Dear Helen Sworn and Naly
Pilorge
Your capacity to remain silent, to refuse to answer any questions at
all, comes as no surprise to me after all these years. How dare anyone have the
temerity to ask questions of either Chab Dai or LICADHO and expect answers.
This is not the way not works. You are accountable to no-one and do not
practice the very transparency that you expect of the Cambodian government. If
a powerful Cambodian (in either government or business) threatened to have an
expatriate NGO ‘forcibly removed’, threated to have him or her arrested, jailed
and banned from coming to Cambodia again, would this not give rise to a public
statement, at least, deploring such behavior? Or are NGOs (particularly
Christian NGOs) exempt from criticism for such thuggish behaviour? Why can’t
Chab Dai take, at the very least, a moral stance in public on such behavior? Is
there any moral principle that Chab Dai will stand up for or is its support of
fellow Christians unconditional?
Given that I have broken no Cambodian laws I have to presume that
Pastor Mulheran believes he has the power and influence necessary to request of
the police that I be ‘forcibly removed.’ Not really the sort of behavior one
would expect of a Christian, I would have thought, Helen, but as you know
Christians come in all shapes and sizes and not all of them are as they appear
to be or as they present themselves to be to the public. But you and Chab Dai
will stand by them through thick and thin.
As I have written before, such a thinly veiled threat is almost
certainly the bluff and bluster of a bully but, as you both know, having me
‘forcibly removed’ (such a delightful euphemism!) would be easy for anyone in
Cambodia with pockets deep enough to make it happen. Radio personalities, politicians, home and land
owners are ‘forcibly removed’ on a regular basis in Cambodia!
Rather than a Mafia style forcible removal I suspect it may be that
Citipointe intends to have me ‘forcibly removed’ by suing me for defamation in
Cambodia for having accused the church of having ‘stolen’ Chanti and Chhork’s
daughters, Rosa and Chita, in 2008? This threat has been made or intimated a
few times this past few years. Citipointe would not consider suing me in
Australia, of course, because in Australia a court would arrive at a verdict
based on facts, on evidence and the church knows that I have a mass of evidence
pointing to Citipointe having ‘stolen’ Rosa and Chita in much the same way in
which Aboriginal children were ‘stolen’ from their materially poor parents in
Australia last century – a now thoroughly discredited form or social
engineering for which we have, as a nation, made a formal apology. And if
Citipointe had not entered into a legally biding contract with the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs in August 2008, giving the church the right to detain Rosa and
Chita contrary to the express wishes of Chanti and Chhork, Citipointe broke
Cambodian law by essentially kidnapping the girls.
The publicity surrounding a defamation case in Australia would throw
onto Citippointe precisely the sort of spotlight that the church does not want
– preferring, as it does, to cloak its activities in secrets and lies.
Questions would be asked along the lines of those I have been asking for close
to five years and which are to be found, in their abundance, on my blog -
questions that Citipointe simply refuses to answer and which neither Chab Dai
nor LICADHO feels that it is even important to ask. Questions like: “Was your
removal of Rosa and Chita from their parents care in mid 2008 in accordance
with Cambodian law?” Do you not ask such a question because you know the answer
and the answer would reflect badly on both your organization for having said or
done nothing to protect the human rights of Chanti, Chhork, Rosa and Chita this
past close to five years?
A court case in Australia would lead to questions of the kind I ask
being publicly aired; to Citipointe being forced to be transparent and
accountable for its actions; to provide the court (and hence my defense team)
with copies of the legal agreements the church claims to have with the
Cambodian Ministries of Foreign and Social Affairs; with the agreements the
church claims to have entered into with Chab Dai and LICADHO giving Citipointe
the right to deny parents and children in the care of the She Rescue Home the
right to maintain meaningful contact with each other. I have asked this
question countless times but will try again:
Is Citipointe’s account of the involvement of Chab Dai
and LICADHO in the removal of Rosa and Chita from their parent’s care in mid
2008 a true and accurate one or is the church lying?
