Andong village resettlement site in Cambodia lacks all basic amenities (Photo: Licadho)
After the people had been evicted, Mittapheap 4 village was fenced in and put up for sale (Photo: Amnesty International)
Twenty families of a fishing community in Sihanoukville were forcibly evicted in February 2008 (Photo: Amnesty International)Housing rights violations around the world
6 October 2008
Excerpt from Amnesty International
As World Habitat Day focuses on the state of the housing rights situation across the globe, here are case studies from Cambodia, Brazil, Italy, Israel and Angola.
1. Forced out for 'development' (Cambodia)
“We have seen the development plan and of course we get worried because it is clear that we are affected: According to the plan we have disappeared,” a representative from Phnom Penh's Boeung Kak area told Amnesty International in February, 2008. Six months on, the plan is underway and hundreds of those affected are protesting amidst intimidation and lack of information.
Some 20,000 Phnom Penh residents face displacement as the Boeung Kak Lake they live around is being turned into a landfill. The filling of the lake began on 26 August 2008, without notice to the residents. Without urgent action to ensure that a process to protect the human rights of the residents is put into place, this project may begin the biggest forced eviction in post-war Cambodia.
Many of those affected are poor, living in basic housing on the lake shore, which is rising as more and more sand is filled into the lake. The affected communities fear the ongoing development may drive them out of Phnom Penh, to an area to which thousands of other evictees have been resettled and which lacks sanitation, electricity and other basic services, while access to job opportunities are desperately scarce. Thousands of evictees from other parts of Phnom Penh have already been resettled there, in what effectively are new slums, recreated outside the city perimeter.
1. Forced out for 'development' (Cambodia)
“We have seen the development plan and of course we get worried because it is clear that we are affected: According to the plan we have disappeared,” a representative from Phnom Penh's Boeung Kak area told Amnesty International in February, 2008. Six months on, the plan is underway and hundreds of those affected are protesting amidst intimidation and lack of information.
Some 20,000 Phnom Penh residents face displacement as the Boeung Kak Lake they live around is being turned into a landfill. The filling of the lake began on 26 August 2008, without notice to the residents. Without urgent action to ensure that a process to protect the human rights of the residents is put into place, this project may begin the biggest forced eviction in post-war Cambodia.
Many of those affected are poor, living in basic housing on the lake shore, which is rising as more and more sand is filled into the lake. The affected communities fear the ongoing development may drive them out of Phnom Penh, to an area to which thousands of other evictees have been resettled and which lacks sanitation, electricity and other basic services, while access to job opportunities are desperately scarce. Thousands of evictees from other parts of Phnom Penh have already been resettled there, in what effectively are new slums, recreated outside the city perimeter.
5 comments:
Hun Sen and the CPP way of stimulating feeling their pockets, sorry I mean to stimulate the economy.
Yea. When real PhDs are on the move you see sad situation like this.
oh my god, some displace people look like the are in refugee camps again. it is partly gov't's fault to let this happen. i mean, there should be better system to assistance them, even though people are asked to relocate from their makeshift residence. can't just abandon them; it is the responsibility of the gov't to see that people are being treated fairly. god bless.
Ah Sen and the CPP being responsible???
Maybe in a million years.
I have to wonder how many more social classes does HUN XEN want to create?
Cambodian social class compose of:
-Technocrat (rich and the powerful)
-Middle class (work for the gov't)
-Working class (self employ)
-Working poor (worker or farmer)
-Homeless (people have no land, no job, and very dirt poor!)
The way Cambodia is heading educationally and economically is to have majority of Cambodian people remain as homeless! It is about time that Hun Xen needs to re-examine his economic policy!
it happens only in hun sen cambodia.
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