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Family unearths clues to missing Texas soldier's fate in Cambodia
Mary Nolan, with son Rodger, believes the government should compensate her for the loss of her husband, McKinley, who disappeared in November 1967 while serving in Vietnam. “I should have been given a good explanation as to what happened, when, why,” she said. (ERICH SCHLEGEL/DMN)Saturday, March 14, 2009
By GREGG JONES (gjones@dallasnews.com)
The Dallas Morning News (Texas, USA)
McKinley Nolan's letters from South Vietnam to his wife in Texas hinted at his anguish. He wrote of playing dead to survive on the battlefield and the suffering of Vietnamese civilians.
"He was just telling me how bad it was over there, all the fighting, all the killing," said Mary Nolan.There was no clue of what was to come.
On Nov. 9, 1967, weeks from completing a two-year hitch in the Army, McKinley Nolan disappeared from his First Infantry Division unit. Communist Viet Cong propaganda broadcasts and leaflets later featured Nolan urging fellow black soldiers to lay down their weapons. The Army branded the missing Texan as one of the war's two confirmed defectors, but offered no explanation as to why Nolan deserted or what happened to him.
Now, McKinley's younger brother, Michael, has joined forces with a New Jersey journalist, a Vietnam War veteran, a New York City filmmaker, a Hollywood star and a Houston congresswoman in hopes of finally unraveling the mystery.
Their combined efforts last month pushed the Pentagon's MIA search unit, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, to act on an eyewitness account and dig for McKinley Nolan's remains in a Cambodian village.
Michael Nolan, an Austin wood pallet manufacturer, flew to Cambodia to watch the U.S. team chip away at the hard Cambodian clay. It was the latest stop in a long journey to find his missing brother and understand who he was: a deserter who turned his back on his country and his family, or a hero who stood up to the Viet Cong and Khmer Rouge and paid with his life.
The Nolan case has long fascinated POW-MIA aficionados. It has spawned such varied tales as Nolan quietly slipping back home to the Brazos River bottomlands of Washington County, Texas, to him living the high life in Cuba as a guest of Fidel Castro.
"In the world of the conspiratorial POW-MIA guys, McKinley Nolan is like Bigfoot," said journalist Richard Linnett, who has spent years tracking missing Americans in Cambodia. "He's spotted everywhere."
As a rifleman in the Army's 16th Infantry Regiment, Nolan was based in Tay Ninh province, near the border with Cambodia. His veiled references to haunting battlefield experiences are supported by a Pentagon document that shows Nolan earned a Purple Heart and a Combat Infantry Badge. Linnett made the document available to The Dallas Morning News.
The Army didn't respond to questions submitted by The News.
By November 1967, Nolan was one of about 500,000 U.S. military personnel in Vietnam. A poll that autumn found that 46 percent of Americans believed U.S. military involvement in Vietnam was a mistake. Black GIs openly questioned why they should die for South Vietnamese freedom when they were denied equal rights at home.
If McKinley Nolan shared those sentiments, he didn't tell his wife.
"If he had a job, he did it," she said.
But Nolan's commitment to the Army was flagging. He was AWOL – absent without leave – from Sept. 7 to Nov. 6, 1967, according to the Pentagon document.
He was jailed for two days. And then, on Nov. 9, the 22-year-old disappeared.
Mary Nolan said the Army revealed little about her husband's disappearance. Months passed before she received a letter stating that Nolan had defected to communist Viet Cong forces, she said. In January 1975, three months before the war ended, the Army notified her that her husband had been seen alive in Cambodia.
In 1992, a U.S. military team thought they had found McKinley Nolan's remains in Cambodia. DNA tests, however, proved negative.
Eight years later, Linnett, a journalist in Newark, N.J., stumbled onto Nolan's trail. Linnett was working on a book about a 1970 mutiny carried out by two crew members of an American freighter transporting napalm to U.S. forces in Thailand. One of the mutineers, Clyde McKay, sought refuge with Khmer Rouge guerrillas and was later executed by the communist group.
