Phnom Penh
authorities ordered police to load protesting monks onto busses during a
demonstration in Phnom Penh on February 27, 2007, for defrocking and
deportation to Vietnam. © 2007 Tang Chhin Sothy
On February 27, 2007, more than 150 Cambodian police armed
with shields, tear gas, electric batons, and guns dispersed a peaceful
demonstration of 52 Khmer Krom monks outside the Vietnamese Embassy in
Phnom Penh during the state visit to Cambodia of Vietnamese President
Nguyen Minh Triet.[182]
Sao Chanthol, representative of the chief of monks for the Phnom Penh
municipality, ordered the monks to cease demonstrating and threatened to have
all the protesters defrocked and investigated. A stand-off ensued, as police
officers began to push the monks into a bus, ostensibly to be defrocked and sent
to Vietnam.
After intervention by monitors from several Cambodian human
rights organizations and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
in Cambodia, the monks were allowed to leave the bus. Rights groups transported
most of the monks to Samaki Reangsay Pagoda, whose abbot heads the Khmer Krom
Krom Buddhist Monk Association in Cambodia and has long provided shelter to Khmer
Krom monks and laypeople from the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam.[183]
That evening Khmer Krom monk
Eang Sok Thoeun, who had participated in the demonstration and was very
close to the abbot of Samaki Reangsay Pagoda, was found dead in his pagoda in
Kandal Province, with his throat repeatedly slit. Police labeled the killing a
suicide, ordered his immediate burial, and prohibited monks from conducting
funeral proceedings.[184]
Repeated requests to have his body exhumed for autopsy were refused by the
Kandal court.[185]
Human rights groups who investigated the killing determined it was a murder,
not suicide.[186]
On April 20, 2007, police forcefully dispersed another
demonstration by around 50 Khmer Krom monks at the Vietnamese and US embassies
in Phnom Penh.[187]Later that night one of the monks who had joined
in the march was badly beaten by a group of unknown men after returning to his
pagoda.[188]
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