John Lowrie 

7. Scams Perpetrated in and from Cambodia

"Human Trafficking" - These freelance ladies were summoned to the Beer Garden for male customers wanting female company as hostesses. They are leaving having been rejected, so no work or income for them.  This is the life of Hostesses, Beer Promotion Girls, and other casual hospitality workers in Cambodia. For many it is the only way to make money and of course it is easy for them to end up in prostitution. For some though this work is a conscious calculated decision.  It is fact that they can make more in one day, if they meet a rich client, than working a 50+ hour week for one month in a garment factory. 


During Covid when entertainment places closed,, many workers like these, were suddenly left without jobs and income. Cambodia's economy is struggling to return to its pre-Covid levels, explaining why new ways are found to make money by rich and poor alike.

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Foreword: Jargon-Warner. “Human Trafficking” is just one of a variety of phrases that have come in to common use in Foreign Aid along with acronyms. Some of us complain about them along with the post-graduate level of English used, it means that what is said is not easily understood by many in the general population where English is not their first language. The terms are hard to convey in to local languages. Human trafficking now encompasses any kind of abuse of people who have been forced or tricked in to leaving families to make money for them and/or profiteers.  “Modern-day slavery" is another term.


This article is primarily about Cambodia's latest and largest-ever human trafficking crime but ends with summaries about other forms - exploitation in the Garment Industry and of children taken for orphanages and adoptions.


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Cambodia or SCAMbodia?


A regular feature in my Blogs and Twitter/X postings is how often in my 26 years of Cambodia we see the same issues cropping-up, or reappearing after we thought that the “problems” had been addressed. It's why we have perpetual Foreign Aid when of course it is supposed to be a temporary intervention.


Indeed I make the point that for some country leaders, there is a greater vested interest in not solving problems. Donor funding only comes if there are problems. Nowhere is that more obvious than in Human Trafficking where it pays both to create and facilitate the problems and to “mobilise” resources to solve them, again and again.


What has changed in recent years has been the sheer scale of these kind of criminal enterprises. For those unfamiliar with the scams, an excellent round-up is given by Danielle Keeton Olsen. There are also good features by Al Jazeera and the BBC. Danielle makes an most obvious point. It is humble Cambodian “beat journalists” who have exposed these crimes, not any of the expensive expatriate “technical experts” in Foreign Aid “co-operation” projects, of which there have been many in Cambodia's justice sector over the last 30 years. Of course the most expensive of those was for the Khmer Rouge trial.

Around the same time as I worked on one of my ghost-written papers for UNDP, on the subject of Impunity in Cambodia, which of course is also endemic there, I came across perhaps the earliest example of this peculiar mix of Foreign Aid funded and inspired “projects” intent on tackling a human trafficking problem, but failing miserably. It also had “unexpected” outcomes, not the intended success for “victims” nor for the Police and NGO involved.


In December 2004, in what was a break from usual official treatment of “Human Trafficking”, a raid was conducted on a brothel by the Police collaborating with a well-known NGO.

As reports of that time are hard to access today, on my blog I have reproduced the original Phnom Penh Post article. At first it was reported that 83 “victims”, young women and girls forced in to prostitution, had been rescued, but then the next morning they were released. It was Foreign Aid in action, with donor money facilitating the operation. For good measure, and future fundraising purposes, a TV film crew was engaged to capture the raid in action. It turned out that most of the girls did not want to be rescued, although it's not easy to establish the truth. They were soon back at work. Not back at work was the Police Chief who led the operation. She fell foul of her superiors.


Let me summarise these essential elements from such an episode:

  • A crime by international standards to be eliminated.
  • Technical help and money provided by foreign donors to both authorities and an NGO to tackle the crime.
  • Mysterious forces brought to bear, so that the crime is not in fact solved at all, with no obvious residual beneficial or deterrent effect.
  • More than a suspicion of illicit money having been made at every stage, i.e. from prior to the crime by tolerating it; to receiving Foreign Aid money to conduct the operation, to tipping off the ring-leaders so that they would not be caught; to hiding trails that lead to those profiting or who gave permissions. etc. 
  • The NGO also benefitted from the direct donor-funding as well as future donations derived from the publicity and material for fundraising campaigns.

  • More young Waitresses.

    Until mass ownership of of cheap Smartphones, you had their undivided attention.

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  • Waitresses

    Waitresses are often the newest and youngest staff members in hospitality businesses. They are very vulnerable as owners seldom protect them from preying customers.

