Despite Show of Force, Pagoda Visit Peaceful

Deputy Phnom Penh governor Khuong Sreng, center, visits Wat Samakki Raingsey on Tuesday as part of an official investigation into what City Hall has called ‘anti-government acts’ by the pagoda. (Ehow Share)

Deputy Phnom Penh governor Khuong Sreng on Tuesday reversed course on a City Hall announcement that it was investigating Wat Samakki Raingsey over alleged anti-government behavior and secessionist designs, comments that sparked fears among its monks that the independent-minded pagoda would be shut down.
During a visit to the pagoda with more than 50 police and military police in tow Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Sreng told its head monks that Samakki Raingsey would need to secure approval from the Ministry of Cults and Religions before it was fully accredited. But he left without making an explicit threat to shut it down or curb the unorthodox activities of its residents. 

“I want the pagoda to follow the rules and laws,” he told acting chief monk Thach Ha Sam Ang. “You should not try to hide things from me. I know everything you do. When you act like this, I am not happy about it.”
Samakki Raingsey is one of the few pagodas in the country that regularly defies the country’s Buddhist hierarchy by speaking out on politically sensitive issues. Over the past year, it has raised the ire of local authorities by offering shelter to out-of-town villagers protesting in Phnom Penh against the private companies they accuse of stealing their land.
Last month, City Hall said it was investigating the pagoda over the fatal stabbing of one of its senior monks and other unspecified “anti-government acts.” In a subsequent interview, municipal spokesman Long Dimanche went so far as to claim that the pagoda’s alleged lack of cooperation with authorities was “like a secession.”
During Tuesday’s saber-rattling visit, however, the deputy governor said the city was only interested in the murder—a suspect has already been arrested and charged—and whether the pagoda was fully accredited, nothing else.
“After the notice [of an investigation], there was a war in the news between the monks, supporters and City Hall, but this is all confusion,” Mr. Sreng said. “This issue has been exaggerated because of politicians and extremists…. It is not like people say, that City Hall is coming to destroy Samakki Raingsey pagoda. It is not true.”
He said the municipal spokesman’s talk of secession was also blown out of proportion.
“You might be confused,” he said. “[Mr. Dimanche] said ‘like a secession,’ not that it was a secession. Khmer words are rich because they have 33 consonants and many vowels, so listen…. He said ‘almost like.’ This is not an issue.”
Reporters attempted to ask Mr. Dimanche, who accompanied Mr. Sreng to the pagoda, to clarify his words for himself. But the deputy governor stepped in to stop the spokesman from speaking.
“I do not allow him to speak,” Mr. Sreng said.

A municipal official records the personal information of a monk at Samakki Raingsey pagoda on Tuesday.

As for accreditation, Mr. Sreng said the pagoda would first need to get an official seal from the Ministry of Interior before going to the Ministry of Cults and Religion. But to get the seal, he said, the pagoda needs to prove it owns the land on which it stands.
Thach Ha Sam Ang, the acting chief monk, said the original title was lost in a fire and asked the deputy governor for help to replace it. Mr. Sreng said he would try, but added that it would be difficult.
After about two hours, Mr. Sreng left Samakki Raingsey to songs and cheers from monks and supporters who were relieved that the pagoda had not been shut down.
But not all of them were convinced by his claims that the city was only interested in the pagoda’s paperwork and the recent murder. Some pointed out that the murder of monks at other pagodas had not attracted the same scrutiny.
During the deputy governor’s visit, his staff recorded the name and age of every monk living at Samakki Raingsey. They instructed the pagoda to notify commune officials any time a new monk came to stay there.
Thach Thavry, the pagoda’s head of administration, said the heavy police presence was clearly meant to scare the monks out of continuing their activism.
“We can see that they want to show their muscle and threaten us,” he said. “What [Mr. Sreng] says is different from what he does…. But we will continue to protest for social justice and support the villagers because it is our right.”

Timber Trader Try Pheap Linked to Logging Racket

By Zsombor Peter | February 6, 2015

In a new report, U.K. environmental rights group Global Witness places Cambodian timber magnate Try Pheap at the heart of a vast illegal logging operation driving the country’s rarest tree species to the brink of extinction with the collusion of government and military officials.
“The Cost of Luxury: Cambodia’s illegal trade in precious wood with China,” released Thursday, summarizes an eight-month undercover investigation last year by the rights group during which their researchers followed Mr. Pheap’s loggers and trucks across the country, interviewed his employees and middlemen, and tracked his shipments to Hong Kong using leaked customs records. 

