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Retailer confidence rock bottom, new survey finds

A shopper pays at a Lucky Supermarket checkout in Phnom Penh on Tuesday. The majority of retailers in Cambodia have seen declining fortunes in the past six months, a new survey said. (Photo by: TRACEY SHELTON)

Wednesday, 22 April 2009
Written by Nathan Green
The Phnom Penh Post

Indochina Research survey finds that 87 percent of retailers think economy has worsened in past six months, but 59 percent expect improvements

CAMBODIAN retailers have been hit hard by the global economic crisis, but more than half expected conditions to improve over the next six months, a survey of retailer confidence released today by Indochina Research shows.
The company's second-quarter I-TRAK survey questioned 600 retailers in Phnom Penh, the Lao capital Vientiane, and Vietnam's two major cities, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. It covered convenience and grocery stores, other retail stores, and the hospitality, restaurant and catering sectors.

Eighty-seven percent of Cambodian respondents said economic conditions were worse in March compared with six months earlier. Only 2 percent said economic conditions had improved, and 11 percent said they had stayed the same.

Most retailers in Cambodia had suffered financially with falling customer numbers and decreasing spend-per-customer eating into profit margins, the survey showed. The decline came despite many dropping prices to boost sales.

But IndoChina Research General Manager Laurent Notin said the survey also contained good news for the sector. Of the Cambodian respondents, 59 percent said the worst was behind them and that the retail situation would stabilise or improve over the next six months.

"Yes, [retailers] are affected by the economic slowdown; yes, they have fewer customers and lower profits - but they do think the economic situation in the next six months will get better," Notin said.

"As the midpoint between manufacturers and customers, retailers are the centre of everything. They are closely connected to the economy and their confidence is a good sign for future growth."

Lam Sopheap, general manger at Sorya Shopping Centre in Phnom Penh, said April was even worse than March for retailers, with the New Year period unusually slow. "This Khmer New Year, everywhere was quiet because nobody wanted to spend money," he said.

Sales at Sorya have been down 30 to 40 percent in April compared with a year earlier, he added, but he said he expected the retail situation to improve by the middle of 2010.

Confidence among retailers in Vietnam was stronger than in Cambodia, but 68 percent of respondents still said economic conditions were worse in March than six months earlier. A further 12 percent said the economic situation had improved for retailers and 20 percent said it had remained unchanged.

Laos bucked the trend with 52 percent of respondents saying conditions had improved for retailers, compared with just 22 percent that said conditions had worsened.

Unlike in Cambodia and Vietnam where retailers lowered prices to attract customers, prices for retail goods in Laos were higher in March compared to six months earlier.

The second-quarter I-TRAK report followed a consumer confidence survey in late February that showed that 39 percent of Cambodian consumers thought economic conditions had worsened, compared with 37 percent that thought they had improved.

"By definition, retailers are always less confident than consumers so I am not surprised to see lower confidence levels than consumers," Notin said.

The retail confidence survey confirmed a Phnom Penh Post report in March that found sales had dropped by up to a half at four of Phnom Penh's main supermarkets in the first quarter of 2009. Sales at Pencil Shopping Centre had dropped by around 20 percent, Sorya Shopping Centre reported a 25 percent sales decline, Sydney Shopping Centre 30 percent and Sovanna Supermarket 50 percent, the Post found.

Chhoy Chhunly, owner of the Lovely clothing shop in Pencil on Sothearos Boulevard, also reported a sales decline in recent months, but said economic conditions were not behind the slump. Rather, Hun Sen's decision in February to outlaw sports and electronic gambling had led to a marked decline in the number of women buying clothes for work in the sector.

"Before, one girl would buy two, three or even four dresses at a time," she said. "Now they say they have no money so they maybe buy one dress or none at all."

Notin said retailers that looked to the future and understood their market would come out the slump the strongest.

"The main message is to do your homework even more than before," he said. "We know the economy is slowing down globally so take that into account, but don't be afraid to invest. It's about long-term thinking."

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Khmer Rouge torturer says Jesus helped find him in hiding

Wed, 22 Apr 2009
DPA

Phnom Penh - The Khmer Rouge's former chief torturer told Cambodia's UN-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal Wednesday that Jesus Christ had ordained his discovery by a journalist a decade ago when he was a fugitive with an assumed identity living in a remote village. Kaing Guek Eav, known by his revolutionary name Duch, faces charges of crimes against humanity, premeditated murder, torture and breeches of the Geneva Conventions allegedly committed while he was the warden of the S-21 torture prison in Phnom Penh.

In the third week of the tribunal's first trial, Duch said Jesus led journalist Nic Dunlop to find him in a town near the Thai border in 1999.

"I spoke to Nic Dunlop and said, 'It was Christ who brought you to meet me,'" he said. "Nic Dunlop quoted those words, and those are the words that I told him."

The 66-year-old born-again Christian recounted an interview he gave to Dunlop and fellow journalist Nate Thayer shortly before he was arrested and detained in a military prison.

He said he told Dunlop that Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot's claim that S-21 was fabricated by Vietnam after it invaded Cambodia in 1979 was a lie.

"I was chief of S-21," he said. "All the crimes there were under my responsibility."

Duch is one of five former Khmer Rouge leaders facing trial for their roles in the deaths of up to 2 million people through overwork, starvation or execution during the Maoist group's 1975-79 reign.

