, when it comes to investigating foreigners.
By Kimina Lyall in Phnom Penh
The Australian (Australian daily)
May 01, 2004
DAVID Ford, an Australian high school teacher who worked as a volunteer chemistry and biology adviser at Royal Phnom Penh University, says that he did not sleep with underage Cambodian boys but it was not for lack of opportunity.
On his daily walk from his small first-floor apartment to the restaurants along the Mekong River, he says he would often be approached by young men asking if he wanted to "dek" or "sleep" – shorthand for paying for sex.
"It was depressing, a sign of the desperation and poverty that these kids would do that," he tells The Weekend Australian. Eventually the boys stopped asking – deterred by his refusals – and were happy instead to sell him a newspaper.
In the five years Ford, originally from NSW, has lived in Cambodia, he says he befriended some of the teenagers, and occasionally they came to his home to practise English, play computer games and empty his refrigerator.
But in early March, while riding his motorcycle to work, he was intercepted by a bank of police officers who "invited" him for questioning. Two weeks later, he celebrated his 50th birthday in Prey Sar prison as a judge began an investigation into allegations he had sexually abused underage boys.
The investigating judge last week tossed Ford's case out of court. From the beginning the case was flawed. One of the young men told police Ford had a voice like a transvestite; another initially said he had a tattoo on his left arm before later retracting that part of his statement. Both descriptions were objectively incorrect.
In Cambodia, the strength of the evidence has not always been the key factor in determining the outcome of child-sex allegations. When Briton John Keeler faced court in 2000, he was remorseful about filming two naked girls, eight and 10, and downloading the images on to his computer. But when his three-year sentence was announced, he cursed his lawyer and threw tables around the courtroom, telling observers he had paid $US5000 in bribes and had been promised an acquittal.
Other anecdotal evidence confirms that approach. One Westerner who has faced recent debauchery charges – Cambodia's term for pedophilia – tells The Weekend Australian that during his police interview his translator quietly suggested $US1000 ($1385) would solve the problem; by the time his case got to court it had risen to $US10,000. A foreign pedophile investigator who also doesn't want to be identified says perpetrators on internet chat rooms boast about how easy it is to get youngsters in Cambodia without getting caught - but warn each other to "take cash, just in case".
The international community has long wrung its hands about the problem of an estimated 25,000 child prostitutes in Cambodia. Nowhere is the problem as obvious as Svay Pak – a shantytown village 11km from Phnom Penh's centre where Vietnamese mamasams sell and resell perhaps 500 Vietnamese children in Cambodia's worst-kept secret.
But Ford's case highlights a new level of the legal, ethical, and political ambiguities surrounding the investigation of child sex offences in Cambodia: that of the practices of non-government organisations such as aid groups.
"If an NGO is prepared to give them another $2 to dob in a pedophile, then they'll dob in a pedophile. The NGO might take them for a drive up the riverbank street and say, 'Point out all the pedophiles' and if it's $2 a time, they'll point out anybody," says a confidential foreign source.
No one as yet accuses any particular NGO of going quite that far. But in Ford's case, the organisation Action Pour Les Enfants broke some of the classic rules police officers across the world use to investigate serious crimes.The investigation began, says APLE director Hang Vibol, when in the course of his regular trips to Phnom Penh's open spaces where street kids play, hawk flowers or beg, he asked a boy how he fed himself and was told he slept with foreigners.
Hang says he asked the boy to show him one such location and was taken to what turned out to be Ford's home. But then the child, who Hang says was about 11, disappeared. But next day Hang's investigative team made contact with another boy, now 18, who had once slept in the NGO's shelter. The boy, nicknamed Svet, pointed to Ford, who happened to be walking nearby at the time, and said he had had sex with him four years ago (a time that would place him below the recognised legal age of consent, 15). He then took Hang to the same house.
