Cambodia's Curse (35 page)

Keo Srey Vy was one of the victims. Her brother-in-law doused her with sulfuric acid because she was trying to stop him from selling his
young children into sexual slavery, she told the
Cambodia Daily
. But like most other acid victims, she was afraid to go outside and show her hideously disfigured face because “she is fed up with the common assumption in Cambodian culture that she must have done something wrong to deserve her devastating wounds,” the paper said. That may have been why the National Assembly refused to pass that law.

At the same time, child rape was reaching the level of a pandemic. Sexual assaults against toddlers were so frequent that hardly anyone took note any longer. Human-rights groups said they investigated one or two each week, on average, and in 2009, 80 percent of the nation’s rape victims were children. Then in the fall of 2010 police and human-rights groups reported 300 rapes in the year’s first seven months. Two-thirds were children, some as young as four years old.

All shock seemed to have been drained from this crime, as incidents were reduced to short notes on newspaper police blotters that recounted the horror in a dull, formulaic monotone. In January 2009 the
Phnom Penh Post
reported, “Two incidents of child rape happened on Friday and Saturday” in “Banteay Meanchey province. Phaing Bor, 28, was arrested for raping a four-year-old girl on Saturday near her grandmother’s house. The suspect had been asked to look after the girl by her grandmother, who trusted the man. The other case happened on Friday when a 20-month-old girl was raped after her mother had gone to market, leaving her home alone. The perpetrator escaped.”

In most cases, if police arrested the rapist, they pushed him to settle the case with a cash payment to the victim’s parents. Then the policemen took a cut of their own. Police reported 468 rape cases during calendar year 2009, 24 percent more than during the previous year. But the police figure was probably just a fraction of the total. Every woman who was raped knew that the police would demand a bribe before even offering to help. “Police only work if you have money, if you pay,” Amnesty International quoted the father of one young victim as saying. “But we don’t have that. And if you don’t pay, the police just ignore you.”

Adult rape victims were often ignored as well. Friends and family viewed them as tainted, spoiled. Often these women then had to leave their families and move away.

Many judges were just as eager to take money as the police. After all, many of them had paid large sums of money to get their job. A Voice of America investigative report in 2009 quoted student jurists saying that, when they graduated from the Royal Academy for Judicial Professions, they had to pay $20,000, $30,000, or more to get assignments in the nation’s court system—but with the understanding that they would “earn” it back through bribe payments.

Nov Mal, a twenty-four year old in Pursat, was charged with raping an eighteen-year-old girl who lived in the same community. She said he attacked her as she was walking home from work at a store that rented CDs and DVDs. But when Nov Mal came to court, the judge freed him. Shortly after his release, he rode his motorbike out to his victim’s home. “He drove a motorbike past my house and teased my sister and me,” said Kem Vuthy, the victim’s brother. “He said that now he is free from jail and that he paid money to the court rather than paying money to us.” The victim, scared for her life, asked the local office of Adhoc, a human-rights group, for protection. “The victim is here now, in care of an NGO,” living in hiding, said Ngeth Theary, head of Adhoc’s Pursat office.

In Bopha, the judge on the case, offered an unconvincing story to explain why he let the man go. “In this case, the two loved each other very much, for a long time, but it was secret. Someone saw it. The girl saw that her reputation was destroyed by that. That is why she complained. The physical exam did not produce evidence she was raped. It confirmed she had sex. There were friends nearby, and when they saw her, she screamed: He raped me!”

Most Cambodian malefactors didn’t have enough money to buy off judges. But foreigners usually did. Given that Cambodia remained a favored vacation spot for pedophiles from around the world, judges saw a steady stream of them standing before them in the dock. In 2003
the government began to recognize its reputation as a haven for pedophiles and announced an antipedophile campaign. Even so, in the courtroom money still managed to trump any government initiative.

Philippe Dessart, a forty-seven-year-old Belgian, was first sentenced by a Cambodian court to eighteen years in prison for sexually abusing a thirteen-year-old boy. A Belgian court had previously convicted him of child rape, in 1994, and he’d moved to Cambodia after completing his jail term. When he appealed his Cambodian conviction, the court reduced his sentenced to three years, but the judge let him out right away—after serving only six months. Human-rights groups were appalled. “It is an incentive for Dessart and other offenders to continue abusing our children,” warned Samleang Seila, country director for Action Pour les Enfants, a French NGO. “It’s very concerning.”

Sure enough, as soon as he got out of jail, Dessart moved back in with the family of the little boy he had abused. Soon he was seen in the provincial government offices applying for a marriage license. He professed to be interested in marrying the victim’s mother. Human-rights officers hypothesized that Dessart had seduced the boy’s mother with his relative wealth. He bought the family a house and a motorbike.

Asked about Dessart, the provincial police human-trafficking chief told the
Cambodia Daily
he was unaware of Dessart’s return from jail but couldn’t do anything about him unless he was found to have molested the boy again. But he promised to “keep an eye on him.”