Linnett was searching for McKay's grave site in eastern Cambodia when a local resident pulled him aside. "Are you talking about the black man?" the villager asked. He told Linnett an intriguing story about an American GI who supposedly lived in the area during the time of the Khmer Rouge.
Back in the United States, a Pentagon investigator revealed to Linnett that the Cambodian man was talking about a missing soldier named McKinley Nolan.
"I thought this story was truly amazing," Linnett said. "This guy had lived with the Viet Cong and the Khmer Rouge."
Working sources in the U.S. and Cambodia, Linnett pried loose U.S. military intelligence documents and began sharing information with Michael and Mary Nolan.
In 2006, Michael Nolan phoned Linnett with incredible news.
"He said, 'Richard, someone saw McKinley in Vietnam,' " Linnett recalled.
That someone was a Vietnam veteran named Dan Smith, and he had contacted the Washington County sheriff in search of Nolan's family.
Linnett was skeptical. He phoned Smith.
A retired 911 operator in the Pacific Northwest, Smith said he had lost a leg serving with the First Infantry Division in Vietnam. In 2005, he made one of his periodic trips to Vietnam to deliver medical supplies.
In the city of Tay Ninh, near the Cambodian border, Smith encountered a black man, about 60 years of age, with rotted teeth and jaundiced eyes. The man told Smith that he had served with the First Infantry Division in Vietnam in 1967.
When Smith mentioned that he was going home soon, the stranger sighed.
"Man, I wish I could go home," he said.
"Where's home?" Smith asked.
"Washington, Texas," the man replied.
Smith reported the encounter to U.S. officials in Vietnam. After he returned home, the Pentagon MIA search unit sent an investigator to his home. Smith said he picked two photographs of McKinley Nolan out of a mugshot book.
Afterward, Smith said the investigator refused to take his calls. So did the MIA unit.
But Linnett heard him out, and he arranged for Smith to tell his story in person to the Nolans.
In the meantime, Linnett had piqued the curiosity of New York City documentary filmmaker Henry Corra. When Smith arrived in Washington-on-the-Brazos, Texas, to meet the Nolans, Corra's camera was rolling.
After a tearful meeting with the Nolan family, Smith vowed to return to Southeast Asia to find the missing GI.
A series of trips to Cambodia followed, first Smith alone, and then together with Michael Nolan, Linnett and Corra. What they learned convinced Smith that the man he encountered in Tay Ninh was another U.S. deserter who had assumed Nolan's identity.
But the search continued, financed in part by actor Danny Glover, who agreed to produce Corra's documentary on the search for McKinley Nolan after seeing footage from Texas and Cambodia.
The group tracked the missing GI to a village outside the town of Memot, in eastern Cambodia, where a man named Cham Son recalled Nolan's life during the tumult of war and Khmer Rouge genocide.
McKinley Nolan's missing years emerged from the mists.
When he arrived in Vietnam in 1966, Nolan was happily married, the proud father of a 2-year-old son. He was a friendly, muscular guy who loved baseball and horses.
By the time he disappeared in 1967, he had grown disillusioned with the war, said Linnett, citing interviews with Nolan's friends in Vietnam and Cambodia.
A Vietnamese girlfriend "convinced him to go with her," said Linnett.
It's unclear whether Nolan willingly worked with the Viet Cong, Linnett said. In any event, Nolan grew disenchanted with the group and in 1973 slipped into Cambodia with his Vietnamese wife and their baby, Linnett said.
In eastern Cambodia, Nolan drove a truck and farmed, local residents told Linnett and Smith. When the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975 and emptied cities to return Cambodia to "Year Zero," Nolan was forced to move to a village deeper in the jungle.
"Because of his size and strength, they made him pull an oxcart loaded with people being taken to an interrogation center," Smith said. "Villagers said he would beg for their forgiveness."
Nolan told jokes and sang songs in pidgin Cambodian to lift people's spirits.
"He would literally step in front of guards to keep them from beating people," Smith said. "McKinley was a hero. Everybody there loved him."
In 1977, the villager Cham Son recounted, Khmer Rouge soldiers took Nolan away.
"He saw McKinley being marched off," said Linnett, "and knew when the soldiers came back without him that he had been killed."
