The Pedophiles Of Cambodia

Hantu Laut

If there is anything that is more conspicuous in Phnom Penh it is not so much the size of the Mekong but strangely enough, the humongous presence of Westerners in this poverty stricken country.Besides the normal tourists, they seemed to be everywhere and everywhere else in the country.

These are the long term residents, either working in the many foreign NGOs, doing their own business, or for some, just up to no good.

Why Cambodia needs so many NGOs is still a mystery.There are more than 2000 associations and NGOs operating in the country which have become a pain in Prime Minister Hun Sen's government's neck who said he has yet to see any positive signs coming out of the NGOs and that they are out of control...they insult the government in every way they possibly could just to ensure their financial survival.

Cambodia attracts all kinds of vagabonds just like the days of 'FILTH' of the eighties that found Hong Kong a basking paradise and an island of opportunity for those who can't make it in the great city of London.

'FILTH', as some of you might already know is an acronym that stands for "Failed in London Try Hong Kong" which become a derivative for the 'Old Filth', a novel by Jane Gardam.I will not elaborate on the story but the book is an interesting read of the stiffed upper lip and is easily available.

Cambodia gets different kind of 'filth'.Haven for the filthy foreign pedophiles.

In spite of messages displayed on billboards, behind buses and tuk-tuks warning visitors to the country of the heavy penalty for pedophiles, they obviously deter no one, and Cambodia seems to be a magnet for this type of people, coming here solely for the purpose of securing underage boys or girls as sex slaves lured by money offered to poor parents or procurers aided by official corruptions.

Remember British popster Gary Glitter who had a string of charges of child pornography and child sexual abuse.He lived in Cambodia until 2002 when he was permanently deported to Vietnam due to suspected child sexual abuse.They couldn't lay a finger on him because he used money to silent his victims from selling him out.He was finally caught in Vietnam for child sexual abuse but the authority couldn't pin him on rape charges for lack of evidence.Rape carry the death penalty in Vietnam.Guess! what money can do in poverty stricken countries.

After serving a short jail sentence Glitter was deported to Britain, his home country.

The perpetrators of this despicable crime appears to be unperturbed by their actions and some even bragged about their exploitation of these young children.

A picture I took while in Phnom Penh.

If you stay here long enough you can't help but noticed some of these geezers with girls who could be as young as their granddaughters.They do not show the slightest trace of shame to be seen in public and how they treat these poor Asian children as sex toys and keeping them in bondage by paying off the families.

I have no recourse to official data that provide statistics of the breakdown of the ethnic makeup of pedophiles but going by known cases in Thailand and Cambodia it is almost frothing to the brim with Westerners.The Asian parts may be well hidden by cultural camouflage

Poverty and corruptions are the sauces to this despicable crime and some of the innocent children knew no better that they have been sold into sexual servitude to men 6 to 7 times older than them and some of these girls hardly having reached puberty.

Poor families who can hardly have three decent meals a day and the sky as their roofs are tempted by the lure of money to part with their children with pittance that would only give them temporary relief.

Corrupt officials are the protectors of these despicable trade.

In August this year a Swedish newspaper reported of how a convicted pedophile boasted of having paid $11,000 to, presumably, court officials to get him acquitted in his appeal case.

A few weeks earlier child rights group Action Pour Les Enfants complained to the Interior and Justice Ministry to investigate a 65-year old Dutch sex offender under detention, bragging in his dairy of bribing court officials in Preah Shianok Province.

Many of these perverts get off the hook by paying bribes to police, court officials and other relevant authorities and coached their victims and families not to incriminate them through the same method, bribery.

In another case, Harvey Johnson, a 57-year old failed American real estate developer from Arizona moved to Phnom Penh under the guise of an English teacher.Johnson gives lessons out of his house.Being a teacher it gives him the opportunity to be near young boys and girls.

Unbeknown to Johnson, he has been under surveillance by a local nonprofit group called APLE.

Using undercover agents who managed to get close to Johnson, who spoke freely and without any sense of guilt of molesting young girls.His hours of conversation were taped and video recorded by hidden camera.He was also caught on camera selling child pornography to the undercover agent.

Cambodia is teeming with sexual perverts of all kinds that tempt poor parents with money to part with their children .Some are known and convicted sex offenders in the West but could no longer get their hand on victims to fulfill their insatiable lust in their home countries where the punishment is severe.

