Word: cambodia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...patches of sidewalk; beggars missing limbs, a legacy of civil war, crowd outside upscale restaurants where a tiny élite downs French entrées and chic cocktails. But many average Cambodians hope this poverty will vanish, thanks to an apparent miracle: the country has discovered oil. Off Cambodia's southern coast, explorers have found as much as 500 million barrels, potentially providing over $1 billion annually to the country...
...Cambodia is hardly unique. As oil prices hit record levels, multinationals are hunting for black gold in ever more unlikely places, and many Southeast Asian nations now are eagerly exploring new fields. Yet few seem to realize that rather than miracles, oil often brings misery, including the massive graft witnessed in some petroleum-rich African and Middle Eastern states...
...Many Asian countries could go Nigeria's way so far as oil is concerned. Cambodia, which is still recovering from the Khmer Rouge era, ranks near the bottom of Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, and does not possess the institutions to monitor how the government uses its new oil riches. East Timor's economy will have almost no other foundations - studies estimate over 90% of government revenues eventually will come from oil. Before its latest brutal crackdown on peaceful protestors, Burma's military regime already demonstrated such little concern for its people that it reportedly spent among the lowest...
...architects of Cambodia's Killing Fields, justice has long been delayed. A U.N.-backed tribunal was established last year to try those accused of orchestrating the genocidal rampage that killed up to 2 million between 1975 and 1979. But after years of bureaucratic snags and political foot-dragging, the number of suspects left to prosecute is dwindling. Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge regime, died in his sleep at age 73 in 1998. Ta Mok, the feared Khmer Rouge military commander, succumbed at 81 in a Phnom Penh hospital last year...
...police special forces and military police surrounded a small wooden home on the outskirts of Pailin town in the country's northwest and arrested Nuon Chea, the Khmer Rouge's infamous "Brother Number Two," Pol Pot's deputy. Now 82, the most senior Khmer Rouge leader still surviving in Cambodia has had years to prepare for his eventual arrest. He surrendered to the government in 1998 but had been allowed to live in quiet retirement with his wife in a region that was a communist stronghold until the mid-1990s. After being arrested and fingerprinted, Nuon Chea was helped into...