These crime rings have revolutionised an industry that turns ordinary citizens into slaves.

Trillion-dollar industry

Interpol says human trafficking and scam compounds in Southeast Asia are worth more than US$3 trillion in illicit revenue a year.

The industry emerged from Cambodia's south coast during the Covid-19 pandemic, where Chinese syndicates honed their criminal enterprises with impunity.

Cambodia has insisted the scourge has been exaggerated by journalists.

This is despite the rescue and repatriation of thousands of people from across Asia who were duped into accepting false job offers.

They were then forced into "pig butchering" out of hidden compounds in secret locations.

Slavers' tools

Romance scams, cryptos, real estate, online gambling, and extortion are just some of the tools of a dark trade.

It was developed alongside legitimate Chinese investors who turned Sihanoukville into a casino mecca known as the "Las Vegas of the East" by the mid-2010s.

Those who fail to meet quotas are beaten, tortured and held for ransom or traded among the criminal networks.

Those who give in and perform are rewarded with cash payouts and promises they can go home and have sex.

"Many women have been trafficked and traded," said a European rescue specialist, who declined to be named.

"If they refuse to scam, they are offered as prizes and passed around. Some even work as models in love scams, performing online for a targeted victim."

Trafficking rife

Rumors of Chinese and Southeast Asians being trafficked first surfaced in late 2020 when some 400,000 legitimate Chinese workers fled Cambodia as the pandemic took hold.

Thousands more, who were associated with illegal gambling, remained, predominantly in Sihanoukville.

More than a thousand buildings, including dozens of casinos, were left empty and at least 500 half-built skyscrapers were abandoned.

That's when human trafficking was kicked from traditional perceptions — of men being press-ganged onto fishing boats or young village girls sold into brothels — into the billion-dollar orbit of cyber-crimes.

Diplomatic sources say this industry makes about $20 billion annually in Cambodia.

Neighboring governments were soon flooded with pleas for help from stricken families whose loved ones had answered advertisements for high-paid jobs only to find themselves trapped in and around Sihanoukville.

Crisis in Cambodia

By late 2021, the embassies of Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Pakistan, and China had all taken what was then a highly unusual step.

They issued warnings about "the situation" and told Cambodia to act, but those reports remained off the radar in Cambodia's well-oiled state-run press.

By March the following year, a group of 35 NGOs told the Cambodian government to urgently address "a crisis of forced labour, slavery and torture".

At the same time, reports detailing kidnapping and extortion rackets began hitting the international headlines.

"The continued existence of these operations is a tragedy, and we are horrified that Cambodia is being used as a base for such inhumanity.

"All relevant actors must immediately guarantee that no one is subject to slavery or torture within Cambodia," they said in a joint communique.

Even an annual report by Cambodia's National Committee for Counter Trafficking reported caseloads in 2021 had more than doubled to 359 over the previous year.

Numbers had been expected to fall given travel and security restrictions imposed because of Covid.

It also found that surrogate mothers, babies, organ transplants, labourers, and sex workers were among those trafficked.

Cambodia had emerged as a trafficking destination as opposed to its history as a transit point, the Committee discovered.

Slaves and slavers

At two press conferences, well covered by the international media in Kuala Lumpur, heartbroken parents cried and pleaded for the release of their children, some as young as 17.

Their children also spoke to reporters from mobile phones they had been handed to scam people with.

"We work more than 15 hours a day. They give us instructions to scam people worldwide," one victim said.

"If we do not perform, they hit us. More than 30 of us have been mistreated because we under-performed."

The evidence was mounting and pointing to senior leaders, real estate tycoons and corrupt businessmen with ties to organised crime, and Chinese nationals with Cambodian passports, as the culprits.

Wan Kuok-koi popularly known as Broken Tooth, former leader of the Macau branch of the 14K triad, was among them.

That should have been enough to prompt Cambodian authorities into action, but they again claimed these stories were exaggerated.

One official described such cases as "immigration misconduct," and another even implied that they, too, were victims.

"Criminals are choosing human trafficking as a career," then interior minister Sar Kheng said, adding: "They won't let it go. They are taking advantage of us when we are facing a crisis."

