The Cambodian War introduced me to the seductive power of tourism. It was the early 1970s. Cambodia was the last country drawn into the larger Vietnam War, and it was being torn apart by massive bombings, indiscriminate shelling and horrifying atrocities. I was a young reporter learning my trade, thankful for any interruption in this progression of death. At the end of a nasty day, when a mortar attack had torn into an open-air marketplace and wounded dozens of women and children, I caught a ride back to the city with Dith Pran, a Cambodian colleague.
My horror subsided during the drive as Dith Pran and I talked about what we had seen and what it meant. To lighten the mood he switched to one of his favorite topics: the monumental temples at Angkor in northwest Cambodia.
“Becker,” he said, “you have to see Angkor. I’ll show you around, you’ll be a tourist.”
Dith Pran would later become famous as the hero in the movie The Killing Fields, but at that point he was simply a journalist who, like so many other Cambodian journalists, had worked around the temples of Angkor when his country was at peace. When war broke out in 1970, these former tour guides, hotel clerks and drivers were hired immediately by foreign journalists who needed help translating the language and the country. Tour guides knew their way around Cambodia and knew its history. Sok Nguon, who had been trained at the EFEO Center, the French archeology school that restored the Angkor temples and researched their history, was snapped up by Reuters as an interpreter and driver. For them, the temples at Angkor—one of the most elegant wonders of the world—symbolized their country at peace, at its best.
The Communists gained control of the temples in the first days of the war, and they were off-limits to those of us living on the government side. That made them even more beautiful in memory. On the hottest, most dispiriting days, Cambodian journalists would reminisce about driving tourists in a white Mercedes sedan to see the temples at dawn. The wartime markets of Phnom Penh still sold the remaining temple rubbings made of the bas-reliefs along the galleries and courtyards of the most famous temples of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, scenes of Hindu and Buddhist gods, demons and dancing angels, the battles with warriors on elephants, all capturing the history and people of the Angkor Empire—“the greatest in ancient Southeast Asia.”
The zenith of their life as tour guides was the day in 1967 that Jacqueline Kennedy came to Angkor, “fulfilling a childhood dream.” The guides followed her around as she climbed the worn stone temple stairs, and saffron-robed monks stole glimpses of her from the shadows. That day the world was reminded of the former glory of Cambodia, a point of pride later on during the war as they saw the country falling apart day by day.
“Becker, you have to see the sun set over Angkor.”
The romance of tourism was imprinted on my twenty-five-year-old soul as we moved from one grisly scene to another, often driving in those same white Mercedes that had been used for tourism at Angkor.
Cambodians had to wait twenty more devastating years for peace to come, twenty years of unimaginable hell. The war ended in 1975 but the victorious Khmer Rouge immediately launched a revolution that killed off one-fourth of the people and purposely destroyed most of Cambodia’s sophisticated, cultured society. That fatal madness was followed by another decade of decay and neglect as Cambodia was fought over as a dubious prize in the last decade of the Cold War.
The United Nations finally sent a peacekeeping mission to Cambodia in 1993, putting an end to foreign intervention and years of war. They supervised a democratic election, but the losers threatened a civil war if they weren’t included in the government. The U.N. gave in to their demands and anointed a joint government that included some brilliant officials, some incompetent officials, many corrupt officials, all working in an atmosphere of mistrust. These were the people charged with reviving a poor, exhausted country with few resources.
They did agree on one matter—tourism would be essential to their recovery. There wasn’t much left standing after war, revolution, genocide, famine and degradation: manufacturing had been depleted by 1975; farming was largely at a subsistence level thanks to too many radical experiments; and many of the surviving professionals and educated classes had fled Cambodia for life overseas. Tourism, centered on Angkor, that would attract wealthy middle and adventurous classes, was the only industry that could bring in desperately needed foreign exchange.
This was a somewhat radical idea for a poor country in the early 1990s. If it hadn’t been for Angkor and its cultural cachet, Cambodia wouldn’t have had a chance at that end of the market. But it made sense at the time, with tourists looking for “exotic” destinations and with modern air transportation hubs in nearby Bangkok and Singapore.
Among poorer countries, Cambodia became a pioneer in using tourism as a development strategy at the end of war. In theory, the country had everything: the exquisite ruins at Angkor, comparable in their majesty and cultural importance to those in Greece and Egypt; unspoiled beaches and islands on the southern coast along the Gulf of Thailand; and the sophisticated French colonial legacy that could be seen in the cities and towns with their blend of Cambodian and French colonial architecture that was as seductive to modern tastes as the overlay of the British Raj in India. The fact that the country had been forbidden to tourists for decades made it all the more attractive. Cambodia was “authentic,” with its tragic history, delicate art, dance and cuisine, and its reputation for enchantment as well as cruelty.
Cambodia’s timing couldn’t have been better. Tourism was gaining the respect of economists and development experts. Over the last two decades it has become the second-largest source of foreign exchange, after oil, for half of the world’s poorest nations. The United Nations World Tourism Organization describes tourism as “one of the few development opportunities for the poor” and publishes thick reports on how those poor nations can use the tourism industry to create modern infrastructure, higher standards of living and improvements in the environment. That rosy outcome is a rarity among the one hundred poorest countries that earn up to 5 percent of their gross national product selling themselves to foreign tourists who marvel at their exotic customs, buy suitcases of souvenirs and take innumerable photographs of stunning sites.
Cambodian tourism started out well. Roland Eng, a young politician and diplomat, was named the first minister of tourism in 1993. He was an inspired choice. Like many of his compatriots, Eng had suffered the anguish of losing his parents and all but one of his siblings during the Khmer Rouge regime. He had been stranded as a student in Paris during that time. In Europe he served as a private secretary for Prince Norodom Sihanouk and later became a functionary and diplomat for the Cambodian non-Communists in exile. Worldly, multilingual and intelligent, Eng was a welcome face to foreign visitors.
As the first minister of tourism, Eng saw his role as a mixture of diplomacy and business. Diplomacy because in the modern world people shape their opinions about foreign nations during visits as tourists as much as from reading newspapers or contemporary histories. Tourism could resurrect Cambodia’s reputation from its low point as the site of the “killing fields” of the Khmer Rouge genocide. On the business side, tourism could set the tone for quality development and allow Cambodia to skip the early, shabby stage of tacky hotels that foul the cities and beaches of other nations while doing little to raise living standards.
Eng aimed high. At the start of Cambodia’s questionable recovery, he pushed aside low-end proposals from foreign companies with “friends” in the Cambodian government and instead reached a deal with the luxury Raffles Hotel chain based in Singapore to invest $80 million to renovate Cambodia’s most celebrated hotels: Le Royale in Phnom Penh and the Grand Hotel outside of Angkor. “It was daring of them, in 1993 and 1994,” he told me. Those hotels are now ranked among the best in the country and Art Deco masterpieces of Asia.
To protect Angkor, the country’s most prized asset, Eng threw his full support behind tentative proposals for an unusual agreement with sixteen foreign countries and the United Nations to restore and preserve the Angkor temples under the authority of Cambodia. The agreement was eventually reached. Eng’s abilities were noticed and in 1995 he was named Cambodian ambassador to Thailand; four years later he presented his credentials in Washington as the Cambodian ambassador to the United States.
Cambodia’s tourism industry then grew under several new ministers who lacked Eng’s credentials or vision. In 1997, Hun Sen took over full power of the country following a coup d’état and much of the balance of power in the government was lost. In the tourism field that meant an increase in cronyism and corruption. Since then, Cambodia has broken nearly every tenet of good tourism management set out by organizations like the U.N. World Tourism Organization. Under the government of Hun Sen, most decisions are made at the very top with little or no community input. Regulations that exist on paper are rarely enforced; courts can be bought off with bribes; and corruption is so endemic that foreign investors list it as the major stumbling block to doing business in the country.
