Courtesy of The Guardian Newspaper

www.guardian.co.uk/

Cambodia's Ray Charles look-alike endured serious hardships. Jon Lusk on the man who escaped the Khmer Rouge.

With his legs folded under him as he sits on the floor, Kong Nay seems a frail figure, dwarfed by the large banjo-like instrument he holds. There's a flash of gold fillings in his smile, and when he sings, the voice of a much stronger man jumps out, answering the call of his strings.

This 61-year-old Cambodian is a master of the chapei dong veng, an ancient long-necked guitar with two strings thought to have arrived in Cambodia with the Buddhist faith nearly two millennia ago. Kong's penetrating, nasal wail closely follows or spars with the simple and often melancholic tunes he plunks out on the nylon strings of the instrument. The dark glasses that mask his heavily pock-marked face and sightless eyes have earned him the nickname of "the Ray Charles of Cambodia", but the two artists have rather different stories.

"I'm so excited and honoured that they compare me to him. But at the same time I'm not very happy with myself because the American Ray Charles was so rich and I'm so poor," he chuckles.

I meet Kong on his first day in the UK, where he is touring with his 21-year-old protégé Ouch Savy to promote their joint debut album, Mekong Delta Blues. Kong admits he doesn't really know what the blues are - not the musical kind, anyway. But the superficial resemblance of his music to the African-American form, and the tough life he's lived do more than justify the title.

Born in the southern Cambodian province of Kampot, Kong was blinded by smallpox at the age of four, and as a boy fell in love with the sound of the chapei. "I felt it was something that I should learn, something that would give me a good life in the future," he recalls.

His family was too poor to afford one, though, and for five years he sang and mimicked the chapei vocally, until his father finally bought him an old one. At 13, he began to take lessons from an uncle, mastering the basic repertoire within only two years. He then began playing professionally, improvising on traditional folk songs by spontaneously spinning stories like a hip-hopper, tailoring them to each audience.

"At 18 I met my wife [Tat Chhan] and we started our life together, depending on chapei. We managed to earn a good living. Not too rich, not too poor, but just good enough to survive, like other people. But when the Khmer Rouge took over, that was a big turning point in my life," he says with characteristic understatement.

In 1975, like millions of other Cambodians, his entire family was deported to a forced labour camp by Pol Pot's genocidal regime. Despite the Khmer Rouge's dislike of artists in particular, they found a use for Kong. "I was forbidden from singing folk tales, or songs that touched on social issues. Instead they told me to sing something that served their propaganda. So during the lunch break, I would sing and play to entertain people."

While most prisoners were given three large spoons of rice per day, Kong and anyone else who was sick or disabled got only one, and starved more rapidly. After two years, they stopped Kong's music altogether and forced him to work.

"They planned to kill me. I was on their list. But then the Vietnamese [army] invaded and so I survived." During the bombing that ended the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror, Kong and his wife each lost a brother. Another of Kong's brothers had been executed, but all seven of their children - three born in the camp - miraculously survived.

In 1979, the family returned to their village, where Kong resumed his life as a chapei artist, and they had three more children. In 1991, Kong won a national chapei singing contest in Phnom Penh, and the following year moved there at the invitation of the Cambodian ministry of culture. The salary was poor, but his family - and those of a few other artists who had survived the genocide - were allowed to build homes in the city's Tonle Bassac squatters' community.

Then in 1998, Kong received a young visitor called Arn Chorn-Pond, a former refugee who now lived in the US. He was another survivor of the killing fields, who had been forced to take part in atrocities from the age of nine and had returned to Cambodia periodically over the previous decade, trying to make peace with his past. Cambodia had lost around 90% of its artists in the genocide, and Chorn-Pond's family, which had run an opera company, had been particularly hard hit.

"When I came back to Cambodia in 1989, I found nobody here, except one of my sisters," he explains from Phnom Penh, his voice still raw with anguish. "They were all starved to death or killed by the Khmer Rouge - my dad, my mum, my cousin, my nephew, my uncle ... 35 in my family had disappeared."

