KI Media: “Indonesia's peace solution proposal approved by Cambodia: official” plus 4 more

JAKARTA, May 13 (Xinhua) -- An Indonesian government official said on Friday that the Cambodian government has approved the peace solution proposed by Indonesia to settle the armed conflict between Thailand and Cambodia.

"Thailand government has yet to approve the package solution. The approval would wait for its cabinet meeting scheduled within the next few days," Indonesian Foreign Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Micahel Tene said here.

Michael added that the package solution was in the recent trilateral meeting between Indonesia, Thailand and Cambodia foreign ministers here on May 9, following tough discussions on the issue during the 18th ASEAN Summit recently.

The meeting among foreign ministers of the three countries was mandated by the previous trilateral meeting among President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, and prime ministers of Thailand and Cambodia in the summit.

As the implementation of the proposal Indonesian Observer Team (IOT) would be deployed in the disputed border area according to a timeline inside the package, monitoring efforts and condition in the fields that favoring to peace solution.

Besides that the quick announcement of the establishment of General Border Committee (GBC) and Thailand's approval on the terms contained in the Terms of Reference (TOR) towards the deployment of IOT was also part of requirement to the package solution.

Thailand and Cambodia agreed that conflict between them be settled in ASEAN-facilitated measures with Indonesia, the ASEAN chair this year.

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WASHINGTON—The arrest of International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn on sexual assault accusations throws into disarray not only the IMF's leadership, but its central role in the financial rescue of several struggling European nations.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn was arrested Saturday in New York for an alleged sexual assault of a maid in a Manhattan hotel, authorities said. According to a law enforcement official, Mr. Strauss-Kahn allegedly forced a cleaning woman onto his bed and sexually assaulted her at around 1 p.m. Saturday inside his room at the Sofitel Hotel near Times Square.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62, was headed to Europe to discuss the worsening European debt crisis with top leaders there. He was scheduled to meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday and financial ministers in the Euro Group on Monday and Tuesday. Besides putting the finishing touches on the €78 billion Portugal bailout package, the main focus of the meetings was how to resolve Greece's deteriorating sovereign debt crisis.

The arrest of the head of one of the world's most important financial institutions comes at a time when the global economy is still recovering from the 2008 financial crisis, and when Europe is still reeling from a still-unfolding series of government debt crises.

The charges, if true, would strike a blow to France's current politics. Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a former French finance minister who ran unsuccessfully for the Socialist nomination for French president in 2006, had been widely expected to resign from the IMF in coming months to run for the presidency of France as a Socialist Party candidate.

The incident Saturday will undoubtedly cast a cloud over the IMF's role in addressing the rescues. Mr. Strauss-Kahn had been seen as a forceful leader in responding to the European debt crisis.

He has strongly supported the Greek rescue, even in the face of growing doubts about the Greek government's ability and resolve to meet the commitments of the international aid package. His latest trip was likely to focus on whether to adjust the terms of Greece's loans in order to keep the country—and the rest of the euro zone—from falling into a deeper crisis.

Germany's finance ministry said the government is waiting to finalize its conclusions on Greece once the troika of the IMF, European Central Bank and European Commission have published the findings of their current ongoing review of the Greek rescue program.

Ms. Merkel wanted Mr. Strauss-Kahn's opinion on Greece, Portugal and Ireland before finalizing her own view.

An IMF mission is in Greece now reviewing the state of the country's finances, chiefly trying to determine whether the fund's board can approve another tranche of the joint EU/IMF €110 billion emergency rescue loan.

Emerging-market nations had questioned aspects of the IMF's response, with some members suggesting "if one of their countries were in trouble the IMF would never give them so much rope," said Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University economist and former IMF official.

Having Mr. Strauss-Kahn sidelined could give them more power to push back against deeper involvement in some European nations.

"The level of support from the IMF for Europe is going to come into question to some degree, both in terms of the amount of resources and the conditions imposed," Mr. Prasad said.

The arrest throws into question whether Mr. Strauss-Kahn will be forced to resign his slot. In 2008, early in his IMF term, he was investigated by the IMF's staff for whether he abused his power by having an affair with a female staffer. Although he was cleared of abuse of power charges, several directors said they warned Mr. Strauss-Kahn that such conduct wouldn't be allowed in the future and that he had brought the IMF into disrepute.

