I believe that almost all immigrant communities whose countries of origin are in some state of social and political turmoil (sometimes even when they are not in turmoil) have had, and continue to have, groups of individuals who support various political factions in their homelands or ancestral lands -- sometimes just sending money, other times putting their own bodies on the line.
***** The New York Times, March 21, 2004 The Strip-Mall Revolutionaries By JOSHUA KURLANTZICK
Traditionally, militant groups huddle in caves in the mountains, or they blindfold journalists and drive them in circles before depositing them at their leader's jungle hideout. The Cambodian Freedom Fighters (C.F.F.), a militant group dedicated to the overthrow of Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia, on the other hand, meets each Saturday at 6 p.m. in an accountant's office in a strip mall in Long Beach, Calif. When I called Yasith Chhun, the group's leader, he didn't hesitate to invite me to the next meeting.
''You can't miss our headquarters,'' he said. ''It's right next to the bridal shop.''
When I arrived, eight people were seated in the office. The room was crammed not only with Cambodian political paraphernalia but also with stacks of 1040 forms, evidence of Chhun's double life as a tax preparer. One smiling C.F.F. devotee was offering members glasses of fizzy orange soda. Chhun, 47, didn't cut a very imposing figure. His stomach flopped over his slacks, and his bent legs, small head and doughy face made him look more like a bowling pin than a warrior.
Still, a warrior is decidedly what he is. The C.F.F.'s stated goal is to enlist thousands of Cambodians to topple Hun Sen's quasi-authoritarian government by force, creating chaos out of which, the group said, a better government will emerge. ''Hun Sen -- believe it or not -- he's going to get it,'' said one C.F.F. member, a muscular, middle-aged man nearly spitting with rage. ''We are probably the last hope for the 10 million Cambodians.'' Chhun said he has little idea what form of government he plans to replace Hun Sen's with, though he has two guiding principles: he wants to model a new regime as closely as possible on the ideals of the American Republican Party, and he intends to populate the government with lots of accountants.
Chhun passed around an attendance sheet so everyone could sign in. After inking the sheet, each member stood up and pledged allegiance to the C.F.F. Then the meeting began in earnest, with one member after another throwing out ambitious, even wild chains of events that might put the group in control of Cambodia.
Chhun decided to expand the meeting by phone to include a few members of the C.F.F.'s global network. The group claims to have hundreds of agents inside Cambodia ready to execute its violent plans, each one known to C.F.F. members by a code of letters and numbers; Chhun admits that the coding system is so complicated that he sometimes loses track of which code represents which agent. He picked up the phone and dialed, trying to reach one of his lieutenants in Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, he had only 34 cents left on his international phone card and couldn't dial out. Frustrated, he rummaged through desks and cabinets, found another card and finally reached a C.F.F. agent in the field, a former Cambodian Navy officer hiding along the Thai border. Speaking in Khmer, Cambodia's language, the officer confidently reported that he had persuaded more than 400 government soldiers to turn against Hun Sen. (Chhun translated for me as the rebel officer spoke.) ''All of them are ready,'' the officer said. ''They're just waiting for my command.'' The speakerphone crackled. ''They take an oath, they swear to God they're with C.F.F. forever. They have the guns, they have the weapons, they have tanks.'' . . .
How does a group get away with planning violent attacks overseas from an office in Southern California? According to most Cambodia experts, the C.F.F.'s actions are illegal, contrary to American policy and harmful to Hun Sen's democratic opponents in Cambodia. Yet at least two conservative American legislators who detest Hun Sen have advocated the removal, or even the overthrow, of the Cambodian leader. That position, some believe, has had the effect of helping provide political cover for the C.F.F. Now that the White House has embraced the idea of regime change in Iraq and other rogue nations, the Cambodia hawks are getting a hearing, and the C.F.F. remains free to plot in Long Beach.
Like any major guerrilla attack, the C.F.F.'s November 2000 coup attempt was many years in the making. After fleeing the Khmer Rouge as a teenager in the late 1970's, Chhun sought refuge in the United States in 1982. Like many Cambodians, he maintained ties with his brutalized homeland, returning to assist an opposition party in the early 1990's, when the United Nations oversaw a transition to elected governments. But Chhun grew incensed at repression by Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge officer who used force and violent purges to remain in power after losing the 1993 election. ''When I came back to the States,'' Chhun said, ''I felt that nonviolence cannot do anything to the dictatorship in Cambodia.''
Chhun soon found a channel for his rage. In October 1998, Chhun and several other emigres held a clandestine meeting on the Thai border with 120 Cambodian dissidents. Together they vowed to foment a coup.
Chhun returned to America and persuaded Cambodian-American friends to join his nascent organization, the C.F.F. In May 2000, Chhun held a fund-raiser attended by more than 500 people, many of them Cambodian expatriates, on the Queen Mary, the old cruise ship permanently moored at Long Beach. Attendees raised their right hands and swore to overthrow the Cambodian government. Chhun told them the money they were donating would be used to attack Hun Sen. Through the fund-raisers, Chhun said, the C.F.F. amassed a war chest of roughly $300,000.
