WILLIAMS: His name is Hawaii, he has the walk and talk of the mean streets, an all American gangster a long way from home. But Hawaii was born in Cambodia. When he was seven months old, he and his mother fled to the US as refugees. Now he’s been sent back because he fell foul of the law.
HAWAII: I always thought I was an American to tell you the truth. I didn’t know I was, you know what I’m saying, an illegal alien or immigrant, I didn’t know any of that. I always thought I was just a normal American kid.
WILLIAMS: Railing against the injustices of America is Boomer, hip hop artist, gang member, former gaol inmate and until recently – a Californian. Boomer and Hawaii are among 127 Cambodian Americans who have been bundled onto a plane with a one-way ticket to Phnom Penh. They were targets in America’s new get tough policy on migrant crime.
Another 1,400 Cambodians are on the list for mandatory deportation once they finish their gaol time. The message is clear – commit one major crime or two minor crimes and if you’re not a fully fledged US citizen, you’re out.
BOOMER: I think I’m an American citizen automatically, you know what I’m saying? I didn’t know what the hell is a, I mean I know what a green card is but okay I thought all Asians had green cards you know, I didn’t know what was . . .
WILLIAMS: You didn’t know you had to do anything else.
BOOMER: Yeah, you know because I was like I was born there you know.
WILLIAMS: As a Cold War battlefield, Cambodia was torn apart by war, genocide, bombing and the interference of competing great powers. Now in a tragic twist of fate, some of those who survived the terrible years of trauma to be accepted as refugees in the United States, are being sent back to a country they know nothing about.
In 1975 after massive American bombing and a US-backed coup, the Khmer Rouge took power. They emptied the capital, sending everyone to work the land. Hunger and genocide killed more than a million. To escape the slaughter, many fled to Thailand.
NEWS BULLETIN FOOTAGE FROM 1975: A new wave of human misery has flooded over into Thailand, into unofficial camps like this. A few weeks ago, these people would have been turned around at gunpoint and sent back across the border. This boy is 9 years old. His parents were killed so he walked to the border by himself from Takeo – it took him two months.
WILLIAMS: Thousands were later accepted by the US as refugees. Most settling in tough inner cities with no money, few skills and little English.
BOOMER: Because my mum couldn’t speak English so for her to communicate she got to be in a Cambodian community. You know with the Cambodian community come poverty, with poverty come gangs.
HAWAII [Talking about tattoos on his arms]: Yeah I’ve got the cards right here, which is four aces. That means I’m hard to beat, you know what I’m saying, and I got the years right here, like when I was doing time ’98, ’99, 2000, one, two and three.
WILLIAMS: Hawaii was raised on a promise of the great American dream but saw no way to achieve it. By the age of eleven, he was making hundreds of dollars every drug deal.
HAWAII: And I was on a corner just pushing that, you know I, what I’m saying, was getting food every day, good food. I was buying clothes every day, bought me a brand new bicycle, you know what I’m saying?.... shit like that.
WILLIAMS: On the street, survival meant joining a gang.
HAWAII: Yeah it was cool. I just, I know them niggers behind my back though, you know what I’m saying? That’s why most people get... be a part of a gang anyways is to have reassurance that... you know what I’m saying, you're straight.
BILL HEROD: This is the residential facility intended primarily for people with psychological problems.
WILLIAMS: Bill Herod has been an aid worker in Asia for forty years.
What sort of psychological problems?
BILL HEROD: Schizophrenia, psychosis.
WILLIAMS: He’s the only one helping the deportees when they arrive in Cambodia.
[Talking to one of the residents]
COW: My name is Kow.
BILL HEROD: His name’s Kow and we call him Cowboy.
They come back angry, disoriented, depressed, ripped away from their families. Many of them have wives and children in the States. All of them of course, most of them have parents who certainly support communities and networks.
WILLIAMS: Bill set up this shelter for deportees with psychiatric problems who need permanent care. Without him, they’d be wandering the streets or dead.
Smokey with his brain fried by drugs still wants to end his pain.
SMOKEY: Yeah my brain is fucked up with cocaine you know. I know I got a brain problem, I got fucked up with the cocaine you know.
WILLIAMS: Bill Herod continues his work despite the personal cost. He lost an eye while struggling to stop a deportee attempt suicide by drinking acid. His anger is not directed at his patients but at the US law that dumps these troubled young men on the far side of the world.
