Inquisition 21
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A country by country report on the progress of the sex abuse Inquisition
Australia’s criminal involvement in Cambodia
The latest - The Cambodian girls plan a response
Twenty two of the Cambodian girls involved in either the false accusations against Australians Clint Betterridge and Bart Lauwaert, or who held out, despite kidnappings and threats, and refused to give evidence against Graham Cleghorn, tried to take a class action against the CWCC but failed.
This followed their letters to the Prime Minister, published in the Khmer papers, their brave protest with their homemade banner, and the publication of both on this web site.
A posting appeared on the Khmer 440 discussion list reporting that the CWCC responded by sending representatives to the girls’ village to harass them and tell them to shut up. It was becoming very serious indeed, both for the three innocent men in prison and these brave but vulnerable Cambodian girls. It also raised the stakes on both sides.
The girls and the villagers supporting them are penniless while the CWCC has a million dollars annually in funding, from the US and from AusAid, the latter administered out of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs office in Cambodia. The Australian government also funded Cambodia’s prosecution of Betterridge, and put him in prison in Australia after he fled Cambodia.
These brave Cambodian girls with no funds and a homemade banner have not been solenced. They are setting up their own web site.
Background
Australia’s criminal involvement in Cambodia may simply stem from the fact that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. In 1996, the Australian government came to suspect that there might be a ‘paedophile ring’ within the department of foreign affairs, which provided desirable foreign locations for its deviant members. When the procuring of boys in Cambodia and elsewhere emerged as a probability, one can imagine the hysteria generated in homophobic Australia.
One of the first on the hit list was Australia's ambassador to Cambodia, John Holloway. Australia sent Federal police to Cambodia to help catch him. He was apparently visiting the same male prostitutes that had been used in a previous case against the British doctor Gavin Scott. In that case the NGO had lowered the ages of the male prostitutes by three years to get a conviction. Scott had been convicted and sentenced to one year which was time already served. This meant that he was free but unable to take action against the government for unlawful detention, as he was no longer held.
The Federal police knew that these boys were male prostitutes, but wanted them to appear as if they were decent kids corrupted by the ambassador. They claimed the ambassador paid poor families to ravage their children. He was taken to Australia for trial. As no one had birth certificates, a doctor was called to give evidence in the court of the ages of the boys, based on the length of their femur bones, compared to that of Australian children. Cambodians are all short people. These boys were young adults who had grown up in hard years and like most Khmers were stunted due to the bad diet of their times.
To maintain the illusion that these were decent children, the federal police paid them twice the monthly salary of a skilled adult Khmer worker so that they would not continue earning money from prostitution prior to the ambassador’s court case. We know the man who carried the money between the police and the boys.
At the trial, the boys admitted that they were the same boys who had testified against Gavin Scott. When they saw that they were contradicting themselves, they tried to explain the contradictory evidence by now saying they had lied in the earlier Gavin Scott case, but that this time they were telling the truth. The Australian judge dismissed the case against the ambassador.
While the 1996 investigation into the diplomatic ‘paedophile ring’ found only a couple of other individuals interested in sex in foreign places and a few photographs of naked boys in diplomatic bags, the moral panic continued and reached a peak with the non-diplomatic Betteridge and Lawauert cases over the past two years, resulting in terrible miscarriages of justice for both men who are still in prison. But the Australian government has become deeply involved in the mechanisms that create that injustice.
Australia has a program call ELMO - English Lessons for Ministry Officials to the Australian Centre for Education. Through this program, the Australian government achieves a lot of influence with the Cambodian government. The program has expanded to provide free education to Cambodian justice officials including all judges and court staff. All the women managing the Cambodian Women’s Crisis Centre (CWCC), which set up the innocent men, are trained also. The Siem Reap Court was repainted and refurbished inside and out for the Betteridge/Lauwaert trials by AusAid – surely a show trial. Prisons in Cambodia are upgraded by the Australian government and prison officials and guards attend courses and receive diplomas from AusAid. The former Cambodian Minister of Justice Niev Satong is himself an Australian citizen and a lot of Australian government money has passed over his desk.
