all you need to know about property in cambodia
INSIDE
Issue NUMBER 1641
16 pages
Successful People Read The Post
THURSDAY, june 6, 2013
4000 RIEL
Schanberg takes stand at tribunal Justine Drennan
THE Khmer Rouge tribunal yesterday heard the first day of testimony from journalist Sydney Schanberg, whose account of his colleague Dith Pran’s experience under the Pol Pot regime inspired the 1984 movie The Killing Fields. Schanberg and Pran worked together for The New York Times in Phnom Penh, and when the city fell to the Khmer Rouge they both took shelter in the French embassy. Now 79, Schanberg spoke to the tribunal by video link from New York, where – back in 1975 – he returned after spending two weeks in Khmer Rougeoccupied Phnom Penh. As a Cambodian national, Pran was forced to leave the embassy and join the rest of the evacuees in the countryside. By then, the city was almost empty, Schanberg told the court. “Almost the entire population of almost two million were taken out of the city on that first day.” At a hospital, “we saw people being pushed on beds . . . with bottles of serum hanging from the bed. They were all being forced out of the city. And the avenue that we came out on was scattered with the shoes and sandals that Nget Chet (left) and Vath Thaiseng, motodops who claim Boeung Kak lake activist Yorm Bopha ordered them beaten, protest outside the Court of Appeal yesterday.
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Motodops’ shaky testimony Khouth Sophak Chakrya and Shane Worrell
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NE of the three judges in the heavily scrutinised appeal hearing of Boeung Kak lake activist Yorm Bopha yesterday suggested that the testimony of her two alleged victims was contradictory to original accounts used to charge her. Less than two hours later, Bopha left the Court of Appeal in Phnom Penh screaming for justice after the case
was adjourned until next Friday and she was ordered back to prison. The 29-year-old, who was sentenced to three years in jail in December for allegedly ordering an axe and screwdriver attack on two motodops, was led to a van bound for PJ prison after court proceedings lasting little more than three hours. “We will continue the trial on June 14 at 2pm because right now it is 6pm and we have to hear the testimony of six witnesses from both sides,” Chay Chantaravann, one of three presiding
judges, said. “We can’t hear this case all night.” During the testimony that was heard, Nget Chet, 28, and his cousin Vath Thaiseng, 24, the two motodops claiming Bopha ordered her two brothers, Yorm Kanlong and Yorm Seth, to beat them last August, contradicted earlier statements they had made to judges. Thaiseng said Kanlong had attacked him with a screwdriver in a bar in the Boeung Kak area, striking him in the temple and on top of the head. “When Yorm Kanlong beat me, Yorm
Seth attacked my friend with an axe, causing him to faint,” he said. But Chantaravann challenged this account, saying Thaiseng had originally told the case’s investigating judge that Bopha’s other brother was his attacker. “You said during the [initial] investigation that Yorm Seth attacked you,” he said. Thaiseng gave no response to this comment. When Chet took the stand, he said Seth struck him twice in the head with
an axe. Chantaravann reminded him that he had previously said Kanlong was his attacker. In the two men’s defence, court prosecutor Tan Seng Narong said their accounts yesterday were the same ones they had provided during Bopha’s trial at the municipal court in late December. “So the court should focus on their injuries instead,” he said. In testimony that differed from Continues on page 4