{"id":30060,"date":"2019-01-22T01:22:39","date_gmt":"2019-01-22T01:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=30060"},"modified":"2019-01-22T01:22:39","modified_gmt":"2019-01-22T01:22:39","slug":"15-years-on-justice-elusive-in-cambodia-union-leaders-murder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=30060","title":{"rendered":"15 years on, justice elusive in Cambodia union leader’s murder"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Phnom Penh, Cambodia<\/strong> – Rong Chhun was visiting family in rural Cambodia<\/a> when he received a phone call telling him that his good friend and colleague Chea Vichea, a prominent union leader, had been shot dead by two men on a motorbike.<\/p>\n

Vichea, the charismatic president of the Free Trade Union of Workers of the Kingdom of Cambodia (FTUWKC), had been on his regular visit to a roadside newspaper stall in the capital, Phnom Penh.<\/p>\n

It was January 22, 2004.<\/p>\n

“After he was shot, authorities sent his body to the pagoda,” Chhun said. “When his relatives and I arrived, they had already prepared the charcoal and everything to cremate him.”<\/p>\n

Vichea’s friends and family refused to let authorities dispose of the body without a formal autopsy, leading to a five-hour stand-off.<\/p>\n

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<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Chea Vichea was gunned down as he browsed the papers at this roadside stall in Phnom Penh [Andrew Nachemson\/Al Jazeera]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

While they did eventually recover Vichea’s body, 15 years later the killing remains one of the most significant unsolved crimes in Cambodia.<\/p>\n

“He was a dedicated, intelligent, courageous and tireless colleague of mine,” opposition politician Sam Rainsy, who helped Chhun and Vichea found Cambodia’s first free trade union in 1996, said in an email to Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

No will<\/h2>\n

Two men were arrested for the murder, but eyewitness accounts cleared them both. When the first judge dismissed the case, he was replaced with a new one who found both men guilty<\/a> and jailed them for 20 years.<\/p>\n

In the end, they were acquitted<\/a> after five years in prison as Vichea’s family and human rights groups campaigned for their release.<\/p>\n

“The authorities don’t have the will to do a real investigation because the killer is somebody powerful in the government,” Chhun alleged.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0investigation resumed following the men’s acquittal.<\/p>\n

Government spokesperson Phay Siphan refused to discuss the case and hung up when asked about the government’s alleged connection to Vichea’s murder.<\/p>\n

Heng Pov, a former Phnom Penh police commissioner,\u00a0<\/span>claimed he knew the truth of what had happened, telling a French news magazine that the national police chief had pressured him into framing the pair, after earlier boasting the murder would be solved within a week.<\/p>\n

Pov is now in jail himself after being convicted of a range of crimes, including the assassination of a judge.<\/p>\n

“[Prime Minister] Hun Sen feared Chea Vichea’s capability to bring worker unions to support an insurrection against his controversial regime,” Rainsy said.<\/p>\n

Chhun said the government, led by Hun Sen since 1985, has long feared the union movement because of its size.<\/p>\n

Organisations are forced to operate within a range of restrictions that risk hamstringing leaders in a web of legal complaints, but there is also the risk of violence.<\/p>\n

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<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Chea Vichea was one of Cambodia’s most charismatic union leaders and a critic of the government led Prime Minister Hun Sen before he was shot dead in January 2004 [Andrew Nachemson\/Al Jazeera]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

‘Clear and principled’<\/h2>\n

In 1997, Vichea was wounded in a grenade attack on a political rally led by Sam Rainsy that left 16 people dead.<\/p>\n

On another occasion, he was badly beaten by soldiers.<\/p>\n

“He only went to meet workers during his lunch break to distribute his business card and explain their rights under the labour law,” Mann Senghak, the current vice-president of FTUWKC, said. Soldiers arrived to disperse the gathering, but Vichea refused to leave.<\/p>\n

“His character was clear and principled. He gained a lot of respect from people because of what type of person and leader he was,” Senghak said.<\/p>\n

It was in 2003 that Vichea first began getting death threats.<\/p>\n

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Cambodian opposition leader under house arrest after jailing<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

“After he received threatening phone messages, we went to the police station to file a complaint,” Chhun said. “A while later, the police said they cannot do anything because that phone number belonged to somebody high-ranking. They advised that Chea Vichea should try to get somewhere safe.”<\/p>\n

The two friends debated whether Vichea should leave the country, but ultimately he decided to set an example by standing his ground.<\/p>\n

Vichea’s widow, Chea Kimny, said that in the days leading up to her husband’s murder, police and soldiers were hanging out in front of their home.<\/p>\n

Kimny was pregnant at the time and their young daughter liked to go with her father to the newspaper stand, but that morning Vichea went alone.<\/p>\n

“I saw that blood covered the newspapers and I asked where is my husband?” Kimny said.<\/p>\n

When she later saw his body at the pagoda, she fainted.<\/p>\n

Pattern of violence<\/h2>\n

Vichea’s assassination was far from an isolated incident.<\/p>\n

Just four months later, two gunmen on a motorbike shot dead Vichea’s replacement, Ros Sovannarith, while Hy Vuthy, who defected from a pro-government union to lead the FTUWKC, met the same fate in 2006.<\/p>\n

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Cambodia garment workers’ strike turns deadly<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

These deaths today may feel like a memory of a distant past, but the 2016 assassination of political analyst Kem Ley<\/a> shows the risk of political violence remains – and justice as elusive.<\/p>\n

Kingsley Abbott, senior legal adviser for the International Commission of Jurists, said there has been a “marked decline in respect for human rights and rule of law in recent years” in Cambodia.<\/p>\n

He pointed to the Supreme Court’s dissolution<\/a> of the main opposition party in 2017 and the unsatisfactory investigation into Ley’s murder as evidence that the courts are still a “political tool”.<\/p>\n

“Until judges are free to act independently and impartially free from any interference, this trend is likely to continue,” he said.<\/p>\n

Struggle continues<\/h2>\n

In the years since Vichea’s death, the $7bn garment industry<\/a>\u00a0has become the country’s biggest formal employer, and some efforts have been made to appease workers.<\/p>\n

But with Vichea’s killing, the unions lost one of their most effective leaders.<\/span><\/p>\n

“Living conditions and working conditions haven’t improved much,” Chhun said. “If Chea Vichea were alive now, the union movement would be a lot stronger and more organised. The government would have to be more careful and maybe even couldn’t dissolve the opposition so easily.”<\/p>\n

While successes have been few and far between, the struggle never ends for Chhun, Senghak and others – they see it as form of social justice in continuing the work of those who’ve been killed.<\/p>\n

Human life in Cambodia is even cheaper than a dog\u2019s life in Finland.<\/p>\n

Chea Kimny<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

“As you know, a lot of union leaders were killed, beaten, sent to prison, or flee the country. It’s dangerous for us but we have our dream to help workers have a better life so we keep fighting. If we leave then who will help?” Senghak asked.<\/p>\n

Now living in Finland, Kimny says she would love to return to her homeland, but doesn’t feel safe. The memore of her husband’s murder remains raw.<\/p>\n

“I cry all the time when it gets close to the anniversary and think about what happened when he was killed,” she said.<\/p>\n

“I think human life in Cambodia is even cheaper than a dog’s life in Finland.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Phnom Penh, Cambodia – Rong Chhun was visiting family in rural Cambodia when he received a phone call telling him that his good friend and colleague Chea Vichea, a prominent union leader, had been shot dead by two men on a motorbike. Vichea, the charismatic president of the Free Trade Union of Workers of the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":30061,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30060\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/30061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}