30th March 2012

The Cambodia Daily reports that campaigners backed by the US State Department-funded American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS) distributed flyers yesterday outside the National Museum in Phnom Penh to protest the sale of the 10^th Century statue of Duryodhana at Sotheby’s auction house in New York city at an estimated value of $US2-3 million.

The statue is one of thousands looted from the Preah Vihear temple complex in the 1970s. The plinth on which the statue stood in still in situ at the temple on the Thai border.

However, it turns out that there is more to this story. Apparently the ACILS is doing the bidding of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who are locked in a seven-month long dispute with Sotheby’s over pay for 43 art handlers in New York city, and saw the sale controversy as another opportunity to pressure Sotheby’s.

The Teamsters even called the controversy over the sale of the statue “bad karma” from Sotheby’s lockout of the art handlers.

Meanwhile, the Cambodian authorities were trying to arrange a private sale through Hungarian businessman Dr. István Zelnik who created the Zelnik István Southeast Asian Gold Museum, that would see the statue returned to Cambodia.

The private museum, located in Budapest, houses nearly a thousand artefacts from SE Asia, most of gold and dating from prehistoric times through to the 20th Century. Zelnik, a former diplomat, now a businessman and art collector, assembled his collection over 45 years, acquiring several collections in Canada and Western Europe.

The protest outside the National Museum over an entirely unrelated matter, may therefore throw an unwelcome light on the quiet diplomacy required to secure the return of this national treasure to its land of origin.

27^th March 2012

The Associated Press is reporting that Australia plans to contribute another AU$1.61 million (US$1.7 million) to the KR Tribunal after the Foreign Minister Bob Carr announced the contribution following meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Sok An yesterday.

Bob Meets His Match

Australia has reportedly given AU$18.3 million (US$19.3 million) since 2006, making it the second biggest donor after Japan. The donation to the Great UN Boondoggle come a day after Carr pledge another $1 million to the upkeep of Angkor Wat.

Sok An would be delighted.

“The independence of the judiciary is paramount and the (court) must be allowed to operate free from any external interference,” Bob Carr said in a statement during his visit to Phnom Penh. “The ECCC’s work is vital to ensure justice for the Cambodian people who endured unspeakable suffering at the hands of the Khmer Rouge,” according to a report in Melbourne’s Feral Hun newspaper.

The Aussies can be relied on to throw more good money after bad, after all the “lucky country” simply digs stuff out of the ground at a cost of $US40 a ton (including freight) and sends it to China who pay them $US150 for it, so it can clearly afford this.

Meanwhile, Bob will be much less thrilled at the timing of the release by the Fairfax News of a story about the Cambodian PM’s nephew being linked a global crime syndicate importing more than $1 billion worth of drugs into Australia annually.

While some have suggested a conspiracy to embarrass the new Aussie foreign minister, the timing appears to have more to do with the pending release of The Sting, a new book on organised crime in Australia, published by Melbourne University Press.

But perhaps the big donations were an act of contrition?

The Kampuchea Thmey Daily reports that during an hour-long meeting with Bob Carr yesterday, the Cambodian minister of Foreign Affairs, Hor Namhong, suggested the two parties agree not raise the on-going conflict over the South China Sea during the upcoming ASEAN Summit – a subject China is very touchy about being discussed at the multilateral level. Namhong told Carr that they should encourage the conclave to start discussing a draft of the Code of Conduct for the South China Sea instead.

“We shouldn’t bring this conflict to the international table as it will just lead to complications and it won’t benefit any country,” he explained.

All that Chinese largess to Cambodia is starting to paying dividends.

Meanwhile, another report tells that Carr said he was also fully committed to Australia’s ongoing support for demining in Cambodia. Just wait until mining magnate Clive Palmer hears about this!

26^th March 2012

Melbourne’s The Age newspaper reports that former Australian army commando Sean McBride has stepped down from the Grey Man charity at the weekend following claims the organisation faked the rescue of Thai hill tribe children from sexual slavery. Funded by Australian donations, the high-profile charity promotes the use of former Australian soldiers and police in daring missions to rescue victims of sex trafficking in Asia.

The charity is now being investigated by Thailand’s Department of Special Investigation amongst counter claims that local Thai police are themselves heavily involved in the racket and strenuously object to foreigners interrupting this highly lucrative trade.

Northern Thailand has long been infamous for the trafficking of drugs and people, either from hill tribe communities within Thailand or from across the border in Myanmar. In many instances, unlike young women who choose to enter the sex industry from other provinces in Thailand, these girls are traded like cattle.

