In times of great uncertainties, danger, and stress, mental health becomes an issue of public concern. Yet, the problem does not quite get the needed response in terms of public health programs, facilities, and services. In this context, the initiatives taken by private individuals and organizations are extremely important.

An inspiring example is that of fifty-four-year-old Cambodian psychiatrist SOTHEARA CHHIM. He was only seven-years-old when the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia in 1975 and forced the people of Phnom Penh and other cities to rural camps for a regimen of slave labor and reeducation. Children, like CHHIM, were separated from their parents to work in these camps. It took more than three years before CHHIM was reunited with his family when Phnom Penh was liberated in 1979.

Amid the psychological devastation wrought by a genocidal rule that claimed 1.7 million lives, CHHIM studied medicine at Phnom Penh’s University of Health Sciences and was among the first Cambodian psychiatrists to graduate after years of war. The challenge that faced CHHIM was forbidding. It is said that 40% of Cambodians suffer from mental health problems. Yet, even today, the resources needed to address the problem are direly lacking. Only 2% of health centers and 59% of referral hospitals offer mental health services to outpatients. There are only two psychiatric inpatient units with a total of fourteen beds to serve a country of about 15 million.

In 2002, CHHIM assumed a leading role in mental health as executive director of Cambodia’s Transcultural Psychosocial Organization (TPO). (The organization started as a branch of Netherlands-based TPO International but became an independent organization in 2000.) TPO Cambodia is the largest non-government organization in the field of mental health care and psychosocial support in Cambodia. Based in Phnom Penh, it has more than forty medical professionals and staff and has satellite offices in four provinces. It is guided by these principles: it is community-based, psychosocial (takes mental health in the context of community and society), capability-building (empowers people to survive and thrive), and integrative.

TPO worked on the “Truth, Trauma, and the Victims of Torture” project at the time the Khmer Rouge Tribunal was investigating the Cambodian genocide (CHHIM took part as an expert witness). TPO conducted treatment and training in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in tandem with Documentation Center of Cambodia, the organization devoted to documenting the genocide. As a method of trauma assessment and treatment, TPO practiced “testimonial therapy,” a localized version of an internationally recognized treatment method developed for PTSD cases resulting from mass, organized violence. With the help of therapists, survivors put into writing their traumatic experiences. A formal testimony is produced, which is then presented by the survivor in a public ceremony presided over by a monk. It is a ritual with healing, spiritual effects. At this time, CHHIM also developed the Cambodian concept of baksbat (broken courage), a post-traumatic state of fear, passivity, and avoidance. Deemed more nuanced and appropriate to the Cambodian experience than “post-traumatic stress disorder,” it is now used by TPO for trauma assessment and treatment.

TPO-Cambodia’s activities include gender-based violence counseling for victims of rape, forced marriages, and other forms of violence against women; a hotline service that provided counselling and referrals during the Covid-19 pandemic; and Operation Unchain, which provided treatment to mentally-ill patients locked up or chained at home and educated families on how to better care for these patients. The TPO Clinic in Phnom Penh has served thousands of patients. It is not, however, the center of CHHIM’s work. CHHIM says: “When I work in the clinic, I see only individuals, one to one with a patient. When I’m in the community, I see the people, the whole family, and the community.” This is where the mental health worker should be.

In electing SOTHEARA CHHIM to receive the 2022 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his calm courage in surmounting deep trauma to become his people’s healer; his transformative work amidst great need and seemingly insurmountable difficulties, and for showing that daily devotion to the best of one’s profession can itself be a form of greatness.

I am still in disbelief to be here in Manila to receive Asia’s most prestigious prize, the Ramon Magsaysay Award.

This Award is very special to me on both a professional and personal level.  It is an acknowledgment of the work that my organization, Transcultural Psychosocial Organization-Cambodia, have done to alleviate the suffering of the Cambodian people from trauma and mental health problems over the past decades.

As Cambodia’s history has shaped my career path, please allow me to quickly share with you my own personal history.

I was born into a family of architects.  Since childhood, I have dreamt of becoming one and to build a skyscraper in Phnom Penh.  My dreams and plans were shattered when the Khmer Rouge regime reigned in Cambodia for three years, eight months and twenty days.  During this regime, the intellectuals in the country were brutally murdered with only 40 doctors surviving. We felt traumatized and demoralized. We Cambodians were all living in deep trauma and with baksbat, literally meaning “broken courage.”

Given our dire situation, my mother insisted that I study medicine and become a doctor.  There is a great need to help save people’s lives.  Thus, I stopped pursuing my own dream and decided to be an obedient son.

As a young doctor in remote areas, I saw the great need for psychosocial help.  I realized that this was perhaps my calling, to provide much-needed psychosocial care to my countrymen, especially those in the rural areas.

My organization, TPO-Cambodia, offers mental health services to hundreds of thousands of Cambodians.  Through our tireless efforts, the stigma on mental health has been reduced; and now more people seek mental health care.

This Award comes with a prize money.  I am donating all of this to TPO’s initiative, “Operation Unchain Project,” to continue to treat and unchain more patients who are in  need of help.  I will continue to implement this project until there are no more patients chained in the country.

I can stand before you today without hesitation to say that I have no regrets in following my mother’s advice.  She has always taught me to do the right thing.  After all, she named me “Sotheara” which means gentle, humble, kind, and compassionate.  I hope that I have lived up to this name.

Words cannot express my sincerest gratitude to be given the Ramon Magsaysay Award.

But please allow me to thank the Foundation for this great honor.

I would like to thank my wonderful TPO family, who have been working with me in this advocacy.  Forty-three of them are here today to celebrate with me.

I also wish to thank my Filipino professor, Dr. Cornelio Banaag, who taught me psychiatry in Phnom Penh 26 years ago.