BILL HEROD: These guys are the products of their time in the United States – good or bad. If they’ve had problems with the law and gotten into trouble, that’s a product of a poor re-settlement program and I think the United States should accept some responsibility.
WILLIAMS: He says there’s a moral question – that once people have been accepted as refugees, should they not be accepted for good?
BILL HEROD: They were political refugees who fled the terror of the Khmer Rouge period and I would certainly argue that if you’re taken in as a political refugee, the government that takes you in has some responsibility to work with you about regularising your citizenship status and the fact that that didn’t happen in these cases now results in their deportation.
HAWAII: I mean you know what I’m saying, it’s just like I said, double jeopardy man, why you going to fuck somebody’s life up even more when he already paid for his fuck up, you know what I’m saying? When he already paid for his crime, you see like that.
WILLIAMS: Cambodia is still slowly emerging from decades of conflict. The last thing anyone needed were plane loads of American gangsters. There’s a firm belief the government here only agreed to take the deportees after strong arm tactics by Washington.
BILL HEROD: As I understand it, Cambodia resisted for more than three years to agree to this for a variety of reasons and one of those reasons was that Cambodia didn’t feel that they were prepared to deal with, you know hundreds, maybe fifteen hundred people with criminal backgrounds and maybe drug problems coming into the society right now. I think that’s understandable.
WILLIAMS: It remains a highly sensitive issue. Cambodian Police General, Sophana Meach, confirms his government only relented after the US threatened to cut the number of visas available for Cambodians. America’s problem has now become his problem.
SOPHANA MEACH, Cambodian Police General: We cannot just dump them like rubbish, you know we have to deal with them with compassion, with humanity and so we would like to appeal that if America can do more to help these people, to transform their lives, to integrate their lives into Cambodia successfully.
WILLIAMS: What Cambodia wants is the US to provide money or training to help the deportees get a job in what to them is a foreign land. Without that, many may return to the only livelihood they know.
SOPHANA MEACH, Cambodian Police General: It can end up with a large number of returnees who cannot make a living in a decent way who will resort to join the crime of the local criminal and create a huge problem for the Cambodian society.
WILLIAMS: The US Embassy would not give an interview but privately officials fear the deportation program is exporting American style gang crime. Hawaii says their concerns are already a reality.
HAWAII: I tell you the truth right now, just me alone, I done raised hell in this mother fucking city. That’s why I’m respected everywhere I go on the streets out here, you know what I’m saying. Half these niggers just coming out of gaol and shit like that, they don’t give a rat’s arse about nothing.
WILLIAMS: The one program the US is funding for the deportees is here in Phnom Penh’s worst slum. It’s a small AIDS awareness centre run by another deportee, nicknamed Wiket.
WIKET: I’m not trying to justify myself but as teenagers, as kids we don’t really have an understanding or we don’t comprehend things like as clearly as adults do, you know what I mean? We’re wild, you know what I mean, and we just do what we think is right.
WILLIAMS: Having worked in Outreach with gangs in the States, Wiket has become a leader here.
WIKET [talking to staff at AIDS awareness centre]: I mean when is the next time you’re going to contact them? What’s your follow-up date? What services did they need? What services did they receive?
WILLIAMS: The staff are all deportees, their job – teaching prostitutes and drug users about HIV AIDS.
STAFF MEMBER: Even just passing, give them condoms, you know tell them where to go get the needles, whatever.
WILLIAMS: It gives these young Americans some purpose but for Wiket it can’t replace the love of his baby daughter. Like many of the boys, he’s been torn away from his own child.
WIKET: When I was over there she didn’t really talk and having her sing the ABCs to me on the phone is just, oh it’s, phew... you know what I mean?
WILLIAMS: No matter how much they’ve changed, or what the boys do here, there’ll be no recognition they’ve reformed, no second chances in the States.
BILL HEROD: I think it would be possible to have a case by case humanitarian review where a deportation judge could look at each case on its merits and see what this person has done, if the person has clearly reformed. Right now none of those factors can be considered.
WILLIAMS: Grudgingly accepting their lot, the boys focus on the job at hand – offering assistance to local addicts in Phnom Penh’s drug dens.
