Prologue
The sunset hung low, orange and pink, over the mountains and rivers of Kampot. In the foreground, a bustling market. People whizzing about on motorcycles, children pressed tightly to their chests, smoke from street-food vendors adding haze to the surreal image. It was five or six, and people had stopped at the market on their way home. There were two prevailing moods.
The first, and you’ll see this at almost every market, was boredom. There were hundreds of vendors selling an array of things, ranging greatly in their usefulness. While the stands selling fruit were surrounded by people, the ones selling Hello-Kitty phone cases were not. The natural result? Dozens, maybe hundreds, of bored vendors on their phones—checking Telegram and Facebook. The second mood was joy. People were sat around small plastic tables eating food or drinking from a fresh coconut. There was laughter between friends and children running about, screaming with excitement.
As I walked through the market, I stumbled on a scene between a soldier, a mother and a small child. The soldier seemed to be smiling, his features impossibly softened by a laughing baby. He was young, but beginning to age. I would come face to face with dozens Cambodian soldiers after this, and I never saw that soft smile again. A scowl is part of the uniform. The mother was very young, maybe in her 20s. She was wearing a straw hat and carried her baby against her chest in a floral sling. She was smiling too, but didn’t seem at ease.
The soldier was playing peek-a-boo with the child. After the game was finished, the soldier pulled a 1000R bill from his pocket. He held it out in front of the child, as the baby looked up. What followed was an odd dance. Prompted by the soldier, the mother proceeded, in fits and starts, to teach her baby how to take the money. Lacking fine motor skills, the child struggled—but eventually got a hold of the bill and held it up in front of his face. He looked on in wonder, not sure what to make of this blue piece of paper that had been so laboriously passed into his hands. The mother managed a restrained smile, as she took the bill from her child’s hands. The soldier looked delighted. As the mother thanked him, he got on his motorbike and drove off. So did she.
The Verdict
I was shoved in the back of a cold van, pressed to the wall by briefcases. At first, the air conditioning was a welcome respite from the thirty-seven-degree heat—but 20 minutes into our journey to the Phnom Penh Capital Court I was starting to shiver. It was the cold, but it was also the nerves. During my three months in Cambodia, I became very comfortable with the courthouse. I went there more than a dozen times to witness the show-trials of political prisoners and human rights defenders. This was amongst my first times, and I was still nervous.
As if somehow to underscore my fears, I looked out the window of the van to see a procession of State-power speeding past us on the roundabout. Out front was a pick-up truck, branded and kitted out with the trappings of the of the Cambodian Judicial Police. Sitting in the back of the pick-up truck, dressed in fatigues and carrying assault weapons, were at least nine soldiers. It was followed by another truck, this time dragging a cage behind it. It was the kind of cage that you see livestock transported in on the highway: opaque, save for rows of breathing holes. Through the holes all I could see was ruffling neon orange fabric and chains connecting wrists. There were people inside that cage, prisoners being brought to the courthouse. The cage was followed by yet another pick-up truck of assault-rifle wielding soldiers. If the goal was to monitor the prisoners, then it was overkill. Of course, that wasn’t the goal.
The Cambodian government projects its power through patronage and violence. This procession was a reminder of the latter, and it was one of many. I often saw military units cruising the streets in the back of pickup trucks, or men being dragged from tuk-tuks by more police officers than there were witnesses. Eventually, I became afraid of the police myself: constantly watching out for the slightest indication of their presence, tensing up as I saw them and feeling relieved when I passed by unimpeded. If we’re being frank about the situation, they weren’t there to scare me: I was a foreigner, which came with a host of macabre privileges. Nonetheless, I internalized signs of them, and I read the road for those signs. There are very few places more powerful to occupy than the back of someone’s mind.