And most importantly, I would like to thank my family, especially my beautiful, beloved wife Chantara, and my two children–Chan Charia and Chan Oussa–who are always by my side in my life. Without their support, I will not be able to do this work.

I wish everyone in Asia the five precepts of Buddha: Longevity, Beauty, Health, Strength, and Wisdom.

The five-year Cambodian genocide of 1975-79, that caused the death of at least two million Cambodians, is one of the most horrific episodes in the long, dark history of crimes against humanity. It is imperative to the cause of justice that this horror is not forgotten. YOUK CHHANG, one of its survivors, has devoted his life to the monumental task of documenting and memorializing the genocide to serve the aims of judicial redress, national reconciliation, and collective healing. More importantly, his work assures that the past is truthfully preserved for present and future generations so that it will not be distorted or ever repeated.

Born in Phnom Penh, YOUK was fourteen years old when his family was forced out of their home by Khmer Rouge operatives to work like slaves in a rural commune. He saw his family reduced to extreme privation; was himself tortured and detained; even worse, YOUK suffered the trauma of the death of his father, five of his siblings, and nearly sixty of his relatives. Able to escape across the Thai border to freedom at the age of seventeen, he found his way as a refugee to the United States. Years later, he would earn a graduate degree in political science and chose to return to Cambodia when civic order had been restored, enrolling in the human rights and democracy training programs of the International Republican Institute and the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC).

YOUK found his life-long mission in 1995, when the Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Project engaged him to head its Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), charged with investigating and documenting Khmer Rouge atrocities. Two years later, DC-Cam became an independent institute, directed and operated entirely by Cambodians. As its executive director from 1995 to the present, YOUK expanded DC-Cam’s work beyond documentation in aid of the Khmer Rouge War Crimes Trials that began in 2009; he pursued the broader task of promoting “memory and justice as the critical foundations for the rule of law and genuine national reconciliation.”

The scope of this work has been immense, arduous, and painfully difficult in Cambodia’s transitioning, polarized society. Despite the destruction, loss, or absence of records, DC-Cam was able to collect and assemble over one million documents, providing over half of these as evidence in the war crimes trials. They digitized these documents for online public access; produced digital mapping of over 23,000 mass graves in Cambodia’s “killing fields”; excavated samples of human skeletal remains for forensic examination; conducted interviews with over 10,000 persons, both victims and perpetrators; implemented research, publishing, and educational programs on genocide, transitional justice and human rights; and promoted public participation in the whole process. Yet YOUK’s work is not only turned towards the past, it also looks to Cambodia’s future: he recognizes that preserving and understanding the past must serve as a powerful safeguard against all those who may seek to distort or erase it.

Today, YOUK is engaged in building the Sleuk Rith Institute, an ambitious project which will house a museum, archives and library; a research center; and a graduate program on crimes against humanity to sustain what DC-Cam has accomplished and serve as a resource center for a world deeply scarred and still threatened by genocide.

All this is not an abstract mission for YOUK but one that is profoundly personal. Of his mother, who, borrowing five US dollars, pushed him to flee Cambodia and whom he would only see some twenty years later, he says: “I do this for my mother who suffered… I want her to be a free woman, not to carry all the tragedy in her heart and in her life.” It is a deeply-felt commitment he has widened into the work of remembrance, justice, and healing for all Cambodians.

In electing YOUK CHHANG to receive the 2018 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his great, unstinting labor in preserving the memory of the Cambodian genocide, and his leadership and vision in transforming the memory of horror into a process of attaining and preserving justice in his nation and the world.

Salamat Po. I am humbled by this most prestigious award. In receiving it, I am reminded of a thought I often have as a survivor: “If you have survived genocide, you are blessed in many ways. You can begin again. You find a place to live, get a job, make friends, and start a family. But physical survival is the easy part. You can also be unlucky in just as many ways. Genocide breaks you. Your heart aches from losing the people you loved. You are haunted by your memories. You feel guilt at merely surviving when so many died. And worst of all, you can lose hope.”

I am reminded every day by survivors and the people who advocate on their behalf, to not lose hope. I take heart in the relentless strength of survivors and the heroic, kind-hearted people who help them. This award is a reminder, on behalf of my mother and all mothers in Cambodia who have survived the genocide, of the kindness of the Filipinos. The Filipinos opened their country to Cambodian refugees in the wake of the Khmer Rouge regime’s collapse in the 1980s. The Philippine government and people, along with other countries including the United States, rose to the occasion in helping us. In receiving this award, I want to take the opportunity to thank the Philippines for their kindness back then. Your help to the Cambodian people was a shining example to not give up hope.

I also want to say that it is important to remember the mistakes of the past. We must remember mistakes as a decisive act at all levels of society from individuals to communities and governments. Remembering mistakes is not easy because it requires us to consciously accept additional pain in the present so that our children will not relive our mistakes in the future. But this is the pathway to justice. Justice will always begin and end with the duty of memory.

Again, salamat po, mula sa kaibuturan ng aking puso.

As Cambodia emerges from the shadows of a destructive dictatorship, building an empowered citizenry is vital to its future as a progressive and democratic society. Food security, market access, and asset creation are basic concerns in this process of empowerment. In a country where 80 percent of the population is in the rural areas and 66 percent depends on rice farming, it is in the rice farming communities where the most important changes must take place.

Agronomist YANG SAING KOMA is at the center of these changes. The son of a teacher-farmer in Cambodia’s Takeo province, KOMA was old enough to experience the terrible dislocations under the Khmer Rouge regime when his family was forced to leave their province for Phnom Penh. He was fortunate, however, after the regime’s fall, to go on scholarship to Germany where he specialized in agriculture and earned a doctorate at the University of Leipzig in 1995. Returning to Cambodia, he worked for foreign development organizations but knew that he had to find a way to be free to pursue his own priorities; he firmly believed that “Cambodians need to take responsibility for their own destiny.”

