This little boy is not in prison, but he may as well be. He's committed no crime other than being born in Cambodia to someone who couldn't or wouldn't care for him. He now lives in the Asian Orphans Association home just outside Phnom Penh and has about zero chance of being adopted.

As I write, more than four years have passed since the USA suspended adoptions from Cambodia. The UK followed suit last year and some other European countries have also made it impossible for residents to bring Cambodian children into their families.

To say that the issue of Cambodian adoptions is contentious in the international adoption community is like noticing a Siberian tiger is a kind of a cat. Should you be so foolish as to voice an opinion, you will be bitten.

Some of the most vociferous opponents of Cambodian adoption are adoptive parents of Cambodian-born children, and those adopting around the time the suspension came into place in America are particularly aggressive in their stance. These families went through their own personal hells, as efforts to bring their children home required almost super-human strength and patience. Many are bitter, and many more worry endlessly about the circumstances that brought their children to them and how they will explain situations with precarious ins and outs in later years to questioning kids. There is a very vocal group that hopes that there are no adoptions from Cambodia at all until the country can conduct its business transparently and with honesty and honor.

Cambodia is an extremely poor country less than thirty years beyond a genocide that killed almost two million of its people. This genocide was not conducted by "others", but by the Khmer version of you and me. No tribal element separated the killers from the victims. No difference in religion or language or physical features existed between the perpetrators of horror and the objects of their torture. Everyone now in a position of power, everyone over the age of twenty-seven in the country today, was on one end or the other of the genocide ... today either a survivor or a former Khmer Rouge monster. There was no middle ground then, and there is none now. Everyone was one or the other.

These are the people now in charge. Corruption? Is this a surprise in any way?

One more angle on this:

The United States carpet-bombed Cambodia. The United States ignored the genocide. The United States supported Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge.

I will revisit this topic. You can count on it.