As the procession of guns and prisoners faded out of our view, I settled back into my reading. We were on our way to hear the verdict of a Cambodian environmentalist youth group called Mother Nature. They had been charged with ‘Plotting’ and ‘Insulting the King’, which together carried a potential 12-year sentence. This was a significant event for two reasons:
- Mother Nature was internationally known, and for good reason. They were a collection of rambunctious and brilliant 20-somethings, fighting tooth and nail to protect the degrading Cambodian environment. I had sat in the court room for many days as they gave statements, and even through a Khmer translator, my heart lept every time they spoke.
- These weren’t the regular charges you would see lodged against human rights defenders in Cambodia. Recent years have seen a rise in violent and judicial intimidation against activists, but this campaign of repression has primarily found its voice through the vague charge of ‘Incitement’ which comes with a 2-year prison sentence. In a bid to raise the costs of speaking out, the government was threatening 10+ years.
Mother Nature had found themselves in trouble because they were repeatedly and successfully disrupting a very profitable arrangement. In the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge and civil war, the Cambodian government sought to rebuild the country on a tenuous economic program of environmental exploitation. Quickly, powerful tycoons, foreign companies, Khmer Rouge holdouts in northwestern provinces and thousands of illegal operations realized that mass logging was the most profitable short-term investment in the Cambodian economy. Once the logging happened, companies could establish massive farming operations for things like rubber and sugar. Cambodia, like many countries, was going to jumpstart its economy with natural resources—and the government needed to facilitate this.
What followed was decades-long policy of de-regulation, corruption and repression which facilitated the profitable extraction of resources from land—no matter who lived there.
Though there are “Protected Areas” and “Commitments to Sustainable Development” in Cambodian law, the de-facto de-regulation of resource extraction in Cambodia has been total. The country ranks second worst in the world for regulatory enforcement according to the World Justice Project, and one of the main things that Mother nature spent their time highlighting was the impunity with which foreign companies illegally logged and stole from the Cambodian environment—without permits, without compensating surrounding communities, and often while threatening locals with violence. You can see this de-regulation everywhere in Cambodia. A kayak through the back-rivers of Kampot is interrupted by the sound of heavy machinery dredging sand from the riverbank and the idyllic beaches of Koh Rong Sanloem are littered with bulldozers that have been abandoned like a construction ghost-town.
This de-regulatory policy is paired with massive Economic Land Concessions (ELCs): 99-year development leases given out to major Cambodian tycoons, foreign companies and relatives of government officials. These unrestricted development permits in once beautiful areas. I remember motorbiking to a mountaintop in the Bokor National Park ELC. Once I got through the lush jungles and monkey-lined roadway, I reached a foggy peak which housed an old Buddhist temple, a 19th-century Catholic church, and massive Casino. These ELCs are granted to the powerful with no regard for the ecosystems or the communities that they overlap with. When people try to stand up, they find themselves at the other end of the barrel of a gun.
When a Thai sugar company linked to a Cambodian tycoon was granted an ELC which covered wide swathes of land in Odar Meanchey province, the people who lived on that land stood up. They petitioned and protested, using legal and non-violent means to voice their discontent with the situation. Their activism was crushed, but not by the company or its private security forces. No, local police and military stepped in to arrest leaders, threaten activists, illegally confiscate land, and push people out of their homes. They burned and bulldozed the local communities, and the villagers were left sleeping at a Pagoda on the side of a nearby highway.
Why was it police and military showing up to enforce the illegal evictions and destruction of that community? Because this policy of patronage and corruption is lucrative for everyone at the top. Like I mentioned, these land concessions are given out to relatives of government officials. Alternatively, they are conspicuously followed by a tycoon-funded school that is named after the prime minister. This is the way the State and the economic elite have organized their assent into the billionaire class. Like those communities in Odar Meanchey, Mother Nature had stood in the way—and they were about to find out the consequences.
As the van arrived outside of the courthouse, we hung our badges over our necks and put our masks on. There was some sense that the masks granted us a feeble anonymity in the face of CCTV cameras and uniformed officers. My colleagues teased me for wearing the mask: I was a tall white guy amongst Khmer legal officials, a small piece of white cloth was unlikely to protect my anonymity. As I opened the car door, we were immediately surrounded by a gaggle of people taking cellphone videos of us. Some of them were journalists, some of them activists, some of them undercover police. I couldn’t tell, so I kept my head down and moved.
