TR EMERITUS

By Daniel Ten Kate from Bloomberg The trial of the Khmer Rouge’s top prison warden ends this week after six months of testimony about the regime’s mass killings and brutality that brought Cambodians face to face with the man who tortured them three decades ago. The court will probably wait until March next year to give its verdict against Kang Kek Ieu, also known as Duch, said Reach Sambath, a spokesman for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the United Nations-sponsored tribunal tasked with trying five senior Khmer Rouge leaders. Duch, 67, the first member of the administration to face trial, hears final arguments in the trial this week. The former math teacher who converted to Christianity in 1996 cooperated with the trial and apologized to victims. He faces four charges involving pre-meditated murder, torture, rape and enslavement at Tuol Sleng prison in the capital, Phnom Penh, where only about a dozen of at least 12,000 inmates survived. Duch’s trial shed light on a regime blamed for the deaths of at least 1.7 million people between 1975 and 1979, stunting economic growth in Cambodia where the average income is $1.40 a day. Tuol Sleng was the most notorious prison in a network that targeted the country’s educated elite as the movement attempted to create an agrarian society starting at Year Zero. “The court has provided a positive means for all of us to speak out and take back our own history,” said Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which has collected thousands of photographs and papers used as evidence in the trial. “Even though some people criticize the court, it’s a positive sign because people can speak without fear.” Duch’s Apology In Duch’s opening statement in March, he accepted responsibility for the prison deaths and apologized to survivors and victims’ families. Cooperating with the court was the “only remedy that can help me to relieve all of the sorrow of the crimes that I have committed,” he said. “I tried to survive on a daily basis,” Duch said of his time at the prison, saying he believed he would be killed if he didn’t perform his duties. “Yes, you can say I am a coward.” Fifty-five witnesses testified at the trial, including 22 victims who talked about how prison officials tortured them with electric shocks, suffocation and beatings. Guards smashed babies against tree trunks and forced prisoners to eat feces, according to testimony during the trial. “I could never forget the suffering that I received until the day that I die,” survivor Chum Mey, who had his toenails ripped out at the prison, told the court. “Once justice can be done, then I would feel better.” Former Soldier Prisoners at Tuol Sleng, known as S-21, were tortured by interrogators who accused them of being Russian or American spies. Many, like Phaok Khan, a former Khmer Rouge soldier accused of turning on the regime, were transferred outside the city for execution at one of more than 20,000 mass graves discovered across the country. “I tried to move, crawling on top of the corpses, and I was so weak and skinny and I could not even stand up or walk properly,” Phaok Khan told the court, recounting how he escaped from a grave outside Phnom Penh. “I could see the bloodstains all over my body and it smelled so bad.” The Khmer Rouge took power after a U.S. bombing campaign during the Vietnam War stirred discontent in the countryside against General Lon Nol’s coup-installed government. Led by Pol Pot, the regime evacuated Phnom Penh to put people to work on farms and closed all schools, universities and monasteries. Money, markets and private property were abolished. Former head of state Khieu Samphan, 78, ex-foreign minister Ieng Sary, 84, his wife Ieng Thirith, 77, and Nuon Chea, 83, who was second in command to Pol Pot, are also facing trial. Pol Pot and Ta Mok, the Khmer Rouge military chief, have died. Impediment to Growth Many Cambodians are too young to remember the Khmer Rouge, with a third of the country’s 14.2 million people under the age of 15. Human resources remain an impediment to growth after two decades of foreign aid, which finances a third of the budget. Cambodia’s gross domestic product, the second-smallest of 10 Southeast Asian nations, has doubled in each of the past two decades after staying about the same size from 1968 to 1988. The country plans to open a stock market next year, aiming to list companies such as Sokimex Group, the biggest petroleum company, and Acleda Bank Plc, its largest bank. - Bloomberg Republished from Bloomberg, 23 November 2009  Read More →

Written by Our Correspondent Acting Minister for Information, Communication and Arts Rear-Admiral Lui Tuck Yew said that the property tax of HDB flats is being raised next year partly to avoid having to introduce a bigger increase later should home prices continue to rise. He said: "The problem is, the longer you defer it, the larger the increase will be...if HDB prices continue to go up." The property tax rate is 10 per cent of a property's annual value which has increased with rising property prices. HDB resale prices have risen a hefty 31.2per cent in the past two years and hit a record high in June this year. The sky-rocketing prices are attributed partly to cash-rich PRs entering the resale market. According to real estate agency ERA, 40 per cent of the buyers of resale flats are PRs. An Indonesian PR forked out a record $653,000 for a 4-room HDB flat in Queenstown lately while he could well afford a similar-sized condominium in the suburbs. Mr Lui also repeated the official view that Singaporeans will stand to gain from the rising value of their HDB flats. "If they eventually need to sell...(it) releases more money for their old age," he said. However, Mr Lui did not elaborate further on where the homeowners will stay if they sell their flats in such an inflationary market. They will probably have to fork out more to buy another flat. More than 85 per cent of the population live in public housing built by the government agency HDB. However, these are 99-year old leasehold flats whose sale and resale are subjected to a variety of conditions such as a minimum 5 year occupation period. Government leaders and HDB officials have insisted that the rising prices of flats helps to “create wealth” for Singaporeans. This prevailing misconception has been debunked by a research done by two NUS professors NUS professors Abeysinghe and Gu Jiaying showed clearly that “higher property prices, instead of creating a wealth effect, exert a significant and negative “price effect” on consumption expenditures leading to a fall in the average propensity to consume.” (read article here) As house prices go up, the increase in the value of housing assets is accompanied by a concurrent rise in the financial liabilities of households, in the form of higher downpayments for purchase of residential properties and burgeoning housing loans.   Related articles: >> Debunking the myth that rising prices of HDB flats create wealth for Singaporeans >> Number of applicants exceed number of flats >> HDB to increase supply of flats >> Mah: don’t compare with prices in the past >> ERA: 40 per cent of HDB flat buyers are PRs  Read More →

