I was set up, says Kiwi freed from Cambodian rape sentence

"I really can't stand to see women cry." New Zealander Graham Cleghorn is staunch in his assurances he never committed the rapes of five girls aged 15 to 17, for which he was convicted in Cambodia.

The former ambulance paramedic received a suspended sentence and a king's pardon, 11 years into a 20-year sentence, allowing him to return home to Wellington earlier this month.

Cleghorn's definition of rape was "using any force or coercion". When asked about rapes that occur in which the women do not cry, the 67-year-old says he is aware if he is hurting somebody.

"Nobody goes to Asia to rape an Asian girl. You get people who say, 'You have no respect for women,' but in Cambodia and in Thailand for $20 you can virtually have anyone you want.

"The culture around sex is totally different in Asia. Just to be in the house with a Westerner, just to be part of that scene. All of the people who worked for me, I looked after them and their families."

Cleghorn, originally from Petone, moved to Thailand in 1986 to work in the refugee camps set up for people escaping from the Cambodian-Vietnamese war, he says.

"I was teaching law and human rights at the English-speaking university. I was a police officer, and law is law."

After the Paris Peace Accord ended the war in 1991, Cleghorn's Cambodian connections meant he saw a chance to make his fortune as the country rebuilt itself.

In the years leading up to his arrest in 2003, he worked as a security guard, tourist guide and owned a bar.

He married a young local woman, Bun Toeur, and settled on a now million-dollar two-hectare plot farming prawns in a village near the Angkor Wattemple complex. He hired villagers as housemaids, and often paid for schooling for them and their siblings, he says.

Cleghorn has consistently said he was innocent of the rape charges that earned him a 20-year sentence, and that he was set up by a corrupt judicial system taking advantage of their asset-seizure powers. He says the judge who oversaw his trial had a family connection to the women's refuge centre that he believes coached the girls into accusing him of rape.

"Because of the elections they [the judges] had power, but [financially] they had nothing. And they grabbed off everybody, everything and anything ... My land was what they wanted."

His claims saw him slammed with a defamation suit by the women's refuge centre in 2010. The centre did not respond to requests to comment on this article, but have previously described the accusations as "groundless".

Cleghorn says, at the time of his arrest, there were more than 50 non-government organisations in Cambodia competing with each other to catch paedophiles to boost their international donations.

"They were spreading the story that Cambodia was the paedophile capital of the world, which it wasn't. There just weren't enough people to go around. They'd already done [set up for rape] three foreigners before me."

Cleghorn says his 2004 trial was a sham. "It was over in the morning – it was about 2½ hours. The only evidence was that the girls stood up and said, 'He raped me,' and then sat down. Not times, dates, places, nothing.

"I had 14 witnesses. The judge said, 'Have you been raped?', and they said no. And he said they had nothing to add as this was a rape case."

Cleghorn says he had physical – but never sexual – contact with the five girls who testified against him.

"People are more touchy-touchy over there than they are in the West. In fact, the girls would come and give me a massage. But they'd do the same to their mother, or the father, or their uncle."

As Cleghorn appealed against his first and only court conviction, his New Zealand-based lawyer, the late Greg King, pointed out "outrageous" trial abuses, such as prosecution witnesses not being cross-examined.

Cleghorn says people who judge his guilt based on a Cambodian conviction simply do not understand how justice works, or fails to work, in third-world countries.

Independent investigator Human Rights Watch describes the country's courts as "notoriously corrupt, lack[ing] competence, and frequently [conducting] unfair trials".

"The Cambodian justice system is just a criminal gang of extortionists," Cleghorn says. "They are not interested in any evidence other than $100 American notes."

Violent acts are not something Cleghorn denies. "There's probably nothing I wouldn't do if the occasion arose ... but New Zealanders really don't understand. They've never been in a world like that when your life could be over in minutes."

He says a prison guard saw this side, as Cleghorn served his sentence in maximum-security Prey Sar prison. The guard had requested Cleghorn bribe him with a can of drink to be let out of his cell door with the others.

"I told him, 'Listen, I've got a 30-year sentence – 20 years, and 10 years if I don't pay compensation. At my age, I'm not going to live 30 years and there's no death penalty in Cambodia. So if I kill you, I'm going to get a life sentence.

" 'I'm not going home to my wife tonight, and if you want to go home to your wife tonight, then don't piss around with me. I'm happy to die right now, looking at a 30-year sentence, on one condition: that I take some asshole with me. And you, at the moment, are leading the pack.'

"Ten minutes later, [the guard] was moved to another block. If you let them do things like that to you, they'll do it every day ... Some of them would be bullies, but only if you allowed them to be."

"I WASN'T GOING TO LET THOSE BASTARDS BEAT ME"

Despite sparse conditions, no hygiene, and gross overcrowding in cells of 200 people, Cleghorn says he has no beef with the prison system, kept honest by the Red Cross. "There was no rapes, no murders. They do what they can with what they've got."

Money sent by his five daughters kept him comparatively well-fed, and his position as head of the prison kitchen gave him more privacy and privileges than other inmates.

"When you go into an Asian prison – I'd never been in one before – sure, it's a shock.

"If you give up in a place like that, you're going to die. People asked, how did I survive 11½ years in jail in Cambodia. Well, what were the alternatives?

"I wasn't going to let those bastards beat me."

Cleghorn says roughly once a year he was offered a deal by the courts: confess, show remorse and beg for forgiveness and he would be released. "It's just something I couldn't do. I would not be able to look myself in the mirror."

Visits from his children proved distressing, rather than a comfort. "I said to them to stop coming, because I couldn't afford to have them turning up here crying their eyes out, and then they'd get me going.

"It doesn't matter what people do to me. But the thing was, that hurt my family as well, these bogus charges hurt my family. And that really pissed me off.

"I've never, ever told people I was innocent. If you know me, you know I am ... I believe I have a good character.

"When I look in the mirror.......

...continued...

http://i.stuff.co.nz/world/asia/6967772 ... e-sentence

Yeah, some really stupid statements by that dude. Good riddance.