on Sunday. The 14 women and three men were traveling to a local Buddhist temple to watch a performance in northeastern Kratie province, about 200 km (124 miles) from the capital Phnom Penh, when their ferry sank in a tributary late on Saturday in strong currents. REUTERS/Chor Sokunthea

Cambodians ride a ferry across the Mekong River towards the city of Phnom Penh October 11, 2009. At least 17 people were missing and presumed drowned in Cambodia after an overloaded ferry, similar to the one pictured, sank in the Mekong river, officials said on Sunday. The 14 women and three men were traveling to a local Buddhist temple to watch a performance in northeastern Kratie province, about 200 km (124 miles) from the capital Phnom Penh, when their ferry sank in a tributary late on Saturday in strong currents. REUTERS

Cambodians ride a ferry across the Mekong River from Svay Chrum village in Kamday province towards the city of Phnom Penh October 11, 2009. At least 17 people were missing and presumed drowned in Cambodia after an overloaded ferry, similar to the one pictured, sank in the Mekong river, officials said on Sunday. The 14 women and three men were traveling to a local Buddhist temple to watch a performance in northeastern Kratie province, about 200 km (124 miles) from the capital Phnom Penh, when their ferry sank in a tributary late on Saturday in strong currents. REUTERS

Cambodian boys ride a ferry across the Mekong River from the city of Phnom Penh towards Svay Chrum village in Kamday province October 11, 2009. At least 17 people were missing and presumed drowned in Cambodia after an overloaded ferry, similar to the one pictured, sank in the Mekong river, officials said on Sunday. The 14 women and three men were traveling to a local Buddhist temple to watch a performance in northeastern Kratie province, about 200 km (124 miles) from the capital Phnom Penh, when their ferry sank in a tributary late on Saturday in strong currents. REUTERS