The Road of Lost Innocence (16 page)

I’ve spent a decade building AFESIP, and it’s been a decade of pain. I can’t distance myself from the suffering of these girls. We carry the same wounds. I share their suffering, their horrors. It is difficult for me not to blame all men for the actions of a few.

In those years of building AFESIP, Pierre had a lot to put up with. Our marriage was under a lot of strain, and it seemed not even the birth of our darling Nikolai could bring us closer together. In 2004 we separated, and we are now divorced.

In 2004, AFESIP began receiving reports about a hotel, the Chai Hour II. It was one of the biggest new brothels in Phnom Penh, a six-floor supermarket of female flesh, where customers could pick out girls standing behind a glass window, by their numbers, and have them delivered straight to their hotel room. Our investigators talked with girls who worked there, and they said they were forced into prostitution. Of the roughly two hundred girls working in the hotel as “hostesses” and “karaoke girls,” many were minors. There were also virgins for sale on the premises.

To free these girls, we had no choice but to go to the police, even though we knew this wouldn’t necessarily mean the guilty would be punished.

The Chai Hour II was a big operation—by far the largest brothel we had ever taken on. We knew that it was run by wealthy and powerful traffickers, and we realized that they probably had close connections with police and government officials.

Our dossier on the hotel was in the hands of the authorities by September. At the beginning of December, the police agreed to conduct a raid. An investigating magistrate had been designated as the person in charge. Once everything was decided, we had to move fast, since leaks were bound to occur.

The raid took place on the afternoon of December 7, 2004. Some of the people at the hotel managed to flee, but eight pimps were taken into police custody, along with eighty-three women and girls. There weren’t enough police cells to house the girls, and many of them were underage. As usual, AFESIP agreed to take them into our shelter that night, to keep them safe while the police needed them for questioning, as several of the girls had agreed to bring charges against the pimps.

Before I left that night, I spoke to each of the girls. Some of them said they wanted to go back to work. One or two were the mistresses of highly placed men. For men of high position, there’s almost an obligation to keep a little virgin or a minor in a luxurious brothel—it’s a mark of status. (They usually also have wives and “official” mistresses with their own apartments.) These girls had expensive cell phones and used them to ring their protectors to express their outrage. I explained to them that AFESIP doesn’t keep women against their will, but they had to stay with us under police authority. The police required them to be available for questioning for a few days, then they could leave.

Most of the girls were in shock. Several showed marks of their beatings. The youngest ones, especially, found it hard to comprehend that they were now safe—that they could stay with us if they wanted to and go to school.

When I left the AFESIP shelter that night, a large black Lexus was parked in front. Two men—two pimps—said they wanted to come in. We refused them access. Our rules for-bid traffickers from coming onto our premises—that’s why our Phnom Penh center has a high wall and a strong gate.

The next morning I began receiving phone calls. Well-placed friends called me, warning me to be cautious: “Somaly, you’re dealing with important people here. You’re going to get into trouble.” The assistant of a person who worked with us in the anti-trafficking unit of the Ministry of the Interior called me in tears to say that her boss was in the office of the police chief, being fired.

I called another person I knew, and he said that he’d heard that the eight pimps had all been released. He too warned that I should be careful. He told me, “Stay out of this, it’s too big for you.” He told me I should free all the women from the Chai Hour II.

Then a woman who worked at the AFESIP shelter phoned to tell me that a mob of men was forming in front of the gates. She said that some of them were in uniform, from both the military and the police, and asked what they should do.

At 11:40 a.m. my contact at the Interior Ministry finally called me back. He said, “Release the girls. Your life is in danger. We have no power over this.” At around noon, while I was still on the phone, about thirty armed men smashed down the gates. The girls and the AFESIP staff inside were terrified. They recognized some of the attackers as the eight men who had just been freed from jail. Their ringleader hit the staff members and threatened to kill them. The men forced all the girls they could find into cars or onto motorbikes that were waiting outside.

