Cambodia Campaign To Attract more Gay Tourism

[Guest fountainhall]

In 2011

[TotallyOz]

When I was in Cambodia on a recent visit I felt very comfortable and very welcomed. I was not in Siam reap. I was in Phnom Penh.

 

I felt very comfortable going around the city as an openly gay man. I felt very comfortable going to the gay bars. I felt very comfortable going to the gay massage parlors. Basically, I felt very comfortable doing just about anything I wanted to do in Phnom Penh.

 

I do have friends that have gone to Siam Reap before and have had NGO groups follow them around the city. They were not looking for, nor were they taking any young boys. But, they were seen going into a gay bar in the area and they had people that followed them the rest of their trip. When something like that happens it makes you wonder whether you're in the right location. I love visiting Cambodia. I love visiting Phnom Penh and Siam Reap. And I plan to go back many times in the future. But if they're going to do an active campaign that is going to attract gay people from all over the world they need to make sure that the NGOs in the area are not just indiscriminately following anyone who goes to a gay bar.

[Guest]

Good to see they are promoting it as a gay friendly destination.

 

I thoroughly recommend a visit. OK it doesn't have a Boystown or Soi Duangthawee, but the country is an interesting place to visit and it's relatively easy to meet nice local guys.

[Rogie]

I do have friends that have gone to Siam Reap before and have had NGO groups follow them around the city. They were not looking for, nor were they taking any young boys. But, they were seen going into a gay bar in the area and they had people that followed them the rest of their trip.

 

Thanks for mentioning that. I'd not heard that before.

 

Fountainhall quoted:

 

Cambodia is refreshingly free and easy for gays wanting to blend in with our live-and-let-live lifestyle.”

 

well, being followed isn't very 'refreshing' in my book.

 

If the Cambodian tourist board wants to attract more GLBT visitors they'd do well to rein in this kind of thing.

 

On a slightly frivolous note, if the Adore Cambodia! campaign bears fruit then there'll be more customers in the gay bars and the snoopers'll be hard pressed to keep inconspicuous. It'd be fun to stage a mass organised walk-out of a bar, say at midnight, and see who gets followed where. . . a sort of follow the followers Pied Piper style maybe.

[pong]

these notes/mails also land in my postbox, due to other jobs.

This is then nr 4 to enter that promising bandwagon of what i recall seems to be named the ''pink dollar'' (though most visitors aimed at do not even use that money). There was tel Aviv, in Israel, with a grand budget of 50/60,000 US$-mainly put into clever use in social networking twitters and faceymyhyvespagebooks and the like.

Then Nepal came on, smiling Sherpa's and all that. PLU or gays are named like ''frinds of Dorothy,, again if i recall correctly. BTW: an amazing nr of Nepalis look quite simliar to Thai.

The faded glory of Amsterdam, which lost most of its brothels, bars and discos, closed, got fresh money to relive and revive its once thriving name.

Lets just think forward: when a more liberated regime starts in revolt-struck countries like Tunisia, it may even also jump on this bandwaggon. Gays are known to quicker jump into that as people to afraid of any violence hurting their holidays they (thats what they claim on telly) have saved all their life to scrape by for that final dream-holiday.

And for Khmerland/Kampuchea: (if people are able to conceive that there is no war going on-more like overgrown kids playing in the schoolgarden with real in lieu of plastic pistols)-they have money for nothing. All these modern looking things are paid for by some subsidy (development aid) from a western nation. The main benefitors are the adv-agencies setting up those campaigns. So who was it? OZzieland?

[Guest fountainhall]

And for Khmerland/Kampuchea . . . All these modern looking things are paid for by some subsidy (development aid) from a western nation.

I have been almost haunted by the ghastly history of Cambodia ever since I moved to Asia in early 1979. That was the time when the world was finally beginning to realise the nature of the genocide the Khmer Rouge had inflicted on its own people. That atrocity itself was the result of the war crimes of Kissinger and Nixon who had secretly started a war against Cambodia without the mandate of Congress.

 

Pong's mention of development aid reminds me that it was largely the UN and UN-sponsored agencies, whose function was to get the devastated country get back on its feet, who introduced child prostitution and HIV-AIDS. Those representatives of a shocked and morally-outraged world ended up by inflicting a new catastrophe on one of the loveliest of peoples who were totally ill-equiped to cope with it.

[Rogie]

Pong's mention of development aid reminds me that it was largely the UN and UN-sponsored agencies, whose function was to get the devastated country get back on its feet, who introduced child prostitution and HIV-AIDS. Those representatives of a shocked and morally-outraged world ended up by inflicting a new catastrophe on one of the loveliest of peoples who were totally ill-equiped to cope with it.

 

Is that true? (well, if you say it is, it must be but I find it hard to believe/stomach). I am aware UN workers have attracted a bad press in many cases, but to go so far as to lay the blame (in this instance) at their feet. . .?

