Cambodia postpones annual meeting with foreign donors [-Land-grabbers, land-grabbers, pants on fire!!!]

Villagers burn tyres during a protest at the Boeung Kak lake area in Phnom Penh August 23, 2011. The villagers said they had written a letter of protest to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen after being told by officials that the land promised to them in return for being removed from their homes at the lake was not being given. Thousands of families living near the lake are facing eviction to make way for a Chinese development project. REUTERS/Samrang Pring

PHNOM PENH, Aug 23 (Reuters) - Cambodia has postponed indefinitely a top-level meeting with foreign donors, a week after an announcement by the World Bank that it had halted loans to the government over its failure to curb forced evictions.

In the letter dated Aug. 17 and sent to the World Bank, Finance Minister Keat Chhon said the upcoming Cambodia Development Cooperation Forum would be shelved because of global economic uncertainty.

Keat Chhon said some of the donor countries were "mired in crisis and struggling for a sustainable solution", according to the letter seen by Reuters on Tuesday. He did not elaborate.

The relationship between Cambodia and the World Bank has been strained recently after the Washington-based lender stopped providing loans to the country over the eviction of thousands of people from lakeside land in the country's capital.

Within two days of the announcement, Cambodia said it would set aside a piece of the land earmarked for a Chinese-led luxury housing project for thousands of people forcibly evicted.

However, some of the residents burned tyres at the site on Tuesday in protest after local officials said they would not be entitled to land deeds.

Forced evictions are a huge problem in Cambodia, with an estimated 30,000 people a year driven off rural farms and city land to make way for foreign and local businesses, mostly in the form of joint ventures led by Chinese firms.

During the last meeting, some donors, including the World Bank, criticized the government for its stalling on promised reforms and for failing to curb the evictions.

The international community pledged $1.1 billion in aid for the impoverished Southeast Asian country last year, an increase from the previous year's commitment of $990 million in 2009.

That figure is dwarfed by investment pledges by Chinese firms, which agreed to spend $8 billion in 360 projects in Cambodia in the first seven months of this year.

The deals have led to domestic and international concerns that Cambodia could become too dependent on China.

The World Bank, which has lent Cambodia up to $70 million annually over the past few years, has repeatedly asked for the evictions to stop.

Land ownership is a complex subject in Cambodia because documents were destroyed and state institutions collapsed under the Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s and the civil war that followed.

The World Bank had an agreement with the authorities to assist with land management and administration but that fell through in September 2009.

(Reporting by Prak Chan Thul; Editing by Martin Petty and Ramya Venugopal)