With Kong Nay and several others, Chorn-Pond founded the Cambodia Master Performers Programme, which soon became Cambodian Living Arts, a charity dedicated to reviving the country's performing arts by helping to lift surviving artists out of poverty and employing them to pass on their skills to the next generation. "It was for me an urgent thing to start this, because I knew that my culture was going down in the next 10, 20, 30 years, if no one did anything about it," he says.

In 2003, Kong began teaching four young students, including Ouch Savy. That same year both he and Chorn-Pond appeared in the harrowing Emmy-nominated film The Flute Player, now being shown before each of his UK performances. When Peter Gabriel saw it, he was so moved that he began donating equipment and expertise to CLA, which led to the recording of Mekong Delta Blues.

Chorn-Pond's vision is of a Cambodian artistic renaissance by 2020, but it won't be easy. The loss of so many artists created a cultural vacuum that has been filled by foreign music, leaving most Cambodian youth hooked on western rap and rock or Chinese pop, and scornful of their own traditions. Government arts funding has been very limited during Cambodia's slow economic recovery, but ironically, Kong and his neighbours are now under pressure to move 20km away as developers eye their inner-city land. He relates this in the song My Life - as close as he's prepared to get to singing about politics these days. Apart from wanting to stay put, what else does he wish for?

"I hope that peace will prevail. There should be no more fighting, no more civil wars, no more conflicts. I am sick and tired of it."

Kong Nay is playing at Womad, Charlton Park (0845 1461735) until Sunday, then touring.

____________________________________________________________________

More information on Kong Nay & his current tour schedule can be found at www.cambodianlivingarts.co.uk/

Those of you who visit my website – Rachel’s Cambodia – will know that I have huge admiration for the work undertaken by The Cambodia Trust in helping disadvantaged disabled people in Cambodia. A good collection of photographs showing their work is now available on Flickr’s photo sharing site. Most of the images have been taken by volunteer photographers who have very generously donated their work for The Cambodia Trust to use in their publications and appeals. The Cambodia Trust hopes that by sharing these photos with the world, through Flickr, their projects will reach a wider audience.

To visit The Cambodia Trust’s Flickr page click here

For more information on the work of The Cambodia Trust click here

By Bronwyn Sloan, DPA, Phnom Penh

Courtesy of The Bangkok Post

www.bangkokpost.com/

The only woman know to have survived Pol Pot's infamous Toul Sleng torture centre, Chim Math broke her silence Tuesday after nearly 30 years, saying she wants to testify at an impending trial of Cambodia's former Khmer Rouge leaders.

The 49-year-old becomes the first woman and among only eight known survivors entered the gates of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot's S-21 secret prison, where an estimated 14,000 people perished.

She says now: "I can't describe what I saw there. I could look out of my cell through cracks in the wall and see the torture and the bodies being thrown away like rubbish. For two weeks, that was my television. The smell of pig excrement mixed with blood which was S-21 will never leave me."

"This is a real breakthrough," David Chandler, a historian and author of "Voices From S-21," replied in an email Tuesday.

Previously, only three men were believed to still be alive as the 56-million dollar joint UN-Cambodia trial of a handful of surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge's brutal Democratic Kampuchea regime looms.

Former commandant of S-21, Kang Kech Ieu, alias Duch, is the only person currently in jail awaiting a decision by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia on indictments.

Documentation Centre of Cambodia director Youk Chhang confirmed that records had been recovered from Toul Sleng proving Math had been held at the former school that became one of the epicentres of Khmer Rouge atrocities.

Chhang said Math had previously denied she had been held at the prison, possibly out of fear. Math says she kept her story secret because it was too difficult to tell.

"I didn't tell anyone all these years. Not even my husband. It was too painful," Math said as she stared at her picture taken by her captors, among more than one thousand images documenting the victims of the slaughter that took place in S-21 between 1975 and 1979.

