Backwardness, corruption, violence, always symbiotic.
Correct Answer Bureau Exhibition
I don't know if you remember a news about blood slaves in February this year.
At that time, a man named Li Yayuanlun said through the media that in May 2021, he was lured all the way through job advertisements and abducted from Chongzuo, Guangxi to Cambodia.
Because he refused to participate in telecommunications fraud, he was punched and kicked by local evil forces and resold many times. During this period, he was forced to draw blood 7 times, 350 ml each time, and became a blood slave.
Of course, in the end, it turned out that this was a lie he made up, but in fact he smuggled himself into Cambodia, and later suffered from liver disease, trying to seek help through the local Cambodian social organization, and fabricated this blood slave incident.
Blood slaves, it seems absurd, why do you still believe in it?
A large part of this is due to the place where the case occurred , the Port of Sihanoukville, Cambodia.
Today, we're going to talk about this magical, chaotic place.
The location of Westport
When it comes to Cambodia's most well-known city, many people's first impression is not the capital Phnom Penh, but Westport.
As Cambodia's second largest city and the country's largest port, WestPort has attracted countless Chinese to come here to pan for gold, and many people regard Westport as the second Shenzhen.
In 2019, there were about 80,000 Chinese in Xigang, almost the same number as the number of local Cambodians, walking on the streets of Xigang, it is difficult to imagine yourself abroad, because you can see all kinds of Sichuan restaurants, hot pot restaurants, Shaxian snacks, Chinese supermarkets, KTV, it feels like a small town in the south.
Street view of Westport
Since Cambodian law allows foreigners to participate in gambling, a variety of golden casinos can also be seen everywhere in Westport, and dazzling neon lights stir up restless humanity.
While the construction of the engineering project has been carried out, it has also brought many social problems.
Rising prices, soaring land prices, online gambling, telecommunications fraud, human trafficking, many people who have committed crimes in China have taken a fancy to the potential and freedom of Westport.
There is a saying in the Chinese circle: "If there is no dream, why should xigang be the west port." ”
Many people dream of making millions a year and returning to their hometowns, but more people are taking advantage of the prosperity to return home, and even lose their lives.
On October 1, 2019, somewhere in the wasteland of WestPort, a male body was cut off by the waist, and the body was divided into three pieces.
On October 29, 2021, in an apartment in Westport, a woman was killed, and next to the body lay the body of a pet dog, even the dog was not spared, which showed that the murderer was fierce.
On January 21 this year, a male corpse was found in the open space of 6 villages in The 4th District of Xigang, with multiple knife wounds on his body and handcuffs on his hands.
At about 8 p.m. on the same day, in the wasteland of Bonuli County near Xigang, another female body was found, and the deceased was the missing Fujian woman Wang Mou.
The frequent occurrence of violent cases has also attracted attention at the national level, and the Chinese Embassy in Cambodia issued an announcement a few years ago to remind Chinese citizens to be cautious when traveling to Cambodia's WestPort.
Named after Prince Sihanoukville, Sihanoukville is the largest seaport in Cambodia and is blessed with natural conditions that make it a haven for Backpackers in Europe and the United States.
With milk-like beaches and blue waters, the scenery is no less beautiful than that of tourist destinations such as the Maldives and Palau, and there are all kinds of leisure resorts that should be available at a lower cost.
In the previous Westport pub, beer cost only $1 a bottle, and a beach house by the sea was only $10 a night. For $2, a tuk-tuk ride, and you can walk around the town.
So as a former tourist attraction, beautiful milk beach, how Westport has become a paradise for criminals, all this has to start from the rise of the gambling industry.
The four pillars of Cambodia's economy are agriculture, construction, processing and tourism, of which tourism not only has Angkor Wat, but also the growing gambling tourism, which has become an important source of contribution to Cambodia's GDP.
By the end of 2018, official data showed that there were 150 legal casinos in Cambodia, of which 88 were in Westport, and in fact there were many black casinos without licenses still operating.
Cambodia is one of the very few countries that allows the legal operation of online gambling business, which is one of the reasons for the rapid growth of the local gambling industry, relying on sexy dealers, online licensing, and its target customers can expand globally.
Although Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen signed a "ban on gambling" in 2020, it only banned illegal online gambling, and licensed casinos can still continue to operate.
If a bookmaker wants to be bigger and stronger, it is certainly inseparable from sales, so it is easy to find various recruitment advertisements on various recruitment websites, tieba groups, forums, and QQ groups.
These advertisements are in the name of recruiting and promoting typists and accompaniment staff, without experience and technology, as long as you want to learn, you can easily earn more than 10,000 yuan a month. These advertisements have also attracted many young people who are not deeply involved in the world and want to get rich easily to come to Westport.
But when mortals come to Westport, they answer the sentence: People in a foreign land cannot help themselves.
I thought it was to be a promotional typist, but the actual job was to be a casino promoter, called "dog push" in the industry.
The work of dog push is through WeChat, QQ, widely cast a net to fool people to bet on the website, if the customer loses, the dog push earns a commission, and the percentage varies from 3% to 10%.
