President, LICADHO
Phnom Penh
Cambodia
27th Jan
2015
Dear Dr Pung
LICADHO, along with most other NGOs in
Cambodia, seems determined to adhere to an omerta-like pact of silence when
asked questions.
It has been suggested to me many times now
that I have no right to ask questions of any NGOs and expect answers.
Acceptance of such a state of affairs by journalists would result in their
never being able to write articles that were anything other than the official
line presented by an NGO to the world. All NGOs are in the business of
marketing themselves. This is how you raise funds for your continued
activities. It is the role of journalists to hold NGOs (along with politicians,
amongst others) accountable for their activities.
Whilst LICADHO quite rightly holds the
government of Cambodia to account for its actions, you appear not to believe
that journalists have a right to hold LICADHO accountable. Just as the lack of
transparency and accountability leaves the Cambodian government free to do as
it pleases with impunity, the same applies to LICADHO and other NGOs in
Cambodia funded by donor and sponsor dollars.
It is now more than a month (23rd
Dec 2014) since I offered you and LICADHO the opportunity to meet and speak
with someone who has some very disturbing observations to make about Action
Pour les Enfants based on personal experience. This person’s story is
explosive. So much so that s/he only wishes to tell it if s/he can be
guaranteed protection from those who do not want him/her to tell it. Of primary
concern is the possibility of being sent to prison for speaking out about
his/her complicity in one particular scam.
That LICADHO has no interest in talking
with him/her is now no longer surprising to me. Through APLE’s close
association with LICADHO, with Naly Pilorge as one of the founders of the NGO,
the activities of Action pour les Enfants will never come under the scrutiny of
LICADHO.
This is a sad reflection of LICADHO’S
commitment to human rights being available to all – including, as is
appropriate, men and women accused of Khmer Rouge genocidal crimes. Yes,
LICADHO will write interminable reports critical of the Cambodian government for its human rights abuses (and rightly so)
but never any reports criticizing NGOs that run bogus ‘orphanages’. LICADHO
never names and shames NGOs that illegally remove children from their families and forcibly indoctrinate them in a religious
faith other than the one practiced by their predominantly Buddhist families. Is
this not, in itself, a human rights abuse?
I now accept, begrudgingly, that LICADHO
has no interest at all in the human rights of men accused of sex crimes –
regardless of (in spite of!) of strong evidence of their innocence. There are
no donor dollars to be gleaned from monitoring and reporting on such cases. There are, however, lots of donor dollars to
be harvested from a proliferation of victims of alleged abuse.
What I cannot and do not accept is that
LICADHO has no interest at all in the way in which Cambodian children and their
materially poor families are exploited by NGOs (through intimidation and
promises of financial reward) into providing false testimony against men
charged with sex crimes. What I do not understand is why LICADHO stands by,
eyes averted, lips sealed, and allows these children to be removed from their
families and held in NGO captivity for months on end until they sign documents
implicating men in sex crimes against them?
These same children are then all-too-often
removed from their families and held captive for years on end by NGOs with a
religious (usually evangelically Christian) agenda and with little or no access
to their families. In the case of HAGAR, as I have informed you before, these family
visits can be limited to 2 hours per annum. Yes, that is not a typographical
error. Two hours per annum. HAGAR also offers children money if they will make
false allegations of sexual abuse against men. Again, I have offered to
introduce you to some young men and women who have experience of this. And I
have recorded interviews with some.
Again, LICADHO is not interested in looking at any evidence of human and
legal rights abuses perpetrated by NGOs.
When these children (mostly girls) are
released back into the community at the age of 18 they are provided with no
assistance at all but left to fend for themselves. I know many of these young
woman and all, with virtually no exceptions, became pregnant by the age of 19 –
in part because they have received no counseling in contraception from their
Christian NGO guardians. Nor have they been provided with ready access to
contraception when they leave their respective NGOs. Once these young women reach
the age of 18 they have ceased to be of any revenue raising value to NGOs who
must, in order to keep the dollars flowing into their accounts, find new
‘orphans’ or ‘victims’!
Virtually the only skill these young women
have acquired after years enforced NGO captivity is an ability to speak English
well - a skill that enables them for the most part to work only in restaurants
and as ‘waitresses’ in ‘girlie bars’. (Some of these ‘girlie bars’, as the
entire NGO community knows well, as LICADHO knows well, are run by NGO men
working with children!)
