By MARK MCDONALD
HONG KONG — A court in Cambodia has sentenced a 71-year-old radio journalist to 20 years in prison for allegedly encouraging a secessionist movement in a remote eastern village.
The conviction, however, by most independent accounts, has nothing to do with insurrection and everything to do with the suppression of dissent over an ongoing series of land grabs, illegal logging and forced evictions.
International diplomats and human rights groups roundly assailed the verdict against the journalist, Mam Sonando, the founder of Beehive Radio, one of the country’s few independent stations.
“Criminalization of land activists and human rights defenders is particularly worrying,” Professor Surya P. Subedi, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Cambodia, said before the verdict was announced.
In a report on Sept. 24 to the U.N. Human Rights Council, Mr. Subedi said he was “concerned that, despite the Government’s commitment to fighting corruption, many concessionaires operate behind a veil of secrecy.”
The U.S. State Department called Tuesday for the government to immediately release Mam Sonando, saying, “A number of observers in Cambodia have noted that the charges against him appear to have been politically motivated, based on his frequent criticism of the government.”
We are deeply concerned by the conviction and harsh sentence of Mam Sonando in #Cambodia. go.usa.gov/Yg7C
— StateDept (@StateDept) October 2, 2012
Three weeks ago, the journalist Hang Serei Oudom, 44, a Cambodian newspaper reporter who had been investigating illegal logging, was found dead in the trunk of his car at a cashew plantation. His murder was denounced by, among others, the director general of Unesco, Irina Bokova.
In April, the conservationist Chut Wutty was shot and killed by a soldier at an illegal logging site, an incident reported on Rendezvous.
Amnesty International, terming Mam Sonando a “prisoner of conscience,” said it would be actively campaigning for his release.
20 year verdict for journalist in #Cambodia shocking and baseless owl.li/e7PZK
— AmnestyInternational (@amnesty) October 1, 2012
Rupert Abbott, Amnesty’s Cambodia researcher, attended the trial and the verdict session and said no evidence was presented about an alleged rebellion or secession.
The case appears to stem from a dispute in Broma, a village in Kratie Province, in Cambodia’s heavily forested northeast. Villagers had been pushing back against a government lease of 37,000 acres of their land to an agricultural company, Casotim. The company, for its part, claimed that village farmers were blocking its bulldozers, planting crops and infringing on land it had leased.
Hundreds of police officers raided the village in May. During the raid, security forces shot and killed a 14-year-old girl.
At the trial, prosecutors would argue that the unarmed villagers had “planned to use common farm and hunting tools to defeat Cambodian forces and form their own nation,” according to an account by Licadho, the respected Cambodian human rights organization.
Mr. Subedi, the U.N. special rapporteur, had repeatedly criticized the government, its lessees and contractors over illegal practices such as the “land grabbing and confiscation of livestock, destruction of homes and property, damage to burial grounds, and physical aggression and intimidation, including the use of firearms against specific individuals and communities.”
In a speech following the Broma raid, Prime Minister Hun Sen called for the arrest of Mam Sonando and other land-use campaigners, saying they had been encouraging Broma to secede from Cambodia.
Around that time, Beehive Radio had been broadcasting reports about possible charges of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court over the forced evictions. Some saw a direct link between Mam Sonando’s I.C.C. reports and his arrest.
“Sonando represents a threat to the government, but not because he has any intention to secede,” said Naly Pilorge, the Licadho director. “It’s because he owns one of the last remaining independent radio stations in Cambodia, and because he provides airtime to opposition parties and voices from outside the ruling circle.”
Press Release: Phnom Penh Court Sentences Independent Radio Station Owner to 20 Years bit.ly/PmCBRz #cambodia #rights
— LICADHO (@licadho) October 1, 2012
In addition to Mam Sonando’s conviction, three activists and three Broma villagers received prison terms of up to 35 years. Seven other villagers, in exchange for their testimony, had their sentences suspended.
Mr. Abbott, the Amnesty researcher, was one of those suggesting that the government had concocted the insurrection plot as legal cover to quash the Broma dispute, one of many across Cambodia in the past decade that have resulted in the forced evictions of tens of thousands of families.
“This unbelievable narrative of secession has been used to silence dissent,” Mr. Abbott said, adding that the case marked “a disturbing deterioration in the situation of freedom of expression in Cambodia.”
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