James Ricketson: September 2014

Saturday, September 27, 2014

THE CAMBODIA PROJECT

Cambodia, a materially impoverished nation; Australia, a morally impoverished nation. Propping up the Hun Sen dictatorship in with close to $100 million in aid each year was bad policy, even before the idea of sending asylum seekers to Cambodia was made public. Letters #1, #2 and #3 to Julie Bishop speak for themselves. The more embers of the Australian media that can bear witness to this the better.

Scott Morrison and Julie Bishop will be counting on the Australian public forgetting about the fate of ‘our asylum seekers’ in Cambodia as the months and years roll by.

Lest we forget, lets as many of us in the media as possible hold our government accountable.

The process whereby ‘our asylum seekers’ are integrated into the wider Cambodian community needs, I believe, to be documented – by filmmakers, photographers, journalists and others in the media.

A Media Pass costs $5

Once ‘our asylum seekers’ arrive here in numbers such a project will be too big for one filmmaker. Too big for half a dozen filmmakers!

THE CAMBODIA PROJECT (tentative title) to be crowd-funded initially.

Benefits:

(1) Let ‘our asylum seekers’ know that there are a lot of Australians who care about their fate and who do not agree with the government’s rendition policy.

(2) Keep interested and concerned Australians informed about the progress being made by ‘our asylum seekers’

(3) Through social media, the news and current affairs, stories arising from such comprehensive coverage could educate those who believe that Australia’s ‘rendition’ programme is a sound and humane policy.

(4) Make it impossible for the government to convince the Australian public that our rendition policy is working just fine thank you very much and we can all just relax now.

(5) Educate the Australian public about the kinds of problems confronting third world countries such as Cambodia – particularly those run by corrupt dictatorships and propped by up donor nations such as Australia.

All this can and should be done through the telling of the stories of ‘our asylum seekers’. This not about an issue but about men, women and children like us who just happen to have been born in countries like….like Cambodia!

If this germinal idea grows as I think it could perhaps SBS or the ABC would consider funding a real Reality TV series along the lines of “GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM.”

Media people, please feel free to pick my brains. I have 19 years experience with Cambodia now. I am quite happy to share any and everything I know with anyone who asks or who turns up in Cambodia whilst I am here.

Anyone media person interested, hop of a plane, come to Cambodia and see for yourself and write, take photos or make films about what you discover.

For all its problems (and they are legion) you will fall in love with the people and with the country.

Friday, September 26, 2014

# 3 letter to Foreign Minister Julie Bishop re refugees - 30th Jan 2014

The Hon Julie Bishop

Minister for Foreign Affairs

House of Representatives, Parliament House 

Canberra ACT 2600

24^th Feb 2014

Dear Minister

Why would a wealthy country like Australia even consider offloading refugees that arrived in Australian waters onto a poor country like Cambodia?

Cambodia is a country in which 40% of children are malnourished; a country in which one in five live below the poverty line; a country which, year after year, is voted one of the most corrupt in the world; a country in which the Hun Sen regime’s response to garment factory workers on strike, seeking the $160 a month wage that the government itself acknowledges is the bare minimum needed for survival, is to call in heavily armed soldiers shoot to kill? These soldiers, none of whom have been charged, belong to an army that receives military aid from Australia. And this army is controlled a government that receives around $100 million in aid from Australia each year – a substantial part of which winds up directly and indirectly lining the pockets of corrupt politicians.

Is Australia’s $100 million being spent to alleviate poverty in Cambodia or is it contributing, along with donor dollars from elsewhere in the world (up to $1 billion a year), to propping up what is essentially a dictatorship?

As I mentioned in my last letters to you of 26^th and 29^th Jan, receipt of which has not been acknowledged by your office, you need only look at some of the footage available to you online to get some sense of the sheer scale of the Hun Sen regime’s human rights abuses. And this is the government into whose care you wish to entrust refugees who arrived on Australian shores?

Will 40% of the child refugees joint the ranks of the malnourished? Will one in five of the refugee families that are deported to Cambodia live below the poverty line? No, it will be considerably more than one in five because these refugees will arrive in a country that has no social services to speak of, a country in which they do not speak the language, a country in which there is so little work for Cambodians that garment factories can get away with paying garment workers just half of what is required to survive?

It is hard to imagine why Australia engages in diplomatic relations at all with a government whose victory in the July 2013 elections is in very serious doubt. Every independent observer of the elections acknowledges that fraud on a massive scale occurred. Many countries, including Australia and the US congress, called for an independent investigation into the election results. Then, last October, Prime Minister Tiny Abbott congratulated Hun Sen on having won elections that few outside the Cambodian People’s Party believe he won. Was it in October that the Tony Abbott government conceived this plan to offload refugees onto Cambodia?

