Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
country would take him, and the only NGO willing to put him up was the human rights
organization LICADHO.
Eventually Sovath found more permanent lodgings at Wat Sammaki Reangsey, a
shabby pagoda on Phnom Penh's outshirts that houses exiled Khmer Krom monks from
southern Vietnam. Established in the mid-1990s by Cambodians returning from overseas,
Wat Sammaki Reangsey has never been recognized by the religious authorities; instead,
its walls record the donations of Khmer communities from places like Paris, Long Beach,
and Philadelphia. Here Sovath inhabits a small room with a thick security door, emerging
to attend protests and make videos which he later posts to Facebook and YouTube. Des-
pite the pressure from the authorities, Sovath says his religion and his activism remain
inseparable. “The Buddhist monks stood up first, to fight for territory, to fight for justice,
to fight for independence from the French,” he said. Then his phone rang again, flash-
ing the name of another well-wisher. He apologized and picked up the call. Cambodia's
“multimedia monk” is busy these days.
A year after Sam Bunthoeun was gunned down, another assassin pulled a trigger and in-
flicted a serious wound on Cambodia's union movement. The circumstances were nearly
identical. At 8:00 a.m. on January 22, 2004, Chea Vichea, the leader of one of Cambodia's
oldest and most active labor unions, was buying a newspaper at the edge of Wat Lanka,
just meters from where Bunthoeun was assassinated. While he was standing reading the
day's headlines, a man dismounted from the back of a Honda motorcycle and pulled out a
pistol. He fired three shots, hitting Vichea in the chest, head, and left arm. The man then
fled with an accomplice.
There was little doubt as to the motive. Since taking over the Free Trade Union (FTU)
in 1999, Vichea had become a prominent antigovernment critic and advocate for Cam-
bodia's floating population of garment workers. Vichea had a magnetic presence. When
he issued a call, workers turned out by the tens of thousands. In the few months lead-
ing up to his death, Vichea had been lying low after receiving a death threat linked to a
high-ranking official. “I think they want to kill me,” he told the filmmaker Bradley Cox
shortly before his death, an interview which later appeared in Cox's moving 2011 film
Who Killed Chea Vichea?
“They know me very well, but I'm not afraid. If I afraid, [it's]
like I die.”
Vichea's killing was followed by an outpouring of grief. A crowd of 15,000 attended
his funeral. Taken aback by the strength of the reactions, the authorities scrambled about
for a culprit. Within a few days they had settled on two men with no clear link to the
crime. They were Born Samnang, 23, and Sok Sam Oeun, 36. Phnom Penh's then po-
lice chief Heng Pov, now serving more than one hundred years in prison on a battery of
charges including murder and extortion, declared that the men were guilty, based on a
police sketch of dubious provenance, and paraded them before the press. Samnang wept