Tourism brings in $2 billion each year, but it enriches Cambodia’s elite rather than helping the underprivileged. Poverty and unemployment is worse around tourist areas, especially Angkor. It is changing the face of Cambodia—not for the better. In two recent surveys the National Geographic evaluated how countries cared for their priceless cultural heritage sites and coastlines. Cambodia was the only country that ranked among the worst in both categories. Angkor still impressed but was criticized for the unrestricted flood of tourists under “atrocious” management, the overdevelopment of nearby hotel areas that was threatening the temples themselves, and the exclusion of local Cambodians from benefiting from “this resource.”
Tourism has thrived on the practice of the government grabbing land from the farmers and peasants and then selling the property to firms tied to a few dozen elite officials. They are behind the country’s new resorts, hotels, spas and prime beachfronts. Those beach resorts in the south were singled out by the National Geographic jury for shoddy development, with too many seedy bars and hotels, poor waste management and a strong whiff of corruption.
The most troubling side of tourism is Cambodia’s new reputation as one of the globe’s hot spots for sex tourism. Men can easily buy young boys and girls for the night despite laws against it. Even the national tragedy of the Khmer Rouge period has become a lucrative niche market of “dark tourism” for foreigners.
Little of this is evident from the vantage of tourists staying in air-conditioned four-star hotels, traveling in air-conditioned sedans and seeing the country in the care of polished tour guides. Cambodia’s beauty can be breathtaking: Angkor gives many visitors a taste for the mystical. At the same time, tourists are often moved by this splendor in contrast to the country’s tragic modern history and poverty.
And on the surface the tourism industry is a huge success. Tourism proceeds account for 20 percent of Cambodia’s domestic product. Tourism is the second-largest employer in the country, providing 350,000 jobs, just behind the garment industry. Roland Eng, who is still a champion of his country’s tourism industry, presciently warned a few years ago that while tourism can bring wealth, alleviate poverty and conserve natural and cultural heritages, it has to be regulated. “Left to itself, tourism development does not necessarily fulfill those roles,” he wrote.
Now Cambodia is a model of tourism gone wrong. It is a far cry from the mythical golden era remembered by Cambodians like Dith Pran and Sok Nguon who in the middle of war found inspiration remembering the dignity and pleasure of showing foreigners the glories of their country.
• • •
Siem Reap is the modern town in northwestern Cambodia that grew up near the ancient city of Angkor. Once a sedate French colonial market center, it is now a loud tourist town of hotels, restaurants and karaoke bars, with nearly three million visitors every year augmenting a permanent population of 173,000 people.
The highway into Siem Reap is one long strip of hotels—the Royal Angkor, the Apsara Angkor, the Majestic Angkor, the Empress Angkor, etc. Few are top-flight. Many cater to Koreans or Chinese or Vietnamese. They come in all sizes and quality, often with giant faux-Angkor statues guarding the front doors. There are blocks of massage parlors and nightclubs like the Café Bar-Noir and the Zone One Club. At many of these nightspots the young girls and boys introduced as waiters or hostesses are prostitutes, and as they say on the blogs, they are “available.” Nightlife in Siem Reap is fast-paced for the foreign tourists: live music, karaoke, massage parlors and bars and drugs everywhere set against a lush tropical town with colored lights strung overhead.
The single-minded pursuit of high-volume tourism has nearly destroyed the charm of the town. What remains can be found in the Old Quarter along the banks of the Siem Reap River that flows through the town center. The old Grand Hotel with its gardens is an axis for a neighborhood of classic wooden Cambodian homes and French colonial villas where cafés still offer dining al fresco under shade trees. Further downtown, the covered marketplace has been preserved with vendors and artists and a lively mix of locals.
The vast majority of tourists are Asian, with South Koreans and Vietnamese sharing the number-one spot. They fly in directly from Seoul, Hanoi, or Ho Chi Minh City. Almost daily flights from Bangkok; Singapore; Vientiane, Laos; and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, bring in more neighbors. Europeans and Americans are now the distinct minority even though they, too, arrive by the thousands, pushing tourism to Cambodia from 176,617 in 1994, the first full year of peace, to nearly 3 million in 2011. Cambodia’s online visa service makes it one of the easiest countries to visit.
The reason for the influx is Angkor, which now has a permanent spot on the lists of one hundred places you must see before you die. The spires of Angkor have joined the rarefied company of the Pyramids of Egypt, the Taj Mahal in India and the Great Wall of China as ancient wonders on any traveler’s list. Travel writers gush over the sheer number of temples. The sculpted faces of the Bayon are routinely described as otherworldly. In that sense, little has changed. Ancient poets tried to capture the magnificence of the Angkor era with its city of temples “enclosed in immense walls like the mountains that girdle the world . . . ponds dotted with lotus flowers in bloom that echoed with the scream of flamingoes and cranes . . . grand avenues, streets and squares with wide staircases, houses, assembly halls and the abodes of the gods.”
Most of that is long gone, lost when the Angkor Empire fell and the capital moved to Phnom Penh. The intricate water system of ponds and irrigation ditches is a shadow of its old self. Now heat and dust await tourists arriving by taxi at the main entry gate to pay the $20 government fee and join the often-immense crowds. The splendid sacred spaces are lost in a scrum of foreigners with guides shouting in competing languages. There is no limit to the number of people allowed in the tourist complex.
The guides have a hard time. “It is not good. Most of the time we miss specific parts of a tour because there are too many people and we are pushed around, pushed away,” said Yut, a guide. “We guides talk about this and many more things—there should be regulations about how many people are allowed in during the day, more areas should be roped off, more wooden walkways, and they should stop putting spikes in elephants’ heads to control them—that makes the elephants cry.”
The tourists have a difficult time, and the frustration can be intolerable until they catch a first glimpse of the spires, see the sensuous curve of an Apsara (angel) statue nestled in a temple, and find their way to Ta Prohm, the temple left as the early French archeologists found it with roots of the banyan and fig trees folded over the stones, the jungle encasing the sacred.
I saw all this through the eyes of my daughter Lily when we took a mother-daughter trip there for her twenty-fifth birthday. After three days she had fallen in love with Angkor, rising early to be the first at the entry gate and staying until the last minute before closing time at sunset. She was in no mood to hear me complain, often, about the irritating crowds that block your view and destroy the spirit of Angkor. She asked me to please stop being so annoying. On the last day she went off on her own.
It was true. I was guilty of nostalgia and unrealistic hopes that Angkor would recover its old grace. I apologized, and that afternoon we sat together watching the sun set over Angkor.
On a subsequent trip I learned that my complaints weren’t so far off the mark. It turns out that those crowds are extremely bad for Angkor. It took five hundred years, beginning in the late twelfth century, to build this complex of temples and walkways, moats and causeways, which culminated in the reign of Jayavarman VII. Now, in less than a decade, the onslaught of tourists and tourist developments is threatening their very foundation.
The temples of Angkor were built for worship and contemplation. The rulers poured their wealth into them, gilding the spires in gold and silver, commissioning carvings that memorialized their conquests and statues of Hindu gods that were in fact carved to resemble the kings and queens of Angkor. Hundreds, not millions, walked the temples.
“For sure, these temples weren’t made to welcome the world, only to pray to God. It is a place solely for God, not even like a western Cathedral where people were meant to assemble,” said Dominique Soutif, head of the EFEO Center.
Soutif was sitting in his office in Siem Reap, at the storied Center, where the restoration and study of the temples was begun in 1907 by French archeologists and scholars who literally rediscovered the ancient history of Cambodia through their work. My last visit to that office had been in 1974, when war was advancing and Bernard-Philippe Groslier was shutting down the Center. Statues were crated, marked and ready for shipment; libraries carefully boxed. Through binoculars you could just see the spires of Angkor Wat five miles away. One could sense a fear of impending loss.
