Isabelle Roughol about Cambodia
Democracy fail in Cambodia - Part 1, Crushing dissent
While the world looks elsewhere, an increasingly authoritarian government discreetly crushes dissent and tightens its hold. Hun Sen oye? (This essay was first posted on my personal blog last week.)It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it what...
Apologies...
... to the people whose comments were neither approved nor acknowledged for weeks. This CMS oddly doesn't notify me of pending comments.And while we're at it, apologies for this blog never really picking up. I had some professional reasons not...
Press Freedom Index 2009: Cambodia's up 9 spots, which doesn't mean it's getting better
Reporters Sans Frontières (Reporters Without Borders) has released its famed Press Freedom Index for 2009. Cambodia has risen in the rankings by 9 spots, from 126 to 117, but the only explanation for this is that many other countries have sucked even...
Back from a country where stuff works
There is comfort in the raucous purr of garbage trucks and robotic street sweepers, in the familiar sweesh-pfff of a bus stopping and the off-beat chanting of a labor protest. They're the sounds of a country where stuff works.Thirteen months...
Where is the rain?
"Where is the rain?" That's the question on everyone's lips these days in Phnom Penh. The full-on rainy season was supposed to have started a month ago. Normally every day like clockwork, a downpour would start in the late afternoon,...
Cambodia less stable than Iraq and Afghanistan?
There's a report going around in Cambodia that everyone it seems can't stop talking about: The Economist puts Cambodia in the Top 5 of countries most at risk of social unrest as the economic crisis deepens. The announcement was such...
The Khmer Rouge trial gets substantial
I witnessed today the first day of substantive hearing of Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, the former chairman of the famed Phnom Penh detention center S-21 who was charged (among other things) with crimes against humanity. (From 1975...
The golden age of foreign correspondence
I'm reading Christina Lamb's Small Wars Permitting these days, a thoughtful Christmas gift from a friend and colleague here who's a Lamb fan herself. I'm enjoying the book, which mixes personal recollections with the stories she wrote at the time...
Isabelle Roughol about Cambodia
Isabelle Roughol is a newspaper reporter who was based in Phnom Penh for a year and is now back in...