Forced from their provincial homelands by poverty and drought, many

of the beggars and homeless living in Phnom Penh's streets are now being picked up

in sweeps and illegally detained in centers like 'Kapsrov'. Chea Sotheacheath

and Martin Wikfalk report.

EMPTY CELL

This center was closed for the election, but arrests of Phnom Penh's homeless have now resumed.

Tuesday, Aug 4, 9:40 pm. A typical sultry Phnom Penh night: hundreds of people are

drinking and eating in the restaurants around Phsar Thmei, children play in the streets

and beggars move from table to table asking for a few hundred riel.

"Go, go, go!... Police. Police! GO!" A dozen or more people, many of them

bare-chested children carrying little bags of food scraps, dash madly through the

street. They collide with diners sitting on chairs and crash into parked motorbikes.

"Go! GO!"

Diners leap up to see what's going on. Some find it funny. Faces crane out from apartments

high overhead: What's happening?

"Oh not again," sighs a drinks seller. "They've come to arrest these

people again. They have often arrested them before," she says, looking at the

melee. "They arrest these people and they escape... they come back here again."

Three men in civilian clothes jog into the street. They shout "Stop!" at

those running but it doesn't work. Two have bulky, squawking ICOM radios under their

shirts. They can't catch the fleeing urchins and even the older beggars have had

too much of a head start.

Three women nearby, obviously frightened but not wanting to show themselves, hurry

off in short, rapid steps to hide behind stalls or disappear into darkened corridors.

For some reason one of them fearfully hangs around.

The three officials zero in on two men and an elderly woman sitting at a food table,

each of them dressed in tell-tale countryside kramas. Two of the officials stand

with hands on hips and watch for other suspects. The third begins interrogating the

woman:

"Where do you live, you? In Phnom Penh or the provinces?"

"Yes?" she says, lifting her spoon to her mouth and glancing at her two

friends.

"I asked what province are you from." Harder. Harsher. Pointing an accusatory

finger.

"I live in Phnom Penh."

"Where's your house?"

"Over there," she says, pointing north.

The noodle seller tries helping. "Oh, she's a bit deaf, she can't hear."

Around the corner, three malnourished and naked babies, noses running and eyes streaming,

have been left behind in the stampede. One almost falls off his folding bamboo cot.

Another sucks on a milk bottle next to a bag. Soiled clothing is left strewn around

him.

This area 50 meters east of the the central market is where the street people sleep.

It is one of the areas most dangerous for them, where they're most vulnerable. After

a quiet election period, the authorities are again rounding up Phnom Penh's street

people.

Many of them have experienced Kapsrov before, one of the Ministry of Social Welfare's

three shadowy detention centers 13km west from central Phnom Penh.

A pickup truck filled with stern, armed military policemen sits behind a larger Korean-made

truck already filled with 15 or more homeless people, mainly women, all of them dressed

in simple, colorful rural clothes. They are quiet and look very distressed - and

probably have good reason to be.

The trucks lurch off.

"I heard the engine and I recognized it was the Kapsrov truck," says Yin

Savun. "That's why I was the first to run away. I hate the Kapsrov truck."

The three babies are still alone in the street; heart-breakingly skinny and dull,

listless. A silent youth with no shirt props one of the kids back onto the middle

of his cot.

Soon, a woman hesitantly returns. She's familiar - the one who had earlier hid from

the round-up rather than flee. It's obvious now why. She begins to cradle her little

son, wrapping a krama around him and glancing about at those watching her.

"I'm so frightened," she says unprompted. "I just arrived here yesterday.

Oh, it's such a drought," she says of her Prey Veng homeland. "I will not

stay here any more. I'm going back tomorrow." This fearful situation in Phnom

Penh is intolerable - even more so than the poverty of home.

She may find it hard to believe that she's been luckier tonight than Yang Mol.

The 43-year-old Mol, who collects empty cans in Phnom Penh, lost her 6-year-old daughter

last month after having left her alone with her 4-year-old brother on a city street.

"I told my children: 'Stay here, you must not move.' My daughter said: 'Oh,

I have to stay here Mum.'" At lunch time Mol returned with food for her family

and her daughter was gone.

Neighbors told her that she had been "sent to the center".

STREET DANGERS

Homeless people like these have a renewed worry in their lives since the passing of election day: the "Kapsrov truck".

Mol spent the last of her money on a fortune-teller who says she "saw"

Mol's daughter living somewhere near Psar Thmei. Mol hasn't been able to find her

there even though she now spends all her time looking.

The Post has been told that some women have been released from Kapsrov only after

being selected as "pretty" enough to be "interviewed", or to

"coin" soldiers at the camp.

The "interviews" and "coining" are euphemisms for sexual favors

in exchange for release. "Coining" involves rubbing a coin on the torso

in a traditional medicinal healing.

Yin Savun, 40, has been arrested twice and detained in one camp. She paid 60,000

riel for each release.

