About 15km outside of Sihanoukville on Cam-bodia's National Route 4, the landscape of flat farmland and scrub forest is broken by a cluster of industrial shipping containers rusting in a field of grazing cows. There are no cordons, no signposts warning of their sinister history.
The rows of 144 containers, their doors ajar in the wind or removed completely by enterprising scrap metal merchants, stand as mute memorial to what environmentalists have described as "the worst act of toxic waste dumping in recent times."
It was this patch of open ground that on Dec. 4, 1998 became the dump site for 2,900 tonnes of highly toxic waste produced in the 1980s at a Formosa Plastics Group polyvinyl chloride factory in Kaoshiung County's Jenwu township.
Although accompanying documentation from the company innocuously referred to the waste as "cement cake," subsequent testing discovered concentrations of mercury more than 20,000 times above internationally accepted safety limits, as well as dangerous levels of dioxin and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).
At first the waste was just dumped in the open air as huge piles of dusty, poisoned rubble. It was only three weeks later, as a growing tide of hysteria spread across the city due to reports of death and illness connected with the waste, that it was packed into the cargo containers.
Four months after it arrived, the waste was eventually removed from Cambodia on March 30, 1999.
Yet the containers remain, undisturbed on their original site, testament to what happened -- and an uncomfortable reminder for officials who would rather make the memories all go away.
A disaster forgotten
"I don't remember anything about that matter ... it was a year ago," says Om Yen Tieng, a special advisor to Prime Minister Hun Sen, who was widely considered to have been a linchpin in negotiations with Formosa Plastics that resulted in the waste's removal. "Talking about that issue is like digging up a dead body that's already been buried."
His metaphor is perhaps tastelessly apt. Human Rights Watch claims at least seven Sihanoukville residents have died from events linked directly or indirectly to the waste dumping. Two men died with symptoms of acute mercury poisoning, four were killed in car accidents as panicking residents fled the city while another man died from injuries sustained when an angry mob attacked offices of the Sihanoukville Port.
But, rather more pertinently, many more remain today in the grip of illnesses which they say were caused by exposure to the toxic waste dump. And some even say there have been many more related deaths.
Officially, there is supposed to be little still to worry about for Sihanoukville residents; the Phnom Penh headquarters of the World Health Organization (WHO) doesn't even have records of deaths from exposure to the waste.
"I hadn't heard about any deaths.... I know that people got sick but this is the first time I've heard about deaths," said Bill Pigott, Cambodia's WHO Country Representative since May 1999. "When I came I was briefed extensively by [former WHO Country Representative] George Petersen and he didn't mention there were deaths [resulting from exposure to toxic waste]."
This comes as little reassurance, however, to non-governmental organizations who have taken a closer look at the controversy. One independent American toxicologist who has done consulting work for Legal Aid of Cambodia (LAC), a non-profit organization which provides free legal counsel for low-income Cambodians, is horrified by what he calls blas? official attitudes toward the events in Sihanoukville last year.
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