At the time, the IMF chief acknowledged the lapse in judgment and apologized to the board and staff. "I am committed, going forward, to uphold the high standards" expected of an IMF managing director, Mr. Strauss-Kahn said then.

An IMF executive board member said the board members were shocked to hear the news from the media, but had seen nothing official from the IMF about the incident. IMF spokesman Bill Murray declined to comment when reached Saturday evening.

With or without a quick resignation from Mr. Strauss-Kahn, the IMF's daily leadership is likely to fall to John Lipsky, the No. 2 official at the fund, under the IMF procedures. But Mr. Lipsky is also on his way out.

Mr. Lipsky, a U.S. national and former J.P. Morgan Chase executive, announced Thursday that he would step down when his five-year term ends in August. Mr. Lipsky, the fund's first deputy managing director, had agreed to serve as a special advisor to Mr. Strauss-Kahn through November's meeting of heads of state from the Group of 20 leading economies.

Current and former IMF board members said that if the investigation proceeds, the IMF's 24-member executive board based in Washington would likely be called in for an emergency meeting to discuss the allegations and how to proceed with the fund's top leadership. By tradition, the fund's managing director is a European and the No. 2 official is an American.

European finance ministers have been preparing for Mr. Strauss-Kahn's possible resignation, given widespread speculation about his pursuit of the French presidency.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn is a leading member of France's opposition Socialist Party and has been considered as a potential front-runner for the next presidential election in May 2012.

The Socialist Party is holding primaries this Fall but candidates have been requested to apply to run between June 28 and July 13.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn's decision regarding his candidacy has been much awaited as polls have consistently shown over the past few months that he would beat France's current president Nicolas Sarkozy as soon as in the first round. His decision was expected as soon as end of May, a person close to him told Dow Jones Newswires.

European finance ministers "were already factoring in that Strauss-Kahn could be leaving very soon," said Domenico Lombardi, Brookings Institution economist and former IMF official. "They would have talked about the succession anyway, of course under different circumstances....I would expect that the position could be filled in a relatively short length of time."

PHNOM PENH - In June 2010, diplomats and donors converged on a conference hall in Cambodia's capital for a meeting with senior government officials. Seated in rows with headphones beaming in live translations, donor representatives listened to key ministers speak about the country's progress on a series of agreed to good governance reforms.

Despite concerns raised about a spate of illegal land grabs, persistent human-rights abuses and legal harassment of government critics - all of which prompted the usual vague assurances from officials that the situation would improve - donors offered development aid totaling an unprecedented US$1.1 billion for fiscal 2010-11.

Aid to Cambodia has increased more or less consistently since the United Nations Transitional Authority's (UNTAC) departure from the country in 1993. A child of the 1991 Paris Peace Accords, UNTAC was designed to bring an end to Cambodia's long civil war, establish a functioning electoral system and eventually usher in economic development.

For any observer of contemporary Cambodia, however, the optimism of the UNTAC era now seems almost quaint. If one accepts political commentator Fareed Zakaria's dictum that a democratic system is better symbolized by the impartial judge than the mass plebiscite (Cambodia, after all, has elections), then one glance at the judicial system - where bribery and political interference are more or less the norm - is all it takes to conclude that the country is not meaningfully democratic.

While the Khmer Rouge era has produced reams of historical accounts and personal memoirs, most books focused on contemporary Cambodia peter out in the late 1990s following the death of the Khmer Rouge insurgency and the end of the country's bloody civil war. How Cambodia has since dealt with the wages of peace remains largely unexamined.

It is therefore welcome that American journalist Joel Brinkley chose Cambodia as the subject for his fifth book, Cambodia's Curse: the modern history of a troubled land. Brinkley, a 25-year veteran of the New York Times who shared a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the refugee crisis that followed the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, returned to Cambodia in 2008 to examine what it had done with UNTAC's $3 billion "gift". What he finds is a country bereft of the rule of law and plagued by grinding poverty, where human development indices are among the lowest in Asia.