With few exceptions, NGOs show no duty of
care to the young men and women who were in residential care for a number of
years. They are left to fend for themselves and, if they don’t fend well, these
same NGOs provide no assistance at all. It is cute young kids that sell the
wares these NGOs have on offer – not struggling young adults.
“There is none so blind as he who will not
see.”
Only a willfully blind person could fail
to see and understand what is going on in Cambodia. A ‘stolen generation’ of
children is being created – with all the problems attendant on the ‘stolen
generation’ of Aboriginal children in Australia. The day will come when this
monstrous scam is exposed in a way that I am not able to with this blog. When
the truth does emerge (as it did eventually with Somaly Mam) the question will
be asked of LICADHO:
“Why,
Dr Pung, why Naly Pilorge, did LICADHO stand by and say nothing, do nothing,
about the scams that everyone in Cambodia was aware of?”
From time to time, articles are written
that allude to the truth about ‘Scambodia’ but, after a brief burst of
publicity, the status quo returns and LICADHO maintains its silence of the
human rights abuses perpetrated by NGOs on children and their materially poor
parents. There are sins of commission and sins of omission. LICADHO is guilty
of the latter.
Why does LICADHO have no interest at all
in the human rights abuses suffered by these children and their families? Is it
because unscrupulous NGOs such as Citipointe church’s ‘SHE Rescue Home’ and
HAGAR (along with APLE) have developed close working relationships (co-dependent
relationships) with LICADHO? Is it
because you all receive funding from the same sources and to do wish to upset
the apple cart - if you will excuse the pun?
SHE and HAGAR (and others like them) require
a constant stream of ‘victims of human trafficking’ in order to keep their business
models operational? Given that so many of them are evangelical Christians they
can justify their breaking up of families with their fervently held belief that
they are ‘saving’ these children for Jesus Christ and hide from themselves the
fact that they are also providing themselves with a good living and a lifestyle
most would not be able to enjoy back in their home countries – replete with
brown skinned men and women attending to their every need. Colonialism is not a
thing of the past. It is alive and well in Cambodia, masquerading as Christian
benevolence.
LICADHO’s raison d’etre likewise requires,
in part, perpetuating the belief for
donors and sponsors that Cambodia is swarming with pedophiles and that all
children (girls mainly) between the ages of 3 and 15 are in danger of being
abused (potential victims’ as Steve Morrish so aptly describes them) if they
are not ‘rescued’ by the likes of the ‘SHE Rescue Home’ and HAGAR. That these
girls (in the main) are forcibly alienated from their families, their
communities, their culture and their religion – clear abuses of their human
rights - is, it seems, acceptable to LICADHO and not worthy of comment?
I should not need to make this point but
it is rendered necessary by the sheer number of times I have been accused of
supporting pedophiles as a result of my advocacy for David Fletcher’s right to
a fair trial.
I deplore any and all forms of sexual
exploitation of children and believe that the perpetrators of such abuse
deserve lengthy jail sentences in whatever country they occur. However, I also
deplore all non-sexual forms of exploitation of children – the very forms of
exploitation practiced by so many NGOs in Cambodia - running ‘orphanages’
filled with children who have parents; running ‘rescue’ centres with few if any
children who have been rescued from the sex trade but whose beds are filled
with girls who have been illegally removed from their materially poor families
or whose parents have placed their thumb prints on documents they could not
read and did not understand.
I am thinking in particular, here, of
Citipoite church’s ‘SHE Rescue Home’. As LICADHO has known since 2008, the ‘SHE
Rescue Home’ removes children from their families illegally. It does so with
the full knowledge of one of its major donors – the Australian based Global
Development Group. Has LICADHO ever stood up for the parents who have lost
their children to Pastor Leigh Ramsey’s fraudulent ‘Rescue Home’ and, in the
process, broken Cambodian law? (* See relevant law below.)
Has LICADHO ever stood up for the rights
of the children that have been illegally removed from their families, forced to
attend Christian churches, forced to abandon all aspects of Khmer culture and
tradition and denied meaningful access to their families? The answer is ‘no’. The
donor dollars are to be found in ‘rescuing’ girls deemed to be ‘at risk’; not
in rescuing kids from greedy and unscrupulous NGO predators that exploit their
poverty for their own income-generating reasons.