In April 2008, after hearing Cham Son's account, Linnett and his comrades gave the Pentagon's MIA search unit precise information on the suspected grave site. The agency still didn't seem interested, Linnett said.
Last month, after the Nolans enlisted the help of U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston, a JPAC team began excavating the site identified by Cham Son.
The team completed two weeks of digging in late February without finding any remains, said Air Force Lt. Col. Wayne Perry, JPAC spokesman. Cham Son told the team as it was wrapping up that the terrain had changed, and he wasn't sure of the precise burial spot, Perry said.
The Nolan family and Linnett, with Lee's help, are trying to force the Pentagon to release McKinley Nolan's personnel file and classified documents on the case. Linnett and Corra are tracking leads that they believe will lead to Nolan's remains in eastern Cambodia.
Mary Nolan, now 62, has never remarried. She believes the government should compensate her for her husband's loss, regardless of the circumstances.
"I should have been given a good explanation as to what happened, when, why," she said.
After years of anger at "the system" for taking his brother away, Michael Nolan said he found peace retracing McKinley's footsteps and seeing him through the eyes of Cambodian villagers who revered him.
"Whether he's dead or alive," said Nolan, "I feel he would be happy that we're bringing the truth to light."
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The evolution of Calgary's deadly gang war [-The life and death of Cambodian-Canadian John Pheng]
Retired police officer Henry Hollinger says Calgary's current gang warfare can be traced back 10 years to kids with ties to Forest Lawn High School. (Photograph by: Ted Rhodes, Calgary Herald)March 14, 2009
By Jason Van Rassel
Calgary Herald (Alberta, Canada)
"Much love from the crew The cries and the pain got me goin' insane Gang life has got me on the brink walking around with a strap on my hip" -- Lyrics from a rap recording paying tribute to slain FOB Killers member John Pheng made by his friends in 2005Before FOB and FK, there was the"Runaway Gang."
That's the nickname police investigators gave a ragtag bunch of troublemakers who either attended Forest Lawn High School or spent time hanging around the school a decade ago.
"We watched this group of goofy kids develop into a gang," recalls Henry Hollinger, a retired Calgary police officer who was working in the intelligence unit at the time.From kids to killers, this is the story of Calgary's evolving gang war, how a group of teens went from cutting class together 10 years ago to shooting each other on city streets.
The feud between FOB and the FOB Killers (FK) has claimed at least 25 lives since 2002, maimed dozens of others and struck fear into law-abiding citizens throughout Calgary.
If there's any question about whether the conflict has escalated into all-out war, consider the life and death of John Pheng.
At age 22, the FK member died on the floor of a 17th Avenue nightclub as his companions pursued the gunmen into the busy street outside two years ago.
Pheng had killed at least one other person. On New Year's Day 2004, he fatally stabbed an 18-year-old Calgary man who was dating his former girlfriend.
This is the life Pheng's friends celebrated in an amateur recording they made shortly after he was murdered in February 2005.
"You're a soldier, man,"raps one.
Pheng's friends sang the praises of his violent ways, but the citizens of Calgary aren't joining in.
Gang violence topped a list of concerns in a citizens' survey released this week, and it dominated the agenda Friday as Premier Ed Stelmach met his counterparts from B.C. and Saskatchewan.
Police have thrown considerable resources toward stopping the violence, disrupting the gangs' criminal businesses and keeping youths from getting involved in the first place.
What makes the war between FOB and FK unique --and difficult to stop--is that it isn't motivated by battles over drug turf, but mutual hatred.
"They've matured, they've learned, they're more criminally experienced and they've developed relationships in other cities and provinces," says Acting Staff Sgt. Gord Eiriksson of the city police's gang unit. "But what concerns us the most is the level of violence and the complete lack of regard for others' lives."
ORIGINS
Pheng came to Canada with his parents and two older siblings when he was three years old.
He was born at a displaced persons camp in Thailand in 1982, shortly after his parents fled Cambodia's murderous Khmer Rouge regime.
By all accounts, Pheng's parents worked hard to provide for their children, first in Olds, then in Calgary.