Svet, who was independently contacted by The Weekend Australian without the knowledge of Ford or Hang, at first said he didn't remember if he slept with Ford, but later in the conversation said he slept with a man he believed to be Ford. Still later, however, asked to describe Ford's flat and his appearance, the boy said Ford lived in a single room and had black, greying and a slightly bald head. In fact, Ford lives in a two-room apartment and is strikingly fair. (He is, however, balding.)
Svet gave a statement to the NGO, demanding $US10,000 in compensation, and later told his story, which included the retracted reference to a tattoo, to police. But by the time it got to court, Svet's allegations could no longer be verified - investigating judge Nup Sophon couldn't find him to question him.
Hang's NGO, however, found another two boys who looked at a photograph of Ford shown by APLE and claimed without any substantiation that he had had sex with them. But Hang insists they were never encouraged to accuse nor were they paid for their statements. Ford denies this allegation.
"Our strategy is not to give money to the child," he says. "We need to help them for the future, not today or tomorrow."
Australian Federal Police were also involved in the investigation, which at one point was seeking 15 potential victims. By the time the formal court investigation began, there were only two. Both told the judge they had never seen Ford and had never slept with him. Hang alleges one of the boy's touts told his field worker they were offered money by an unknown party to change their statement.
Svet's own reasons for not pursuing his complaint are as stark. "I went to court before against a Frenchman," he says, "but I didn't get any money."
Only 5 per cent of Cambodia's sex industry clients are foreigners: Western tourists make up a small number. The street kids are organised by touts, usually motorcycle taxi riders barely older than them. The children might be paid $US10 to $US20 for oral sex, but they are promised thousands of dollars in compensation from the perpetrator if a conviction is secured.
Until recently, that was never. It was only after US internet pornographer Dan Sandler boasted to a local newspaper that Cambodia's women were the country's biggest export asset that the country's police force took action, deporting him to the US in 1999 in one of the first high-profile cases. Since then, cases have been mounted against more than a dozen foreigners, with six convictions.
Mu Sochua, the Women's Affairs Minister, who was once a lone voice attempting to shame her Government into action, says Sandler's open humiliation of the country was the turning point activating political will.
Some of the highest profile cases since then include that of Australians Bart Lauwaert and Clint Betterridge, who were convicted last January of raping their maids in their Siem Reap home. Lauwaert was sentenced to 20 years in jail – the first pedophile to attract the maximum sentence – while Betterridge created a diplomatic storm by escaping justice with a fresh passport given to him by the embassy. Australian Justice Minister Chris Ellison will shortly decide whether to grant Cambodia's request to return him to serve his 10-year sentence.
But now Mu is concerned that poor collation of evidence by NGOs may begin to bring the high-profile successes undone.
"I am as much concerned about innocent people being brought to court as the protection of our children and the prosecution of people who have really committed a crime in our country. We have been successful so far, but one or two more cases where the evidence does not stand in court would jeopardise that work. I don't want to put the NGOs in that position where questions are raised," Mu says.
About 50 of the 500 NGOs in Cambodia deal exclusively with children – and most of them are competing for millions in aid money. Aid workers claim other problems are as pressing on Cambodia's future – HIV, for example, or malnutrition – but sex tourism attracts the dollars.
Sok Sam Oeun, the executive director of the Cambodian Defenders Project, an NGO that represents young victims and perpetrators of crime and has acted for 90 sex trafficking cases in the past six years, says NGOs still need to be involved in the investigation work.
He argues that police, who he claims are the main beneficiaries of the sex industry, act only when they are shamed into doing so by evidence presented by others. "Look at the cases that come to court. Which ones are they?" he asks. "The ones where NGOs have been involved."
Hang, whose organisation also was involved in allegations against former Australian ambassador John Holloway, which failed in an Australian court, admits that his high-profile cases have pleased his donors and led to increased grants. "Yes, of course," he says. "They have increased my funding because of our convictions."
Of 45 cases APLE has investigated, 44 of the accused are foreigners. Why? "Foreigners come to meet the streets boys in places we know because we work with street children," he says. "Foreigners [exploiting children] are easy to find."