Championing sustainable agriculture, KOMA founded in 1997 the Cambodian Center for Study and Development in Agriculture (CEDAC), with a team of seven and the help of a French non-government organization. Its early years were difficult as KOMA struggled to make CEDAC an independent, self-sustaining organization, but his single-minded determination paid off. Today, fifteen years later, CEDAC has become the largest agricultural and rural development NGO in Cambodia.

The linchpin of CEDAC’s success was its introduction of the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), an ecologically sustainable approach to rice production. SRI is based on a simple system of plant, water, and soil management, and is suitable to Cambodia’s dominant pattern of smallholder farms. KOMA introduced SRI in 2000 to twenty-eight reluctant farmers; since then, he has painstakingly promoted SRI so that it gradually spread to more than 100,000 rice farmers, registering a 61 percent increase in rice yields, even as it decreased the amount of seeds and chemical fertilizers used while increasing the use of organic fertilizers by 85 percent. In 2005, the Cambodian government officially endorsed SRI as a rice production strategy. Today, CEDAC is supporting 140,000 farmer families in twenty-one provinces. Between 2002 and 2010, Cambodia’s rice production rose from 3.82 million tons to 7.97 million tons, and CEDAC’s work has been credited as the major factor in this increase.

Recognizing the need for rice farmers to share knowledge among themselves, CEDAC established in 2003 the Farmer and Nature Net (FNN), an independent network of 1,402 farmer associations with around 40,000 members in all. Calling this a “mind net,” KOMA organized FNN to promote sustainable agricultural practices, women engagement in agriculture, and marketing and savings cooperatives. Today, the associations under the FNN have been able to mobilize savings of more than US$8 million, with an average monthly increase of 5 percent.

In 2008, KOMA initiated CEDAC Enterprise for Development (CESDE), subsequently renamed Sahakreas CEDAC (SKC), a social enterprise that addresses predatory market conditions by linking farmers directly to the market. By selling only organic products, KOMA explains, “SKC also links the responsible farmer to the responsible consumer.” To date, CESDE runs a chain of thirteen shops that sell only locally produced, organic agricultural products. It is supporting over 5,000 farmers in eight provinces and has already begun to export organic rice.

All this has been accomplished through a “bottom-up” approach that does not impose a pre-set formula but allows farmers to discover by themselves a better way of doing things. “The challenge,” KOMA says, “lies in building people. We have to believe in ourselves, we have to believe in our ideas.” Asked what this means for Cambodia, he avers: “Everything is interrelated. A simple thing can have a lot of influence on the system. If more people grow, society will grow.”

In electing YANG SAING KOMA to receive the 2012 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his creative fusion of practical science and collective will, that has inspired and enabled vast numbers of farmers in Cambodia to become more empowered and productive contributors to their country’s economic growth.

First, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for selecting me to be one of the 2012 awardees. It is a great honor for me, for CEDAC, our cooperating farmers, as well as for our national and international partners who have worked with us for the empowerment of small farmers. I consider this award as recognition of our collective achievements in working for the improvement of the livelihood of small farmers during these past fifteen years.

In August 1997 I set up CEDAC as a small NGO with seven people and initial support from a French NGO called GRET. We are now the leading Cambodian NGO which works for the improvement of the livelihood of more than 100,000 farmer families. The progress in livelihood has been especially due to increasing rice production and income using the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) and developing cooperation among farmers in collectively saving for mutual help.

SRI is an innovative approach in sustainable rice intensification which focuses on improving the farmer’s practices in seed, plant, soil and water management. It was developed in Madagascar by the priest Henri de Laulanie in the 1980s. I introduced SRI to Cambodian farmers in 2000, with only twenty-eight experimenting farmers. Now, SRI is considered by our national government and other partners as an important solution to poverty among small rice farmers. There are now around 200,000 SRI farmers in Cambodia.

So far, there is a generally accepted belief that rice farmers can only increase rice yields by relying on the use of external inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides, and high-yielding varieties. This has contributed to creating an attitude of dependency and has developed into a vicious cycle of poverty among rice farmers. With SRI we are able to prove that farmers can increase their rice productivity from 50 to 150 percent by using less or no external inputs, especially imported fertilizers, pesticides and external seeds. This is possible as farmers understand more about the huge natural potential of rice plants to produce higher yields; they have also developed the creative capacity to tap the natural potential of rice plants by gradually developing their knowledge, skills and practices in effective use of existing local resources, such as local varieties, local soil and local water resources.

The Ramon Magsaysay Award is not only a recognition for our past achievements. It is also an important encouragement for me and my colleagues to reinforce and expand our assistance to small farmers. For the next ten years, we will focus on assisting subsistence rice farmers in Cambodia to become commercial organic farm entrepreneurs, producing healthy food to feed society. We will also support them in working together to invest in cooperative rice mills run by the gasifier system. I consider this work as an important contribution to ensure long-term food, income and energy security for our rice farmers

In many places in the world today, citizens are engaged in a historic struggle to democratize their societies, often under conditions of extreme difficulty and danger. One such place is Cambodia. The country was traumatized by decades of war and the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, which left 1.7 million Cambodians dead. The country took its first step to establishing a “multi-party liberal democracy” when it proclaimed a new constitution and embarked on its first democratic elections in 1993. Cambodians have gone through five national and local elections since then. But democracy’s progress has been slow and turbulent, and elections have been undermined by factionalism, fraud, violence, and the threat of a return to authoritarian rule. Many know that the central challenge is for Cambodians to claim the electoral process as their own, by protecting it as an instrument for building a democracy. One of those who have bravely stepped up to this challenge is a Cambodian engineer named KOUL PANHA.

