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| Prime Minister Hun Sen in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in June. On Tuesday, he ordered Agape International Missions, which works to rescue women and children sold into the sex trade, to leave the country.Samrang Pring/Reuters |
Cambodian Leader Orders U.S. Charity Shut Down Over Sex Trade Report
New York Times | 1 August 2017
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — An American charity that was featured in a recent CNN report on the sex trade in Cambodia was ordered shut down on Tuesday by Prime Minister Hun Sen, who denounced the network and said President Trump was right to criticize it.
The CNN report, “Life after trafficking: The Cambodian girls sold for sex by their mothers,” was a brief follow-up to a 2013 documentary that relied heavily on the work of the California-based Christian group Agape International Missions, which works to rescue women and children sold into the sex trade.
After the report was broadcast last week, the Cambodian government accused Agape of exaggerating the current extent of sex trafficking in Svay Pak, a village north of Phnom Penh that had been notorious in the 1990s and early 2000s for brothels that sold sex with children. The government announced a police investigation into the charity group’s activities.
Many Cambodians were also angered that the three trafficked girls featured in the segment were ethnically Vietnamese, a fact not mentioned by CNN, which later changed its headline to remove the reference to nationality.
In a speech on Tuesday, the authoritarian Mr. Hun Sen, who is known for making off-the-cuff pronouncements that have the force of law, ordered the group to leave the country.
"By any means, this NGO must get out of Cambodia,” he said, referring to a nongovernmental organization, adding that all children living in Agape’s rehabilitation center would be taken into government care.
“My country is poor, but you cannot insult our people,” Mr. Hun Sen said. “You bombarded our country, and now you make more trouble. It is fitting that CNN was blasted by President Donald Trump. I would like to say that President Trump is right: U.S. media is very tricky.”
Mr. Hun Sen also demanded that the United States Embassy in Phnom Penh open its own investigation into Agape.
An embassy spokesman, Arend Zwartjes, said it had no immediate comment. CNN did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Agape International Missions could not be reached.
Huy Vannak, an official at Cambodia’s Interior Ministry who also runs a government-affiliated association of journalists, said he had lodged a complaint with CNN over the segment, which he called “outdated and fabricated.”
The government’s main issue, he said, was the headline singling out Cambodian mothers, but he also accused Agape of overstating the extent of the problems in Svay Pak as a way to raise funds.
“They say Cambodian girls are sold for sex by their mothers,” Mr. Huy Vannak said. “This violates the dignity of Cambodian mothers and girls, as culturally Cambodian mothers will never sell their girls for sex at any cost.”
He added, “They portrayed Cambodian girls sold for sex, but the persons they put in the story were Vietnamese — it’s like your body is confused with your head.” He suggested that Agape might have intentionally misled CNN, violating the terms of its operating agreement with the government.
Svay Pak and other areas of Cambodia were notorious in past decades for sex trafficking that disproportionately involved women and girls from the country’s marginalized [but who run the lucrative middle class industry and privileged in agriculture and land allotment] ethnic Vietnamese population. By all accounts the situation has vastly improved since then, although there is still debate on the extent of the problem.
In 2015, the International Justice Mission, a Washington-based nongovernmental organization, conducted a study that reported on the Cambodian government’s efforts to eradicate the child sex trade. It found that the prevalence of minors in the commercial sex trade had decreased by 73 percent between 2012 and 2015.
“The picture of very young girls being removed from horrific brothels in the Cambodian village of Svay Pak is seared in the minds of the global community as an example of the horrors of sex trafficking worldwide, but this picture is no longer reality,” International Justice Mission said in a statement at the time.
But Agape’s co-founder Don Brewster disputed the report, writing in The Washington Post that the child sex trade had been driven underground but was still thriving.
In addition to more conventional rehabilitation and rescue activities, Agape has courted controversy with programs like The Lord’s Gym, in which men who were once sex traffickers are taught kickboxing skills. Agape made headlines in 2014 when one of its volunteers was jailed for raping four young boys in the group’s care.
The State Department’s most recent Trafficking in Persons report, released in June, ranked Cambodia as a “Tier 2” country, writing that it had failed to “fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking” but was making “significant efforts” to improve.
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