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  • Beer Promotion Girl

    Hospitality staff came in to their own during Covid when they took on the extra role of implementing precautions. To this day some still apply measures like for example sanitising bowls and when wiping tables. 

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  • Beer Garden Karaoke Hostesses

    In Cambodia and other South East Asian countries, many girls and some boys from poor urban and rural areas can only find work in hospitality. Some are engaged by the establishments. Others are freelance. If customers don't pick them, they make no money.

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  • KTV Staff

    KTV staff at a very popular parlour. They were laid off during Covid and many have yet to find work again as some places have not opened and trade lower for those that have.

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  • Welcome to our KTV

    Familiar sight. Girls hoping to entice customers and to greet and welcome them. They do this if not otherwise "engaged".

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Human trafficking in the most obvious form, seen by Cambodians and visitors alike, all across Cambodia.


Tat Marina


A few years before, we had a not dissimilar case with tragic consequences for a 15 year old karaoke parlour waitress. Tat Marina was taken by a senior Government official to be his mistress. His wife was jealous. The girl was doused with acid. She was lucky to survive but scarred for life, as the after and before pictures (right) shows. Although the wife was charged, to this day she and her husband have avoided any consequences for the crimes.


This case actually led to public comment by me after I failed to persuade my Cambodian human rights colleagues to correct one public statement made. They claimed that Tat Marina was also at fault for entering in to the relationship.


 I wrote that “She was a victim pure and simple!”

Tat Marina before and after her acid attack.


Roll on a decade to October 2013 and that same brothel-raid human trafficking NHO mentioned above was suddenly propelled in to international scrutiny. Please read Newsweek or the Cambodia Daily. Basically it was found to be guilty of falsifying stories of victims, to embellish its fundraising material.


Again I felt compelled to make public comment after reading false claims such as the NGO head claiming to be an indigenous person from one of the groups I worked with, and more so that she was justified in making such falsifications to raise funds. A well-known international journalist not only reported but was part of the story.  He later regretted it.


In the overall scale of things, these human rights abuses and those profiting from them, although appalling and all too common, are small compared to the latest human trafficking scandals, or scams, as exposed by the journalists that Danielle talks about and international ones like her picking up the story. One stark figure illustrates the scale of today's human trafficking scams. We have always known about the Black Economy but not its size. A USIP study suggested they are in the order of “$12.5 billion annually – half the country’s formal GDP”.


Numerous journalist investigations, despite well-founded fear of reprisals, have uncovered scam locations throughout Cambodia and neighbouring countries in unused hotels or casinos. Some of these buildings have been traced back to elite people in Cambodia as owners or with interests. Most scam operators trick workers to go to work for them, having posted plausible-looking legitimate jobs. Once ensnaring the workers, they confine them and force them to act as scammers. One building was actually close to us, and the Prime Minister's estate in Takhmau, literally metres from the provincial gendarmerie HQ.


Human trafficking takes many forms.  One variation is often called "Modern Day Slavery".  Cambodia as a developing country and mired in poverty is fertile ground for exploitation of labour.  Brick factories and the [Blood] Sugar Industry have been studied  by academics and featured in international media. I can come across them simply by walking around the neighbourhood.

  • Child Food Hawkers

    Children are often employed in gangs, sometimes just to beg or to sell food items. They are out late at night until they make enough money.

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  • Boy Recyclers

    Children breaking up electonics for collection of most valuable materials.  Note no safety-gear to protect them from toxic chermicals.

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  • Sweat Shops

    Concessions towards some improvements in working conditions were hard-won by Cambodia's nascent trade unions in large factories where they could be organised. One response to this was to out-source work to small Sweat-Shops like this. Another was to create bogus or yellow unions actually loyal to employers and the ruling party to undermine the real unions.

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  • Construction Sector

    Children and women are also employed widely in the construction sector, where they are cheaper and harder-working than men.

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  • Brick factories

    Cambodiia's building boom has spawned many brick factories where whole families are found to work regardless of basic health and safety laws that are weakly enforced.

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  • Women Navies

    Proof the women work hard while the men play.

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The question that is always asked is “How can such crimes take place in and around local authorities and law enforcement agencies?” Most of the workers, in the order of thousands, are not Cambodians, but yet they have managed to get in to Cambodia, or been smuggled-in, without normal immigration and work permission formalities.


