Who Killed Chea Vichea?

Robert McKinley reviews Who Killed Chea Vichea?, directed by Bradley Cox (2010, 56 minutes)

Who Killed Chea Vichea? is an investigative masterpiece. The film's director, Bradley Cox, and his producers Rich Garella and Jeffrey Saunders are to be thanked and congratulated for this arresting documentary. They have let the rest of the world in on what all Cambodians already know: namely, that their lives under the Hun Sen government, though no longer the disaster of the Khmer Rouge years from 1975 to 1979 nor the calamity of the civil war years that followed through the 1980s to 1993, are still caught up in a terrifying existence in which might makes right. The full-time nightmares of the killing fields past have lessened to become more occasional, more contextualized. They are limited to situations where power is challenged, or is felt to be so. But they are no less horrifying and brutal for all this. Those deemed in the way will pay. One former hit man, interviewed in shadow, says many Cambodian corpses have already been fed to the crocodiles. Not just ten or even fifty. Many more!

One comes away from this film understanding that the killer of the much loved Cambodian labor union president Chea Vichea on January 22nd, 2004, Chinese New Years, in front of a news stand near his home in Phnom Penh, has never been brought to justice. In fact, the courts, in a compounding act of injustice, falsely convicted two innocent men of the crime. What makes this film work is its convincing presentation of the background of these two events: Chea Vichea's assassination in broad daylight and the trial and subsequent appeals of the two convenient scapegoats, Born Samnang and Sok Sam Ouen. Director Cox spent five years in Cambodia and had already been interviewing Chea Vichea in the period leading up to the 2003 elections. He knew of his staunch commitment to workers’ rights in Cambodia and also of the threats to Vichea's life resulting from his fight for those rights. Vichea had opted to stay in Cambodia and support its 200,000 garment workers, whose wages were only around US$45 a month, in their demands for better pay and working conditions rather than flee. He had allied with the opposition leader Sam Rainsy against Hun Sen and the ruling Cambodia Peoples Party, CPP. In the July 2003 national election, no side had gotten a majority and the three leading parties, CPP, Sam Rainsy, and the Royalists, spent months bargaining over how to form a coalition government. Eventually the Royalists sided with the CPP, and Sam Rainsy lost out. Then came Chea Vichea's killing.

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