Groslier and his father George, both scholars, had dedicated their lives to Angkor. Now the son was forced to abandon it. I asked if he thought the Khmer Rouge would destroy the temples. He shook his head and said no. The temples were too important to both sides: to prove their nationalism, their patriotism, the superiority of the Cambodian culture. He said he believed the armies would be more protective of the stones at Angkor than the Cambodians who revered them. He was right. Through the six-year war and the Khmer Rouge revolution that ended in 1979, the temples were left largely untouched. Whatever damage they suffered was from decay.
Instead, since the war, the worst culprits have been bandits who stole the statuary, often cutting off the heads, and now it is tourism. Soutif outlined the immediate damage being done by the millions of tourists who march all over the temples, their fingers touching the intricate carvings, their arms brushing up against the stones.
“Wat Phnom Bakheng, the temple on the hill, the effect of the daily traffic has degraded the temple considerably,” he began. “The steps of Angkor Wat are slippery from the damage by tourists. Inevitably with millions of guests the bas-reliefs have been touched by them and that’s extremely detrimental. I’ve seen Korean guides hitting those bas-reliefs with sticks to demonstrate an historical fact. It’s all just inevitable.”
What can be done to reduce the sheer numbers of tourists and prevent this cumulative damage? His answer was revelatory, as if the other shoe had dropped.
“It is not as simple as you think,” he told me. “Without the tourists, there would be no restoration, no research,” he said.
That is the price the foreign preservationists and archeologists pay: they have become a very sophisticated clean-up crew, repairing damage caused by tourism as the quid pro quo for the privilege of working at Angkor. The arrangement goes something like this. Angkor draws in the millions of tourists who bring in billions of dollars to this poor country. That tourism volume, in turn, draws the attention of foreign investors who put more money into the country, much of which lands in the private bank accounts of officials. The system works brilliantly for some, but it rests on the splendor of those temples in Angkor. They have to be restored and maintained.
This is where the foreign archeologists and their governments enter the picture. In order to have the key role in Angkor, sixteen foreign governments offered to provide their expertise, their labor and their money to restore and research the site. The Cambodian government accepted this proposition on the express condition that this work cannot interfere with tourism at Angkor.
These countries, along with the United Nations, became part of the International Coordinating Committee for the Safeguarding and Development of the Historic Site of Angkor (ICC-Angkor). The Cambodian government created a complementary Apsara association that works with the foreigners while the Cambodian government retains authority over all decisions regarding Angkor as “an historic site, a natural site and a tourist site.”
To streamline the effort, each country “adopts” a temple for restoration and posts signs showing that Hungary, Japan, India or the United States is financing the recovery and maintenance of that temple. Germany is the master for stone conservation. France trained a 300-member Cambodian heritage police force to prevent thieves from hacking off statues, bas-reliefs and lintels with hammers and saws. Now theft has largely ended in the official Angkor area. All of the countries praise the “very great openness of the Cambodian authorities to debate aspects of the country’s economic, environmental and social policies that elsewhere would remain jealously guarded.”
Soutif said that forgetting the tourism angle, this proposition works. “It’s easy to raise money for Angkor—a belle image!” And Cambodia wins friends in the rarefied world of the arts for being wise enough to avail itself of foreign expertise and money to preserve what is a cultural heritage of the world.
“For years we’ve worked daily with these people, helping to form the Cambodian archeologists,” said Soutif, who listed all of the scholarships and studies abroad for them. “It’s a unique example for a developing country and a good example for UNESCO [the United Nations agency that created the system].”
One report by the association stated the limits of their influence: “We don’t discuss what they should do, we don’t have the right—that is a Cambodian question but we can have conversations about issues.”
What the foreign governments can discuss are ideas—ideas about regulating the circulation of visitors in the temples; encouraging people to visit more than the “big three,” which includes Angkor Wat, considered the Mona Lisa of Cambodia; preserving some bas-relief under glass; and building wooden stairs over the worn stone steps for over-sized foreign tourists.
Other organizations are less inhibited about describing the damage. The nonprofit Global Heritage Fund reported in 2010 that “hundreds of thousands of visitors climb over the ruins of Angkor every year causing heavy deterioration of original Khmer stonework.” The report about safeguarding cultural sites said this was inevitable given that the number of visitors to Angkor Wat has increased by 188 percent since 2000.
A mounting problem is water. Siem Reap does not have the modern water and waste system to accommodate these tourists. The temple foundations are sinking as the surrounding water table is being drained by hotels that drill down as deep as 260 feet into ponds and underground aquifers, emptying them in order to have enough water to allow tourists to shower and flush toilets, to clean their clothes and to irrigate hotel landscapes and golf courses at an unsustainable rate. There is no adequate system to filter and dispose of the resulting sewage and the Siem Reap River has been polluted from the irresponsible dumping of waste.
The result is an ongoing threat to the foundation of the temples. At the Bayon, fifty-four towers have started sinking into the ground. Experts worry that the sandy soil is becoming so unstable it could threaten other temples.
Son Soubert, an archeologist and member of Cambodia’s Constitutional Council, said he first raised the serious threat of sinking temples in 1995 but to little avail. “Obviously our authorities are mindless and see only the financial benefits, to the detriment of the monuments they are meant to preserve and restore,” he told me.
The World Bank sounded a similar alarm in a 2006 report on tourism in Cambodia, stating that because of poorly regulated mass tourism in Siem Reap “energy, water, sewage and waste are all significant problems.”
The same foreign governments that restore the temples have been given the additional responsibility of solving the water problem. In a report, the groups euphemistically said that water is “a complex issue wherein the survival of the temples must be reconciled with the sometimes effervescent get-up-and-go of Siem Reap town.”
With the Cambodian government’s approval, Japan drew up a master plan and is building a water supply system for the city of Siem Reap. Korea began building new drainage and sewage networks. France is cleaning up the Tonlé Sap River. The Asian Development Bank is loaning money for some of the projects, and a few hotels have promised to install recycling systems for their used water, all with the aim of repairing the damage done by draining the water table.
The government has made no attempt to finger the culprits who are pumping or drilling for water or measuring how much water is being sucked out of the ground. That might discourage investment in tourism.
South Korea is a major patron of the Cambodian tourism industry in Siem Reap. Overall, South Koreans account for billions of dollars of private investment in the Cambodian economy, with a strong accent on tourism. (Only China has invested more money in Cambodia.)
Korean visitors fly to Cambodia on one of Korean Airlines’ nearly daily flights from Seoul. In Siem Reap, Koreans have invested in restaurants, hotels and karaoke bars. The largest project is a new $1.6 billion international airport for Siem Reap that, in theory, could bring up to 14 million tourists to the temples every year. Another South Korean developer is building a $400 million casino resort near Angkor with the avowed goal of drawing the high rollers from Macao and Singapore. The government not only promised the Korean company incentives like corporate tax holidays and low gaming levies; Prime Minister Hun Sen himself entertained the developer in Phnom Penh.
Koreans are so favored that one enterprise received rare government approval to stage variety shows in Angkor Wat itself. A Cambodian whistle-blower complained that the company had drilled holes in the temple to light the “Angkor Night Show.” The show was canceled, although there was no punishment for the Korean company. Instead, the Cambodian whistle-blower was forced to leave the country under threat of arrest by the government.
The government is determined to turn Angkor into a tourism money machine. To which many may ask, what’s wrong with bringing in millions of dollars to a poor country? The answer is that those tourist dollars do little to help most of the people in Cambodia.
Siem Reap is the prime example.
In the 1960s, before all the war and genocide, Siem Reap was the richest per capita province in the country, famous for its rice fields and fish. Today with its multibillion-dollar tourism business it is the poorest per capita. The promise of tourism to raise the livelihoods of the poor has failed miserably in Siem Reap. The “leakage” of money out of the province is among the highest in the world, according to Douglas Broderick, the United Nations resident coordinator in Phnom Penh.
