It wasn’t just go-go dancing after all. Rusu and six other Romanian and Moldovan women claim that once they got to Cambodia, their boss detained them in a hotel and tried to force them to sleep with his customers. Last week, acting on a tip from the United Nations office in Phnom Penh, Cambodian military police raided the hotel, and detained the boss, who was a co-owner of the hotel, and his deputy manager. After three days, the authorities had released both men, sparking outrage among legal reformers and women’s-rights activists. The seedy story, plastered on the front pages of Cambodia’s newspapers, highlighted the decadence and sense of lawlessness in the desperately poor country. “It’s not only the political elite but the business elite, too, who are immune to the law,” says Kyle Gillespie, a U.N. human-rights officer. “This is another discouraging sign for those who are working to build a civil society.”
Cambodia has become a new destination for Southeast Asian businessmen looking for sex. The scantily clad European dancers worked at the Ritz Club, one of dozens of sleazy nightclubs that have sprouted to service an array of Southeast Asian investors, loggers and narcotics traffickers. According to Rusu, the Chinese-Canadian boss, Richard Cheung, ordered her to sexually service his patrons.When she refused, Rusu says, Cheung threatened to make her “disappear.” She says he charged clients $220 to have sex. The women received nothing. Cheung denies any wrongdoing. “They are dancers, and that’s all,” he says. Colin Woodford, the assistant manager of Cheung’s hotel, who was also temporarily detained, insists “this is a mistake” and says “the girls might be lying or making it up.”
The Cambodian government has launched campaigns to clean up the country’s image and fight sex tourism, which has added to a growing AIDS problem. But during the raid, one of the Moldovans was at the beach with a senior tourism official–who had recently called on tour operators to combat sex tourism. The official says that he was with a group of Americans, who had brought the woman.The seven dancers have flown home. They may think twice before taking a gig in Cambodia again.