Even more surprising to outsiders but not those of us who have lived and worked in Cambodia is how such trafficking of people evades the local authorities. The ruling party openly boasts about its vast network down to sub-village levels. The lowest representatives, serving the party, are invariably also assistant village chiefs. In fact most can't distinguish their duties for the party from their official public service administrative roles. Let us be clear. They do not miss anything that goes on in their allotted areas. There are approximately 1,652 communes in Cambodia and 14,750 villages. Each has a village chief and several assistant village chiefs.


In November 2017, Cambodia's Supreme Court, doing the ruling party's bidding, legally banned the Opposition Party CNRP. Within hours every CNRP outpost, even in the most remote places, were visited and their sign-posts dismantled.


It proves that there is no way that any of these scams go on without blessing from upon high and that nearby local authorities, police, and courts must not interfere.


Finally I wish to make a relevant observation. There are basically two approaches to the work of countering human rights abuses. One is “constructive engagement” with authorities where donors and NGOs work directly with police and judicial authorities. The other is where NGOs keep their distance from authorities, so as not to be compromised or co-opted, and seek to elicit change externally through a variety of means. Often advocacy is tried first but when it is to no avail what amounts to “Name, Blame, Shame” is their only potentially effective resort.


My organisations and projects have tried both approaches over the years in Cambodia. Sadly neither approach has proven to work in the face of intransigent authorities. Constructive engagement in our human rights and good governance efforts led to no discernible change in public service processes or standards. There used to be more success with “Name, Shame, Blame” especially if you warned authorities beforehand for them to act first, but this has all but disappeared increasingly since 2011. That was when the Cambodia Government ended its regular sessions with donors as a group to monitor progress on reforms. It also marked the crackdown on all forms of #CivilSociety, closing organisations down or co-opting them. The process then accelerated after the 2013 elections, after Prime Minister was shocked by the results.


"After the 2013 national elections, the ruling party was given a real shock – the opposition was close to winning, and perhaps would have done if the elections had been conducted fully freely and fairly. Soon after, still in shock, a very contrite subdued Prime Minister gave a 5 hour speech to his ministers and the country to “scrub themselves clean”.


Astute as ever, he soon realized that to take on his friends was much harder (and more dangerous) than his enemies, and so he set about “detecting, disrupting, and destroying” all forms of opposition, whether party political, or neutral civil society, anywhere where absolute loyalty could not be assured."


Strangely most donors have reacted mildly to the crackdowns or not at all to such, reneging on their international guarantees.


Conclusion


What “Human Trafficking” Foreign Aid interventions demonstrate abundantly is direct “constructive engagement” with the Cambodia Government is largely a waste of money.  Surely that money could and should be better used to prevent people falling prey to criminals through education, advocacy and direct support to most vulnerable groups.


Updates to this article can be seen on my blog of the same name.



The Garment Girls – Victims of Trafficking or Lucky Employees?


Cambodia has become a major player in the production of garments, footwear, and other mass-produced items. Indeed they are the nation's main source of revenue.


These industries employ large numbers of workers. Most are young women from poor households with few other work opportunities for them, obliged to provide extra income for their families, meaning that the demand for such jobs far exceeds availability. This helps to explain why employers are able to avoid giving better pay and conditions while resisting collective bargaining efforts of trade unions.  In general the government sides with employers.


The question is “Are these young women exploited?”


The answer to that is a clear “Yes!”


Exploitation actually starts in their home. Poor families do pressure children to help family budgets. The eldest child especially if a girl is expected to make sacrifices for her family. Therefore very many are pressured to leave home to go in search of paid work. Then once obtained – in whatever job either “above board” like sewing garments or dubious ones like hospitality – they are under strong pressure to repatriate as much of the money to their families and skimp on their living expenses. For “dubious” read socially-condemned occupations. Many hide how they make their money. People do look down on these occupations, hence why it is deemed lucky to obtain “respectable” garment jobs.

  • Cambodia Factory Workers' Food

    Few factories have canteens so workers rely on small sellers outside factory gates or near where the stay. Usually they go for the cheapest option, rice, sauce and meagre meat, fish or venegatbles.

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  • Typical Factory Workers' Rooms

    As with their food workers seek to save money by sharing and crowding in to the cheapest of rooms. This one floods in in the Rainy Season. Some are ghettoes.

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  • Accident and Injuries

    Several times a year they are involved in accidents, with deaths and injuries. Neither employers nor authorities take corrective action.

