Nice find Epidemiks, no surprises there of course.
gavinmac wrote:It's my impression that, over the last 2-3 months, the Khmer Times is running more anti-foreigner stories than usual. Foreigners being rounded up and deported, foreigners committing crimes, etc.
Yesterday there was a "letter" titled
"The US mission: We want to rule the world". I'll let you guess of the tone.
As it was in the "letters" sections, which I think they confuse with what other papers write "editorials", I was curious if the author was real. Turns out that Raoul M Jennar, PhD, is in fact real, with his own
wikipedia page and
website. It appears that he is a Belgian/French essayist that specialized on Cambodia, a country that he has been visiting since 1988.
There's nothing inherently bad, or wrong, with what he states, but he is very much a large mouthpiece against the West. Again, he's not necessarily wrong when he lambastes the U.S. and other Western countries for their treatment of Cambodia over the years. I just thought that it's interesting that this French writing essayist would write into the Khmer Times like that, and how strongly worded it was. It certainly follows the line of others that write it, but none seem to write in against the government.
I also find it interesting that in the past month in "letters to the Khmer Times" it appears that the Russian and British embassies in Phnom Penh are having a row:
20 March, Russian Embassy: "Russia’s clarifications on the Salisbury ‘incident’"
27 March, Russian Embassy: "Further clarification on the Salisbury incident"
28 March, Russian Embassy: "A hostile standoff with Russia is not needed"
28 March, British Embassy: "Britain’s clarification of the Salisbury incident"
3 April, Russian embassy: "Russia: Burden of proof rests solely on UK"
Are the embassies really writing into the Khmer Times to have this debate?