Things became more difficult after Pheng's mother died of cancer and his father was left sole responsibility for raising the kids.
It's a pattern common to many immigrant communities, and not just the Asian-Canadian teens who made up most of the Runaway Gang: parents favour more traditional values, which their Canadianized offspring find too strict.
But the parents often have to work long hours to support the family, which means they have few ways of enforcing their will when the child rebels.
"Usually, these kids aren't involved at home and have activities outside," says Do Huu Trong, chairman of the board of the Calgary Vietnamese-Canadian Association.
At first, Hollinger and other investigators who encountered the Runaway Gang were dealing with truants who were imitating things they saw in gangster movies.
Several used cigarettes and coins to burn dot-pattern tattoos on their hands and forearms, crude imitations of traditional three-and five-dot markings favoured by Vietnamese gangs.
The meanings of the tattoos can vary, but a common five-dot design is meant to depict the "five T's" in Vietnamese: tinh (love), tien (money), tu (prison), toi (crime) and thu (revenge).
For Pheng and his friends, they were soon on the road to becoming hardened criminals instead of teenage imitators.
RUNAWAYS BECOME GANGSTERS
"White"--slang for cocaine --drives the business of FOB and FK today.
Dealing cocaine was the ticket to bigger money, but it was also what got the first person killed.
Huu Pham, a 15-year-old from Calgary, was in a fourth-floor Edmonton apartment when a police tactical team burst through the door on Sept. 24, 1999.
Pham and another man fled to the balcony and climbed over the railing. Both died of head injuries when they fell to the pavement below.
The raid was part of an investigation by RCMP and Edmonton police into a cocaine trafficking organization. Son Nguyen and Tan Diep, who later became members of FOB, were also swept up in the police operation.
"They went to Edmonton as baby gangsters and came back to Calgary as big-time gangsters," Hollinger says.
Their time in Edmonton taught budding criminals like Son Nguyen and Diep the potential behind dial-a-doping (mobile drug sales arranged using cellphones and pagers) in Calgary.
As the core group from Forest Lawn branched into new rackets, its members got to know teens from other parts of the city, like the Chin brothers, Roland and Roger, who attended John G. Diefenbaker High School in the northwest, and Jackie Tran, who went to Crescent Heights High School.
At first, everyone got along and enjoyed the profits, but something split the friends into two groups.
The catalyst for the break isn't known by outsiders: some have told police it may have been over a stolen personal item--a watch or a jacket -- a fight over a girl, or the theft of some marijuana.
As a veteran investigator recently put it, determining what started the war isn't as important as recognizing what it has become.
"I don't think the reason they splintered is as fundamental as what's happening -- and that people are dying," Sgt. Gavin Walker said during a hearing in December for Jackie Tran, who is facing deportation to his native Vietnam, in part due to his alleged membership in FK.
WAR BEGINS
Only the people who opened fire inside the Shaken Drink Room on Feb.26, 2005, know exactly why Pheng had to die that night.
Pheng's killing, like 23 of the 25 with confirmed links to the war between FOB and FK, remains unsolved.
Five months before he died, Pheng was arrested in connection with a violent home invasion in Chestermere, where six men kidnapped and assaulted a 20-year-old woman.
Though Pheng was never charged by police, his enemies weren't about to about wait for the courts to proclaim his guilt.
Violence -- including murder--was already an established way of settling scores between the two gangs, but investigators recall Pheng's enemies felt he crossed a line by harming a woman.
"One of them said to me, 'You don't mess with the bitches,' " one veteran police officer says.
Pheng's 2005 killing marked the end of a period of relative quiet during the FOB-FK conflict brought about by a police task force formed two years earlier.
Back in February 2002, Pheng, Vuthy Kong and other members of the emerging FK gang got in a fight outside a downtown karaoke bar.
During the melee, Kong fatally stabbed a young Calgarian, Adam Miu. The victim wasn't a gang member, but his death angered people who were.
Police were reluctant to publicly say the killing, and sporadic violence that followed it, were related to gangs. In fact, police at the time wouldn't use the word "gang" to describe criminal organizations.
Six days in December 2002 changed all that.