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  • Factory Workers Transport

    Factories do not provide transport so workers rely on old private flatbed trucks where they all crowd-in.

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  • Garment Girls on Strike

    One of the longest strikes in Cambodia as workers, after suddenly losing their jobs when their factory closed, maintained a vigil to be paid salaries due and severance payments.

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Adoptions and Surrogacy


Twenty years ago the most prominent cases of human trafficking were in international adoptions of Cambodian children and the proliferation of orphanages for which poor families were coerced in to parting with their children. The same ingredients and pattern as in today's scams exist there too – unscrupulous people exploiting vulnerable families to make easy money with complicit authorities at local and national levels.


Fortunately Cambodia  has made commendable progress in these two areas, persuaded or shamed in to it by local and international NGOs.


Sadly this is not yet the case for surrogacy. Although the state has clamped down on Cambodian women having babies for others, whether by free choice or being seduced, there has been no regard for the “best interests of the child”. Indeed the state now forces mothers and their families to bring up children conceived by surrogacy.


As with many other cases of human trafficking the victims are more likely to be treated as criminals than perpetrators.

Cambodia has always had a tradition of families taking in children in need of homes. This began to break down after the country opened up in the 1990s and well-meaning incoming people wanting to do something about what they thought were the large number of orphans. There seemed to be many “orphans” because of past conflict, displacement, and fatal illnesses. They were not aware of concepts of “Care-in-the Community” with adoptions and fostering much better options for children to grow up in as normal a family setting as possible and within their own culture. These “heroes and heroines” successfully fund-raised in their home countries to build orphanages, ironically when state ones were not full, and then costs to run them. Some methods were mercenary, not always truthful as in Somaly Mam's case and, and harmful to children. It does not take long in Cambodia for others to emulate lucrative money-spinning operations, so the number of orphanages escalated. Many were badly and cruelly-run.

The “luckiest” orphans were deemed to escape that fate by international adoptions.  Angelina Jolie is well-known for it. Formal adoption agents operated with full co-operation from social affairs authorities. However local human rights organisations and then the prominent international NGOs (Save the Children, World Vision Fund, etc) uncovered dubious orphanages where children were being enticed from their families that had parents, siblings and extended members.  We began our co-ordinated advocacy against international adoptions and success was largely achieved after the notorious Lauryn Galindo case.


It was the same with children in orphanages. Many, often ending up in the of worst places, were being removed from families just because the families were poor. Parents were persuaded by operators and their local officials to part with their children so that they could be “better fed, cared-for, and educated.” Some families were tricked in to thinking it would be a temporary arrangement, their child would return home; that they would have continued contact, only to learn that these promises were lies. Their child once adopted abroad was untraceable. Young, healthy and attractive children were the first to be snapped up. Again NGO advocacy managed to achieve the closure of most orphanages and better regulation of ones that remained, after much time and effort.  However the problem persists and dangers still remain. It has been re-fuelled by the economic down-turn due to Covid 19 and there is even talk of international adoptions being permitted again.


The same improvement has not occurred with surrogacy although cases of this are on a much smaller scale. However for each and every child born through surrogacy it can lead to a lifetime fraught with issues for him or her. In recent years with DNA technology curious people want to know about their origins.


Now Cambodia has banned surrogacy with criminal penalties for all parties – prospective parents, obliging mothers, and agencies making the arrangements. However the move was done arbitrarily for both ongoing cases and any more that might occur. Mothers are forced to keep the child, with no consideration of its best interests.  Cambodia simply lacks professionals dedicated purely to the child. Families must for example bring up a child fathered by in vitro fertilisation (IVF). The mother and her family often don't want it whereas the biological father abroad does. They are in a worse plight than when agreeing to surrogacy.  These children will have a hard time growing-up and soon learn that they are different from their peers.


Strangely to me both local and international organisations with child-care in their mission have remained silent on the issue of surrogacy in Cambodia, as if it is too sensitive a subject. So far mine and other's efforts to stimulate responses have not yet paid off.  The worst aspects of the current policy remain in force with surrogate mothers to be jailed.


 Latest story October 2024.


More Reading


There have been many studies and articles about Cambodia's Garment Industry.  Rather than listing some I suggest you begin with Sabina Lawreniuk and Laurie Parsons and take it from there.  Please feel free to contact me too. Laurie adds the dimension of how the industry is exploiting the environment not just workers.


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