Scrutiny of the kind that a court case would involve in Australia is
the last thing Citipointe would want. If the church were to sue me in Cambodia,
however, the facts, the truth, contracts and agreements would be of secondary
(or no) importance – as a wealth of ‘defamation’ cases in that country bear
witness. It is possible, in Cambodia, as you would be well aware, to be found
guilty of defamation for simply questioning the wisdom of hanging lights off
Angkor Wat so that tourists can visit the temple at night. The Cambodian
judiciary’s definition of defamation is very flexible indeed!
The
problem with Citipointe, Hagar and Love In Action (and a whole host of others)
is that there is no mechanism whereby such NGOs can be held accountable for
what they do or fail to do. Any and all NGOs can write whatever they like on
their websites about family re-integration, helping families become
self-sustaining, capacity building etc and there is no body, no organization,
that will ever look at what they do and determine whether of not the NGO is
achieving its goals or even if it is trying to achieve its stated goals. An NGO
is able to run for years illegally, flying a Christian flag (in the case of
Love In Action) with no questions asked. Or, in the case of Citipointe, pay
poor parents such as Chanti 25 cents to manufacture a wrist band that the church
sells for $3 – blatant exploitation – with no questions being asked by anyone.
And Hagar can, allegedly, limit visits between parents and children to 2 hours
per annum with no questions being asked. It is encouraging that the Ministry of
Social Affairs is now starting to ask such questions but why haven’t Chab Dai
and LICADHO been asking any of these questions this past five years?
Clearly,
in amongst all the good and effective NGOs there are some that are badly run,
badly conceived and which have an agenda other than the one that they declare
on their website to their donors and sponsors. It is in the interests of all
NGOs that these bad NGOs be weeded out of the system. Otherwise, all NGOs
become tainted by the reputation of the bad NGOs.
One
way of weeding out ‘bad NGOs’ would be for all NGOs in Cambodia to contribute a
small amount each year to fund an independent monitoring body that is totally
open and transparent and not beholden to any one NGO. Such an independent
monitoring body could do spot checks on NGOs, conduct surveys, talk to
‘clients’ to determine how effective or otherwise NGOs are in meeting their
stated goals. This could be the NGO equivalent of random breath testing. In the
case of Hagar, for instance, this independent monitoring body could ask a
representative sample of Hagar ‘clients’ how often they got to see their
families and whether or not ‘clients’ were forced to attend Citipointe church
services. In the case of Citipointe the Independent monitoring body might ask
that the church make known to it the legal basis on which it took control of
the lives of Rosa and Chita in mid 2008. And so on.
It
could be, from one year to the next (as with random breath testing) that an NGO
is not assessed at all but, as with random breath testing, an NGO would be wary
of making claims that could not be substantiated by the independent monitoring
body – especially if the NGO knew that all of its fellow NGOs were going to
find out about it. Given the sheer number of NGOs in Cambodia, the financial
contribution of every NGO that signs up would be minimal. There need be no
obligation on the part of NGOs to sign up but in not doing so the NGO would be
making it publicly known that it was not committed to the precepts of
transparency and accountability – a useful piece of information for others who
have dealings in one way or another with the NGO.
An
independent monitoring body would have no legal clout at all but would serve as
a moral beacon only – pointing out to all those NGOs that have signed up, that
such and such an NGO will not answer certain questions or that there is a
credibility gap between what the NGO says in public and what it does in
private.
In
the event that an NGO does come in for criticism by the independent monitoring
body, the NGO in question should have the right of reply in the same issue of
the newsletter that is sent out to all the other NGOs. So, for example, if the
independent monitoring body finds that an NGO is employing poor Cambodians to
manufacture a product for 25 cents that it then sells online for $3, the NGO
would have the right to defend its actions or deny the truth of them. In the
event that the NGO refused to do so, the other NGOs in the consortium would be
free to draw their own conclusions. What I am suggesting is, of course, only that NGOs be given some encouragement
(at the risk of being publicly shamed) to be transparent, accountable and
honest. Art present, as far as I can sew, there is no requirement on any NGO to
be transparent, accountable or honest – unless they wish, as a matter of
principle, to be so.
I
stress again that such an independent monitoring body should not have any
powers at all other than those that accrue to being publicly shamed for saying
one thing and doing another. Without such a body it is highly likely that a few
rotten apples in the NGO barrel will besmirch the reputation and credibility of
all NGOs.
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