“More tourism money stays with the locals in parts of Africa than it does in Siem Reap,” he said.
Broderick pointed to a 2009 United Nations Development Program Report which said that the majority of tourist spending doesn’t reach the poor. “The pro-poor benefit is very low in Siem Reap, an estimated seven percent (of tourist receipts),” a statistic that compares badly to neighboring Vietnam and Laos. This is not the result of lack of money: at least one-third of direct foreign investment goes to tourism in Cambodia. Instead, the report fingers government corruption, uncertain regulations, and poor management as the reason.
Cambodia’s official Apsara preservation agency in Siem Reap confirms that the plight of the poor has worsened with the tourism boom there. “The province of Siem Reap is now one of the poorest in Cambodia,” wrote Uk Someth, of the agency. “Villagers profit little from tourism, while (foreign) investors and suppliers have the advantage.”
Hotels import 70 percent of their needs from companies outside of Cambodia. They purchase only 5 to 10 percent of their food from Cambodian farms. Well-trained foreigners are hired for the upper-level jobs, while Cambodians scramble for the lower-paying positions that offer long hours, little training and seasonal employment—a common problem for the low end of the tourism industry, according to studies by the U.N. International Labour Organization.
“In the middle of all this wealth, the average pay in Siem Reap is thirty dollars a month,” said Soutif, of the EFEO Center. “Cambodians work two jobs, study at night, anything to improve their lives. They are courageous.”
Yut, the Angkor guide, told me that corruption is another hurdle to finding a good job. To get anywhere you have to pay bribes. For instance, to become an official guide at Angkor, Cambodians must attend a government guide school where tuition is $130. But it is nearly impossible to be admitted without paying a bribe.
Yut avoided paying the bribe because he is a retired monk. The twenty-nine-year-old was born and raised in Siem Reap, and by the time he left the monastery three years ago, he had mastered the articles of faith and the intricacies of Khmer history well enough to pass the guide’s test. Still, he had to attend the school to receive his license. A guide for a top tour agency is paid $15 to $30 a day; the tour agency charges the tourists $60 a day. “It is difficult even for guides to earn a good living,” said Yut.
Prime Minister Hun Sen argues otherwise. In a recent speech he claimed that tourism was the “green gold” of Cambodia that “plays a vital role in improving the livelihood of locals, mainly local communities at the tourist sites.”
Tourists aren’t stupid. They see the gaping disparity between the comfort and luxury of their tourism bubble and the poverty around them. Some even wonder how the elite Cambodians can live so well while the average Cambodian appears so poor. The average income in Cambodia is $2,000 a year and some 30 percent of Cambodians fall below the national poverty line. For many tourists, this is the first time they’ve seen that degree of poverty, and they feel moved to give back, either with money or as volunteers.
This impulse has become institutionalized as travel philanthropy or “volun-tourism” and is very much in vogue. All over the globe, travel agencies and nonprofit groups are offering inventive and mostly painless ways to be a philanthropist on vacation. In parts of Africa, Central and South America, as well as Asia, some of this philanthropy has helped individual families and small communities. Other projects have done little beyond relieving the consciences of travelers as they struggle with the scale of inequities.
In Cambodia these well-meaning tourists have proved ripe for scams. A website called Scambodia posts examples of phony orphanages. One advertised for “Volunteers Abroad” asking each volunteer to pay $1,000 a week for room and board while working in an orphanage—which turned out to be filled with children from neighboring families. One of the young foreign volunteers turned them in.
Even real institutions raise questions. Many evenings a local orphanage sends a parade of children marching under its banner through the Bar Street area of Siem Reap, beating drums, dancing and inviting the tourists to “visit our orphanage.” Tourists take the bait and drive over to a newly built mansion on the outskirts of town. There they are ushered to bleachers in a courtyard where the young children dance and put on puppet shows on a stage festooned with colorful streamers. They pass around a bucket that the foreigners fill with dollars. At the program’s end the tourists are invited back on special days to visit and play with the children and “give them the love they are missing.”
When the tourists do, they add to their donations and leave sincere notes saying how much they appreciated this opportunity to know the love of these children. One woman wrote, “I now know why Angelina Jolie has so many orphan children.”
I went one day, unannounced, and found thirty-six children running around the mansion with no supervision. No one was in school. A foreign tourist named Christian, a man in his twenties from Toronto, was playing with a few of the older boys in the large salon. With no one to stop me I went upstairs to check out how the children benefited from these “donations.” Their bedrooms were a mess: there were no beds or cupboards, only clothes and bedsheets tossed on dirty floors. The bathrooms were locked; the children said the toilets were broken and that they bathed outside. They showed me the pump in the backyard where several children were soaping down and splashing themselves off.
They said they had no expectations of being adopted. Sophan, an eighteen-year-old boy, said he had been living with his aunt when he was offered a place at the orphanage four years earlier. “We play with foreigners,” he said. “No adoptions.”
To be fair, the establishment never actually says the children can be adopted.
In 2012 the United Nations published a report about orphanages in Cambodia entitled With the Best Intentions. The study said that foreign tourists were major funders of a system that hurt children more often than helped them. The children in these orphanages usually had at least one living parent: 44 percent had both parents; 61 percent had one parent or close immediate family. Their impoverished families had placed them in the orphanages under the false promise that the orphanage would provide them with an education.
Instead, these pseudo-orphans spend their days raising money.
“Tourists play a major role in funding residential care,” said the report, citing children staying in their orphanage to play with foreigners or being pulled out of school to dance for foreigners. Remarkably, with peace and stability for the first time in its modern history, there has been a 75 percent increase in children taken to orphanages since 2005.
“Sometimes I think people leave their brains at home when they go on vacation,” said Daniela Ruby Papi, the American founder of PEPY, a nonprofit organization in Siem Reap that casts a questioning eye on westerners who are conned into thinking they can change lives in a few days or weeks. As anyone in the development world knows, that requires years of commitment.
Tourists who rarely volunteer at home are easy prey. Scams have been uncovered where tourists helped pay, and even build, schools that will never have teachers or students. They have paid for wells that were already drilled.
Papi has a check-off list for tourists who want to volunteer, but she believes the most you can do on vacation is to learn about Cambodia, to understand the joys and difficulties of the people. She gives tours on bicycles so foreigners can go into the countryside and meet her Cambodian partners who are working on education, health and the environment. The goal is getting the tourists out of their bubble and into the real world. “That’s the one thing they can do,” she said.
If you want to make a monetary contribution to the poor, she said, you should tip generously.
• • •
Dozens of shaven-head monks dressed in gray, orange and scarlet robes quietly filed into the modern Sofitel Angkor resort dining room. Chimes punctuated the silence as the monks filled their plates at the buffet. They had traveled to Siem Reap to celebrate Vesak Bochea, one of Buddhism’s holiest days, at Angkor. Cambodia had won the honor of holding the world convocation and had organized the ritual prayers at the Angkor temples as well as multicolor light shows at night. Banquets were part of the celebration.
Thong Khon, the Cambodian minister of tourism, flew to Siem Reap to greet the monks as they arrived from other Asian nations, and that is where I caught up with him.
Charles-Henri Chevet, the French general manager of the hotel, showed us to our table and thanked the minister for all he was doing for tourism. The minister watched the procession of monks at the steam tables and was elated. “We can sell Cambodia to the world, Cambodia—Kingdom of Wonder,” he said, “Buddhist Cambodia.”
