On Jan 11, 4:18 am, "Sam Rainsy Party of North America"
<[email protected]> wrote:
> http://www.camnews.org/2009/12/31/khmer-riche/
>
> "KHMER RICHE"
> Written by Andrew Marshall
> Good Weekend Magazine for the Sydney Morning Herald
> Sunday 12/12/09
>
> They live in one of the poorest countries on earth, yet they drive flash
> cars, dwell in mansions and scorn their impoverished brethren. Andrew
> Marshall meets the rich sons and daughters of Cambodia elite.
>
That's right. That's the way they do it in Cambodia. Do you know how
you get rich ?
Ofcourse, you have to have the power or affiliated with power first.
Then you use your preveledge to suppress others for money to get rich
yourself. IT IS THE TRADITION OF CAMBODIA. Sam Rainsy is doing the
same thing. How can he afford to do what he has been doing with his
small salary? Please tell us. Do you want us tobelieve that Sam Rainsy
is so rich and is spending all of his money for his causes?
Paleeeeeezzzzzzzzzz
> The huge Phnom Penh mansion owned by Victor's parents, General Meas Sophea.
> (Good Weekend Magazine)
>
I think he enherited from his encient friends called stealing.
> "I'm going to drive a little fast now. Is that Okay?" There is one place in
> Cambodia where you can hold a cold beer in one hand and a warm Kalashnikov in
> the other, and Victor is driving me there. We're powering along Phnom Penh's
> airport road with Oasis on his Merc's sound system and enough guns in the
> boot to sink a Somali pirate boat. Victor is rich and life is sweet. His
> father is commander of the Cambodian infantry. He has a place reserved for
> him at L'Ecole Speciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr, France's answer to Duntroon.
> And, in his passenger seat, there is a thin, silent man with a Chinese
> handgun: his bodyguard.
>
> "His name is Klar," says Victor. "It means tiger."
>
There was a story of a son of the Cambodian paratrooper commander. He
used to eat any foods at any restaurants for free. Who dare to do
anything to him?
Do you know whom I am talking about?
That's right. I am talking about him.
> Victor is only 21, but when reach our destination-a firing range run by the
> Cambodian special forces-the soldier at the gate salutes.
>
> Devastated by decades of civil war, Cambodia remains one of the world's
> poorest nations. A third of its 13 million people live on less than a dollar
> a day and about 8 out of every 100 children die before the age of five. But
> Victor-real name Meas Sophearith-was raised in a different Cambodia, where
> power and billions of dollars in wealth are concentrated in the hands of a
> tiny elite. This elite prefers to conceal the size and sources of their
> money-illegal logging, smuggling, land-grabbing-but their children just like
> to spend it. The Khmer Rouge are dead; the Khmer Riche now rule Cambodia.
>
Rich always rule Cambodia.
> I first met Victor at a fancy Phnom Penh restaurant called Café Metro.
> Outside, Porsches, Bentleys and Humvees fight for parking spaces. The son of
> a powerful general, Victor has his future mapped out for him. He went to
> school in Versailles, speaks French and English, and now studies politics at
> the University of Oklahoma. "My mother wanted us to get a foreign education
> so we could come back and control the country," he says. The shooting range
> is where Victor and his friends go to relax. "I've grown up with guns and
> soldiers all around me," he says, laying out a private arsenal on a table:
> two automatic assault rifles, two Glock pistols, one sniper's rifle, one
> iPhone.
>
Cambodians in general love to kill each other.
> "My mother wanted us to get a foreign education so we could come back and
> control the country". Meas Victor Sophearith (above) is one of Cambodian's
> privileged elite.
>
> Victor and his generation are Cambodia's future. Will they use their
> education and wealth to lift their less fortunate compatriots out of poverty?