KOUL knows firsthand what brutalities are possible in the absence of a true democracy. He was eight years old when his father and relatives were killed by the Khmer Rouge. The indescribable trauma impelled him to dedicate himself to changing his society. He finished his university degree, taught in Phnom Penh, and was already involved in the human rights movement even in the time of the dictatorship. When Cambodia embarked on its first free elections in 1993, he joined the non-partisan Task Force on Cambodian Elections, and was one of the organizers when this task force became the Committee for Free and Fair Elections (COMFREL) in 1997. KOUL assumed the role of COMFREL executive director in 1998; returning home after earning a master’s degree in the Politics of Alternative Development, he threw himself full-time into COMFREL’s mission of assuring that Cambodian elections are free and fair.

Under KOUL’s leadership, COMFREL has become the country’s leading independent organization on electoral issues. It aggressively campaigns for responsible voting and electoral reforms, using all available media. In protecting the 2008 electoral process, COMFREL and its partners trained and deployed over ten thousand volunteers, covering 60 percent of the country’s polling stations. For the first time in Cambodia, a citizens’ parallel “quick count,” initiated by COMFREL, helped forestall the manipulation of results by establishing voting trends three days after the elections. They have also proactively campaigned for the wider political participation of women, who constitute half of Cambodia’s population, a campaign that has seen a subsequent increase of women in public office.

Based in Phnom Penh, COMFREL maintains a nationwide network of partners and has mobilized, since its inception, over fifty thousand election volunteers; more than 150,000 Cambodians have participated in COMFREL’s training programs, workshops and other activities. This is an impressive show of civic participation in a democracy still so young. Even more significant is how COMFREL has gone beyond elections—into post-election issues of governance. It actively lobbies for reforms in matters like election campaign finance and the national budget. In 2003 it initiated Parliamentary Watch, which monitors the performance of legislators and officials using benchmarks and concrete indicators in grading government performance at both local and national levels. COMFREL’s monitoring reports are publicly disseminated.

Democracy in Cambodia remains fragile, and the situation complex and dangerous. KOUL has experienced harassment, and he knows he has to walk a tightrope for COMFREL to continue doing its work. But despite the legitimate fears of friends and family, he remains committed to using every inch of democratic space to empower his people in building a homeland that is democratic and free. Recalling the tragic experience of millions of Cambodians and his own family, the soft-spoken KOUL says: “I think Cambodia has suffered enough. This pushes me to do something as a citizen of Cambodia, to make sure the suffering does not happen again.”

In electing KOUL PANHA to receive the 2011 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his determined and courageous leadership of the sustained campaign to build an enlightened, organized and vigilant citizenry who will ensure fair and free elections—as well as demand accountable governance by their elected officials—in Cambodia’s nascent democracy.

First of all, I would like to thank the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for granting me such a prestigious award. I am very much honored for myself, my family and my country Cambodia.

Before the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) was established, along with other former prisoners of conscience I initiated the first human rights movement to prevent Cambodia’s return to civil war, the genocide, the brutality of human rights abuses, oppression and disasters.

After UNTAC finished its mission, I, along with other leaders of civil society organizations realized that as Cambodian citizens we have the responsibility and obligation to continue to promote democracy and citizen participation. We set up two mission goals. Our first core mission goal was to help create an informed and favorable climate for free and fair elections. The second mission goal was to strengthen the meaningfulness of post-election periods by encouraging citizens to participate in democratic governance and decision making. This is in order to implement reforms and increase the accountability of elected officials.

We believe that a fragile democracy like Cambodia is not just about elections; it is about the sustained work to aggressively campaign for free, fair and meaningful elections, which are necessary in order to promote democracy. This is why we have devoted great efforts to strengthen citizen participation in genuine democratic elections.

Although these mission goals have been partly implemented and fulfilled, Cambodia currently is facing challenges, limiting the democratic space that allows citizens to freely express and engage in democracy and human rights activities. For me personally, this is a frustrating situation.

This award is a new source of energy that gives me strength to work harder and to reinforce the courageousness of the organizations that I work for and engage with.

On this very special occasion, I would like to thank my family, friends and the organizations that I work for and engage with, as well as donor organizations. They have given me enormous support, trust and encouragement. I would also like to express my appreciation for colleagues, stakeholders, and the leaders of national and regional organizations, including the Asian Network For Free Election (ANFREL), for their collaboration and strong solidarity with us, that strengthens our work for the democratic cause in Cambodia and Asia.

I would like to acknowledge in a special way the Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia, or COMFREL. I owe this achievement to the COMFREL staff, board members, our huge network of activists and volunteers. In particular I am grateful to our member-organizations including the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association (ADHOC), who work unceasingly so that we might attain the goal of a truly free, democratic society in Cambodia.

Asia’s urban multitudes are thirsty and ever-growing. Providing them with safe drinking water is a gargantuan task everywhere. But consider Phnom Penh. The Cambodian capital and former French colonial center had only a modest water distribution system to begin with. Bombing, civil war, and social havoc in the early 1970s brought waves of refugees to the city. Then, abruptly in 1975, the triumphant Khmer Rouge banished every person from Phnom Penh and abandoned its already sagging infrastructure to atrophy. When the genocidal regime was driven from power in 1979, the city swelled again, yet little was done to revive its broken-down water system. Then, in 1993, EK SONN CHAN was put in charge. 

