![]() “But they said they would kill me if I didn’t have sex with that white man.” “I was still bleeding after what they did to me”, she said. A day later, the first customers arrived. ![]() Then, they locked her in one of the bamboo shacks, at Kilometer Eleven. They raped her – they gang-raped her, holding her in the fields for two days – on the way to Phnom Penh, right after smuggling her through the border. A Cambodian gang of traffickers had kidnapped her when she was very young. But the Vietnamese girl, who happened to be born in a tiny village near the border, obviously had nothing to lose anymore. The Khmer girl was too terrified to testify, she began shaking, begging us not to photograph her. We ‘hired’ two girls, one Khmer and one Vietnamese we took them to a room, and as they were getting ready to undress, we told them that we did not come for sex: we were here to talk, to help. One day I hooked up with a Khmer-born Reuters reporter, we grabbed a car and ‘infiltrated’ the place, with small cameras, recorders and notepads. We pulled forces and began a smear campaign against the State, which was basically acting as a pimp, even jailer, instead of as the protector of the most vulnerable and defenseless. And it was all in the open, not even trying to hide from the eyes of the corrupt police, government officials and the military.Īt some point, the UN, some international NGO’s and us – investigative journalists and war reporters operating in the area –had enough. It was a town of filthy shacks, serving as sex parlors that mainly offered young children and minors, to ageing, pot-bellied European sexual tourists. It was the Southeast Asian center of sexual slavery, a place where rape was institutionalized. Kilometer Eleven, was much worse than hell that is, if hell exists at all. Some 15 years ago I participated in the process of shutting down that notorious neighborhood of brothels, called Kilometer Eleven, the name derives from the distance of the area to the center of the capital. Let me side-track a bit, and tell you what the most terrible stuff I have faced in Cambodia is: ![]() Of course the intersections of Phnom Penh are far from the worst I have ever experienced here. It is because they do not choose their destiny they are brought to this hopeless existence, by their compassionless parents or other custodians. Amputees stick out their stumps at the car windows in traffic jams women expose their tumors.īut children, their plight is always hard to swallow. Visual horrors are quite common in Phnom Penh: there are people, mostly men, with all sorts of deformities, sometimes with missing faces, with missing jaws, with empty eye-sockets almost all of them begging. The citizens don’t care, as they don’t seem to care in many other places, including India. ![]() The Police do not care, or are too corrupt to intervene. There are thousands of them, child beggars, working the intersections and the sidewalks, in front of virtually all the tourist attractions. Whenever in doubt, there is UNICEF in Phnom Penh, as well as many NGO’s: they will coach you on how to prevent your children from malnutrition so do exactly the opposite and you will never be poor.” And when the children begin bringing home loads of money, prevent them from recovering. “Make sure that the kids are suffering from malnutrition, that their bellies are swollen, hair unnaturally light-colored, and tears rolling down their cheeks. Do you know how one can turn a little child say 5 or 6 years old, into the most productive beggar? I did not know, but I was told by a mother who was pimping her own girls at night, while forcing them to beg during the day:
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