Cambodian authorities keen on "clean" streets during elections
Updated
There are so called "rehabilitation centres" in and around the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, where authorities have been quietly imprisoning some of the city's most marginalised people. While one centre has been closed, others remain open and the city appears determined to keep the streets 'clean', ahead of this month's elections.
Presenter:Bill Bainbridge
Speakers: Holly Bradford, Founder of Korsang, an NGO that works with Phnom Penh drug users; Jason Barber, consultant with human rights group Licadho
BAINBRIDGE: It's early evening and Phnom Penh's streets are teeming with people. As night falls most of them will return to their homes, but thousands of others will bed down in parks and on pavements. Entire families sleep rough with little more than a straw mat between them.
It's the inevitable consequence of the country's problems with poverty and drug abuse. But the people who run Phnom Penh don't like it.
BRADFORD: "We've missing between 250 and 350 injection drug users and yama (amphetamine)
smokers that were participants of Korsang, so people that we served to prevent HIV using a harm reduction method.
BAINBRIDGE: Holly Bradford is the founder of Korsang, a Phnom Penh based organisation that works with the city's drug users.
She say's two weeks ago her clients started to go missing.
BRADFORD: It was a Tuesday and on Saturday we located about 30-35 of them at Koh Kor, and then on the next Tuesday they were all released from Koh Kor and came directly back to Korsang.
BAINBRIDGE: Koh Kor is an institution run by Phnom Penh's Social Affairs Department.
A former Khmer Rouge prison it is officially a voluntary centre where people are supposed to receive vocational training.
This 28-year-old drug user spent several days inside Koh Kor. (Voice to translation)
She says around six in the evening the police collected anybody on the street who looked poor or homeless. Those who could pay a bribe were let free, but others were transferred to Koh Kor, where men, women and children were locked inside a wooden detention centre. Although one woman died they simply wrapped her in a mat and left her body there for several days.
Rights workers who visited the site reported that inmates included a woman on the verge of giving birth, a nine year old epileptic girl, without access to her medicine and several others who were clearly mentally ill. Only rice gruel was served and the inmates were so hungry they pushed their hands through the barred windows to collect grass to eat.
Jason Barber works with the rights group Licadho.
BARBER: This is one of two main centres used by the Phnom Penh social affairs authorities. We've never been able to get access to the other one of those centres. Everybody who has been in Koh Kor, the centre we did get into, everybody says the other centre is considerably worse than Koh Kor.
BAINBRIDGE: The outcry from rights groups saw all but a few of the detainees released last week and Phnom Penh's Department of Social Affairs has told the local press there is no organised program of extra-judicial arrests and detentions.
But the former inmate - who did not want her name used - says the police made it clear the roundups would continue.
INMATE: "They told me "she says " to tell my friends not to walk around on the streets, there's an election coming up and we want to keep the streets clean.
Jason Barber of Licadho says the police are continuing to cast their net wide.
BARBER: None of these people have been charged with any crime. They are arrested because they're poor and because they're either living or working on the streets. So they may be sex workers who are working on the streets, they may be street children, they may be street families who have no houses, they may be drug users, some of the people we met said they didn't live or work on the streets, because of the way they were dressed they were mistaken for poor people therefore they had to be homeless, so they were arrested and detained as well. So it's very indiscriminate.
BAINBRIDGE: And he says the government should close the remaining detention centres without delay.
BARBER: It's not a crime to be poor, if the government wants to do something about people on the streets then it's going to have to find real solutions to deal with the social problems that cause people to live and work on the streets. Just rounding them up, detaining them in appalling conditions and abusive conditions in unlawful detention camps isn't going to achieve anything.
