Sam Rainsy’s Lawyer to Clarify Groundless Accusations with The Judge

April 18, 2010

SAM RAINSY’S LAWYER TO CLARIFY GROUNDLESS ACCUSATIONS WITH THE JUDGE

On April 20, MP Sam Rainsy’s lawyer will meet with an investigating judge to clarify a number of groundless accusations made against the opposition leader by the government Border Committee led by Mr. Var Kim Hong.

The accusations are the following:

1- SGI [1/100,000] map deposited at the United Nations in 1964 and map annexed to the 2005 Additional [Border] Treaty, have no grid on them, unlike the map shown and disseminated by Mr. Sam Rainsy, [who therefore is accused of forging a public document].

Clarification: This is a really strange accusation. All maps have a “grid” on them, which is called “graticule”. Graticule is a network of parallels and meridians for equal intervals of latitude and longitude on the earth's surface. Both the official 1952 French-era SGI 1/100,000 map and the 1966 US Army 1/50,000 map have a similar graticule on them (see March 23, 2010 Report by Professor Régis Caloz, page 7 showing a “coincidence of graticules”). Each square of the graticules on the two maps corresponds to a 1-km side square on the ground.

2- Mr. Sam Rainsy has produced a new map on which he has determined the locations of border posts which are different from the locations of border posts determined by the joint [Cambodia-Vietnam] expert committee on border affairs.

Clarification: Mr. Sam Rainsy has not “produced” any “new map” at all. He has only exposed the two above-mentioned existing maps. He has neither determined any “locations of border posts” at all. On October 25, 2009, he was led by a group of local villagers to the so-called temporary border post # 185, which he pulled out because the land owner had complained that that so-called temporary border post infringed on her ancestral rice field. As for the locations of the three nearby “temporary border posts” # 184, 186 and 187, they were also indicated to opposition parliamentarians by local farmers who feared losing their land because of alleged border encroachment. After collecting on the spot the GPS locations of the four so-called temporary border posts as identified with the help of local farmers, Mr. Sam Rainsy asked a professional cartographer to spot on the two above-mentioned maps the precise locations of the four so-called temporary border posts according to their geographical coordinates (see Report by Professor Régis Caloz, page 10, figure 12 showing the “localization of the four sites in the border area”).

We are now happy to learn that the “real” locations of the corresponding border posts # 184, 185, 186 and 187 as determined by the joint [Cambodia-Vietnam] expert committee on border affairs, are actually situated at a distance of respectively 570 m, 516 m, 720 m and 510 m to the East (toward Vietnam) from the “border posts [wrongly] determined by Mr. Sam Rainsy” (see explanation given with the map most recently presented by the government Border Committee to the Court).

3- Mr. Sam Rainsy has not used the appropriate mapping techniques because he has not made the required conversion of datum when taking geographic coordinates of border posts as collected with a GPS device under WGS 84 datum and entering those data onto a map under Indian 1960 datum.

Clarification: It was a theoretical mistake but it had, in this specific case, no incidence whatsoever in the final result. This is clearly explained in the Report by Professor Régis Caloz, page 10: “The GPS locations under WGS 84, directly converted into UTM 48 without change in the ellipsoid and entered onto the digitalized Duc Hue map in UTM 48 under Everest (India) 60, coincide with the points obtained by following the procedure used for the first assumption which logically includes a datum conversion.”

4- Mr. Sam Rainsy has exposed the geographic coordinates for border post # 186 at a time when the joint [Cambodia-Vietnam] expert committee on border affairs has yet to determine the location of the concerned border post on the ground.
Clarification: As stated above, the locations of the four so-called temporary border posts # 184, 185, 186 and 187 in Svay Rieng province’s Chantrea district have been indicated to SRP elected parliamentarians and councilors by local villagers and farmers who are victims of land grabbing associated with border encroachment. The corresponding geographic coordinates were obtained on the ground with a GPS device.

The government Border Committee should make public the geographic coordinates of all the "real and legal" border posts so as to allow public scrutiny.

See related documents in Khmer, English and French at http://tinyurl.com/yyoqa2n