Executive Staff - Americans for a Free Republic
Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas, a graduate of Beloit College in Wisconsin, and the Executive Director of Americans for a Free Republic. His articles have appeared in publications such as The Dallas Morning News, Insight, The Freeman, Liberty, The Social Critic, and on numerous websites such as Free Market News, Financial Sense, Safe Haven and Gold-Eagle. He is the author of Why We Must Abolish The Income Tax And The IRS (1996), and Breaking the Demopublican Monopoly (2004). In addition he has just finished a book on political- philosophy titled, The Golden Mean: The Case for Libertarian Politics and Conservative Values. In 1998, he was featured along with Congressmen Bill Archer, Dick Armey, and Billy Tauzin in Texas Business magazine as one of Texas' leading tax reformers ("Texas Tea Party," May-June 1998).

Gerard Fitzgerald serves as the President of Americans for a Free Republic. He has enjoyed a highly prosperous career in the field of advertising for over 35 years in Las Vegas, Nevada. Semi-retired at present, he owned his own company (Domad, Inc.) for many years and served as the Director of Advertising for Argent Corporation's Stardust, Hacienda and Freemont Hotels. For 12 years in the late 70s and early 80s, he was the advertising director and close confidant of the famous entertainer Rodney Dangerfield. He handled "out of state promotions" for the state of Nevada throughout North America, and in 1994 he ran on the Republican Party ticket for the Nevada State Legislature. He started life as an ardent Republican, but gradually came to realize the corrupt nature of all politics that tries to run the American economy from Washington. He describes himself as a "Goldwater conservative without the bellicose foreign policy."

Alex Wallenwein serves as the National Chairman of Americans for a Free Republic. He is a freelance journalist out of Houston, Texas, with a B.A. degree in Economics from Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, FL (1986), and a Juris Doctorate from South Texas College of Law in Houston (1990). He practiced law in Houston from 1991 to 2002, and in 2003 launched his own publishing business and website, A1 Guide to Gold Investments.com. In 2007, he expanded his investment / financial business into the Small Business Goldmine, which is designed to give U.S. small business owners the opportunity to protect themselves from the current and mounting worldwide credit collapse and the decay of the U.S. dollar. Alex is a fervent advocate of free enterprise and writes a regular online newsletter, Euro vs Dollar Gold Monitor. His articles are carried on numerous Internet sites such as SafeHaven, Financial Sense, and 321 Gold.

Frank Baumgartner is the owner and CEO of Osiris Gold Inc. in Denver, Colorado and the Project Coordinator of Americans for a Free Republic. For all of his adult life, Mr. Baumgartner has been an exemplar of the entrepreneurial spirit that built this country, holding positions of ownership in several highly successful corporations, such as Phoenix Aviation Inc., XL Drilling Company Inc., and Jupiter Corporation. In 1965, he was a member of the famous Arnold Heim Geological Expedition to Greenland. He served in the 25th Division Army Artillery during WW II and was called back for the Korean War. A graduate of Clark University in 1950, he has been a history buff for many decades and is naturally alarmed with the direction of America under the influence of Demopublican political control.
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New show to take audiences through history of Angkor Wat's 'discovery'
Extravaganza to follow French explorer A.H. Mouhot on dreamlike journey through Khmer legends

Photo Supplied

Organisers are ready to top last year’s lavish Angkor Wat multimedia spectacular with a new production at the end of this year.

IT'S been described as a cross between television historical-romance razzmatazz, mysticism and a traditional music-and-dance stage spectacular, and the promoters call it a "sensory odyssey through magnificent multimedia performances".

But whatever you call it, it was, in showbiz parlance, a smash hit when it debuted last year at Angkor Wat.

A new version of the show will run again during the coming peak tourism season. The lavish outdoor performance is called The Legend of Angkor Wat and subtitled "When History Comes to Life". It will run for six weeks, from December 5, 2008, to January 31, 2009, at an under-the-stars venue set up inside Angkor Wat itself. Performances will be held nightly except Sundays, Christmas Eve (December 24) and New Year's Eve (December 31).

