 |
A Life Sentence in Cambodia, but Kem Ley’s Murder Is Far From Solved
New York Times | 23 March 2017
PHNOM
PENH, Cambodia — A Cambodian court sentenced a man to life in prison on
Thursday for the brazen killing of a prominent government critic last
year, a murder that has come to symbolize a growing crackdown on
dissenting voices here.
Court
monitors said the case was rife with troubling inconsistencies that
judges or investigators had not questioned. Even the defendant’s name
was in doubt.
The killing of Kem Ley, 46, in broad daylight in July has gripped Cambodia because of the prominence of its target and its chilling similarity to political assassinations of years past. The main opposition party branded it “an act of state terrorism,” while the authoritarian prime minister, Hun Sen, has sued people who suggested his government was behind it.
Mr.
Kem Ley, a popular commentator who helped found a political party
catering to farmers, was shot as he was having his morning coffee at a
convenience store inside a gas station, at a busy intersection in
central Phnom Penh. The man arrested, seemingly confused and brandishing
an expensive Glock pistol, identified himself to the police as Chuob
Somlab, an improbable moniker that means “Meet Kill.”
His
trial this month was brief, with just 10 witnesses called to the stand,
seven of whom were police officials. The defendant admitted killing Mr.
Kem Ley, but glaring holes in his story went unchallenged, said
Kingsley Abbott, a lawyer who observed the trial for the International
Commission of Jurists.
“What
was missing from the trial was a proper establishment of the truth,”
Mr. Abbott said. “What happened was that the accused provided a version
of events which were totally improbable, and they weren’t explored in
any meaningful way.”
The
defendant insisted in court that Chuob Somlab was his real name. He
said that he was an unmarried orphan who grew up in a province on
Cambodia’s western border and that he had earned the money to buy the
Glock by working on a cassava plantation in Thailand.
But
nearly every detail of that story was contradicted by his mother and
his wife. They said he was neither an orphan nor a migrant worker but a
former forest ranger and soldier from an entirely different province.
They said they had never heard the name Chuob Somlab before, and they
produced a fingerprinted identity card indicating that the man in the
dock was really Oeuth Ang, 44.
The
defendant said he was seeking revenge against Mr. Kem Ley over a $3,000
debt, though the families of both men said that was highly improbable
and insisted the two had never met. No financial or telephone records
were presented in court, nor were several crucial witnesses called,
including a man the defendant named as Pou Lis (“Police” in Khmer).
According to the defendant, that man introduced him to Mr. Kem Ley and
even provided the commentator’s license plate number so the defendant
could track him down.
And
although the gas station where the killing took place was equipped with
multiple surveillance cameras, most of the footage seems to have
disappeared, with only a brief snippet from one of the cameras shown in
court.
A
group of Cambodians affiliated with the political opposition here have
mounted a case in a United States court to force Chevron, which operates
the gas station, to release the full footage. Judge Donna Ryu of the
Northern District of California approved a subpoena in February ordering
Chevron to turn the video over, but the company was given until the end
of this month to respond.
Chevron,
however, has said that the Cambodian police confiscated all the
surveillance footage. “The digital video recorder along with the
recording it contained were removed by the police within hours of the
incident and have not been returned,” the company said in a statement on
Thursday.
The
police chief of Phnom Penh, Chuon Sovann, the head of the team
investigating the killing, said Thursday that the police gave the
footage to the court. He said he did not know what happened to it after
that or why it was not shown during the trial. “They would do this in
any country — there is nothing strange about it,” he said.
The
inconsistencies in the gunman’s story were apparently accepted by Judge
Leang Samnat, who said before announcing the verdict that it was clear
the defendant had killed Mr. Kem Ley, whatever his name, background or
occupation. Based on the footage from the convenience store, “the
suspect on the video looks exactly the same as the suspect here,” he
said.
In the days before his killing, Mr. Kem Ley gave radio interviews about a new Global Witness report,
“Hostile Takeover,” that detailed the vast wealth amassed by the family
of Mr. Hun Sen over his 30 years in power. Mr. Kem Ley was adept at
communicating with rural Cambodians over the radio, deftly deploying the
puns, double entendres and allegories that are staples of effective
political communication in what is still overwhelmingly an oral culture.
“Kem
Ley mastered the art of communication to perfection,” Astrid
Noren-Nilsson, a lecturer at Lund University’s Center for East and
South-East Asian Studies, wrote in an email.
He
had also been campaigning against Vietnam’s supposed theft of
borderlands — a highly delicate topic here — and writing a collection of
mordant political fables.
They
were set in a surreal version of Cambodia populated by talking animals
and characters like Uncle Strong, Aunty the Farm’s Gone and Mr.
Microfinance, a world in which an assassin named Meet Kill would fit
right in. Mr. Kem Ley called them “political jokes,” but usually the
joke was on the common people, who were continually being duped by
tigers, lions and rapacious rulers.
In
one, a man called Hostile Takeover accrues endless resources for
himself and his family. Another, published the day before his killing,
is set in a garden where “good and gentle animals are constantly killed”
by a small cadre of thieving predators.
While
Mr. Kem Ley always had a following, he has become a household name in
the eight months since his death. His funeral procession attracted tens
of thousands of mourners who marched through the streets of Phnom Penh, a
display of collective anger that had not been seen since postelection
protests in 2013. Photomontages featuring quotes and images of Mr. Kem
Ley are widely shared on social media, collections of his fables have
been printed and distributed, and absurd puns on Meet Kill’s name are a
favorite new political joke at coffee shops.
“The
sheer fact that it is so easy to share a picture on Facebook and get an
instant response means that Kem Ley’s portrait has quickly become
iconic: Sharing it means protesting against everything that is perceived
to be wrong with Cambodia today,” Dr. Noren-Nilsson said.
“The social media age
has created a kind of martyr that we hadn’t seen in Cambodia over the
decades that the ruling party has been in power,” she added.
Questioning
the official narrative of Mr. Kem Ley’s death, meanwhile, has become
risky. This month, a group of students were briefly arrested after
screening an Al Jazeera documentary that positioned the killing amid a
broader wave of political violence directed at opposition voices.
Three
people have been personally sued by Mr. Hun Sen for suggesting that the
government was involved in the death. Two of them, including the former opposition leader Sam Rainsy, are now in exile, while a third was summarily jailed in February.
Mr.
Kem Ley’s wife and five sons — the youngest born after he died — have
fled Cambodia and applied for refugee status with the United Nations.
His wife, Bou Rachana, said she was certain her husband had never met
the man calling himself Meet Kill, much less received thousands of
dollars from an impoverished migrant worker.
“I don’t believe in the Cambodian court system — and it’s not only me. The people of Cambodia don’t either,” she said, laughing.
No comments:
Post a Comment