I'm not concerned about all hell breaking loose, but that a PART of hell will break loose... it'll be much harder to detect.
George Carlin
He sat in the Foreign Correspondents Club at sunset watching that famous scene, the foreign flags fluttering, tourists coming and going. One fat f... sat grandly at a table, shoveling food into his enormous body. An Asian woman with a bored Eurasian child playing at her feet sat next to him, dwarfed. There were so many things to think about. Had enough now? Done now? The corporate suck. Lost, after so many years working, the days grew longer in the stifling heat and the dust. Astonishing architecture and a way of life. An American academic in his sixties, accompanied by an enormously frail old man, asked if they could share his table. By all means he declared, and thought of adding, I could do with the company.
Gary had disappeared so a pub crawl down the Riverfront seemed the only solution. There were so many tourists, he was surprised. Cambodia just didn't seem an ordinary sort of place for tourists to come, too dusty, too dirty, too hot, too chaotic. But there they were, often clutching their Lonely Planet Guides. You didn't want to come here? he asked the old man, after his academic friend explained he hadn't wanted to come to this particular establishment and was grumpy about it. I've been here so often before, he explained. But the ambiance, the high ceilings, the fans, the view, the sunset, his friend declared. I love it. Time cured all, that's what they declared, but time was our worst enemy.
They were so enormous, some of those elephantine girls climbing the steps to the rooftop bar. He stayed where he was. He watched them come, he watched them go. All was not lost, but he needed to be careful now. He sat in Street 86, in the forecourt of that enormous house, and waited for someone, anyone, to come, even one of those garrulous Americans who never stopped talking about themselves. They were in paradise. They had found the vehicle of their dreams. They could be the legends they had always wanted to be. Water trickled through the fountain; gold fish swam in its base. No one came and he was left with his own thoughts, his own broiling stomach and disorganised, sometimes anguished head. Fully optioned deviate, he declared; but there was no fun in growing old.
He watched those women climb those stairs, looming over the fat f... who had just finished shoveling a giant meal into his already giant frame, and thought of the lean Khmers in the crowded streets outside. The coolies who worked all day in the beating sun on the construction site next door. The pounding of hammers breaking through the day. They seemed oblivious to their own disgrace. The man lit up a cigarette, unhealthy in every way. The people with him watched on in a kind of complicity. There could be no way out. A man would drive him home in a tuk tuk for a slightly inflated price, four dollars, because he was white and pissed. He was happy to tip if they got him home safely and didn't rob him.
They didn't and everything came swirling back. More than 90% of the professors in America are Liberals, the academic told him, they voted Democrat. So how is Obama doing? Has he failed to link to the working masses all you people purport to represent? But they had no love of the common man. They had a love of their comfortable salaries and comfortable views; so progressive in their own little extinguished minds. He said something to that effect and the academic shouldered it all with good humour. Yes, I am in a very privileged position. The ugly girl talked to one of her friends, even higher up the stairs now, disappearing, all but her trunk like legs, and next to him another bunch of tourists settled. Briefly. It's tourist season, the old man explained, before the hot season gets here in April, May. And this place - the Foreign Correspondents Club - there will always be tourists. It's in all the Guide Books.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.smh.com.au/national/hunt-for-killer-after-indian-boy-found-dead-20100304-pm01.html
Police have launched a hunt for the killer of a three-year-old Indian boy who was found dead last night after he disappeared from a house in Melbourne's north.
A council worker found the body of Gurshan Singh Channa in long grass on the side of a road near Melbourne Airport just before 7pm.
The boy, who had been visiting Australia on a holiday with his family, went missing yesterday afternoon from a house in David Street, Lalor.
His mother, Harpreet Kaur Channa, called police after he had been missing for 45 minutes, prompting a massive search. She told police she thought her son had walked out the front door while she was showering.
Homicide detectives were called in last night after the discovery of the body at Wildwood Road, Oaklands Junction, about 20 kilometres from where the boy went missing.
Police said he was found in the same clothes he was wearing when he went missing - a grey top and blue jeans.
They declined to give details of injuries he had suffered, or to speculate on the precise cause of his death.
But at a media conference late last night, Victoria Police deputy commissioner Sir Ken Jones said it was believed the boy had been murdered.
''We are treating as worst case … as a homicide,'' Sir Ken said. ''This is a terrible tragedy.
''We are doing everything in our power to establish what happened. Clearly the circumstances are suspicious, so we are assuming the worst.''
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/asia/100215/cambodia-development-street-sweep
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — At night in Cambodia’s capital, parks once populated by sex workers fell silent. Streets and abandoned lots in the center of Phnom Penh where drug addicts and homeless slept lay empty. The city’s underbelly had been washed away.
Then reports of abuse emerged. Sex workers said police had detained them for weeks, taking the cash they had on hand and raping them — even those who protested by saying they had HIV. There were accounts of government facilities where drug users, street kids and the mentally ill were beaten and starved. Rights workers reported a security crisis for the groups they served, and a facility was shut down after they and the U.N. raised concerns.
That was more than a year ago and the uproar has since eased. Now, a new report has put the government’s street sweep campaign front and center again.
In a report released Jan. 25, Human Rights Watch describes a climate of “sadistic violence” in the government’s drug rehabilitation centers. Drug users face beatings and arduous forced labor, while being deprived of effective treatment for their addiction, the watchdog group says.
“He had three kinds of cable … he would ask you which one you prefer. On each whip the skin would come off and stick to the cable,” the report quotes a 16-year-old identified as M’noh as saying.
In its own study, the World Health Organization found a nearly 100 percent relapse rate in people coming out of the government’s drug rehabilitation facilities. “This is a common approach globally,” says Graham Shaw, a technical adviser for the World Health Organization in Cambodia. “It’s cheap and easy and it allows the government to show the public that it’s responding to drug dependence problems amongst the population, but it doesn’t provide a solution.”
The facilities are presided over by a mix of authorities, including local government offices, the Social Affairs Ministry as well as civilian and military police. Human Rights Watch says officials running the rehabilitation centers profited by renting out detainees as laborers and by selling blood they forced detainees to donate. More than 2,000 people were detained in 11 of these facilities throughout the country in 2008, the vast majority involuntarily, according to the group.
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