Cambodia and Thailand have become their hunting ground due to poverty and corruptions, which allow them to work the system to their advantage.

Galas:A Long Shot For UMNO,Passing The Buck To Ku Li

Hantu Laut

There is much talk about Ku Li as candidate for Galas.

Tungku Razaleigh shouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole.He should not be inticed by the overture from the DPM whom I dread to think of as our next PM. It wouldn't be a feather in his cap for UMNO's new breed.He will be disappointed and hurt after the show ended.

Najib had acted as a true deputy when he was deputy to Pak Lah even under pressure from Mahathir to push Pak Lah out he has behaved nobly which I can't visualise the same with our current DPM.Political doublespeak and body language can tell a lot about a person.Muhyiddin's mixed signal does not bode well with Najib's 1 Malaysia.

Tengku should be beyond this meagre offering.The choice, off course, is his but I believe he wouldn't fall for it.

It is a thankless job. If UMNO loses he gets the blame and a bad name and if they win someone else gets the credit.

Galas, will be a testing ground whether UMNO has regained the Malay supports.It could be a long shot for the party.

If they have high regard for the Tungku than they should give him a high ministerial post as a show of appreciation and source of wisdom, not ask him, mind you he is not young anymore, to be the workhorse in an election.

Other than Najib, most of UMNO leaders are not the thinking lot, they only show their cleverness by being combative.

UN 'to appoint a Malaysian as first space ambassador to greet alien visitors'.What a joke?

Hantu Laut

What a joke! Is this for real?

What resources the UN has to be in the front line of this terrifying idea of receiving extraterrestrial visitors to our planet that could likely be not in peace but probably want a piece of our planet.

Wouldn't the Pentagon and other powerful nations be better equipped to deal with the aliens?

I hope they wouldn't incinerate Mazlan when they first saw her.

"Take me to your leader" If they come sooner than expected where would Mazlan take the aliens to, Obama, Najib or the useless Ban Ki-moon?

It must be an honour to accept such job.

A space ambassador could be appointed by the United Nations to act as the first point of contact for aliens trying to communicate with Earth.

Mazlan Othman, a Malaysian astrophysicist, is set to be tasked with co-ordinating humanity’s response if and when extraterrestrials make contact.

Aliens who landed on earth and asked: “Take me to your leader” would be directed to Mrs Othman.

She will set out the details of her proposed new role at a Royal Society conference in Buckinghamshire next week.

The 58-year-old is expected to tell delegates that the proposal has been prompted by the recent discovery of hundreds of planets orbiting other starts, which is thought to make the discovery of extraterrestrial life more probable than ever before.

Mrs Othman is currently head of the UN’s little known Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa).

In a recent talk to fellow scientists, she said: “The continued search for extraterrestrial communication, by several entities, sustains the hope that some day human kind will received signals from extraterrestrials.

“When we do, we should have in place a coordinated response that takes into account all the sensitivities related to the subject. The UN is a ready-made mechanism for such coordination.”

Professor Richard Crowther, an expert in space law at the UK space agency who leads delegations to the UN, said: “Othman is absolutely the nearest thing we have to a ‘take me to your leader’ person”.

The plan to make Unoosa the co-ordinating body for dealing with alien encounters will be debated by UN scientific advisory committees and should eventually reach the body’s general assembly.

Opinion is divided about how future extraterrestrial visitors should be greeted. Under the Outer Space Treaty on 1967, which Unoosa oversees, UN members agreed to protect Earth against contamination by alien species by “sterilising” them.

Mrs Othman is understood to support a more tolerant approach.

But Professor Stephen Hawking has warned that alien interlopers should be treated with caution.

He said: “I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. The outcome for us would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

The Telegraph

The Politics of Skullduggery and...?

Hantu Laut

We need not tempt ourselves to such prolix and discursive explanation of what happened in PKR elections.We are not dealing with children or people with lack of education.These are grown-ups and mostly educated people.

As adults, we expect maturity,discipline and self-restraint.There is no need to send squad of enforcers to oversee proper conduct of the elections.You do not expect mass hysteria of bad and disrespectful behaviour in adults

When greed takes over everything else take a back seat.What happened in PKR is nothing less than the epitome of greed.

The thuggery for positions in PKR were nothing less the dream of Putrajaya's bounty, the El Dorado, the money on the brain.For all that matters, it may as well be an elusive dream.

