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| Chanti, aged 14. Hers and Vanna's home, in the background, is a bamboo platform up against the wall. Vanna has a job as a cleaner but does not earn enough to rent a room |
Ms Sam Mostyn
President
Australian Council for
International Development
24th Feb. 2014
Dear Ms Mostyn
I imagine that it might be a little annoying to be
getting so many letters from me. I think that you will eventually appreciate
why I am placing all this on record. Whilst I have been aware of NGO scams
since 1995 (my first visit to Cambodia) and watched over the years as the scams
became more and more outrageous, it was
only when Citipointe removed Chanti and Chhork’s daughters in 2008 that this
became a matter of person (as opposed to professional) interest to me. As a
documentary filmmaker it is my job to tell the story unfolding in front of me
as honestly as I can. And I am doing that. However, in this instance, I am also
a friend of the family and so wear two hats. I know the family very well and
know that a huge injustice has been perpetrated here. As a family friend I want
to help Chanti and Chhork get their daughters back. The line between being an
observer of and a participant in the lives of this family have become blurred
and so it is that the process of my trying to help Chanti and Chhork has become
part of the story I am telling.
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| Chanti, aged 14, with her mother, Vanna |
It is in this context that my letters can be viewed. The Global Development Group and ACFID are now, for better or for worse, a part of the story I am telling. Will GDG conduct a proper investigation or will the NGO move into damage control and call in spin doctors to make the problem go away? In the event that GDG does not conduct a proper investigation, is there anything that ACFID can do, in reality, to conduct its own investigation? I hope so, but I think, with the best will in the world, the very best of intentions, you will find it difficult if not impossible.
Not only are the Global Development Group’s
monitoring and assessment processes inadequate, so too is ACFID’s capacity to
monitor and assess NGOs whose obligations to their clients (recipients of aid)
extend no further than self-assessment. Let me explain.
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| Chanti, aged 14, and her best friend Sekun |
In my documentary CHANTI’S WORLD there are, quite
apart from Chanti’s experience with Citipointe, two other stories that involve
GDG funded NGOs that have, according to their aid clients, abrogated their
rights as parents by (a) limiting visits to their daughters to once per year
and (b) refusing to return their daughters when requested.
On Saturday I sent email to the Executive Director
of one of these NGOs. (see below) In 2007 this NGO offered to help a very poor
family. As was the case with Chanti and Chhork, the offer being made by the NGO
was a very generous one. It so happened that I had been filming with this
family prior to this NGO’s offer of help – documenting their lives also.
The parents took up the NGO’s offer. At the outset
the two daughters were able to visit their parents every weekend for one day.
The girls were, from my observations during visits to them, well fed, well
cared for and receiving a good education. My only reservation about the program
of this particular NGO is that, like so many NGOs, it saw its job as rescuing
children from poverty but not the parents. The parents remained in dire
poverty, with no chance of ever getting out of it, whilst their daughters were being
well fed, educated, learning how to use computers and living a close-to-Western
lifestyle within one of the NGOs homes.
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| S*****, before she and her sister were rescued by GDG-funded NGO |
Helping the children of poor families whilst not
helping the rest of the family is an approach common to NGOs in Cambodia. I
think it is wrong. That it is in fact wrong is borne out by the fact that 75%
of the ‘orphans’ in Cambodia are not ‘orphans’ at all. Many of these ‘orphans’
are being cared for by Australian NGOs (some of them funded by the Global
Development Group) whilst the materially poor families of which they are a part
receive no assistance at all. Indeed, if you think of the running of an
‘orphanage’ as a business (which of course it is for many NGOs) the more
‘orphans the better. To help the families of the poor children in the
orphanages to become self-sufficient would result in these kids being returned
to their families and deplete the supply of orphans upon which the ‘orphanages’
rely to convince sponsors and donors to keep giving generously. Imagine trying
to raise money from donors and sponsors by announcing, on the NGO’s website:
“We are delighted to be able to announce that most
of the children who were in our care have been able to return to their
families, their homes, their villages, their communities as a result of the
assistance we have provided the families to become self-sufficient.”
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| S***** and her mother K***** |
The donations would dry up quick smart. Donors and
sponsors want to experience the warm inner glow of having helped to ‘rescue’
‘orphans’ and ‘victims of human trafficking.’ Helping an entire family, both
nuclear and extended, and a community does not provide quite the same inner
glow.
Getting back to the NGO I was writing about
earlier. I sent the following email on Saturday 22nd Feb in hopes of getting an
appropriate response from the Executive Director of the NGO. I have, for the
time being, redacted his name and that of his NGO.
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| S****** and her older sister S******* |
Dear XXX
It is now two and a half years since I
began to correspond with you and XXX on 10th Sept 2011.
My request at the time was a simple one
– to be put in contact with the family I had, a few years beforehand, filmed in
the Phnom Penh rubbish tip.
Using a variety of different reasons,
(one of which involved you telling me, whom you had never met, that I was a
’voyeur!) you refused to put me in
contact with the family or to pass on to the family that I was wishing to make
contact with them. You also lied to me about the help XXX had given to the
family.