A man walks past shipping containers holding Siamese rosewood belonging to timber magnate Try Pheap
at the international port in Sihanoukville in early 2014. (Global Witness)

“Buyers of lavish four-post beds and vanity tables in China may be unwittingly lining the pockets of what can only be described as timber gangsters,” Megan MacInnes, the head of Global Witness’ land team, says in the report.
“Try Pheap and his network are destroying Cambodia’s last forests and robbing indigenous communities of their livelihoods. Meanwhile, the very officials in Cambodia who should be stopping them are conspiring to ensure that contraband wood enjoys safe passage and is exported as seemingly legitimate lumber,” Ms. MacInnes says.
A former adviser to Prime Minister Hun Sen, Mr. Pheap has bought up land and mining concessions across the country while heaping donations on the prime minister’s wife’s charity and the very government ministries charged with keeping his operations in check.
Mr. Pheap has the exclusive rights to purchase every tree logged on land concessions in northeastern Ratanakkiri province and all the illegally logged wood seized by authorities anywhere in Cambodia, contravening the legal requirement that confiscated timber be publicly auctioned off.
The Global Witness report adds to mounting evidence over recent years that Mr. Pheap has leveraged those rights to launder vast volumes of illegally logged wood, flout a raft of local laws and ship it all out of the country using dubious export licenses.
The timber route the group’s researchers map out in the report ends in China, where carefully carved tables and beds fashioned from the rarest trees can fetch up to $1 million a piece. It begins in the remote forests of Cambodia’s Virachey National Park in Ratanakkiri.
There, Global Witness said, its team visited illegal-logging camps and watched loggers pick off the most valuable trees—plotting it all by GPS. They followed trucks hauling the wood to depots under the control of the Try Pheap Group (TPG), the parent company of Mr. Pheap’s various operations, on to his provincial depot in Banlung City, and from there to the Vietnamese border or the international port in Sihanoukville.
Rarely Legal
The country’s 2002 forestry law bans the harvesting of rare trees in natural forests, though the government never followed up with a planned directive listing those trees by name. But a 2000 government list of rare species includes thnong, neang nuon and—the most precious of the lot—kra nhung, or Siamese rosewood.
Global Witness’ researchers saw Mr. Pheap’s network logging, transporting and shipping all of these species.
“While monitoring TPG’s operations on the ground, researchers observed that forest clearance activities and timber stockpiles in TPG’s log depots in the forest, Banlung, the company’s special economic zone in O’Yadaw and main depot in Udong all primarily contained the two rosewood species,” neang nuon and kra nhung, the report says.
“Interviews with those involved in the illegal logging throughout [Virachey park] and the forests in its southern vicinity showed exactly how easy it is for TPG to harvest timber outside [concession] areas and bring it to provincial depots where it is mixed with timber transported from inside the [concessions],” it adds. “Most of the timber in the park and surrounding area is reportedly being harvested either under commission by or for sale to TPG.”
Global Witness says villagers and loggers in the province told them that Mr. Pheap’s middlemen show up with officials from the Environment Ministry about once a month to push the illegal logging a few kilometers deeper into the forest, doling out patches to “subcontractors” with their own saws, trucks and work teams. Even those who don’t want to join in, the report says, are coaxed along with a combination of gifts and threats.
“If we do not log,” one villager reportedly told the researchers, “how can we feed and raise our families? And if we do not cut the trees, the company is doing it anyway. Logging for money is better than losing the forests without anything taken.”
Global Witness says it identified at least 89 of Mr. Pheap’s middlemen by name, the most powerful among them being Hom Hoy, a major general in the army’s Brigade 70, once the personal bodyguard unit of the prime minister. It says villagers, loggers and a source close to the general all confirmed the arrangement.
It says it obtained a contract between Maj. Gen. Hoy and a group of villagers in which the general offers to build them a bridge and community hall, “apparently in return for their consent for his men to log in the area.”
“They agreed to Hom Hoy’s proposal only reluctantly, believing they had no choice. However, after all of the luxury trees had been felled, the middleman’s loggers moved on but the village hall and bridge were not built,” the report says.
Global Witness says it wrote to the general for comment in December but received no reply. Contacted Thursday by a reporter, Brigade 70 deputy commander Duong Ra said there was no one by the name of Hom Hoy in the unit.
Shady Shipping
Besides the harvesting of rare trees, Cambodian law also bans the export of round or roughly squared logs wider than 25 cm of any species.
Global Witness says its researchers watched Mr. Pheap’s depot in Ratanakkiri’s O’Yadaw district, which sits on the Vietnam border, and saw the company load several shipping containers with logs both wider than the legal limit and cut from protected species. Over two weeks, they saw an average of 15 of the containers a day cross into Vietnam. The drivers told them the wood was headed to the Vietnamese port of Qui Nhon and from there on to China.
The researchers also followed some of the containers they watched being loaded with rare wood in Ratanakkiri and elsewhere to the Sihanoukville Autonomous Port.
Over four weeks, they saw at least 30 of Mr. Pheap’s containers being trucked into the port a day.
“This amounts to an estimated 900 cubic meters of TPG-acquired timber stock passing into the port daily, an estimate which was confirmed by information given to the team by a customs officer,” the report says.
That team also obtained records from the port for one TPG shipment of 4,607 cubic meters in March.
Global Witness says the records include an export license listing the Forestry Administration as the exporter—which the group claims government procedure prohibits—and a TPG invoice with a handwritten note from a customs official more than doubling the value of the timber per cubic meter from $510 to $1,200, bringing the single shipment to $5.5 million. An export permit issued to TPG seven days later, however, lists the lower unit value.
A second set of records for another shipment of 105 cubic meters, also in March, cites a customs permit from the previous shipment the researchers had records for, a permit that had already expired. “This means that this second export of timber by Try Pheap may have been done without the correct customs permit, which could constitute fraud,” the report says.
According to the records, both shipments were headed to China via the same Hong Kong firm, the Kin Chung Transportation Company.
In Hong Kong, Global Witness found the firm operating out of an unmarked residential house with a share capital of 2 Hong Kong dollars split evenly between two directors. The company had no listed phone number or website.
None of the people the researchers interviewed at Kin Chung’s other properties had any knowledge of the firm trading timber. The firm’s directors claimed to have no idea what was in the containers they shipped and told the researchers they had never seen the records of the Cambodian shipments from March and had no idea why their company’s name and address was used.
“Such a response only further raises suspicions about…Try Pheap’s timber trading business,” the report says. “Timber harvested, processed and exported by the Try Pheap Group or its affiliates should not be considered legal until proven otherwise.”
The report offers no figures on how much rare timber Mr. Pheap is shipping to China, Cambodia’s biggest market. But Global Witness’ findings, and Chinese customs data, suggest he is shipping most of it.
Chinese customs data obtained by the Environment Investigation Agency, another U.K. environmental rights group, shows that China imported nearly 21,000 cubic meters of hongmu—a category of prized timber species for making furniture that includes Siamese rosewood—from Cambodia in 2013. That was nearly triple what the country imported from Cambodia the year before.
According to Chinese customs data obtained by Global Witness, China’s imports of hongmu from Cambodia shot past 55,000 cubic meters in the first nine months of 2014 alone and accounted for 97 percent of all the wood China imported from Cambodia over that period.
“The Try Pheap Group’s raids on Cambodia’s last forests are tantamount to daylight robbery,” Ms. MacInnes says in the report. “The company is routinely and brazenly flouting laws aimed at protecting Cambodians and the ecosystems they rely on. This is yet another example from Cambodia of political power and business interests trumping citizens’ rights and the wholesale capture of the country’s natural resources by its corrupt ruling elite.”

