A well trodden route for human smugglers
In the dry season the unpaved road from this border town to
Phnom Penh is a dusty but swift three hour drive, favoured by
human smugglers for delivering their cargo to transit points.
Girls as young as 10-years old are taxied across Vietnam to a
deserted paddock or stretch of forest that straddles the
Cambodian border.
A brisk walk across the frontier to a second car follows and the
Vietnamese imports are whisked off to the assorted pimps,
mama sans and traffickers that await in the Cambodian capital.
Even as the rivers of the Mekong Delta rise between July and
September and Route One becomes impassable, smugglers
simply opt for high powered speed boats to ferry teenage girls
into a life of prostitution and slavery.
The land and river borders are porous and patrolled by only a handful of guards who earn about 20 dollars a month
each.
By-passing them is easy says 24-year-old Long, a "bar girl" from Hanoi who plies her trade by choice in a
ramshackle Phnom Penh nightclub.
She said there were rarely any problems in avoiding Vietnamese customs because their priority was people entering
Vietnam and not leaving.
"Once in Cambodia, and if you don't have a passport, then you pay Cambodian customs 80 dollars a head if you're
caught, and they let you go," she said.
In Phnom Penh, virgins can fetch 350 dollars, and once sold are tattooed with a butterfly to denote their status.
However, some have been reportedly "stitched" and re-sold as virgins more than once.
Authorities also believe Cambodia is being used to establish alternative trafficking routes to other Asian destinations,
particularly Malaysia, from where girls can again be traded to places like Hong Kong and Macau.
Vietnamese passport holders require visas to enter most Asian countries while Cambodians do not, making
Cambodian travel documents a prized asset.
On May 20, authorities arrested a Cambodian polygamist and his two wives for trading virgins, acquired for about 75
dollars a head in Vietnam.
Police said the four Vietnamese girls and six women were smuggled from Vietnam and were to receive forged
Cambodian passports while being held in a Phnom Penh brothel.
They were then to be sold on to brothels in Malaysia.
Cambodia admits it has an enormous problem with human smugglers. But as one of the world's poorest countries it
lacks the resources to bring it under control.
In Vietnam, human smugglers face stiff jail terms of up to 20 years, a stark contrast to Cambodia's legal system
where a desperate need for reform was highlighted in mid-June when 14 Vietnamese girls were jailed for being
illegal immigrants.
First, the girls were rescued from brothels they had been trafficked into by the non-governmental organisation Afesip
and government authorities.
But a Phnom Penh municipal court then issued a warrant for their arrest because they did not have the correct travel
documents.
The net result of this trade for Cambodia is being added to the blacklist of countries, which was compiled by the US
State Department, for not doing enough to combat human slavery.
This could result in US financial sanctions from 2003 unless Cambodia shows better results. Cambodian Prime
Minister Hun Sen has said his country must "recognise the truth" and crackdown on human trafficking.
Agence France Presse - June 30, 2002.
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