I saw the white UN OHCHR van and I assumed they were monitoring the protests. The Mother Nature defendants had chosen to boycott the verdict reading and hold a demonstration outside the courthouse. This wasn’t the first time, but it was significant. While they had refused to show up to the first day of the proceedings, five of them had attended the other days of the trial: Yim Leanghy, Thun Ratha, Pheon Keoraksmey, Long Kunthea, and Ly Daravuth. Over that time, I had become familiar with their stories and their oratory.
Yim Leanghy and Thun Ratha were clearly the elders of the group (though they could not have been older than their early thirties). They wore their head bald. My brain, accustomed to the stories that it is, couldn’t help feeling that the baldness evoked a kind of religious martyrdom. A monkish innocence and stoic strength in the face of injustice. I couldn’t tell you if that was their goal, but it shaped my understanding of them. They were both fathers to young children, and they approached their oratory with the tenderness and vision of someone who loved the next generation.
Long Kunthea and Pheon Keoraksmey were some of the youngest and newest members of the group. They were 19, having only been part of Mother Nature for a few months when they were first arrested and thrown in prison. They were targets because they exuded grace and fearlessness in their silent protests—marching through the streets in white clothes, unimpeachable symbols and brave warriors wrapped into one. A dangerous combination for anybody who is gravely addicted to power.
Ly Daravuth immediately stood to me personally: headstrong, well-spoken and hilarious. During the last day of pre-verdict proceedings, the Mother Nature team had continued to make statements in a kind of round-robin of speech-making. In the face of an almost inevitable outcome, drawing the proceedings out was one of the only tools they had. When the Prosecutor forcefully asked why the Defendants were drawing the trial out, Daravuth told him that it was because he didn’t want to stop looking at the Prosecutor’s handsome face. Imagine that: looking into the eyes of a man who wanted nothing more than to put you in prison for a decade, knowing he had the power to do it without issue, and making fun of him. That was Daravuth.
As the demonstration continued outside of the courthouse, between 50 – 100 members of the Judicial Police, Royal Cambodian Armed Forces, and Gendarmeries were called in to manage it. The group protesting was mostly made up of young supporters and family: the mothers, fathers, and grandparents of these five brave young people. Wearing straw hats and protected by cellphone cameras, these people stood face to face with rifle-carrying officers. Everyone stood tense, waiting for verdict.
We rushed past the protests and citizen journalists, through the gates of the courthouse. We had signed up for the trial, and there were badges ready for us. At this point, I had become comfortable with the routine of the courthouse and the feeling of the guards’ eyes on me. The act of NGO court monitoring is part of the theatrics, and everyone is well-rehearsed. You walk in, armed officers look at you with suspicion and disdain, they frisk you, and then you sit in the court room watching the proceedings. It doesn’t change the uncomfortable feeling of having an armed guard peer over your shoulder to read your notebook. You simply need to feel safe in the hunch that his peering is performative, and that he only reads Khmer.
As we entered the Phnom Penh Municipal Court, I was greeted by ambassadors and rapporteurs there to witness the verdict. They had not been to other trial dates, but now was the time for them be the prying eyes of the world—to fulfill the vital role of being a human rights voyeur.
Many scholars have pointed out the essentially voyeuristic character to the work of human rights. You are positioned from the outside, looking in. Everything you see must be rejigged and reformulated to fit your lens: whether that be the sanitized language of international human rights law or the patronizing saviorism of Christian adventure. The negative impacts of this kind of hegemonic voyeurism are numerous, but it also has a precise value: “eyes” make judges and prosecutors uncomfortable.
In the country with the second-worst rule of law in the world, where widespread judicial persecution of activists is commonplace, how do you hold someone accountable? When power is entirely discretionary in its exercise, how do you keep it in check? One working theory is that the best you can do is see the violation of justice. When the system is a “gunman writ-large”, our only true recourse is to witness the injustice and measure it against some definition of justice—pointing and saying: “I see what you’re doing.” That’s the value of the voyeur: armed with eyes, and an imperfect sense of justice which can be used as a measuring stick.