McBride, who also uses the name John Curtis, apparently told The Age the Grey Man’s board decided he should step down because ‘‘personal issues’’ between him and people in Thailand were interfering with the organisation’s operations after police in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai cut ties with the charity amid claims and counter-claims about the organisation pending the outcome of the departmental  investigation.

Anyone with experience of the Thai police, especially those in Northern Thailand, knows that corruption there is institutionalized. The police are very poorly paid but have immense power – a recipe for corruption. Firstly, it costs money to buy a position in the force, then officers are expected to keep channeling money from protection rackets and other forms of payola up the patronage network they belong to. Meanwhile, their superiors need to accumulate large sums of money in order to support the lower ranks that belong to their particular network. Without corruption, the whole system would collapse.

Apparently an undercover Thai former head of investigations for The Grey Man inside Thailand is now claiming the charity’s website had exaggerated the success of its operations, including changing the ages of victims.

He said Australian volunteers who travelled to Thailand to support operations also provided little assistance because they could not speak Thai and had little knowledge of Thai culture. McBride replied that the man did not like working with foreigners ‘‘so we had to send our volunteers off to do their own tasks’’.

Responding by email to questions from The Age sent before he stepped down, McBride said he never changed reports ‘‘except to make them more readable and media-orientated’’. He said the charity, which last year had about 25 field operatives and was training 20 more, would not put ‘‘people on the ground in Thailand until we get the all-clear from the DSI’’, although its website continues to appeal for donations to support its main objective of ‘‘assist[ing] the police in Thailand in locating and rescuing children from trafficking and sexual abuse’’.

He told The Age that much of the controversy about the charity he founded in 2007 was about ‘‘corruption and vested interests’’. Trying to deal through official channels when the system on the ground is mired in corruption, can be a huge challenge.

Police from the Chiang Mai-based transnational crime unit told The Age that 21 hill tribe children from a village in northern Chiang Rai province were not rescued from prostitution as the charity claimed on its website along with appeals for funds.

Meanwhile the charity says it has rescued dozens of children from prostitution in Asia, the youngest aged 10. It also works on prevention measures such as supporting employment and education programs in an attempt to stop children being trafficked for sexual exploitation.

However the charity has had acrimonious disputes with its operatives in Thailand, including how much money local police should be provided with to support its operations.

Referring to the hill-tribe-children investigation and the Grey Man’s critics, Mr McBride said: ‘‘Did we rescue 22 children and did we scam the Australian public? They know they are about to lose that one, so they are using half-truths now to try and discredit us in other ways and they will keep trying.’’

As usual in Thailand, it appears to all come down to money.

Thank goodness we don’t have this type of problem here in Cambodia!

25^th March 2012

Columnist Daphne Bramham of British Columbia’s premier broadsheet warns the world in a exposé that citizens of Canada are travelling to Cambodia to increasing numbers. According to Bramham, these tourists are apparently coming here in the hope of engaging in sex with children.

At least, that is what you might think from reading her series.

From her report, it appears that Bramham was parachuted in and asked to write a high sensational report on the sex industry here, which she claims caters to the depraved proclivities of men with a predilection for young children – apparently the younger the better. Run in The Vancouver Sun over consecutive days, it is an object lessons in the dangers of flying a highly credulous reporter into a country she understands little about, and then give her a week to interview people with a vested interest in promoting a specific agenda.

However, no-one is arguing that a decade or so ago, Cambodia did become a magnet for paedophiles. The country was just getting over the tragic dislocation of the Khmer Rouge period, civil war and international financial blockade. For a while, anything went.

Undoubtedly some foreigners also took advantage of this situation, but Bramham paints a picture in which foreigners were (and are) the main players. This was never true then and it certainly isn’t true today.

Surveys back in the bad old days of 2000 by the UNDP and the Ministry of Planning reported that around 30% of sex workers were under 18 years, the age of consent in Cambodia. Even then, these reports showed that locals are still the major patrons of the sex workers, including children. A preoccupation with pubescent girls and ‘virginity’ by Asian men was common throughout the region until fairly recently. In some, unfortunately, it still is.

According to Bramham, Cambodia “is a choice destination for so-called sex tourists”. She cites a number of cases, which on closer inspection, do not appear to have anything to do with Cambodia or, at best, have only a casual relationship, such as the case of Canadian Chris Neil, who was on Interpol’s most-wanted list in 2007 before he was jailed in Bangkok for sexually abusing two under-age boys.