They took ninety-one girls in all, some of whom had been with us for only a few weeks and were beginning to smile and trust that we could keep them safe. We never saw any of them again.

One girl hid in the bathroom the whole time. She was thirteen and had only come to us the week before. She had just begun to believe that she really was safe now. When I got to the AFESIP shelter and took her in my arms, she couldn’t stop sobbing and shaking.

I was angry, so horribly angry. What can you do when the mafias that run the trade in women become so rich they are more powerful than the law?

I phoned Pierre, who was in Laos. He phoned the French embassy. Then a staff member from the AFESIP shelter called. She said she had heard a group of boys in the market saying they were going to lob grenades into the center and kill the staff one by one. I called a meeting and told everyone we had to suspend our operations temporarily and gave them all time off. I tried to help them stay calm, but I was frightened too.

I am not an intellectual. I have no specific expertise. I don’t know how to speak properly and I’ve never had a proper education. But sometimes it’s up to me to stay calm, to have an answer for everyone, to give people strength and help them to overcome themselves. I live day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. I don’t know what will happen to me when I leave this room. Nobody does.

The next day, December 9, some of the local press began reporting that the girls from the Chai Hour II had pushed down the gate in an attempt to escape because AFESIP was holding them against their will. They also reported that all the girls were over eighteen. I began receiving countless calls from people of influence in government and the police suggesting that I just keep quiet and not interfere in what didn’t concern me. Friends warned me that I would get myself killed if I tried to make this into a confrontation and suggested I leave the country for a while, as soon as possible.

The municipal chief of police produced a communiqué that charged us with kidnapping the women and impeding the liberty of working people. It was a statement that was full of lies and venom. Journalists from local newspapers reported that the Chai Hour II was an ordinary hotel, offering massages and a karaoke parlor, and that all the girls were willing to testify that they were not prostitutes.

Pierre was flying home to Cambodia from Laos, but he called a press conference while he was in transit, in Bangkok, to try to get support for us from the international press.

The next day my children were followed by motorbikes on their way home from school. I knew I had to go to Kampong Cham, to check on the children in Thlok Chhrov. The staff who worked there were terrified that there would be a raid on them too, and the children were in a panic.

We left at four in the morning, but still, a car followed us. Fortunately they weren’t very clever, and we managed to lose them before we reached Thlok Chhrov. I tried to calm the girls there. I told them that nothing would happen to anyone and that we had lawyers. I was trying to think clearly, but I was frightened too. I didn’t want to take my friends’ advice and leave the country—I couldn’t simply get up and leave all these girls and AFESIP’s staff behind.

But it seemed pressure was also building from an unexpected source. Officials from the American embassy came to see me, to find out what was going on and look into it themselves. We began receiving phone calls from people at the UN. I was invited to the French embassy to speak with the ambassador. Journalists began to call.

In the space of a few days, the tide began to turn. In Europe, newspapers were reporting the case, and we heard that diplomats from the European Union and the U.S. government were threatening Cambodia with economic sanctions if more was not done to stop sexual trafficking and corruption in the government. The Chai Hour II was now a symbol of something important.

The English-language
Cambodia Daily
led an investigation to see who had forced open the gates of the AFESIP shelter. Neighbors testified that it was the traffickers themselves who had led the assault. AFESIP received discreet invitations to return to work, and the government agreed to set up a panel to investigate the case and look into whether any corruption was involved.

Many months later, the commission reported that it “lacked evidence” of any corruption or that any women had been forcibly removed from the shelter. Some people are too big to take on. If I spelled out names there’d be a bullet through my head tomorrow. I’d have crossed the boundary that separates life and death in our country. That still may happen one day. But before it does, at least I will have spoken out.

In some ways, the Chai Hour II case unblocked the system for us. AFESIP began receiving markedly more help from the authorities. But eighteen months later, the Chai Hour II case came back to haunt us in the most horrible, personal way.