While tickets are not cheap - $60 for standard and $80 for premium seats - sales through international agencies have already been brisk. In August more than 3,000 tickets were sold in Japan alone.

The outdoor venue has 100 VIP seats, 400 premium seats and 400 standards seats, and, if the season is sold out, the collective audience will total almost 50,000.

The show is organised by Siem Reap's Bayon CM Organizer Co Ltd, a joint venture with Bayon TV
General manager Ladda Patthanun Chaiprasert said the venture is put together with the cooperation of the Ministry of Tourism and the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts.

All historic and cultural details of the show, the script and choreography were developed and supervised by Proeung Chhieng, vice rector and dean of the Faculty of Choreographic Arts, at Phnom Penh's Royal University of Fine Arts. A crew of over 120 helps stage the show which has a cast of 160.

PETER OLSZEWSKI

Bayon CM Organizer general manager Ladda Patthanun Chaiprasert gets ready to put on a show.

The show has a storyline that criss-crosses in time, centering on the adventures of 19th-century French philologist and explorer Alexandre Henri Mouhot who is mistakenly credited for "discovering" the Angkor complex. While other foreigners had been aware of its existence, Mouhot's visit and his evocative writings popularised the temples in the West, and the rest is, as they say, history.

The Legends show plays with that history, beginning with Mouhot's arrival at Angkor in 1860. He lapses into unconsciousness and, in his dream state, a beautiful Apsara woman guides him back in time to the legendary beginning of Khmer civilisation, with the marriage of the daughter of the king of the nagas.

Subsequent scenes take Mouhot through the King Suryavarman II era, and then it gets even more weird: an exploration of the creation of Apsaras.
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As Muslim community grows, so do Kingdom's ties to Arab states
Over $700 million has been pledged to the nation over the last six months by land-hungry Arab nations, raising concern that their rising influence will radicalise Cambodian Muslims

HENG CHIVOAN

Kuwaiti Prime Minister Sheikh Nasser Mohammed Al-Ahmed Al-Sabah during a state visit this year.

IN the last six months, more than US$700 million has been pledged to the Kingdom by oil-rich Gulf states, sparking concerns among Western diplomats that the vast investments could be used not just to kick start the agricultural sector, but also to radicalise Cambodia's small but increasingly significant Muslim population.

"There are some organisations here from the Middle East that are very radical and that are very intolerant, and they are trying very hard to change the attitude and the atmosphere of the Muslim population here in Cambodia," said outgoing American Ambassador Joseph Mussomeli in his farewell speech to reporters on August 25.

At a time when rising international commodity prices have given a new imperative to food security and made food export more lucrative, Cambodia, with its vast swaths of under-utilised farmland, is in a strong position to form relationships with cash-loaded but nonarable Arab nations.

In April, the emirate of Qatar said it would invest some $200 million in Cambodian farmland.

Last month, the Gulf state of Kuwait announced it would give Cambodia more than $500 million in soft loans and revealed plans to establish an embassy in Cambodia - which, were it to happen, would mark the first embassy from an Arab nation to open in Phnom Penh.

"Kuwait, of course, is a very wealthy country, so in ways it could be very helpful to Cambodia economically.... The one thing we all need to be careful about is what the money is going to," Mussomeli said.

Cambodian Muslims are "very open and tolerant of other countries", Mussomeli said, but he cautioned that as a very poor community they are vulnerable to being manipulated by groups offering money who "are much more rigid fundamentalists in their perspective and who certainly don't like foreigners or other religions".

Islamic ties
The recent series of high-level state visits from Kuwait and Qatar represent the newest round of contact from Arab countries.

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COUNTRIES LIKE THE USA ARE UNHAPPY THAT CAMBODIA IS RECEIVING MONEY FROM KUWAIT.

