ACFID Code of Conduct Committee
Australian Council for International Development
12 Napier Close, Deakin ACT 2600
24th April 2014
Dear Dr Sue-Anne Wallace
Greg Brown
John Gilmore
Bandula Gonsalkorale
Harwood Lockton
Dr Petrus Usmanij
Fadlullah Wilmot
Dr Simon Smith
Michelle Pearce
Julie Mundy
Last night I received an email from a friend of Chanti’s in Phnom Penh. Attached was a document which, Chanti told me in a phone conversation this morning, is her request that ACFID investigate Citipointe church’s removal of her daughters in 2008.
I have yet to have this document translated but I have told Chanti that I do not want to be involved in her complaint. Indeed, I told her that she was wasting her time and building her hopes up, only to have them dashed yet again. Any investigation that excludes the MOUs, any investigation that does not require of Citipointe that the church provide that it had a legal right to remove Rosa and Chita in the first place, will be a sham.
Imagine an investigation in Australia that focused on contractual law, in which the prosecutor reserved the right not to call the actual contract in question into evidence! This would be seen, quite rightly, as corruption on the part of the prosecutor – guaranteeing that the accused be exonerated for lack of evidence of his or her breach of contract.
The sole function of any ACFID Code of Conduct committee investigation, in the absence of the MOUs, will be to provide Citipointe with a legal fig leaf, behind which it can hide. The church will then use the findings of your committee to fend off any further questions relating to the legality of its actions. You can be sure, also, that the church will use your findings to bolster any other vexatious legal actions it chooses to initiate in Cambodia.
In the meantime, Citipointe has taken its child-stealing, soul-saving scam to India. The church has recently acquired 100 ‘orphans’ in Goa – funded, no doubt, by the Global Development Group. That’s 100 new souls won over to Pentecostalism; 100 young girls to be used by the church to raise funds. How many of these girls are orphans? Any of them? Will the ACFID Code of Conduct committee ask Citipointe for evidence that these girls are in fact orphans? No. Not until or unless the parents of one of the girls makes a complaint. And how likely is this? Which of the parents of these young ‘orphans’ will even know of the existence of ACFID? And even if, by chance, they discovered that ACFID exists and they could make a complaint, they would be in for a rude shock and major disappointment when they discovered that the committee of which you are a part could and would do nothing to help them get back the daughters removed by Citipointe – no doubt with the approval of Indian government officials who have been paid to provide a patina of legality to the church’s actions.
Your committee is a disgrace, a waste of money and complicit in illegal activity of the kind that has led not just to Chanti and Chhork losing their daughters (along with other materially poor Cambodian parents) but, now, to up to 100 families in India losing their daughters.
As far as I am concerned, as far as both my film and book CHANTI’S WORLD are concerned, you are each morally responsible for the breaches of law and human rights perpetrated by Citipointe church in both Cambodia and India.
Shame on you all.
It is to be hoped, though I will not hold my breath, that at some point in the future there will be an ICAC-style investigation into fraud within the aid industry and that your committee will be called upon to explain why you failed to ask Citpointe for documented proof of the legality of its actions in 3rd world countries.
best wishes
James Ricketson
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