[Demographic Vietnamization: Tonle Sap, Environmental Destruction, Fishing, Svay Pak, Criminal Elements] Fleeing Sewage, Houseboat Fleet Floats Into Phnom Penh

[Background / related]

Svay Pak CNN videos

Tonle Sap

[Demographic Vietnamization, Kampong Chhnang, fisheries] ជន អន្តោប្រវេសន៍ វៀតណាម កាន់តែ ច្រើនឡើង កំពុង បន្តរស់នៅ និងប្រកប របរនេសាទ នៅខេត្ត កំពង់ឆ្នាំង | not a word of Khmer spoken, flooding of Vietnamese fishing families, mcerchants in Kampong Chhnang 

The Vietnamization of Kampuchea: A New Model of Colonialism (Indochina Report, October 1984)

*****

Fleeing Sewage, Houseboat Fleet Floats Into Phnom Penh

 The Cambodia Daily | 3 May 2017

Hundreds of floating houses have been snaking down the Tonle Sap river to central Phnom Penh over the past few days, fleeing what one boat owner described on Tuesday as an influx of sewage that killed a massive amount of fish.

“All the fish died, and the water turned smelly and black,” said Mann Ream, 65, who has been farming fish in cages beneath her floating house since 1979, when she relocated to Phnom Penh’s Kilometer 7 neighborhood in Russei Keo district. “It smelled like sewage.”

Black water that smells of sewage flows into the Tonle Sap river 9 km north of downtown Phnom Penh in Svay Pak commune on Tuesday. (Brendan O’Byrne/The Cambodia Daily)

Towed by boats, the flotilla of wooden houses has been slowly making its way along the river since Sunday. As Ms. Ream and dozens of other fish farmers who also live above their stock guided their homes under the Chroy Changva bridge on Tuesday at lunchtime, hundreds of people crowded against the railing and along the riverbanks to watch and take photographs of the unusual sight.

For Ms. Ream, the trip downriver has been a costly inconvenience.

When her fish started dying on Sunday, Ms. Ream could have lost up to 6 million riel, or about $1,500. She saved hundreds of dollars by selling the already-dead fish for a little less than half the price of live fish.

Sewage has killed the farmers’ fish stocks before, and the hundreds of families who farm in the Tonle Sap at Kilometer 7 used to guide their homes downstream once every few years, according to Ms. Ream, who estimated between 200 and 300 floating houses had joined the latest exodus.

But the problem has grown worse in the past three or four years as the capital has expanded and sewage treatment systems have failed to keep pace. In recent years, boat owners have had to move two or three times a year due to fish deaths, sometimes for several days at a time, Ms. Ream said.

According to Taber Hand, a researcher who has studied fisheries on the Tonle Sap and Mekong River for more than 20 years, fish deaths like this are often the result of untreated sewage being pumped into the river.

“The black water sucks out oxygen because of the high biological oxygen demand” of microbes that feed on the sewage, Mr. Hand said. The problem is exacerbated after heavy rains flood the city’s sewage systems, pushing their contents into waterways, he said.

When black water began seeping under her home on Sunday, Ms. Ream suspected the most recent flush of sewage came from 2 km north of the boat’s usual spot, in Svay Pak commune.

Mann Ream squats next to fish cages in the center of her house on the Tonle Sap river in Phnom Penh on Tuesday. (Brendan O’Byrne/The Cambodia Daily)

Reporters who visited the riverbank in Svay Pak on Tuesday saw a stream of black water, about 5 meters wide, that smelled strongly of sewage. It flowed between wooden homes raised on stilts, making its way directly into the Tonle Sap. A pool of black water formed where the stream met the river before it faded into a greenish-blue hue.

[See

[Svay Pak, the epicenter of child trafficking in the Southeast Asian nation. 

["Svay Pak is known around the world as a place where pedophiles come to get little girls," says Brewster, whose organization, Agape International Missions (AIM), has girls as young as four in its care, rescued from traffickers and undergoing rehabilitation in its safehouses....

[Svay Pak, a dusty shantytown on the outskirts of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, is at the heart of this exploitative trade.

[As one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in one of Asia's poorest countries – nearly half the population lives on less than $2 per day -- the poverty in the settlement is overwhelming. The residents are mostly undocumented Vietnamese migrants, many of whom live in ramshackle houseboats on the murky Tonle Sap River, eking out a living farming fish in nets tethered to their homes.]