"Now the trial is coming, my family has persuaded me to come forward so I can be an eyewitness and help my country."

Known as Khem Math at the time of her October 10, 1978 arrest, she says she was held in S-21 for two weeks before being transferred to nearby Prey Sar prison, which she escaped from to run to the mountains of Kampong Speu province when Vietnamese-backed troops overthrew the Khmer Rouge on January 7, 1979.

Math thinks she may have been spared because she was from Stoeung district in Kampong Thom, prison chief Duch's place of birth.

She held a copy of a Khmer Rouge document showing she joined the movement in 1974 as a 16-year-old. Above her picture is a stamp from S-21 in Khmer script. At the bottom corner of the page, a blank space remains next to the column grimly titled "date of death".

Up to 2 million Cambodians are believed to have died during the four-year reign of the Khmer Rouge as the ultra-Maoists attempted to turn the country into an agrarian utopia, bereft of markets, money and social classes.

Math says two photos she kept with her of her father dressed in a Lon Nol-era police uniform had led to her arrest during a period when the south-western zone, led by former military commander Ta Mok, began conducting internal purges.

Court officials say they hope hearings will get underway by early next year. Pol Pot died at his home in 1998 without facing trial. Ta Mok died in hospital of age-related complications last year.

Researchers say Math's testimony will shed invaluable light on the conditions inside S-21 for female prisoners, about which little was previously known.

South Asian Women’s Forum

http://news.sawf.org/

From his arrest in late 1977 to a rescue, of sorts, from certain death, Cambodian artist Vann Nath has meticulously recorded his year spent in the Khmer Rouge's most notorious prison in a series of paintings exhibited for the first time earlier this month.

PHNOM PENH (AFP) - "Transfer - Story of Artist Vann Nath" traces his terrifying descent into the Tuol Sleng security facility, one of the worst hells created by the communist regime which devastated Cambodia in the late 1970s, killing up to two million people.

The former high school was converted by the Khmer Rouge into a torture centre through which passed some 16,000 men, women and children who were brutalised for months before being taken to the outskirts of the capital and executed.

Only 14 people are known to have survived Tuol Sleng. Like Vann Nath, they had a skill - mechanical or artistic - deemed valuable enough by their jailers to justify keeping them alive.

Vann Nath painted portraits of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot.

Using thick brushstrokes to lay down harsh swathes of blues, greens and greys, Vann Nath's 14 new panels, all painted this year, take on a primitive, almost abstract quality, mirroring the surreal world he was thrown into after being arrested by the regime.

He is first seen tied to a chair, his elbows wrenched painfully together behind his back and electrical cables snaking along a blood-spotted floor to his metal manacles. Two Khmer Rouge cadres sit at a desk across the room.

"I was accused of mobilising a movement against the Revolutionary Policy," he says. "After seven days of being tortured and interrogated I was transported to Phnom Penh with over 30 other prisoners in two trucks."

Much of this journey took place at night -- sharp shafts of yellow light from the torches of guards minding the bound prisoners cut through the surrounding gloom, painted in heavy swirls of deep blue and black that descends as heavily on the viewer as it does on the doomed men in the trucks.

Blindfolded and tied together with ropes around their necks, the prisoners stumble dazed through Tuol Sleng's gate, as Vann Nath takes the viewer through the dehumanising process of being photographed, stripped and shackled together in long rows.

The exhibition stands as a stark reminder that nearly 30 years on, no Khmer Rouge leader has been brought to justice for one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century, leaving Cambodians who suffered under the regime to grapple alone with their demons.

Mental trauma plagues many; substance abuse and domestic violence are an ugly by-product of decades on unresolved anger and fear.

Dredging up this painful subject took its toll on Vann Nath, he says.

"It was truly painful because I had to recall these incidents -- I faced difficulties in painting but I had to overcome them," he tells AFP.

"If we don't make these paintings, no one will know (what happened). People cannot understand with only words, so we show them pictures also and they can understand some," he adds.