I eventually tracked down the parents,
despite your attempts to make this impossible.
They informed me that they had recently asked the XXX to return their
daughters to them and that XXX had refused to do so.
I asked the parents if they had signed
any form of contract or agreement with XXX in relation to their daughters that
gave XXX a legal right to keep the girls against the wishes of their parents.
They said no, that they had entered into no written agreement with XXX.
I cannot speak to the truth of what the
parents told me regarding a contract or agreement – only that they wished to
have their daughters returned to their care and that XXX refused.
I filmed with the family that day – the
mother and father having just returned from their days work in the new Phnom
Penh rubbish dump. They told me that XXX provided them with no financial help
at all; that XXX had done nothing to help them extricate themselves from their
life of working in the dump (for a combined income of $1000 per annum) and
become sufficiently self-sufficient to be able to take care of their daughters.
It should not be necessary to even make
this observation but these parents loved their children and the children loved
their parents – as my footage make perfectly clear. It broke their hearts to
have limited access to their daughters and to be refused when they asked to
have them returned to their care.
During this meeting with the parents
(filmed) I reiterated a promise that I had made to them a few years earlier –
namely that when my film CHANTI’S WORLD was completed, when I had some money,
that I would buy them a block of land in the their home province and enable
them to make the first step towards becoming self-sufficient. They were
delighted.
On my next trip back to Cambodia I went
to visit the family – only to discover that they had moved. Their neighbours
did not know where they had gone. Again I had lost contact with them. Again I
appealed to XXX to put me in contact with the parents. You refused.
I would like to give you one last
opportunity to put me in contact with the family. I wish to fulfill my promise
to them to buy them a block of land. I had hoped, when I first made contact
with XXX, that it may have been possible to acknowledge in CHANTI’S WORLD the
good work I believed at the time that XXX was doing. Instead, the story I have
to tell is one that does not show either you or XXX in a good light.
I am copying this to others at XXX so
that there is no possibility, further down the track, of you saying that I did
not give you an opportunity to correct the serious error in judgment you made
when you decided to prevent me from contacting the family.
I have attached a few stills from that
part of CHANTI’S WORLD that deals with the lives of family – not just working
in but living in the Phnom Penh dump.
best wishes
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| S******* walking to work |
I have no idea now what has happened to this family. I have no idea whether or not the two daughters remain in the care of this NGO. And nor do I have any easy way of finding out. My point here is this:
What could the mother and father of these
two girls have done to secure the release of their daughters at the time their
requests were being refused by this Global Development Group-funded NGO? How
would the parents even have been aware that they had a right to lodge a
complaint with GDG? Is this GDG-funded NGO under any obligation to inform
clients such as these parents that they can, if they are not happy with the
treatment they receive at the hands of the NGO, file a complaint with the
Global Development Group? The answer would appear to be ‘no’. Once an NGO
funded by the Global Development Group has a child in its custody there is no
way, unless the NGO reports it to GDG, that the Global Development Group will
ever know that the parents are devastated to have essentially lost their
children.
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| S****** at work in the Phnom Penh dump |
It seems to me that one way of addressing
this problem would be if the Global Development Group insisted that all NGO
recipients of GDG funding provide all aid recipients (members of materially
poor families in the third world) with a copy of a document informing them of
their rights. Given that the bulk of such aid recipients will be illiterate, it
should also be a provision insisted upon by GDG, that the parents of the
children (in this instance) have their rights explained to them in their native
tongue before placing their thumb print on the document that leaves no doubt
but they have been informed of their rights.
As you will be aware, in a country such as
Cambodia where the poor have no rights, nor do the poor believe that they have
any rights. If you will excuse the vernacular, they are accustomed to being
screwed, they expect to be screwed – by their government, by public servants,
by the rich and powerful. When a rich NGO offers to help such people it does
not occur to them that they have rights and that they have a right to have
these rights respected. This makes them easy prey for NGOs that wish to exploit
them for their own money-raising or soul-saving ends.
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| S********'s family home - built on top of a 20 ft high pile of rubbing in the Phnom Penh dump |
I would like to stress here that the Global Development Group is not alone in having weak and ineffective monitoring and assessment processes. The problem is systemic – which is one reason why I believe that Chanti and Chhork’s complaint about Citipointe church, even if it is resolved quickly at far as GDG is concerned, is relevant to ACFID. Without effective monitoring and assessment processes ACFID can no more know what is going on on the ground (as opposed to what NGOs say about themselves) than can GDG. If this systemic problem is not addressed sham NGOs will find it very easy to pull the wool over GDG’s and ACFID’s eyes.
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| S********at the end of a day's work in the Phnom Penh dump |
As you read my letters and ponder their
contents the thought may arise: “The many NGOs taking care of orphans who are
not orphans and ‘victims of human trafficking’ who are not victims of human
trafficking are doing so with the blessing of the Cambodian Ministry of Social
Affairs. Why is that?”
Possible answers include:
The Ministry of Social Affairs (MoSAVY)
does not care
MoSAVY is incompetent
Senior members within MoSAVY are being
paid by fraudulent NGOs to turn a blind eye to the fact that the children in
care are not orphans or are not victims of human trafficking.