A medical doctor, Thong lost most of his family, including his blind father, during the murderous reign of the Khmer Rouge. After their overthrow he stayed in the country, refusing to emigrate to the West. He worked first in public health, then as mayor of Phnom Penh. When he was named deputy minister of tourism, Thong said he knew nothing about business or tourism. By 2007 he was the minister. Like other top government officials, Thong said he has earned his luxurious lifestyle after surviving twenty years of unimaginable deprivations through war, revolution and more war and occupation.
“We rebuilt with nothing, nothing,” he said. “I learned by doing.”
In his government’s vision, questions about social justice and equality take a backseat to development and catching up in the material world. Because Cambodia has risen from the ashes, with an overall economic growth rate of 10 percent each year, Hun Sen and his cabinet believe they are the only ones capable of leading the country.
Thong spoke with me over lunch; none of my questions fazed him. He said problems of corruption, bribes, sex tourism or sinking temples had either been solved or were exaggerated.
“We will change—we want to change from mass tourism to quality tourism in the future,” he said, qualifying his statement. “I don’t say that we want fewer people to come, but our tourism has to be better managed . . . We’re trying to enhance.”
The question of the sinking temples and related water shortage and sewage pollution were being resolved, he said, thanks in large part to the work of the United Nations and in particular the governments of Japan, Korea and France. “The deterioration is over. Yes, before there were problems, but now it is recognized that this area is well managed.”
He disposed of the question about the explosion of sex tourism with equal ease. “The government policy will not encourage sex tourism—we fight it, absolutely fight child trafficking and child prostitution.”
He hesitated for a moment. “Tourism provides positive impacts and negative impacts,” he said. “The positive is providing jobs and revenue. The negative is drugs, prostitution and sometimes crimes, but not much.”
He was proud, he said, that Cambodia had passed laws to stop this “negativity.” And he was crafting a new tourism master plan that would tackle all the hot-button issues: sustainability, climate control, ecotourism, biodiversity, protecting wildlife, even “contributions to the poor.”
I told the minister that my research told a different story. Tourism was often spreading inequality, injustice and misery in the country. The laws may look good on the books, but they are enforced haphazardly to favor the rich and powerful. The poor are evicted from their land, which is then sold to the highest bidder regardless of property rights or regardless of the poor effect on protected wilderness or the environment.
Thong shook his head. Evictions, he said, made land available for new development that was necessary to lure tourists. Half of the foreign tourists visit Siem Reap, but only 3 percent make it to the southern beaches. The government had to broaden the base of tourism so those peasants had to lose their land, homes and livelihoods.
“We have to diversify to the beaches, to our coastal zone,” he said. “Our new strategy is to make [the south] our new destination.”
His other big idea to expand Cambodia’s tourism appeal was to promote “dark tourism,” or genocide tourism. The Ministry of Tourism wants to create an official tourism “genocide trail” of the sites where the Khmer Rouge once tortured, murdered or buried their victims. Tourists are already drawn to them, he said. “More foreigners go to Tuol Sleng (the torture center) than Cambodians. We want to promote that . . . train guides in London . . . bring in more tourists.”
Instead of erasing Cambodia’s reputation as a home of the dark side of human nature, the home of the killing fields, as Roland Eng once wanted to do, the Ministry of Tourism is turning it into a profit point for tourism.
• • •
Tuol Sleng was a high school that became the Auschwitz of Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge transformed the quiet tree-lined campus in Phnom Penh into the regime’s central interrogation and torture center after their victory in 1975. At least 14,000 people were murdered there after being whipped, raped, water-boarded, hung upside down and forced to watch the execution of their loved ones. All victims were photographed when they were booked, mothers often holding a child. I knew some of the Cambodians killed there.
When they invaded in 1979, the Vietnamese preserved Tuol Sleng as they found it, modifying a few details to turn it into a museum. They left the classrooms that had been divided by brick walls into cells as well as the instruments of torture that had replaced the school desks on the classic red-and-white-tiled floors. The Khmer Rouge had left extensive records of each victim and these were kept filed away in cabinets. The Vietnamese mounted photographs of the victims on the walls and opened the museum with the clear propaganda goal of justifying their occupation of Cambodia.
Today, Tuol Sleng is the single most popular destination of foreign tourists visiting Phnom Penh, averaging five hundred visits a day. It is the centerpiece of the dark tourism, or genocide, trail that the minister of tourism is promoting. Cambodia is now on the circuit of dark tourism that includes the Nazi death camps at Dachau, Germany, and Auschwitz, Poland; Sarajevo, Bosnia, and Kigali, Rwanda. Travel agents now specialize in those tours.
There is a thin line between memorialization and manipulation when creating museums to honor the victims of genocide or a mass attack. Questions were raised when a Pennsylvania farmer charged $65 a person to tour the site of the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. Similar issues have been raised in Cambodia about making money from foreign tourists following a trail of genocide.
Other curators of genocide museums have wrestled with those questions. Holocaust museums and memorials routinely reject the idea of operating to make a profit and instead say they are dedicated to peace and understanding. One rule of thumb is to put the dignity of the victims first, identifying them by name and telling their stories as much as possible. At the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the surviving victims have had a major role in designing the displays, said Michael J. Abramowitz, director of the Committee on Conscience at the museum.
“Holocaust institutions do everything they can to avoid even the slightest appearance that they are exploiting the history of the Holocaust to raise funds or in any way profit from the murder and suffering of millions,” said Abramowitz.
Cambodia opted for profits along with memorialization for its genocide tourism. After repairing and restoring Tuol Sleng the government encouraged tour buses to drop off foreign tourists. The price of admission is $2, with an additional cost of $3 for a guide.
Inside, the museum breaks the cardinal rule of respect for the victims. Haunting photographs are hung throughout Tuol Sleng, but most of the victims are left anonymous—no names and no stories about their lives and deaths even though the information has been available for decades. Instead, the accent is on the barbarity of the Khmer Rouge and how they tortured these people. Most visitors leave the museum stunned.
Nearby is Choeung Ek, the killing field south of Phnom Penh where the Khmer Rouge clubbed countless Cambodians to death and buried them in mass graves. It is the second site on the proposed genocide trail. The government erected a memorial using 8,985 skulls collected from the grounds. These skeletons were never given the religious rites and cremation required by the Buddhist faith; instead, they are on permanent display, some organized by age and gender but, again, without names. This does not feel like a sacred space but one of utter desecration.
In 2005 the government turned Choeung Ek into an official commercial enterprise by signing a thirty-year contract with a Japanese company to enhance its tourism possibilities. The Japanese added amenities and built a visitor’s center, raising the price of admission from 50 cents to $2. Youk Chhang, the executive director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia that documents the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, tried to prevent that Japanese contract. He said that “the Japanese have commercialized the soul of the Khmer Rouge survivors and provided a superficial education to the foreign tourists.
“How can we learn from history so that it cannot be repeated if we continue to fail to understand that the memory of those who have died cannot be commercialized?” he said.
The government was surprised by Youk Chhang’s anger and asked him for advice on the proper preservation of the genocide sites and training of tour guides. Chhang told me he agreed to work on the master plan to insure the sites were educational.
The third site is Anlong Veng in western Cambodia, the last holdout of Pol Pot, far from Phnom Penh. In 2001 the government issued a circular ordering the preservation of Anlong Veng for “historical tourism.”
At the same time as it was promoting genocide tourism, the Hun Sen government was blocking an international trial of the former Khmer Rouge leaders who were living quietly in Cambodia and had never been arrested. After a decade of negotiations, an agreement was reached and in 2009 the first trial was held more than thirty years after the Khmer Rouge defeat. The first man convicted was Kaing Guek Eav, or Duch, who had headed Tuol Sleng. By then his old torture center had welcomed nearly 1 million foreign tourists.
• • •
The building that houses the Ministry of Tourism in Phnom Penh is a metaphor for how the government has robbed the people of their land, their heritage and their livelihoods to profit the tourism industry.