Vann Nath says he hopes his paintings will preserve something of the past for a younger generation of Cambodians who know almost nothing of the apocalypse that engulfed the country under the Khmer Rouge.

"Nowadays children do not know or understand. They just hear from their parents that to live under the Pol Pot regime was so miserable," he says.

A month after arriving at Tuol Sleng, Vann Nath says he was "just about finished off".

Starved and plagued by lice and skin lesions, he and the dozens of others he was shackled to were surviving on a few teaspoons of rice gruel each day.

"If someone died close to where we were confined, we had to sleep and eat with the body right there," he says.

"At the time it seemed as if we didn't have any sense of disgust or revulsion. We just thought the same thing would happen to us later on."

But then Vann Nath was abruptly ordered by prison officials to paint portraits of top regime leaders.

The final few panels in his series depict this resurrection. Vann Nath has shed his rags and cut his hair. He stands before a large portrait of Pol Pot in an open, airy room.

"This gave me a bit more freedom both physically and morally," he says.

Vann Nath was still dogged, though, by the fear that he was only alive as long as he was useful to his unpredictable teenage guards.

"They were keeping me alive temporarily. Of course, in the future I would also not survive," he says of his thought process at the time.

But he did manage to escape in the chaos of Phnom Penh's fall to invading Vietnamese troops, somehow being spared Tuol Sleng's final bloodletting as guards murdered the few remaining prisoners before fleeing the advancing army.

After the Khmer Rouge were pushed from power in 1979, Vann Nath was made famous by his savage depictions of life in Tuol Sleng; a mother being ripped from her screaming child, guards pulling out prisoners' fingernails or shoving them head first into vats of putrid water.

A self portrait of Vann Nath shows a gaunt, nearly naked man slumped in a tiny brick cell, his ankle chained to the wall.

Vann Nath's work is "a powerful testimony about the crimes of the Khmer Rouge," said Sara Colm, who this month presented the artist with the Human Rights Watch's Hellman/Hammett award for his work.

"Through his art Vann Nath has become a very outspoken advocate for victims of the Khmer Rouge."

An international court to try former Khmer Rouge leaders has been under way for more than a year, with prosecutors expecting to submit their first cases to investigating judges in the coming weeks.

But Pol Pot died in 1998, and concerns are growing that other elderly senior regime leaders who are living freely in Cambodia could die before being put on trial.

Vann Nath said his hopes for justice are fading.

"If we're talking about hope now, I don't hope because it has been nearly 30 years and no one has shown their face to take responsibility for killing Cambodians," he said.

Courtesy of International Herald Tribune

http://www.iht.com/

England soccer great Bobby Charlton arrived in Cambodia on Tuesday as part of a mission to raise awareness for the impoverished Southeast Asian nation's continuing land mine problem.

"We are going to try to teach young people how to recognize the dangerous mines that are still around," said Charlton, who is in Cambodia as a supporter of charity Spirit of Soccer, which helps children in land mine affected areas of the world through the development of soccer.

An estimated 4-6 million mines and other pieces of unexploded ordinance remain buried in Cambodia after more than three decades of armed conflict.

Charlton will to tour land mine areas in Battambang province, about 250 kilometers (155 miles) northwest of the capital Phnom Penh, said Khek Ravy, vice president of Football Federation of Cambodia.

Spirit of Soccer operates one of its two soccer coaching projects in Cambodia, the other is in Bosnia.

On Thursday, Charlton — who joined Manchester United when he was 17 — will meet with young Cambodian soccer players to discuss some techniques with them.

Charlton, 70, is one of soccer's best known identities. He was a member of England's 1966 World Cup winning team, the same year he was named European Footballer of the Year.

The Manchester United director said Cambodia should promote its soccer to as high a level as many of its regional neighbors.

"It's about time," he said. "Everyone's waiting for Cambodia. Vietnam, China, everywhere else is very happy playing football."