Pig butchering — where the victim is gradually lured or forced into handing over more money — continued.

This angered the Chinese government amid perceptions that Beijing was, at best, incapable of controlling its criminal element abroad or, even worse, supporting those networks.

China's response

Authorities in Phnom Penh declined the Chinese government's request for special powers to arrest its own nationals involved in criminal activity.

Instead, they swore they would end the scourge before local elections were to be held in mid-2022. That didn't happen.

But China withheld Cambodia's much needed investment dollars and in making its displeasure known, Beijing censors approved the release of "No More Bets" — a movie.

It tells the story of a Chinese pair trapped and trafficked into compounds in Southeast Asia.

The movie was a smash hit in the People's Republic, where authorities refused a Cambodian request to have the film banned.

The United States then dropped Cambodia to its lowest tier on the annual human trafficking list and later imposed sanctions backed by Canada and the United Kingdom.

Rescue and repression

Rescue operations emerged with the help of independent NGOs, foreign embassies, and Interpol operating with local police.

They gathered pace as fears the country's tourism industry — still reeling from the pandemic — would not recover amid all the negative headlines.

A crackdown did follow, and criminal networks scattered, initially to the Vietnamese and Thai borders and further afield into Laos and Myanmar.

There criminal syndicates have taken advantage of the civil war and can operate with impunity from places like Shwe Kokko, where some 10,000 victims are housed in one compound.

Tourism has still not recovered in Cambodia, but the crackdown has escalated in conjunction with Chinese law enforcement.

Two operations in March netted 700 Chinese nationals, all are suspected cyber criminals and to be deported for running scam and human trafficking operations.

However, the scourge is far from eliminated, and recruiters in Cambodia have shifted targets.

No longer favoring Chinese and Southeast Asians, human traffickers are now focused on Central Asia, luring in nationals from Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

• First published in UCA News
• Luke Hunt is a UCA News columnist and author and academic. He is an expert on East Asia's socio-political issues.

Online Khmer- and English-language outlet Voice of Democracy (VOD) stopped broadcasting on Monday. Prime Minister Hun Sen had ordered its licence revoked over what he said was an erroneous report about his eldest son.

Late Monday night the United States said it was "deeply concerned" by the "abrupt" closure of the broadcaster, adding to a chorus of criticism from rights groups and western missions over Phnom Penh's actions.

"Foreigners have no right to order us to do this or that to fulfil their wishes because this is our internal affairs," Hun Sen wrote in a Facebook post on Tuesday afternoon, reiterating the media outlet "has no chance to reopen".

Read More

Hun Daneth felt that, counted on that.

When she gave birth to the boy, who didn't look like her, she knew it even more.

But four years after acting as a surrogate for a Chinese businessman, who said he had used a Russian egg donor, Ms Hun Daneth is being forced by the Cambodian courts to raise the little boy or risk going to jail.

The businessman is in prison over the surrogacy; his appeal was denied in June.

Even as she dealt with the shock of raising the baby, Ms Hun Daneth dutifully changed his diapers.

Over the months and years, she found herself hugging and kissing him, cajoling him to eat more rice so he could grow big and strong. She has come to see this child as her own.

"I love him so much," said Ms Hun Daneth, who is looking after the boy with her husband.

The fates of a Cambodian woman, a Chinese man and the boy who binds them together reflect the intricate ethical dilemmas posed by the global surrogacy industry.

The practice is legal — and often prohibitively expensive — in some countries, while others have outlawed it.

Still, other nations with weak legal systems, like Cambodia, have allowed grey markets to operate, endangering those involved when political conditions suddenly shift and criminal cases follow.

When carried out transparently with safeguards in place, supporters say, commercial surrogacy allows people to expand their families while fairly compensating the women who give birth to the children.

Done badly, the process can lead to the abuse of vulnerable people, whether the surrogates or the intended parents.

The practice flourishes in the nebulous space between those who can and cannot bear children; between those with the means to hire someone to bear their biological offspring and the women who need the money; and between those whose sexuality or marital status means they can't adopt or otherwise become parents and those whose fertility spares them having to face such restrictions.