For the first decade of peace the ministry was housed in a grand French colonial villa on Phnom Penh’s waterfront in the heart of the capital, where three rivers meet as they flow toward the sea. This is one of the most exclusive areas of the city. The fifteenth-century Wat Ounalom Buddhist temple is directly across the street, and the golden walls of the Royal Palace compound are a stone’s throw away. The palace resembles an illustration from an Asian fairy tale, with a royal pavilion, throne hall, royal court, silver pagoda, Moonlight Pavilion for royal ballet performances and private residences laid out for a dream potentate. Behind the palace is the National Museum, built in traditional Khmer architecture that houses the world’s finest collection of Khmer art. It was the perfect neighborhood for the Ministry of Tourism to make a visual statement about the history and treasures of Cambodia.
Then one morning in 2005 workers came, and in three days they had torn down the ministry’s building. Local reporters rushed to the site thinking this was an illegal demolition of one of the city’s historic villas. Not so. The destruction was legal. The reporters were told that the government had given the property to a new Cambodian development company in exchange for a nondescript new building on Street Number 73 in a nondescript neighborhood. No money was exchanged for the villa or the land that was worth millions. The company did pass out $100,000 to divide among the employees of the Ministry of Tourism to thank them for accepting the deal. The developer, in turn, built a hotel on that prime property.
This noncompetitive sale of public property for private gain was being duplicated around the country. The government has orchestrated the sale of state assets to new private business ventures that had close ties to top officials and their families. The government used the same dictatorial powers to declare privately held lands part of new “development zones” to sell those, in turn, to business ventures tied to the government. This was all done behind closed doors with no competitive bidding, public hearings or judicial review.
The Ministry of Tourism was unhappy with the building on Street Number 73 and set its eyes on land in the central district of Phnom Penh known as Borei Keila. It was home to some of the city’s poorest residents, including a high concentration of people suffering from AIDS. The area was declared an “economic concession” and the families were evicted from there. The government then sold the land to private developers who promised to replace the hovels with clean modern apartments for the poor. That didn’t happen. The dispossessed were never given market value in return for their land and only half received new apartments. A Cambodian nonprofit organization trying to help the evicted said it was difficult to find any proof that money made from the sale ended up in the national treasury.
The Ministry of Tourism was given a large parcel of the newly empty land in Borei Keila. In 2009 the ministry constructed a brand-new home—an imposing, pink-toned modern building on a large piece of property on Monivong Boulevard, the main artery in the capital. Forty-seven families were thrown out to clear the land for the new ministry building. Most of those families ended up under tarpaulins near their old homes or in camps far from the city center, not in the promised new apartments. When Prime Minister Hun Sen cut the ribbon for the ministry’s grand inauguration, a video on the Internet showed how the evicted families were still living in green tin sheds with no electricity, no running water and garbage strewn in their narrow living space. A father begged Hun Sen: “We are Khmer residents. We have rights, please save us.”
The video was filmed by LICADHO, a Cambodian human rights organization that represented the residents before the government and courts. Founded by Kek Galabru, a Cambodian doctor who played a critical role in bringing peace to her country, LICADHO is one of a handful of human rights groups whose research and advocacy has laid bare the enormity of the land-grabbing by the country’s elite and its ties to tourism.
“This group had a very strong claim on their property based on the law of Cambodia. They were discriminated against. They were moved, ‘relocated,’ to animal stalls. That was their compensation for losing their homes,” said Mathieu Pellerin at LICADHO.
This is a distortion of a government’s right of eminent domain for the public good. Cambodia uses those powers to the opposite effect, creating the multimillion-dollar racket that grabs land from the nation’s poor to enrich the elite.
There is nothing hidden about this epidemic. In 2009 the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights called for a moratorium on further evictions and said it was “gravely concerned over reports that since the year 2000, over 100,000 people were evicted in Phnom Penh alone; that at least 150,000 Cambodians continue to live under threat of forced eviction; and that authorities of the State party are actively involved in land-grabbing. . . . ”
Global Witness, the nonprofit British advocacy group, has documented how 45 percent of the country’s land has been deeded to private interests through these land grabs. (Land is also grabbed to sell to agribusinesses as plantations, to mining companies, to logging firms and, recently, to oil and gas companies.)
Land for the Cambodian tourism industry was opened up in 2005 when Prime Minister Hun Sen said he was resuming his land concession program despite earlier pledges to wait until those already evicted could be resettled.
“I have to make a decision for my country’s development,” he told a group at the Government Private Sector Forum in Phnom Penh, a government group that coordinates private investment, especially foreign investment. “I can’t wait. So I have gone ahead to provide concession land to investors. This is a necessary way to attract investment.”
The government then revoked the protected public status of the southern coast and its pristine islands, putting the property up for sale to private, largely foreign, investors. This breathtaking breach of the public trust put on the market the country’s coastline along the Gulf of Thailand, which had been declared state public land by the coalition government of the 1990s. Reversing that designation was as shocking for Cambodians as it would be for Americans if the government in Washington suddenly put most of the U.S. national parks up for sale to foreign bidders.
Adding to the insult, the government sold the land at bargain prices and gave foreign investors extraordinary financial enticements, including nine-year tax holidays. The country already had a reputation for lax enforcement of money-laundering laws, and it allows holding companies in Cambodia to be 100 percent foreign-owned.
Within three years the entire coastline and most of the islands were privately owned, and resorts for tourism were under construction everywhere. Cambodia’s natural heritage of coral reefs, endless stretches of empty, palm-fringed beaches, and sapphire-blue waters had been sold off.
The human cost was enormous. Whole communities were summarily evicted despite a 2001 law that requires due process and full compensation in these cases. Farmers and fishermen fought back as police and the army burned down their villages on government orders, bulldozing fields and orchards and tearing down docks.
Photographs of the evictions are heartbreaking. In one series, a khaki-clothed official orders everyone to lie on the ground facedown as police officers torch their thatched huts. Helmeted police with shields and batons beat back anyone who protests. Fires burn away everything but villagers’ large earthen water jars. With their plastic bags and confused children, the newly homeless villagers are forcibly marched away.
Those villages and wild open spaces were replaced by a mix of seedy hotels, private luxury resorts, and rampant sex tourism. Coastal resorts from Sihanoukville, the largest and the least attractive, to Kep and Koh Kong, exploded with tension as the new private owners took control of the land. Stories of evictions and clashes over ownership are commonplace. More than 100 families fought eviction from the homes overlooking Serendipity Beach and lost. Now that beach is famous among the Lonely Planet crowd as the Waikiki of Cambodia.
An army of bulldozers and trucks filled with armed men cleared one section of the Occheuteal Beach in 2006, tearing down 71 homes and 40 local restaurants. A resort project on Independence Beach in 2008 required the eviction of “scores” of other families. The litany is endless. It’s safe to say that any tourist spending a day or two in Sihanoukville has partied on property stolen from the locals.
This is not to say that all foreign developers are evil. The Brocon Group, an Australian company, has retrained out-of-work Cambodian fishermen for new employment and has appointed a marine biologist to clean and preserve the area around their new resort on the island of Song Saa, opposite Sihanoukville.
And the southern beaches are still beautiful, the water a startling blue, and the wildlife is hanging on.
In Koh Kong, which borders Thailand, the evictions were part of a drive to bring casinos to Cambodia. There a judge divided a swath of land between two well-connected businessmen without consulting the forty-three families who lived on it. The families were thrown out by the police despite a request from Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni for an official investigation to determine if the families’ treatment was legal. Now Koh Kong has its casinos, half a dozen hotels and guesthouses, restaurants, spas, and fenced-off land for future tourist development—most of it built on land grabbed from its residents.
Cambodia has defied the common wisdom that a developing country should stay away from gambling, especially in Asia, where gambling is woven into the culture and the poor are especially vulnerable to betting their futures on Lady Luck.
