Cambodian PM rejects UK report of political unrest

PHNOM PENH, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen here on Monday rejected a UK report that the kingdom is among the top 5 countries at high risk of political instability amid the global economic climate.

"We have political stability and live in peace now, but they still labeled us negatively," he told the opening ceremony of the annual work-review meeting of the Health Ministry, while mentioning the report issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a British think tank.

"We know that their assessment had other purposes inside," he said, adding that EIU was just afraid of assessing other neighboring countries in turmoil now.

Due to the current global financial crisis, the EIU report classified the risk of social upheaval and political unrest as high or very high in 95 countries, and ranked Cambodia the fourth in terms of such threat. Read more!

Human Trafficking on the Rise in Cambodia

By Rory Byrne
Pnom Phen


Every year in Cambodia, hundreds of girls are trafficked and sold into brothels where they are forced to work as sex slaves. Although precise figures are unavailable, analysts say that the rate of trafficking is soaring. Many of the victims endure years of torture and abuse in brothels, resulting in lasting physical and psychological damage.

Despite recent efforts by the Cambodian authorities to curb the country's huge illicit sex industry, analysts say it is continuing to thrive. Although many brothels have closed their front doors, their back doors remains wide open. Other brothels are using hairdressers or beauty shops to front their illicit trade.

Although some sex workers do the job to escape poverty, many of those working in brothels are victims of human trafficking who are held against their will and forced to work as sex slaves.

Founded by a former sex slave, The Somaly Mam Foundation was set up in 1996 to rescue and rehabilitate victims of human trafficking.

Since then, the group has rescued more than 5,000 girls from brothels throughout Cambodia and is now caring for more than 250 former sex workers, more than half of whom were under 18 years of age.

Somaly Mam says that the trafficking problem is getting worse every year. She blames organized crime and corrupt officials for running the industry.

She says that criminal networks have set up a structured people-trafficking system. She says agents go from village to village, looking for girls whom they lure away with promises of marriage or a good job. She says that, because many of the victims are poorly educated, they fall for the trick and when they come to the city they get locked in a brothel.

Trafficking victims are enslaved, tortured

Trafficking victims in Cambodia typically endure years of torture and abuse.

Vann Sina was lured from her village with an invitation to a Christmas party when she was just 13 years old. When she arrived in Phnom Penh she was locked in an underground cellar.

She says she was beaten a lot and had to serve many clients. She says that if she refused she was tortured with electric shocks or forced to eat hot chilies. She says that if she did not receive 15 or more clients every day she was starved and beaten.

Life in a brothel is a living hell, says Somaly Mam, as she recalls her years of abuse:

She says that, if you have never lived in a brothel, you cannot understand how bad it is. She says she had to receive more than ten clients a day and that most of them were drunk, smelled bad and were very violent. She says that the terror she endured was so bad it is indescribable.

Years spent locked in a brothel takes a huge mental and physical toll on the victims.

As well as the scourge of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, many are psychologically damaged by their experiences

Most of the girls who arrive at the Somaly Mam Foundation require years of therapy, says chief doctor Ma Ly.

She says that most of the girls who come to the center have severe mental problems. She says they get angry easily, they shout a lot and many of them just want to die. She says she tries to encourage them to love themselves again, but that can take years of therapy.

The Somaly Mam Center creates a loving environment where former victims can make new friends and attempt to recapture their lost childhoods.

Somaly Mam says the center tries to teach them to love themselves again, but that they must never forget what happened to them.

She says, just because you have lived in a terrible situation, it does not mean that you are a bad person. She says that she has survived by reshaping her past and turning it into something positive.

Mental treatment may take years

As well as treating victim's mental and physical injuries, the Somaly Mam Foundation provides further education and job training to help the girls find employment after they leave the center.

But the main aim is to teach the girls that their lives have meaning and that they can have a bright future.

A woman says that, when she was in the brothel, she never thought she could escape from that hell. She says she thought her pain was for a lifetime but that today she feels much better.

Analysts say there are more victims of human trafficking today than at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Without a greater effort to stamp it out, thousands other girls in Cambodia and around the world will fall victim to this modern-yet-ancient form of slavery. Read more!

Global downturn threatens Cambodian garment success

By Ek Madra


PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - Mon Moeun, one of thousands of Cambodians pulled out of poverty by a job in the garment trade since foreign investors arrived in the 1990s, may be back rearing pigs soon after a collapse in demand from Western countries.

Many garment factories in Cambodia are closing as shoppers in the United States, Europe and elsewhere cut back on clothing purchases due to the global financial crisis.

Garments are Cambodia's biggest export earner and its economy may shrink this year due to the drop in demand.