On Dec. 23, rival gangsters crossed paths at Southcentre as last-minute Christmas shoppers filled the stores.
As the parking lot teemed with shoppers, FK member Linju (Billy) Ly drove his car past the Indigo bookstore, while passenger Michael Oduneye pointed a .223-calibre handgun out the window and fired four shots.
Two shots hit Jason Youn: one perforated his bowel and the other lodged near his spine. Youn needed a wheelchair and a colostomy bag for months after the shooting.
But he was lucky -- he survived.
Revenge came swiftly to Ly, who was shot dead as he shovelled the sidewalk in front of his parents' Renfrew home six days later.
Ly was the second person connected to FK to be killed in retaliatory attacks that day: someone shot FK associate Vinh Le inside a crowded downtown club hours before.
Less than two weeks later, then police chief Jack Beaton announced police were forming a task force to investigate several connected incidents "directly related to criminal street-gang activity."
The police had escalated things, but so had the gangs: they demonstrated they would exact revenge any time they felt they had a clear shot, no matter how many others they put in danger.
EXPANDING HOSTILITIES
Many have been killed, wounded and jailed since those lyrics were dedicated to Pheng.
Shootings in public continued, including two separate ambushes at Calgary gas stations in less than two months in 2005 that killed three.
Police began seeing evidence that warring gangsters were preparing for combat whenever they left their homes: some had guns in secret compartments in their vehicles and many started wearing body armour.
Even as killings and prison decimated their ranks, FOB and FK have recruited new members willing to fight a battle that predates them.
"Half of them don't even know what this dispute is even about," Hollinger says.
But the hatred between the two sides has become entrenched. When police visited Jackie Tran in 2007 to inform him of a threat to his life, he shrugged off the warning.
"This isn't going to be over until they're dead or we're all dead," he told an officer.
FOB and FK have long since grown into multicultural gangs with many Canadian-born members and many whose parents aren't immigrants.
In a southwest Calgary home occupied by a Caucasian family, an anguished father recently wondered how his son became involved in such a dangerous life.
"There's a big part of me who blames myself for how things are,"says Brian, whose name has been changed to protect his identity.
Although the younger man's parents divorced when he was growing up, he took part in normal activities such as minor sports, church groups and skiing.
Brian figures his son first got to know members of one gang after spending time in custody following minor legal scrapes.
"I believe he is a friend or associate -- I still don't even know the extent of his involvement," he says.
"I've asked him and he's said he hasn't done anything wrong. But if he had, I don't think he would tell me. Why would he tell me he's committed a crime?"
Brian is under no illusions about the dangerous company his son keeps--so much so, he fears for his son's life and even worries about his own safety.
"I've come home many, many nights and watched for suspicious vehicles,"he adds. "My hope is that he leaves the city of Calgary, because I don't believe he can survive in Calgary."
REVENGE, FEAR AND THE CODE
As Pheng's friends rapped those lyrics in his memory, there's no mistaking their message: justice comes from the barrel of a gun, not from a courtroom.
Gang members intent on revenge and witnesses too afraid to come forward have formed a formidable wall of silence that has played a large role in thwarting police efforts to solve all but two of the 25 killings with confirmed connections to the war between FOB and FK.
"We're dealing with the fact these groups have instilled fear in other people who have knowledge about what's going on," Eiriksson says.
But the code of silence is only part of the challenge.
Over the years, the gangs have become increasingly sophisticated and found new ways to hide their activities. That makes for complex, time-consuming police investigations.
Further clouding the picture are the ties FOB and FK have with other gangs:FOB has connections to the Crazy Dragons in Edmonton, while FK has aligned itself with the Redd Alert aboriginal gang in that city. Calgary police have also publicly identified an FK member as an associate of the United Nations gang, a notorious group from B. C.'s Lower Mainland.
Following the murder of FOB member Roger Chin last summer, one of his friends vowed the gang would bring in reinforcements from other cities.
FOB and FK have proven they won't hesitate to use deadly violence against each other, but they have also demonstrated little regard for the lives of anyone who crosses them.
Pheng stabbed and killed Jason Dang on New Year's Day 2004 in a fight over a woman.