As a young engineering graduate, EK SONN CHAN lost his entire family to the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. He managed to survive as a farmer. In 1979, he found work at the Phnom Penh municipal abattoir and subsequently rose to be the city’s director of commerce. The water system he inherited in 1993 was barely a system at all. Over the years, its ancient French-laid pipes had been augmented haphazardly into an indecipherable maze of connections. No blueprints had survived the Khmer Rouge, nor had the engineers who understood them. The entire labyrinth was riddled with holes and so porous that disease-laden sewage easily seeped in. EK discovered that 70 percent of the city’s water was lost to leaks or theft. Among the thieves were his own employees as well as military men and other VIPs who profited by selling water to better-off neighborhoods. Poor people paid black marketeers dearly for what was left. The city’s water agency collected fees from only half its users. Not surprisingly, it was losing money. 

EK combed his bloated workforce for the best and brightest and set them to work — locating and repairing the system’s myriad leaks, installing thousands of water meters, and closing hundreds of illegal connections. He installed a computerized billing program, financed by France, and persuaded other international lenders that his agency was a good risk. In 1997, the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority (PPWSA) became an autonomous public enterprise. With major loans from the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the government of Japan, General Director EK SONN CHAN embarked upon a major overhaul. 

He laid 1,500 kilometers of new pipelines and expanded the Authority?s water output by 600 percent. He confronted VIP nonpayers and cut off their water when persuasion failed, achieving a collection rate of 99 percent by 2003. He raised prices, resulting in strong revenues and an enviable reputation for paying the Authority’s debts ahead of schedule. With pricing policies favoring light users as well as subsidized connection fees and installment payment plans, he made cheap water available to the city’s poorest neighborhoods. New and refurbished water-treatment plants ensured that this water met WHO water-safety standards. At the same time, EK professionalized the Authority’s workforce, building its technical capacity and instilling in its employees a work ethic of discipline, competence, and teamwork. 

Today, EK’s clean water reaches virtually all of Phnom Penh’s inner city and he is busy spreading it to the outer reaches of the metropolis. In 2004, the World Bank cited PPWSA for its “dramatic improvement in organization, profitability and organizational performance.” 

Now fifty-six, EK SONN CHAN attributes his drive to “work for the country” to the traumas of Cambodia’s recent past. Patriotism also explains his preference for public utilities over private-sector ones. “The profit made by us,” he says, referring to the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority, “will be profit for our country.” 

In electing EK SONN CHAN to receive the 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the board of trustees recognizes his exemplary rehabilitation of a ruined public utility, bringing safe drinking water to a million people in Cambodia’s capital city.

The Honorable Chief Justice, Chairman and Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, distinguished guests, fellow Awardees and dear friends. 

Thirteen years ago, I was appointed by my superior to be the head of the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority — an organization synonymous to corruption, inefficiency and a big bully from the public point of view. No government officer wanted to accept this job; but it challenged me. 

Today, I come here to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award for having rehabilitated a ruined public utility, bringing safe drinking water to a million people in Cambodia’s city. This is doubtless the most profound honor I have received. Words cannot express my deep appreciation and gratitude to the Foundation and its officers and trustees for this award. 

I feel humbled by this recognition because I know that I did not do it alone. There are so many other unsung organizations and people who have made their respective contributions to help me achieve my mission at this level. 

Cambodia was devastated by 20 years’ civil war. Many homes were damaged and many lives were lost. Most infrastructure facilities were destroyed. The country under civil war was ruled by a dictatorship. This ravaged our economy and shattered the morale of our people. Surviving from the killing fields, favored with the support of well-meaning individuals and organizations, my colleagues and I have tried to do something for the benefit of our people; and we are able to do it to some extent. 

In receiving this 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, I would like to pay my humble tribute to this great leader, to thank those who have taken part in the selection process for bestowing this honor upon me, and to share it with all the dedicated and selfless men and women of PPWSA, who have contributed so much in bringing PPWSA to where it is today. 

Our mission is by no means complete; we continue to do our best, as this award has propelled me to consolidate and expand my work. Thank you all.

Violence against women knows no one place or social condition, alas. But it flourishes in times of upheaval and great social change, as in Cambodia during its long painful recovery from war and holocaust. OUNG CHANTHOL, executive director of the Cambodian Women?s Crisis Center (CWCC), wants to make her country a safer place for women. 

Born in Kampot, Cambodia in 1967, OUNG lost her father to the Khmer Rouge and spent many years of her youth in a Thai refugee camp. There she studied law and public administration and led a job-training program for widows. Returning home in 1992 under the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), she worked as an interpreter and joined a human rights task force. Here she became acquainted with the magnitude of sex trafficking and other gender-related crimes in Cambodia. Following a period of study at Columbia University and an assignment with the Cambodia office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, she decided to act. With the support of friends and of Terre des Hommes (Germany and the Netherlands) she founded CWCC in 1997. 

Prostitution has a long history in Cambodia. But it rose dramatically during the UNTAC transition and afterwards. By 1994, in Phnom Penh alone, some 17,000 women and girls were involved, most of them sold or tricked into prostitution and kept in virtual servitude. Thousands more were being trafficked to Thailand to be prostitutes, maids, and beggars. Profits from this cruel trade were shared by traffickers and brothel owners and by the goons, police, and politicians who protected them. For the women, there was no recourse. 

It was the same for victims of rape and domestic violence, crimes the Cambodian police barely acknowledged and acted upon capriciously, if at all. Many women endured such an assault fatalistically, fearing they had somehow brought it upon themselves-a view Cambodian society tended to uphold. 

OUNG moved her new organization into action quickly. CWCC set up confidential shelters for women rescued from brothels and abusive husbands. It gave legal assistance to victims of rape, trafficking, and domestic abuse and helped them understand their rights. It investigated cases of gender violence of all kinds and prodded the police to intervene and make arrests. It provided medical care and counseling, giving comfort to hundreds of women who, before CWCC, had no one to talk to about their fear, shame, and depression. And it trained women in literacy, health, and livelihood skills and helped them find jobs. Thousands of women have now received such assistance from CWCC. 