 

There was an interesting This World documentary on Uk TV recently called The Paedophile Hunters. Based in Cambodia, it showed American ICE agents, (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) on the trail of suspected child sex abusers. Apparently ICE agants have arrested 85 Americans operating overseas (so not just Cambodia) & returned them for trial in the US. I was fascinated to see a lab, somewhere in America (sorry, do not recall where exactly)where they can examine a camera suspected of harbouring digital photos. Even though in one case the suspect had erased hundreds of photos of his victims, this lab was able not only to recover them, but could also determine the exact date they were taken!

[Moses]

but could also determine the exact date they were taken!

 

it is very easy determinate if you restore file of picture - all info incl. camera's model, date of picture and many other details (i.e. EXIF) are stored in each file of digital photo...

 

cameras of Blackberry (or other phones with GPS) store there not only technical details or day and time, but location also!!!

[Guest fountainhall]

Is that true? (well, if you say it is, it must be but I find it hard to believe/stomach)

I did post this information in a discussion on this Board about Cambodia a year or so ago. I cannot find the sources I quoted then, but a quick check this morning found this from a Johns Hopkins University paper on Humanitarian Aid -

 

In Cambodia, UNTAC's 1991-1993 20,000 person, multi-billion dollar mission affected the daily lives of Cambodians in multiple ways, including high inflation, social dislocation, and a large increase in prostitution and HIV/AIDS cases in Phnom Penh.

http://www.sais-jhu.edu/cmtoolkit/issues-in-practice/humanitarian-aid/dilemmas-organizational.htm

 

A second more specific source states the following -

 

The United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) arrived in the country in March 1992 to ensure the implementation of the Agreements on the Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict, signed in Paris on 23 October 1991. It was granted full authority by the Cambodian Supreme Court to govern the country and continued in this role until the end of its mandate in September 1993, when it handed over authority to the new democratically elected government, operating under a new constitution.

 

The United Nations operation involved approximately 22,000 military and civilian observers . . . The sex industry also grew explosively, fuelled by foreign peacekeepers (a high percentage of whom admitted contact with sex workers) and newly-prosperous Cambodians with money to spend.

http://www.adb.org/Documents/Reports/HW_Cambodia/HWCAM.pdf

 

The first case of HIV was discovered in 1991 and that may have been from cross border traffic from Vietnam or Thailand. But the explosion of cases in Phnom Penh is generally agreed to have been largely initiated by the aid workers.

[Guest fountainhall]

Another source on the devastating effect of the presence of the UNTAC personnel on the people of Cambodia.

 

Cambodia has been subjected to foreigners for decades . . . bringing with them bloodshed, devastation, sometimes salvation, but also death in the form of the HIV virus. A specific case in point is the presence of UNTAC (United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia) between 1991-1995. This UN mission "included 20,000 people from numerous countries, including the US, Western Europe, Bulgaria, Uruguay, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Korea, and several African states" (Chris Beyrer, 1998. War in the Blood: Sex, Politics and Aids in Southeast Asia. Published by Zed Books Ltd)

 

Byerer raises two main concerns regarding the presence of so many foreign soldiers. The first is the introduction of HIV into Cambodia . . . the second issue is a reverse transferal of the disease upon return of the soldiers to their homeland. Many of the soldiers present in Cambodia came from strict countries that govern issues concerning sex education with complete censorship (such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and India). In turn, many of the soldiers were not educated on safe sex practices, which exacerbated the spread of the virus. Fifteen percent of Indian soldiers returning from Cambodia were tested HIV positive. Although their goal and mission were peaceful, the UNTAC undeliberately brought long term suffering to the people of already torn Cambodia.

http://www.avnerofer.com/cambodia/campaper.html

[Rogie]

Thanks for going to the trouble to dig out those quotes FH.

 

Looking back, the reason why in my previous post I mentioned that programme on UK TV, is it seemed a natural follow-on from FH's earlier comment. He had said the UN workers had 'introduced child prostitution and HIV-AIDS'. There is no specific mention of that in any of the sources quoted, but I guess it makes a kind of grisly sense. So many adults were killed in the Pol Pot years the numbers of young women (18 - 30) surviving must have been badly impacted. I've no idea, it's simply conjecture on my part, that younger girls (17 and under) became involved for this reason.

[Guest fountainhall]

I take your point that my use of the specific "introduced" was going too far. I suspect HIV may well have been introduced by the Vietnamese Occupation forces who no doubt had their own sexual desires to fulfil. But the evidence seems pretty conclusive that the explosion of HIV and child prostitution occurred only after the UNTAC troops and administrators moved in.

[pong]

but to the subject of gay life developing in Camb/PnPn:

just found a link/announcement that a new gay-aimed disco has opened, I think not mentioned before (sorry-too lazy to make a post on the other forum for that country-seems that anything gets into this thailand branch anyway): qgpnompanh.com. opens from 22.00 till very late. stickyrice.ws is mentioned as having a recent overveiw and mentions bars like glory hole and pontoon. And we have the dear BL from Australia, posting recently about his adventures.