> Or will they simply continue their parents' fevered pursuit of money and
> power? Britain's Department for International Development (DFID), which gave
> almost $US30 million of its taxpayers' money to the country in the last
> fiscal year, offered one answer in June, when it announced the closure of its
> Cambodia office by 2011. The official reason? "It was felt UK aid could have
> a larger impact . where there are greater numbers of poor people and fewer
> international donors," said a DFID statement. But the development agency
> might also have tired of throwing money at a nation where so much poverty can
> be blamed on a grasping political elite-and their luxury-loving children.
> (Australia clearly has not: it has allocated $61.4 million in development
> assistance to Cambodia for 2009-10.)
>
> Depressingly, the Khmer Riche Kids sometimes seem indistinguishable from the
> old colonial ruling class. They were educated overseas-partly because their
> families' wealth made them targets for kidnapping gangs-and often speak
> better English than Khmer. They carry US dollars - only poor people pay with
> Cambodian riel - and live in newly built neoclassical mansions so large that
> the city's old French architecture looks like Lego by comparison. And their
> connection to the Cambodian masses is almost non-existent.
>
> The "Paris Hilton of Cambodia", Sophy, daughter of a Deputy PM. Sophy's
> extravagantly decorated car. (Good Weekend Magazine)
>
> Sophy, 22, is the daughter of a Deputy Prime Minister. Rich, doll-like and
> self-obsessed, she could be the Paris Hilton of Cambodia. She imports party
> shoes from Singapore, brands them "Sophy & Sina" (Sina is her sister-in-law),
> hen displays them in her own multistory boutique. It has six staff, no
> customers and a slogan: "It's all aboutme." Sophy's name is spelled out in
> sparkling stones on the back of her car, a Merc so pimped up that I have to
> ask her what make it is. "It's a Sophy!" she replies.
>
> We meet at her hair salon, where she is prepping a model for a fashion shoot
> for a magazine she is starting up with her brother Sopheary, 28, and their
> cousin Noh Sar, 26,. All three were educated abroad and prefer to speak
> English together. Sopheary, who studied in New York state, seems both amused
> and slightly embarrassed by his wealth and privilege. "What can you do?" he
> asks. "Your parents give you all these things. You can't say no. If someone
> gives you cake, you eat it."
>
> Talk to Sopheary and his friends, and Cambodia's tragic history seems very
> far away. The genocidal Khmer Rouge blew up banks and outlawed money before
> being driven from power in 1979. Later came the 1991 Paris Accords, and the
> plunder of Cambodia's rich natural resources-forests, fisheries, land -began
> in earnest. Cambodia's official economy largely depend on garment, exports,
> but there is a much larger shadow economy in which only the ruthless and the
> well-connected survived and prosper. "If you're doing business, you have to
> know someone high up, so he has your back," says Victor.
>
> The closer you get to Hun Sen, Cambodia's autocratic Prime Minister, the
> better connected you are. Hun Sen staged a bloody coup d'etat in 1997 and has
> kept an iron grip on power ever since. Opponents have been silenced while
> loyalists have grown rich. This includes ministers, a handful of tycoons and
> generals. Cambodians are often driven from their land by soldiers or military
> police. Formerly a French possession, Cambodia has been colonized all over
> again, this time by its own greedy elite.
>
> But the Khmer Riche have a problem. "None of them can answer a simple
> question: where does all your money come from?" says a Western journalist in
> Phnom Penh. Ask Cambodian ministers how they got so rich on a meager
> government salary, and they will reply, "My wife is good at business."
>
> When I ask Noh Sar, whose father is a senior customs official, why he is so
> wealthy, he gives me a slight variation: "My mother works a lot."
>
> Victor's mother is also good at business, according to "Country for Sale," an
> investigation into the elite published by the London-based corruption
> watchdog Global Witness in February 2009. "She is a key player in RCAF [Royal
> Cambodian Armed Forces] patronage politics, holding a fearsome reputation
> among her husband's subordinates on account of her frequent demands for
> money," says the report. "RCAF sources have told Global Witness that military
> officers sometimes bribe [her] in order to increase the chances of her "close
> connections" to a major timber smuggler.