By painstakingly documenting hundreds of cases of rape, trafficking, and domestic abuse, OUNG has learned that these crimes are abetted by pervasive ignorance. CWCC therefore mounts awareness campaigns to tell people that sex trafficking is illegal and should be deterred. It educates local authorities and the police. It broadcasts effective radio and TV messages and provides authoritative data to journalists; OUNG herself speaks bluntly to the media. With its partners in Cambodia’s growing civil society, it is carrying the dialogue about women?s rights to the highest levels of government. 

At CWCC, the future is charted at meetings where OUNG and her twenty-five staff members analyze problems and brainstorm about solutions. There are many problems. In Cambodia, old habits die hard and the wheels of justice grind slowly. Moreover, CWCC’s work is inherently dangerous, provoking the wrath of brothel owners, angry husbands, police, and politicians. 

OUNG and her colleagues are accustomed to this. Soft-spoken but passionate, thirty-four-year-old Oung shrugs off the dangers and, when frustration mounts, gathers her staff to talk things through. And the work goes on. 

In electing OUNG CHANTHOL to receive the 2001 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes her rising courageously to confront and eliminate sex trafficking and gender violence in Cambodia.

Your Excellency President Gloria M. Arroyo, members of the Magsaysay family, distinguished guests, trustees, fellow awardees, ladies and gentlemen: 

Granting an award to me tonight as the second awardee from Cambodia is a great honor and pleasure for me, my family; my colleagues at CWCC; funding agencies, media, partner NGOs, Cambodian people; and government. 

I would like therefore to express my deepest thanks to the trustees and staff for working very hard in selecting me to receive the Award for Emergent Leadership. It confirms that our mission of eliminating violence against women is right and should be pursued. It has been very inspiring for me to see not only CWCC grow, but also get more young people involved, stay involved and work harder for the best interests of women and children who are the most vulnerable groups. I am sure that the recognition will facilitate my work in this very hard struggle. 

In 1997, my friends and I, with the support of TDH, decided to establish the Cambodian Women’s Crisis Center (CWCC) in response to the outcry of hundreds of thousands of women and children who were victims of sex trafficking, rape and domestic violence. Communities were ignoring their cries for help because they could not access services such as safe shelter, therapy, social services, legal remedies and justice. Our mission is to empower women and children victims to help themselves, and to mobilize communities and government officials in responding and eliminating violence against women to achieve safety, equality, peace, development and happiness for all. 

After many years of great effort in empowering victims, villagers, police officers, local authorities, and the court; gradually become our allies in assisting victims and preventing issues and start to cope with the problem by themselves. An office and hot line for helping the victims have been set up for them and the same programs are duplicated by other NGOs and a few ministries. The lawyers, who traditionally represented only the accused, agreed to assist the victims. Newspapers, TV, and radio now are actively and successfully working together in disseminating information to the public and policy and lawmakers. The media and newspapers come to us for information, unlike in the beginning when CWCC staff approached them. It is common to see CWCC’s work reported in the media. 

Last year, the Ministry of Social Affairs, Labor, Vocational Training and Youth Rehabilitation presented two Certificates of Appreciation to CWCC for its outstanding work. 

Despite all our success, what we have achieved is still very small compared to the seriousness of violence against women in Cambodia, which needs continuous and integrated interventions and gender-based sensitivity to change public attitude and behavior. 

Breaking ground in the fight against violence against women is lengthy and dangerous. We have encountered so many obstacles including resistance from unreasonable conservative communities, threats from abusers, and the frustration in the failure of the legal system in providing justice to victims. We are also daily witnesses and listeners to abuse against women and children. 

On a personal note, as a young female leader I have to overcome other problems such as seniority and negative reactions to feminism. I face challenges in choosing appropriate and responsive strategies, selecting the right gender-sensitive staff, enabling them to become more professional, and keeping them from burning out. But the suffering of victims is the motivating factor for us to continue this difficult mission. 

I have also learned a lot from this work. First, everything can be changed for the better. But it needs time, persistence, accurate information, and proper planning with input from the victims and all the stakeholders. Second, empowering people to deal with problems by themselves needs to be effective and efficient. I am sure that no one wants violence against their daughters, sisters and mothers if they are aware that it is violence and it is unjust. Culturally, we have been taught that violence against women is an acceptable act and a private matter. We therefore need to educate people and empower them to collectively respond to the issue by themselves. Third, a leader in this kind of work must be dedicated. If the leader is uncommitted and afraid, the staff will be the same, but if the leader is committed and brave, the staff will follow suit. Then, everything is possible. Fourth, coordination and networking is necessary for success and the leader must constantly build her own capacity through formal and informal education to gain strength and confidence from people and institutions they work with. 

SI believe that a society can be peaceful and prosperous only when men, women and children hold hands together with equal dignity and respect. These can be attained only with participation and support from all sectors, not only from women?s groups, including civil society, government, NGOs, men and women. 

To conclude, I am very encouraged by your recognition. CWCC would not be as successful as today without the help of our supporters. I hope the support is continued. THANK YOU!

Any great public tragedy embraces within it a million small and private ones. NUON PHALY encountered this truth in a refugee camp to which she and ten thousand others fled to escape the horrors at home in Cambodia. Among the private tragedies she found there were those of women in whose minds the nightmares of war lived on and on. NUON didn’t really know how to help these women crippled by depression and sadness. But putting aside her own needs, she began to try.

