Continued from here ...

Another Free Trade Union leader was murdered this week ... the third since 2004.

Chea Mony, current FTU president of Cambodia, said that the killing was an attempt to intimidate union members.

"The killing is to frighten FTU members from striking or staging demonstrations against the garment factories. This is also a threat against workers not to participate in the FTU," he said.

According to official statistics, from 2004 to 2006 Cambodia witnessed 288 cases of strikes and 594 cases of labor disputes, some 50 percent of them initiated by FTU.

A couple of stories feature US Ambassador to Cambodia, James Mussomeli.

The first has Cambodian response to oil policy recommendations made by the ambassador. Perhaps they were annoyed at his tone?

'Some countries have made the irritatingly human decision to use the resources to relax fiscal discipline,' Mussomeli warned. 'Like children who never think about the long-term consequences of the choices they make, they act as if the revenue will never stop flowing and they never act responsibly.'

As all Cambodians know only too well, children with power are very, very dangerous.

The director general of the Cambodian National Petroleum Authority, Te Duong Tara, very conveniently missed the ambassador's speech ... he said he was too busy to make it ... but dismissed concerns.

'To say 'keep money for this purpose or that purpose' for me is too early. Wait until the money from the oil is here. The fish is not in the boat yet,' he told reporters.

He said Cambodia realized it had little experience in this area but had reached out to other, more seasoned players to learn from their human resources and marketing experience.

Tara added that Cambodia had studied the experiences of countries such as Angola and Nigeria and learned from them. Angola, he said, made the mistake of marketing by themselves and Nigeria had made errors because it did not know how to market.

That's the problem in Nigeria? Hmmmm.

Hun Sen chimed in on this, too, after Mussomeli suggested that the government should avoid the situation that would see, "a small corrupt elite siphons off revenue that should go to improving the welfare of all the people."

The health and education sectors in Cambodia will receive a large share of the revenues, Hun Sen said while addressing a public ceremony.

In addition, Cambodia will not follow the path of some oil-rich African countries, who can not enrich themselves hereafter due to corruption, he added.

We'll see about that, won't we?

There seems to be some discrepancy over just how much oil there may be, as the World Bank has put them at two billion barrels while the UNDP confirmed 700 million barrels.

Continued ...