# 64 Don't die, David. Not yet!

James Ricketson

316 Whale Beach Road

Palm Beach 2108

Sydney, Australia

jamesricketson@gmail.com

Mr Phillip Hammond

Foreign Secretary

Parliamentary House of Commons

London SW1A                                                                                   

10^th    Dec. 2014

Dear Foreign Secretary

Yesterday I sent a long email to David Fletcher from Australia. I did not know if he would receive it and could only hope, if he did, that he would respond to it in the way I hoped he would.

David

I do understand why you want to end it all, to die with dignity and so on, but let me tell you the reasons why I think you are wrong. Let me start with the words of a good friend of yours who, like me, think you should continue the fight:

“Hello my friend.  Just want to lay out some facts to you, in hope that you can allow this ‘process’ to continue, so that you can do some more ‘real good’ in this world.

If you are gone, there is no process that can go forward.  There is no legal will, no legal power or attorney.  The FCO and others will fight that there is nothing legal in any requests you have made.  Sue Bennett will not honor any of your last requests and the FCO will never reveal the true story of their involvement.   

I know it has been over 4 years of hell for you, but James has only been on this for 3 months.  Just look at all of the progress he has made in that time, and his good work is just beginning to come to fruition. 

You need to appeal your case to the MOJ.  If they deny your appeal, with all the legal processes that they have fucked up, this case will become an international incident.  If the MOJ is complicit in this travesty of justice, there is no way that the international community can ignore it.  We need to find out if the MOJ is corrupt and willing to ignore all legal process.

Don’t let the assholes (is that English), Neeson, Drummond, the FCO, the British Embassy, APLE, human rights groups, etc. get away with it.  There is great honor (honour, if you prefer) in your fight.  Others have failed,  but you will not!  As you remember, many years ago, I told that that there were two sides to you.  One side was so evident from our trip to the dump.  You were kind, generous, giving, caring and very soft hearted.  The other side, is that you are one tough SOB!  We need you to be that tough SOB, and fight on!!

Admiringly,”

I am not yet half way through having the court documents I now have in my possession translated but already the significant holes in the prosecution’s case are clear to see – for anyone who wishes to look, that is. The Foreign & Commonwealth Office does not want to look, however. Foreign Minister Phillip Hammond, Ambassador Mark Kent, Sue Bennett and others have as little interests in the facts of your case as the corrupt judges within the Phnom Penh Municipal Court. Your own government has abandoned you. Your own government provides funding to the NGO that set you up on false charges – Actions Pour les Enfants.

This is the bad news. The good news is that these career bureaucrats leave paper trails and, in the era in which we now live, electronic trails also. Emails (many of them) will have passed back and forth between:

- CEOPS and the British Embassies in Cambodia and Thailand

- Scott Neeson, CEOPS and the British Embassies in Cambodia and Thailand

The British Embassies in Cambodia and Thailand and senior bureaucrats within the FCO – up to and including, I suspect, the Foreign Minister, Mr Phillip Hammond.

Copies of all of these communications are available to you under FOI legislation – but only if you are alive.

Sue Bennett and those who are instructing her are going to release some documents today – if that is, the anonymous email writer is true to his/her word. Now that Phillip Hammond knows you are on a hunger strike to the death Sue Bennett will find some reason not to release the documents as promised today – hoping that you will die beforehand and her problem, the FCO’s problem, Mr Phillip Hammond’s problem will disappear. This would be a real shame. The FCO would have won and, given the FCO‘s indifference to the fate of UK citizens abroad, it is only a matter of time before APLE sets up some other UK citizen and the same merry-go-round begins again.

It would be a shame also, of course, if you were to die from a sense of hopelessness when there is, I believe, the possibility of some light at the end of the tunnel. Just as APLE set out to destroy you, we should set out to destroy APLE. APLE did not set out to destroy your life for any personal reason. You just happened to be someone who was easy to set up. APLE picks its targets fairly carefully – men who, for one reason or another, do not have the power to fight back. You have fought back to date but with both of your hands tied behind your back owing to indifference on the part of the British Embassies in Cambodia and Thailand. No, not indifference but, as is becoming increasingly apparent, as a result of complicity between CEOPS, APLE and the Embassies to see you in jail regardless of the lack of evidence in support of the proposition that you raped Yang Dany.

Unless the British Embassies in Cambodia and Thailand destroy documents, evidence of Embassy complicity is discoverable. But only if you are alive. If you are dead this whole matter will die with you.

Even if Sue Bennett does release some documents to you today I doubt very much that she will have been instructed to release anything of significance. This first release will be a token gesture. There will probably reams of useless material and arcane explanations as to why certain documents cannot be released. You can be sure that the documents that cannot be released will be those that pertain, directly, to communications between the British Embassies in Cambodia and Thailand, CEOPS and Scott Neeson between 25^th June 2010 and 7^th July 2010.

Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond will fight tooth and nail to prevent the release of any of these documents and instruct his staff accordingly. The same applies for all documents relating to when the British Embassy in Thailand came into possession of your passport. Clearly, the Embassy was in possession of your passport on 4^th August 2010. However, the FCO will have to stick with its story that it did not come into possession of your passport until July 2013. How Ambassador Mark Kent will explain what travel document you were going to use on 4^th August 2010, when you were due to fly out, escorted to the airport by Embassy staff, is going to be a true test of the skills of his best spin doctor.

It is also going to be a test of Sue Bennett’s prowess as a bureaucrat to find reasons not to release any documents relating to your passport that do not pass the laugh test. This is what the Sue Bennetts of the world are paid to do, however, and not doubt she will do an efficient job.

So, we can expect there to be lots of key documents missing when the first tranche is released – a release that will occur, can only occur, if you are alive.

The limited release of documents will be a temporary setback only because there are FOI laws that must be adhered to. Despite all the obfuscations, spin-doctoring and so on Sue Bennett and others will be aware that the Ombudsman may take a dim view to breaches of FOI legislation. Also, there will be those in the upper echelons of the FCO who will be aware that your case may well wind up in a fully functioning court of law one day – if you are alive, that is. I am not referring here to a Cambodian court but to a court in the UK investigating the circumstances surrounding the theft of your passport and the deliberate destruction of the evidence it contained, along with the complicity of the FCO in your pursuit, persecution and prosecution by APLE and CEOPS – based on scuttlebutt perpetrated by Peter Hogan and Scott Neeson. A properly functioning court in the UK will not be relying on any statements by myself or senior members of the FCO but on the very same documents we are seeking to obtain through FOI. Where our attempts to secure these through the office of the Foreign Secretary have failed, the court will succeed. It may take some time but I believe that when the truth emerges, a truth that Mr Hammond has sought to conceal, he will have no choice but to resign as Foreign Minister.

Rather than giving up without further fight, I think we should take the fight to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, get a decent lawyer in the UK and commence legal action with a view to finding out what happened to your passport and obtaining copies of all the documents that Mr Hammond is now fighting tooth and nail to prevent you (and me) from acquiring; documents that will reveal complicity on the part of Ambassador Mark Kent and a cover-up that goes right through to the office of the Foreign Secretary.

In short, come out fighting rather than make your exit from the planet as planned.

This tactic may not work but if it does, if we can secure irrefutable evidence of a conspiracy, the media (to date uninterested in your plight) will take an interest. Not necessarily in you but in the fact that the very British institutions the public expects to take care of citizens travelling abroad is not above conspiring to have them jailed if the whim takes some senior FCO bureaucrat.

That APLE is a corrupt and criminal organization is now known by so many people in Cambodia that it is only a matter of time before the NGO is exposed. I am certainly doing my best but I know that others are also and it is to be hoped that in the not-too-distant future an article will appear in a major publication that will do for APLE what the media did to Somaly Mam – expose so many of her lies so comprehensively that not even the best spin doctors could explain away the anomalies in her story.

In the case of APLE yours is the only case I know of in any detail. However, there does seem to be a thread common to many of the cases – namely that the courts are quite prepared to ignore doctor’s reports that make it clear that the victim of an alleged sexual assault has not been assaulted.

If we continue the fight, if we join forces with others who are fighting similar battles, I believe it is possible that APLE couldl be run out of town in the not-too-distant future. This is not going to happen overnight but once Samleang Siela and Thierry Darnaudet are exposed as criminals it will be that much more difficult for the judges within the Phnom Penh Municipal Court to get away with convicting men like you without a trial.

Whilst the British Embassy (and government) may well be prepared to sacrifice you to to protect APLE, it may be difficult from a PR point of view for Mr Phillip Hammond, Ambassador Mark Kent, Nigel Eusatce and others to turn a blind eye if AFLE is exposed as being a fraudulent, corrupt and criminal  NGO.

Somaly Mam may well have lied about her past but her crimes are minor compared to those of APLE. This is well and generally known. Be patient. The truth will come out. With a bit of luck Samleang Siela and Thierry Darnaudet might sue me for defamation, have me arrested and dragged before the Phnom Penh Municipal Court – thus guaranteeing that APLE gets precisely the sort of publicity it does not want; guaranteeing that questions will be asked of APLE that, as yet, no-one has the courage to ask in public.

LICADHO has revealed itself to be a dead loss when if comes to protecting your human rights. You are a fat (well, not so fat, now) 70 year old man who likes to help children and so do not have human rights in LICADHOS’s point of view –especially not with Naly Pilorge, Director of LICADHO, also being a founder of and closely associated with APLE.

David, I do not know you all that well, but I know enough to know that you have not shied away from a fight before. Yes, I understand that there comes a point where it is pointless to give up fighting but I really don’t believe that we have arrived at that point yet. I suspect that there are many within the British Embassies of Thailand and Cambodia who are fervently wishing that you will carry through with your plan to die. This will let them off the hook. Don’t let this happen. Go after them. All those responsible for the destruction of your passport should lose their jobs. And they will once proof positive of their involvement in its destruction is revealed in court.

