Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land

by Joel Brinkley

  Meanwhile, Ang Vong Vattana, the minister of justice, was growing angry. After all, he had approved the prosecutor’s request to transfer the case. Now, the minister thought, what was a governor doing messing around in his courts? “The minister of justice asked me why I got involved in this,” council chief Chhay Sareth recalled with a slight shake of the head. “I told him: ‘This problem came here from Banteay Meanchey, and when someone vomits on your leg, you have to react. So I got involved.’ I respect these people, even though they came from Banteay Meanchey. I did not know about this case until they came here. The prosecutor brought this case here.”

  So then, why, after all of that, was Top Chan Sereyvudth still chief prosecutor in Pursat Province? The governor said he was asking the same question, “why the prosecutor, who was really involved in this case, why there is no punishment, no measure taken against him. I still wonder why. If you want to know more, I suggest you talk to the minister of justice.”

  A few days later, Justice Minister Ang Vong Vattana swept into an anteroom to his office in Phnom Penh and sat in one of the room’s elegant chairs painted with gold leaf and upholstered with brown velvet. He was tall, balding, with gold wire-rim glasses. He wore a gray suit and a bothered expression. “What do you want?”

  I asked him about transferring the land case into Top Chan Sereyvudth’s courtroom. The minister answered with an imperial tone: “I have the right to transfer the case, and I did it.”

  But didn’t the prosecutor have a personal interest in the case?

  “People say he was involved, but nobody has shown me the proof.”

  Okay, then, was it proper for this same prosecutor to pronounce guilt in the Ou Bunthan case before he had even seen the police report? For a moment the minister simply glared with a pinched-lip, narrow-eyed stare. Then he stood up and stormed out of the room, muttering, “You waste my time.”

  Let Ting was six months pregnant when her husband died of his burn wounds. When I spoke to her, he had been cremated just the day before. Let Ting was sorrowful, but she did not cry.

  The colonel kicked her off his property, so she had no choice but to move back to the “house” she had lived in before—just a platform a foot or two off the ground with a low, sloping palm-frond roof and no walls. A plastic tarp on bamboo poles provided a porch. It was there that her husband passed away. When the hospital could do nothing for him, she brought him home to die. Her home held no obvious possessions. Whatever they owned was still in their cottage on the colonel’s property, and Let Ting said she was afraid to go back. It was getting dark. Neighbors came by bringing food. One middle-aged woman was frying some fish over a wood fire. The pan rested on three stones. “We could earn 50,000 riel in that job,” she volunteered. That’s $12.50 a month. “Now, I don’t know what I am going to do.”

  Even though Leang Saroeun’s murder was a heinous crime, it barely stood out among the various acts of brutality and carnage that Cambodians wrought on each other every day. About once a week, on average, police reported an acid attack, often committed by a wife intent on destroying a woman suspected of sleeping with her husband. Typically, she would splash battery acid on the victim’s face. The numbers of attacks were increasing so fast that a victims’ group called Cambodian Acid Survivors Charity opened to treat victims who could not get help anywhere else. It worked with more than two hundred victims between March 2006 and December 2009, including scores of children. For its part in 2002 the government refused to pass a law making it illegal to possess acid for use as a weapon. Only in 2010, when government officials became concerned that the nation faced an acid-attack epidemic, did the National Assembly impanel a committee to study the issue.

  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 govern
ment 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.”

  Not 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.

  • “Khim Ny, 44, was severely beaten by her husband after she went to retrieve him from a gambling club about 200 meters from their family home in Kampong Cham Thursday. Khim Ny’s husband broke her leg with a long pole after she rebuked him for gambling and not earning money for the family.”

  • “A Khmer-American man has confessed to pouring gasoline on his fiancée and her sister and burning them at their home in Cambodia’s northwestern Battambang province, authorities here say, amid what the government describes as a worsening pattern of violence against women.”

  • “The headless and naked bodies of Nhaem Phoeun, 37, and her daughter Bun Savy, 8, were found floating on Prek Chhlaung River in Snuol district, Kratie province, on November 11. Police have arrested Sem Bun, 48, the husband and father of the victims for the murders, when the suspect’s oldest daughter, Bun Saron, 20, alerted the authorities after her father confessed his crime to her. She said her father had been sexually abusing her for one year, and she believes he killed her mother and sister because they knew of the rapes.”

  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.

  Dr. Mam Bunheng, the minister of health, addressed the worsening statistics with a furrowed brow and a worried tone. “Yes, now we see more domestic violence,” he acknowledged. “We had it before but not as much. A big part of the problem today is that so many people like to drink.” But then he brightened. “Also look at how we inform people about this now, educate people.”

  Given the bleak statistics, that didn’t seem to be helping. In fact, in late 2009 the Women’s Affairs Ministry conducted a nationwide survey and found that 70 percent of all respondents, male and female, said they believed physical violence against women was sometimes permissible. More surprising, 55 percent of the women surveyed said they deserved to be beaten if they questioned their husbands about spending habits or extramarital affairs. Isn’t that what the Chbab Srey, required reading in the schools until 2007, had been teaching Cambodia’s children for generations?

  Pailin is a scruffy town near Cambodia’s western border with Thailand. It is distinguished by its role as the former Khmer Rouge “capital.” In Pailin, Chhoun Makkara represents the human-rights organization Adhoc, which pursues human-rights cases in court—often a fruitless endeavor, given the corruption endemic to the legal system.

  One morning in the summer of 2009 Chhoun Makkara heard about a double murder in town, including a hanging—an extreme example of domestic violence, it appeared. He went to have a look, “because this kind of hanging is increasing,” he explained. Really, not much happened in Pailin, but this looked interesting. Now he was looking at grisly photos from the murder scene. A ceiling fan rotated slowly overhead—too slow to create a breeze. A fluorescent light hung from the ceiling just above the fan, creating a slow, eerie strobe effect. The room was bare, save for a desk, a table, and a couple of chairs. “I don’t think the police will drop this case,” he added, as if that were unusual. “They are doing an investigation.”