Aaron Cohen's Blog

The Cambodian Incident
- Posted on 09.10.08
Hi I’m Aaron Cohen, a human rights activist who works in the area of slave retrievals. That’s right! Slavery is NOT history. It’s the fastest growing illegal business in the world. I started my activist career in the music business and parlayed the parties we had making concerts and music festivals into a modern-day “Jubilee” movement to free slaves around the world. I began my career combating human trafficking initially as a fundraiser, but over time I took on the fieldwork and eventually ended up as the scout, sent out to find the lost children who had been sold into the sex trade. I wrote this prose poetry journal entry after a round of slave retrievals in Cambodia in November of 2004, when I was filled with the emotion of seeing death and children lost in the night.

For a long time now I have worked undercover and have assessed the phenomenon of slavery from the inside. Our teams have retrieved thousands of children from human trafficking over the years in more than 23 countries, but many, many more kids need our help. More than a million kids are trafficked every year into slavery, and heart broken parents are facing an agonizing choice when they realize that there are few options when it comes to getting their children back.

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You go into the village already dead, with backpacks of cash dreaming about freedom. Then you run for it with the girls. Maybe with jurisdiction or guns on fire over the heads of spooks who are in the way. You run, evade, and keep running.

Last night I was Night-Frighting—looking for under aged girls lost in the dark, singing karaoke, drinking beers with them in the brothel. The horror stays with you, and now I'm back with the unit. We get forms signed with the leverage of weapons and SWAT uniforms, grab and go. It was an easy mission. They saw we had five armed soldiers; it was enough. We loaded eight minors into the van and drove away. Pray, pray, pray our way out of the city by the next day and make a three-hour jungle trek across a section of ruins. Corpses were strewn along a main highway bisecting the road. Across the bridge on the other side, dragon mafias make the killing fields come alive. Bones along the path reveal teeth like open mouths reaching through the earth for a breath of life. Rouge red marks on the trees tell you where demons and land mines call your feet and knees. Black columns of smoke spiraled into the sky for burning tires, playing Russian roulette to screaming buzzards forever, until I think the saddest things and say a prayer.

In the rice patties of Cambodia, and in the heat—my hopes vanish from their channels. My smiles and I love you's turn aside from their routes. They go up into the wasteland and perish like slaves waiting for the evening shadows, and I am still.

I’m ready for the mafia to come after us, and I suspect they will be here soon.

For a second, while we waited for the vans to arrive, I realized that I had not slept in two nights and begin to doze off. The prophet Job visits me in the flames of my dreams. "I've had my hedge removed," Job says, almighty arrows are in me. My spirit drinks their poison, and terrors marshal against me. Oh, that I might have the request that I hope for. That the system would be willing to crush the fractures, with no dark delays, forgotten in this world and on my way… So if the mafia came after us with more fire power or with poisons or the dark arts they practice, then I would still have this consolation—the next world of love and my joy in unrelenting pain that I had not denied myself the enjoyment of seeing the master’s hand in the divine play of humanity. "Silence, dirty rags." a voice said in my second mind, and I awoke again thinking of salvation, but said a dirty word, “whores.” Why do we reduce them to being just whores? I wondered. My goodness, they’re only children. Most of the girls had just few things, flip flops, a Barbie lunch pale, and that’s it.

It's okay, we can walk around them and cry until the end of the world, chained to their freedoms and dreams. I'm sent to the remote jungle areas where you wouldn't think you would look for trafficking victims because it's so prevalent in the cities. Finding slavery here in the jungle regions of Battambang up river from Siem Reap, one couldn’t help but get a sense for the deep silence of certain moments. Staring at the massive Temple complex, I am reminded of the poor slaves from the past and how they suffered. Here in this timeless cast system we make our peace, and there is something hanging in the stillness like a garden. It’s as if just on the other side of my sleepy eyes; there is a whole gallery of monsters, and they are coming.

All of the Vietnamese girls retrieved in this round of missions were later re-abducted by corrupt Cambodian police officers, who sold them back into the sex trade. What came to be known as the “Cambodian Incident” drew harsh criticism against the Cambodian Police, when the US State Department found Cambodia in violation of international human rights laws and set up the infrastructure to train the Cambodian Police and begin to address the pandemic. An entire generation of young girls could be lost if we don’t act now.

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Activists interested in supporting the humanitarian fieldwork and slave retrievals this winter in Darfur, Cambodia, Burma, and Iraq will be volunteering through the Million Kids campaign. Help us free a “Million Kids” from slavery!

Contact Aaron Cohen via email: aaroncohen@abolishslavery.org

Related causes: Human Rights

Tags: aaron cohen, slavehunter, human trafficking, cambodia