To lure foreign tourists, Cambodia has opened flashy casinos on its borders with Thailand to the west and Vietnam to the east. Thailand has no legal casinos, while Vietnam has allowed only four casinos, which are open to foreigners only. (Vietnam requires a $4 billion investment for a gaming license.) Gamblers from both countries arrive by the busloads to Cambodian border casinos with a decided Las Vegas look and with “massage parlors” attached to the gambling halls. To build just one of these larger casinos in Poipet, along the Thai border, the authorities evicted 218 families.
Today, Cambodia has at least 32 casinos, many underwritten by foreign investors attracted to the country because of low taxes, low fees for licenses and low wages and construction costs. For all of these concessions and the agony it cost Cambodians who were evicted, the taxes from casinos contribute only $17 million to the Cambodian treasury. This distinguishes Cambodia from other gambling capitals in Asia, especially Macao, which draws the high-rollers from China and Japan, where casinos are outlawed. One regional gambling expert calculated that if the Macao taxing regime were applied to Cambodia, the taxes from a single casino in Phnom Penh alone would be $43.6 million.
These loose rules and poorly enforced laws have made it relatively easy for money to be laundered through casinos, giving Cambodian casinos a taint that has put off some high-end investors, who have stayed away. Cambodia also has rivals.
Straitlaced Singapore recently gave up its laws against gambling and legalized the activity, joining the race for tourist dollars in Southeast Asia. After watching Cambodia and Macao attract planeloads of gambling tourists, Singapore approved the construction of two casinos that opened in 2010 and rival any palace in Macao. Resorts World Sentosa advertises itself as an “eco-resort and casino” and was designed by the famed American architect Michael Graves. Singapore officials said they expect Asia’s gamblers to spend enough at the two casinos—Sentosa and the Marina Bay Sands—to boost Singapore’s GDP by $2.5 billion, or nearly 1 percent.
While Cambodia’s border regions are now studded with casinos, only one has been allowed in Phnom Penh. The government gave Chen Lip Keong, a Malaysian businessman and senior economic advisor to Hun Sen, the exclusive license for a casino in Phnom Penh through 2035. He built NagaWorld, a splashy casino resort on multiple lots along the city’s waterfront district in 2003. The neon-lit façade of the NagaWorld now flashes across the boulevards and rivers and attracts Chinese gamblers as well as Vietnamese, Thais and Malaysians.
It is also a sore point for Cambodians, who are unhappy that Chen has the gambling monopoly in Phnom Penh. NagaWorld made $35 million in profits in 2010, according to its listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange. Local Cambodian newspapers have editorialized that NagaWorld openly violates the law against locals gambling and “is operating to extract money from people addicted to gambling in Cambodia, earning colossal profits.”
• • •
Cambodia has become a new center for sex tourism. Bangkok in neighboring Thailand was a pioneer in tourism for sex beginning in the 1960s, when American soldiers took their rest and rehabilitation, or R & R, in the Thai capital along the infamous Patpong red-light district. The bars offered risqué sex shows and young girls waiting to be chosen for the night. The soldiers returned home to the United States with stories, and diseases, from that strip where everyone seeking flesh was welcome for a small price.
Sex tourism spread beyond Patpong, throughout Bangkok, and became part of package tours in Thailand. Advertisements began appearing in Europe and Asia like this one from Roise Reisen of Germany: “Thailand is a world full of extremes and the possibilities are unlimited . . . especially when it comes to girls. Still it appears to be a problem for visitors in Thailand to find the right places where they can indulge in unknown pleasures. It is frustrating to have to ask in broken English where you can pick up pretty girls. Roise has done something about this. For the first time in history, you can book a trip to Thailand with erotic pleasures included in the price.”
Yoko Kusaka, a Japanese anthropologist, examining why Japanese men were attracted to sex tours to Bangkok found they were looking for easy sex without humiliation. Japanese tourists were met by Thai tour operators at the airport and taken to their hotels, where Thai girls with the job of “special services” accompanied each man to his room. Alternatively, the men could board a bus and visit massage parlors where Thai girls were waiting to give the same services.
Brothels returned to Cambodia when the United Nations peacekeepers arrived there to enforce the peace agreement in 1992. During their stay of less than two years the number of girls in brothels jumped from 6,000 to 20,000 and the average age of the girls entering the trade dropped from eighteen to twelve. This was the first post–Cold War peacekeeping mission where the peacekeepers faced charges of sexually abusing girls. Back then Yasushi Akashi, the special representative of the U.N. Secretary General, refused to take the issue seriously, saying “boys will be boys.”
In subsequent years, as U.N. peacekeepers faced increasing allegations of sexual misconduct, the U.N. stepped in to forbid most abuses, including giving money or food to young girls for sex.
Cambodia became just one of the countries where sex tourism sprang up in the 1990s during the chaotic transformation of Communist nations to capitalist and the sudden opening of closed borders. Rogue gangs and organized crime got footholds in many industries, including tourism and prostitution, when governments were at their weakest. The money was eye-popping and bribes helped the trade dig deep roots. In Eastern Europe underground syndicates took over prostitution in the former Czechoslovakia along the “Highway of Shame” originally patronized by German truck drivers.
“Before the dust from the Berlin Wall had even settled, gangsters and chancers were laying the cables of a huge network of trafficking in women,” wrote Misha Glenny in McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld.
Estimates from individual countries suggest that these criminal syndicates earn in the hundreds of billions every year. Sex tourism provides anywhere between 2 and 14 percent of the gross domestic products of Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, which monitors the aspects of sex tourism that are criminal behavior.
And it is a crime to traffic in women and children and to have sex with underage girls and boys. Foreign male tourists convicted of any of these crimes can be punished with long prison terms in the home countries.
The tourism industry publicly opposes child sex tourism. Respectable hotel chains prohibit guests from bringing underage children to their rooms and forbid all solicitation on their premises. Many hotels cooperate with the police, contribute to campaigns to stamp out the scourge and pass out information leaflets to tourists about illegal prostitution of minors.
However, the industry is also quick to point out that they can’t stop sex tourism or be held responsible for the brutal trafficking of women and children—that is the job of the local authorities. The industry may condemn tourists traveling to foreign lands to buy sex with an underage girl or boy or a young woman who is being held against her will, but it remains a cornerstone of its profit earnings, an extension of the idea that you can let your hair down on vacation and indulge in fantasies.
I saw this confirmed in the middle of an earnest discussion at an exclusive conference of tourist executives in Brazil. Brett Tollman, president of the Travel Corporation, interrupted comments about responding to tourists’ desire for environmentally responsible travel by saying many young men travel just “to drink and get laid.”
The crowd of mostly men broke out into knowing chuckles. Sex tourism makes billions of dollars from those fantasies, and that money is spread throughout the industry—agencies, operators, airlines, hotels, restaurants and, of course, brothels. The Czech Republic is famous in the business as a magnet. Cheap flights to Prague are routinely filled with young men looking for a sex vacation. Czech brothels are cheap and operate in a legal gray zone. During the recent 2008 Recession, when tourism dropped, the Czech hotel industry lobbied hard to legalize prostitution and boost business. (Tourists account for 60 percent of the $500 million sex trade in the Czech Republic.) The government said no, but in the economic rebound, sex tourism, along with hotel bookings, is up.
Cambodia is recognized as a hot spot for child sex tourism along with India, Thailand, Brazil and Mexico. At least 2 million children are prostituted in sex tourism around the world, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, and millions of lives ruined. In the global world system there are international rules and regulations to govern the trade of goods and services. But even though every minute of every day a child or a woman is coerced into sex as a prostitute, there are no rules covering sex tourism.