OPINION If you are going to fork out money to spend one night with your spouse or lover in one of the most luxurious hotels in Singapore like the Raffles Hotel, Marina Mandarin or Pan Pacific, you would naturally expect out of the world service worth every single cent paid. Unfortunately, the air-conditioner in your room somehow leaked in the middle of the night when you were soundly asleep and you found your $1,000 Armani cloak soaked wet the next day. This is a "freak" event which happens once in fifty years. The hotel would probably have your cloak replaced for free and on top of that, give you another night's stay in its presidential suite. Such is the response expected from a world-class hotel. Similarly, if one has the fortune of staying in a country governed by the highest paid leaders in the entire world, especially on a small island well sheltered from the unpredictable forces of nature, one should expect living a carefree life with few hassles from Mother Nature. Of course "freak" events do happen at times as Bukit Timah residents discovered to their horror when their houses, cars and whatever became submerged by rainwater last Thursday. According to the state media, Thursday's intense rainfall which was about six times that of a normal storm resulted in massive amounts of water to drain into Bukit Timah 1st Diversion Canal, causing it to overflow. Minister for the Environment and Water Resources Yaacob Ibrahim described the flooding of parts of Bukit Timah on Thursday as a "freak" event that occurs once in 50 years. "What happened was very unusual. The intensity was tremendous. We knew the diversion canal was not big enough to take this," he added. (CNA, 20 Nov 2009) Did Mr Yacacob know the limitations of the canal only after the flood? If he had known earlier, why wasn't the canal expanded? Dr Yaacob did not explain why the canals were not widened earlier to prepare for this “freak” event”. He claimed that it is “not possible” to plan for every event. “I hope the public will have more patience with us because it will take us some time to enlarge those drains. But having said that, it is not possible for us to plan for every event,” he said. But surely it is not too much for Singaporeans to expect a multi-millionaire minister to plan ahead and prepare for such "freak" events beforehand? By Mr Yaacob's definition, a "freak" event occurs once in fifty years. Twenty five years had passed since the canals were first built which means there is a 50 per cent chance it will happen anytime between now and another quarter of a century later. Mr Yaacob was appointed the Minister of Environment and Water Resources in 2004. He had 5 years to do something about the canals. It is 5 years, not 5 months, weeks or days! How can such a "freak" event be allowed to happen? Unfortunately, the Bukit Timah flooding wasn't the first "freak" event encountered by Mr Yaacob during his tenure. In case Mr Yaacob forgot, he used the same excuse to exonerate himself and his ministry from any blame back in December 2006 when heavy rain caused excess water from the MacRitchie and Upper Seletar reservoirs to overflow and flood the surrounding areas. In an interview with Channel News Asia, Mr Yaacob said: "You can't design for rainfall of this level, it is just too huge. The thing we can accept is that we can only design our canal of a certain size, and at the end of the day, we have to live with some of these occurrences which occur once in 50 years or so. I know it is inconvenient to some Singaporeans, but on the part of PUB and NEA, we'll do our best to alleviate the problem as quickly as possible." If an unusually heavy downpour is a "freak" event, what about Typhoon Morakot which hits Taiwan a few months ago, the Sichuan earthquake last year and the Asian tsunami in 2004? Singaporeans are told again and again that their leaders are the best talents in the world who can easily earn more in the private sector and we should be thankful to them for willing to serve "lesser mortals" like us. It appears that even first world talents do get caught out wet in the cold sometimes by "freak" events like this. Fortunately, the "Thunder God" got the blame this time instead of Singaporeans as in the last "freak" event which occurred under Mr Yaacob's watch. In April this year, two Singaporeans died and hundreds fell ill from a mass food poisoning outbreak after eating from an Indian Rojak stall at the Geylang Serai temporary market. You would think that deaths from gastroenteritis only occur in third world countries, but to happen in squeaky clean Singapore is really a "freak" event beyond our wildest dream. The exact cause of the "freak" event was never discovered though the authorities did find a convenient scapegoat in the beleaguered Indian Rojak stallholder who was charged in court. The Management Committee of the market which was linked to a grassroots organizations was not taken to task. Neither was the National Environment Agency whose officials somehow forgot to send the latest food grading labels to the stallholders. As usual, Singaporeans were blamed for the "freak" event, this time for not practicing proper hygiene in public, never mind the fact that Indian Rojak is eaten using fork and spoon and not bare hands. One isolated incident of flooding in 50 years may be considered a "freak" event, but how about two cases in less than two years? Is Mr Yaacob becoming a minister a "freak" event too? Singaporeans must be praying hard that no more "freak" events will occur again under Mr Yaacob's watch for he is unable to do anything about it except to tell you that it is not possible for him to "plan" for every event because it is a "freak" event. Related articles: >> Once in 50 year event: Yaacob used the same excuse in 2006 >> Bukit Timah residents unhappy about freak storm >> Yaacob: Bukit Timah flooding is a freak event  Read More →