It's really happening!
My photography show at the International Center of NY is drawing perilously close. It opens June 1 at the center, located at 50 West 23rd Street. Harassing emails about the June 12 reception to follow.
I am a freelance writer based in New York City. I also like to take photographs; some of them are on this page. I'm writing a book about a group of tribal minorities in Cambodia's highlands who ran into the forest to hide from the war, and ended up staying for 25 years. True story!
For freelance writing and editing inquiries, please contact corinne.purtill at gmail dot com.
Photo: Susan Whitney-Wilkerson
Seeking Truth in Cambodia
One of the most fascinating experiences I had in Cambodia last year was the opportunity to attend a hearing of the long-awaited Khmer Rouge Tribunal. No member of the Khmer Rouge had ever faced an international court for his or her role in the death of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians during the 1975-79 regime. The reasons for the 30-year delay in justice are many - the Cambodian government's unwillingness to air dirty laundry, lack of money, the inability of the United Nations and the Cambodian government to agree on a format for the trials - but in 2003 the court got off to a slow and shaky start. The first pre-trial hearings did not begin until late 2007; rumors of alleged corruption within the hybrid UN-Cambodian court were legion, but unsubstantiated.
John Hall is a human rights law professor at Chapman University who has taken a particular interest in the Khmer Rouge trials. Hall became hooked on Cambodia after visiting the country as a backpacker in the 1990s and has since kept a close watch on the country's search for justice. While visiting Phnom Penh in 2007, he managed to obtain a copy of a damning internal audit of the court that revealed serious flaws in hiring and other ethical issues. Hall published his findings in the Wall Street Journal, compelling the UN to make the documents public and set stricter anti-corruption rules. My story on Hall appears in the current issue of Stanford Lawyer magazine.
When I attended the pretrial hearing of Nuon Chea, Pol Pot's right-hand man, I was struck by two things: the harmless, grandfatherly appearance of the then-81 year old man charged with ordering brutal crimes against his countrymen, and the fierce attentiveness of the elderly people who had come in by bus or taxi from the provinces, dust clinging to their plastic flip flops and thin cotton clothes, clutching the headphones broadcasting the proceedings to their ears so as not to miss a word said against the man they held responsible for their family's deaths. If you'd like to see my February 2008 article in the San Francisco Chronicle about the Nuon Chea hearing, you can read it here:
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Sunset over Manhattan
The view from the new apartment... A perfect end to a busy and rewarding move-in weekend.
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A Matter of Principals
Sandra Stein is the dedicated director of the New York City Leadership Academy, a training camp for aspiring principals. My profile of her in Stanford Magazine is up now.
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Six Sentences
I have a strange fondness for quirky structured writing assignments - 55 word stories, 1000 words or less, etc. So when I came across this project called Six Sentences, I had to give it a go. My piece ran today - what do you have to say in Six Sentences?
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A major reason to celebrate this New Year's Day.
This is truly the best news I have heard in some time.
In 2004, a Cambodian rights activist named Chea Vichea was assassinated in plain daylight on a busy intersection in Phnom Penh. He was an outspoken critic of Prime Minister Hun Sen, who had publicly threatened him in the weeks before the shooting. Days later, police paraded two men named Born Samnang and Sok Sam Oeun in front of reporters as the "suspects" arrested for Chea Vichea's murder. The two men were weeping and screaming their innocence. Witnesses said it wasn't them. Neither man was near the scene at the time of the shooting nor possessed any apparent motive for murder. At the time I was working as at The Cambodia Daily, where enterprising reporters tracked down alibis for both men. It didn't matter. They were each sentenced to 20 years in a trial widely denounced as a sham, and have been jailed for the last five years despite pleas from rights groups.
Today, they are free.
On Dec. 31, Cambodia's Supreme Court ordered both men released and a retrial of the case at the Appeals Court. This isn't the end of their ordeal - they remain under court supervision, and it's possible that the Appeals Court will uphold their convictions. But their release is a huge step toward justice for both men, and a victory for everyone who believes in human rights. Happy New Year!
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Union Station
Wigleaf, an online journal of verrrry short fiction, has accepted two of my stories. The first one is up now.
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