Cambodia's leader calls Kenyan violence the 'killing fields'

The Associated Press
January 3, 2008

Cambodia's prime minister compared Kenya's bloody rioting to the "killing fields," continuing a scathing attack Thursday against a Kenyan-born U.N. envoy who criticized the Southeast Asian nation's human rights record.

Prime Minister Hun Sen said Cambodia's troubles were nothing compared to the situation in Kenya, where an estimated 300 people have been killed in rioting since the African nation's highly contested Dec. 27 presidential election.

"There is killing and bloody violence there. Kenya is almost becoming a killing field," Hun Sen said, using the term synonymous with the Khmer Rouge's genocidal reign of Cambodia in the 1970s which led to some 1.7 million deaths.

Hun Sen has persistently denounced Yash Ghai, the U.N. special envoy for human rights in Cambodia, since the envoy's Dec. 1-10 visit to the country.

Ghai criticized the government's alleged rights violations and called the judiciary "a perversity." He predicted that Cambodians were eventually "going to rise" against the government.

"All the points he raised in his human rights reports about Cambodia are now happening in his own country," Hun Sen said.

Hun Sen, who has had a prickly relationship with U.N. envoys, has vowed to never meet Ghai. Hun Sen shunned the Kenyan constitutional lawyer during his recent trip.