BATTAMBANG FACES

Outside the Central Market in Battambang this morning

Images by

Atsushi Furusawa

Battambang's Newest Hot Spot Opening Soon

Battambang is rapidly modernizing and new place to shop, wine, dine, shop, relax and be entertained will open soon.

Watch this blog for further developments

Here are some pictures of the mystery venue undergoing renovations:

Reporter recalls rare trip to Pol Pot's Cambodia

Journalist Elizabet Becker beside a photo she took of Pol Pot in December 1979, a few days before the Vietnamese invasion

AFP
Saturday, Feb 25, 2012
PHNOM PENH - When the Khmer Rouge invited a pair of American journalists to Cambodia in the late 1970s for a rare glimpse of the revolution, they found empty streets and schools in a city with no laughter.
"There was nobody there. It was like walking into the Twilight Zone," recalled one-time Washington Post correspondent Elizabeth Becker.
Invited by the hardline communist regime to visit the capital Phnom Penh in 1978, she jumped at the rare chance to see the secretive revolution in action and meet its leader Pol Pot.
But after a tense two-week trip, peppered with numerous staged photo opportunities in a filmset-like atmosphere, Becker left convinced of the regime's insanity. And her British travel companion was dead.
More than three decades later, the now retired journalist has returned to put her photographs and recorded interviews with Pol Pot and other Khmer Rouge leaders on display in Cambodia for the first time.
She is also preparing to testify before Cambodia's UN-backed court in a landmark trial against three top leaders - including ex-foreign minister Ieng Sary, who arranged her visa for that fateful trip.
The three deny charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide for their roles in the 1975-1979 regime, which is blamed for the deaths of up to two million people from starvation, overwork or execution.
Led by "Brother Number One" Pol Pot, the hardline communist movement emptied cities, abolished money and religion and forced millions to work in huge labour camps in a bid to create an agrarian utopia.
But the outside world understood little about what was going on in the closed-off country at the time.
By December 1978, in the final days of the regime, a Vietnamese invasion was imminent and the Khmer Rouge belatedly sought support to fend off the enemy -- starting with positive press about the revolution.
"They had isolated themselves from the world and desperately needed friends or help," Becker, now 64, said in a recent interview with AFP.
Becker, who began her career as a war reporter in Phnom Penh in the early 1970s, was invited with US journalist Richard Dudman, who had covered the Vietnam War.
The third guest was Malcolm Caldwell, a Scottish Marxist academic who had written a favourable book about the revolution.
That Becker was granted a visa is somewhat remarkable since she had already published several critical pieces about the Khmer Rouge, based on the horror stories that were trickling in from Cambodian refugees.
"Do not presume they were all-seeing and all-wise," Becker said about the Khmer Rouge leadership. "The one thing people keep forgetting is how incompetent these people were. They were cruel and ruthless and incompetent."
Throughout their stay, Becker said the three foreigners were "under the equivalent of house arrest", escorted by armed guards at all times.
But the intrepid reporter "snuck out a couple of times" and behind the facade of freshly painted buildings and manicured parks in the capital, "they just left everything to rot".
Outings to model cooperatives in the countryside, where well-fed villagers were working in seemingly idyllic surroundings, proved no less surreal.
"I was alarmed by what I didn't see," she recalled. "You kept thinking you're going to turn a corner and real life would show up but it never did.
"There were never kids playing on the street, there were never kids at school, there were never people at the pagoda, there were no markets, no laughing, nothing."
On the final day, Becker and Dudman became the first and last Western journalists to interview Pol Pot during the Khmer Rouge's reign.
"He was much more charismatic and handsome than I'd expected," she said.
Pol Pot lectured them about the threat of war with Vietnam, saying he wanted NATO troops to fight alongside Khmer Rouge soldiers.
"That's how desperate it was, that Pol Pot would imagine NATO would join him," Becker said.
Caldwell had a private meeting with the Khmer Rouge supremo. Hours later, he was shot dead in his guesthouse.
Mystery surrounds the murder to this day although Becker, who briefly encountered the Cambodian gunman in the guesthouse where Caldwell was killed, simply blames the madness of the Khmer Rouge.
"To find some rational reason why Caldwell would be murdered when this was a regime that was irrationally killing its own people... I don't know that that makes sense."
On December 25, 1979, two days after Becker and Dudman left Cambodia with Caldwell's body, Vietnamese forces invaded. By January 7, they had taken the capital and ousted the Khmer Rouge.
Pol Pot fled to the jungle from where he would continue to fight a guerrilla war. He died in 1998 without ever facing justice.
When her turn comes to take the stand, Becker does not expect to suffer from the recollection problems that have plagued some elderly defendants and witnesses.
"I don't have to rely on my memory," she said. "I kept my notes, I kept my recordings. That's the writer's advantage."

