‘Rice Children’ in Cambodia and ‘Sound of Freedom’ the movie
I have not seen the movie, yet. Still, one cannot avoid the publicity, especially the egregious criticism of people who for quite bizarre reasons would rather NOT publicise what is a massive worldwide trade in humans.
Let’s put this industry — it is one — in context:
From the 16th to the 19th century, around 12 million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic as slaves. The Global Slavery Index, published by the Walk Free Foundation, estimated in 2018 that approximately 40 million people were victims of modern slavery, including forced labour, forced marriage, and forced sexual exploitation.
The trafficking of children, primarily for sexual purposes is a subset of this number. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) says that, globally, one in three detected trafficking victims is a child.
In other words, worldwide literally millions of children are taken, sold, bought, traded, usually for sexual purposes. This is not casual crime, it is an organized multi-billion dollar industry.
My own experience:
I worked in Cambodia in 2015. For the World Bank Group (International Finance Corporation), and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Both projects were related to rice, so one comes to understand the dynamics of poor villages and impoverished people well. The truth is, in many poor countries desperate families sell their children to traffickers.
However, bad as that is — and you have to be poor to understand the behaviour — far worse is when rich foreigners exploit this poverty. It goes beyond comprehension if these foreigners are part of aid programmes aimed at improving the welfare of the poorest of the poor.
And yet, the manager of the ADB project turned out to be a paedophile.
I wrote this story as a chapter in my book, ‘Rivers of Aid: Stories from the Poor Countries’.
Chapter 10 in my book is entitled ‘Rice Children’. Here is a (heavily) abridged, somewhat re-written version:
RICE CHILDREN
Context
We are in Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia. Some will remember from April 1975 the black and white photos of empty streets as the Khmer Rouge announced ‘Day Zero”. It was, they said,
“An age in which there will be no families, no sentiment, no expressions of love or grief, no medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books, no learning, no holidays, no music, no song, no post, no money — only work and death.” (‘Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia’, John Pilger).
They were wrong about the “age”; it was only four years long. A period so terrible that one of my local colleagues who had experienced it as a young boy was unable to speak — literally could not verbalize — in an open meeting. In private, he hesitatingly told me that his survival had depended on saying nothing, even as he watched his parents’ skulls smashed with hoes.
In January 1979, Vietnamese troops entered Phnom Penh and overthrew Pol Pot’s genocidal regime. Two million Cambodians had died by execution, forced labour, and famine.
And yet oddly, the Cambodian seat at the United Nations was held by the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot, a democidal, genocidal mass murderer had won the support of the US and most of Europe against Vietnam. The murderers of millions of their fellow citizens were seen as a legitimate government, while those who had restored some semblance of stability and safety (i.e., the Vietnamese) were not.
In the years that followed, the United States, traumatised by its defeat in Vietnam, would support the Khmer Rouge as an “anti-communist resistance movement”. Eventually, unable to ignore the human rights record of the KR (the movie ‘The Killing Fields’ had shocked audiences as much as the ‘Sound of freedom’ is doing now). President Reagan changed policies, and the KR were out.
Yet what had happened was horrendous damage to Khmer society, not only in terms of millions of murdered people but the destruction of the very basis of civilized behaviour.
The Khmer Rouge attacked the attitude of the citizens rather than their race or nationality. They attempted a complete remould of Cambodian society, disrupting every aspect of daily life. Monks were defrocked, cities emptied, and villages were renamed. Ritual life was halted, Buddhism outlawed, and family life remodelled. The fabric of society was destroyed.
To this moral wasteland came the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia. In 1992 UNTAC effectively took over the government.
It soon came to be seen as another foreign invader bringing pestilence. With them came HIV/AIDS. Sex was freely available. At one infamous Phnom Penh bar/club, a large signboard stood outside with the names of each bar girl. Next to the names (in an early version of Facebook), punters could provide a rating and a short description. AIDS became depicted as the new “killing fields”.
The trauma of the Pol Pot period, followed by what was seen as social anarchy fostered by foreigners and local rent-seeking officials, led in the ’90s to an atmosphere of anything goes. There was a rise in crime, including sexual abuse, rape, and paedophilia.
WARNING — THIS IS HARD TO READ:
Here are two stories from the time:
“Three young boys aged from 11 to 14 years old were arrested for having raped a 5-year-old girl at noon in Banteay Meanchey district. Their mother said that the three confessed that they had just viewed a sex video. She realized only when she saw the bloodstain on her daughter’s skirt and her son told her the truth. The 14-year-old boy also told the police that when he had lived in the provincial capital he had persuaded his immediate younger sister, then five years old, to have sex with him and when his family moved to this village, he had sex with another little girl. Altogether he had raped three girls. The police confirmed that the root cause of the problem was that a military official had played sex videos at his house and had allowed a big group of boys to watch, arousing them to rape the girls.” (R. J. Rummel, Death by Government, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994, p. 4).
“Sokha grew up in a poor village near Phnom Penh. She said she was just 7 years old when she was sold for sex to an American man named Michael Joseph Pepe, a former U.S. Marine, who was then living as an ex-pat in Phnom Penh. “He won my virginity,” Sokha said. She did not know why he had come to Cambodia to buy a child like her for sex.” (‘Inside the world of Cambodia’s child sex trade, as told through the eyes of a survivor.’ By Bob Woodruff, John Kapetaneas, Geoff Martz, and Karson Yiu, ABC News, March 8, 2017)
Sokha was a “virgin sale,” and she spent years shuttling between illegal brothels, always locked in a dark room. The child sex trade is not simply the pimping and prostitution of children; it includes trafficking these youngsters within the region, perhaps farther afield.