Moeun and his wife have suffered a double blow. They used to earn $80 a month each as garment workers, sending half of it back to support their 8-year-old son living with Moeun's parents in the southern province of Takeo.

Then, three months ago, their factories shut without notice.

"We see hard times ahead when we get back to the countryside, raising pigs and planting vegetables to make a living," said Moeun, 39, chatting with friends under a tree near a shuttered factory on the outskirts of the capital, Phnom Penh.

More than 1,000 workers were owed pay when South Korean-owned Da Joo (Cambodia) Ltd. closed. It has become an all too familiar story.

At its peak, Cambodia's garment sector boasted almost 300 factories employing 340,000 workers, many of them women from the countryside.

Foreign companies started to move into the impoverished Southeast Asian country after U.N.-sponsored elections in 1993, fuelling an economic revival after 30 years of civil war and the horrors of the Khmer Rouge "killing fields" in the 1970s.

The monitoring of work conditions by the International Labor Organization helped lure brands such as Adidas, Nike and Gap, keen to avoid bad publicity from sweatshops. Cambodia's membership of the World Trade Organization from 2004 provided another boost.

Factories sprang up where once there were green rice fields around the capital and garments became Cambodia's biggest export earner. They brought in $2.78 billion in 2008, but that may drop about 30 percent this year, said Kaing Monika, spokesman of the Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia

(GMAC).

Exports of garments to the U.S. market dropped nearly 40 percent in January compared with a year earlier. Some 70 percent of the clothes go to the United States, 25 percent to Europe and the rest mainly to South Korea and Japan.

So far about 20 out of 291 factories, owned mostly by Taiwanese, Chinese, South Koreans and Malaysians, have closed their doors, Monika said. Other factories, at best, were running at 70 percent of capacity now. Some had no orders at all.

Some 70,000 workers have been laid off since last year and another 100,000 jobs are under threat over the next two years, according to the country's leading Labor union, Chea Mony.

Another laid-off worker, 28-year-old Sar Bunthoeun, said his mother would suffer now he can no longer send back $40 a month. "I'll return to my old job as a barber. It's my fate," he said.

ECONOMIC SLUMP

The sector represents about 16 percent of Cambodia's GDP, so the factory closures will hurt, with a ripple effect in the countryside as the money sent home by garment workers dries up.

The International Monetary Fund says the economy could shrink 0.5 percent in 2009 and the garment trade slump is a big factor.

But Kang Chandararot, director of the Cambodian Institute of Development Study (CIDS), said even if the double-digit growth of recent years was out of reach, 4 or 5 percent may be possible thanks to a bountiful rice crop in 2008/09 and the record $950 million in aid pledged by international donors for 2009.

"Cambodia could use the aid of nearly $1 billon to invest in infrastructures to stimulate its economy," Chandararot said.

People surviving on less than $1 a day are deemed to be living in poverty. Garment workers earn on average $2.7 a day so the loss of these jobs will hurt.

"More people will be pushed into poverty," said Huot Chea of the World Bank in Cambodia.

Historical data is lacking in Cambodia, but the World Bank says 45 to 50 percent of the people lived in poverty in 1994. Prime Minister Hun Sen says that was cut to 30 percent by 2008 thanks to the garment sector, tourism and agriculture.

Analysts doubt the job losses will undermine the grip on power of Hun Sen, who has run the country for 23 years, but some are worried about social problems.

"The massive layoffs of workers could lead to social unrest, with more armed robberies or drug smuggling," Chandararot of the CIDS said.

And he foresaw land disputes as people returned to the countryside. "What is most likely is that they will fight over the land needed to make a living in the future," he said.

Hun Sen called on aid donors at a meeting on March 12 to join with the government to provide a social safety net to help workers who had been laid off. He also said the government would try to find new export markets in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Opposition leader Sam Rainsy has urged the government to make foreign-owned factories deposit funds with the Treasury so that workers can get what they are owed in the event of bankruptcy.

There have been reports of looting of machinery but, in some instances at least, it's more a question of workers and management trying to find ways to pay wages.

Chhen Mey, 30, was a supervisor at a factory of Malaysian-owned L.A (Cambodia) Garment Pte. Ltd, which closed in late 2008 with the loss of 2,180 jobs.

Reuters reporter saw L.A workers carrying sewing machines onto trucks, heading for auction. "If we don't sell the machines, we'll have no money to pay the unpaid workers," Mey said.

Albert Teoh is the director of a Malaysian-based company with three factories that used to export goods worth over $160 million a year under the 'Target' brand and employed 12,000 workers.

He is worried that in the next few months most of the subcontractors for the factories will have folded.

"There's no way to make profits. How to survive the crisis is our main priority, really," Teoh said. Read more!