Defend and Deny
Contacted Thursday, government officials and TPG employees either declined to comment, denied the report’s claims or defended their own work.
Chey Sith, who heads a shipping company that has handled Mr. Pheap’s exports, said he no longer worked with the timber tycoon but declined to say when the arrangement ended or discuss their past work together.
A spokesman and an administration chief for Mr. Pheap could not be reached for comment. Neither could Pol Visal, the head of his operations in Ratanakkiri.
Sei La, who manages Mr. Pheap’s operations in Preah Vihear province, however, rejected all of the report’s allegations.
“What Global Witness says in the report is not true because we never log inside or outside of economic land concessions. We only buy confiscated illegally logged wood from the government for export,” he said.
The deputy director of the Commerce Ministry’s customs department, Sem Meng, said he could not comment on exports from the Sihanoukville port because they were under the jurisdiction of the port authority. The port’s director, Lou Kimchhun, could not be reached.
Sao Sopheap, a spokesman for the Environment Ministry, which oversees Virachey National Park, declined to comment because he had yet to read the report.
In a prepared response, the Forestry Administration denied any wrongdoing.
“Until now no licenses have been issued to harvest, transport or export forest products irregularly or contrary to the law. The harvesting of forest products was carried out in compliance with the permit principles of the Cambodian government,” it says.
It says the rare timber the country exports comes only from what authorities take from illegal loggers or forests being cleared for development projects. It boasts of a 1,900-hectare plantation in Siem Reap province just for growing luxury-grade wood.
The Forestry Administration also notes the government’s decision in 2013 to join 176 other countries in signing an international convention giving special protection to Siamese rosewood.
Under the rules, the government has to issue a license for any shipment of Siamese rosewood in unprocessed form out of the country. Despite what Global Witness’ researchers saw and recorded during most of 2014, Cambodia has yet to issue a single such license.

In Restive Pagoda, City Sees Threat of ‘Secession’

Villagers displaced from Kratie province’s
Snuol district mingle with CNRP officials, monks
and laymen at Phnom Penh’s Samakki Raingsey pagoda
in May. (Siv Channa)

Phnom Penh City Hall has created an ad hoc committee to investigate whether monks at the restive Samakki Raingsey pagoda—a hotbed of anti-eviction activism that has raised the ire of local authorities over the past several months—have been properly ordained.
Rights groups and monks at the pagoda say the move is a ploy to silence one of the few pagodas in the city not under the thumb of the ruling CPP and to stamp out legally protected dissent. 