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Beginning in the early 1990s, money from Malaysia and the Middle East flowed into Cambodia's Muslim community, ostensibly to rejuvenate a minority community that had been devastated by the Khmer Rouge and needed to solidify its rightful place in Cambodian society, Cambodian Muslim leaders say.

HENG CHIVOA

Kuwaiti Prime Minister Sheikh Nasser Mohammed Al-Ahmed Al-Sabah with Prime Minister Hun Sen.

The primary focus of the most recent state visits have been trade. Yet cultural ties are also at stake: Kuwait pledged some $5 million for Cambodian Islamic institutions, including renovating the dilapidated International Dubai Mosque near Boeung Kak lake.

Ahmad Yahya, a government adviser and president of the Cambodian Islamic Development Association, told the Post on Monday that the new facilities at the Boeung Kak mosque were necessary to accommodate the steadily growing Muslim community.

He described the prospect the having Arab embassies in Cambodia as being "symbolically very significant for our community here".

He added that the Muslim community in Cambodia "has just begun to grown up" and pointed to a series of recent gestures by Prime Minister Hun Sen as a sign that it is receiving the respect it deserves.

Within the last year, Hun Sen has called for a Muslim prayer room at the international airport, instructed educators to allow Muslim girls to wear a hijab in the classroom and granted Cham leaders an hour of free airtime for Cham language broadcasts on public radio - all of which Ahmad Yahya called a "big achievement for us".

In response to concerns by Western countries - particularly the US - over how the money will be used, he responded: "If the money goes to individuals and NGOs and no one monitors it, then maybe you have reason to be afraid; but the money is going to the Cambodian government, so why worry about it?"

Domestic recognition
Sith Ybrahim, a secretary of state at the Ministry of Religion, said in an August 28 interview with the Post that the good relationship Hun Sen has maintained with the Cham community has encouraged Islamic countries to give loans to Cambodia and that while "some countries like the USA are unhappy that Cambodia is receiving money from Kuwait, it doesn't affect the feelings of the Muslim people here".

"Some say the money can help make Cambodian Muslims radical, but it won't," he said.

Yet past cases have put an uncomfortable spotlight on Cambodia's Muslim community. In May 2003, police raided the al-Mukara Islamic school. Three foreign-born men as well as one Cambodian man and the Saudi charity that ran the institution were charged with international terrorism and accused of having links to Jemaah Islamiyah, or JI, the Southeast Asian affiliate of al-Qaeda most famous for the 2002 bombings in Bali, Indonesia, that killed more than 200.

It was later discovered that the head of JI, Riduan Isamuddin, had spent almost a year laying low in Cambodia. Another serious scare came in December 2003, when Thai Muslims living in Cambodia were arrested for allegedly plotting terrorist attacks on the US, British and Australian embassies in Phnom Penh.

In the post-September 11 world, Western authorities have continually raised concerns that Cambodia, with its record of poor law enforcement and easy cross-border access, is a vulnerable site for money laundering and purchasing arms, as well as other illicit activities that support terrorism.

Cambodian Chams
Most of Cambodia's 320,000 Muslims, as estimated in 2006 by Cham specialist, Norwegian Bjorn Blengsli, are ethnically Cham, whose practices have traditionally been moderate. But Blengsli has noted a rise of fundamentalism in the Cham community, in particular of Wahhabism, an austere form of Islam originating from Saudi Arabia that he said is now taught in more than half of the Cham community's religious schools.

"Economic ties between Cambodia and Arab countries will lead to more funding for Islamic organisations in Cambodia and, since they are often unhappy with the purity of Islam as it's practiced here, there will be increasing Arab influence on local Muslim practices," Blengsli said.

The penetration of Islamic missionaries, as well as development and educational organisations into Cambodia, is problematic because of the isolation some of these groups encourage, said Alberto Perez, a Cham researcher who is based in Phnom Penh.