(For Citipoite lawyers poring over this document
online in search of evidence that I am ‘threatening to defame’ the church,
please go ahead and sue me, but please have the courage to do so in Australia
and not in a country where you can buy the verdict that suits you and which,
you hope, in vain, will silence me. And please, this time around, have the
courtesy to inform me that I am being sued and the date upon which my court
case is to be heard!)
Dr Pung, please ask Citipointe (as I have
been asking LICADHO to do for six years now) to produce the documents, the MOUs,
that Pastor Leigh Ramsey insists gave the church the right to remove girls from
their family in 2008 and hold them in custody for close to six years despite
repeated requests from the parents that the girls be returned from their
families? As the Law on Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation (see
below) makes clear, Pastor Ramsey would be doing time in a Cambodian jail if
the rule of law applied in Cambodia.
You will not ask Citipointe to produce
proof of the legality of its actions in removing girls from their homes. Why?
You will not ask Scott Neeson to produce copies of the pro-forma contract he
forces parents to sign before taking their children into residential care. Why?
You will not ask Neeson why the parents are not allowed to keep copies of the
‘contracts’ they enter into with CCF for themselves. Why? You will not ask
Neeson why CCF locks families out of their CCF owned hovels when they get
$12.50 behind in their rent? Why?
The questions that need to be asked of
Neeson, of HAGAR, of the ‘SHE Rescue Home’ are legion. You will ask none of
them. Why?
Materially poor Cambodians have human (and
legal) rights that are being regularly abused by NGOs who, with no regard at
all for Cambodian laws that do not suit their agenda, cause enormous suffering
to both children and their families.
Can you please explain to me, Dr Pung, to
the NGO community, to the donors and sponsors who put millions of dollars into
NGO coffers, why LIDAHO turns a blind eye to the illegal removal of children
from their families? Why will LICADHO not
even ask NGOs such as the ‘SHE Rescue Home’, HAGAR and the Cambodian Children’s
Fund to (a) produce documented evidence of the legality of their removal of
children and/or (b) copies of contracts that the NGO has entered into with the
parents of the children that have been removed?
Please stop turning a blind eye to this,
Dr Pung. Please act in accordance with the same precepts of transparency and
accountability that LICADHO applies to its criticisms of the Cambodian
government.
At the risk of belabouring points I have
made twice now, I reiterate my offer to:
(1) Introduce LICADHO to a person whose
account of APLE’S modus operandi needs to be made public, if s/he can be
provided with protection from those who would wish him/her harm.
(2) Provide copies of all the court
documents relating to David Fletcher – in not one of which is there evidence of
his guilt of rape that would stand up in a trial that took place in accordance
with the Cambodian Code of Criminal Procedure. These documents could be
couriered to you from Australia if you and LICADHO’S lawyers are interested in
looking at them. To date it seems that LICADHO is not interested in
representing, advocating for, any man charged with a sex crime – regardless of
the weight of evidence in support of his innocence.
LICADHO could make a significant
contribution to resolving key problems that arise in cases of alleged sexual
abuse by playing a proactive role in formulating procedures and protocols in
relation to the videotaping of the testimony of children involved in cases of
alleged sexual abuse. I have written about this on my blog entry #85:
http://cambodia440.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/85-canadian-national-pierre-deslauriers.html
The content of blog entry #86 could
function as a starting point for a discussion that LICADHO sets in motion if
there is a will, a desire, on your part, on LICADHO’S part, to safeguard the
human and legal rights both of children and those accused of sex crimes against
them:
http://cambodia440.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/86-interviewing-methods-in-suspected.html
best wishes
James Ricketson
Law on
Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation
Article
8:Definition of Unlawful Removal
The act
of unlawful removal removal in this act shall mean to:
1) Remove a person from
his/her current place of residence to a place under the actor’s or a third
persons control by means of force, threat, deception, abuse of power, or
enticement, or
2) Without legal
authority or any other legal justification to do so to take a minor person
under general custody or curatoship or legal custody away from the legal
custody of the parents, care taker or guardian.
Article
9: Unlawful removal, inter alia, of Minor
A person
who unlawfully removes a minor or a person under general custody or curatorship
or legal custody shall be punished with imprisonment for 2 to 5 years.