In a statement posted to its Facebook page on Friday, City Hall said the committee was created in the wake of the fatal stabbing last month of the pagoda’s second deputy chief monk by a fellow monk “to resolve illegal controversies and other anti-government acts” there. It said Phnom Penh deputy governor Khuong Sreng presided over a meeting of the committee on Tuesday to review the work of the pagoda’s monks and other inhabitants.
For the past half-year, Samakki Raingsey has offered shelter to communities from the provinces that have come to Phnom Penh to press the government to intervene in their land disputes with private companies. Police have repeatedly blocked the visitors and their hosts from leaving the pagoda to protest, and in November arrested a pair of monks who were on their way to a planned rally there.
Contacted Sunday, municipal spokesman Long Dimanche said the newly formed committee includes representatives from the city’s police, military police and department of religion. He accused the pagoda’s chief monks of being bad Buddhists and went so far as to suggest that they had designs to break away from the government’s control.
“All their actions are in contravention of Buddhist rules and discipline, and we have never seen Samakki Raingsey cooperate with the authorities. It is like a secession in the city, and we cannot let them do it,” he said.
Mr. Dimanche said municipal authorities would visit the pagoda sometime this month.
“We will check whether the pagoda has been created legitimately. We will look at the laws and procedures and check the monks who stay there to see if they joined the monkhood in compliance with the law,” he said. “We do not know if Samakki Raingsey is legitimate.”
Thach Ha Sam Ang, Samakki Raingsey’s acting chief monk, said the January 12 murder was being used as an excuse for City Hall to intimidate monks at one of the few pagodas that refused to toe the CPP line, and possibly close down the pagoda.
“The government is afraid of the pagoda because it supports the people and dares to speak out against the government,” he said. “It is not right to use this excuse [the murder] to shut down the pagoda.”
“All the actions of the monks at Samakki Raingsey are meant to help people with land disputes,” the acting chief monk added. “This does not violate the law and it is the right thing to do. We are not causing insecurity.”
Am Sam Ath, technical supervisor for rights group Licadho, also said that the city was scrutinizing the pagoda now—some 17 years after it was established—because the pagoda was supporting protesters, and not because of the recent murder.
He scoffed at the city spokesman’s suggestion that a secessionist movement was brewing there.
“They cannot use the word ‘secession’ for the pagoda; it is a serious word,” Mr. Sam Ath said. “Secession means the pagoda wants to separate from the state. But how can they separate when the monks have no weapons?”
Mr. Sam Ath said the new committee was further proof that the government feared losing control of the monkhood.
Before and after the 2013 national election, hundreds of monks defied their Buddhist patriarchs by joining the opposition CNRP in protest marches against the CPP in Phnom Penh and staging their own marches in the countryside. The CPP narrowly won the poll, according to the official count, but the ruling party had its worst showing in 20 years.
In November, the leaders of the country’s two main Buddhist sects called on the government to pass a law that would prevent monks from voting.

How Cambodia’s Secretive Timber Auctions are Fueling the Illegal Logging Trade

 By Zsombor Peter and Aun Pheap | July 14, 2014
In the predawn hours of May 6, a flatbed truck packed with lengths of illegally logged timber sped past a checkpoint in Ratanakkiri province, knocking aside a police car and racing off.
Police later tracked down the truck to a house in Banlung City. In the raid that followed, two men jumped a fence and got away. But they had left behind their illicit haul—5 cubic meters of luxury-grade timber, including more than a ton of especially rare rosewood, coveted for its hard, blood-red grain. 
By law, the government will have to put the wood up for public auction, just as it must with all the timber it seizes from illegal loggers across the country, and deposit the proceeds with the state treasury. But there is scant evidence that any real auctions ever happen, and there is nothing public about them.
Government officials charged with running the auctions and signing off on the winning bids refuse to provide a full explanation of the process. Based on what they will say, the government has continued to sell tens of millions of dollars worth of timber at bargain rates to a businessman who recently served as an adviser to Prime Minister Hun Sen. The man heading the committee approving the secretive sales is the prime minister’s personal assistant.
NGOs trying to monitor Cambodia’s thriving illegal logging trade say they have never seen or heard any trace of an actual auction and have been kept completely out of the loop. Environmental protection groups say the practice is prone to abuse, actually helps fuel illegal logging, and should stop. Some suggest sending the wood up in flames.
“When there is more illegal logging, there is more corruption, and [it is] easy for the government to make money,” Pen Bonnar, a senior investigator for rights group Adhoc, said of the auctions. “This means the illegal logging cannot stop.”
The businessman winning the bids lately is timber magnate Try Pheap, a man with land holdings and timber purchase deals across the country—and the frequent subject of illegal logging allegations himself.

Nothing to Hide

In March 2013, when the government auctioned off nearly 5,000 cubic meters of wood seized from illegal loggers and stored up across the country, Mr. Pheap won the lot for $3.4 million.
Government officials and staff for Mr. Pheap say his buying spree has continued.
When the government put up for auction another 6,000 cubic meters of wood in January, Mr. Pheap won the lot again, this time for $1.5 million, said Hout Ponloer, head of planning and finance at the Ministry of Agriculture’s Forestry Administration.
Mr. Ponloer, who showed reporters a record of the sale last month, said the 6,000 cubic meters was all the wood the government had seized from illegal loggers—or those hauling more wood than their transport permits allowed—the previous year.
However, Chey Sith, the head of a freight company who has worked with Mr. Pheap to ship his wares overseas, said Mr. Pheap also won a bid for seized wood in Preah Vihear and Pursat provinces in April at $4 million, and another for seized wood in Ratanakkiri and Stung Treng provinces in May for more than $2 million. They were just waiting for the paperwork to haul it away.
“The national Forestry Administration made us pay more than $2 million after winning the bidding and we have, but we haven’t taken the wood away yet,” he said in May.