Though she never intended to raise the boy, Ms Hun Daneth has come to see him as her own. "I love him so much," she said.

As the industry flourished, the government imposed a ban on surrogacy, promising to pass legislation officially outlawing it.

The ill-defined injunction, imposed in a graft-ridden country with little rule of law, ended up punishing the very women the government had vowed to safeguard.

In 2018, Ms Hun Daneth was one of about 30 surrogates, all pregnant, who were nabbed in a police raid on an upmarket housing complex in Phnom Penh. Although Cambodia to this day has no law specifically limiting surrogacy, the government criminalized the practice by using existing laws against human trafficking, an offence that can carry a 20-year sentence. Dozens of surrogates have been arrested and accused of trafficking the babies they birthed.

In a poor country long used as a playground by foreign predators — paedophiles, sex tourists, factory bosses, antique smugglers and, yes, human traffickers — the Cambodian authorities said they were on the lookout for exploitation.

"Surrogacy means women are willing to sell babies, and that counts as trafficking," said Chou Bun Eng, a secretary of state at the ministry of interior and vice chair of the national countertrafficking committee.

"We do not want Cambodia to be known as a place that produces babies to buy."

But applying a human trafficking law to surrogacy has imposed the heaviest costs on the surrogates themselves.

Nearly all of those arrested in the 2018 raid gave birth while imprisoned in a military hospital; some chained to their beds.

They, along with several surrogacy agency employees, were convicted of trafficking the babies.

Their sentencings, two years later, came with a condition: In exchange for suspended prison terms, the surrogates would have to raise the children themselves. If the women secretly tried to deliver the children to the intended parents, the judge warned, they would be sent to prison for many years.

This means that women whose financial precarity led them to surrogacy are now struggling with one more mouth to feed.

From behind the bars of a courthouse in Phnom Penh, Xu Wenjun, the intended father of the boy to whom Ms Hun Daneth gave birth, spoke quickly, his words tumbling out before the police intervened. He has been in prison for three years.

"My son must be big by now," said Mr Xu, dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit.

"Do you think he remembers me?" Continue reading

It followed a decade of unprecedented economic growth and poverty reduction in Cambodia.

At that time, the global economy was experiencing strong growth rates.

The report "Toward A More Inclusive and Resilient Cambodia" notes Cambodia's poverty rate fell by almost half - from 33.8 percent to 17.8 percent - between 2009 and 2019.

Almost two million Cambodians escaped poverty.

The pandemic reversed this. Cambodia's poverty reduction progress and the poverty rate has since increased by 2.8 percentage points.

This means around 460,000 people have fallen below the poverty income threshold.

"Efforts to accelerate Cambodia's structural transformation have helped reduce poverty," said Maryam Salim, the World Bank's Country Manager for Cambodia.

"However, despite this impressive success, many households remained vulnerable, with few savings or safety nets. This meant Covid-19 dealt a setback [to] the country's progress in combating poverty as employment and wages diminished."

Cambodia has recently redefined the poverty line.

It now uses the most recent Cambodia Socio-Economic Survey for 2019/20, the World Bank says. The national poverty line fluctuates. Currently, it is the equivalent of US$2.15 per person per day.

An exodus of Western businesses has exacerbated the Cambodian economic hardships. Their departure followed a government crackdown on opposition political parties, the media, unions, and NGOs initiated in 2017.

Chinese investment and generosity emerged as the most significant foreign contributor to the national economy. That, too, faded as the pandemic took hold.

The World Bank says during Cambodia's decade-long growth phase, "rising non-farm earnings, for example in the tourism, garment and construction sectors, contributed most to poverty reduction."

At the same time, trade and investment-led growth supported a structural transformation in Cambodia's economy. Workers moved out of low-paying agriculture jobs and boosted their earnings. More productive sectors followed, creating better-paid manufacturing and services jobs for Cambodians.

"At the same time, living conditions and access to basic services such as electricity, water supply, sanitation, health and education improved for broad segments of the population. This improvement has narrowed standard-of-living gaps between rural and urban households," the report says.

