Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Detained sex workers face similarly harsh conditions. Neary, a transgendered sex
worker interviewed by HRW, recalled an incident that allegedly took place in April 2009
in central Phnom Penh:
Three police officers beat me up seriously at Wat Phnom commune police station after I was
taken from the park. One of the police officers pointed his gun at my head and pulled the trigger,
but the bullet did not fire. They kicked my neck, my waist, and hit my head and my body with a
broomstick.
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Like the young women who work in garment factories, many sex workers move to Phnom
Penh from rural areas in search of economic opportunity, joining a new urban underclass
living on the city's geographic and economic fringe. The government makes few pro-
visions for this floating population of seamstresses, bar girls, and construction workers,
who do not figure in official statistics. Very little housing is provided, and no welfare
support; in order to access the opportunity of the Cambodian capital, people are forced to
rely on their own resources.
Ham Chantha looks much older than his 49 years. For two decades he has lived in
shacks on construction sites around the city. His current digs—a workers' camp of cor-
rugated iron shacks with wooden walls held together with rope—sit in the shadow of the
half-completed Sokha Phnom Penh Resort, a towering Sokimex project across the river
from central Phnom Penh, where he has worked pouring concrete foundations. Chantha,
a laconic man with grey hair and sunken cheeks, recounts a familiar story. In 1993, drawn
by the UNTAC boom, he moved to the city from his village in Prey Veng, where he lacked
the land to support a family. Since then he has lived and worked on construction sites, one
of the thousands of laborers who have built Phnom Penh into a modern city. Workers at
the Sokha site earn $5 per day ($7 for supervisors), enough for Chantha to provide for his
wife and their three-year-old grandson—whose mother works in a garment factory—but
little more. “My children are still in the provinces,” he said, “but I never send money to
them because my work takes money from hand to mouth.”
Back across the river, Diamond Island was under lockdown. Its main road was blocked
off by city police. Private security guards in tan safari suits waved SUVs through the bar-
ricade and on toward the entrance to a vast reception hall. Rising from a sea of flowers,
a giant pink love-heart proclaimed the marriage of Hun Chan Makara, a niece of Prime
Minister Hun Sen, to Bun Eang Chhoung, the son of a wealthy Sino-Khmer gold trader.
After passing through metal detectors, guests accumulated at large round tables inside
the hall, a vast hangar with sails of pink bunting drooping from the ceiling. Pink lights
illuminated a pink stage, where a wedding band casually worked their way through a
list of Cambodian pop standards. As at a sporting event or political convention, three