Five Arrested After Brawl At Wedding in Battambang Province

Police in Battambang province’s Mong Russey district arrested five men between the ages of 18 and 33 on Sunday after a brawl broke out at a wedding reception. Police said that two groups of roughly seven men each were involved in an argument on Saturday night. On Sunday, as one group of men was leaving the reception, the other group attacked them with sticks and stones. Five men were badly injured and sent to hospital. Police are searching for another two men who fled the scene. Source: Koh Santepheap

Battambang Movie Night. The Iron Lady to Screen at Bamboo Train Restaurant

Every Thursday night, Bamboo Train Restaurant in Battambang shows a movie in a large projection screen.

If you are a visitor to Battambang or have just moved here, it is a good chance to meet some of the locals.

You can arrive anytime from 6.30 and have a drink and a meal then settle back and enjoy the show.

This weeks offering is The Iron Lady (see movie review below)

An 'Iron Lady' Fully Inhabited By Meryl Streep

by David Edelstein

I admit I was biased against the Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady. Not, you understand, against Thatcher and her Tory politics. Against Meryl Streep and her accents. Which are great, no doubt. But I went in resolved not to fall for her pyrotechnics yet again. I wanted realism.
Well, it didn't take long to realize that I was watching not only one of the greatest impersonations I'd ever seen — but one that was also emotionally real.

The Iron Lady has a free-form structure. It drifts back and forth between Thatcher as an old woman, in the early stages of dementia, and Thatcher rising to power, with Alexandra Roach playing Thatcher, very well, in her late teens and twenties. The first thing you notice about Streep is that her make-up is uncanny — and also that she inhabits it fully. She has big false teeth and a voice that is, even in Thatcher's fading state, a nasal trumpet. Streep gets the music in the voice and through the music, the mind.

As the middle-aged Thatcher, Streep plays a woman armored for battle, a female in a male chauvinist's world and a Tory in a quasi-socialist one. Her lacquered hair signals strength, her pearl necklaces a pride in the fruits of her wealth. Her philosophy of free enterprise comes from her shop-owner father, seen in flashbacks preaching self-reliance over welfare. But Margaret's prickly spirit is all her own. In an early scene, she's furious being directed to sit with the ladies while men who have been wooing her to run for office move into the drawing room to smoke cigars.

The director, Phyllida Lloyd, and writer, Abi Morgan, clearly admire her feminism — not that Thatcher would use that word — but are studiously neutral about her politics. This has already goaded viewers and critics who'd like to see Thatcher's ideas given a proper airing. And it must be admitted that on that level the film is weak tea. You'll have to make up your own mind on the merits of say, Prime Minister Thatcher's decision in the early eighties to attack Argentine's junta after it seizes the Falkland Islands. But it's hard not to thrill to Streep when her Thatcher talks tough, as she does to the patronizing Alexander Haig, played by Matthew Marsh.
"We will stand on principle or we will not stand at all," says Thatcher.
"But Margaret, with all due respect, when one has been to war..." says Haig, before Thatcher interrupts him.

Streep plays Margaret Thatcher — and Jim Broadbent her supportive husband, Denis — in The Iron Lady.

"With all due respect sir," Thatcher says. "I have done battle every single day of my life. And many men have underestimated me before. This lot seem bound to do the same. But they will rue the day."

In later scenes in which Thatcher quarrels with Michael Heseltine played by Richard E. Grant over how to cope with an economic crisis, the political machinations were harder — at least for this American — to follow. What's clear is that the filmmakers finally view Thatcher as someone with an inflexible and somewhat limited intellect. The imperviousness to criticism that brought her to power also leads to her downfall, which is swift and dramatized in short, brusque scenes with little emotional kick.