Mr. Sith would not say how much wood the money had bought. The Forestry Administration’s Mr. Ponloer said he knew nothing about a timber auction in April or May, and that as far as he knew there had not been an auction since January. Forestry Administration officials in three of the provinces Mr. Sith named declined to comment on anything to do with auctions.
In Stung Treng, Forestry Administration cantonment deputy chief Chean Yudong said his office gathered up and stored whatever illegally shipped or logged wood was seized in the area. But the auctions, he said, were run out of Phnom Penh.
“We collect the wood from illegal transport and loggers and keep it,” he said. “We send a report on how much wood we have when the upper levels need to hold a bid…. The company [that buys the wood] just shows us a permit issued at the national level and we let them take it.”
He declined to say which companies had been issued the permits, whether any of these permits had been issued for Mr. Pheap, or who approved the sales.
Mr. Ponloer, who spoke with reporters at his Phnom Penh office last month, said the winning bids were all approved by a committee set up just for the purpose, the Committee for Evaluating and Bidding for Wood. He showed the reporters a list of committee members. At the top of the list, as chairman, was Eang Sophalleth.
When asked if the committee’s chairman was the same Eang Sophalleth who served as Prime Minister Hun Sen’s personal assistant, Mr. Ponloer snatched the list back from across his desk. He said the other 10 members of the committee were from the ministries of Agriculture and Finance, but declined to name them.
After last year’s national elections, Mr. Sophalleth was made an undersecretary of state at the Ministry of Agriculture and cabinet chief to the minister, Ouk Rabun. But his business card still lists his other job first—“Assistant to Samdech Techo Prime Minister HUN SEN.”

In his office at the ministry, Mr. Sophalleth said his days were occupied with making sure the country managed to export a million tons of rice by the end of next year, an ambitious target the prime minister has made a personal priority.
Asked about his position on the auction committee, Mr. Sophalleth said he did not know he was on it or that it even existed. He said it was often the deputies on these committees who did the real work.
“Sometimes they put your name on a committee and you do not know,” he said.

Officials at the ministries of Agriculture and Finance, however, not only confirmed that Mr. Sophalleth was on the committee but said they have seen him chairing the meetings.
“He always joins the meetings,” said Chann Heng, the Agriculture Ministry’s head of administration. “I’ve seen him at the meetings.”
Mr. Heng, whose desk sits in a cramped corner two floors down from Mr. Sophalleth’s office, said meetings of the auction committee were usually held at the Ministry of Agriculture. He said members and chairmen were all handpicked by the ministers of agriculture and finance whenever it came time for an auction.
“The minister chooses the committee for each bidding, and usually it [the chairman] is Eang Sophalleth,” he said.
Mr. Heng said he did not have records of the committee’s work at hand, because the documentation was all stored upstairs in the office of the cabinet chief, Mr. Sophalleth.
Soun Pinkanika, the head of natural resources revenue at the Finance Ministry’s state property department, also sits on the auction committee and says she has also seen Mr. Sophalleth chairing the group’s meetings.
“He is the chairman of the committee for bidding and for discussing the price of forest yield for auction,” she said. “He is the chairman, so he attends the meetings.”
Ms. Pinkanika refused to say who was bidding in or winning the auctions. She said the events were usually advertised a few weeks in advance in the pages of Rasmei Kampuchea, but did not know who would have records (The paper’s advertising director said he could not remember the placement of any such ads). And after four years on the committee, Ms. Pinkanika said she did not know the ground rules for the auctions or whether the rules even existed in writing.
She said the records of all timber auctions were with the Forestry Administration.
Until last year, the auction committee was headed for many years by Ung Sam Ath, a deputy director general at the Forestry Administration. Mr. Sam Ath declined to comment on the auctions and referred all questions to his boss, Forestry Administration director general Chheng Kim Sun.
Mr. Kim Sun said he had “no idea” how much wood the Forestry Administration was auctioning off or how much money the government was making off of the sales.

“I have nothing to hide,” he said by phone, after having just canceled a scheduled meeting with a reporter and refusing to release any records of the auctions or a list of committee members.
“I have a mandate to report to parliament. I have no mandate to talk to you,” he said, and ended the conversation.
Only the Powerful
NGOs that monitor the country’s forest sector say they have all encountered the same secrecy. More than half a dozen NGOs said they have seen no effort by the government to sell off the seized timber openly and competitively.
“They never allow the NGO to attend the auction. [We] want to try, but they never allow,” said Adhoc’s Mr. Bonnar, who now works out of Phnom Penh but spent more than a dozen years in Ratanakkiri, one of the country’s hotbeds of illegal logging.

“Only the powerful people can bid. They take very [good] care about who comes to the bid. It [is] not free,” he said. “Not only me, all the NGOs that work closely with the government, they don’t get the information. They [are] only called when they [authorities] go to catch the illegal loggers…. They want to [show] that they do work.”
Toby Eastoe has been working side by side with the Forestry Administration to stem the illegal logging trade for more than six years, first for Flora and Fauna International and now for Conservation International. He hasn’t once seen any trace or accounting of the auctions, either.
“They just happen, and the wood disappears…. They’re always done pretty quietly,” he said.
“Auctions are part of the timber trade and it’d be nice if it could be monitored,” he added. “We just don’t know about them; we never know when it’s going to happen.”

One man involved in the local timber trade for the past two decades says that’s just the way the government wants it.
The businessman, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, buys up logs from plantation owners across the country to feed his timber-processing factory.
A businessman like him should be in a prime position to bid in the auctions. But even with a sizable operation and 20 years in the trade, he said he did not dare to participate. He said he dealt with the Forestry Administration on a regular basis and that the auctions were clearly roped off for a select few.
“This one only the special person can do it, not like me,” he said. “This one I cannot do. Once I do, I die. I don’t touch.”