In July 2006, while a journalist, Mariane Pearl, was in Phnom Penh to interview me for
Glamour
magazine, Ning’s school phoned. Ning had disappeared. She had left the school grounds at midday and hadn’t come back. The cell phone I’d given her for her fourteenth birthday wasn’t picking up. I instantly panicked. Ning is not the kind of girl who would just take off. She is a sweet, loving child. She has her own secrets, but she would never seek to worry me.

My instant reaction was that my deepest fear had been realized: the traffickers had taken my child. In Cambodia, this is not a far-fetched scenario. Every year thousands of girls are abducted and sold into prostitution. Most of them are poor, but my adopted daughter would be a special target. My blood froze.

I phoned Pierre, who was temporarily in Thailand. He promised to fly to Cambodia right away. Then I phoned everyone I knew at the police and in the government and told them what had happened. And I settled down to focus on finding Ning.

This is what I know how to do—I know how to trace girls through the prostitution networks. Every investigator we had ever employed at AFESIP went to see every informant who had ever contacted us. Very quickly, we heard that Ning had been seen getting into a car with several people in it, just outside her school. A woman and several men were in the car, and the woman was someone connected to the Chai Hour II.

Four days went by, of frantic phone calls and the even worse terror of waiting. During those four days, Mariane Pearl was a rock for me. She told me about the abduction of her own husband, Daniel Pearl, by Islamic militants in Pakistan in 2002. She helped me retain my self-control.

I knew that if Ning had already been taken to Thailand, we might lose her. The first thing we did was send people out to the main border towns with her photo. Our only hope was if she was still in the country; in that case we might still find her and get her back.

Working closely with the police and the authorities, we finally tracked Ning down and, after three days, we were reunited. She had been in Battambang, in the hands of traffickers, along with a boy she knew. The boy had persuaded her that he was going to commit suicide over her, and she felt pity for him, so she had left the school to talk. Then he led my daughter to a car full of armed men.

I didn’t realize Mariane would write about this incident, but she did. I’m sorry that my daughter’s personal life has become a public story and I won’t add to that. The people involved have been released from jail, although the trial is still pending. The Chai Hour II is still in business, still a brothel—it’s called the Leang Hour now. And the woman in the car has never been found.

.15.

Conclusion

Today in our children’s shelter in Kampong Cham Province we have a twelve-year-old girl with deep circular scars around her neck and upper arms from the time a drunken client tried to hurt her. One charming fourteen-year-old girl who has been living with us for almost a year has lost her mind. When we found her she was locked in the basement of a brothel, and for the first few months she was mute and couldn’t control her body. Now she speaks, and she’s learning to help out in the kitchen. She’s very sweet, like a small child, but she doesn’t always make sense. She wasn’t always this way. We’re still not sure who she is.

Sometimes I am flooded with anger at what these children have been through. I speak with some of the girls, and I find myself overcome by having shared in their suffering. It eats away at my bones, until I feel almost deranged.

How did Cambodia get to be this way? Three decades of bombing, genocide, and starvation and now my country is in a state of moral bankruptcy. The Khmer no longer know who they are.

During the Khmer Rouge regime people detached themselves from any kind of human feeling, because feeling meant pain. They learned not to trust their neighbors, their friends, their family, their own children. To avoid going mad, they shrank to the smallest part of a human, which is “me.” After the regime fell, they were silent, either because they had helped cause the suffering or because this is what they had learned to do in order to survive.

The Khmer Rouge eliminated everything that mattered to Cambodians. And after they fell, people no longer cared about anything except money. I suppose they want to give themselves some insurance in case of another catastrophe, even though the lesson of Pol Pot—if there is one—is that there is no insurance against catastrophe.

More than half the people in Cambodia today were born after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Things should be improving. But the country is in a state of chaos where the only rule is every man for himself. The people in power don’t always work for the common good. When I was young, we were poorer, but school was free in those days. Today, school has to be paid for, and you can buy a diploma—or get one for free, if you show your teacher a gun. The justice system is for sale, and the mafias are close to power; the prostitution business is worth $500 million a year, almost as much as the annual budget of the government.