Yet the film as a whole is extremely moving. What clinches it, I think, are the scenes between Streep and Jim Broadbent as her husband, Denis, alive in flashbacks but a fantasy companion in Thatcher's scenes as an old lady, long after he has has died. Denis was often spoofed and ridiculed in the U.K., but here, you see the sweet-tempered clown who took off Margaret's edge and made her laugh.

Some former Thatcher allies have expressed outrage over scenes in which Thatcher suffers from the delusion she's still Prime Minister. In one, directing staff to release a statement of condolence after a terrorist bombing. But I think those scenes make her look more admirable than pathetic. So much else is gone, yet Thatcher's sense of civic duty is undimmed. Unlike the masks of many — arguably most — politicians, the one Streep presents in The Iron Lady is held in place by character, not expediency. Streep makes you think it was the role Margaret Thatcher was born to play.

SOURCE: National Public Radio

http://www.npr.org/2012/01/13/145119069/an-iron-lady-fully-inhabited-by-meryl-streep

Battambang Police Detain Well Fed Crooks

Two men were arrested after attempting to leave a shop without paying for their dinner and drinks in Battambang town on Monday. The shop’s owner said the pair had spent five hours eating and drinking, and had assured him they had a lot of money. However, they tried to leave without paying, saying they had left their money at home. Police detained them for one night before forcing them to pay. Rasmey Kampuchea

BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL COMES TO BATTAMBANG

FREE ENTRY!!!!!!!

 This weekend, Battambang is host to INTERFILM, Berlin's Premier short film festival!!!

Saturday at Make Maek (#67, St 2.5) at 7pm festival director, Heinz Hermans, will be presenting a selection of "The best of the Fest"

 Sunday at 7pm, Make Maek will screen a selection of films from the festival that focus on South East Asia, including films from Cambodia.

Monday at Sammaki (#87, St 2.5) at 5pm, will screen a selection from the festival, of films that express themselves without words...A great programme that is also perfect for an audience that doesn't speak English, so please encourage any Khmer collegues, students or friends to attend!!

About interfilm and the Festival

interfilm Berlin organises the Berlin International Short Film Festival as well as interfilm Short Film Distribution. Established in 1982, the festival has years of experience and a growing number of contacts in the international cultural and short film sectors. This has enabled interfilm to forge ongoing links with several significant institutions and hold frequent, regular events, testifying to the festival’s success at bringing the short film format to an ever wider audience.

interfilm’s goal is to search out skilled and creative filmmakers and bring their work together -  presenting them in an international, culturally political framework in order to best facilitate the exchange of imaginative ideas. interfilm offers a wide variety of short live-action, animation and documentaries to enthusiastic audiences who value the short film format in its own right.  

The International Short Film Festival

interfilm has established itself as one of the most important short film festivals in Europe. It is the second oldest German short film festival (after Oberhausen), and is recognised as the second most significant and oldest international film festival in Berlin after the Berlinale. More than 5.000 films with a maximum running time of 30 minutes are submitted each year. Of those, approximately 400 films are selected and organised into different thematic programs. These include; international, German, animation, documentary and children’s films. 'Focus On' highlights productions from specific countries or regions. Beyond that there are also special sections devoted to areas such as music videos, commercials, experimental films, historical films and retrospectives.

interfilm Berlin Short Film Distribution

The interfilm distribution portfolio currently comprises around 300 films. We place equal importance on distributing both 90 minute short film programs and individual shorts shown before a feature film. Our films are hired out to cinemas, television stations, cultural institutions and internet platforms. interfilm distribution's DVD sector is continually expanding, mostly for use in public spaces such as subway trains, waiting rooms and on mobile entertainment devices. This format is particularly suited to exploiting extremely short films and interfilm has a great selection at hand.

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Battambang's Got Talent. Watercolours by Circus School Student from two books feature in Phnom Penh Exhibition

Artists from Phare Ponleu Selpak (PPS) art school in Battambang are featured in The Epic Journey, an exhibition now showing at Romeet Gallery, where watercolour paintings from two books, A Journey on the Jayavarman and Bohak, the Land of Guignols, are on display.

The event will also serve as a launch of the whimsical children's book Bohak, the Land of Guignols, and 26 watercolour illustrations from the book are on show..

The paintings were done by 13 student artists from PPS in Battambang.

Srey Bandaul, a PPS teacher, wrote the text and had his students create matching illustrations in 2009.

