CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN THE KINGDOM OF CAMBODIA

If you were the nephew (or niece) of the prime minister of Cambodia, and you were returning from a late-night party with your best buds, hot-rodding it through the crowded streets of Phnom Penh, and you 'accidentally' plowed into a group of people minding their own business by the side of the road, and an even larger crowd started to gather (as it always does here) to check out the commotion, what would you do?

The answer is obvious, right?

Take out an AK-47 and start shooting.

That's just what the Prime Minister's nephew did last year. He was caught. He was tried. And he was put in jail. The ancient, glorious bells of justice and freedom rang throughout the land.

Kind of.

Sort of.

Well, not really.

You see, just last week the right and honorable Prime Minister Hun Sen gave a very lovely, moving, tear-inducing speech about freedom and justice and punishment, in which he stated that it was not fair or proper or right for the children of the rich and the powerful to get off scot-free; it was good, very good, that his nephew was in jail, because then he could not get into any more trouble, and the citizens of the glorious kingdom of Cambodia could sleep soundly at night.

All very well and good.

Only problem is, he's not in jail.

Some enterprising reporter decided to check out the validity of the prime minister's comments, and, lo and behold, the nephew is now in China, studying computers.

Good for him, reforming his life and all. What a guy. There was some sort of secret trial for him back in August, and a decision was reached, and off to the orient he goes.

I'm sure, of course, that Hun Sen knew noooooooothing about it...

Yet another example of blatant, every-day corruption in Cambodia. As striking and out-of-place here as the blue sky and the hot sun. Reading The Cambodia Daily or The Phnom Penh Post on a regular basis will make you laugh or weep, or probably both. Just yesterday a high-ranking official announced that massive quantities of oil had been discovered off the coast of Cambodia, which could easily be utilized to rejuvenate the economy and the engine of his Mercedes, and all was well with the world. Until experts in the paper today said, well, yes, there was oil discovered, sure, but it's not really good for much of anything, anyways, so let's just settle down a bit, shall we?

And so it goes.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: I never realized how fundamentally crooked most of the world is.

Case in point:

Another story in today's paper details the corruption charges levelled against the former Prime Minister of Panama, who diverted twenty-five million dollars worth of discretionary funds traditionally spent on emergency disasters and medical care for the poor, all for a perfectly logical, reasonable reason: since she didn't want to look like a pauper, you see, her being the leader of a country and all, she decided to spend those millions on clothes and jewelry for herself and plastic surgery for her assistants. (And Canadians get upset about their politicians secretly buying a few extra flags. Which is not to minimize the recently unearthed scandal back home, but believe me, Paul Martin and Jean Chretien have got nothing on these folks. But Martin's young, he's still got time to learn...)

You can't think about this stuff for too long. Because, if you do, you will then put down the paper, and walk outside, and be forcefully, unavoidably confronted with human squalor in all its messy disorder, and the issues are connected, these two are, the waste of money and the waste that is poverty, and you can't figure out how, or why, and that's that, as they say.

The thing is, growing up in a nice, safe country like Canada, you don't really have to think about politics, or politicians. The mechanism is in place, and there are people doing their work, and all is well and good. Somebody's running the show; let's hope they do a good job, we wish them well, and what time is the game on, again? Eight o'clock, was it?

I remember being in Grade 3, answering Mrs.Knevel's question about how the prime minister of Canada was. (And I just realized that I'm probably older now than Mrs.Knevel was then, and that's impossible to believe, inconceivable, as the little dude says in The Princess Bride, so I'll move right along.)

"Elliot Trudeau," I said. Confident. At one with the universe and my nation's leader.

Ah, no. Close, but no cigar ( given that I was seven, and not allowed to smoke.) Pierre Eliot Trudeau, to be precise, but I had answered wrongly in front of a group of my distinguished peers, who probably decided that and, well, that was it for politics and me until Oliver Stone's J.F.K.

It's only now, confronted on a daily basis with the sheer, unending, monstrous inequality that exists in developing countries that I can appreciate and understand (a little) how good we have it back home compared to places like here.

I can also see the danger of complacency. The threat of inertia that exists when we treat politicians as somehow higher than ourselves and beyond our (limited?) reach.

If the nephew of Paul Martin (or George Bush) pulled out a gun and fired at innocent people, would he do time? Most likely, yes. Would he be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, free from any kind of judicial favor whatsoever?

I hesitate before answering that one, which indicates, perhaps, that we still have a little bit to work on back home, too.

Maybe a lot to work on.


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As an interesting (?) annex, did you know what AK-47 actually stands for? I didn't think that it stood for anything (not that I had given it a lot of thought, true), but it means something like 'All Kalishnikov'. How do I know? Because there was an article in the paper about the gun, and the guy who invented it, whose name is, get ready for it, here it comes, Kalishnikov. He's still alive, this guy. Some Russian dude. Very proud of his work. Created the weapon in WWII. Famous in his village. Still looks like he could kick the living hell out of me with his big toe, and I bet he pours vodka in his corn flakes and orange juice every morning. Has a face not even a mother could love.

Can you imagine if that was your legacy, being the guy who created the AK-47? To have your name live long in the annals of eternity, not through your offspring, but through an endless round of bullets?

That'd be awesome, as Christ Farley (may he R.I.P.) used to say.

(I'm joking. I swear. Now, if it'd been an Uzi, sure, now that's a legacy to be proud of. But an AK-47? Not so much.)