Wiket and his crew are trying to make a go of it. Many of them are creative and entrepreneurial but for those deportees who feel the urge of the old ways, Cambodia offers a lucrative mix of cheap hard drugs, corrupt police and an untapped export market.
BILL HEROD: I think we will be able to track a rather dramatic increase in drug usage in Phnom Penh. I think it will increase the level of gang violence and local gangs are being pitted against imported gangs from the US. We’re looking at about a third who are making it, about a third who are in trouble and about a third who are in serious trouble.
WILLIAMS: Without some help, Hawaii embodies the risks.
HAWAII: This is the whole show where the prostitution ring is at and right there, that’s our prostitutes right there and that’s where people get robbed.
WILLIAMS: For four months he lived here on the streets selling dope and fighting with police among the pushers, pimps and violence.
HAWAII: I seen niggers get their head bust open and police just watching like, you know what I’m saying. He run over there tell “help me, help me” the police and a dude hit him again with a mother fucking big-arse sword, you know what I’m saying, not one of them little knives, a big-arse sword and the worst part about it is that mother-fucking sword is dull and rusted so hit him again in front of the police – bam... and I'm like, damn!
WILLIAMS: In one of the few positive turns in his young life, Hawaii recently got married. But he soon lost his job and his young bride took up prostitution to help pay the bills. He’s channelled his anger and despair into a poem titled “Decisions” – the hard choice between unemployment or a return to crime, to save his wife.
HAWAII: This is the most important decision I’m going to be forced to make, even if I don’t want to, I still have to choose. My heart says hang in there but fate says fuck it, just rob niggers so now I’m confused. But if shit don’t get better soon, pop pop is how it sounds like when thugs cry.
WILLIAMS: Boomer’s also trying to make the best of it – but warns that without help not all the deportees will.
BOOMER: When a person really don’t care, that’s when they’re most dangerous, you know, cause they really don’t care and I think that's going to have a bad effect on the Cambodian society.
BILL HEROD: The US can’t take responsibility for everything but it seems to me when we accept groups of people as political refugees, accepting them suggests some obligation to take care of them.
WILLIAMS: The United States has exported much to the world. A Made-In-America gang culture has just joined the list.
BOOMER [singing]: Dear Mr President, what did we ever done, we only products of what America made us become. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I’m saying?
HAWAII: I always thought I was an American to tell you the truth. I didn’t know I was, you know what I’m saying, an illegal alien or immigrant, I didn’t know any of that. I always thought I was just a normal American kid.
WILLIAMS: Railing against the injustices of America is Boomer, hip hop artist, gang member, former gaol inmate and until recently – a Californian. Boomer and Hawaii are among 127 Cambodian Americans who have been bundled onto a plane with a one-way ticket to Phnom Penh. They were targets in America’s new get tough policy on migrant crime.
Another 1,400 Cambodians are on the list for mandatory deportation once they finish their gaol time. The message is clear – commit one major crime or two minor crimes and if you’re not a fully fledged US citizen, you’re out.
BOOMER: I think I’m an American citizen automatically, you know what I’m saying? I didn’t know what the hell is a, I mean I know what a green card is but okay I thought all Asians had green cards you know, I didn’t know what was . . .
WILLIAMS: You didn’t know you had to do anything else.
BOOMER: Yeah, you know because I was like I was born there you know.
WILLIAMS: As a Cold War battlefield, Cambodia was torn apart by war, genocide, bombing and the interference of competing great powers. Now in a tragic twist of fate, some of those who survived the terrible years of trauma to be accepted as refugees in the United States, are being sent back to a country they know nothing about.
In 1975 after massive American bombing and a US-backed coup, the Khmer Rouge took power. They emptied the capital, sending everyone to work the land. Hunger and genocide killed more than a million. To escape the slaughter, many fled to Thailand.
NEWS BULLETIN FOOTAGE FROM 1975: A new wave of human misery has flooded over into Thailand, into unofficial camps like this. A few weeks ago, these people would have been turned around at gunpoint and sent back across the border. This boy is 9 years old. His parents were killed so he walked to the border by himself from Takeo – it took him two months.
WILLIAMS: Thousands were later accepted by the US as refugees. Most settling in tough inner cities with no money, few skills and little English.