This cauldron of mass crime against humanity, extensive social disruption, poverty, and mental distress — arguably the deliberate destruction of a culture of morality based on traditions and Buddhism — attracted the worst kind of criminal, those that prey on children. Neither UNTAC nor the government prioritised the issue, focused as they were on economic reconstruction and growth. The sorts of people working in the development agencies were not bad people by any means, simply that when the day of meetings ended, it was too much to expect more than to visit a bar and chat with a pretty boy or girl. As for the local officials, including the police, there was too much money flowing to spend time on matters that seemed trivial compared to what had been suffered in the recent past.
UNTAC — the international ‘‘humanitarian community’’ — laid the foundation of a society in which human trafficking and sex for sale, including the sale of children, was casually accepted. The Government run latterly by Prime Minister Hun Sen (himself a veteran of the Khmer Rouge and personally a strong opponent of trafficking) itself made lacklustre attempts to fight it.
The extent and persistence of the problem is described by the US State Department,
“The Government of Cambodia does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so, even considering the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on its anti-trafficking capacity; therefore Cambodia was downgraded to Tier 3.” (2022 Trafficking in Persons Report: Cambodia Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, US State Department).
My Story
It is 2014–15. Phnom Penh is a different city from the bleak days of Day Zero. The economy is booming, and the humanitarian development folk are in fine voice; the River is pouring its largesse into one of the greatest kleptocracies on the planet. During the day, the trendy cafes are full, and traffic is jammed solid, with a Lexus the least of the high-end models used by government officials. At night haute cuisine is found in world-class restaurants, and the bars and clubs do colossal business.
Nevertheless, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is struggling. The Bank has been in Cambodia since the early days, but has had limited impact. It was fortunate that “in the pipeline” (“pipelines” are streams of funds committed to specific projects) is a loan for USD 100 million aimed at increasing Cambodia’s rice crop productivity, improving post-harvest processing, and raising annual exports to one million tons.
My company was brought into the project to help with policy and rice marketing issues. I arrived in Phnom Penh to find that things were going well. The work on the project was undertaken by a consortium led by a large Danish company.
The project manager for this company that implemented the project was an Australian, Geoffrey Moyle. He had been in Cambodia some years, had a local wife and children. I knew Geoff Moyle well. He was a nice guy, professional, experienced, well respected in the Phnom Penh community. We would enjoy a beer or two after work, and I knew his family.
But surprisingly, soon after the project starts, Mr Moyle resigns and leaves the country. Soon he emails to say he is working for another large international development company. I wished him the best, although his sudden absence had caused some disruption in the project; we missed his knowedge of Cambodia, contact with the government officials and all-round expertise.
It comes as a profound shock to read,
”Adelaide man who admitted to abusing children in Cambodia identified as Geoffrey William Moyle
Geoffrey William Moyle, 46, last week pleaded guilty to 11 charges, including nine offences which were committed in Cambodia, and a further two committed in Adelaide. In his online profile, Moyle stated he worked in Cambodia for a decade as the South-East Asia director of an international engineering consultancy company. It stated he was “retained” by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) as a “specialist” under its Aid Advisory Panel. The charges included unlawful sexual intercourse with a child, commit (sic) indecent act on a child and possessing child exploitation material. The sexual offences were committed in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, between 2002 and 20005 …” (report by Meagan Dillon, ABC News, Posted Wed 22 Jan 2020).
The police had seized a USB containing child exploitation material. Moyle, who operated under the codename “Waka”, was sentenced to eight years and nine months in prison with a non-parole period of four years and six months. He was further sentenced to nine months for possessing child exploitation material in Australia in 2019. In sentencing, Judge Paul Cuthbertson described Moyle as a “loving father, son and husband”.
There are times when words fail.
In June 2022, South Australia’s Court of Appeal found that Moyle’soriginal sentence did not reflect the seriousness of the offending and the harm suffered by each of the victims. The Court overturned the sentence and jailed him for twelve years with a non-parole period of seven years.
The judges said,
“The victims of Mr Moyle’s offending are not limited to the nine victims of each of the offences of which he was convicted. Mr Moyle’s participation in the commercial exploitation of children played its part in supporting the ongoing trade of those who peddle in the misery of children.” (The Canberra Times June 22, 2022).
Exactly.
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It makes lousy reading. I knew Geoffrey Moyle well. No one had the slightest idea of who or what he was — a monster — and he was only caught (as far as I know) by accident. Although there were reports of the investigation by ‘‘shadowy agencies’’.
He operated under our noses. He was a friend, a colleague. He betrayed any idea of humanitarianism that he pretended to represent. And because of his position I imagine he felt protected. Very likely others like him feel the same, and they get away with it.
The damage that he did goes further than the immediate children that he abused. He help destroy faith in what are genuine efforts to alleviate the misery of the rice children. Instead he took them, and foully hurt them.
He was unlucky to get caught, and you wonder exactly how many more of such persons there are out there. A lot.
I hope he rots.
I hope that the movie ‘Sound of Freedom’ goes much further than it already has done in exposing this ghastly business. It cannot go far enough.
And yet still there are the cretins, the morons, the despicable shits, who criticise and wish to pretend none of this happens.
It does. RIGHT UNDER OUR NOSES, AND WITH PEOPLE WE COUNT AS OUR FRIENDS.
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You won’t have liked this story. Who could. Unfortunately it’s true. Others in my book are less so, a mix of fact and fiction. Moyle is all too real fact. However, what I’ve tried to do in the book is to reflect the way the international development business affects individual lives. Do please check it out.