>
> It is only in the past few years that the children of Cambodian's elite have
> grown confident enough to show off their family's wealth. "If you want people
> to respect you in Cambodia, you must have a good car, good diamonds, a good
> cell phone," explains Ouch Vichet, 28, better known as Richard. "It's an
> I'm-richer-than-you competition." Richard is quite a competitor: he drives a
> $US150,000 Cadillac Escalade and wears a $US2,500 Hermes watch and a
> $US13,000 2.5-carat diamond ring. He doesn't have a bodyguard, although some
> friends keep them as status symbols.
>
> "Crazy money": (above) Ouch "Richard" Vichet is surprisingly candid about his
> wealth. (Good Weekend Magazine)
>
> Richard was sent to New Zealand to be educated after a gang tired to abduct
> his brother. He is a short, affable man with an impish grin. In a city where
> the elite have a tribal suspicion of outsiders, he is refreshingly candid
> about his wealth. "My money is from my parents," he says, and then breaks it
> down. They gave him a villa, half a million US dollars, and a 400-hectar
> rubber plantation that will generate income for the rest of Richard's life.
> His parents-in-law gave him $US100,000 in cash and another villa, worth
> $200,000, which he sold and invested in real estate. Richard also runs a busy
> Phnom Penh nightclub called Emerald - his parents made their first fortune in
> gems - which provides him with "pocket money". A party of rich kids can spend
> $US2,000 on drinks in a single night, more than an average Cambodian earns in
> 3 years.
>
> His parents' second, much larger, fortune comes from real estate. A few years
> ago they bought about five hectares of land just outside Phnom Penh for $US14
> a square metre, then sold it for $US120 a square metre two years later,
> making more than $US5 million in profit. "Where else can you make profits
> like that?" grins Richard. "It's crazy money." He has a daughter called
> Emerald and a son called Benz. (His other Benz is a GL450.) They all live
> with his parents in a newly built mansion.
>
> Yet Richard's house is modest by the operatic standards of Phnom Penh's Tuol
> Kuok precinct, part of which was once a notorious red-light district. A taxi
> driver shows me the neighborhood - it's like a "homes of the stars" tour in
> Beverly Hills, except that Tuol Kuok's backstreets are piled with rubbish. My
> driver points out giant mansion after mansion, and tells me who lives there.
> Hun Sen's son, Hun Sen's daughter, Secretary of State at the Ministry of
> Labour. A Deputy PM-Sophy and Sopheary's dad. A four-mansion compound with
> lots of razor wire, and a gate guarded by special forces soldiers - Victor's
> family.
>
> Tuol Kuok's houses are well-guarded for a reason: until there was real estate
> to invest in, many wealthy Cambodians kept their money at home in bricks of
> cash. "We don't trust banks," says Richard. "The old generation kept their
> money under the bed. The new generation keep it in safes in their houses."
> Victor says his family also stays away from banks, but for a slightly
> different reason. "If you put your money in a bank, everyone will know how
> much you have," he explains.
>
> I had also heard that rich Cambodians had repatriated hundreds of millions of
> dirty dollars from Singapore banks after a post-September 11 shake up of
> global banking, and that his money had helped fuel the land speculation.
>
> For the children, the wealth comes with one big condition: they must do what
> Mum and Dad tell them. "I wanted to go to art school but my parents wouldn't
> let me," says Sopheary. Most kids dutifully join the family business-Richard
> translated for his father during overseas gem-buying trips. For some, that
> business is politics. Concept like nepotism and conflict of interest don't
> count for much in Cambodia. Commerce Minister Cham Prasidh-whose giant house
> resembles an airport departure hall, one with its own jet-ski lake - gave a
> ministry position to his wife and made his daughter his chief of cabinet.