Cambodian people have always been trained to obedience, and they have always been poor. In Cambodia, one child in eight dies before the age of five. The streets are full of garbage and flies and shit, and the rain churns it into muck. More than a third of the population lives on less than a dollar per day, and you have to pay the hospital when you get sick.

Men have the power. Not all the time; in front of their parents, they keep quiet. With the powerful, they must also stay silent and perhaps prostrate themselves. But once these encounters are over, they go home to assume the upper hand and give orders. If their wife resists, they hit her.

There is one law for women: silence before rape and silence after. We’re taught when we’re little to be like the silk-cotton tree:
dam kor.
Deaf and dumb. Blind too, if possible. Your daughters will look after you, because that’s their duty. Other than that, they’re not worth much.

One-third of the prostitutes in Phnom Penh are young children. These girls are sold and beaten and abused for some kind of pleasure. In the end I don’t think there is any way you can explain or justify that, or the homeless children scrounging through garbage, inhaling glue from little cans you can buy for five hundred riels in every hardware stall, or the stolen children who are trucked into Thailand for the modern slave trade. Trying to explain it is not what I do. I keep my head down and try to help one girl after another. That is a big enough task.

I still feel that I’m dirty and that I carry bad luck. When I sleep, my dreams are filled with violence and rape. Most of my dreams are nightmares. Last night I dreamed again of serpents crawling into my trousers. I’ve tried to rid myself of these nightmares, but they continue to haunt me.

Consulting a psychologist isn’t enough. I did that. I’ve tried a great many things. But the past is inscribed on my body now. When you see the marks on your skin, the scars of torture and cigarette burns, the shape of the chains on your ankles, you feel the past can never be wiped away. You carry the marks of the suffering. They’re just there. But that’s precisely why I carry on with the work of AFESIP.

A lot of people play a part in the work of saving children from sexual slavery, but I fear that some of the volunteers feel a sense of superiority toward prostituted women. They’re contemptuous of them. For me, it’s different. I’m one of them. Everything they’ve been through, I share. I wear their scars on my body and in my soul. We don’t need to say much to understand one another. We know that life is a daily hell. Some of the workers here work for their salaries; in their hearts they don’t understand.

When I close my eyes, I see the physical tortures again. I prefer them to the psychological ones, like the fear I felt when I was told my family and my collaborators would be killed. But even so, my eyes close and the blows and kicks are there. Remembering makes you want to die, but you’re not allowed to die. You want to disappear, but you can’t disappear.

The memories that torment me most are those of rape and the stink of sperm. In brothels, they don’t bother changing sheets much. The smell of sperm is everywhere. It’s insufferable. Even today, I often have the sense that I’m breathing in the smell of the whorehouses. The customers were dirty. They never showered. I remember one man with the most hideous breath. We had no toothpaste, but we would brush our teeth with ash or sand. Some of the clients never bothered at all; their teeth were yellow and rotting.

I lived amid this stench for so long that I can’t bear it now. Even fifteen years later, I feel dirtied by it. So I wash myself like a madwoman, put cream on and cover myself in eau de toilette in order to mask the stench that pursues me. At home, I have a cupboard full of perfume. I spend money to blot out a smell that exists only in my imagination. I try to chase it away with the contents of my bottles.

Writing this book has brought everything back, and I can no longer sleep. It makes me sick. I have nightmares remembering all the horrors. Sometimes I don’t know if I can bear to keep living with them. There are times when I’d like to get rid of this burden of memory that weighs me down, the roll call of my misery that forces me to have shower after shower, rubbing myself down as hard as possible before covering myself in cream and drowning myself in perfume. What’s the use of such an existence? Apart from crying, what does one do with it? Are my friends who died and are now free of it all luckier than I am? I would have liked to live a happy life, but the problems are there, always in front of us, gaping, demanding our energy, our ceaseless activity, and even our despair. To say that the past is past, that you need to put it all behind you, is what I say all the time to the girls who come to the center with their unendurable suffering.