“We will cease our calls for an independent investigation of the election results, Mr Hun Sen, and pump another $100 million into the Cambodian economy next year in foreign aid if you will help us with our refugee problem?”

Is this the reality behind the spin that will ultimately be presented to the Australian public if this deal is sealed? Given that you did not take questions at your Phnom Penh press conference, we in the media will never have an opportunity to put this question to you and get an answer.

Not only is your plan to offload refugees onto Cambodia an abrogation of Australia’s duty of care for people who arrive on our shores seeking refuge, not only is it inappropriate to ask a poor country to shoulder the burden and prop up a corrupt government in the process, it is also virtually guaranteed to fail. And when it fails there will be plenty of representatives of the media in Cambodia, including myself, who will inform the Australian public of this failure – in all likelihood at a time when the Abbott government is trying to convince the Australian public that its policy of stopping the boats has been a success.

You should abandon this misconceived idea immediately.

best wishes

James Ricketson

# 2 letter to Foreign Minister Julie Bishop re refugees - 30th Jan 2014

The Hon Julie Bishop

Minister for Foreign Affairs

House of Representatives, Parliament House 

Canberra ACT 2600

30^th Jan 2014

Dear Minister

Imagine this:

Your neighbours are very poor. The mother and father cannot feed, clothe, educate or provide medical care to their many children. The roof to the family home leaks and they have no money to repair it. Their lives have been marred by tragedy and trauma. You feel for them. You want to help. What do you do? You are comparatively rich and in a position to pay to have the roof repaired, buy decent clothes for the children, put them in school and provide the family with healthy food and other basic necessities of life. You are a good person, so you open your wallet put your money where your heart is. Your actions are to be applauded. Everyone in the family is appreciative, thankful for the help you are providing to keep their heads above water.

Having committed yourself to helping this family you discover that the father regularly beats, intimidates and mistreats his children. You are shocked to learn that a substantial part of the money you have provided to help the family is being spent by the father to indulge in his own pleasures – drinking and gambling in particular. What do you do?

Concerned, but not wishing to be judgmental, (this father has suffered a great deal in his life) you take him aside and tell him, politely, that you cannot provide financial assistance to the family if he continues to mistreat his children; to drink and gamble away the money you give him. You suggest also that he put some effort into finding a job so that he, too, can help support his family. Contrite, hand on heart, the father promises to mend his ways and look for a job. You are relieved.

It soon becomes apparent that the father has no intention of keeping his promises. The gambling, drinking and abuse of his children continues and you see no evidence that he is trying to get a job. You feel a little uneasy about how your effort to help is turning out. You wonder if, in providing his family with generous financial assistance, the father now has no pressing need to earn a living. He knows that you, out of the goodness of your year, will feed, clothe and educate his children.

You speak with the father again. More forcefully this time! Again, he is contrite and makes the same promise to reform in his behaviour. Yes, this time he will be true to his word, stop gambling, drinking and mistreating his children. He makes a solemn promise. And he will put a great deal of effort into finding a job. His promises are made with such sincerity that you give him the benefit of the doubt; one more chance. After all, this father has suffered so much, has been so traumatized by past experiences beyond his control, that it is unrealistic to expect him to mend his ways immediately. It will take time. This is what you tell yourself. This is what you need to tell yourself. This what you need to believe.

This round robin of promises made and promises broken goes on for some time until, in exasperation, you say to him, “I will provide no more support for your family for as long as you spend the money on yourself – drinking and gambling - and not on your family; until you get a job and stop intimidating and mistreating your children.” The father responds, with a sorrowful expression, “But my children must eat! If you do not provide us with money, how will my children eat? I am a poor man. Our family has been through so much trauma. Please, you must continue to help us. Think of the children.”

This works. You feel both guilty and trapped. How can you possibly withdraw financial aid to your neighbours, knowing full well that if you do, it is the children who will suffer the most? Do you want to take on that responsibility? Do you want to be seen as uncaring? No. So you keep on giving. You come to accept as a fact of that the father skims a good deal off the top of what you provide for the family - to spend on his own drinking, gambling and other selfish pastimes. You accept that he is not going to even try to get a job so that he can support his family himself. This is the price, you tell yourself, that you must pay for helping his children. Surely it is better, you ask yourself, that some money trickles through the father’s fingers to help the children than none at all? You answer in the affirmative because the alternative is too distressing to contemplate – namely that you have become an accessory in the father’s mistreatment of his children by relieving him of his responsibility to support them in an atmosphere free of intimidation and fear.

