#73 – Togetherness
Sweating through Khmer New Year Heat
Sou Sdei and welcome to Campuccino, your fortnightly dispatch of key headlines in Cambodia with a dash of opinion.
To new subscribers, welcome! I’m Darathtey, a communication consultant, writer, and researcher. Learn more about my work here.
It’s been almost a month since you last heard from me. I took a mini newsletter break to focus on other work while doing a bit of travelling. During the break, I spent some time in Hanoi which I absolutely adored despite the pollution, and I finally took a short Khmer New Year trip down to Sihanoukville (SHV) after my last visit 8 years ago. It was an experience with mixed emotions which I will briefly share in a short write-up below. In the meantime, let’s get you caught up with what has been going on in the Kingdom in the past few weeks.
- Darathtey
In this issue: Khmer New Year celebration, Sihanoukville: the goods and the bads, economic growth forecast, new big canal on the Mekong, design magazine, and more.
I must admit that I put off going to SHV for so long because I was afraid of what I might find. I tried to preserve some of my most precious memories of my family's quality times on the quiet Otres beach, one of which was our last trip with my mother. However, delaying my going there has made me feel like a hypocrite in the sense that I have talked about it extensively in this newsletter. So, I made myself go, partly to spend time with my family but also partly for research purposes. I was not surprised that the city had transformed beyond my recognition. However, it was not all bad, from my perspective as an overnight Cambodian visitor. Were there abandoned buildings? Of course. In fact, there were 500 of them according to this article by Nikkei Asia. The beaches felt more polished and organised, a stark contrast from 8 years ago. I appreciate some of the new developments along these beaches – bigger paved roads, sidewalks, public showers and restroom stations. While sitting on the beach listening to the sound of the sea on one side and watching people playing water fight on the other, it felt almost normal if not for the knowledge I store in my head that in this very town, there are compounds that trap people against their will to conduct a global-scale scam business. In early April, a joint operation between Cambodia and Chinese law enforcement arrested over 700 Chinese during a crackdown on two online gambling and scam sites in SHV. Read more about the raids here.
For those who like numbers, ADB has predicted that Cambodia’s economy will grow 6% by 2025. The growth will be mostly driven by tourism and export-oriented manufacturing. Now, I can’t comment much on the manufacturing front because I frankly don’t know enough about it. However, I couldn’t help but feel like the growth expected from tourism is a bit overly optimistic, even though I am aware that numbers don’t lie. Having travelled regularly to Bangkok and recently to Hanoi, I observed that the level of tourist activities in those cities are at another level compared to Phnom Penh or Siem Reap. While I can tell from the naked eyes that visitors have slowly returned to the Kingdom, I am not sure if it is back to the level that it once was before the pandemic. In fact, the government just recently announced the Tourism Financing Scheme for Siem Reap (TFSS). TFSS offers struggling tourism-related businesses special loan terms, including providing fixed credit from $20,000 to $600,000, with a financial period of up to eight months with a 6.5% annual interest rate.
Cambodia’s newly announced canal project in the Mekong, which I mentioned in #72, continues to spark interest from regional media as well as Vietnamese academics concerning China’s influence. On top of the anticipated environmental impact, Vietnam state-backed researchers expressed concern over the potential use of the new canal for Chinese military presence, according to a news report from the Strait Times. This concern was met by a response from Cambodia’s former PM and Senate President Hun Sen dismissing that the Techo Funan Canal would facilitate Chinese Naval activity closer to the Vietnamese border. I guess only time will tell? 🤷🏽♀️
Visually Pleasing
Arts & Culture
💭 This week, Cambodia celebrated one of the biggest holidays – Khmer New Year. While yours truly is borderline a KNY Grinch, I couldn’t help but feel the joy radiating from celebrations across the country. I have noticed that the party aspect – water and powder fights – of KNY has become more popular and bigger in the past couple of years. Even though I happily sat out the festivities of coming into physical contact with hundreds of strangers, I enjoyed observing it at length.
🎨 BondomKomnit is a platform for artists, designers, and the Cambodian creative community to intersect, learn from, and empower each other. I think it is pretty neat, and I’m most excited about their first design e-magazine that is packed with tons of ideas, articles, and resources from various experts, and up-and-coming Cambodian artists. It is free to download.
Worth Reading
For Indigenous Bunong, Land Rights Are Key to their Identity | By Meng Kroypunlok and Danielle Keeton-Olsen
Similar to many indigenous communities around the world, Bunong people in Cambodia have an inseparable tie between their land and their identity. Losing their land means losing significant parts of themselves. The residents of Laoka village of Mondulkiri are facing many barriers in attempts to register their land as community protected forest. They have been living on the land for generations, but the government has granted parts of it to private companies.
Experts fear Cambodian cybercrime law could aid crackdown | By Fiona Kelliher and Sun Narin
The cybercrime law is not a new topic and I mentioned it before. However, this recent article in VOA stood out to me because it presented a new angle of suppression that I had not read about before. Apparently, this law deems it illegal to use any technology to “display, trade, produce or disseminate pornography, or to advertise a ‘product or service mixed with pornography, online.” It loosely defines pornography as anything that “describes a genital or depicts any act or activity involving a sexual organ or any part of the human body, animal, or object … or other similar pornography that is intended to stimulate sexual desire or cause sexual excitement.” I’ll let you put 2 and 2 together regarding who will be the target of such vague law.
Campuccino is a fortnightly dispatch of key headlines in Cambodia, written by @DarathteyDin.
I’d love to hear from you. If you have feedback or content ideas, please write to me at hello@darathteydin.com
I greatly appreciate your newsletter, Darathtey! I used to live in Thailand but have never been to Cambodia. However...my partner and I are moving there in June with our two cats. I'm trying to learn more about that corner of the world before our arrival.