NUON PHALY was just eleven when Cambodia gained its independence from France at the end of 1953. During the brief era of peace that followed, she attended high school, started a family, and learned to take shorthand in French and Khmer. By 1972 she was a senior secretary at the Ministry of Finance. When the Khmer Rouge seized Phnom Penh in April 1975, NUON was among the multitudes of Cambodians forced brutally into the countryside. She survived the killing fields but, in 1984, fled with her family to a refugee camp on the Thai border—the way-station, she hoped, to a new and better life abroad.

NUON remembers the camp as a huge repository of misery and casual violence. Failing to qualify for asylum in another country, she joined a research project to document the experiences of her fellow camp members under the Khmer Rouge. This led her to meet many women who were traumatized by memories of war, torture, and family separation. Widows suffered horribly. Since no one seemed to be addressing this particular need, she began to do so herself.

In 1985, NUON and her husband opened their small house in the camp as a center for refugees suffering from depression. With the support of the Catholic Office for Emergency Refugee Relief and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, her modest center grew quickly to accommodate thirty-five women, as well as sixteen children whose parents were lost or incapacitated by mental illness. In 1987, she named it the Khmer People’s Depression Relief Center, or KPDR.

Operating at first from her own compassionate instincts and with the assistance of traditional Khmer healers, NUON later studied Western mental health therapies in Thailand. At KPDR she combined these approaches in a unique counseling service. In time, most of the women in her care resumed normal lives outside the center. But the number of children increased. When NUON returned to Cambodia in 1993, she was accompanied by nine widows and ninety-one orphaned children.

NUON reestablished her center and, in 1995, occupied a two-hectare site outside Phnom Penh that today boasts several handsome classrooms, dormitories, and workrooms. The Future Light Orphanage, as she now calls it, is home to some 150 orphans and the center from which NUON provides livelihood training and mental health counseling to over a hundred war widows in neighboring villages, as well as education and medical and clothing assistance to hundreds of needy children. Nuon’s center is supported by the government and by the World Food Programme of the United Nations, and proceeds from the sale of handicrafts made by the children themselves. But it is still struggling.

Although often discouraged, the ever-smiling NUON perseveres with the daily assistance and fervent support of her husband, Hem Soeurn. A small pamphlet published by the center captures the essence of her labor of love. The Future Light Orphanage, it says, “is a place of hopes and dreams.” Children in blue and white uniforms “are seen learning English. Young women are sewing and reconstructing their lives.”

In electing NUON PHALY to receive the 1998 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes her selfless commitment to helping war-traumatized women and children rebuild their spirits and lives in the wake of Cambodia’s great national tragedy.

Thank you very much for electing me as the 1998 Magsaysay Awardee for Community Leadership.

I feel particularly privileged, not because it is such a prestigious award, but mainly because it has been established in honor of your great President the late Ramon Magsaysay, who rendered such distinguished service to the people of the Philippines when they needed it most.

It is a great honor for me to receive this prestigious and honored award. I consider my efforts to be too small for this award; still it is very encouraging to see my work recognized by the Foundation. It is an indication that Cambodia’s women and its unfortunate, war-ravaged masses are not forgotten by the international community and still have friends who have sympathy for them and their cause. Especially, the plight of the victims of the regime of the Khmer Rouge and their killing fields from 1975 to 1979 during which 2 to 3 million innocent people and children died from starvation, execution, and diseases without medical care and, services, and tens of thousands of women were left widowed and suffering from depression, while having to take care of many small children without support; and children who were rendered homeless and were orphaned.

It is the obsession of my life to serve the underprivileged of humanity, especially women and children, and to extend to them the recognition and the rights they deserve.

I accept this award on behalf of Cambodian women and children who have been the most oppressed and forgotten people of the Cambodian community. I have only done what I consider to be essential for the unfortunate people of Cambodia. My attempts are too small to heal the wounds inflicted on millions of my fellow countrymen and women and children; I shall always need the support of others, especially the sisterhood of women and that of the children, for the continuation of my work.

I thank all those who have promoted my nomination for this award, all those who have been supportive of my work, the kind donors and generous individuals who have made my work possible, and all the people of the Philippines for their warm hospitality.

Once again I thank you all for the honor you have done me—a humble Executive Director of the Future Light Orphanage. I accept it on behalf of the women of Cambodia.

I re-dedicate the years left of my life to the service of the underprivileged, the dispossessed particularly the most vulnerable of them in our society—women and girls—to their health and development in the sacred memory of your great PRESIDENT RAMON MAGSAYSAY.

Mobilizing Asia’s resources to meet man’s growing needs is often crippled by narrow sectional and traditional loyalties. Such shortsighted insistence upon more immediate and personal advantage frustrates rational solutions to many common problems. 

Since it was established nine years ago, the MEKONG COMMITTEE has shown what can be achieved for farmers, fishermen and new industry by international cooperative effort in one of the world’s most troubled regions. Created in response to a recommendation of the United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East, this COMMITTEE joins Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam in common utilization of the immense potential of the Mekong River. Technical and financial assistance has come from 21 countries outside the basin, 12 United Nations agencies, three foundations and a number of private business organizations. To date, equipment, technical services, grants and loans totalling some US$105 million have been marshalled  about one-third pledged by the four riparian countries. 

The hitherto untamed Mekong—one of the world’s 10 largest rivers—rises among the snows high on the Tibetan Plateau and has carved a twisting course, often through rugged mountains, some 4,600 kilometers to the South China Sea. The Lower Mekong Basin, which is the focus of this effort, extends for some 2,500 kilometers from the forests of the Burma border, through Laos, along the dry northeastern frontier of Thailand, through jungles and deltas of Cambodia and Vietnam. It drains an area nearly twice the size of Japan that is inhabited by some 20 million persons. 