He liked the thought of buying up lots of luxury-grade timber, selling them off, and making a tidy profit. But he will not even risk asking officials how he might get involved.
“This information I don’t need to gather, because I know it’s danger,” he said. “Luxury wood I don’t involve. If I involve, my reputation gets in trouble.”
For those who do get to take part, tens of millions of dollars stand to be made.
When Mr. Pheap won the auction in January for $1.5 million, he paid an average of $250 per cubic meter.
Mr. Pheap’s staff won’t say how much they sell the wood for, or to whom. But the Chinese retail website Alibaba is full of traders hawking luxury wood from Cambodia. Some offer a cubic meter of rosewood for anywhere from $7,500 to $35,000.

But with rosewood stocks dwindling fast, most of the illegally logged wood authorities are seizing lately is the less valuable—but still luxury grade—thnong.
Alibaba has a cubic meter of thnong from Cambodia going for $3,850. At that rate, 6,000 cubic meters of thnong alone could fetch Mr. Pheap $23.1 million, more than 15 times what he paid for the haul he won in January.
Mr. Bonnar, at Adhoc, said even those prices may be modest. He has spoken with loggers who say a cubic meter of thnong in Vietnam can go for $10,000 or more.
With Mr. Pheap paying only a few hundred dollars per cubic meter, he said, “I think it’s very low, much lower than the market price.”
The timber auctions have been good to Mr. Pheap. But Mr. Pheap —who served as an adviser to Prime Minister Hun Sen from 2009 to 2010—has also been good to the ruling CPP.
In May 2013, Mr. Pheap donated $100,000 to the Cambodian Red Cross, an organization headed by Mr. Hun Sen’s wife, Bun Rany, who has used Red Cross events to stump for the CPP and slam the opposition. The donation came just two months before last year’s national elections.
In 2011, Mr. Pheap footed the $30,000 bill for a CPP party office in Preah Vihear province. He donated another $100,000 for a new head office for the Boeng Per Wildlife Sanctuary, also in Preah Vihear, a pristine wilderness inside of which the Environment Ministry had just granted him 10,000 hectares for a rubber plantation.
Mr. Pheap owns at least two other plantations, both in the remote eastern reaches of Virachey National Park in Ratanakkiri. In February 2013, the Agriculture Ministry wrote to Mr. Kim Sun at the Forestry Administration to let him know that Mr. Pheap had just been granted exclusive rights to buy up all the wood on plantations like his across the province. As with the auctions, there was no sign that Mr. Pheap had any competition for the deal.

Let It Burn

NGOs blame most of the deforestation in the country on these plantations, whose owners clear-cut thousands of hectares of healthy forest at a time. Using satellite data and regular reports from farmers who live around the plantation, the groups say the owners are logging well outside of bounds as well. Both are forbidden by law. Staff for Mr. Pheap admit they have no way of telling whether the timber the company is buying off the plantations in Ratanakkiri is being logged legally, fueling speculation among environmental protection groups that the arrangement is covering up a massive laundering operation.
But NGOs say the timber auctions are driving forest loss, too, letting buyers essentially launder illegally logged timber through the system, at the same time giving the government a multimillion-dollar reason not to take stronger action against the loggers who make the auctions possible.
Global Witness, a U.K.-based environmental transparency group that has done extensive work investigating government involvement in Cambodia’s illegal logging rings, says the auctions should stop.

“In almost every country in which Global Witness works on forest issues, most recently Liberia, we have come across seized timber being auctioned off,” said Josie Cohen, a land campaigner for the group. “This is usually just a scam to launder illegal timber into the market with the original illegal logger, who is usually in league with the authorities, profiting from the auction. This system in effect legalizes illegal timber and therefore further fuels logging.
“In Cameroon and DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo], for example, the money raised from auctions goes to the Forest Ministry plus the seizing officer gets to keep 10 percent of the funds, hence the system provides huge incentive to provide timber for auctioning.”

Better to burn the wood and take the incentives away, she said.
“In order to create an effective deterrent against illegal logging, the ‘loot’ has to be removed from the system and the market. Burning timber has therefore proved to be an effective deterrent against illegal logging.”
In Cambodia, some villagers are doing just that. Besieged by illegal loggers and rogue plantations, and having lost faith in the local rangers and police who should be protecting their forests, more and more of them are mounting community patrols of their forests and setting fire to caches of illegally logged timber where they find them.
Villagers around central Cambodia’s Prey Long Forest have been burning timber for the past few years. Others in Mondolkiri announced last month that they would start doing the same.

The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), another U.K.-based environmental rights group, says the auctions are letting Cambodia and its neighbors sidestep their own legal protections for some of the rarest and priciest of their tree species.
Cambodia’s 2002 Forestry Law prohibits the harvesting of rare tree species like rosewood. Last year, the country joined 176 others in giving Siamese rosewood in particular Appendix II protection under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. The government now has to issue a special export license anytime someone wants to trade the timber abroad.
But even then, any semi-processed rosewood gets an exemption from the rules under the convention’s Annotation 5. EIA says this exemption, along with government auctions, leaves the supply of illegally logged rosewood alive and well.

