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Cambodia's border casinos back in
business
By Khan Sophirom
POIPET, Cambodia - Gambling kingpins in this
frontier town can see their business fortunes restored
now that the Thai-Cambodia border is open and the two
countries are mending fences.
Thailand and
Cambodia agreed last Friday to resume full diplomatic
relations, which were downgraded after anti-Thai rioting
in Phnom Penh in January. This comes weeks after the
border between the two countries' actually opened.
"Normal relations will be resumed as a Songkran
gift to Thais and Cambodians since Cambodia has shown
sincerity by paying compensation of 250 million Thai
baht [US$5.95 million] for damage to the Thai Embassy
during the riots," Thai Foreign Minister Surakiart
Sathirathai told reporters. Songkran, the Water Festival
marking the traditional Thai new year, occurred on
Sunday. A similar festival is also observed in Cambodia.
The reopening of the border has Thai authorities
worried as huge sums of money - between 71 billion and
84 billion baht ($1.7 billion to $2 billion) a year, a
study by Chulalongkorn University last year estimated -
is spent by their citizens at casinos in neighboring
countries. There are casinos in at least three other
border regions in Cambodia and others in Myanmar and
Laos.
Denied satisfaction of their addiction at
home, as casinos are banned in Thailand, many Thais are
quite happy to flock overseas either to blow away their
petty cash or hard-earned savings at baccarat,
blackjack, roulette, poker or slot machines.
The
one-kilometer-long gambling strip, with its well-watered
and immaculately manicured lawns, luxury hotels,
air-conditioned shopping centers, massage parlors and
brothels, has seven casinos, with an eighth under
construction.
"More than 1,000 Thais cross the
border every day," said Wanchai Topan, police chief in
Aranyaprathet district of Thailand's Sa Kaew province,
just across from Poipet.
This, among other
reasons, has triggered a debate in Thailand on whether
the country should have its own casino at home, and one
site commonly mentioned as a possibility is the tourist
haven of Pattaya in the south.
Meanwhile, what's
alarming is that the lure of Poipet's casinos seems
irresistible to low-income Thai workers in neighboring
Aranyaprathet district who appear trapped in a cycle of
debt.
Knowing exactly how many Thai villagers
squander their lives away at Poipet's casinos is not
easy, said Samay Kongchaman, a villager in
Aranyaprathet. "It's all a question of honor and they
will never tell how much money or properties they lost
at the gambling tables," he said. "But they still keep
destroying their lives.''
A Thai worker in Rong
Kloeu market, on the Thai side of the border facing
Poipet, said he was a frequent visitor to the casinos.
"I go there whenever I have at least 500 baht [$12] in
my pocket," said the worker who did not want to be
named.
Poipet, during the Cambodian war, was a
transit point for refugees and a smuggling route for
Thai traders operating in the neighboring Rong Kloeu
market. In late 1998, the frontier town was accorded the
status of an international border gate between Cambodia
and Thailand.
In that year, too, Cambodian Prime
Minister Hun Sen embarked on a plan to promote foreign
investment in the country by seeking overseas capital in
casinos along the Thai-Cambodian border.
Poipet's first casino was opened in 1999 and the
seventh began trading at the end of 2001.
The
building of the casinos also caused a population boom in
the frontier town. According to Poipet's new commune
clerk San Seang Hou, appointed by the Ministry of
Interior, the town's population has increased to more
than 100,000 from 9,244 families in 1998 census.
But a medical aide in a district hospital in
O'Chreuv said many Cambodians came to Poipet with false
expectations. "Many hope to find jobs in the casinos,
but end up being trafficked to neighboring Thailand as
illegal workers on the construction sites or sex workers
in the brothels," said the aide, who did not want to be
named.
Opposition politician Sam Rainsy has
questioned the Hun Sen government's economic rationale
of resorting to transnational gambling to spur economic
growth.
"One of the present engines of growth is
gambling besides logging, drug trafficking, prostitution
and cheap-labor industries. This type of growth is not
sound," said Sam Rainsy, a former finance minister and
founder of the Sam Rainsy Party.
"The social
costs that are associated with this type of growth will
translate into heavy economic costs in the coming years
resulting in the rise and destruction of the nation's
social fabric," he added.
(Inter Press
Service)
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