At least 15,000 men, women and children are believed to have been imprisoned, tortured and interrogated at S-21 before being sent to be murdered at the Cheoung Ek "killing fields" outside the Cambodian capital.

Duch earlier in the trial apologized to his victims, their families and the country but maintained that he was simply following orders.

On Wednesday, he maintained that he was mostly acting on the orders of fellow detainee and former Khmer Rouge chief ideologue Nuon Chea.

Duch's trial was expected to run into mid-June, and he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.

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The Khmer Rouge trial is inadequate

April 22, 2009
A. Gaffar Peang-Meth
Pacific Daily News (Guam)

"Small countries have littlepower to alter the region, let alone the world," said Singapore Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew in his April 9 address on "The Fundamentals of Singapore's Foreign Policy: Then and Now."

He expressed, in an eloquent and easy to remember way, the nature of national interest in international relations: "Friendship ... is not a function of goodwill or personal affection. We must make ourselves relevant so that other countries have an interest in our continued survival and prosperity as a sovereign and independent nation."
In this space on June 18 of last year, I wrote, in "Lessons of Hartford, Laos, Cambodia," about a streetlight surveillance camera that captured the scene of 78-year-old Angel Torres "tossed like a rag doll by a hit-and-run driver" on a busy street in Hartford, Conn., "left unattended by dozens of passers-by," and I quoted Alexander Green of spiritualwealth.com -- "Without compassion, there really isn't much to separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom."

Tying the story in a domestic environment to politics on the world stage, where politics can get ugly as a country acts to promote its national interest, I quoted Mao Zedong's "Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed," and Nikita Krushchev's "Politicians are the same all over the world. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river." I wrote, too, about Americans' exit from Laos and Cambodia.

Thirty-four years ago, in April 1975, Cambodian Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak, one of the "seven traitors" earmarked for death by the victorious Khmer Rouge, responded to U.S. Ambassador John Gunther Dean's offer to evacuate him from Phnom Penh: "I thank you very sincerely for your letter and for your offer to transport me to freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion.

"You leave, and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under this sky. But, mark it well," continued Matak, "if I shall die on the spot and in my country that I love, it is too bad, because we all are born and must die (one day). I have only committed this mistake of believing in you, the Americans."

Six days after Dean was evacuated by helicopter from the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge entered the capital. According to Dean's "oral history" of events in Cambodia deposited at the Jimmy Carter Library, Matak "was executed publicly" near Phnom Penh's Grand Hotel.

Dean claimed that in "message after message" sent to Washington, he pleaded: "If the Khmer Rouge take control of the country, there was going to be a bloodbath."

As many in the world had enough of the United States' war and the destruction and suffering in the former French Indochina, American national interest dictated a U.S. withdrawal from the region. The chant around the globe then was, "Let Peace Have A Chance!"

From April 17, 1975, when Chinese-backed Pol Pot took control of Cambodia, to Jan. 7, 1979 -- when some 200,000 Vietnamese regular troops, supported by tanks, heavy artillery and aircraft, spearheaded a breakaway Khmer Rouge faction that knocked Pol Pot out of power -- an estimated two million Cambodians and some foreigners died under Khmer Rouge rule as a result of starvation, forced labor, torture and arbitrary killings.

It is believed that hardly a Cambodian family anywhere had not had at least one member fall victim to the Khmer Rouge's atrocities.

Among those who were part of that Khmer Rouge faction that allied itself with the Vietnamese invasion of 1979 were Heng Samrin, currently Cambodia's National Assembly Chairman, current Prime Minister Hun Sen, and current Senate President Chea Sim, among others in the current Cambodian leadership.

But the No. 1 Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, most wanted for Khmer Rouge's crimes against humanity, died in 1998, the year the United Nations pressured Cambodians to create a special court to try the Khmer Rouge leadership.

In 2001, a law to create a court of Cambodian judges (to be in the majority) and international judges under Cambodian jurisdiction was passed, and finally a joint tribunal was set up in 2006.

The Christian Science Monitor reported the United Nations at first opposed the arrangement "because of widespread concerns over the notoriously corrupt Cambodian judiciary, and its lack of independence." But on Feb. 17 this year, the tribunal known as the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia began its hearing of its first accused -- former math teacher Kaing Khek Eav, alias Duch, commandant of the gruesome S-21 Tuol Sleng torture center.

Four other defendants -- Nuon Chea, chief ideologue next to Pol Pot; Khieu Samphan, former president of Khmer Rouge Cambodia; Ieng Sary, foreign minister; Ieng Thirith, Sary's wife and minister of social affairs -- all in poor health, are to be next on the stand.

With the objective to put the accused before the victims or their families and the media for each to explain his or her actions, and the ultimate goal to "achieve justice, promote peacebuilding, encourage reconciliation, and begin healing," as Radio Free Asia Web site says, the U.N.-backed Khmer Rouge Tribunal ought to help put a much-needed end to Cambodia's dark history and unleash a "national reconciliation" process.

The trouble is, the trial of a mere five Khmer Rouge leaders for the death of about two million people in 1975-1979 is far from adequate to bring justice and national reconciliation to Cambodians, to begin healing and promote peacebuilding in the country.

A. Gaffar Peang-Meth, Ph.D., is retired from the University of Guam, where he taught political science for 13 years. Write him at peangmeth@yahoo.com.

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