All the news is new and approved
I get to see the news every so often, not that often. The TV news is CNN or BBC World, so it’s quite US-centric, or in the case of BBC World a procession of B-team news readers and dull-as-ditchwater business reports I swear not a soul watches, interspersed with adverts for Rolex watches and how nice it is to do business in Bahrain. The advert about Bahrain made me laugh. A lady who runs a school here told me she left the school she’d run in Bahrain after she’d been called ‘infidel whore’ for about the millionth time.
The news here has been focussed on the food crisis. in Thailand, people have been working all day in their rice paddies and then staying outside at night, all night, just to guard their rice in case it is stolen from the fields. It is too precious. In Siem Reap, food prices and gasoline prices have gone up, even the contraband gasoline that you buy from Johnnie Walker bottles at the roadside. A short while ago the World Food Program dropped off a huge shipment of yellow peas at a school because there was no rice available, and then even worse turned up the next day and took it all away saying it had been a mistake delivering it there in the first place. Friends of mine who are working there were asking me if I knew any good recipes that used yellow peas, as the Cambodians didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with them.
Iain posted a link to a story on the Guardian website about the sale of Cambodian land to foreign property speculators - as much as 50% of the whole country has been sold off to Russia, Korea, China, the UK and elsewhere and people who thought they had legitimate property deeds have been booted off their land by the police and military. It has been doing the rounds and people have been talking about it, but it is a sad fact that we get this kind of news from media in the West as it is buried here. Though Cambodia is ostensibly a democracy, criticism of the government is not tolerated and many Khmers are very careful about what they say for fear of reprisals. When Global Witness published a report about illegal logging in Cambodia they were unceremoniously ejected from the country, and government officials who speak out about corruption are moved to jobs guarding lavatories in remote areas. There are elections coming up in the next couple of months, but the chances of the ruling elite losing power are slim to none, and even if they did, talk is that it would be contested, violently if need be.
And to think with the clear, fair democracy we have in the UK, people actually voted Boris into power.
Quite Random is the blog of Nathan Nelson, a human male who lives in the UK and is not entirely sure what he's going to do when he grows up but is interested in international development, photography, secularism, technology, music and movies and other things anyone of his age would be.