You are now, despite your good intentions, complicit in his mistreatment of his children. Your support for the family, well-meaning though it was at the outset, is actually damaging the family further since the father controls the purse strings and his purse is mostly filled with your money! That you are an accessory to a the crime of the father’s human rights abuses within his own family is something you must do all you can to hide from yourself. You are a good person, after all!

One day you discover that the father has so badly beaten one of his children that she has been hospitalized and may die. What do you do? Withdraw your aid to the entire family? Punish the children for the father’s bad behavior?

This simple cautionary tale ignores the fact that others in the neighbourhood are also providing the father with financial assistance on the presumption that it is being used to help the entire family. If you withdraw your aid the others will step in to fill the gap. You have, in reality, no leverage. The father is playing you for a sucker. The only way that your threat to withdraw your aid to the family can or will carry any weight if it is made in conjunction with all the others in the neighbourhood that are providing financial assistance to it.

What would happen if you, and all your all your neighbours, speaking with one voice, were to say to the father, “We will provide no more aid until you stop mistreating your family and spending our aid money on yourself?” With nowhere to turn for financial aid it may well be that the father is not in a position to play the neighbours off against each other and has no choice but to not only agree to change his ways, but to actually change them.

Analogies of the kind I am making here are, of course, simplistic. However, they do point to a truth so glaring that it cannot be ignored: The international donor community has, though its billions of dollars of aid this past 20 years ($18 billion) absolved the Hun Sen government (the ‘father’) of the responsibility to feed, clothe, house and otherwise take care of the Cambodian people. The international donor community has stepped in to do what the Cambodian government should be doing in terms of providing social services. If this community, and the gaggle of NGOs it supports, were to withdraw aid, Hun Sen could accuse them of heartlessness, of abandoning the poor who are, after all, poor because they are victims (albeit 2^nd and 3^rd generation victims) of the Khmer Rouge! Blackmail!

If the International donor community speaking with one voice, were to cut all aid to Cambodia until Prime Minister Hun Sen acts in accordance with the Cambodian constitution, until his government obeys the Land Laws that make it illegal to steal the land and homes of Cambodians, and until he stops sending armed soldiers and black-helmeted thugs armed with electric cattle prods to beat up and sometimes kill peaceful protestors, his government would be broke within weeks. His Ministers, members of his family and the corrupt businessman who make up the kleptocracy that controls Cambodia – its people and resources – would be unable to survive in the absence of the bribes that are the lifeblood of their dealings with the international community. Something would have to change.

What would happen if the flow of money that keeps Hun Sen and his regime in power were to come to a sudden end? There are many possibilities. Backed into a corner, Hun Sen may respond violently and much blood may be spilt by innocent Cambodians who want nothing other than a genuine democracy and not to be ruled, for yet another five years, by a dictator.

On the other hand, Hun Sen’s own party may realize that his autocratic ways have rendered him a liability and get rid of him. Or, Hun Sen may realize that the tide of history is against him and that it is time for him to retire and live in comfort on the many millions of dollars he has acquired in his Prime Ministers’ salary! In the south of France, perhaps! No-one can be sure what the outcome would be but it is hard to imagine that it could be worse than the situation that prevails.

Do you, as Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, do the Foreign Minister’s of other countries propping up the Hun Sen government want to be a party to the political turmoil that is racking the country now, in five years? When Hun Sen arranges, through his manipulation of the National Election Committee and the Constitutional Council to win yet another election in 2018, how will you and the international community respond? Express your concern? Yet again? Expressions of concern are meaningless unles backed up with action.

No doubt, later this year, when Australia promises another $100 million in aid to Cambodia, Hun Sen will make the same kinds of solemn promises of reform as he has been making this past 20 years. Will you buy it, Minister? Is there any point at which you and your fellow Foreign Ministers will say, “Enough”? When the international donor community will stop expressing its ‘concern’ and actually act in a way that has the best interests of the Cambodian people at heart?

Australia could play a leading role here in coordinating an international coalition of donor countries to put pressure on Hun Sen to (a) allow for an independent investigation to take place into the ‘flawed’ July 2013 elections, (b) to implement an independent investigation into the murder of striking garment factory workers earlier this month such that the killers, along with those who gave the orders to shoot to kill, are identified and punished in accordance with Cambodian law.

You do not need, Minister, to await the arrival of more reports into what is taking place in Cambodia. Just go online and see for yourself. You could start with this one – footage of the Deputy Governor of Phnom Penh beating up a moto dop driver:

http://truth2power-media.blogspot.com/2014/01/phnom-penh-post-video-deputy-gov-caught.html?showComment=1391053517494#c3339757106368361075

If the Deputy Governor of Phnom Penh can perpetrate violence of this kind with impunity it should come as no surprise that members of the armed forces can and will follow suit. Is this the form of government that Australia wants to support with an annual injection of $100 million in foreign aid?