As the economy tanked, Cambodia was widely praised for a swift roll-out of its Covid-19 vaccination programme. It was one of the first countries in Southeast Asia to ease pandemic travel restrictions and open up its borders.

The World Bank said Cambodia could consider a range of policy actions to support a more inclusive and resilient recovery from the pandemic and the economic shocks that have come with it.

"These include targeted cash transfers, steps to strengthening social protection, investments in health and education," the report says.

Source

• UCA News
• World Bank

"We are in golden times at this moment. The government is helping us. We have the freedom to work and also enjoy the freedom of belief. We face no problems from the government," said Bishop Enrique Figaredo Alvargonzalez, apostolic prefect of Battambang.

The Cambodian Church began to emerge only in the 1990s after the Khmer Rouge's communist regime (1975-79) nearly destroyed the tiny Catholic community.

Cambodia is home to only 35,000 Catholics, just 0.2 percent of the population of 17 million. There are no dioceses, but three ecclesiastical jurisdictions — one apostolic vicariate and two apostolic prefectures.

"I must say the Church in Cambodia is emerging from its dark times," he said. He noted that they are in a better situation than Christians in neighbouring countries.

"We have no big conflicts; we are at peace."

Government Collaboration

He said the Cambodian government acknowledges the presence of the Church and appreciates its humanitarian activities for the poor.

"The government not only accepts us, but they also appreciate our presence because we address the needs of the poor. They appreciate that we are engaged and we are not like NGOs that create problems. We really engage with the people," Bishop Alvargonzalez said.

The government also collaborates with the Catholic Church in caring for the sick. With the help of Caritas, the Church's social service organisation runs two hospitals — an eye hospital and a mental health hospital.

Takeo Eye Hospital belongs to the government, but Caritas is a partner. The Maryknoll Fathers initiated it to alleviate poverty by reducing avoidable visual impairment.

"It is the best hospital for eye treatment in Cambodia," the prelate said.

The pandemic has created an opportunity for the Church to explore new activities, Bishop Figaredo said.

"Something good has come out of Covid: we were put in touch with the people. It allowed us to quietly reach out to the people, and to the poor. We were there during the Covid outbreak helping people, so the people know us, and the government knows us," Bishop Alvargonzalez related.

The Church is also working to increase local vocations to the priesthood and religious life.

Bishop Figerado said Cambodia enjoys peace. The government has put up slogans everywhere that say: "Thank you, peace."

"They are right. We have many injustices and many problems. But ‘thank you, peace,' we can run things."

"I think we have a great future. Well, we have a great present already," Bishop Figerado said.

Sources

UCA News

CathNews New Zealand

"Up until now, there has not been a single case of a human trafficking organisation harvesting organs from their victims to be sold," Chou Bun Eng, the permanent vice-chair of the National Committee for Counter Trafficking, said in dismissing the allegations.

"These stories are all fabricated," Chou Bun Eng said.

She said the allegations that "some human trafficking organisations in Cambodia are committing organ harvesting" were made by a Hong Kong official and a Taiwanese journalist, which she added were "not new".

Videos of organ harvesting, widely dismissed as fake, have also been circulated online.

Read More

The government has detained at least 30 people for spreading "fake news" since the start of the outbreak in the country in January, New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on April 29.

Initially reluctant to respond to the coronavirus threat, Cambodia's long-serving Prime Minister Hun Sen is now using the pandemic as cover to crack down on his perceived enemies, the rights group said.

The government "should immediately and unconditionally drop the charges against all those accused of crimes in violation of their rights to freedom of expression and association," HRW said in a statement. Read more

Born in Gijon, Spain in 1959, he joined the Society of Jesus he was stationed at refugee camps near the Thai border from 1984-1988.

Since 2000 he has been the Apostolic Prefect of Battambang, a city on the banks of the Sangkae River in northwestern Cambodia.

Figaredo recently told UCAN News that conversions to Christianity, usually Protestantism, were quite common among former Khmer Rouge soldiers.