Save Malaysia Today have found what went wrong in PKR and, as usual, at the end of the day, blame the culture of skullduggery, thuggery and violence as inheritance from UMNO. The writer, presumably, either younger in age than UMNO and did not know better or a greying adult with short memory, UMNO wasn't like that in its infancy years. If it came from UMNO, than did they not learn it from the grand master who refused to be the elected leader but yet still want to hold the whip.

In UMNO, the less than sanctimonious behaviour started less than three decades ago when cronyism and nepotism created the monster called 'corruptions'. It happened during Mahathir's time.Although, without any doubt I think Mahathir himself is not involved in personal corruption, he chose to close his eyes and ears to its existence in his pursuit of greater progress.

I am not sure whether I can agree with this and not sure what to call it, an editorial or an opinion, didn't say what it was nor a name to it if it was an opinion.

The full article below:

The ugly side of PKR

PKR took great pride in holding its first direct election for party posts, a practice never seen in other political parties. But it turned out to be a shameful show of democracy turned topsy-turvy. In several divisions, the elections descended into rowdy scenes, which do not bode well for a party aiming to capture the heartbeat of the nation in the next general election. Vandalism, verbal abuse and balloting irregularities were the order of the day, causing some divisions to postpone their AGMs and division polls. What went wrong?

In large measure, the blame can be pinned on poor preparations. PKR was all heady when it spoke about its transparent democratic voting process but gave little thought to the reality on the ground. The party should have realised that with 400,000 members in its fold, it would not be an easy walk in the park to carry out direct elections without encountering daunting hurdles along the way. But perhaps blinded by over-confidence and creeping hubris, the top leaders did not see the need to sort out the nitty-gritty of an electoral process, especially when the nationwide operation involved massive infrastructural and logistical problems. Perhaps, PKR assumed that its right-thinking members will do a mature job or that all's well that ends well.

PKR should have mobilised an army of workers from both camps – contenders and incumbents – to oversee the smooth running of the operation. But shockingly it failed to do so. Unsupervised, the field was left wide open to gross abuse: voters were intimidated, ballot boxes were switched or broken, phantom voters were brought in, votes were rigged, names had gone missing, bankrupts had been allowed to jump into the ring. Worse still, violence erupted in several divisions: in one incident, a candidate vying for the chief post was beaten up by a well-known medical doctor although it was denied. In another division, groups of men wreaked havoc when they smashed the ballot boxes, chairs and tables in a thuggery attempt to disrupt the meeting. It also defies logic when only one election official was sent to collect election fees from thousands of eligible voters. As a result, many were left out of the democratic loop because they could not produce the official receipts to cast their votes.

If PKR had done its homework properly, it would have ensured that things would have proceeded smoothly. Election fees could have been collected and receipts issued well in advance of polling day. The list of candidates could have been vetted thoroughly and kept safe in some strong vaults of the PKR headquarters. Bigger halls could have been rented to accommodate the large crowds. Volunteers or even the police could have been roped in to keep out mischief makers and disqualified candidates and keep in eligible voters. The grassroots members should have been left in peace to perform their democratic duty. Sadly, PKR missed the golden opportunity to prove that the party can conduct free and fair elections.

The fingers must also be pointed at seasoned politicians like Anwar Ibrahim who have created an unhealthy climate with their partisan politics. The whole world knows that Anwar is all for Azmin Ali in the latter's quest for the number two spot in the party hierarchy. And the whole world knows that Zaid Ibrahim, the other title chaser, is out in the cold and the target of character assassination. It is an open secret that the intense rivalry between these two political pugilists has spilled into the divisional contests and fuelled the squabbles between the followers of the two factions. When the ballot box is defiled, democracy is thrown out of the window.

PKR is in the dock in this “show trial”. How it performs is crucial to its chances of forming the next federal government. But the party which took the national stage by storm in 2008 is showing all the classic symptoms of the Umno malady – internal spats, political skullduggery, factionalism, smear campaigns, back-stabbing, unrestrained greed for power and glory. This is not a promising development for Anwar's “child” for the child is already becoming wayward and ill-mannered. Suddenly, the scales have dropped and people are seeing the true colours of PKR. If the party cannot put its own house in order, it cannot claim the right to put the whole country into better shape.

Free Malaysia Today