Investigators found Pheng's DNA on property left at the scene, but he was murdered before police could charge him.
THE FUTURE
If you want to get out of a gang, police say there are only three ways to do it: getting killed, getting thrown in jail, or getting help.
Pheng got out the first way.
One of his enemies, FOB member Roland Chin, has taken the second route -- though not by his own choosing.
But Chin, 25, will soon be afforded a chance to try the third option and leave the gang behind.
Chin, serving a 32-month sentence for drug and weapons offences at Bowden Institution in central Alberta, is due to be freed on supervised release sometime in the coming months.
"I have been very busy with work and schooling inside the institution,"Chin wrote last fall in a letter to the Herald.
Chin was behind bars when someone killed his younger brother, Roger, in a drive-by shooting on Centre Street N. last July.
Roland didn't discuss his plans after he's released from prison, or whether his brother's killing will influence the path he chooses.
"I am trying to move on with my life and avoid the media attention . . . (and) I feel that the media just want a story to sell newspapers, which will jeopardize what I am trying to accomplish with my life," he wrote.
Only time will reveal whether Chin succeeds.
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Hor 5 Hong's MFA rejects US criticisms on human rights issues, however, the wording used sounds strangely like those of Hor 5 Bora
Demolition workers for the 7NG company are obligated "to negotiate with the squatters in order to make appropriate resettlement arrangement," Hor 5 Hong's ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed -sic!-The ministry of Foreign Affairs rejects US criticisms on human rights issues
15 March 2009
By Ky Soklim Cambodge Soir Hebdo Translated from French by Luc Sâr Click here to read the article in Khmer
The ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) issued a press communiqué on Friday 13 March, i.e. exactly two weeks to the date after the US Department of State issued a scathing report on human rights conditions in Cambodia. Like every year, the US thrashed the lack of
human rights respect by the Cambodian governmentThe US singled out forced evictions, lynching scenes, endemic corruption and regular threats issued to human rights defenders in Cambodia. The MFA called these criticisms “baseless”. The MFA denies all attacks on freedom of expression in Cambodia by citing as example the existence of opposition newspapers published in Khmer, as well as foreign-language periodicals that “do not hesitate to harshly criticize the government.” The MFA also denies the alleged abuses exacted by the police forces. Regarding the forced evictions, the MFA declared: “Which country in the world is forced like us to negotiate with squatters who occupy public land? We strive to find the best possible solution.”
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Statement of the Spokesman of The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the Kingdom of Cambodia
13/03/2009
The “2008 Country Report on Human Rights Practices” on Cambodia issued by the US State Department seems to be a routine that has nothing to do with human rights reality in Cambodia, and appears to be almost a carbon copy of the reports of the previous years with a few cosmetic changes here and there.
The report contains a number of unsubstantiated assertions which appear to be relied on misleading information supplied by certain organizations, which are monitored and financially supported by certain foreign countries.
In this connection, the spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation wishes to make clarifications on some issues raised in the report as follows:
* First, it is very normal in democratic countries that political party which wins landslide victory in democratic elections has to lead the country; and there is nothing unusual about such democratic practice everywhere in the world.
* Second, there is simply never “extrajudicial killing” by security forces in Cambodia as mentioned in the report. This is only vulgar lie.
* Third, with regard to the freedom of speech and press in Cambodia, one only need to read and see how the ubiquitous opposition newspapers attack the Royal Government of Cambodia. Even the newspapers written in foreign languages, financed and managed by foreigners do not have the slightest reservation or hesitation in criticizing the Royal Government of Cambodia.