[See also

Every Day in Cambodia -- WATCH THIS EXTREMELY DISTURBING CNN video of Svay Pak [where at one point, 100% of children born there were trafficked]

Every Day in Cambodia

CNN | 23 March 2014

Mira Sorvino (5:45): Many are sold as virgins by their own parents. As we walked along the dirt road, Don points out a table of men playing cards.  He say they're there every day.

Don Brewster (5:52):  Instead of caring for their family or working, they sit there every day gambling, drinking all day because they traffic kids, including their own.

Mira: Their own?  They traffic their own children?

Don: Others, not just their own. ... They think they're untouchable.

Mira:  Do they even speak English?

Don: No, no.  Most of them speak Vietnamese.

[Demographic Vietnamization: Criminal Elements] Interior Ministry to Investigate CNN Child Prostitution Coverage

Interior Ministry to Investigate CNN Child Prostitution Coverage

The Cambodia Daily | 28 July 2017

[Could it be that this puppet government does not want the public to connect the dots of Demographic Vietnamization with Criminal Elements with the Sex and Child Trafficking Industry?  An open industry that has gone semi-underground.]

The Interior Ministry on Friday said it would investigate a story about child prostitution in Phnom Penh that reappeared this week on CNN, a day after a prominent journalist union criticized the U.S. network for recycling a “fake news” story that could have a negative impact on Cambodia’s international reputation. 

The ministry’s investigation would center on Agape International Missions (AIM), a Christian anti-human trafficking NGO that provided information for the CNN report, said Chou Bun Eang, secretary of state with the interior Ministry and vice chair of the national committee to combat human trafficking.

Huy Vannak, center, director of the Union of Journalist Federations of Cambodia, on Thursday appeared with Interior Ministry officials to criticize a CNN report on child prostitution that the group branded as “fake news,” in a photograph posted by Fresh News.

“We just want to them clarify because what the CNN broadcasted, it already happened in 2007. They broadcast it every year,” Ms. Bun Eang said.

“We are going to gather all the information and send it back to CNN because what they’ve done, it manipulates the truth and it affects the country’s reputation,” she said. “It is not a small issue.” 

CNN has run numerous stories on Svay Pak, a commune in Russei Keo district that was a notorious hub for child prostitution until a crackdown in the mid-2000s. 

In a 2013 CNN film “Every Day in Cambodia,” actress Mira Sorvino accompanied Don Brewster, AIM’s founder, around Svay Pak to meet girls who had been sold into the sex trade, sometimes by their parents. The documentary was then aired on numerous occasions in 2015 after it picked up an award.

On Tuesday, CNN ran a story with the headline, “Life after trafficking: The girls sold for sex by their mothers,” in which a reporter returned to interview woman featured in the 2013 film. Although the story was about the women’s progress, the top half of the story recycled the same horror stories of the girls’ ordeals.

In reaction, Huy Vannak, director of the Union of Journalist Federations of Cambodia, criticized what the group described as “fake news” being peddled by CNN.

[Demographic Vietnamization: Criminal Elements] NGO Facing Expulsion Praised for Programs

NGO Facing Expulsion Praised for Programs

 The Cambodia Daily | 4 August 2017

Long time residents of Phnom Penh’s once-notorious Svay Pak neighborhood say an NGO facing imminent closure on orders from Prime Minister Hun Sen was a boon to their small community and they had mixed feelings about its pending demise.

On Tuesday, in a blistering speech to graduating law students, the premier accused Agape International Missions (AIM) of falsely claiming, by way of a recent CNN story, that some Cambodian mothers sell their daughters into the sex trade.

A man and woman leave a job training center run by Agape International Missions in Phnom Penh’s Svay
Pak neighborhood on Thursday. (Zsombor Peter/The Cambodia Daily)

Mr. Hun Sen said he had ordered the interior and foreign affairs ministries to waste no time investigating the NGO, shutting it down and kicking it out of the country for its “unforgivable” insult.

But in Svay Pak, where AIM operates a number of community programs that were still running as of on Thursday afternoon, residents had nothing but praise for their neighbor.

The Christian NGO says it made the fight against child sex slavery a focal point of its work in Cambodia in 2005. Within two years it opened a community center in Svay Pak, a poor neighborhood of mostly ethnic Vietnamese once riddled with brothels. It has since added a gym and a garment shop that puts dozens to work, including some of the girls the NGO has helped remove from the sex trade with the aid of a dedicated investigations team.

AIM says it has helped rescue more than 700 people with the help of local police over the past dozen years.