He said former Khmer Rouge soldiers used to come to his church.

Some were haunted by the ghosts of the past, hinting at the atrocities they witnessed or participated in."They were Catholics but also former Khmer Rouge," he said.

Some would bring their kids while they stayed outside. I'd invite them in but something was stopping them. They would say things like, 'I did some bad thing so I can't come in yet'," he recalls.

Figaredo said he can understand why they turned to Christianity instead of Buddhism, the predominant faith in Cambodia.

"In Christianity, there is forgiveness and there is hope," he said.

"All depends on God's judgment, and they can try to transform their lives.

"Moreover, Buddhism stresses karma whereas Christianity offers salvation, which may have held more appeal."

Figaredo is also known as Kike or the bishop of the wheelchairs because of his work with people who had lost arms and legs fleeing or fighting with or against the murderous Pol Pot regime.

Source

ucanews.com

Image: facebook.com

The challenge runs from April 1 to May 15.

The annual event in New Zealand aims at demonstrating solidarity with those living with poverty or injustice.

The challenge activities and experiences come under the headings "Move It", "Live It", "Sweat It" and "Stop It".

Social injustices faced by many Cambodians include loss of land, the effects of climate change, human rights breaches and economic instability.

Continue reading

Like the hundreds of thousands of his fellow Cambodians who migrate in search of work each year, he had a simple but powerful motivation: "I heard there were better jobs in Thailand and I knew bahts were worth more than riels, so I decided to go."

It was a decision that nearly cost him his life. After chatting with others in his village who had made the journey before him, San waited at the border for two days. When night fell on the second day, he crossed the border into Thailand and then waited another day on the other side. Eventually, a group of men appeared in a large pick-up.

"They used their mobile phones as torches to see which of us looked strong, then they laid us next to each other and on top of each other in the back of the pick-up," says San.

"There were three layers of us, with the strongest at the bottom. There were about 20 of us in the back and they put a plastic sheet over us and told us not to make any noise."

Eight suffocating hours later, the pick-up stopped in a forest and San and five other Cambodians were herded into a cage and "locked in so that the police wouldn't find us". Behind bars in an unknown forest in a strange land, the negotiations began. San and the others were offered $200 (£132) a month - far more than they would make at home - to work on construction sites in Bangkok.

They accepted, only to discover that they would have to pay their captors-cum-employers $80 for transporting them to the Thai capital, $80 for the correct documents, and $30 a month for basics such as mosquito nets. Continue reading

Sources

• The Guardian. The article is by Sam Jones, a Guardian reporter currently on a secondment on Global development.
• Image: YouTube

Dr Mora's voluntary contribution is funded by the Australian-based Sight for All Foundation. He will work with the Cambodia Ministry of Health and local doctors to establish a specialist clinic there. Continue reading

It is an unremarkable house, and if tourists happened to be this far off the beaten track they would have little idea that this was the residence of one of the world's greatest war criminals.

I thought back to 1987 when I met a Khmer leader in the Site Two refugee camp on the Thai Cambodian border. I asked him if he could ever imagine a return to government in Cambodia. He looked very sad as he told me how the Khmer Rouge had killed most of his immediate family. He could not trust the Khmer Rouge again.

I had the sense that he would find it hard to trust any of his fellow Cambodians ever again in rebuilding his nation from such ruins. Reconciliation was a fashionable textbook concept.

Twenty five years later, there is a certain routine to life in Cambodia, though poverty in the villages is widespread and government corruption legendary.

The previous evening I had been asked to address a multi-faith group of NGO and Church workers on faith, justice and public policy. What could I, a Catholic priest from Australia, say about such matters in a largely Buddhist country devastated by genocide?

Whether Christian, Buddhist, or Muslim, faith is about my having, owning and reflecting on a belief system which allows me to live fully with the paradoxes and conflicts of life and death, good and evil, beauty and suffering. It is only fundamentalists who are able to live as if these paradoxes are not real, as if they do not impinge on our sense of self and on our considered actions every day. Continue reading

Sources

• Fr Frank Brennan S.J. in Eureka Street
• Image: John D Ciorciari