* Fourth, for the so-called “unlawful forced eviction”, one must ponder whether there is any country in the world which allows squatters to takeover possession of or occupy permanently private properties or public areas such as public gardens, sidewalk and streets. Nonetheless, in the recent cases in Cambodia, the owners of the occupied private properties were always obligated to negotiate with the squatters in order to make appropriate resettlement arrangement. At the same time, notice had always been given well in advance in order to facilitate a smooth process of resettlement. For instance, as reported by the Phnom Penh Post news paper on 11 March 2009, an overwhelming majority of families from the Dey Kramham community has accepted housing at a relocation site. Furthermore, the RGC has put in place a “Social Land Concession Policy”, providing poor and landless people with access to plots of land which they can now own. Presently, approximately 4000 hectares of land in Kratie province and 870 hectares in Kampong Cham Province have been registered as state private land and allocated to the landless poor for housing and family farming. At the same time, around 10,118 hectares of land in Kampog Thom province have been proposed for the same purpose. The implementation of this policy will be expanded all over the country, in order improve the livelihood of the poor and alleviate poverty reduction as set out in the Rectangular Strategy of the Royal Government of Cambodia.
Finally, if enforcing rules to maintain public order is construed as human rights violation, then what does one have to say in terms of human rights respect on the condition in the secret prisons of a certain country where torture of prisoners is practiced as reported in the media such as the Nation on 4 and 10 March 2009 and the Bangkok Post on 4 March 2009?
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Skun spiders
A Cambodian vendor waits for her costumers while selling her deep-fried spiders at the town of Skun, about 75 kilometers (46 miles) northeast of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Saturday, March 14, 2009. The town is well-known for selling deep-fried spiders to travelers who stop by on their way to and from the country's northern and northeastern provinces. ( AP Photo/Heng Sinith)
A Cambodian girl demonstrates to travelers how to touch a live spider at the town of Skun, about 75 kilometers (46 miles) northeast of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Saturday, March 14, 2009. The town is well-known for selling deep-fried spiders to travelers who stop by on their way to and from the country's northern and northeastern provinces. ( AP Photo/Heng Sinith)Read more!
Lost in the ruin of Cambodia
Kim Echlin's masterful novel of meetings, partings and cross-cultural love
March 14, 2009
By CHARLES FORAN Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)
- THE DISAPPEARED
- By Kim Echlin
- Hamish Hamilton Canada, 235 pages, $29
He is 21, a musician, now in his sixth year in exile in the West. The attraction is immediate. For her, it is "that animal feeling, the smell of your leather jacket, the quiver in my stomach, Buddy Guy's voice and your breath on my ear." For him, it is, in part, the dare, "an Asian guy with a white girl," and "all of us pretending nothing was forbidden." They are soon lovers.
The affair is reckless and Anne's father, her only parent, is disapproving. But the two are magnetized, the pull at once erotic and spiritual. "I love you with or without a name," he tells her on their first night. She mentions his name, Serey, one of the few instances in The Disappeared when he is so identified. Another night, she dreams that she calls for him but he cannot hear. "Do not worry, oan samlanh," he says, mixing Khmer with English, "I will always be here."
Her premonition, it turns out, is well founded. Montreal, the title of the novel's opening section, ends in the wake of Serey's return to Cambodia after the fall of the Pol Pot regime. Its buoyancy, capturing the lightness and charge of first love, gives way to the weighted adult textures of the dominant middle part, Phnom Penh. Echlin's storytelling, shifting continents and years in a paragraph, gathers much of its pace and grace equally from her lyrical prose.
A decade has passed. Anne, who has not heard from her lover in all that time, has likewise never ceased being in love. She appears in the Cambodian capital on the eve of contentious elections, with the government brutalizing the opposition. The ragged city, still in shock - like the entire nation - from its recent waking nightmare, is finely rendered: "Phnom Penh. The leisurely put-put sway to the traffic, rickshaws drawn by skinny barefoot men who run or pedal bicycles, four-wheeled remorques drawn by motorcycles, white UN vans, Red Cross trucks, military jeeps and buses, an elephant carrying lumber, the streets wrinkling up from the waterfront ..."
In the city, she meets first a driver named Mau, with "a scar across his left cheek," and then a fellow Montrealer who is in Cambodia helping chronicle the genocide. Forensic worker Will Maracle is actually from Kahnawake, the Mohawk reserve south of the city. "I like the intuition it takes to get bones together," he explains, "to make sense of the scene."
In Phnom Penh, Anne Greaves does finally locate her own "disappeared." The reunion of lovers is human and sad, a meeting of adults now separated by experiences and fates more than cultures or proprieties. In the book's final section, titled Ang Tasom, after a village outside the capital where Anne, Mau and Will Maracle travel, events turn harrowing - bone stripped of all flesh.
