In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia and decimated its government, economy and society. The extremist communist group forced people out of the cities and into the countryside to forcibly work in labor camps. The Khmer Rouge killed nearly two million people through overwork, starvation and murder from 1975 to 1979. Cambodia was in the dark — completely isolated from the world.Although it has been three decades since that genocide, Cambodia is still struggling to recover from the misguided and fatal policies of the Khmer Rouge. It is one of the 50 poorest countries in the world as a result of years of civil war. It has remained in this impoverished state, however, because of corruption and the absence of the rule of law.

 Cambodia’s children are among the most vulnerable victims of this poverty. Thousands of them live in slums. Others are homeless and sleep on the sidewalk. They face starvation, illiteracy, diseases, drug addiction, HIV/AIDS, sexual exploitation, gang rape and human trafficking.

They are at risk, as no system exists to protect them. There is no government welfare system, for example, or free health care services. No one is alert to the ill-treatment of abusive parents. These children live without hope; they live in fear of their unknown future.

Many children moreover do not have enough food to eat. They sniff glue instead of eating breakfast, lunch or dinner. The glue takes away their hunger and makes them forget the pain in their stomachs.

Furthermore, many families in Cambodia are too poor to send their children to school. They cannot afford to buy school uniforms or to offer extra payments to poorly paid teachers to supplement their income, which can result in discrimination against the child. These families make their children work to earn money for the family. Most of them are scavengers who collect plastic bags or soda cans from the street or from the trash bin to sell, receiving about US$.50 a day for their labor. The children also pick up food from the street or the dump to eat. Sometimes they save this food for their entire family.

In Phnom Penh, many of the beggars at gasoline stations and restaurants are children. Most of their parents are from the countryside where they could not produce any agricultural products because of drought and land-grabbing. Consequently, the poverty afflicting adults becomes the poverty of children.

This reality is perhaps best comprehended by understanding the lives of adult beggars in Phnom Penh, many of whom sold their land to pay debts. In the countryside many poor families are forced to borrow money from private businessmen to pay for medical services or medicine when one of their family members gets sick or is injured.

Moreover, it is difficult for people in Cambodia to find a place to live. Land-grabbing, for example, has been a serious issue since the end of the 1980s. After the Khmer Rouge fell, Cambodians left the labor camps and went to look for a place to live. Everyone tried to get a piece of land; people grabbed whatever they could find.

Unfortunately, land is still being grabbed, but now powerful businessmen and government officials are taking the land of poor, powerless people. Those with economic and political power pay local officials to secure illegal land titles to valuable property and pay soldiers to evict the villagers from the property. The villagers are rarely compensated. If they refuse to leave their homes, officials use bulldozers to crush their small houses. Any further resistance by those who are forcibly evicted is met by the police and military with assault rifles and electric batons.

In these circumstances, Cambodia’s judicial system is of little use: it is not transparent, and it rarely helps the poor. As a result, Cambodia lacks institutions to uphold the rights of those without influence. Those who are poor remain poor and, if anything, become more impoverished.

Cambodia’s children are a product of this unjust environment. If Cambodia’s children and, indeed, Cambodia itself are to have a future, the government must introduce and implement measures to quickly transform this scenario. The creation of rehabilitation centers for the children of the poor that provide food and clothes as well as organize sports activities for the youth would be a logical step in this direction.

Health care for the poor in both urban and rural areas would also be a welcome development, as would immediate steps by the government to end the practice of land-grabbing, especially the seizure of the land of the poor. In this regard, all land concessions should be cancelled and the land returned to landless or homeless families.

A comprehensive solution though entails support for the families of poor children so that they can receive adequate care from their parents and society. Education is a vital necessity for the children and the country so that child beggars do not become adult beggars in a few years. The children of today can become a valuable human resource for Cambodia instead of a weight on its future economy.

Having ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Cambodian government has indicated its intention to its citizens and the international community to uphold the rights of its children and meet their needs.

Cambodia has even expressed this intention in its own Constitution as it has inserted the provisions of the U.N. convention in Article 48 of the Constitution, in which it declares that the state shall protect the rights of children to life, education and health, that they shall be protected against economic or sexual exploitation and the violence of war.

While these actions by the government are positive developments, it is not enough without creating a domestic law and ensuring that this law is implemented. The government thus should enact a domestic law as soon as possible to rectify this shortcoming.

The international community in general, and the United Nations in particular, should assist the Cambodian government in achieving these goals, not just with aid, which naturally is a valuable contribution, but even more importantly with advice and encouragement to make the necessary legal changes that offer an institutional framework to support the other essential policies.

In addition, the international community should help strengthen Cambodia’s civil society to enable it to better promote these changes and to monitor the actions of the government. Cambodia has lost a generation to the Killing Fields. It would be a further tragedy if another generation is lost in Cambodia to apathy, neglect and a lack of action by the government to serve the needs of its children.

by Sarada Taing, program assistant

Cambodia Project, Asian Human Rights Commission in Hong Kong