Showing 1 - 7 of 7
Locked away and forgotten: inside a high security jail
Spectrum, Ezra Kyrill Erker, Published on 04/11/2012
» At two security checkpoints visitors are frisked and scanned with metal detectors. No sharp objects, no liquids, no metals, no mobile phones or gadgets.
After the horrors, Cambodia looks to reclaim its heritage
Spectrum, Ezra Kyrill Erker, Published on 14/10/2012
» For decades, thousands of Khmer antiquities have been sold on the international art market and through major auction houses in London, New York and elsewhere, bought up by leading museums and wealthy collectors. A large portion of these artefacts came with little or no ownership history, meaning they could well have been looted from temple complexes by thieves during the country's years of political turmoil, with Cambodia powerless to stem the trade or repatriate any of the items.
Development rush could doom Yangon's architectural treasures
Spectrum, Ezra Kyrill Erker, Published on 07/10/2012
» For local investors they are unwieldy behemoths occupying prime real estate. For the nostalgic they remain noble vestiges of an era almost forgotten, when the city, then called Rangoon, was the most cosmopolitan in the region. For tourists they are one of Asia's most concentrated collections of colonial buildings and grand sights in themselves, unartificially preserved in time. For nationalists they can be an unwanted reminder of less independent times, when the subjugated people were answerable to the caprices of colonial authorities.
For Belarusian troupe, show must go on despite dangers
Spectrum, Ezra Kyrill Erker, Published on 19/08/2012
» Thespians of the Belarus Free Theatre have been beaten, arrested and harassed by authorities. And husband-and-wife co-directors Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada, as they explained to Spectrum last week while on a visit to Bangkok, are now forced to live in exile, facing prison sentences if they return home. Within Belarus _ their large landlocked country of just under 10 million people, bordered by Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Latvia and Lithuania _ the actors continue to perform in secret and at great risk to themselves and their audiences.
For-profit business model sees citizens reap dividends
Spectrum, Ezra Kyrill Erker, Published on 03/06/2012
» In Yangon an organisation, FXB Myanmar, gives vocational training and business opportunities to HIV-positive workers and women rescued from the Thai sex industry. A manufacturer of affordable foot pumps for irrigation, Proximity Designs, has a network of distribution channels to upcountry farmers that NGOs and government organisations envy. BusinessKind-Myanmar sells low-cost mosquito netting in malarial and dengue fever regions, and half of its work force is also HIV-positive. Myanmar Business Executives provides low-interest microcredit and networking outlets to needy individuals and organisations.
A mercenary's tale
Spectrum, Ezra Kyrill Erker, Published on 06/05/2012
» Peter Slade was once in prison for five years on charges of murder, conspiracy to commit another murder and attempting to overthrow a foreign government _ partly a victim, he says, of a corrupt Australian judicial system. He fought in the Vietnam War, was a security contractor in 1973 Rhodesia, a debt collector at home in Melbourne and as far afield as Nigeria, and arrived in reconstruction-era Cambodia and Iraq without connections but a desire to start anew, in stints that would last some seven years each. He witnessed first-hand the Bangkok coup that killed journalists Neil Davis and Bill Latch in 1985 and was on the beach in Patong the morning the tsunami struck Phuket in 2004.
She shall not be moved
Spectrum, Ezra Kyrill Erker, Published on 12/02/2012
» Five years ago, Boeung Kak Lake was Phnom Penh's largest. It served as home to some 20,000 Cambodians as well as the capital's backpacker ghetto, where foreign travellers would sit on guest house patios in a cannabis haze to watch the sun set over the waters and finish another Angkor Beer. And although the lake was full of sewage and debris and was hardly pristine, it served as an important catchment basin for the capital, providing equilibrium during the wet and dry seasons.