Emerging from those final pages is an act of love, and an image of horror, that elevates The Disappeared to a level of tragic intensity that it had been bound for from its opening sentences. To describe the act apart from its setting as the climax of a powerfully vivid narrative would be ruin its extreme beauty.
Readers of Kim Echlin's earlier books, Elephant Winter and Dagmar's Daughter, will be familiar with the tension in her fiction between a literary anthropologist's interest in archetypes and a poet's rendering of the sensory world. By the close of her luminous new novel, it becomes apparent that for her the two perspectives, or truths, are in harmony.
For all its brevity, The Disappeared still attends to the skulls and bones and slaughterhouses of Cambodia's agony. Anne's defiant visit to Tuol Sleng, the school-turned-prison where 14,000 men, women and children were killed - and from which Vann Nath, who provided that two-word entreaty to "tell others," emerged, one of just seven survivors - is about witness and record: "In Tuol Sleng," she writes, "a person is asked to stare."
But for the penultimate scene, the truth is definitely poetic. It may also be dramatic. The book, which can be read in a single sitting, builds toward a complex expression of annihilating loss and eternal love that is best experienced, in a sense, like the final act of a tragic play: as something inevitable and beyond the calculations of reason. The final line certainly speaks to that variety of wild human truth. "Come and I will whisper your name to you one more time."
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Four Thais arrested for illegally crossing inot Cambodian territory
By Sav Yuth
12th March, 2009
Reported in English by Khmerization
Khmer border soldiers claimed that they have arrested four Thai nationals for illegally entering Cambodian territory at Choam Ksan district in Preah Vihear province.
Maj. Meas Yoeun, border commander for Choam Ksan district of Preah Vihear province, told RFA on the morning of 12th March that his soldiers had arrested for Thai nationals at Prolean Tatum, Po Veal village, Choam Ksan commune, in the afternoon of 10th March.
Maj. Meas Yoeun, border commander for Choam Ksan district of Preah Vihear province, told RFA on the morning of 12th March that his soldiers had arrested for Thai nationals at Prolean Tatum, Po Veal village, Choam Ksan commune, in the afternoon of 10th March.
He said: "These four Thai nationals live in Obun province, Khanthalak district. They come to hunt in the areas and our border force patrolling in the Prolean Tatum border point saw them and arrested them. We have sent them to the police already."
These Thai nationals were found carrying three home-made guns and three batteries with them.
Mr. Preap Tan, governor of Preah Vihear, said that the four claimed that they are normal Thai citizens but they were found with weapons that are capable of killing so they were sent for questioning waiting for contacts from the Thai side before deciding what to do with them.
RFA is unable to seek comments from the arrested four Thai nationals nor the Thai embassy.
Since the beginning of February, there were reports of many arrests of Thai nationals who were illegally crossing the border into Khmer territories, with a lone Thai soldier arrested on 26th February carrying many 69-type explosives and a map. On 27th February, another lone Thai soldier was arrested near the former mango plantation of Ta Mok in Anlong Veng.
The four Thai soldiers who were arrested and detained for illegally entering Cambodia at Choam Sra-Ngam Checkpoint on 28th February, 2009.
Delay in the release of a Thai national arrested for illegally crossing the Cambodian borders
Deum Ampil newspaper
12th March, 2009
Reported in English by Khmerization
Cambodian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is due to hold a ceremony on 11th March to hand over an arrested Thai national for illegally entering Cambodian territory on 27th February carrying many 69-type explosives and a map.
Mr. Koy Kuong, spoksman for the Foreign Ministry told Deum Ampil newspaper on the morning of 11th March that the ceremony had been cancelled, but he did not specify the reasons behind the cancellation.
The lone Thai soldier was arredted on 27th February at O'Kro-Nhoung border point in Anlong Veng. Recently, there are reports of arrests of up 9 Thai soldiers and Thai civilian for illegally entering Cambodian territories in Ouddor Meanchey, Preah Vihear and Banteay Meanchey provinces.
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