"If there were some beautiful girls among the [detainees] we could not sleep,"

she says. "[Camp guards] would go around with a flashlight to check from one

mosquito net to another and if they found a beautiful girl she would have a job to

do..."

"... 'Coining'," interrupts Khieu Noeun, another former detainee, finishing

Savun's sentence, "... or 'interviewing' the Sangkat [commune] official."

The crowd all laugh along with them.

Any girl the center's guards found pretty was called out from her mosquito net at

night and went to "coin" for them, Neoun says. It was always a different

girl.

Sometimes the girls would be put in a car and driven to Phnom Penh to be "interviewed",

she says, again to the crowd's amusement. "Some of the girls were sent back"

because they might not have been so beautiful, but others "we would see again

in the morning".

If detainees didn't have money, or couldn't escape through the flimsy-looking wooden

walls of Kapsrov center - or if the women weren't "beautiful" enough -

they would eventually be trucked back home to the provinces. "They are dumped

back home," Savun says.

Most come from Prey Veng and Svey Rieng - areas so drought-stricken and poor that

villagers have been meeting together for some months and selecting able-bodied locals

to go to the capital to try to make some money.

"[Kapsrov] is worse than a prison. Normally prisoners have a regular schedule

to their daily lives. They even have a dish to eat their rice. [At Kapsrov] we have

to eat rice and salt from our hands," says Noeun, 34, who was detained when

she was pregnant last year.

In May, San Chantra and his wife were arrested at night by armed men at Chbar Ampeou

Market where San Chantra works as a porter. The armed men fired in the air to scare

the people and those who where not quick enough to escape were arrested - more than

50 of them. Most of the people were beaten, some with guns, before they were loaded

on pickup trucks.

They were told that they were arrested because they were not residents of Phnom Penh,

but simply squatting on the road.

A 32-year-old woman was arrested by policemen and soldiers as she was sleeping near

Mohamontray Pagoda. They told her that they were "taking her away to educate

her". Instead they took her to a military headquarters. On the way a police

officer hit her with a gun. She was later taken to Kapsrov center where she says

she was continuously beaten with guns by the guards at night.

The living conditions at Kapsrov were very poor. The food was insufficient. Water

was taken from a well and was drunk without having first been boiled.

"Poverty chased me from my homeland to Phnom Penh and Phnom Penh police chased

me away... Oh life is difficult," says Sarng Koun, who quit his high school

in Prey Veng last month.

Escapees say that authorities have now begun erecting fences around the center and

that it is being patrolled by four to five guards in military uniforms with AK-47s

and dogs.

Those who lived there had to relieve themselves through holes in the floor. "Oh,

it was so bad... like prison. Worse," says one inmate. "And the smell..."

One human rights worker says most of the people complained about illnesses and some

showed signs of vitamin deficiency while others were seriously malnourished.

Chantra left Kapsrov after three days. Relatives paid for his release. "In the

detention center if we have 30,000 to 40,000 riel to pay the guards we are able to

get out, if not we have to stay there indefinitely."

Some people were questioned by guards using electric cattle prods, Chantra says,

adding that people who tried and failed to escape were tortured.

In an interview with the Post, Minister of Social Welfare Suy Sem said that the center

had been used to collect people from the streets for the last two years.

"We collect them from the streets, after that we provide some food, clothes,

skills and capital."

However, Sem denied allegations of detention by force and release through bribery.

According to him, social workers undertake counselling with the homeless, who are

only taken to the centers if they consent.

Sem had not heard about payments of bribes to be released. "Street people have

nothing in hand," he said, adding that the people came and stayed at the center

voluntarily.

Sem denied that street people were rounded up by armed authorities at night. "Social

workers don't work at night," he said.

Rights workers said Kapsrov and its two sister centers closed down before the election

period.

Suy Sem said that the center had been closed because it will be rebuilt as a "project

center".

When the Post visited the center last week it had been closed. A woman running a

small shop close to the center said it was "closed more than a month ago. They

do not arrest any more because it is close to the election."

"They just opened the doors and the people walked away," she said. However,

she had heard that they would start arresting people again after the election.

The Post confirmed Kapsrov was closed, but on Aug 4 a Post reporter witnessed a renewal

of the official armed round-ups of homeless near Phsar Thmei. The people had to flee

again from the "Kapsrov truck".

A human rights worker who visited the center before it closed said that the arrest

and detention of street people were illegal acts.

"There is no suspicion [of them] having committed any crime," the rights

worker said.

"I have spoken to about 20 people who have been taken to the center and no one

had mentioned about any voluntary element. Quite the contrary, people living on the

streets and markets were arrested at night by armed law enforcement groups."

If the center was voluntary, "why are people locked up and why have armed guards?"

He had not heard anything about skills training. "People instead complain about

being locked up for most of the day... There is no equipment that can be used for

training."

If the guards didn't get money from relatives who could somehow find where their

family members had been taken, the detainees would have to stay at the center for

several weeks before boarding forced transport to their home provinces.