Leigh Ramsey
322 Wecker Road
Carindale
QLD 4152
1st May 2014
Dear Leigh
Citipointe’s recent announcement that the church intended to return Rosa and Chita to their family has turned out to be, as with all such pronouncements made by you and Pastor Mulheran, a lie. It served the public relationship purposes of the moment but now that the media is no longer interested, you can carry on as normal – until such time, perhaps, that the media takes interest again. At this point you will be able to make more promises and, yet again, break Chanti and Chhork’s hearts.
Just before I left Cambodia, a few days after the end of the Khmer New Year holidays, I conducted an interview with Chanti and Chhork. They were, as they are each year, devastated to have been denied by Citipointe the opportunity to spend this very special Cambodian holiday with their daughters. Quite apart from the illegality of your removal of the girls, quite apart from your forced indoctrination into you own perverse form of Pentecostalism, your efforts over the years to alienate Rosa and Chita from their family constitutes, in my mind, a major human rights abuse.
How could you, as a mother, Leigh, subject Chanti to such treatment, knowing as you must how devastating it would be to have your daughters, whom you love, removed from your family and with no chance of being reunited with them? Imagine if this had happened to your daughter, Becky, and she had been forced to grow up a Buddhist, in an institution, with little of no contact with yourself - her birth mother? With no opportunity to grow up with her siblings, to enjoy living with her family and no rights other than those bestowed by the Buddhist institution? With no avenue of appeal? With no body, no organization, no institution you could appeal to to have your daughters returned to you?
Of course, if anything similar to this had ever happened to you in Australia the perpetrators of such abuse would have been before the courts quick smart and Becky returned to your care. In Cambodia, however, the materially poor parents of girls like Rosa and Chita enjoy no such rights when it comes to unscrupulous NGOs such as Citipointe’s ‘SHE Rescue Home’. With a corrupt and incompetent Ministry of Social Affairs prepared to sanction the kidnapping of children, you can do what you like without fear of punishment. And if some nuisance advocate for the parents of stolen children, such as myself, comes along and starts asking for evidence that the NGO has abided by Cambodian law, the NGO can enter into a corrupt arrangement with the Cambodian judiciary and have him (or her) charged with whatever nonsense offence takes the NGO’s fancy. “Threatening to dishonor”? Mmmm, yes, that sounds good. “Hindering?” Why not? “Profiting from prostitution.” Indeed, that sounds very serious. (As you know, the logic of the ‘profiting from prostitution’ charge is that because I sold SLEEPING WITH CAMBODIA in 1996 and because the film deals, in part, with the subject of prostitution, I have thereby ‘profited from prostitution!)
Pretty much anywhere else in the world such charges would, literally, be laughed out of court. In Cambodia, however, a country in which there is no rule of law, the absurdity of the charges is not relevant. The object of the exercise is intimidation. Find the asker of questions guilty of anything (it doesn’t matter what) and scare him (or her) into backing off. Such tactics have been refined by mafias of one kind or another and have been applied here, to me, by Citipointe church.
Unfortunately, corrupt NGOs such as Citipointe’s ‘SHE Rescue Home’ can rely on the tacit support of the Australian Embassy in Cambodia, of DFAT in general, of the Minister for Foreign Affairs (of both political persuasions) and of the Australian Council for International Development. This support takes the form of a refusal to ask questions; a refusal to ask Citipointe (in this instance) to provide evidence in support of the legality of the church’s removal of Rosa and Chita.
The deck is well and truly stacked in favour of corrupt NGOs – a category that includes the Global Development Group. GDG knows full well that Citipointe had no legal right to remove Rosa and Chita in 2008 on the basis of the sham 31st July ‘contract’ or of the 2008 MOU. GDG has copies of both the 2008 and 2009 MOUs which, were they to be made public, would make clear that your church did not have the rights it has exercised this past close to six years. GDG, like Citipointe, refuses to produce the MOUs.
Now, secure in the knowledge that no-one is going to ask any questions (not DFAT, not AusAID, not Julie Bishop, not ACFID), Citipointe has taken its child-stealing and soul-saving model to India. And what do you know, almost over night Citipointe has found 100 orphans – who have been welcomed into the big family that is Citipointe church! Do these 100 ‘orphans’ have a mother or a father? Do they have grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins? Do they come from villages in which members of their extended family could care for them if it is true that both their parents have died? Has Citipointe entered into any kind of contractual arrangement with the parents of these 100 ‘orphans’; with the extended families of these ‘orphans’? Are these 100 ‘orphans’ now being force fed Citipointe Pentecostalism? Are these girls now being alienated from their families as is the church’s practice in Cambodia? Has the acquisition of these 100 ‘orphans’ been financed by the Global Development Group? Are the 100 ‘orphans’ now providing GDG with a way of using tax-deductible Australian charity dollars to evangelize – contrary to AusAID rules?
These and many such other questions will not be asked by DFAT, by AusAID, by Julie Bishop or by the ACFID Code of Conduct committee. And, because the questions will not be asked and hence no answers required, Citipointe and GDG will be free to take this child-stealing/soul-saving model anywhere in the world it pleases.
I hope, Leigh, that one day there will be an ICAC style investigation into corruption within the aid industry and that you will be called upon, under oath, to answer questions of the kind I have been asking for close to six years; to answer all those questions that DFAT, four ministers for Foreign Affairs and ACFID refuse to ask. I hope, by the time any such investigation takes place, that the damage your church has done to families worldwide is limited. I fear this will not be the case, however, and that there will be hundreds of parents like Chanti and Chhork whose hearts will be broken by the loss of the daughters they were tricked, Citipointe church, into giving up.
best wishes
James Ricketson
cc the Hon Julie Bishop, MP
Alison Burrow, Australia’s Ambassador to Cambodia
ACFID Code of Conduct committee
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