I know how to say all this, but I also know that it’s useless and serves little purpose. Nothing can cauterize those old wounds. If I confide in Pierre or my close friends that I feel dirty, they tell me that it’s not true, that for them I’m this, that, or the other, but I’m not dirty. These words don’t help me at all. The only people to whom I can say that I feel dirty and who can understand are the girls who have walked the same path as I have.

Journalists make it difficult, in a way, though I am very grateful to them. The attention of the world’s newspapers helped save our operation from being shut down. But often reporters want a “sexy” project, something hot, to wake up the readers and viewers. They ask me to talk about my past—if not, how will they convey the importance of the work we’re doing?

That’s one of the reasons I decided to write this book. Perhaps it will stop me from having to tell my story over and over again, because repeating it is very difficult. And one day I may no longer be here, so I want everyone to know now what is happening to the women of Cambodia. Given what’s going on in my country, who knows who may still be alive tomorrow.

When we started doing our work, we couldn’t manage to close down the small brothels. We didn’t have enough experience and the pimps and
meebons
just laughed at us. Then, with time, work, and support, we began doing it. Now it’s the big brothels that pose the challenge.

We have to proceed step by step. We’ve been working for ten years, but it’s only in the last three years that we’ve begun cooperating well with the police. The justice system is beginning to improve too. When there’s an AFESIP case these days, some of the judges are more careful, because they know we don’t let things drop easily. And some people in government do help me; if we had no support from the government, none of our work would be possible.

I never wanted to become a public person; it just happened that way. My dream, really, is to be like that old man who told me about the frogs and the king: I would like to have a quiet life, in a garden, living with all my children and with the girls from Thlok Chhrov. I would be a grandmother and great-grandmother and I would be happy, and someone else would have taken over the work of running everything. But so far it hasn’t been like that.

I have written this book for several reasons. I want people to realize to what extent prostitutes are victimized and how important it is to help them. These women and girls are marked by their experiences for life, and it’s very hard for them ever to find even a little happiness. It simply isn’t true, as some people think, that the girls are glad to find work, that they volunteer for it, that they are well paid.

People think prostitutes are deceitful and dishonest. They think these girls are hard and intractable—we have a saying in Cambodia: “Don’t try to bend the
sroleuw
tree, don’t try to change a whore.” On the contrary, prostitutes are often honest girls from the countryside, and most of them will do anything they can to leave the suffering they endure in the brothels.

My story isn’t important. The point is not what happened to me. I write my story to shed light on the lives of so many thousands of other women. They have no voice, so let this one life stand for their stories.

On their behalf, I would like this book to serve as a call to the governments of the world to get involved in the battle against the sexual exploitation of women and children. Victims are victims in every country.

I recently set up a foundation in the United States that I hope will assist in our work. I want to be able to buy enough land so that one day, the girls from our Thlok Chhrov center, who have grown up with us, can farm it, all together. AFESIP is about short-term help: we cannot support a girl indefinitely. We cannot pay to educate her beyond a certain level or allow her to stay on forever, even though we may be her only family. Our new foundation will provide longer-term support and it could help other women—former prostitutes, but also orphans, ethnic minorities, the elderly. We have called it the Somaly Mam Foundation, because my notoriety helps us raise money, but I hope the victims themselves will run it.

For the moment, our opponents are winning the war, but we’ve won one battle at least. They’ve lost face and respect. We’ve investigated this traffic, exposed it for what it is, and made it shameful. We’ve shown that these people aren’t invincible, and I’m glad we’ve managed that.

People ask me how I can bear to keep doing what I do. I’ll tell you. The evil that’s been done to me is what propels me on. Is there any other way to exorcise it?