Not all bliss for take-away
Cambodian brides By Brian
McCartan
As Cambodia's once war-shattered,
now booming economy opens to the world, Cambodian
women are leaving in droves as several
international marriage brokers have established
match-making services in the impoverished country.
Operating in a shadowy legal space, questions have
been raised about the possible exploitative nature
of the business, which some contend has acted as a
front for global human trafficking rings.
Last week, the Cambodian government moved
to put that trade on hold while it investigates
whether any of the international brokers have ties
to underworld crime syndicates. The Geneva-based
International Organization for Migration (IOM) had
earlier drawn attention to the trade and is
scheduled to release next month an investigative
report on the growing numbers of South Korean men
who come to Cambodia in search of brides.
The mechanics of the trade are still
murky. What is known is that
women
from mostly rural areas are brought by brokers
into the capital city of Phnom Penh and put on
display for prospective foreign grooms. The
brokers are usually either informal operators or
connected to one of several matchmaking
businesses, which until now operated freely in
Cambodia.
Most of the women who contract
with the matchmaking services are in their teens
or early 20s and usually from rural areas where
they have received basic, if any, schooling. The
IOM's report says "the vast majority of
[Korean-Cambodian] marriages occur through an
informal and exploitative broker-arranged
process".
The introductions are more
transactional than romantic. Bride selection often
takes place in hotel restaurants where as many as
100 women, the IOM report claims, are lined up and
put on display for prospective grooms. After a
woman is chosen, details are worked out between
the groom and bride-to-be and the broker.
A marriage is held after a few days,
followed in some cases with a short honeymoon. The
groom then returns to his home country while
paperwork is processed for his new wife to follow.
In 2007, the number of foreign marriage licenses
rose to 1,759, up from a mere 72 in 2004. There
were 160 foreign marriages registered in Cambodia
in January of this year.
South Koreans
make up a large percentage of the men seeking
brides in Cambodia. In 2005, marriages to
foreigners accounted for 14% of all marriages in
South Korea, up from 4% in 2000. According to the
United States 2007 Trafficking in Persons Report,
72% of South Korean men in foreign marriages marry
women from Southeast Asia or Mongolia. They are
often lured by billboards which dot the South
Korean countryside, advertising marriage services
to foreigners.
Rural governments have even
been known to subsidize marriage tours as a way of
dealing with growing rural depopulation. The South
Korean marriage brokering business began in the
late 1990s, where it first aimed to pair Korean
farmers or physically handicapped men with ethnic
Koreans from China. The Korean Consumer Protection
Board claims 2,000 to 3,000 marriage agencies now
operate in South Korea.
Marriage tours
also began in Vietnam and by 2007 the number of
South Korean marriages to Vietnamese women ranked
second only to brides from China. The search for
foreign brides has been driven by low birth rates
and the growing difficulty South Korean men have
finding brides among the country's newly ambitious
young females.
Many of the men coming on
marriage tours to Cambodia have already arranged
contacts through online services, which usually
host images of eligible women on their websites.
One such service is "Mr Cupid", which offers
Cambodian, Vietnamese, Vietnamese Muslim and
Chinese women. The agency, which has been
operating since 1993 from Singapore and does not
cater specifically to South Koreans, claims to
customers to "transform your life in six days!"
Its operations were expanded beyond
Vietnam to Cambodia and China in 2000 and Mr
Cupid's website also offers franchise services.
The website claims, "Come to Cambodia today and we
guarantee that your visit will be fruitful, you
will find the lady of your dreams waiting for you
right there." From services like this, or those
based in South Korea, men can arrange four- to
six-day marriage tours.
Match made in
hell In many ways such services are
false advertising. Marriages between Cambodian
women and South Korean men are known to be fraught
with difficulties, frequently caused by huge
cultural and linguistic divides. "Often the women
have misguided expectations of what life may be
like abroad; there is a lack of realistic
information about life in Korea," the IOM's report
says.
Indeed, most of the women's
fantasies of what their new lives will be like are
based on Korean movies and television shows that
have recently gained popularity in Cambodia and
other parts of Asia. The new Cambodian brides
often expect their South Korean grooms to be rich,
successful businessmen; the reality, however, as
the IOM report explains, is that they are often
poor and poorly educated. This impacts the women's
hopes that through marriage they would be able to
send money home to support their families.
The pressures often result in
disappointment and physical abuse. The deaths of
several Vietnamese wives in South Korea in 2007
and early 2008 due to mistreatment by their South
Korean husbands have already raised hard questions
about the trade in Vietnam. One case that made
headlines in both Vietnam and Cambodia involved
the death of Tran Thanh Lan, a purchased bride who
jumped or fell from her 14th floor balcony after
only six weeks of marriage in South Korea. Her
mother recently went to the country to demand an
inquiry into her daughter's death.
Because
the business apparently lacks a coercive element -
women are allowed to turn down a marriage offer -
it is not technically considered human
trafficking. The business side of the trade,
however, is certainly exploitative. Potential
grooms pay as much as US$20,000 to brokers for
their services, while the bride's family is given
$1,000 as well as money to cover the costs of the
wedding. The broker and agency divvy up the rest
of the spoils.
The IOM report indicates
that while there have been cases of abuse and
domestic violence, "human trafficking has been far
more difficult to identify". This may be the case
in Cambodia so far, but there is plenty of
documentation of Vietnamese women tricked by
marriage brokers into factory work in South Korea.
On February 26, police in Busan, South Korea,
arrested a Vietnamese woman under suspicion of
arranging sham marriages for $10,000 each. Once
the purchased brides receive Korean citizenship,
the women were divorced from their husbands and
forced to work in factories.
Abuse against
Cambodian brides has also been reported and some
have ended up running away from bad marriages. The
2007 US Trafficking in Persons Report said, "NGOs
[non-governmental organizations] are reporting
cases of foreign women placed in conditions of
commercial sexual exploitation or forced labor by
fake 'husbands' who work for trafficking rings or
exploitative husbands who feel they 'own' the
woman and can use her as a farm hand or domestic
worker."
After recent crackdowns on the
trade by Vietnamese authorities, the marriage
brokering industry has grown rapidly in Cambodia,
leading some trafficking experts to conclude that
the brokers and trafficking rings have simply
shifted countries. Marriage brokering is now
illegal in Vietnam, but at its peak 20,000 brides
were leaving the country every year.
Current Vietnamese law allows only the
establishment of marriage support centers by
non-profit women's groups. The Vietnamese Ministry
of Justice has recently recommended legalizing the
service in order to place stricter controls on it.
The police, however, have recommended raising
penalties, making the offering of Vietnamese women
as brides on a par with human trafficking.
The Cambodian government first publicly
acknowledged a potential problem in March. Sar
Keng, deputy prime minister and minister of
interior, said at the launch of a national
anti-trafficking awareness campaign that some
cases of human trafficking had been identified in
the Cambodia marriage industry. Prime Minister Hun
Sen has since ordered a crackdown on the industry,
including cancelation of the licenses two South
Korean companies engaged in the trade.
Brian McCartan
is a Thailand-based freelance journalist.
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