In Southeast Asia, the Authorities Are the Biggest Gun Dealers in Town

It’s 1 a.m. in Poipet, a Cambodian town on the Thai border where the economy runs on casinos, illegal online gambling, and the now-notorious “pig-butchering” scams that use forced and trafficked labor to reel in victims worldwide. The town’s clubs and karaoke bars are awash with cocky Chinese gangsters splashing their cash on expensive liquor and bags of meth, which is sold openly by bartenders hovering by the bathrooms.

But at the outdoor tables of a tiny bar by the night market, overshadowed by an under-construction compound that locals say will house yet more Chinese-run scams, four Indonesian members of an online gambling syndicate are keeping a lower profile. Their “boss” is an unassuming, chain-smoking Indonesian man in his 30s with just a smattering of tattoos. But as the empty bottles of Captain Morgan’s rum pile up, his guard falls, and out comes the mafia-don swagger.

“The best thing about living here is that we can do whatever we want,” he boasts. “We can get a ‘44 for 20,000 baht” – around $540. The boss is referring to his high-powered 44-caliber revolvers, which he claims to buy through a middleman who gets them straight from the Cambodian police – something he said could never happen back home. In fact, until they came to Cambodia, the group barely knew how to handle firearms; they trained at a shooting range in Phnom Penh. Here, he explains, lowering the flat palm of his free hand, the balance of power puts the easily-bribed police “down here, then us, then the Chinese” – and his guns are for “going to war” with these Chinese rivals.

But while the authorities are low priority, police and soldiers do become targets. Three officers were injured trying to break up a drunken shootout outside a Poipet casino in 2021, and in 2022, a drug dealer shot dead two Poipet police. His weapon? A .44-caliber Magnum Revolver.

Selling weapons to potential enemies sounds like an absurd act of self-sabotage, but all across Southeast Asia, state security apparatuses – police, military, and government – are a primary source of weapons for criminals and guerrilla fighters, within their own borders and beyond. The civil war in Myanmar, the ongoing separatist insurgency in the south of Thailand, and the rapid growth of organized crime groups running the region’s multi-billion-dollar, human trafficking-driven online scam industry all require a steady supply of firearms and munitions. Capitalizing on this demand is a lucrative business, and armed forces have ready access to legal supply. Throw in high-level corruption and weak control of inventory, and this makes for a potentially catastrophic mix.

“The presence of organized crime can act both as a driver for demand and availability of illicit weapons, while also directly causing instability and increased armed violence,” said Llewelyn Jones, the Asia-Pacific regional director at MAG International, a humanitarian organization that specializes in clearing landmines and unexploded ordnance, as well as small arms initiatives to prevent weapons falling into the wrong hands.

States need to be able to record and trace all domestic and international arms and ammunition shipments, he said, and to enforce legislation when it comes to producing and licensing weapons. “It is widely acknowledged globally that unsecured or poorly secured stockpiles of small arms and ammunition are at risk of diversion to the illicit market, with significant consequences for peace, security and stability,” Jones added.

In Cambodia, measures like these seem a distant dream. A steady stream of Telegram, Facebook, and WhatsApp exchanges seen by The Diplomat detailed negotiations for black market firearms including AK-47s, AR-15s, and Beretta and Glock pistols, alongside various accessories such as high-capacity ammunition magazines and suppressors. Sources in the sector said many of these could only have come from the armed forces.

In another Telegram group chat, police discussed how, just one week after a delivery of assault rifles and pistols to the counterterrorism unit in Phnom Penh in August 2023, one of these new semi-automatic rifles turned up in a raid on a Chinese criminal gang in Sihanoukville. Yet another video showed a recently seized AK-47, with the police strap still attached to the gun.

“Mafia With Rifles”

Often, military and police units simply falsify the number of firearms procured legitimately and then sell off the unregistered surplus through personal networks or social media, explained “Z,” a Cambodian military officer who asked that his identity be protected.

We met Z, as per his request, at a beachfront trans hostess bar in the crime-ridden casino city of Sihanoukville, where heavily tattooed Chinese and Taiwanese gangsters were shouting to hear each other above the clamor of mini-dressed waitresses singing “Happy Birthday” to a small child. Z was in civilian clothes, but brought his Glock pistol – as had at least one other patron, who flashed it accidentally at the bar while fumbling in his sling-bag for his wallet.

Shielded by the chaos, Z explained how his superiors required him to assist in the sale of arms from his unit to criminal groups, and had also arranged for him to act as private security for high-ranking Chinese and Korean crime bosses. The role brought in extra income for Z and his unit commanders, while providing these crime figures with a bodyguard who can openly carry a weapon, which only serving members of the armed forces are legally allowed to do. (The Cambodian government officially banned the outsourcing of Royal Cambodian Armed Forces for private security roles in 2019, but the rule is widely ignored).