Brinkley does a commendable job in sketching out the contours of Cambodian society. His narrative is enlivened by the voices of individual Cambodians who have been marginalized by the country's corrupt political system. Traveling around the country, he examines Cambodia's courts, schools and health system, all of which have been bled dry by graft and hollowed out by years of official neglect.

He visits ramshackle settlements on the edges of Phnom Penh, where thousands of residents have been dumped after being illegally uprooted from valuable land in the city center, and highlights the nexus of corrupt officials and businessmen who have plundered Cambodia's natural resources for personal gain. In one of the book's more memorable passages, Brinkley interviews tycoon and senator Mong Reththy at his luxurious Phnom Penh villa, listening to the businessman proffer a series of thin excuses about the origins of his lavish wealth.

Unfortunately, the book's text is marred by a series of small factual errors. Officials or political parties are occasionally misidentified (Deputy Prime Minister Sok An is not a member of the government's ruling triumvirate, whose three-headed insignia Brinkley spots on the wristwatch of a government official); the now daily Phnom Penh Post was never published weekly, though it was previously a fortnightly publication.

Brinkley also errs when he describes Pol Pot as having died a "free man" in 1998. In fact, the Khmer Rouge leader was living under house arrest at the time of his death after facing a kangaroo court set up by the last remaining members of his Maoist movement. His preface ends with the puzzling assertion that Cambodians "remain the most abused people in the world", a phrase that invites rather aimless comparison with other unfortunate nations in the developing world.

The book's best passages deal with the complex relationship between Cambodia and its Western aid donors. The author deftly charts the process by which government officials, through a combination of flattery and feigned outrage, have learnt to manipulate foreign governments into pledging ever-higher amounts of development assistance, all the while presiding over a system that has consigned the majority of Cambodians to poverty. He also pours acid on those foreign aid workers who, attached to the country's comfortable expatriate lifestyle - Phnom Penh's parallel economy of "espresso bars and stylish restaurants" - see little incentive to rock the boat.

The text falters, however, when Brinkley attempts to answer the questions posed by his own narrative: why, in the final analysis, do contemporary Cambodians seem unable to struggle against those who exploit them? Why do so many seemingly accept poverty and exploitation as their natural lot in life? His thesis, built into the title of his book, is that Cambodia is somehow "cursed" by cultural hand-me-downs from its feudal past. "Far more than almost any other state," he writes, "modern Cambodia is a product of customs and practices set in stone a millennium ago".

"Given their history, given the subservient state Cambodians have accepted without complaint for more than a millennium, they don't seem to care," he adds. "Now, once again, most expect nothing more than they have. They carry no ambitions. They hold no dreams. All they want is to be left alone."

This is hardly the case. The country's modern history is rife with examples of rebellion, of which the Khmer Rouge, while representing its bloody apotheosis, was far from the only significant manifestation. Brinkley's assertion also fails to account for the villagers who have fought back against land grabbing by corrupt officials and the continuing efforts of those human-rights activists, trade union leaders and opposition figures who have stood up to demand more official accountability, often at threat to their lives.

For Brinkley, Cambodia's great hope lies in its foreign donors. If only such governments and international institutions put pressure on prime minister Hun Sen's government to enact key reforms and respect international human-rights law, he reasons, Cambodians might "after 1,000 years" be delivered from their perpetual suffering.

Given Brinkley's emphasis on foreign countries - some of his main sources, tellingly, are former US ambassadors to Cambodia - it is surprising that the rise of China rates only a brief mention in the book's epilogue. In recent years, Beijing has risen to become Cambodia's main source of investment and economic aid, a development that has undoubtedly complicated the West's ability to take a principled policy stand. The related point is that Western donors may actually have wider strategic objectives than promoting human rights or good governance.

By appealing to cultural essentialism and putting much of the onus for change on Cambodia's foreign donors, Brinkley leaves little scope for the possibility that Cambodians themselves may be able to forge their own path to a better life. As the yearly government-donor meetings play out year after year with much the same effect, there may, at the end of the day, be little in the way of an alternative.

Cambodia's Curse: The modern history of a troubled land by Joel Brinkley. PublicAffairs, 2011. ISBN 1586487876. Price US$27.99, 416 pages.