America dumps felons in Cambodia

America dumps felons in Cambodia
By Richard S Ehrlich

PHNOM PENH - Fresh from America's prisons, dozens of convicted gang-bangers, sex criminals, thieves, drug abusers, stalkers and other felons have been forcibly sent to Cambodia as part of 1,400 ex-cons who are being handcuffed, shackled and flown here on US government planes.

"I was convicted of assault and battery of a police officer in Massachusetts, an aggravated felony. After I was incarcerated for one year in Massachusetts, I was sent here," said Phok Chhoeuth in an interview in the Cambodian capital.

He was also a manic depressive who spent years eating Ritalin, lithium and Thorazine. When he arrived in Cambodia with no medication, he flipped out and went hostile. Without his "meds", he became a raving lunatic in the streets of Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, hallucinating, suffering bizarre beliefs and getting beaten and jailed by terrified locals, he said.

"I can't think straight when I'm manic," Chhoeuth said, depressed that the US government dumped him here on the other side of the world, in a dismal land still traumatized by the legacy of the late Pol Pot's "killing fields".

The US government insists its forced deportations are a magnificent solution to crime. Under a March 2002 agreement signed by Washington and Phnom Penh, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) can deport any Cambodians convicted of aggravated felonies after the criminals finish their prison terms in the United States.

Even if the ex-cons grew up as kids and teenagers in the US, or have lived in the US as adults for many years, if they neglected to secure US citizenship, they are shoved out of airplanes into the country of their birth, even if they can't speak the language and don't know anyone.

After their arrival in Phnom Penh, their handcuffs and shackles are unlocked. They are then free to wander Cambodia's slums, minefields and jungles, but forbidden to return to the US.

Some were ripped away from their children, spouses and other relatives in the US when the INS locked them in a Kafkaesque maze of jails and detention centers before deportation.

One of the weirdest cases occurred when a Cambodian man was busted in Houston for urinating in public, which was interpreted as a sex crime similar to exhibitionism - taboo especially because children might see it. Five years into a six-year parole for the crime, cops caught him again pissing in the street. Urinating in public was not a major crime, but his breaking a law while on parole was a felony. So he was deported to Cambodia, despite being a construction-site supervisor in Houston.

At least 67 felons from the US are currently in Phnom Penh and other Cambodian cities, including many who display street-gang tattoos, baggy pants, colored bandannas and sweatshirts common in the US but curiously freaky in Southeast Asia.

"I didn't know what was going on - I didn't know what INS was or what it stands for," Chhoeuth said, wincing in confusion.

In 1998, he had just finished a year behind bars for a 1997 police assault and expected to be released and allowed to return home, just like any other inmate. Prison authorities, however, handed him over to INS agents who had discovered he was born in Battambang, Cambodia, even though he had lived in the US since he was seven years old.

INS held him in federal detention centers and hospitals in Louisiana, Missouri and Oklahoma for an additional four years, he said. Several thin, straight, whitish scars marked his forearm where he said he slashed himself while languishing under INS control. Last September, ignoring his plea for political asylum, US officials escorted him - handcuffed and shackled - on a one-way flight to Phnom Penh.

"My dad asked me to go to a citizenship ceremony in 1990, when I was 18, but I didn't go," Chhoeuth said. "I was already a permanent resident, so I thought to be a citizen just meant I could vote ... I didn't know when you do something wrong, you get deported."

The felons from the US are now either peacefully blending into Cambodia's traditional, Buddhist-majority society or establishing themselves as the newest, roughest gang in town.

Many find shelter at the Returnee Assistance Project (RAP) recently set up by Bill Herod, 58, an American who has spent many years in Cambodia working on projects designed to mend this country's social wounds.

RAP includes a modest guesthouse, Internet link and counseling center while functioning as a place where "returnees" can mix with each other, snuggle with neighborhood girlfriends and learn how to adapt to life in one of the world's poorest countries.

On the wall, however, a RAP "security notice" warns: "The undercover officers who enjoy your companionship so much at The Heart [nightclub] and other nightspots many of you frequent can be expected to be fairly aggressive in their search for suspects to take into custody on suspicion of being troublemakers or even terrorists."

The warning advised them "to practice your low-profile mode" to avoid arrest.

Some deportees, meanwhile, treat RAP's halfway house with crude indifference. One heavily tattooed resident chuckled while his puppy tugged on a leash and urinated on RAP's red concrete floor next to a picnic table in the front yard. "My cat never does that," the white-haired Herod quipped before meekly mopping up the yellow puddle while the young man snickered, smirked and sauntered away.

"There was an incident at The Heart when four of our guys [returnees] had been arrested after a British gentleman was savagely beaten, a bottle broken over his head and a cheekbone kicked in," Herod said later in an interview, describing other difficulties in running the RAP center. "It became clear our guys had done it ... just a gang-bang beating, there was no point to it. Everybody was drunk and they decided to beat him. He was a likable guy, not the sort of person who would cause a commotion in a bar.

"The police said they had enough evidence to go before a judge. So we paid an amount equivalent of his lost salary and medical treatment. "I shelled out the cash," Herod added.

Other cases were more upbeat. Some felons have found work and prospered in Cambodia, using their managerial skills, US education and fluency in English to fill positions where Cambodians couldn't compete.

But a lot more felons will soon be arriving. "There are 67 returnees in-country now and about 1,400 to come. We expect the US to send 12-15 people a month for the next 10 years," Herod said. "We don't have any women who have arrived yet but they are in the pipeline, mothers who are being deported for corporal punishment of their children, and female gang members."

RAP receives US$1,000 a month from the American Friends Services Committee, and scored one-time grants of $5,000 each from Oxfam America and Refugees International, plus other donations, he said. "Our operating costs are $6,000 a month and salaries haven't been paid for months," he said, anxious about future funding.

"With a felony conviction resulting in a year or more jail time - even if suspended - deportation is mandatory," Herod said.

"The vast majority went to the US as children and the [citizenship] paperwork is something their parents should have done, but they didn't know about it, nobody told them about it," he said. "These are political refugees and their resettlement failed. They were put in big cities with poverty, racism, dysfunctional families while struggling to cope with life in the United States."

When Herod reads the name list of new arrivals, he checks for possible violent cases. "If I see street [gang] names, and ages under 25 from California, I worry. I think we already have four of the Tiny Rascals Gang, plus some from the 'Cold-Blooded Cambodian Killers' or some nonsense gang name," Herod said.

The Tiny Rascals Gang began in California in the mid-1980s and is now considered the largest Asian gang in the US, entrenched on the west and east coasts. It is primarily composed of ethnic Southeast Asians, but also includes some Hispanics, Caucasians and others.

"If there is a way I can get back to the States, I want to see my family," Chhoeuth said, insisting he now takes medication to behave. "My son is there. He is six years old. I never even got a chance to see him born. But I'm probably stuck here," he said, looking desperate.

"It's not that you miss America. You miss your family," he said.

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