Teang Chin, a laborer who moved to Svay Pak in 1982, said the tightly packed warren of muddy streets used to be teeming with sex for sale, until about the time AIM showed up in the mid-2000s.

“Prostitution was everywhere,” he said while taking a break at a coffee shop. “The NGO played a very important role in shutting the prostitution down.”

And with the brothels came fights and robberies.

“I used to be nervous sometimes because of the gangsters. They came to find prostitutes and they caused trouble,” said Ek Kunthea, who moved here in 1995. “There were a lot of prostitutes. But when AIM arrived, they started to be shut down.”

She said the brothels started closing in 2002 thanks to stepped-up police raids, but really fell away a few years later, around the time AIM showed up.

Of the nearly dozen residents interviewed on Thursday, each had only good things to say about AIM. They said the NGO had helped repair crumbling homes, distributed free medicine and gave them work at the local garment shop. But what they valued most were the classes for the children.

“Every time my kids come home, they know how to read and write, so I think it’s a good school,” said Ms. Kunthea, whose son and daughter have both attended.

Most of those interviewed said they had not heard about the CNN story that so raised the prime minister’s ire, or his televised tirade.

What seems to have piqued the government’s anger most was the CNN report’s claim, quickly corrected, that the three girls featured in the story were Cambodian. The government insists the girls, and the mothers who sold them into the sex trade, were Vietnamese.

The headline to the story referred to “Cambodian girls” when it first ran on July 24, but CNN removed “Cambodian” by the next day. In a clarification, the network said it made the change “to more accurately reflect the content of the piece, which refers to girls of Vietnamese descent who were victims of sex trafficking in Cambodia.” Neither the story itself, nor a short video accompanying it, ever repeated the claim that the girls were Cambodian. AIM staff quoted by CNN made no reference to their ethnicity at all.

[Demographic Vietnamization: Criminal Elements, Tonle Sap] CNN: EVERY DAY IN CAMBODIA

WATCH THIS EXTREMELY DISTURBING CNN video of Svay Pak [where at one point, 100% of children born there were trafficked]

Every Day in Cambodia

CNN | 23 March 2014

Mira Sorvino (5:45): Many are sold as virgins by their own parents. As we walked along the dirt road, Don points out a table of men playing cards.  He says they're there every day.

Don Brewster of Agape International Missions (AIM) (5:52):  Instead of caring for their family or working, they sit there every day gambling, drinking all day because they traffic kids, including their own.

Mira: Their own?  They traffic their own children?

Don: Others, not just their own. ... They think they're untouchable.

Mira:  Do they even speak English?

Don: No, no.  Most of them speak Vietnamese.

[Demographic Vietnamization: Criminal elements] Reporter's notebook: covering brothel raids and Christian missionaries rescuing girls in Cambodia

 [Background / related]

Every Day in Cambodia -- WATCH THIS EXTREMELY DISTURBING CNN video of Svay Pak [where at one point, 100% of children born there were trafficked]

Every Day in Cambodia

CNN | 23 March 2014

Mira Sorvino (5:45): Many are sold as virgins by their own parents. As we walked along the dirt road, Don points out a table of men playing cards.  He say they're there every day.

Don Brewster (5:52):  Instead of caring for their family or working, they sit there every day gambling, drinking all day because they traffic kids, including their own.

Mira: Their own?  They traffic their own children?

Don: Others, not just their own. ... They think they're untouchable.

Mira:  Do they even speak English?

Don: No, no.  Most of them speak Vietnamese.

 ...

Reporter's notebook: covering brothel raids and Christian missionaries rescuing girls in Cambodia

ABC News | 13 March 2017

ABC's John Kapetaneas is a producer for "Nightline." This is his account of a report he produced with ABC's Bob Woodruff and Karson Yiu.

 

"How can I help you?" an undercover informant asked in broken English. 

"Yeah," the man replied, asking without hesitation "where I can find sex with young girls?” 

His intonation was sharp and his request sounded crystal clear. We were looking at a video of a grown man, possibly American, purportedly looking for young girls for sex. 

Within the first hour of meeting former pastor Don Brewster, he pulled out his iPad to show us hidden camera video of what looked and sounded like western men -- 3 Americans and 1 Australian to our ears -- asking strangers on the streets of Cambodia where to find children for sex. The video was filmed covertly by members of his staff over the last two years in the neighborhood of Svay Pak, just 10 miles outside the capital of Phnom Penh, where Don and his wife Bridget now live. 

Our team sat mouths ajar. You could hear a pin drop in the room as the video played: 

Undercover: How old do you want? 

