SVAY PAK, Cambodia, Jan 23 (AFP) - Cambodia's most notorious brothel village, Svay Pak, where women and girls as young as 10 have been coaxed or enslaved into the sex trade over the past 20 years, has been shut down by the government, officials said Thursday.
Phnom Penh police chief General Soun Chheangly said a decision was made to shutter the infamous village in an effort to salvage Cambodia's cultural reputation.
"Svay Pak is extremely famous for its bad name," Soun Chheangly told AFP. "So the government does not allow them to operate there any more, because it affects our culture badly."
Villagers and Svay Pak shopkeepers said several of the 50-odd brothels had been closed for weeks.
On Wednesday police swooped on the dusty village 11 kilometres (seven miles) north of Phnom Penh, turning away customers, closing up brothels and ordering an immediate halt to the sex trade there.
Police said they had yet to make any arrests, and it was not immediately clear what, if any, action would be taken against the women and children engaged in the business.
Svay Pak, often dubbed K11, has earned a horrific reputation as a black hole of child-trafficking and sexual exploitation.
The ramshackle collection of concrete houses along a dirt road is temporary home to hundreds of sex workers, the vast majority of them Vietnamese and some younger than 10. They service a foreign and Cambodian clientele for as little as three dollars per customer, said Ly Lay, police chief of Svay Pak's Russey Keo district.
But by Thursday all the brothels were locked and the normally busy village was nearly a ghost town.
"You can see it is very quiet. No girls, no business, no money," a cafe owner said.
The owner of a second cafe nearby said the brothels had received orders last August to close their doors but most of the dens flouted the regulations.
"This time it's different," said the woman, declining to give her name.
Several brothels had notices nailed to their doors with written promises from brothel owners that they will cease operations, apparently signed by the owners and sex workers.
A handful of foreign men were seen in the few open cafes or wandering around the village.
South Korean tourist Jim Yum, 25, said he was visiting for the first time after learning of Svay Pak through the Internet but was disappointed it was empty.
"On the Internet it said there are a lot of girls here and they are cheap, but now I don't see any of them," he said.
A number of villagers said they had heard the sex workers had mostly returned home to Vietnam.
Many of the thousands of young girls working in Cambodia's red light areas have been rescued recently by police and non-governmental organisations amid a sweeping crackdown on paedophilia launched last year by Prime Minister Hun Sen.
Prostitution is illegal but rife. The government last year ordered the closure of all brothels and karaoke bars in the country, though many have eluded repercussions by re-styling their businesses as massage parlours, going underground or bribing police or other authorities.
Cambodia is in the midst of a major tourism drive and is eager to clean up its unsavoury reputation as a haven for paedophilia, human-trafficking and the sex trade.
The country is ravaged by the AIDS epidemic, with estimates that 2.6 percent of the population have contracted HIV, the virus which causes AIDS.
Chitra Vanaspong, a regional officer with the Bangkok-based advocacy group ECPAT (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking) said the closure was a key step but expressed concern over how long the crackdown would last.
"We have heard for some time that the government is trying to be strict on enforcing the law on prostitution," Chitra said by telephone.
"Our concern is whether the action is going to be long-term or not."
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