> Cambodia's ambassadors to Britain and Japan are brothers, and their boss is
> also their father: Foreign Minister Hor Namhong. He says he hired his sons on
> merit. "It's not nepotism," he insists.
>
> Their parents also expect them to marry young-men in their 20's, women in
> their teens-and strategically, meaning to someone from a rich and influential
> family. These marriages are often arranged. "It's like medieval times in
> France," complains Victor, still a bachelor. This means that many
> high-society Cambodians soon find themselves trapped in loveless unions;
> affairs are common. Sophy was married off at 17 to the son of the rich and
> powerful Interior Minister.
>
> The web of marriages binds together Cambodia's political and business elite
> and ensures the ruling Cambodian People's Party's stranglehold on power. At
> the centre of the web sits Prime Minister Hun Sen. His three sons and two
> daughters are all married to the children of senior ruling party politicians
> or, in the case of his son Hun Manit, to the daughter of the late national
> police chief. Now in his 30's, Hun Manit is being groomed to succeed his
> father. He graduated from West Point, the US military academy, in 1999, amid
> protests by members of the US Congress over his father's human rights record.
> In July, Global Witness urged the British Government to revoke the visa of
> the Cambodian Prime Minister, who visited Bristol University to watch Hun
> Manit receive a doctorate in economics.
>
> Senior Khmer Rouge figures such as Comrade Duch, the mass-murdering
> commandant of Tuol Sleng prison, are currently on trial at a United
> Nations-based tribunal in Phnom Penh. The Khmer Riche, on the other hand,
> remain above the law. Victor displays a military VIP sticker on the front
> dash of his Mercedes. "It means the police cannot touch me," he says. Richard
> is an advisor to a military police commander, which also effectively grants
> him legal immunity.
>
> Many of his generations abuse such privileges. Last August Hun Chea, a nephew
> of the Prime Minister, hit a motorcyclist with his Cadillac, ripping off the
> man's leg and arm. Hun Chea tried to drive off but couldn't because the
> accident had shredded a tyre. Military police arrived, removed the car's
> license plates and, according to "The Phnom Penh Post", told Hun Chea: "Don't
> worry. It wasn't your mistake." Hun Chea walked away. The motorcyclist bled
> to death on the road.
>
> Hun Sen has yet another bad-boy nephew, the widely feared and mega-wealthy
> Hun To ("Little Hun"). In 2006 a newspaper editor filed a lawsuit against Hun
> To for alleged death threats, then fled overseas to seek asylum with the
> United Nations' help. Hun To was also once spotted sitting in his luxury
> speedboat, its sound system cranked up high, being towed around Phnom Penh by
> a Humvee. A few weeks before, Victor had been in Los Angeles, where he
> test-drove Hun To's latest acquisition before it was put in a Cambodia-bound
> shipping container: a $US500,000 Mercedes McLaren SLR supercar." He has
> already built a special garage for it," says Victor.
>
> Victor will not - dare not-criticize Hun To. But he is critical of Cambodian
> society. "From top to bottom, everyone is corrupt," he says. He hopes to one
> day set up a foundation to help poor Cambodians send their children to study
> overseas. "We want to change things, but we'll have to wait until our parents
> retire," he says.
>
> But older generation shows no sign of retiring - not when there's so much
> cake left to eat. In January, foreign donors pledged $US1 billion to
> Cambodia, its biggest aid package yet. The Government relies on foreign aid
> for almost half its budget. It could break this reliance by exploiting its
> reserves of oil, gas and minerals: the International Monetary Fund estimates
> Cambodia's annual oil revenues alone could reach $US1.7 billion by 2021.
> Could, but probably won't. Why? Because the same elite who cut down the trees
> and sold off the land are now poised to extract the oil and minerals, with
> the help of their children.
>
> Some Hun Sen loyalists have already been allocated exploratory mining
> licences. One of them is General Meas Sophea, the army chief. He recently
> hired a temp to act as his foreign liaison officer. The temp is his son. His
> son's name is Victor
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