"It's extremely difficult for new understanding of Islam brought from the Middle East to find expression in politics and mainstream public life [in Cambodia]," he said.

"The result is that greater Islamisation tends to result in greater separation from Khmer society - a bubble within which they can put Islam into social practice far away from Khmer influence."

While Hun Sen has publicly stated that Muslims must be accepted as an integral part of the country, Perez said many Khmers continue to imagine Muslims as a foreign group and are "suspicious of their intentions because of perceived connections between them and unwanted foreign influences".

But Sith Ybrahim feels that newly formed ties between Cambodia and Islamic countries, as well as the growing presence of Cambodian Muslims in high-ranking government positions, point to a clear trend: Islam has found firm ground in Cambodia.
He added that Cham leaders want to eliminate the stigma in Cambodia associated with their religion and rid them of the "shyness" they have about their identity.

"I'm proud to be Muslim and so should be all Muslims here," he said.
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Hitting the ground running
Arriving in Cambodia in March, Pascal Deyrolle became vice president of the nation's hotel association in July. He's moving fast to carry out some big plans

PETER OLSZEWSKI

Pascal Deyrolle, general manager of La Residence d’Angkor and vice president of the Cambodian Hotel Association.

WATER conservation and cheaper energy costs in Siem Reap are at the head of the wish list of the new vice president of the Cambodia Hotel Association, Pascal Deyrolle.

Deyrolle is also general manager of Siem Reap's La Residence d'Angkor, and his rise has been rapid. He only arrived in Cambodia on March 19 from France, where he managed luxury canal barges.

Four months to the day after his arrival, he was elected to the vice presidency of the Cambodia Hotel Association, with Luu Meng, general manager of Phnom Penh's new Almond Hotel, as president.

Deyrolle is joined on the board by fellow Siem Reap hoteliers, the general managers of Raffles Grand D'Angkor, the Sofitel Phokeethra, and the Victoria Angkor. He also has the ear of the outgoing association president, Philip Set Kao of Borei Angkor Resort and Spa.

But while new to Siem Reap, Deyrolle is savvy to the looming issues of the day, particularly water conservation.

Water conservation
At the 17th technical meeting of the International Coordinating Committee of Angkor, held at the Sokha Hotel on June 4-5, there was agreement among the delegates to begin a push to persuade major Siem Reap hoteliers to contribute to measures to conserve the province's dwindling water supply. In particular, the delegates agreed, the hotels needed to be urged to spend the capital required to install water recycling plants.

Deyrolle has already begun meetings to address the issue.

"I'm talking to a company about dirty water recycling projects. I want to obtain figures about return on investment to see whether it's feasible for this hotel to have its own plant that can recycle water for gardening." he said.
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Boeung Kak lawyer fails to file appeal due to court tax
The legal battle against lake developers is dashed by the court’s demanding $39.5 million in taxes to accept residents' complaints

HENG CHIVOAN

A Boeung Kak resident thumbprints a complaint on Tuesday.

THE lawyer representing Boeung Kak lake residents who are demanding market-price compensation for their land said Wednesday that he failed to lodge a case on their behalf with the Phnom Penh Municipal Court due to the court's demands that he pay a tax of millions of dollars.

"The tax payment is 50 percent of the money at stake in the lease agreement," said attorney Choung Choungy.

"The 99-year lease agreement between Shukaku Inc and Phnom Penh Municipality is worth over US$79 million. So the payment would have been about $39.5 million," he added.

"The demand is too high and is likely to close the way for us to bring the complaint to court," Choung Choungy said, adding that he will study the civil code to look for a loophole that will allow him to refile the documents.

A clerk at the court who met the lawyer in the morning said that, according to the law, the more money one demands, the less tax one needs to pay to lodge a complaint. "The tax is only one percent normally," the clerk said.

Lack of resolution
Also on Wednesday, representatives of Boeung Kak villagers, who marched on City Hall demanding a halt to the reclamation of the lake and fair compensation for their land met with Sok Sambath, district governor from the Daun Penh district office.