Man: I don’t know, 10? 

Undercover: 10? 10 years old? 

Inside the world of Cambodia's child sex trade, as told through the eyes of a survivor

Fighting Cambodia's child sex trade: Part 1

Inside the world of Cambodia's child sex trade, as told through the eyes of a survivor

 

Don and Bridget are the founders of Agape International Missions, or AIM, a Christian missionary group on the front lines of the war against child sex trafficking in Cambodia. They are both in their 60s and have 12 grandchildren back home, in Northern California and Upstate New York. 

[Demographic Vietnamization, criminal elements] Every Day in Cambodia -- WATCH THIS EXTREMELY DISTURBING CNN video of Svay Pak [where at one point, 100% of children born there were trafficked]

Every Day in Cambodia

CNN | 23 March 2014

Mira Sorvino (5:45): Many are sold as virgins by their own parents. As we walked along the dirt road, Don points out a table of men playing cards.  He say they're there every day.

Don Brewster (5:52):  Instead of caring for their family or working, they sit there every day gambling, drinking all day because they traffic kids, including their own.

Mira: Their own?  They traffic their own children?

Don: Others, not just their own. ... They think they're untouchable.

Mira:  Do they even speak English?

Don: No, no.  Most of them speak Vietnamese.

[Demographic Vietnamization: Military, Criminal Elements] Undocumented immigrants polluting the Tonle Sap

ផ្ទះបណ្ដែតទឹក នៅតាមបណ្ដោយ ទន្លេសាប ដែលភាគច្រេីន ជាអ្នកមាន គុណសម្តេច តេជោ​ នៃយើង​ -- យួន

- Chham Chhany

Demographic Vietnamization, undocumented immigrants polluting the Tonle Sap

Theary C. Seng

In Cambodian history -- modern (within living memory) and prior -- Vietnam has swallowed swathes of Cambodian territory (e.g. 21 provinces of Kampuchea Krom that make up present-day southern Vietnam/the Mekong Delta hardly 70 years ago) first by flooding Cambodian territory with its CITIZENS followed by MILITARY takeover/enforcement. But since the MILITARY invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam in Dec. 1978 followed by 10 years of military occupation, the process has been simultaneous and reversed -- military followed immediately and since by Vietnamese citizens -- with a blueprint to flood the south and remaining territory of Cambodia with 10 million Vietnamese by the year 2000, mainly their most vulnerables and undesirables, including the criminal elements. (That was 17 years ago.) Hence the culture of prostitution, beginning with the UNTAC era in 1991, with the occupying Vietnamese military and Hun Sen regime trafficking Vietnamese girls and women --already part of the culture during the Vietnam War with the US troops stationed in South Vietnam -- to satisfy the libido of 24,000 men from around the world paid handsomely in UN salary in a country that had just been devastated by the monsoonal downpour of US bombs at 500,000 TONS during unrelenting 4 years, followed almost immediately by another 4 years of KR mass crimes, and then the military invasion and 10-year occupation. Prostitution is the oldest profession and exists everywhere since time immemorial, including during pre-KR Cambodia, but not the CULTURE that is now identified with "Khmer" society. The initial population of trafficked Vietnamese girls and women over the years has also absorbed the once more reserved Cambodian girls and women.

Recently, I had a conversation with an in-law of the Huns who had just visited the disputed Koh Tral and a smaller nearby island that is undisputed as Cambodian. But that smaller island is now too populated with illegal Vietnamese citizens and patrolled by the Vietnamese military.

References:

Every Day in Cambodia

CNN | 23 March 2014

Mira Sorvino (5:45): Many are sold as virgins by their own parents. As we walked along the dirt road, Don points out a table of men playing cards.  He say they're there every day.

Don Brewster (5:52):  Instead of caring for their family or working, they sit there every day gambling, drinking all day because they traffic kids, including their own.

Mira: Their own?  They traffic their own children?

Don: Others, not just their own. ... They think they're untouchable.

Mira:  Do they even speak English?

Don: No, no.  Most of them speak Vietnamese.

,,,

CNN, March 2014

Svay Pak, a dusty shantytown on the outskirts of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, is at the heart of this exploitative trade.

As one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in one of Asia's poorest countries – nearly half the population lives on less than $2 per day -- the poverty in the settlement is overwhelming. The residents are mostly undocumented Vietnamese migrants, many of whom live in ramshackle houseboats on the murky Tonle Sap River, eking out a living farming fish in nets tethered to their homes.

,,,

Demographic Vietnamization