He says the idea was inspired by Bo Hak, a new student at the time who had been deported from Thailand in 2003 after crossing into the country illegally to look for work.

Bo Hak didn’t return to his home town in Kampong Thom province. 

Instead, he stayed in Battambang to study.

“He stayed at Phare Ponleu Selpak to study painting with me. When he arrived, he was a bit funny. He was a joker in the way he walked and behaved, so I decided to write about him. My students, including Bo Hak himself, began to paint many pictures,” Srey Bandaul says.

Bohak, the Land of Guignols is the story of a young arts student who asks his teacher if he can take home a puppet his class has just made, only to be woken up by the same puppet at midnight.

The two become friends and visit places together in the colonial town of Battambang and in the puppet’s home village.

They take a journey and ride on animals, dinosaurs and elephants, fighting against obstacles they face on the way.

The second set of book illustrations featured in the exhibit include watercolour paintings from A Journey on the Jayavarman.

This book is a visual travel guide consisting of watercolour paintings accompanied by text describing a boat trip from Siem Reap to Ho Chi Minh City.

The paintings were done by five students from the PPS art school.

The book, commissioned by  Heritage Line, a cruise company in Vietnam, was published in 2010 and sold on the company’s boats journeying between Cambodia and Vietnam.

“It’s kind of a big project, similar to the Carnet de Voyage travelling notebooks in France,” says Anna Tuyen Tran, the manager who led the book project. 

Before making the book, Tran took a trip by boat from Siem Reap to Saigon with an artist from the PPS. That artist took photographs of landscapes, boats, ports and what he saw along the river.

He and other artists at the PPS then created paintings inspired by those photographs.

Tran wrote the text to describe her personal trip, along with tips for passengers.

Aside from showing the book illustrations, Romeet will also host a children’s art workshop series as part of the exhibit.

The “Kids Creative Workshop” will be held for three hours every Saturday in March and will be led by professional artists from Phare Ponleu Selpak.

Children will learn to draw pictures and make books similar to A Journey on the Jayavarman or Bohak, the Land of Guignols.

“Through the workshop, we want to educate people and get them involved with the gallery, and help them have a great experience with art,” Romeet Gallery manager Kate O'Hara says.

She plans to have participants create a story and paint pictures for a book.

Everybody will get a copy of the book they have made. 

O’Hara says A Journey on the Jayavaraman is already available on the Heritage Line's Cambodia-Vietnam cruises, and at some bookstores in Cambodia and Vietnam.

The first run of 200 books are available for sale at the gallery.

The Epic Journey exhibition is now open and will run until March 20 at the Romeet Gallery, #34E Street 178, Phnom Penh.

Movie Night Tonight at Bamboo Train Restaurant

Continuing the Oscar Season at Bamboo Train Restaurant.....HENG LENG  - YOUR HOST....dinner and drinks from 6.30pm

This week: Thursday 16 Feb	The Descendants	SUMMARY* This sweet, sad new film from Alexander Payne holds a promise of gentleness that is fulfilled, and a promise of complexity that isn't. Starring George Clooney as a wealthy Hawaiian lawyer whose wife is in a coma, The Descendants has a kind of surface difficulty, but is distinctly soft-centred, lenient and sentimental compared to the three scabrous and brilliant pictures that have cemented Payne's reputation over the last decade.	Production year: 2011 ·  Country: USA ·  Cert (UK): 15 ·  Runtime: 115 mins ·  Directors: Alexander Payne ·  Cast: Amara Miller, Beau Bridges, George Clooney, Judy Greer, Matthew Lillard, Michael Ontkean, Nick Krause, Robert Forster, Shailene Woodley
Advance Notice: Thursday 23 February	The Iron Lady	SUMMARY* Poor Margaret Thatcher: her transformation into biopic drag queen is now complete. Daringly, screenwriter Abi Morgan and director Phyllida Lloyd have made a movie about Baroness Thatcher's flashback-riddled dementia while their subject is still alive. Britain's most important and controversial postwar prime minister has been recast – rather like Judi Dench's Iris Murdoch 10 years ago – into a bewildered old lady cherished in dramatic terms for her poignant vulnerability and decline, rather than for the mature achievements of her pomp.	· Production year: 2011 ·  Country: UK ·  Cert (UK): 12A ·  Runtime: 104 mins ·  Directors: Phyllida Lloyd ·  Cast: Alexandra Roach, Anthony Head, Harry Lloyd, Jim Broadbent, Meryl Streep, Olivia Coleman, Olivia Colman, Richard E Grant, Roger Allam

 

*Review comments from Guardian UK Film Critics

Battambang Orphans and Underprivledged Children to Benefit From New Regulations

 Children belong, first and foremost, with their families, not in institutions – that was the central message delivered by Minister of Social Affairs Ith Sam Heng when he recently announced that 70 orphanages would be closed.