BOOMER: Because my mum couldn’t speak English so for her to communicate she got to be in a Cambodian community. You know with the Cambodian community come poverty, with poverty come gangs.
HAWAII [Talking about tattoos on his arms]: Yeah I’ve got the cards right here, which is four aces. That means I’m hard to beat, you know what I’m saying, and I got the years right here, like when I was doing time ’98, ’99, 2000, one, two and three.
WILLIAMS: Hawaii was raised on a promise of the great American dream but saw no way to achieve it. By the age of eleven, he was making hundreds of dollars every drug deal.
HAWAII: And I was on a corner just pushing that, you know I, what I’m saying, was getting food every day, good food. I was buying clothes every day, bought me a brand new bicycle, you know what I’m saying?.... shit like that.
WILLIAMS: On the street, survival meant joining a gang.
HAWAII: Yeah it was cool. I just, I know them niggers behind my back though, you know what I’m saying? That’s why most people get... be a part of a gang anyways is to have reassurance that... you know what I’m saying, you're straight.
BILL HEROD: This is the residential facility intended primarily for people with psychological problems.
WILLIAMS: Bill Herod has been an aid worker in Asia for forty years.
What sort of psychological problems?
BILL HEROD: Schizophrenia, psychosis.
WILLIAMS: He’s the only one helping the deportees when they arrive in Cambodia.
[Talking to one of the residents]
COW: My name is Kow.
BILL HEROD: His name’s Kow and we call him Cowboy.
They come back angry, disoriented, depressed, ripped away from their families. Many of them have wives and children in the States. All of them of course, most of them have parents who certainly support communities and networks.
WILLIAMS: Bill set up this shelter for deportees with psychiatric problems who need permanent care. Without him, they’d be wandering the streets or dead.
Smokey with his brain fried by drugs still wants to end his pain.
SMOKEY: Yeah my brain is fucked up with cocaine you know. I know I got a brain problem, I got fucked up with the cocaine you know.
WILLIAMS: Bill Herod continues his work despite the personal cost. He lost an eye while struggling to stop a deportee attempt suicide by drinking acid. His anger is not directed at his patients but at the US law that dumps these troubled young men on the far side of the world.
BILL HEROD: These guys are the products of their time in the United States – good or bad. If they’ve had problems with the law and gotten into trouble, that’s a product of a poor re-settlement program and I think the United States should accept some responsibility.
WILLIAMS: He says there’s a moral question – that once people have been accepted as refugees, should they not be accepted for good?
BILL HEROD: They were political refugees who fled the terror of the Khmer Rouge period and I would certainly argue that if you’re taken in as a political refugee, the government that takes you in has some responsibility to work with you about regularising your citizenship status and the fact that that didn’t happen in these cases now results in their deportation.
HAWAII: I mean you know what I’m saying, it’s just like I said, double jeopardy man, why you going to fuck somebody’s life up even more when he already paid for his fuck up, you know what I’m saying? When he already paid for his crime, you see like that.
WILLIAMS: Cambodia is still slowly emerging from decades of conflict. The last thing anyone needed were plane loads of American gangsters. There’s a firm belief the government here only agreed to take the deportees after strong arm tactics by Washington.
BILL HEROD: As I understand it, Cambodia resisted for more than three years to agree to this for a variety of reasons and one of those reasons was that Cambodia didn’t feel that they were prepared to deal with, you know hundreds, maybe fifteen hundred people with criminal backgrounds and maybe drug problems coming into the society right now. I think that’s understandable.
WILLIAMS: It remains a highly sensitive issue. Cambodian Police General, Sophana Meach, confirms his government only relented after the US threatened to cut the number of visas available for Cambodians. America’s problem has now become his problem.
SOPHANA MEACH, Cambodian Police General: We cannot just dump them like rubbish, you know we have to deal with them with compassion, with humanity and so we would like to appeal that if America can do more to help these people, to transform their lives, to integrate their lives into Cambodia successfully.
WILLIAMS: What Cambodia wants is the US to provide money or training to help the deportees get a job in what to them is a foreign land. Without that, many may return to the only livelihood they know.
SOPHANA MEACH, Cambodian Police General: It can end up with a large number of returnees who cannot make a living in a decent way who will resort to join the crime of the local criminal and create a huge problem for the Cambodian society.
