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before the cameras. While in custody, he had reportedly “confessed” and implicated Sam
Oeun.
Even by Cambodian standards the investigation was a farce. Eyewitnesses said Sam-
nang and Sam Oeun bore no resemblance to the men who carried out the shooting. Both
men had alibis. Samnang soon retracted his confession, saying it had been coerced. The
case was so flimsy that Heng Thirith, an investigating judge at Phnom Penh Municipal
Court, threw it out for lack of evidence. Shortly after the ruling he was fired and reas-
signed to a remote part of the country, and the Appeal Court ordered the case to trial.
On August 1, 2005, Samnang and Sam Oeun were found guilty of Vichea's killing and
sentenced to 20 years jail. No one seriously believed their guilt. Vichea's brother even re-
fused the $5,000 the two men were ordered to pay his family as compensation. “I would
not want to accept any money, they were not the real killers,” he said.
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Human rights groups clamored for the release of the two men. Amnesty International,
with sublime understatement, announced that the case raised “serious concerns about the
independence of the judiciary in Cambodia.” A year later, Heng Pov, who had since fled
Cambodia following a power struggle with the national police chief Hok Lundy, gave an
interview to the French weekly
L'Express
, in which he admitted framing the two men on
Hok Lundy's orders. “It did not take me long to understand that the two suspects, Born
Samnang and Sok Sam Oeun, had nothing to do with the murder,” he said. (Pov also ac-
cused Hun Sen and Hok Lundy of a raft of other crimes, including the March 1997 gren-
ade attack and the unsolved 1999 shooting of the actress Piseth Pelika, supporting the
unconfirmed allegation that she was murdered on the orders of Bun Rany.)
32
Vichea's killing, followed by the murder of another FTU leader a few months later, cast
a pall of fear over the labor movement. Since the mid-1990s, the unions had grown in tan-
dem with Cambodia's garment sector, which had benefited from an arrangement that gave
the country tariff-free access to the US market. Under the American scheme, Cambodia
found a niche as an “ethical” destination for major clothing retailers—brands like Gap,
Levi Strauss, and Abercrombie & Fitch—hoping to avoid the sweatshop stigmas of rock-
bottom apparel producers like China and Bangladesh. Cambodia let inspectors from the
International Labour Organization monitor its factories, and permitted collective action
to improve working conditions—a freedom enshrined in a progressive Labor Law passed
in 1997. “If we didn't respect the unions and the labor standards,” Commerce Minister
Cham Prasidh told the
New York Times
in 2005, “we would be killing the goose that lays
the golden eggs.”
33
But the Cambodian government showed a limited tolerance for sustained industrial ac-
tion. Police have been deployed to block May Day marches and strikes. Factories have
fired workers who attempted to unionize or take collective action. In September 2010
an estimated 200,000 workers walked off the job, demanding a hike in the $61 monthly