If you want to make money as a dog push, you must have enough customers and routines, and generally dog push has multiple Micro Signals, QQ numbers, and mobile phones. The work can be as short as 10 hours a day and up to 16 hours at long hours.
The work place is in the office building under black pressure, and the light is not seen all year round, and the overall atmosphere is very depressing.
Successful dog push has many routines, such as disguised as a female number, to the major gambling ball groups to add people, copy the beautiful women found on Weibo to send the circle of friends to package themselves, and gradually win the trust of the other party through chat, inadvertently tell each other their betting sites to attract each other to play.
As long as the other party is hooked, he has money to earn.
Dog push to put it bluntly, it is a deception, you want to pick a pick and leave, sorry, it is not so easy.
To go to lose money, the company's training fees, management fees, beds, water and electricity bills, adding up to 70,000-80,000.
If you are expelled because you can't complete your performance, first lock up the small black house, all kinds of abuse and beatings, and only by losing more money can you redeem yourself.
Some dogs once shared their own cases, came to Cambodia for half a year, not only did not earn money, but the debt increased from 120,000 to 800,000.
Many people naively think that they can redeem themselves by losing money, but more often than not, they are just resold to another company engaged in online gambling, jumping from one pit to another.
Many people will wonder, why are these online gambling companies so cruel and fierce?
The reason is that they are engaged in illegal and criminal activities, and it is impossible to retain employees through high welfare and high treatment like regular companies.
Therefore, it can only be solved by force.
Many people just listen to advertisements, are deceived from china, and naturally do not want to stay and do fraud, so they do not work hard at work and cannot do performance. Whenever you have the chance, you want to run away.
In order to firmly control these people, these online gambling companies must coerce and induce, and even kill chickens and monkeys, so that they dare not call for help and escape.
Seeing this, many people will wonder, Westport is so chaotic, don't the police care?
Here we have to mention Cambodia's legal system, as a constitutional monarchy, Cambodia has suffered from war in history.
Cambodia did not establish its own legal system until 1993, which is still imperfect.
According to the Constitution, the maximum penalty in Cambodia is only life imprisonment, not the death penalty.
In Cambodia, the cost of crime is extremely low.
In the aforementioned 2019 Westport corpse splitting case, both the victim and the perpetrator were Chinese, and in 2020, the Sihanoukville Provincial Court sentenced the defendant to 10 years in prison for murder and hiding the body according to articles 199 and 531 of the Criminal Code.
They all cut people into 3 pieces, the methods were extremely cruel, and the heavens were intolerable, but they were only sentenced to 10 years in prison.
It is precisely because of the low cost of crime in Cambodia that there are many people with criminal records in China, and even wanted people are smuggled to Cambodia's WestPort to start a second life.
Cambodia's prisons are now overcrowded because of the absence of the death penalty, and the data shows that the Cambodian prison system is one of the top 25 most crowded prison systems in the world, with more than 38,000 offenders.
With insufficient funds, aging equipment, a steady stream of prisoners, and the government providing them with a variety of food and lodging, amnesty is needed from time to time in Cambodia.
In Cambodia, there are five important festivals of Pisa Banana Festival, New Year, Water Delivery Day, Victory Day and Independence Day, and criminals can submit information to the authorities to apply for commutation or exemption.
On the other hand, corruption in Cambodia is a serious problem.
In the 2021 Global Corruption Perceptions Index, Cambodia ranked 157th out of 180 countries and regions, and Cambodia only scored 23 points in the Corruption Perceptions Index with a full score of 100 points.
Coincidentally, cambodia ranks 186 out of 194 countries and 47th out of 50 Asian countries in the 2020 Bribery Risk Index released by TRACE, a globally renowned business federation.
According to the survey, 89% of Cambodians believe that the police unit is the most corrupt.
This is exactly the case, the Cambodian people can feel the existence of corruption in the police system at any time, the attendance rate of the traffic police is extremely high, and they are searching for all traffic violations anytime and anywhere, with only one purpose, that is, fines. And the amount of the fine is more than the prescribed amount, and it is not possible to issue a receipt.
Why is public officials so corrupt?
The most direct reason is their low income level, in Cambodia, the lowest level of public servants salary level is less than 100 US dollars, the highest is only 550 US dollars.
Despite the Cambodian government's efforts to change, only one Anti-Corruption Law, drafted in 1994 and not officially introduced until 2010, has been working and bargaining for more than 10 years, showing how many people's pockets anti-corruption work will affect.
But what happens after the bill is enacted?
Cambodia's National Anti-Corruption Commission in 2021 said it received a total of 660 corruption indictments in 2020, and of the 350 cases investigated, almost all of them had no clear evidence of corrupt practices.
Without direct evidence to substantiate the allegations, the Anti-Corruption Bureau could only abandon the investigation, and the anti-corruption ended up in a dead letter.
Cambodia's corruption problem has a long history, and many people are angry at the incompetence of the Cambodian government.
Corruption in the police system and weakness of the law have seriously constrained the accountability of perpetrators and hindered law enforcement and criminal proceedings.
It is this policy of turning a blind eye that has led to victims who have been deceived into ruining their homes and even dying.
While the credibility of the government is losing, many tragedies are still happening, and it is not known when it will end.
In fact, this truth is common throughout the world.