Sue Bennett and her puppet masters will continue to obstruct and to find obscure clauses within FOI legislation to deny you access documents you are entitled to. This is a given. And we can keep asking for them; keep asking for reasons why you (we) cannot be provided with them. The biggest challenge for Mr Phillip Hammond is going to be how the FCO accounts for the fact that the British Embassy in Thailand was in possession of your passport on 4^th August 2010, on the morning of your flight to the UK, but then ‘lost’ it for the next 3 years. The various versions of what happened to your passport will not stand up in a proper court. The judge will look over the top of his glasses and tell the FCO’s defense lawyer that he was not born yesterday, that he did not come down in the last shower, that he is not a fool and does not appreciated being treated like one. The FCO lawyer (costing the UK tax-payers an arm and a leg) will do his or her best to explain how the FCO had lost, then found your passport but it simply will not wash if you have decent legal representation.

My final reason why you should not die, and the most important one, is that as (a friend) wrote a few days ago, you only get one shot at life and, no matter how shitty things might turn out (as they have with you) there is always the possibility that the wheel will turn and that problems that seem insurmountable will be surmounted and you can get back on with your life. Yes, you might have lost five or six years but you can come out of this a wiser and more compassionate man and in a position to continue your work with poor families. Yes, life has been tough for you but so has it been for so many others in Cambodia who have had to deal with the loss of everything in their lives – their families, their friends, their communities, their towns and villages. There are people, and always have been, who have lost everything and started again. You can do this. You must do this. If you do, a day will come when you re-read these words and those of (your friend) and thank us for telling you that ending your life may be more dignified than a slow death of the soul and spirit in jail, but that it is less dignified than fighting to your last breath to secure justice not just for yourself but for all those who will come after you – all those who will, if APLE is not stopped, be set up as you have been and who, like you, will find themselves incarcerated not for crimes committed but  in order to feed the corrupt business model that APLE has created – one that requires a constant stream of sacrificial victims such as yourself to convince sponsors and donors that it doing a great and effective job in stamping out sex crimes against children.

Of course, everyone wants to stamp out such crimes and this is what makes APLE’s PR job so easy. Keep the arrest and conviction rates up and the dollars will flow into APLE’s coffers. Unfortunately, you were tailor made to fit into the APLE business model. Not only were you working with kids but you ‘raped’ a 15 year old girl in 1998. Yes, statutory rape, yes, a consenting sexual partner, but not the kind of past that is going to win you any friends in high places. Indeed, it is the kind of past that enables journalists such as Andrew Drummond and Richard Shears to portray you and a child abuser. Or, better yet, as a serial child abuser. Such is the dislike most people feel for men who sexually abuse children, you were tailor made for the gutter press to exploit.

One final reason not to die, just in case I have not made my case strongly enough, is this. After close to 20 years of experience in Cambodia and having covered the last elections and their aftermath closely, I believe that real change is on the horizon for Cambodia; that there are lots of Cambodians who do not want the status quo to continue; lots of Cambodians (including those in government departments and the judiciary) who want to put an end to NGOs flush with money calling the shots. If we can beat APLE by playing in accordance with the legal rules in Cambodia (outlined in the Cambodian Code of Criminal Procedure), important members of the judiciary may well feel empowered to turn the tables and hold corrupt NGOs such as APLE to account for the way in which they exploit those poor and powerless Cambodians into playing the roles they do in setting up men like you.

Don’t die, David. Not yet.

cheers

James

Mr Fletcher did respond to my email – telling me that no-one from the British Embassy in Cambodia had delivered the documents he was promised to be given on 10^th Dec. No surprises there.

Mr Fletcher told me also that he had made contact with the lawyer who has visited him a few times in jail now offering to represent him. She has asked him to give her $600 to file the necessary papers with the Phnom Penh Municipal Court to lodge an appeal against the judges decision to refuse him a re-trial. I know precisely which papers she is referring to, having once had to lodge such papers myself. There is, in total, about an hour’s work involved in preparing the papers and another hour or two involved in the actual lodging of them with the Phnom Penh Municipal Court. Cambodian justice in action!

Since Mr Fletcher has no money (the last of it having been stolen by police within the prison) and since the British Embassy will not help him in any way, I have offered to pay the required $600. I am doing so not because I believe that it will make any difference to his legal status but because I want to keep alive in Mr Fletcher the hope that one day justice will prevail; that he will be a free man and in a position to sue all those, including yourself, who have conspired to have him arrested in 2010, held in illegal detention in Thailand and illegally deported to Cambodia to serve a 10 year jail sentence for a crime he could not possibly have committed.

In Dec 2014, on your own instructions, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office is deliberately withholding the documents Mr Fletcher is entitled to under FOI legislation. It will come as no surprise to me if, when this matter reaches a court within the UK, certain key documents have been ‘accidentally destroyed’ by your staff on your instructions, as was his passport by Ambassador Mark Kent.

Finally, Mr Hammond, it is clear that I have moved from being merely a writer and a filmmaker to being an advocate for Mr Fletcher’s right to a fair trial. It is equally clear, having written now 27 letters to you (this is the 28^th) that you are equally committed to seeing to it that Mr Fletcher does not receive a fair trial.

best wishes

James Ricketson