Money in hand, Chhun and Richard Kiri Kim, a local Cambodian immigrant, recruited 20 or so Cambodian-Americans to travel with them to the Thai-Cambodian border, where they set up a secret base. From there, Chhun dispatched Kim into Cambodia to contact military officers and offer many of them money and positions in a potential new government. In June 2000, Kim and his colleagues brought several officers to the border to meet with Chhun, who organized them into units and sent them back to recruit foot soldiers and wait for a signal.
On Nov. 23, 2000, Chhun called Kim from the base on the border and told him to strike the following day. Early on Nov. 24, a team of about 70 C.F.F. agents slipped into the center of Phnom Penh. Armed with B-40 rockets and assault rifles, they moved swiftly toward a compound of government buildings. They attacked the Ministry of Defense and the Council of Ministers, peppering them with fire, then turned their weapons on a local television station and a nearby military base. State security forces engaged the group in a fierce firefight that lasted more than an hour, leaving bullet holes in ministry offices and blood pooled in the street. By daybreak, eight people lay dead. In the wake of the violence, more than 200 people, including Richard Kiri Kim, were arrested by the Cambodian police. Chhun fled to Thailand and then returned to Long Beach to raise more money for the C.F.F., arriving in time for the 2001 tax season. ''I couldn't keep my tax clients waiting,'' he said.
Chhun defended his group by claiming he limits his actions in the United States to raising money and planning strategy. But under the Neutrality Act, it is illegal for American citizens on American soil to organize military action against a country with which the United States is not at war. And although Hun Sen has presided over political repression, including using thugs to maim and kill critics, Washington has diplomatic relations with the Cambodian government. William Banks, an expert on national security law at Syracuse University, explains that the act prohibits even raising money or giving orders for violent attacks from the United States. ''If you're providing the means -- money, weapons, technology, intelligence -- from within the United States, you're violating the law,'' Banks said. . . .
Since the C.F.F.'s coup attempt, the State Department has issued public statements condemning the group's actions and has listed the C.F.F. as a ''terrorist group'' in its annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report. So how does the C.F.F. manage to keep functioning? The fact is, in Washington there is official policy and unofficial policy, and unofficial policy sometimes wins the day. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher of California, a blunt, passionate advocate of human rights and a man with a history of supporting covert operations abroad, has become Hun Sen's most vociferous opponent. As a senior aide to Ronald Reagan, Rohrabacher, a Republican, was instrumental in enlisting quiet White House backing for insurgents like the Afghan resistance warriors and the contras. The congressman's district offices in Huntington Beach, 10 miles south of Long Beach, are adorned with photos of Rohrabacher, in full mujahedeen beard, holding a machine gun alongside Afghan rebels in the 1980's. . . .
A Congressional Republican like Rohrabacher may have ideological reasons for advocating regime change in the region, but politics play a role, too. Southeast-Asian-Americans are becoming a solid Republican bloc, and they dominate some Congressional districts. In 2002, staff members of the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (N.R.C.C.), Thomas M. Reynolds, asked Chhun to serve as a fund-raiser in the Cambodian community. The C.F.F. leader said that he and his vice-president contributed more than $5,000 to the N.R.C.C. and that he canvassed some 1,600 people to persuade them to vote Republican. N.R.C.C. representatives call Chhun twice a month to check up on his political work, Chhun said, and the committee has rewarded him by nominating him for a Congressional Order of Merit, appointing him to N.R.C.C.'s Business Advisory Council and inviting him to the council's annual meeting in Washington last May. At the meeting, where Chhun wore a pin saying ''Cambodian Freedom Fighters,'' council members hobnobbed with Newt Gingrich, Katherine Harris and other Republican luminaries and then attended a fund-raising dinner for President Bush. When I called the N.R.C.C. and asked about Chhun's attendance at the meeting, Carl Forti, a spokesman, told me it was impossible to thoroughly investigate every person invited to join the group.
The Bush administration's stand on regime change in rogue nations has created a moment in which the murky, often secretive advocacy of insurgency abroad has suddenly gained credence. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the No.2 Republican in the Senate and a leading force for human rights in Cambodia, has begun publicly calling for nonviolent regime change in Phnom Penh. The C.F.F., accordingly, has grown bolder. During one conversation, Chhun linked Hun Sen's repression to Saddam Hussein's repression and compared his organization with that of the Iraqi exiles who were carried into Baghdad by American troops. According to the C.F.F. vice president, Sokhom So, who is based in Virginia: ''The U.S. overthrew Saddam Hussein's government. If I'm a terrorist, then George Bush is a terrorist too.'' (The White House referred requests for comment to the National Security Council, which in turn referred requests to the State Department, which reiterated its official opposition to the C.F.F.)
The Bay of Pigs exiles and the contras required direct American government support and money to penetrate closed societies. But today, porous borders, the proliferation of small arms and the increasing wealth of immigrants in America have changed the equation. The C.F.F. can easily raise money, slip into Asia and launch attacks without coming to the American government to ask for help. All they need is for Washington, and law enforcement, to look the other way. And as Sokhom So said proudly, the United States government ''has never given us a red light.'' . . .
Joshua Kurlantzick is the foreign editor of The New Republic.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/21/magazine/21CAMBODIA.html> ***** -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>