Extensive studies by teams of scientists and engineers from the riparian and cooperating nations have now produced an overall Basin Plan with both mainstream and tributary projects. These multi-purpose projects will provide irrigation, power, vastly improved navigation, expanded fisheries, control of seasonal floods and many other benefits. Navigation improvements now permit night sailing upriver to Phnom Penh. In November 1965 the King of Thailand inaugurated at Nam Pung one of the two electric power and irrigation projects already completed. Construction is underway on four other tributary projects and one tug and barge building program. 

Among the projects for the mainstream of the Mekong, three have a “one” priority. At Pa Mong, just above Vientiane, a massive dam between Thailand and Laos will create a reservoir more than 200 miles long, have an installed generating capacity of over one million kilowatts and irrigate roughly one million hectares, or two and one-half million acres. Sambor, in Cambodia, will be the site of a second major power and irrigation dam. A barrage across the Tonle Sap waterway in Cambodia, that each year alternately admits Mekong water to the Great Lake and then drains it, will amplify fisheries and irrigation and hold back silt from delta lands in Vietnam while deepening water in the shipping channel to the sea. 

When the Lower Mekong Basin program for the period 1965 to 1975 is completed at an estimated cost of more than three billion dollars, the largest single natural resource of southeast Asia will be substantially under productive control. The fact that, despite turmoil, war and other differences in the region, so much headway has been made represents a triumph of reason and consideration of mutual well-being. 

In electing the COMMITTEE FOR COORDINATION OF INVESTIGATIONS OF THE LOWER MEKONG BASIN and COOPERATING ENTITIES to receive the 1966 Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding, the Board of Trustees recognizes purposeful progress toward harnessing one of Asia’s greatest river systems, setting aside divisive national interests in deference to regional opportunities.

On behalf of the MEKONG COMMITTEE—that is to say on behalf of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and the Republic of Vietnam—and on behalf of the United Nations and the UN Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East, whose Executive Secretary is with us this afternoon, I should like to express profound thanks to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for the great honor you are conferring upon us. We are especially pleased by your mention of the entities cooperating with us: notably ECAFE, and also 11 other members of the UN family; 21 countries from outside the basin, three foundations, and a number of private business organizations. Our Mekong project has two origins. On the one hand is the vast Mekong River itself: tenth largest river in the world, 4,600 kilometers long, draining in its lower basin an area larger than all France and twice as large as Japan, inhabited—in our four countries—by 20 million people, and pouring annually more than 400 million acre-feet of water into the South China Sea. On the other hand is the appreciation, slowly dawning upon our four countries, of the tremendous underutilization of this great resource. Our objective in the MEKONG COMMITTEE is to bring this great resource into use. In doing so, our four-member MEKONG COMMITTEE—one member from each of our four countries—follows one basic rule: we work for all the people of the basin with absolutely no distinction as to nationality, creed, or politics. On the mainstream of the Mekong we are pushing the planning of three major projects which will be among the largest in the world. We hope and believe that these three mainstream projects, or at least two of them, will be at the finance and construction stage by or before the end of the present decade—the United Nations Development Decade. The COMMITTEE also has projects scheduled for the 34 principal Mekong tributaries. Here the COMMITTEE’s work has gone beyond planning to construction. On 14 November 1965 His Majesty the King of Thailand officially opened the first of the MEKONG COMMTTEE’s tributary projects to be brought physically into being: the Nam Pung in the parched northeast of Thailand. This was followed on 14 March 1966 by a similar ceremony at which His Majesty opened the much larger Nam Pong Project, also in northeast Thailand. Two modest but welcome hydroelectric projects are advancing in Laos, near Pakse and Luang Prabang. In 1965 the COMMITTEE and its friends concentrated fundraising activities in the US$24 million Nam Ngum tributary project in Laos. These efforts culminated in success; Nam Ngum in Laos and Nam Pong in Thailand are to be interconnected, pursuant to a covenant signed by the four MEKONG COMMITTEE members and the United Nations, and work is now proceeding whereby power generated at Nam Pong in Thailand will be in use across the Mekong in Vientiane, Laos, by mid-1967. The stage is also set for construction of the Prek Thnot tributary project in Cambodia. Some work has already begun and the MEKONG COMMITTEE, assisted by the Secretary General of the United Nations and the Executive Secretary of ECAFE, is now exerting every effort to arrange financing for this project pursuant to an ECAFE resolution endorsing the MEKONG COMMITTEE decision to consider 1966 as “Cambodia Year.” No less determination is invested by the COMMITTEE in its efforts to improve navigation in the maritime lower reach of the river, in the canal network of the delta, and in the Lao and Thai reaches of the river upstream of the Khone Falls. We are also pressing forward with a large number of ancillary projects, including a network of experimental and demonstration farms, forestry and fisheries development, power market projections, mineral surveys, industrial planning, and social development and public health projects. Training is a vital part of our activity. Forty-one percent of the COMMITTEE’S professional staff are drawn from the four riparian countries; these staff members are contributing greatly to the COMMITTEE’S progress, and at the same time are growing with the COMMITTEE. In addition, the COMMITTEE sponsors an extensive program of seminars, study tours, and fellowships, and obtains considerable quantities of textbooks and technical studies for use throughout the basin. Much money is needed for all this work. We are happy indeed to have received some US$110,000,000 in pledges to date. And we are proud that nearly one-third of this is coming from our four Mekong governments themselves. President Marcos, Senator Manahan, and members of the Board of Trustees, may I say in conclusion that your decision to present to us the Ramon Magsaysay 1966 Award for International Understanding marks an important milestone in our work. For the first time in our history an eminent body from outside our basin, a body with which we have had no previous contact, has paid tribute to what we are trying to accomplish. Through this major and splendid Award, you give each of us deep inspiration, which will be a source of assurance and strength in all that lies ahead. You have touched the Mekong Spirit with something of the spirit of Ramon Magsaysay. My friends, allow me to record our deep appreciation.