Instead she seems to have taken hook, line and sinker the word of number of organisations, including dodgy god-bothering outfits from the US, like the private company Agape International Missions (AIM) that claims it has “over 600 Christ-centred Bible teaching churches in Cambodia.”

Penh Pal unreservedly apologises to Steve Morrish of SISHA, who apparently wasn’t the source of any of the “research” in Bramham’s articles, as suggested earlier by us, no doubt because his organisation isn’t faith-based. Steve must be pissed to have missed out on the free publicity!

Bramham claims “children as young as three have been, and continue to be, rescued; the youngest are almost always procured for foreigners…because raping children is normalised here.”

This is one of numerous preposterous and unsubstantiated claims in her series of articles, heavily reliant on anecdotal accounts by people who clearly have an interest in perpetuating this narrative.

She then cites lots of examples of this corruption, such as what happened in the case of the serial abuser, the Russian businessman Stanislav Molodyakov, known here as Alexander Trofimov, who appears to have been able to use his considerable wealth to buy himself a royal pardon.

But of course, this can go both ways. In a country where justice can easily go to the highest bidder, presumption of innocence often simply doesn’t stand a chance. Under theses circumstances, it is reasonable to assume that at least some of those in jail here accused of crimes against minors were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Cambodia is a signatory to the major international human rights instruments such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its related Optional Protocols. And, in recent years, the country has created laws and procedures which aim to protect children.

However, much remains to be desired, particularly in the implementation of these measures. In 2008, for instance, the government passed a new law that provides for stiffer penalties for trafficking and that gives more clarity in defining minors as those under 18 years. Unfortunately, however, the Kingdom remains under “Tier 2”, meaning that it is below average in complying with the minimum set standards in preventing trafficking.

Trafficking, however, is a broad subject: which of it refers to the trafficking of workers generally, not sex workers specifically.

And which enforcement by the authorities here can be spotty, much of the monitoring of possible paedophiles here has been taken over by private organisations, many of them faith-based, and usually reliant on lurid campaigns to keep their coffers full.

These private, donation-dependent agencies operation large networks of casual spies (especially tuk-tuk and moto drivers) who keep a weather-eye out for anything they witness that these groups will happily pay for.

Given the incentives, in a country where the Rule of Law is weak, Truth is often the first casualty.

Any foreigner who does have a prediction for sex with minors and imagines as a result of reading the sort of sensational drivel like that written by Bramham, that Cambodia is a country where they readily indulge this proclivity, should be warned: where-ever you are in Cambodia, you will be watched.

More sensationalist nonsense, this time from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:

www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/02/22/cambodia-pedophile-mimi-wells-report.html

23^rd March 2012

According to a report today from the AFP, the UN is now discussing whether to pull out of the KR Tribunal altogether or find a replacement for Laurent Kasper-Ansermet from May 4th.

This was after saying yesterday it would not tolerate impunity at the court following the shock resignation on Monday of the Swiss co-investigating judge in a spat over whether to find more suspects to face justice.

“The United Nations, in its dealings with the (court), remains committed to ensuring that impunity for the crimes committed during the period of the Democratic Kampuchea is not tolerated,” UN chief Ban Ki-moon’s spokesman Martin Nesirky said in an email to the AFP.

This follows Kasper-Ansermet publishing of a document detailing how his efforts to investigate the cases were blocked at every turn by his Cambodian colleague, who he alleges made it difficult for him to have access to drivers, translators and even the office’s official seal to validate court filings.

“The United Nations is seriously concerned about these worrying developments,” Nesirky is quoted by the AFP as saying.

The Prime Minister has long objected to the potential new cases involving five mid-level Khmer Rouge members. As Joshua Kurlantzick from The Council on Foreign Relations notes, “although Hun Sen, a former KR cadre, was low-ranking enough that he never would have been touched by the tribunal, he has many allies who conceivably could have been, and he probably just does not like the concept of the tribunal pushing harder into the past of important figures in Cambodia, a precedent he does not want to set for his own government.”

Today’s Cambodia Daily reports that the government is undeterred by these developments, maintaining the Tribunal is operating perfectly fine.

No doubt, from their point of view, this is the case.

However, Penh Pal has little faith that the UN has the cajones to pull the plug on the Tribunal given the vested interests behind its continuation, even as it descends further into farce.