WILLIAMS: The US Embassy would not give an interview but privately officials fear the deportation program is exporting American style gang crime. Hawaii says their concerns are already a reality.
HAWAII: I tell you the truth right now, just me alone, I done raised hell in this mother fucking city. That’s why I’m respected everywhere I go on the streets out here, you know what I’m saying. Half these niggers just coming out of gaol and shit like that, they don’t give a rat’s arse about nothing.
WILLIAMS: The one program the US is funding for the deportees is here in Phnom Penh’s worst slum. It’s a small AIDS awareness centre run by another deportee, nicknamed Wiket.
WIKET: I’m not trying to justify myself but as teenagers, as kids we don’t really have an understanding or we don’t comprehend things like as clearly as adults do, you know what I mean? We’re wild, you know what I mean, and we just do what we think is right.
WILLIAMS: Having worked in Outreach with gangs in the States, Wiket has become a leader here.
WIKET [talking to staff at AIDS awareness centre]: I mean when is the next time you’re going to contact them? What’s your follow-up date? What services did they need? What services did they receive?
WILLIAMS: The staff are all deportees, their job – teaching prostitutes and drug users about HIV AIDS.
STAFF MEMBER: Even just passing, give them condoms, you know tell them where to go get the needles, whatever.
WILLIAMS: It gives these young Americans some purpose but for Wiket it can’t replace the love of his baby daughter. Like many of the boys, he’s been torn away from his own child.
WIKET: When I was over there she didn’t really talk and having her sing the ABCs to me on the phone is just, oh it’s, phew... you know what I mean?
WILLIAMS: No matter how much they’ve changed, or what the boys do here, there’ll be no recognition they’ve reformed, no second chances in the States.
BILL HEROD: I think it would be possible to have a case by case humanitarian review where a deportation judge could look at each case on its merits and see what this person has done, if the person has clearly reformed. Right now none of those factors can be considered.
WILLIAMS: Grudgingly accepting their lot, the boys focus on the job at hand – offering assistance to local addicts in Phnom Penh’s drug dens.
Wiket and his crew are trying to make a go of it. Many of them are creative and entrepreneurial but for those deportees who feel the urge of the old ways, Cambodia offers a lucrative mix of cheap hard drugs, corrupt police and an untapped export market.
BILL HEROD: I think we will be able to track a rather dramatic increase in drug usage in Phnom Penh. I think it will increase the level of gang violence and local gangs are being pitted against imported gangs from the US. We’re looking at about a third who are making it, about a third who are in trouble and about a third who are in serious trouble.
WILLIAMS: Without some help, Hawaii embodies the risks.
HAWAII: This is the whole show where the prostitution ring is at and right there, that’s our prostitutes right there and that’s where people get robbed.
WILLIAMS: For four months he lived here on the streets selling dope and fighting with police among the pushers, pimps and violence.
HAWAII: I seen niggers get their head bust open and police just watching like, you know what I’m saying. He run over there tell “help me, help me” the police and a dude hit him again with a mother fucking big-arse sword, you know what I’m saying, not one of them little knives, a big-arse sword and the worst part about it is that mother-fucking sword is dull and rusted so hit him again in front of the police – bam... and I'm like, damn!
WILLIAMS: In one of the few positive turns in his young life, Hawaii recently got married. But he soon lost his job and his young bride took up prostitution to help pay the bills. He’s channelled his anger and despair into a poem titled “Decisions” – the hard choice between unemployment or a return to crime, to save his wife.
HAWAII: This is the most important decision I’m going to be forced to make, even if I don’t want to, I still have to choose. My heart says hang in there but fate says fuck it, just rob niggers so now I’m confused. But if shit don’t get better soon, pop pop is how it sounds like when thugs cry.
WILLIAMS: Boomer’s also trying to make the best of it – but warns that without help not all the deportees will.
BOOMER: When a person really don’t care, that’s when they’re most dangerous, you know, cause they really don’t care and I think that's going to have a bad effect on the Cambodian society.
BILL HEROD: The US can’t take responsibility for everything but it seems to me when we accept groups of people as political refugees, accepting them suggests some obligation to take care of them.
WILLIAMS: The United States has exported much to the world. A Made-In-America gang culture has just joined the list.
BOOMER [singing]: Dear Mr President, what did we ever done, we only products of what America made us become. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I’m saying?