I trust that ACFID is aware that
corruption is endemic in Cambodia. There is no sector of society that I am
aware of in which it does not occur. Chanti and Chhork must, fir instance, like
all parents of children in Cambodia, pay 1000 Reil per day (25 cents) to send
their children to an ostensibly free government school.
If, perchance, you do not happen to be
aware of the level of corruption that exists in Cambodia, do a quick good
search and you will find out.
My point is this: An unscrupulous NGO in
Cambodia will have no trouble at all obtaining from the Ministry of Social
Affairs retrospective justification for its human rights abuses. For instance,
here is the Ministry of Social Affairs justification of Citipointe church’s
removal of Rosa and Chita contrary to the express wishes of Chanti and Chhork
from Nov 2008 onwards. It is the sole justification the Ministry of Social
Affairs has provided in five and a half years for its decision to turn a blind
eye to Citipointe church’s actions:
For the SHE resuce project,
according to the agreement made with the Ministry of Social Affairs, Veterans
and Youth Rehabilitation, the organization has projected to help victims of
human trafficking and sex trade as well as families which fall so deep in
poverty. After questioning directly, the ministry believes that Rosa must have
been in any of the above categories.
That the Ministry
‘believes’ (as opposed to knows) that Rosa must have been in any of the above
categories’ does not suggest much in the way of thorough research or the asking
of questions. Certainly, the Ministry never spoke with Chanti or Chhork. If they had they would have discovered
that in the same month the Ministry wrote this letter, Chhork was running a
boat on the Bassac River for tourists, Chanti had a stall by the river selling
snacks to tourists and the family lived on the house boat – in much greater
comfort than the majority of Cambodians.
For whatever reason
(incompetence, lack of interest, corruption) the Ministry of Social Affairs
response to the plight of Chanti and Chhork in Nov 2008 is clearly inadequate.
And nor, I hope, would the Global Development Group find it adequate. Or ACFID.
Since Nov 2008 the
Ministry of Social Affairs has refused to provide Chanti and Chhork with a copy
of the ‘agreement’ MoSAVY entered into with Citipointe - leaving Chanti and
Chhork with no idea why they are being detained by the church, when or even if,
her daughters will ever be returned to them This has caused Chanti and Chhork enormous
distress this past close to five years – made all the worse by Pastor Leigh
Ramsey’s repeated promises to them that Rosa and Chita would be returned
‘soon’.
Excuse me for belabouring
the point but an incompetent or corrupt NGO plying their trade in Cambodia can
either rely on the incompetence of the Ministry of Social Affairs, its lack of
interest or pay whatever is required to guarantee that MoSAVY will turn a blind
eye to its breaches of Cambodian law. Article 8
of Cambodia’s 2008 Law on Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual
Exploitation is quite clear:
Definition of Unlawful
Removal
The act of unlawful removal
in this law shall mean to:
1) remove a person from his/her
current place of residence to a place
under the actor’s or a third
person’s control by means of force,
threat, deception, abuse of power, or enticement, or
2) without legal authority or any
other legal justification to do so, take a minor or a person under general
custody or curatorship or legal custody away from the legal custody of the
parents, care taker or guardian.
The Ministry of Social
Affairs may have little interest in administering Cambodian law but I trust
that the Global Development Group does have
an interest. If so, GDG must look at the 31st July 2008 ‘contract’
and decide whether or not it considers it to provide Citipointe with the legal
authority to have removed Rosa and Chita in 2008 and to have told Chanti and
Chhork on 11th August 2008 that Rosa and Chita were now in the legal
custody of the church until they turned 18.
If GDG’s lawyers decide
that it is not a legal document, the Global Development Group will hopefully
then request that Citipointe provide a copy of the ‘agreement’ that the church entered
into with the Ministry of Social Affairs. If Citipointe does provide GDG with a copy of this document I trust that Geoff
Armstrong will be of the opinion that natural justice necessitates that the
parents be supplied with a copy of it also – as they have been requesting for
the past five years.
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| Chanti, aged 14, and Sekun, aged 17 |
In the event that
Citipointe does not supply the
Global Development Group with a copy of this ‘agreement’, Geoff Armstrong would
be justified in arriving at the conclusion that Citipointe had broken Cambodia’s 2008 Law on Suppression of Human Trafficking;
that the church was itself guilty, in accordance with Cambodian law, of
trafficking. Under such circumstances it is hard to imagine how the Global
Development Group could possibly continue to provide funding to the ‘SHE Rescue
Home.’ Indeed, Geoff Armstrong would be justified in requesting that Citipointe
return the money that it acquired from GDG under false pretenses.
Again, please excuse me if I
address, yet again, the proposition that Rosa and Chita were ‘victims of human
trafficking’. The girls were never involved in any aspect of the sex
trade and nor was there any suggestion made by Citipointe in the early months
of their residency in the ‘SHE Rescue Home’ that they were. It was only a few
years later that Citipointe decided to re-brand Rosa and Chita as ‘victims of
human trafficking.’
best wishes
James Ricketson
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| Chanti, aged 14 |
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