The Scramble for Cambodia - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 176

timber trade. On the evening of April 30, 2002, Eva Galabru, who headed the group's
Cambodian operations, was attacked as she arrived at her office in Phnom Penh. As she
got out of her car several men, at least one of them masked, pushed her to the ground.
Then they kicked and beat her. The following day she received an anonymous email with
a single threatening word: “QUIT.” 20 The government eventually fired Global Witness as
its forestry monitor, while Hun Sen castigated the organization for its “hostile, untruthful,
unjust, and destructive attitude.” 21
From its London “exile,” Global Witness kept publishing damaging reports that ex-
plored high-ranking involvement in illegal logging and natural resource extraction. Cam-
bodia's Family Trees , a report released in 2007, blew the lid off operations in Prey Lang
and for the first time named close associates of Hun Sen—including his first cousin Dy
Chouch, Dy Chouch's ex-wife Seng Keang, and Khun Thong, an in-law of Agriculture
Minister Chan Sarun—as the heads of the Seng Keang Import Export Co. Ltd., which it
described as the most powerful logging syndicate in Cambodia. The report was imme-
diately banned in Cambodia. Hun Sen's brother Hun Neng, the governor of Kampong
Cham, said that if any Global Witness staff returned to Cambodia he would “hit them un-
til their heads are broken.” 22
Global Witness's “name and shame” approach unfortunately had little real effect. In
2010, in response to bad publicity about logging, Hun Sen fired Ty Sokhun as head of
the Forestry Administration. Sokhun was kicked upstairs, becoming an undersecretary of
state at MAFF. Hun Sen said he should treat it as a learning experience. Technically, it
was a promotion. 23 And the logging continued. Cambodia's forest cover had dropped to
57 percent by 2010, down from 73 percent two decades earlier. These were the FA's own
statistics; the real figure was probably much lower. 24
For the past decade conservation and forestry management have remained understandably
high on the donor agenda. But progress toward reform “benchmarks” has been a mix of
intermittent crackdowns and holographic management schemes that never seem to emig-
rate from PowerPoint presentation to reality. In 2008 the World Bank terminated its $5
million Biodiversity and Protected Areas Management Project (BPAMP) after the gov-
ernment opened the project area to mineral exploration rights by Indochine Resources,
a little-known Australian mining firm. Indochine was given the right to prospect across
180,000 hectares of Virachey National Park, and neither the Bank nor the Ministry of En-
vironment had been consulted. 25
The decision threatened to undermine BPAMP's main objective. Since 2000, the pro-
ject had made steady progress toward the creation of “an effective national protected
areas system” for Cambodia. 26 BPAMP focused on improving management procedures in
Virachey, a 333,000-hectare area in Cambodia's northeast “Dragon's Tail”—the secluded