In a recent report, EIA blames an unhealthy appetite in China for high-end wood furniture—and countries like Cambodia that are happy to feed it—for driving rosewood to the brink of extinction across the Mekong region.
In the forests of northern Cambodia, rosewood trees are now so rare—and valuable—that impoverished villagers paid by local middlemen risk their lives to sneak into Thailand for even a few leftover stumps. Every year, dozens of them are shot dead by Thai soldiers.
Any of the wood they bring back that gets seized and booked ends up in the auctions. EIA says this situation, and now the exemption for semi-processed rosewood in the Endangered Species Convention, helps keep the illegal loggers going.

A team of undercover investigators EIA sent to Laos earlier this year found traders misusing the paperwork from government auctions to export up to five times the amount of illegally logged wood they officially bought, mixing the auctioned timber with their own hidden stores. In March, another trader in Shenzhen, China, showed the investigators a re-export permit issued by Vietnam for rosewood coming from Cambodia, rosewood the Cambodian government claims it never let out of the country.
“Despite domestic laws prohibiting harvest and trade, Annotation 5 provides a perverse veneer of legitimacy to ongoing trade in semi-processed rosewood products made with illegal timber,” the group says.
“The Annotation also allows countries that seize illegal timber and auction it in local markets to continue doing so. Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia regularly conduct such auctions. This timber is then exported to global markets as finished products outside the scope of [the convention]. EIA’s investigations have shown that such auctions are clearly corrupted and paperwork generated by them is then used to launder far larger volumes of equally illegal timber into international markets.”
Despite its harvesting bans and convention restrictions, Cambodia has been exporting ever more high-grade wood to China, according to U.N. trade data analyzed by the EIA. Of the 60,000 cubic meters Cambodia officially exported to China from 2000 to 2013, a third was shipped out last year alone.
EIA says the exemption for semi-processed wood should be lifted and the auctions in Cambodia and its neighbors stopped.
What little praise EIA offers the Mekong countries for trying to stem illegal logging it gives to Thailand, which it says has for the most part put a stop to timber auctions.

A Legal Business?
Mr. Sith, who coordinated Mr. Pheap’s international freight shipments until last month, insisted that Mr. Pheap was strictly abiding by all the relevant rules and regulations.
Last year, researchers at the University of Maryland looking at the latest satellite data ranked the countries with the fastest rates of deforestation. Cambodia ranked fifth in the world.
Across the country’s northeast, teams of men caught logging illegally have told villagers, rights workers, and even reporters that they work for Mr. Pheap. On a visit to Virachey National Park in December last year, reporters saw illegal loggers hard at work—sawing down the rarest trees, hauling them out of the forest, floating them across the river, loading them onto waiting trucks and driving them to a local depot. The man paying for it all, the loggers said, was Mr. Pheap.
But Mr. Sith argued that most of the world’s “chopping” was happening elsewhere.
“Who chops? The Try Pheap Company never chops, but we have to clear the land,” he said. “Who is the big chopper? Canada, Papua New Guinea, USA. Why don’t you ask them?”
Mr. Sith rejected claims that the company was colluding with illegal loggers, that its deal with the Agriculture Ministry in Ratanakkiri was letting plantations launder wood, or that the auctions were doing the forests any harm.
“Try Pheap does not motivate the people to chop. We just go to the auction,” he said.
Asked for details and figures on the company’s bids and exports, Mr. Sith said he was out of time. He said he could not meet again because the rainy season had arrived and he would be tied up with work on his private farm.
He suggested calling Sam Phany, the company’s chief of administration. Mr. Phany declined to comment. Pheang Chetra, Mr. Pheap’s head of public relations, also declined to comment, and refused to put reporters in touch with the company’s spokesman.
“I think nothing is secret, but we have our own regulations,” Mr. Sith said. “So please eliminate your doubt. We have to be a legal business.”

Sources: TheCambodiadaily

Artist Leang Seckon Reflects on Cambodia’s Journey

By Michelle Vachon | June 23, 2014

Leang Seckon has spent the past few years revisiting through his art a childhood that was filled with the sound of bombs falling over his village in the early 1970s. Through his elaborate collages, he has also reflected on the vibrant world of songs and movies in 1960s Cambodia—a world that died during the Pol Pot years.
In his latest series, the artist has become even more personal, illustrating the journey of a Cambodian man who grew up amid this turmoil and emerges today in a country very much connected with the global scene, having to decide who he is. 

Entitled “Hell on Earth,” Mr. Seckon’s series of 14 large works—mainly 2-by-2 meters—and five small collages will be exhibited in London in a solo show opening Friday at Asia House. The month-long exhibition has been organized by the London gallery Rossi & Rossi, which represents him.
A few of the works are the tapestry-style scenes for which Mr. Seckon is known. “World Born,” for instance, is a vast patchwork of painted images and pasted illustrations from past and present. They range from Chinese artists and international movie stars to old motorcycles and new sports cars, images of century-old British royals and a Gustav Klimt painting. They also include Hindu and Buddhist imagery along with an Angkorian sculpture.

This work is about the “normal world” to which Cambodia now has access, Mr. Seckon said in an interview. “I talk about…the universe born, the city born, the art born…growth of nature, of the country, everything exploding.”
Also in his signature style, there is the painting he describes as “King Sihanouk’s Tea Party.” The work is divided into four sections with the late King Norodom Sihanouk in the middle, pouring tea. A sign above him reads, “King Sihanouk’s Tea Shop.”
The two upper quadrants of the work show images related to the Khmer Rouge and political factions of the 1980s that King Sihanouk eventually brought to the negotiating table, which led to the 1991 Paris Peace Agreement and the official end of war in the country. The lower sections refer to today’s political parties, the ruling CPP and opposition CNRP, which, Mr. Seckon noted, could do with a “tea party” to iron out their differences.