To many, witnessing, pointing and measuring may seem an inert toolkit in the project of building global justice—but I’m not sure. It’s powerful enough that, in moments of conflict, everyone was filming each other in Cambodia—police and citizen alike. It’s noted by those in power. I remember during a hearing for a political prisoner, the Defense lawyer implied that his client was a prisoner of conscience. The Prosecutor interrupted, looking at me, and saying “the world is watching this trial, so I want to make a correction: there are no prisoners of conscience in Cambodia, only criminals who have been convicted on the basis of law.” Ultimately, it’s why the theatrics of court monitoring necessarily involve guards watching your every move—it is a way for them to even the playing field: “if you’re going to watch me, I will watch you.”
We shuffled into the court room. It took ten-minutes total between the moment the Presiding Judge walked in and the moment she was finished issuing the verdict. Reasons were not read in detail, there was no need. The Defendants would go to prison for 6 – 8 years for their activism.
From the reports, the soldiers outside leapt into action within a minute of the verdict being announced. Chaos followed. The young activists were violently grabbed and arrested. Held in headlocks and forced into police cars. Daravuth was heard telling his mother not to lift anything too heavy while he was away. Keoraksmey—only 23—broke into tears as her mother screamed for her not to go. Long Kunthea and Thun Ratha stood stoic, as mothers, sisters, wives and children cried for their loved ones.
I rushed out of the courtroom after the arrests were made. We jumped right into the car and sped off. The silence was deafening. Everyone frantically wondering where they had taken the activists. Yim Leanghy had not been present at the protests, so nobody knew where he was. As the rest of the day was spent pinpointing the locations of the activists within the carceral system, whispers spread that Leanghy had escaped the country. The soundtrack of these frantic hours was a single cell-phone clip of the arrests being made, the sound of mothers and sisters and grandfathers yelling after these brave young activists as they were violently forced into the police car. I spent the rest of the day hearing that 45-second soundbite on loop in the background.
When the dust had somewhat settled, and the arrest video was no longer on loop, the information came in. Leanghy had not escaped. He had been arrested earlier that morning, alone. The five activists were being separated into five different prisons in the farthest reaches of Cambodia: a unique and cruel punishment without precedent in the Cambodian carceral system, designed to cut the activists off from their families and each other.
While there are few bright spots in this story, it does make you think: how terrified must one be to think of such a cruel punishment?
Epilogue
The sun soared high, gold and blue, over skyscrapers and crowded streets of Phnom Penh. I sat in a coffee shop outside of my apartment looking out onto the gradually waking streets. By 6:30am the morning ice delivery had been made by motorbike and several pairs of monks had come around to say their prayers. Across the road I saw three generations: a mother, washing clothes and a grandfather holding his granddaughter against his chest.
I had seen this old man almost every morning since I had moved in. He always looked pensive and serious—fixing motorbikes or looking onto the coffee shop crowd. Today, he was grinning ear to ear holding his granddaughter. At a certain point he was dancing with her, as if teaching the infant how to waltz. She giggled as her mother looked up with a soft joy and pride.
Across the road, the coffee-shop owner had just picked a fresh mango from the trees that stood over the street. He was a young man, brimming with energy and constantly smiling. He came over to the grandfather and his granddaughter, with the ripe mango. He played peek-a-boo, and made the young girl laugh. He picked out a piece of mango for her and offered it. After a laborious process of trying to pass the slippery fruit to a baby with rudimentary motor skills, she finally got a hold of the mango with the help of her grandfather. She looked on in wonder, until her grandfather finally helped her try a piece.
As she tried the mango and her eyes widened, her grandfather, his daughter, and the coffee shop owner all laughed together.
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Images were taken by me or downloaded from the LICADHO website.
Thank you to everyone at LICADHO for making Cambodia home.