Ranger arrested for shooting PM weighs in on Russia-UK in Jolie-Pitt Foundation area
AN ENVIRONMENTAL ranger and a community forest member on Tuesday were released from prison under court supervision following their brief detention after allegedly firing at a suspect hauling timber within a protected area supported by the Maddox JoliePitt Foundation in Battambang province.
The Ministry of Environment ranger, Sok Toeut, 43, and the forest community member, Dieb Somuntha, 60, were patrolling the Samlot protected area on Friday when they spotted a tractor loaded with wood and ordered the driver to stop. When he refused, Somuntha allegedly shot at him.
Toeut is employed by the ministry but also receives part of his salary from the foundation, founded by Angelina Jolie to promote conservation in Cambodia’s northwest. Somuntha also receives a small salary from the organisation to patrol.
Oun Fai, chief of the crime office with the Battambang Provincial Police, said the man transporting the wood, Duch Thy, 58, filed a complaint to police, which led to the arrest of Toeut, Somuntha and two other rangers, who were released shortly afterwards on Sunday.
Fai claimed after Thy refused to stop, Somuntha became angry and took Toeut’s AK-47 rifle and fired at the tractor.
“[Thy] had a chainsaw, [and was] driving a tractor to look for wood at the protected area,” he said. “He got some wood to make charcoal. They saw him and fired to flatten the tyres of the tractor hauling the wood.”
Both sides committed a crime, he acknowledged, though Thy was not arrested.
Toeut was charged with “carelessness” in handling his weapon under Article 21 of the Law on the Management of Weapons, Explosives and Ammunition, which carries a maximum two-year prison sentence. Somuntha was charged with “intentionally causing damage” based on Article 410 of the Criminal Code, which also carries a maximum two-year prison term.
Thy, meanwhile, was charged with clearing forestland under Article 59 of the Protected Areas Law, though he remains free.
“He used a chainsaw and drove a tractor into the prohibited forest, which is a protected area. Therefore, he is also guilty,” Fai said. “However, the court will make a decision to arrest or not.”
Tieng Sambou, spokeswoman for the provincial court, said Investigating Judge Ly Sokha decided to release the duo under court supervision after questioning them on Tuesday. Sambou wasn’t able to provide further comment.
Kong Mony Chan, director of the Maddox Jolie-Pitt Foundation, declined to comment on the case. PRIME Minister Hun Sen on Tuesday waded into a conflict between Russia and the West, warning of global “disorder” that could end up affecting Cambodia.
On March 4, British double agent Sergei Skripal was poisoned in Salisbury, England, with a nerve agent believed to be of Russian origin. Skripal and his daughter Yulia both remain under medical care, with doctors reportedly fearing the elder Skripal will never fully recover.
The United Kingdom has accused Russia of being behind the attack, and began expelling Russian diplomats from the country. The US and other European countries followed suit, with Russia then retaliating by expelling Western diplomats.
“Now, the diplomatic war became a hot topic,” Hun Sen told a group of graduates on Tuesday.
He counselled that Cambodia would do well to “observe” the situation. “The world is in disorder,” he said. “Please don’t forget that what happens in the world affects us too.”
The Russian and US embassies in Phnom Penh have also exchanged barbs over the scuffle, with an open letter from the Russians published in the
on March 27 claiming that efforts to prove that it was linked to the poisoning have been “futile”, and calling on the world to “stop de- monising Russia”.
In response, the US Embassy in Phnom Penh released a statement backing the UK’s stance, saying the attack was either “a deliberate action by the Russian government or else it was a result of Russia’s failure to declare and secure its stocks of this weapon”.
Astrid Noren-Nilsson, a political scientist who specialises in Cambodia, said Foreign Minister Prak Sokhonn previously “singled out China and Russia as the countries with which Cambodia’s foreign policy future lies”.
Noren-Nilsson referred to Russia as Cambodia’s “moral patron”, and noted that it was significant that Hun Sen did not take sides in the current dispute. “Hun Sen’s reluctance to take clear sides on this incident so far does appear to signal . . . concern with this type of conflict given Cambodia’s Cold War-era sufferings,” she said.
Given his history, Hun Sen would indeed be sensitive to any potential return to Cold War politics.
As hostilities in Vietnam spilled across the border in the 1960s and ’70s, a bloodless coup in Cambodia gave rise to a pro-US republic, which was subsequently overthrown by the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge, which oversaw the deaths of over a million Cambodians, and for which Hun Sen was a military commander. That regime was, in turn, overthrown by the Vietnamese, to whom the premier had defected, and who at the time were backed by Russia.
Cambodia, meanwhile, remained mired in civil war for decades, with Hun Sen at the helm of Vietnamese-installed government, until the Paris Peace Agreement, which was brokered with the involvement of both the Soviet Union and the West.