Locals manoeuvre their small vessels along the Mekong river in Phnom Penh November 7, 2012.

BANGKOK | Fri Jan 18, 2013 5:05am EST

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Vietnam urged Laos to halt construction of a $3.5 billion hydropower dam pending further study, environmental activists said on Friday after a meeting of the Mekong River Commission.

The activists said Cambodia, also downriver from the Xayaburi dam, accused Laos during heated discussions on Wednesday and Thursday of failing to consult on the project.

The dam in northern Laos, the first of 11 planned for the lower Mekong river running through Southeast Asia, threatens the livelihood of tens of millions who depend on the river's aquatic resources, activists say.

"Vietnam requested that no further developments on the Mekong mainstream occur until the Mekong mainstream dams study agreed upon at least year's Council Meeting is completed," International Rivers, an NGO devoted to river conservation, said in a statement.

"The Cambodian delegation asserted that Laos had misinterpreted the Mekong Agreement."

Officials from Cambodia and Vietnam were not immediately available for comment.

Ministers from member countries that make up the Mekong River Commission (MRC) overseeing the river's development -- Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand -- met in northern Laos on Wednesday and Thursday.

The MRC is bound by treaty to hold inter-governmental consultations before dams are built. But members have no veto.

"In the absence of an agreement, other countries can disagree if they like but this can't stop Laos," said Jian-hua Meng, a specialist in sustainable hydropower at the World Wildlife Fund.

"The role of the MRC is now being questioned along with the level of investment put in the organization."

TURNING POINT

In December 2011, MRC member states agreed to conduct new environmental impact assessments before construction proceeded, but last August Ch Karnchang PCL, the Thai construction company behind the project, said it had resumed work.

A groundbreaking ceremony in November signaled the formal start of construction, said Meng.

Ch Karnchang's 50 percent-owned subsidiary, Xayaburi Power Co, has received a 29-year concession from the Laotian government to operate the dam's power plant and Thailand is set to buy around 95 percent of the electricity generated.

Milton Osborne of the Lowy Institute, an Australian foreign policy think tank, said Xayaburi marked a turning-point that would enable others to build their own dams, including Cambodia.

He described as a "monstrous disaster" a proposal for a Chinese power company to build a dam at Sambor in northeastern Cambodia, on a tributary of the Mekong.

"It would be so disastrous, blocking one of the main fish migratory systems," he said by telephone.

Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia share the lower stretches of the 4,000-km (2,500-mile) Mekong. Activists say dams could threaten food security in Cambodia and Vietnam.

The river provides up to 80 percent of the animal protein consumed in Cambodia and sediment and changes to river flow threaten the Mekong Delta, which contributes half of Vietnam's agricultural GDP.

Cambodia approved its own hydroelectric dams in November.

A second Cambodian project, the Lower Sesan dam in northern Stung Treng province, is a joint venture between Cambodian, Chinese and Vietnamese companies. Campaigners say it would reduce the fish catch in a country with malnutrition issues.

(Additional reporting by Prak Chan Thul in Phnom Penh; Editing by Alan Raybould and Ron Popeski)

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PHNOM PENH | Thu Dec 27, 2012 2:41am EST

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - A Cambodian court ordered the return to prison on Thursday of two men seen by rights groups as scapegoats for the 2005 murder of a top unionist, the latest controversial ruling in a country chided for its low judicial standards.

The Appeals Court upheld a lower court's handing down of 20-year jail terms for Born Samnang and Sok Sam Oeun for killing Free Trade Union (FTU) leader Chea Vichea, despite weak evidence.

Following a public outcry, the Supreme Court released the two on bail in 2008 after three years in jail to allow further investigation. The Appeals Court on Thursday made no mention of any new evidence against them.

"Please help me, this is very unjust," Born Samnang shouted as he was taken away by police. He wept and said he would seek help from King Norodom Sihamoni to clear his name.

Cambodia's positive image among investors as one of Asia's most promising emerging economies and a cheaper alternative to China is being dented by allegations of rampant rights abuses and political interference in the judiciary to silence dissent or allow well-connected figures to walk free.

Violence against union leaders is not uncommon in Cambodia and activists say scapegoats have been found to ensure those instigating the attacks go unpunished.