Marina Diotallevi of the World Tourism Organization is an expert on the sexual exploitation of children. “Sometimes a normal tourist goes to a poor country and sees this new opportunity and says, ‘Why not—I’ll try this and I’ll do these poor children a favor and give them money.’ That is the crime. Tourism is not the crime.”
As she points out, the battle against sex tourism has been going on for more than thirty years, and some of the biggest victories have been won in Thailand, where much of it started. There are international campaigns to inform consumers, including an international code of conduct, increased prosecutions of sex offenders by their home nations, more reporting of crimes even without prosecution and greater cooperation between the industry and international organizations. Yet she can’t say whether all this effort has reduced the risk for poor children.
“It is such a big world,” she said. “Most of these countries don’t want to admit they have such a big problem with child sex tourism.”
There are few things more odious than walking along Phnom Penh’s waterfront and running into a white-haired old man walking to an assignation with a girl young enough to be his granddaughter. That image of the old man is something of a misnomer. Young men buy sex from prostitutes on vacation at least as often as old men. One study found that twenty-seven years was the average age of the 80,000 Italian men who travel abroad for sex. Male tourists traveling to Cambodia for sex ranged in age from twenty-eight to sixty-eight, according to one study, and they come to Cambodia because law enforcement is lax and sex is cheap.
“Visitors taking a trip as part of a tour group inevitably ask their guide where to go for sex services,” said one agent in a Phnom Penh study, adding that they delivered sex workers for the tourists. “The tour guides are there to help. . . . the customer is king.”
That demand is met by girls, boys and young women who are mostly held against their will, drugged and beaten into submission. The sadism has been chronicled by human rights campaigners who have documented whippings, burnings, live burials and repeated rapes while the girl is handcuffed or tied to a bed. The most hair-raising and eloquent testimonies have been written by the women themselves.
Somaly Mam, a Cambodian woman, has told her story in a stark memoir, The Road of Lost Innocence. Somaly tells how she was forced into prostitution when she was twelve years old and became a sex slave. She was brutally tortured and raped almost daily and was suicidal until other girls inspired her to flee. She escaped and over time set up a nonprofit organization that frees underage children from brothels, with the cooperation of the police, and then rehabilitates them.
She says it is inspiring for her to help young girls. What is striking is that sex tourism is so prevalent in Cambodia today that Somaly Mam is one of Cambodia’s most famous women, at home and abroad. In the first months of 2012 alone she spoke at the United Nations and met First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House.
Somaly Mam was not in Phnom Penh during my two research trips, so I visited her center to rehabilitate former prostitutes with her assistant Lin Sylor. The center charges a $100 visitors’ fee. Even though I never pay for interviews, in this instance I paid $50 as a courtesy and since the center said the fees help cover the costs of caring for the young women.
The compound, on the outskirts of the city, is close to idyllic. When I arrived several dozen young women were in classrooms learning sewing, hairdressing and computer skills. Others were taking remedial reading and writing in the Khmer language. All were described as women liberated from sex slavery. They stayed about two years and no one was held against her will. But I was forbidden to verify this information.
Our first stop was the kitchen, where four young women were preparing lunch. I struck up a conversation with a woman who introduced herself as Sreya and said she was twenty-six years old. Then a large Cambodian woman came up to me and said our conversation had to end. “It is too traumatic for these girls to talk about their former lives,” she said.
I turned to Lin Sylor, my escort, who said I would not be able to interview any of these young women about their past despite promises to the contrary. I could ask them about their dreams for the future and nothing else. I went elsewhere to find out more about sex tourism.
Today easy sex draws nearly as many tourists as the Angkor temples. In a survey, tour agents estimated that 21.7 percent of male tourists to Cambodia were looking for sex and 32.5 percent for culture. Another survey did a profile of these men’s nationalities. In recent years Asian men are the most numerous—from Korea, Japan, China, Thailand and Malaysia. Chinese sex tourists stand out for being obsessed with buying the services of young virgins, willing to pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars for them in the belief this will enhance their masculinity and health. French and American men top the list of westerners.
You can find these male tourists seeking girls and boys in brothels and on the street. At dusk male tourists find young boys near the Royal Palace or the Central Market in Phnom Penh. They know where to look thanks to Internet chat rooms and local motorcycle and taxi drivers. Similar transactions take place just outside the main gate at Angkor. The most blatant trolling for sex is in the south, on the beaches of Sihanoukville. Since neighboring Thailand began cracking down on child sex tourism, hundreds of sex tourists have arrived in Cambodia with its lax law enforcement and beautiful beaches.
The Ministry of Tourism has joined with several private charities to stop child sex tourism, in part in response to growing pressure from Europe, the United States and the World Tourism Organization. “Don’t Turn Away, Turn Them In!” is one of the campaign slogans. Cambodia has passed laws that are better than even those in Thailand, and some Cambodian police work with foreign nonprofits to capture foreign tourists caught having sex with minors. In 2009 three American men from California were arrested in Cambodia for having sex with young prostitutes and extradited to the United States. Among them was a forty-nine-year-old man charged with having sex with a ten-year-old girl and a forty-one-year-old man charged with having sex with young boys for $5 and $10.
The International Justice Mission or IJM, a human rights group with an office in Phnom Penh, played a central role in that arrest. Ron Dunne, the head of the IJM office, took me on a “brothel crawl” through Phnom Penh to show me how difficult his job is and how ineffective those anti-sex-tourism campaigns are.
Dunne is a retired Australian military officer whose last post was attaché at the Australian embassy in Phnom Penh. As we drove around Phnom Penh, he explained how sex tourism ruins lives and society. “Most of the young children are sold by families who are deeply in debt. They’re farmers, coming from the rural areas where they can’t make money. They’ll wait to sell a virgin girl to the highest bidder—a foreign tourist who will pay from eight hundred to four thousand dollars,” said Dunne.
“After she loses her virginity, the girl works in a brothel—often drugged and beaten—and by her mid-twenties she’s finished. She’s lucky to make $10 a night. You rarely meet girls over twenty-six years of age in a brothel. That is the life cycle for sex tourism.”
We spotted some single foreign men nosing around a café that fronts for a brothel in the club district. The Soul Club was on the right. Dunne remembered a particularly difficult investigation in the area that included several well-paid informants spending lots of hours gathering evidence, presenting the evidence to the police, shepherding them through a raid and finally freeing the underage girls.
I asked why he didn’t just buy the young prostitutes from the brothel. “First rule—never buy a girl. It only keeps the system going and encourages other families to sell their children,” said Dunne.
Dunne had high praise for a Cambodian general recently appointed director of the government’s juvenile section antitrafficking division. “He’s good, but he can’t prevent all the snitches from tipping off the brothel owners about a raid.”
The rescue is only the beginning. The difficult task of rehabilitation of the children takes years. That is done by several charities at a cost of $800 a month for long-term care of as much as eight years or short-term care at $1,200 a month over two or three years.
“Often we can’t send the girls back to their families because that would risk the family exploiting them all over again. They depended on the girls for their livelihoods. We have a program to train the families to find other methods of employment and to reintegrate their daughters. Sometimes they do return to their families.”
Since 2005, Dunne’s group has rescued 406 children from brothels and helped investigate 186 sex violators. As the sun set and the clubs began to open, Dunne pointed to the right. “Look—that corner with the children—they could easily be underage prostitutes. That would never be permitted in Thailand. Here, the police and courts are far more corrupt,” he said.
We saw foreigners ducking into a doorway that Dunne said led to a brothel. “It costs a tourist twenty dollars for a night; it costs us at least twenty thousand dollars to rescue the girl and put her on the road to recovery.”
The supply of those girls seems endless. As more families are thrown off their land, as rural Cambodia is left behind and the urban elite prospers, poor young girls have few options other than “tourism.” The youngsters are sent to tourist spots to sell trinkets, where their families end up selling them.