There is a depressing irony here. The Australian Government claims it does not interfere in any judicial proceedings in Cambodia. The few people around the world working to try to free two Australian men from prison have come to interpret this as meaning that they never help any Australian citizen who is charged unjustly by the Cambodians.
Many countries are conscious of their tier rating in the US Congress. The tier rating system awards points on efforts to prevent trafficking and sex offences. Australia and Cambodia are no exceptions. Cambodia has to be conscious of it, as it is tied to US Foreign Aid. Just as the CWCC needs arrests to obtain its annual funding honestly or otherwise, so do whole countries.
The Australian federal police have stationed federal officers at Phnom Penh, Bangkok, Bali, and Manila. Their job is to assist in the arrest of Australians, not to protect them or to see they are treated fairly. In Phnom Penh they share the same building with the Australian Embassy. They say they do not talk with Embassy officials and staff as there is a conflict of interest. The Embassy is there to assist Australians, but the federal police are there to catch them.
The sole purpose of these federal officers is to assist in the arrest of Australians and to ensure that the evidence collected against them is thorough. Unlike an officer at home who has many duties, these officers’ only duty is to produce watertight cases against Australians. Combine this with the Australian government’s very heavy influence in the Cambodian Justice ministry and the desire for a higher tier rating, and we can assume that there will be more cases like those of Lauwaert and Betteridge.
In July of this year, the Australian Feds were involved in the arrest of an Australian Consul officer in Bali. A common interrogation tactic is to promise if you resign and confess we will try to get you deported without conviction. The officer confessed to oral sex with a seventeen year old but denied ever touching a fifteen year old. He was convicted on both counts and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Such a harsh sentence is completely unheard of in Bali where the bombers of the Mariott Hotel got ten years. The Consul officer returned to his cell and hung himself. One can only ask who leaned on the judge to impose such a dreadful sentence.
From within Cambodia Robin Baxter adds the following:
“One recipient of Western aid is receiving it from more than one source. Lieutenant Un was chosen by Global-Pac as a worthy recipient of sponsorship and largesse.
GLOBAL-Pac chose wisely as Lieutenant Un’s mother is the only female One Star General in Cambodia, and happens to also head up the Juvenile Protection Unit
in Phnom Penh, one of the two main police forces targeting foreign sex offenders. Her husband, Un's father, is Governor of Mondulkiri Province. All progress in Cambodia depends on patronage, so not only are Un's parents extremely important
people, they in turn are connected to the very highest echelons of society, including the CPP. Un’s forensics computer course at an October 2004 Interpol meeting in Berlin was also paid for.”
Three innocent men in prison
The three men whose causes we support on this web site are the two Australians Clint Betteridge and Bart Lauwaert and the New Zealander Graham Cleghorn. See the sub menu at the bottom of the page for each story. Bart Lauwaert and Graham Cleghorn are in prison in Siem Reap, while Clint Betteridge has been imprisoned by his own government in Australia. The girls that falsely accused them because they were set up by the NGO, the CWCC, have published a retraction saying that the CWCC forced them to make the accusations. The men are still in prison. What is now emerging is a story of Australian government involvement.
At last! The Cambodian witnesses retract
The Khmer newspapers in Cambodia have printed an open letter from the ten girl witnesses in the Betteridge and Lauwaert cases in which they state their complaints and court evidence were completely false and given for money promised to them by the child right’s group CWCC. The originals letters were sent to the Prime Minister his Excellency MR. Hun Sen and the Human rights Committee of Cambodia by these witnesses.
We have copies of the letters in Khmer. We have also sent them to the relevant Australian government ministers and officials to try to secure the release of Clint Betteridge from prison in Australia. We can only hope that the Cambodian authorities now release Bart Lauwaert and New Zealander Graham Cleghorn sentenced to 30 years in Cambodia because of similar false allegations engineered by the CWCC.