World governing body FIFA ranks Cambodia's national team at 169 out of 208.

Charlton visited Spirit of Soccer's Bosnian program in 2005.

Courtesy of People’s Daily Online (China)

http://english.people.com.cn

Cambodia will present big events late this year to attract more tourists to visit the country and help boost the economy and reduce poverty, said Tourism Minister Thong Kong on Thursday.

"We will have night markets soon in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap province, home of the Angkor Wat temples, organize the Johnnie Walker Cambodia Golf Open 2007 in Siem Reap, conduct better celebration of the Water Festival than previous years in Phnom Penh, hold half marathon in Siem Reap, and join the World Culture Expo 2007 from Sept. 7 to Oct. 26 in South Korea," he told reporters at the half-year review meeting of his ministry's work.

Cambodia is also preparing to host the Angkor International Tourism Expo 2007 in Siem Reap in early October and the ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asia Nations) Boat Racing soon in Phnom Penh, he added.

"These events can show tourists that our country is stable and peaceful to visit," he said.

The plane crash in June, which killed 22 people, had limited impact on the kingdom's tourism industry, as the government had worked hard in the rescue operation and the aviation companies will strengthen the control of their planes' quality, improve safety measures for tourists and adopt better flight routes, he said.

In the first six months of this year, Cambodia received 975,349 tourists, about 20 percent increase over the same period last year, and most of them were from South Korea, Japan, the United States, Vietnam and China, he said.

At the end of this year, we estimate to have about two million foreign tourists in all, he added.

Last year, 1.7 million foreign tourists visited Cambodia, harvesting over one billion U.S. dollars for national revenues.

Tourism is one of the three pillar industries of Cambodia. The Angkor Wat temples in Siem Reap, the clean beach resorts in Sihanoukville and the Phnom Penh city are travellers’ hottest destinations.

Article by Jerry Harmer

Courtesy of The Scotsman Newspaper www.thescotsman.scotsman.com

Photograph Courtesy of www.killingfieldsmuseum.com

THE most senior surviving leader of Cambodia's infamous Khmer Rouge regime, accused of genocidal policies that led to the deaths of 1.7 million of his countrymen, declared his innocence yesterday as he prepared to face trial.

He spoke a day after prosecutors in the tribunal examining the deaths gave a list of five former Khmer Rouge leaders they believe should be tried, along with the evidence to back the charges. Judges will decide whether to proceed.

"They did not specify the names of the people, but I know I am included," Nuon Chea said at his home in north-west Cambodia near the Thai border.

Now an ailing 82-year-old, Nuon Chea - the former "Brother Number Two" in the Khmer Rouge, right-hand man to the group's notorious leader, the late Pol Pot - has consistently denied any responsibility for the mass brutality.

"I was president of the National Assembly and had nothing to do with the operation of the government," he said. "Sometimes I didn't know what they were doing because I was in the assembly.

"I will go to the court and don't care if people believe me or not."

He was the chief ideologue for the communist Khmer Rouge when it held power in the late 1970s. Its ideology was largely responsible for the genocide.

The prosecutors said the acts allegedly carried out by the five unnamed Khmer Rouge leaders "constitute crimes against humanity, genocide, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, homicide, torture and religious persecution".

Nuon Chea said: "I had no intention to kill my people. The tribunal should not rely solely on the law but on intention."

Former Khmer Rouge leaders have usually denied knowledge of large-scale killings, even though mass graves have been found around the country.

They sometimes blame neighbouring Vietnam, Cambodia's traditional enemy. After bloody border raids by the Khmer Rouge on Vietnamese villages in 1978, Hanoi invaded Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge and install a puppet government, garrisoning the country for about a decade.

"There are two kinds of war, one to protect your country, one where you invade another country," said Nuon Chea, in apparent reference to battles with Vietnam. "I was trying to protect my country."

He said there were more police than usual outside his house since Wednesday's announcement of the legal moves and he had to be careful what he said.

"It happened 30 years ago a