Annus horribilis for
Cambodian rights By Sebastian
Strangio
PHNOM PENH - On April 26, a
prominent Cambodian anti-logging campaigner was
shot and killed by military police in the Cardamom
Mountains in the country's southwest.
Chut
Wutty, the director of the Natural Resources
Protection Group, was reportedly escorting two
local journalists through a densely-forested part
of Koh Kong province when his car was stopped by
military police. An altercation broke out as the
officers attempted to confiscate the memory card
from the activist's camera and shots were fired,
leaving Wutty and In Rattana, a 32-year-old
military policeman, dead.
Wutty, 46, is
the highest-profile activist to have been killed
in Cambodia since union leader Chea Vichea was
gunned down in 2004.
Over the past decade,
the former soldier had built a reputation for
his tireless grassroots
campaigns and daring raids on logging operations
in national parks and wildlife sanctuaries.
Patrick Alley, director of London-based watchdog
Global Witness, described Wutty as "one of the few
remaining activists willing to speak out against
the rapid escalation of illegal logging and land
grabbing" in Cambodia.
"The national
government and international donor countries must
publicly condemn his murder and take swift action
to bring the perpetrators to justice," he said in
a statement.
The tragic incident
highlights the extreme risks run by those who go
up against the powerful interests that control
Cambodia's illegal timber trade. In its explosive
2007 report "Family Trees", Global Witness alleged
that the country's ruling and business elite,
including officials closely linked to Prime
Minister Hun Sen, were systematically stripping
the country's once-bountiful forests for personal
profit, deploying state security forces including
the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF) to guard
their operations.
In recent years, Wutty
had become a particular thorn in the side of
Cambodia's timber mafia. Late last year, he and a
large band of villagers clashed with around 500
police and military police after burning
stockpiles of illegal timber in Prey Lang, a
swathe of threatened lowland rainforest in
northern Cambodia. Wutty had also worked closely
with local and international media to produce a
recent series of exposes on the axis of
government, business and military interests
cashing in on Cambodia's rapidly-diminishing
forests.
"People at the grassroots had
been taking action, had been conscious of the
importance of the forest to the nation, to their
livelihoods, to the ecology," said Lao Mong Hay,
an independent human-rights activist based in
Phnom Penh. "All these actions hurt the interests
of a group of people." He added that the killing
was clearly intended to "send a signal" to others
opposing the illicit trade in timber.
Journalists covering land issues -
especially illegal logging - have also been
subject to intimidation and threats. The Cambodia
Daily journalists accompanying Wutty on his
ill-fated trip to Koh Kong last week were forced
to surrender their cameras; after the shooting
they also recalled overhearing a soldier
instructing his colleagues to "just kill them
both".
In December, a reporter and
photographer investigating illegal logging for the
Phnom Penh Post were similarly stopped and forced
to delete photos from their cameras, and were
chased in their car by military police.
Though it's still unclear whether Wutty's
killing was premeditated, the official response
has raised some thorny questions. After a 24-hour
investigation, military police announced that the
man responsible for the shooting was in fact the
dead military police officer, In Rattana.
After gunning down the forestry activist
with an assault rifle, officials claim, he then
shot himself twice in remorse - once in the
stomach and then, when that failed to do the job,
in the chest.
"The military police officer
fatally shot Chut Wutty and when he realized he
had made a mistake and could not flee from the
law, he decided to kill himself," national
military police spokesman Kheng Tito told Agence
France-Presse.
The claim was greeted with
incredulity by rights activists and opposition
politicians, who said it was implausible that the
officer would have been able to shoot himself
twice in succession and that the "suicide" was
being used as cover for the real culprit.
"It is impossible to call it closure,
impossible to call it suicide," said Mu Sochua, a
lawmaker for the opposition Sam Rainsy Party
(SRP), who said she was "alarmed" how little was
done to investigate the killing. "The more they
say it, the more you get suspicious."
In
particular, Sochua said, four other military
police on the scene were not taken in for
questioning, suggesting that the responsible
officers were in the pay of senior government
officials.
"There were other people
involved and they were around. They were very much
part of the story and what led to the killings,"
she said, adding that only a full and independent
investigation would allay her suspicions. (The two
Cambodia Daily journalists who were in Wutty's car
at the time of the incident reported that they did
not see who fired the lethal shots).
Cycle of impunity Government
critics say the shooting - and the perfunctory
investigation conducted by the military police -
follows a familiar pattern of impunity in
Cambodia, under which the murder and assault of
anti-government critics goes largely unpunished.
Lao Mong Hay drew a comparison between
Wutty's killing and the high-profile assassination
of Chea Vichea, a popular union leader who had
rallied Cambodia's garment workers and spoken out
strongly against labor abuses. After he was shot
at a Phnom Penh newspaper stand in January 2004,
police quickly framed two innocent bystanders for
the crime, a story told in the 2011 Who Killed
Chea Vichea? documentary.
The two were
released by the Supreme Court in 2009, which was
eventually forced to recognize the lack of
evidence linking them to the murder. The real
killers, alleged to be in the pay of powerful
officials, remain at large.
This pattern
has also been seen in a recent spate of shootings
of activists and protesters working to expose
land-related corruption and other abuses. In the
past six months, Licadho, a local rights group,
has documented five shooting incidents
specifically involving land activists, causing 19
injuries. These included an incident in January in
which security guards employed by the TTY rubber
firm shot and injured four villagers protesting
the company's clearing of their land in Kratie
province.
On February 20, a government
official allegedly shot his handgun into a crowd
of protesting garment workers at the Kaoway Sports
factory in Bavet near the Vietnamese border,
injuring three young women. After several
unsuccessful attempts to buy the victims' silence
(local media reported sums ranging from $500 to
$1,000), the alleged shooter, Bavet district
governor Chhouk Bandith, was removed from his
post.
In mid-April, the provincial court in Svay Rieng
eventually caved to outside pressure and charged
Bandith in mid-April with causing "unintentional
injury", a charge rights groups said was
excessively lenient. The outcome was a familiar
one. "One cannot help but conclude that Chhouk
Bandith belonged to a certain powerful faction in
the government," said Lao Mong Hay. "He must have
been protected somewhere."
Rupert Abbott,
Cambodia researcher for rights group Amnesty
International, said the only thing that will stem
the tide of violent incidents is if Cambodia's
leadership finds the political will to reform
Cambodia's pliant judiciary. "In none of these
cases has anyone senior been held accountable,"
Abbott said of the spate of recent shootings. "If
you reform [the judiciary] and make people realize
they can't get away with murder and that there
won't be impunity, there will likely be a decrease
in violence."
But without concerted action
to end impunity and investigate Wutty's tragic
killing, it's possible that Cambodia's annus
mirabilis of 2012 - a year in which it is
chairing the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations and campaigning for a non-permanent seat
on the UN Security Council - could be marked
instead by an escalating cycle of abuses, protests
and state violence.
"This is going down as
a bit of a dark chapter," Abbott said. "And the
story of this violence isn't going away because
the violence isn't going away."
Sebastian Strangio is a
journalist based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He may
be reached at sebastian.strangio@gmail.com
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