October 2, 2012,
By MARK MCDONALD
European Pressphoto AgencyThe Cambodian radio journalist Mam Sonando in police custody Monday after he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
HONG KONG — A court in Cambodia has sentenced a 71-year-old radio
journalist to 20 years in prison for allegedly encouraging a
secessionist movement in a remote eastern village.
The conviction,
however, by most independent accounts, has nothing to do with
insurrection and everything to do with the suppression of dissent over
an ongoing series of land grabs, illegal logging and forced evictions.
International
diplomats and human rights groups roundly assailed the verdict against
the journalist, Mam Sonando, the founder of Beehive Radio, one of the
country’s few independent stations.
“Criminalization of land
activists and human rights defenders is particularly worrying,”
Professor Surya P. Subedi, the United Nations special rapporteur on
human rights in Cambodia, said before the verdict was announced.
In a report
on Sept. 24 to the U.N. Human Rights Council, Mr. Subedi said he was
“concerned that, despite the Government’s commitment to fighting
corruption, many concessionaires operate behind a veil of secrecy.”
The U.S. State Department called
Tuesday for the government to immediately release Mam Sonando, saying,
“A number of observers in Cambodia have noted that the charges against
him appear to have been politically motivated, based on his frequent
criticism of the government.”
We are deeply concerned by the conviction and harsh sentence of Mam Sonando in #Cambodia. go.usa.gov/Yg7C
Three weeks ago, the journalist Hang Serei Oudom,
44, a Cambodian newspaper reporter who had been investigating illegal
logging, was found dead in the trunk of his car at a cashew plantation.
His murder was denounced by, among others, the director general of Unesco, Irina Bokova.
In April, the conservationist Chut Wutty was shot and killed by a soldier at an illegal logging site, an incident reported on Rendezvous.
Amnesty International, terming Mam Sonando a “prisoner of conscience,” said it would be actively campaigning for his release.
20 year verdict for journalist in #Cambodia shocking and baseless owl.li/e7PZK
Rupert Abbott, Amnesty’s Cambodia researcher,
attended the trial and the verdict session and said no evidence was
presented about an alleged rebellion or secession.
The case
appears to stem from a dispute in Broma, a village in Kratie Province,
in Cambodia’s heavily forested northeast. Villagers had been pushing
back against a government lease of 37,000 acres of their land to an
agricultural company, Casotim. The company, for its part, claimed that
village farmers were blocking its bulldozers, planting crops and
infringing on land it had leased.
Hundreds of police officers raided the village in May. During the raid, security forces shot and killed a 14-year-old girl.
At
the trial, prosecutors would argue that the unarmed villagers had
“planned to use common farm and hunting tools to defeat Cambodian forces
and form their own nation,” according to an account by Licadho, the respected Cambodian human rights organization.
Mr.
Subedi, the U.N. special rapporteur, had repeatedly criticized the
government, its lessees and contractors over illegal practices such as
the “land grabbing and confiscation of livestock, destruction of homes
and property, damage to burial grounds, and physical aggression and
intimidation, including the use of firearms against specific individuals
and communities.”
In a speech following the Broma raid, Prime
Minister Hun Sen called for the arrest of Mam Sonando and other land-use
campaigners, saying they had been encouraging Broma to secede from
Cambodia.
Around that time, Beehive Radio had been broadcasting
reports about possible charges of crimes against humanity at the
International Criminal Court over the forced evictions. Some saw a
direct link between Mam Sonando’s I.C.C. reports and his arrest.
“Sonando
represents a threat to the government, but not because he has any
intention to secede,” said Naly Pilorge, the Licadho director. “It’s
because he owns one of the last remaining independent radio stations in
Cambodia, and because he provides airtime to opposition parties and
voices from outside the ruling circle.”
Press Release: Phnom Penh Court Sentences Independent Radio Station Owner to 20 Years bit.ly/PmCBRz #cambodia #rights
In addition to Mam Sonando’s conviction, three
activists and three Broma villagers received prison terms of up to 35
years. Seven other villagers, in exchange for their testimony, had their
sentences suspended.
Mr. Abbott, the Amnesty researcher, was one
of those suggesting that the government had concocted the insurrection
plot as legal cover to quash the Broma dispute, one of many across
Cambodia in the past decade that have resulted in the forced evictions
of tens of thousands of families.
“This unbelievable narrative of
secession has been used to silence dissent,” Mr. Abbott said, adding
that the case marked “a disturbing deterioration in the situation of
freedom of expression in Cambodia.”
3 comments:
i'm not surprised - it was fair verdict by court
3 October 2012 12:34 AM, did your Hanoi masters tell Hanoi Yuon/Viet slave Hun Sen to hire to verdict innocent people illegally, Vietnamese thief?
I'm not surprised - it was fair verdict by curse.
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