Dessart’s was not an isolated case. Some payoffs were so brazen that even fellow government officials were angry. Bribes seemed to work particularly well in Sihanoukville’s municipal court. A judge there sentenced Nikita Belov, a twenty-six-year-old Russian, to three years in prison for abusing three boys aged seven to thirteen but then released him two days later. “Police worked hard to arrest him, but the court just released him,” Deputy Prime Minister Sar Kheng complained during a conference on human trafficking.

The same court freed John Claude Fornier, a sixty-four-year-old Frenchman charged with sexually abusing an eight-year-old girl, even
before his trial. Then the very same court in Sihanoukville sentenced Fabio Cencini, a forty-three-year-old Italian, to two years in prison for sexually abusing four girls and two boys between eight and fourteen years old—but then let him out on “bail.” He disappeared.

And then there was the case of Alexander Trofimov. Another Russian pedophile, Trofimov was convicted of sexually abusing seventeen young girls. A court in Phnom Penh charged a senior Justice Ministry official with trying to forge an extradition request for Trofimov that would have allowed him to be released from prison, in exchange for a $250,000 bribe. This official got in trouble because he crossed a line. It wasn’t the appearance of taking a bribe, though. In the process of forging the extradition request, he had tried to forge Hun Sen’s signature. As for Trofimov, whose real name was Stanislav Molodyakov, he was sentenced to seventeen years in prison. On appeal in August 2010, the appeals court, inexplicably, cut nine years off his sentence so that he would be eligible for parole in less than three years.

 

Ouk Bounchhoeun used to be the minister of justice. After he left that position, he was appointed to the senate and became chairman of the Legislation and Justice Committee. Even as a CPP legislator, he found the state of the court system appalling, and so he opened a wide-ranging investigation with the hope that he could convince his government to act.

What he found were problems both in individual judges and with the system itself. “The judges and the prosecutors are facing difficulties implementing the laws,” he said, because “there are a lot of technical terms they don’t understand. We also don’t have any law, or code of ethics, to ensure that a judge is not influenced by anyone else.” Judge In Bopha in Pursat Province raised a similar concern. “There is no debate or discussion here. The law, it does not work, but we never discuss it. We should set up a national conference.”

Senator Ouk Bounchhoeun wore one of those tan safari suits; a Cambodian flag sat on his desk. Small signs affixed to every piece of
furniture and equipment in his office—the sofa, file cabinets, telephone, even a Cambodia map on the wall—said “Property of The Honorable Ouk Bounchhoeun,” as if he feared someone might walk off with all of it at any moment. He added, “We have to seriously look at the problem of paying money to win a case. If you don’t pay, you don’t win; this is one of the issues I am looking at. Sometimes it’s not the judge, sometimes it’s a middleman who runs the paperwork and takes the money.”

A week before this conversation Yorn Than, a circuit court clerk in Ratanakiri Province, acknowledged to reporters that his boss, the judge, had asked him to request five hundred dollars from relatives who wanted a young man released from prison. When the relatives complained about the bribe request, Yorn Than acknowledged asking for the bribe but warned that he would sue them “for defamation or disinformation” if they kept talking about it. Often disputes like that ended in violence.

Juanita Rice, an American jurist from Minnesota who volunteered in Cambodia, working to improve the court system, said she witnessed all of the malfeasance and criminality the court system offered. She said one court official in Kampot Province told her, “The Khmer Rouge created a nation of liars and thieves.” The government’s occasional proposed legal reforms, she said, “are like spraying air freshener on a trash dump.”

Senator Ouk Bounchhoeun wanted to make clear that every class of citizen shared guilt. “Even wealthy people get to court, and the trial does not satisfy them. So they make a secret plan to kill someone. It’s not just the poor people who commit violence. I do not agree with what some people say, it is a result of the Khmer Rouge.” That, he suggested, was just an excuse. He shook his head and said, “We need to reform everything.”

N
ot surprisingly, domestic violence was even more widespread than rape or sexual abuse of children. Many men viewed beating
their wives to be a cherished Cambodian tradition—taking to heart the Cambodian proverb “Men are like gold; women are like cloth.”

In 2003, women tried to force the issue. Government figures then showed that 25 percent of all women nationwide were subjected to serious domestic violence in any given year. Yet when a bill came before parliament that would punish men for beating up their wives, legislators erupted in anger. They accused the sponsors of trying to bring Western fads to Cambodia. “They called me a revolutionary,” said the women’s affairs minister, Ing Kantha Phavi. “They said this was a family matter,” not something the state had a right to adjudicate. The bill died.

The ministry came back with a new version in 2005, and this time it passed. Human-rights advocates were jubilant—but not for long. Like so many other laws the rulers did not like, the government simply declined to enforce it. Violence continued and even increased, as reports newspapers printed almost every day in 2008 and 2009 made clear.

The government had been shamed into passing a law it did not agree with. Its solution, as usual, was to do nothing. As a result, four years later the Women’s Affairs Ministry conducted another national survey and found that the incidence of domestic violence had actually increased. In 2009, one-third of the nation’s women reported that they were subjected to physical abuse. “We have a lot of good laws; the problem is the enforcement of the laws,” said Ing Kantha Phavi, using the bureaucratic understatement required of a minister serving in the government she is criticizing.