Presenting the findings of With the Best Intentions, a study into attitudes to residential care, primarily focusing on orphanages, Ith Sam Heng announced a new progressive policy on alternative care aimed at keeping children out of institutions.

“Family care is the best option; no one loves children like their families,” he said, stressing that residential care for at-risk children would now be considered only as a last resort.

Only 23 per cent of children found inside Cambodian orphanages had actually lost both parents, the minister said, citing the report.

The majority of parents who sent their children to orphanages did so because they were poor and held the misguided assumption that an institution could provide better care, he said, urging orphanages not to exploit these misperceptions.

“Before you think about gathering children for the centre, please think first about keeping them in their families. And forget that a source of funding is pretending to support the children; this is a kind of exploitation.”

Stressing the need for orphanages to more stringently abide by minimum standards of care, Ith Sam Heng said  70 of  the 93 such facilities run by an organisation called Good News would be turned into community centres, but did not specify when. Contact details for Good News could not be found.

Richard Bridle, country representative of the UN Children’s Fund in Cambodia, which provided technical support for the study, said the new policy amounted to three key points.

Proper standards needed to be implemented, child-care institutions held to account and funds redirected from residential care institutions to families to make sure they had the capacity to care for their children.

“What the minister has outlined today are a series of measures with which we fully agree – first, that we should be prioritising keeping children in their families,” Bridle said.

“I have small children, I want them to stay with me. And if I were poor, I would want someone to help me, not take them away, and certainly would not like to have an organisation that is pressuring me to give up my children to go into an institution.”

While Cambodia’s adult death rate dropped between 2005 and 2010, the number of children in orphanages more than doubled – to about 12,000 – during the same period, he added.

The study found that more than 60 per cent of surveyed villagers felt a poor family should send their children to residential care if they could not pay for education, but that young people inside those orphanages felt they lacked love, freedom and opportunities.

In September, the Siem Reap province-based Cambodia Orphan Fund was shut down amid allegations from the Ministry of Interior that staff members had molested children and the revelation that its director, Nicholas Griffin, had been convicted of raping a child in 2007.

That followed the revelation in August that 30 children were unaccounted for at the Australian-funded Hope for Cambodian Children orphanage, which had failed to meet the Minimum Standards on Alternative Care for Children set by the Ministry of Social Affairs, Veterans and Youth Rehabilitation.

In October, Friends International, Childsafe and UNICEF launched the “Children are not tourist attractions” campaign, urging visitors to Cambodia to think twice before visiting an orphanage.

Sarah Chhin, a program manager at the social welfare group International Cooperation Cambodia, said tourists need to think about what sort of conduct would be acceptable at orphanages in their own countries.

“Having people coming and going constantly doesn’t help them, and actually does more harm than good,” she said.

“Actually, the children within orphanages already have attachment issues, they have rejection issues, they have all sorts of other issues. They have all sorts of other issues that come with the trauma they have experienced.”

Hengchhea Chheav, founder and president of the Siem Reap town orphanage Assisting Cambodian Orphans and the Disabled Organisation, said his orphanage was trying to move away from foreign donations-based funding but was not finding it easy.

“I think from the beginning of when I created ACODO orphanage, I found that the problem was the income, I couldn’t find the income that I would say was sustainable for supporting the children,” he said.

“Some of the local organisations in Cambodia, they couldn’t help themselves, and then they opened to make like a business or something.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION: http://www.thinkchildsafe.org/thinkbeforevisiting/

Source: Phnom Penh Post

Battambang Faces

Visal - Self Portrait

Battambang Police Detain Four Human Traffickers, Rescue 51 Victims Including Kids

At about 3.00 am on Wednesday morning, Battambang Provincial Police detained four Human Traffickers and fifty-one migrant workers, including nineteen minors, who were attempting to illegally cross into Thailand.

