Killing Fields for sale: It only happens under Hun Xen

Selling the Killing Fields

Source: http://www.voxy.co.nz/entertainment/week-tvnz-7/5/46716

Broadcast date: Tuesday 18 May, 7.35pm
On:Unreported World On TVNZ 7 (New Zealand)

Thirty years on from the fall of the Khmer Rouge, and at the same time as Pol Pot's accomplices are being put on trial for war crimes, Cambodia's people are once again being brutally driven from their land.

This time, however, it is capitalism, not communism, that is displacing them, as growing numbers of tourists fuel a property boom that is having devastating results.

In Phnom Penh where land is now worth three times as much as two years ago, Unreported World investigates allegations that the Cambodian authorities are behind a policy of violent evictions of the country's poor from their homes. The inhabitants of the slum district of Dey Krahorm, which is home to 120 families and right next to central Phnom Penh's plush new hotels, embassies and new National Assembly, are being forced to leave so their land can be sold to a property developer.

On Cambodia's White Coast where beaches are an increasing draw for foreign tourists, the people of Kom Penh Chit fishing village are barred from the adjoining beach because it's been sold off to developers while local farmers have also suffered displacement because their coastal farms were highly prized for development.

In a 'resettlement village' where the government has relocated people it has evicted from the capital, the residents live under tarpaulin sheets and diseases like typhoid, dengue fever, pneumonia, tuberculosis and dysentery are endemic. It is a chilling echo of the suffering of those evicted from Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge. As one woman tells her story, she says she has already survived the Khmer Rouge regime, but after this eviction she feels her life is over.