As a result of these retractions, a group of individuals all of whom were in the past accused of crimes within Cambodia by the CWCC has issued a statement and sent it to the governments and embassies of New Zealand, UK, Switzerland, Australia, France, USA, and to travel agents as follows:
Travel warning on Cambodia
The Khmer Newspapers have printed an open letter from the 10 witnesses in the Betteridge and Lauwaert cases in which they state their complaints and court evidence was completely false and was given for money promised to them by the CWCC. The original letters were sent to the Prime Minister his Excellency MR. Hun Sen and the Human rights Committee of Cambodia by these witnesses.
In view of this evidence, we urge you to issue a General Travel Warning to any of your nationals travelling to Cambodia or contemplating doing business here while the CWCC is still operational. Failure to do so could expose you to criticism or legal action if one of your nationals is targeted and falls victim to these criminals. Any organization that funds the CWCC should be aware that they are funding a body that detains people unlawfully and uses bribes, threats and terror to get them to make false allegations against foreign nationals. Further evidence is available on request of breaches of human rights and the United Charter of children's rights. For fairness it also needs to be mentioned, that Mu Suchua, an American passport holder and founding member of the CWCC and Minister of the Funcinpec party in charge of women's affairs, no longer holds the job as minister and in protest has defected to the Sam Rainsy Party.
To this we can add the following:
The police and military act hand in hand with the CWCC and other child right’s organizations, helping to arrest foreigners, who then suffer extortion.
Some police and military also run the prostitution industry.
Taxi drivers follow their own customers and other foreigners and report what premises they visit. They obtain the names and passport details of these travellers from the hotels. The NGO pays a commission for each report of ‘significant tourist activity’, which could include adult entertainment.
The CWCC and other NGOs pay, or offer to pay, girls large sums in compensation if they accuse Western men of rape or any underage sexual activity. Their income from foreign donors depends on their prosecution rate. The CWCC also pays the police.
Global Pac, a much criticized foreign child rights organization, or an organization posing as such, has provided a total office refurbishment for the police, including new high end computers, state of the art thermal imaging, night vision goggles and other highly expensive equipment. They are arranging to send a compliant local police chief to Berlin in October to take part in specialised computer forensics training. This has been set up by them in collaboration with the British ambassador, Steven Bridges, and the UK police. Bridges harbours naïve ideas about child trafficking and appears unaware of what he himself is now involved in.
Latest – serious warning to British, American and Australian tourists
This is new information, not yet corroborated, so please confirm through Contact on the left if you can.
As of the beginning of September 2004, British, American and Australian police have been patrolling Svay Pak, (Phnom Penh's brothel shanty town) together with Khmer police (some of whom run the brothels). The Khmer police have been approaching any foreigner seen there, asking for their ID and then bringing over the relevant overseas policeman or woman to join in the questioning, whenever the foreigner happens to be British, American or Australian.
In this way, the British, American and Australian police are acquiring the names of anyone showing an interest in this red light district. No expats will be found there, as no expat is stupid enough to go near Svay Pak these days, knowing that using a camera or sitting in a cafe and drinking a beer there is evidence enough to be interrogated. It is a fair guess that any British, American and Australian man questioned there will have his PC back home seized in a search for child porn.
The irony is that life goes on as usual for the Khmer, Japanese** and Chinese men who pay for prostitution at Svay Pak, as the new police patrollers are not interested in them, but only in the bigger prey. There are plans for Western TV crews to join the patrollers shortly.
** May be about to change since the CWCC visit to Japan.
Important information
For all those interested in following up on these miscarriages of justice. The four main stories are in the menu below under:
Clint Betteridge – stop this extradition!
Bart Lauwaert tells his own story
Graham Cleghorn writes from inside Siem Reap Prison
The setting up of Rudolf Knuchel
* See separate stories about Bart Lauwaert and Clint Betteridge, all linked to the CWCC in the menu below.
Country by country
Clint Betterridge - stop this extradition! It's over.
The Peter Ellis story
The Shieldfield travesty
The Saskatoon story
The McMartin and other US stories
Act of infamy – the Nora Wall story
Bart Lauwaert tells his own story
Australia’s criminal involvement in Cambodia
Graham Cleghorn writes from Cambodian prisons
The setting up of Rudolf Knuchel
The Pitcairn sex trial – the cast and the story
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