Victims wait at Battambang police station

Police stopped the traffickers, who were driving two vans crammed with the 51 villagers, mostly from Pursat Province, attempting to illegally cross the border into Thailand without documentation, Battambang anti-human trafficking and juvenile protection director Koy Heang said.

“Investigating police hunted down the two trucks, because they were filled with people who looked strange, not like they were from Battambang, and when police detained them, they admitted they were trying to illegally cross into Thailand,” Koy Heang said.

He said the four brokers would be sent to court for questioning and charging, and the victims would be sent to the social affairs department for reeducation.

“So many of these victims are minors [under 18], and most paid the brokers between 2,000 and 3,000 baht [between US$65 and $98] for the crossing,” Koy Heang said, adding that all but one of the villagers, including the minors, had been told they would receive work in factories in Thailand.

One man was told he was going to be a farmer.

ADHOC provincial officer Prak Sophima said the villagers were victims of human trafficking.

“This is the first case this year in Battambang,” Prak Sophima said, adding that Battambang was a popular illegal border-crossing destination for people from many of the surrounding provinces.

“But when these victims cross into Thailand illegally without any documentation, they usually end up going to work somewhere else like Malaysia or Indonesia, and this is the reason that nowadays so many families complain to ADHOC about their missing children abroad,” he said.

“People put themselves at risk when they immigrate without enough information and they hurry to believe the broker’s lure.”

Battambang's Got Talent

Battambang has a vibrant arts scene and several talented, local photographers are emerging. On of them is a student at the University of Battambang.  He took this image of the library at  UBB which is currently under construction.

The photograph was published in the December 2010 issue of La Riene Magazine

University of Battambang Library (under construction)
Featuring in La Reine Magazine December Issue
Models: N/A
Art-director: Sin K.D
Photographer: Sin K.D.

General assistants: Srun Sopanna

  SIn Photograph's Copyrighted Material. Do not reproduce or use without permission.

Sin Photograph Studio, Battambang, Cambodia.
No. 210 Street Corner Street , Sangkat Chomkasomrong, District Battambang, Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Office: 053 690 264 9 | Mobile: 012 359 050 / 016 615 580 | E-mail: info@sinphotograph.com | Website: www.sinphotograph.com

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Battambang Circus Program for February 2012

http://phareps.org

Battambang Student Hacked With Sword

A high-school student was seriously injured during a face-off between rival groups in Battambang town on Wednesday. Police said two groups, each comprising high-school and university students, were attacking each other from their motorcycles. In the scuffle, the 19-year-old was hacked in the back with a sword. Two university students, aged 19 and 22, have been arrested and police are looking for others involved.
Source: Phnom Penh Post

Battambang Human Trafficing Scam

Above: many foreigners get short term visas to pick fruit in Australia but it is highly unusual for Cambodian Citizens to be given this type of visa

Military police have charged a person who allegedly cheated 37 people out of up to US$5,000 each for non-existent jobs in Australia.

Some of the victims come from Battambang.

They had been promised jobs as fruit pickers in Australia, had borrowed money, mortgaged land and sold property to raise between $2,500 and $5,000 that the brokers were charging for the fake jobs.

One man said he realised he had lost everything after waiting 10 hours with thirty-six other people at Phnom Penh International Airport on Saturday for the brokers, who never arrived.

“We sold our cow, other property, borrowed some money and mortgaged some land,” he said.

“We are poor. We needed jobs so we hoped that we would get a job in Australia, but our hope disappeared when we realised we were really cheated. We lost our money.”

After hesitating, because of threats from the brokers, the group of would-be migrant workers decided to go to the police.

An Integrity Officer at the Australian embassy in Phnom Penh, said once brokers names had been verified, they would be flagged.

“This one will go straight into our local warning record and all our case officers will be able to get this information,” he said.

Another official at the Australian Embassy said it was highly unusual for Cambodians to be granted working holiday visas to Australia, which are offered for foreign fruit pickers.

A Provincial Coordinator for rights group Adhoc, said the victims had not taken the time to consider whether they could realistically get jobs in Australia or not.

“It is a rare case for the broker to cheat people to find a job in Australia. Before, we’ve had cases of [promised jobs] in Thailand, or Malaysia. So it is an example for the residents that they should think before deciding to believe,” he said.