However, several of the paintings in the series are a marked departure from Mr. Seckon’s familiar exuberant collages.
“Hell on Earth” is a striking work featuring an elephant carrying a man and two figures dressed in black Khmer Rouge-era garb. Although garlands of flowers adorn the elephant, the people are in the process of killing, and the bottom half of the painting is red with the blood of their victims. An emaciated figure of the Buddha stands below, comforting the dead.
Entitled “The Elephant and the Pond of Blood,” the artwork illustrates the Khmer saying “Chheam Dap Poh Damrei,” or “blood reaching to the stomach of the elephant.” The upper part of the work is painted on fabric from the skirts that village women wore and mended endlessly during the civil war in the early 1970s, he said. The lower part is a collage of red paper for wrapping incense sticks.

The last painting of the series is entitled “Desire,” or “Kiles” in Khmer. It features a nude man seen from the back who is looking at himself in the mirror where his face is reflected as a tiger while his shadow on the wall is that of a wolf. These actually are the three figures on the back of the elephant in the first painting.
The acrylic work about a man’s journey is based on Mr. Seckon’s life, the 44-year-old artist explained. It is painted on three kramas, the iconic checked Cambodian scarf.

In the 1980s, Mr. Seckon lived in the countryside, watching over buffaloes in the field. “After the Khmer Rouge, life was difficult,” he said. “We were poor. Sometimes I would cry because I could not go to school and I was just a buffalo boy.” Mr. Seckon had wealthy relatives in Phnom Penh whom he would envy, unsure how to be as successful as them. In the end, he listened to some of their advice about the importance of education, but chose his own distinctive path.
In “Desire,” Mr. Seckon explained, “The young man tries to learn about himself…and he’s scared.”
Unfortunately, he soon gets caught in unrealistic dreams of fame and wealth, and ends up seeing a powerful tiger in the mirror instead of his own reflection. “He has wasted his future because he lost knowledge of who he is: He just wants to be a movie star,” Mr. Seckon said.
This outcome differs from Mr. Seckon’s own. “Today, I’m very clear about my own journey…. As for my appearance, some say my face is not very international, but I reply that it’s beautiful because it’s like any of those at Angkor,” he said, laughing.

This will be the second solo exhibition that Rossi & Rossi is staging of Mr. Seckon’s work in London, the first one having been in 2010. Since then, the artist’s work has featured in Singapore twice, and Mr. Seckon took part in the Season of Cambodia arts festival in New York last year.
“I think what is special is the way that Seckon can make the public [feel] very personal and vice versa:  The public is never indifferent in front of Seckon’s work, on the contrary there is always great engagement and interest in the story behind the paintings and the artist,” the gallerist Fabio Rossi said in an email.
Leang Seckon’s exhibition “Hell of Earth” runs through July 25 at Asia House in London.

•  Sources : Cambodia Daily

As Workers Stream Back, Gov’t Scrambles to Respond

By Colin Meyn | June 21, 2014
More than 1 percent of Cambodia’s population has returned from Thailand since the country’s military took power in a coup d’etat late last month, fleeing a regime intent on cleaning the country’s labor force of illegal immigrants.
Some 200,000 Cambodians, most citing rumors of arrest and violence by the Thai army toward illegal migrant workers, have left or been forced out of their jobs and found their way back across the border.

At the Poipet border crossing, where the vast majority of workers have re-entered the country, the government has shown unusual efficiency, sending soldiers and military trucks to tend to exhausted workers and send them back to their home provinces. Volunteers with the Cambodian Red Cross, Scouts and other youth groups have provided a steady supply of food and water.
Though the Labor Ministry places the number of Cambodian workers in Thailand at about 90,000, estimates from rights groups and the Thai government place the number at more than 400,000. Facing limited job prospects and low wages at home, Thailand’s robust economy has been a magnet for impoverished Cambodians.

“If you do the same job in Cambodia and in Thailand, you earn about three times the salary in Thailand,” said Tun Sophorn, national coordinator for the International Labor Organization. Employers in Thailand also offer benefits, such as free meals and lodging, that aren’t provided in Cambodia. Over the past five years, Mr. Sophorn said, sophisticated recruitment networks have been formed to bring illegal Cambodian workers into the Thai labor force.
For Cambodians, going through the legal process to emigrate into Thailand is often prohibitive. “If you were to go through legal channels, you may take a longer time and spend more money than if you go through illegal channels,” Mr. Sophorn said. “That is why you have such a large undocumented population [of Cambodian workers] in Thailand.”

Now that about half of this migrant population is back in the country, the government is facing the challenge of what do with almost a quarter of a million people who had been making relatively good money and supporting their families through their jobs. “The government has to fulfill their obligation to respond to people who now don’t have the means to feed their family,” said Thun Saray, president of local rights group Adhoc.
“I think it will be hard to find jobs for 200,000 people. It’s hard because they left their country because they could not find work. Now when they are back it is hard for them,” he said. “That is the big job for the government.”

• Sources : Cambodia Daily