The strike at Ocean garment factory, owned by Bangladeshi capital, has not come to an end. For a suspension time of two months due to a lack of orders, the workers were paid 15$ instead of their normal salary. The workers are afraid that the factory will close down and leave them stranded without severance pay.
This is a follow-up post on my ebook ‘A Fine Thread’, available for your iPad on iTunes HERE.
On the day an official Rolls Royce car dealer opened shop in Phnom Penh (basic model at least 400,000$s) people bike in the rain.
Who will get stuck in the traffic jam? Not those riding a bicycle… And there will be no police to stop them… But then the police probably will not stop a Rolls Royce either…
The opposition CNRP held a press conference following their attempt the previous day to reach Anlong Veng, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold. The presence of army units and groups of civilians on the access road from Siem reap who threatened to block access to the CNRP convoy were deemed menacing enough to cancel a planned visit by the CNRP co-presidents to sympathisers from the party at the house of Nhem En. Nhem En was one of the photographers at the infamous S21, a Khmer Rouge interrogation centre, who defected to the the Khmer rouge in 1995 and was a CPP deputy district governor until he defected to the CNRP last March.
A small group of 8 members of a youth group gathered in front of the barbed wire fence at Freedom Park, requesting that its access would be given back to the public. The park, which was a place designated by the authorities for demonstrations, was closed early January after a violent crackdown on a worker’s strike and a series of opposition CNRP demonstrations following the July 2013 elections.
A majority of the more than 2000 workers of the Ocean garment factory are on a strike since several days to demand half of their 100$ salary instead of the 15$ they are getting for a two months suspension because of a lack of orders. Ocean garment factory is a 100% Bangladeshi investment…
This is a follow-up post on my ebook ‘A Fine Thread’, available for your iPad on iTunes HERE.
Does running after 2 rabbits on World Environment Day make sense?..
Some 400 activists gathered near the Russian Embassy to celebrate World Environment Day. They planned to march to the nearby Ministry of Environment but were stopped by the police doing so. Only a delegation of 10 was allowed.
At the same time about 800 garment workers from the Ocean factory in Choam Chao marched towards the Ministry of Labour to demand a 15$ housing bonus. They were stopped by security guards and the police and parked in a side street near Pochentong airport.
The workers will probably be back on the street tomorrow. The environment activists will go back looking at how forests are being cut down in their country.
Because of a factual error, this post has been edited…
In what some consider yet another administrative error back in 1949, when granting more autonomy to its Indochinese colonies, the French administration decided that Kampuchea Krom would be part of Vietnam, without taking into account that a majority 20 to 30% of the people living in some areas there were speaking Cambodian and in fact were ethnic Khmer.
The loss of that territory has since then fed the anti-vietnamese feelings the Khmer have been nurturing for centuries.
A commemoration ceremony, attended by HRH Princess Sisowath Pongsanmony as a representative for the Royal Family, by the opposition CNRP MP’s with their presidents Sam Rainsy and Kem Sokha, a couple of hundred monks and a large group of young khmer nationalists, was held at the Samaki Reangsey pagoda in Phnom Penh which was founded by a Kampuchea Krom monk.
My website was updated with the latest photographs for the ‘This is not Belgium’ story that I am still working on (after 30+ years…).
Check out all the photographs HERE.
Work in progress… Check out the other ‘This is not Belgium’ series as well.
