Little won in logging crackdown
Early on Monday morning, at about 1am, two trucks carrying roughly 10 cubic metres of illegally felled timber were bouncing down the road between Oddar Meanchey and Siem Reap.
Police stopped the trucks – one of which bore military plates – and seized the haul, but the drivers, a Siem Reap police official said, “escaped into the dark”.
A little over six months after Prime Minister Hun Sen issued a circular ordering authorities to step up their efforts to stamp out illegal logging, luxury timber seizures are a regular fixture of media reports, but incidents such as the one above have come to typify the crackdown on illegal logging. …
Thon Sarath, an official with the Ministry of Agriculture, declined to comment on logging arrests and referred questions to provincial authorities. Battambang provincial FA chief Pit Phearak, however, maintained yesterday that timber smugglers simply have too much at stake to go along quietly. …
Allegations of corruption among logging enforcers extends far beyond the local level. One observer, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the subject, posited that Hun Sen never intended the crackdown to generate arrests, but rather to let illegal loggers continue their operations while “letting them know it’s not a free-for-all”.
“If you introduce a new law, or a new regulation, it’s just a new way of taxing,” the observer said, citing interviews and direct observation. “You never really try to enforce the law, you just try to tax the law. It creates new opportunities for revenue generation.” …
Stuart White and Phak Seangly
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/little-won-logging-crackdown
