It was more than a year ago when police officers in a Phnom Penh park forced Smonh, who made a living by selling rubbish, into the back of a large truck. They didn’t tell him why he had been detained, Smonh said, but he wasn’t alone. The truck held about a dozen other people, sex workers, street kids, and beggars. It was two weeks before US President Barack Obama was set to visit Cambodia.
Nearly all the people in the truck were driven to the capital’s outskirts to Orgkas Khnom (“My Chance”), which is not a jail or prison, but supposedly a place for people dependent on drugs to receive treatment and rehabilitation. Never mind the fact that Smonh, like many others in the truck, didn’t use drugs. He used to smoke the drug “ya ma”—methamphetamine—as a teenager, he said, before proudly adding that he had stopped using it four years ago of his “own free will.”
The authorities locked him up anyway. Over the next few months, he would be beaten and tortured until he no longer felt human. It was only after he was released from the center that he started using drugs again, he said.
Cambodian authorities unlawfully detain hundreds of drug users and others deemed “undesirable” in centers where they face torture, sexual violence, and forced labor, according to our new report, “They Treat Us Like Animals.” People in the centers described being thrashed with rubber water hoses and hit with sticks or branches. They told us they were forced to crawl along stony ground or stand in septic water pits. Female former detainees said they were raped and sexually abused by male guards. Many detainees said that they were forced to work unpaid in the centers – and in some cases, on construction sites – and that those who refused were beaten. Ten percent of the people in these centers are younger than 18.
Although Human Rights Watch has documented similar abuses in Vietnam, Laos, and China, the brutality inflicted on detainees in Cambodian drug treatment centers by staff, or by other detainees tasked to act as guards, was horrifying.
There should be no illusions: these centers are not intended to help those dependent on drugs.
Rather, Cambodia’s government uses these centers as dumping grounds not just for drug users and those suspected of drug use, but also for ‘undesirable’ people, like Smonh, often in advance of high-profile visits by foreign dignitaries.
Smonh’s voice was soft and, initially, mistrustful as he told his story. It was night time, and he sat in a park in Phnom Penh, keeping to the shadows. Smonh, in his 20s, wore shorts and a T-shirt and, like many drug users, was thin and wiry. His plastic rubbish bag was beside him, holding the plastic bottles and tin cans that he would later sell to traders. The lights of the luxury 5-star hotels favored by wealthy tourists shone nearby
He never saw a lawyer or a judge after he was picked up, and had no opportunity to contest his detention, he said. After Smonharrived at the center, he was regularly whipped. The whippings became so painful that after a few weeks Smonh, along with a group of other inmates, attempted to escape the center, a large compound of low, one-story buildings, surrounded by a high wall topped with barbed wire. They broke through the tile roof of their sleeping quarters, and once on top of the building, jumped to the ground before dashing across the yard and attempting to scale the wall. Smonh couldn’t make it past the barbed wire. A guard knocked him down with a shock from an electric baton.
Detainees acting as guards then clubbed, kicked and shocked him with electricity until he lost consciousness.
But that was only the beginning.
When Smonh came to, he said, he was tied up and in chains, in a room with the other attempted escapees. Only one had managed to make it out.
That evening, nearly 24 hours after his attempted escape, the thrashing began, Smonh said, his anger rising. They forced him to do physically exhausting military exercises, beating him all the while. They whipped him like an animal, each lash tearing away his skin. Smonh looked furious as he spoke. It went on for hours, he said. He pleaded with them to stop, he said.
Then he paused and began to choke up. At this point of his punishment, he said quietly, he tried to kill himself by swallowing his own tongue.
For 4 or 5 days after his beating Smonh coughed up blood from internal injuries.
After a couple more months in the center, he was released. Since then, his life has disintegrated. Although Smonh had quit using drugs years before being confined in the center, he said, he began sniffing glue as soon as he was released. Now, he goes through one can of glue a day, and if he can afford it, he also smokes ya ma.
His face looked drained and frustration laced his voice.
“They consider drug users animals,” he said. “If they thought we were humans, they wouldn’t beat us like this.”