Protest leader Bun Navy told the Post that the three-hour-long meeting ended without a resolution to the residents' complaints.

"District officials in the meeting still want us to choose options offered by City Hall ," he added.

"Until now 700 families have volunteered to leave the area and decided to choose one of the two options - relocation or a cash sum," Mann Chhoeun, deputy governor of Phnom Penh, said. "The third option is for them to get houses in Boeung Kak after the area is developed."

Mann Chhoeun said that the development company has a set compensation policy requiring homeowners to give their thumbprint before being re-located or receiving money. "Homeowners must give their thumbprint to agree to the deal."

More than 30 families have torn down their homes without seeing any compensation. Protestors are also worried by rising water levels that have caused their houses to flood before they've agreed to receive compensation.
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Good sanitation celebrated
Students participate in a ceremony to mark world WASH day, which aims to highlight the importance of clean water, sanitation and good hygiene

HENG CHIVOAN

School children celebrate world WASH day on Wednesday in Phnom Penh.

ABOUT 1,000 villagers and primary school students in Russey Keo district's Tuol Sangke commune attended a ceremony Wednesday celebrating Phnom Penh's first Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) day.

WASH day emphasised the importance of washing hands in order to prevent the spread of disease.

Mann Chhoeun, deputy governor of Phnom Penh, and Katherine Crawford, director of USAID's office of Public Health and Education, led the morning ceremony by engaging in a hand-washing display, before about 20 school children who joined in, eager to scrub their palms.

Chiek Ang, deputy director of the municipality's Environmental Department, explained the message behind WASH day.

Stay clean, stay healthy
"People must care about sanitation before eating and after using the toilet by washing their hands," he said. "If our hands are not clean, we can easily get diarrhoea."

Chiek Ang said people around the world would celebrate with a global WASH day on October 15, as a continued celebration of the UN's International Year of Sanitation.

Tuol Sangke commune would become the model for 76 other communes in Phnom Penh by leading the way in improving sanitation and the environment, Chiek Ang said. Toul Sangke commune chief Soy Kosal said at the opening of the campaign that the local authorities were concerned about environmental conditions in the commune.

"Liquid and solid waste affects people's lives in the commune," he said, adding that a lack of education and responsibility had made people unhealthy.

USAID's Crawford said she hoped the day's event would be "the first in a series of events in Phnom Penh, which is joining with the world to mark the International Year of Sanitation".

Mann Chhoeun said there would be educational banners on five main national roads connecting to the city.

"Pictures and words in banners educate people to the importance of clean environments for good health," he said.

"People should pack waste in plastic and dispose of it correctly," he said.
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Cambodia gets more urban
The Kingdom's second post-UNTAC census shows that overall, population growth is slowing but the percentage of the people living in cities is rising

VANDY RATTANA

Census data being handed out to participants at a ceremony Wednesday.

Cambodia's population is fast approaching 14 million people, more than half of whom are women, according to preliminary results from the first general census to be conducted in a decade, which were released Wednesday.

The census, which was supported by the United Nations Population Fund and the Japan International Cooperation Agency, also found that population growth was slowing.

While Cambodia remains a largely rural country, more people were living in cities, the census found.

"According to the preliminary results, the population of Cambodia stood at 13,388,910 at midnight on March 3, 2008, consisting of 6,495,512 males and 6,893,398 females," said Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior Sar Kheng, who also chairs the National Census Committee.

"The provisional figures at the national level indicate that the total fertility rate and growth rate of the population has slowed down as predicted [due to rising prosperity and improved female literacy acting to reduce birth rates,]" he added at a ceremony to mark the release of the census.

The 2004 Cambodia Inter-censal Population Survey, which unlike the 2008 census did not take into account the institutionalised and the homeless, estimated the Kingdom's population to be 12,824,000, which broke down along gender lines to 6,197,000 males and 6,627,000 females.
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