As Cambodia's $4.2 billion garment manufacturing sector grows, unions and workers are becoming increasingly emboldened, holding protests and strikes over pay and working conditions.

Rights groups were incensed last week when a local politician connected with the ruling party was cleared by a court of firing bullets into a crowd of striking factory workers earlier this year, wounding three women.

Chea Mony, the current FTU president and brother of the late Chea Vichea, said he was shocked by Thursday's ruling and criticized the authorities for failing to bring the real culprits to justice.

"We have not seen any light of justice at all in this case," Chea Mony told Reuters. "The court is well aware of what's going on and that it lacks its independence."

(Editing by Martin Petty)

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NEW YORK | Thu Sep 27, 2012 7:58am EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A seven-year old child is torn from a secure and happy life when the Khmer Rouge come to power in Cambodia in 1975 and send her privileged family into the misery of hard labor as the new regime destroys the established order.

"In the Shadow of the Banyan" is the first novel of Vaddey Ratner, 41. While the book is powerful as told through the eyes of seven-year-old Raami, Ratner's own story is more so.

Only five when the Khmer Rouge came to power, the author endured four years of forced labor and starvation before she and her mother were able to flee the country. Arriving in the United States by a tortuous path and unable to speak English, she ultimately graduated from Cornell University and only years later returned to Cambodia.

Ratner now resides in Potomac, Maryland, with her husband and daughter and talked to Reuters about the book and her experiences during a brutal period of Cambodian history.

Q: How much of your story is autobiographical?

A: "The overall narrative follows my family experience, the move from the city, the uprooting, the loss of loved ones, the starvation. I make my father a poet but in real life he was a pilot. The story is a closed narrative and the characters have to move the story forward. I had to collapse some characters into one, the same with villages and towns. I created a lot of fictional villages and towns and used the memories of where we stayed."

Q: Do you want vengeance? Do you feel any bitterness?

A: "I don't want vengeance and I don't feel any bitterness. If I feel anything, I mourn for those I lost and the act of remembering requires so much energy, I feel that is all I have to give. I don't have the energy for anger or vengeance, nor do I want to have it."

Q: Your father was a pilot and member of the Cambodian royal family. Did you reveal who your father was to the Khmer Rouge as the child does in the book?

A: "Yes, I revealed who he was. I said his name. I revealed who he was."

Q: Do you feel guilty?

A: "What I feel is haunted and I will never be free of what happened. I will always reflect on what if I had not said his name."

Q: Mae and Pok, the two peasants who took in the book's main protaganists as family, were very sympathetic characters. Were they based on real people? Did you ever try to find them?

A: "Yes, they were real people. They were the easiest to capture as I felt they just translated into English. I did not need to collapse any other people into them to make them in the book. They were as I remember them as a child. But I would not go back to those various villages. Even now, my heart goes aflutter at the thought of going back to those various villages. I would only be confronted with those various losses. What was redemptive about writing this book was I found something beyond those losses. For me to go back, I fear that."

Q: Is your mother still alive? How does she feel about her life?

A: "My mother is still alive. She is very grateful and fiercely guards the few things she feels she has. The peace and solitude she has now. We have so little left of our family, what she was able to build was out of sheer determination."

Q: How much do you tell your daughter? How old is she?

A: "My daughter is 12. My husband and I have an understanding with each other, maybe an extension of how my father spoke to me, when we are asked something we tell her the truth as much as she wants to know."

Q: Was writing the book an act of personal therapy?

A: "It was a strange kind of therapy. At the end of writing it, I realized the depth of redemption I feel. I had felt apprehension that I would have to relive a lot of the ordeal over again. I did not know for sure whether I would come out of it. But I also felt this was the story I had to write.

Q: What was the one personal anecdote in the book that was hardest to write? Why?

"Gosh, every single one of them. Each one dealt into a different dimension of loss. With the loss of my father, it is founded on loss that is unanswerable to this day. I don't know what happened to him. With my sister I felt even the certainty I felt was so absurd, that a disease such as malaria could have been prevented. I chose all of them (the anecdotes) to find some understanding. They did not appear at random. I struggle with them still."

(Reporting By Nick Olivari; editing by Patricia Reaney and Paul Casciato)

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