Cambodia’s Landless Class

September 26, 2012
By LUKE HUNT
International Herald Tribune (Paris, France)

The land grabs can be traced back to 2001 when laws were passed that allowed the government to usurp any “private state land” and grant up to about 25,000 acres to companies and private individuals. The shady deals escalated sharply after 2008 as property prices soared and well-off businessmen, local and international companies took control of grants for development.

PHNOM PENH — In a union office for garment workers on the outskirts of the capital on a recent afternoon, Tith Srey Mom and her sister Mach were pondering what to do next. After losing a 10-year legal battle to keep their 200-square-meter plot of land, they were being evicted. All legal avenues had been exhausted. All they could do was wait for the police to come and forcibly remove them.

The sisters are from Chrolang Village, about 30 miles south of Phnom Penh. Tith Srey Mom’s grandparents assumed control of their land in 1979 as the Khmer Rouge were retreating. The family tilled the patch of dirt for decades, growing rice to subsidize their meager incomes.

Then in 2002 the police arrived and told them to leave, claiming that the sisters no longer owned it. No one among the 32 families in Chrolang had ever heard of Tep Menon, but the police said he was now the owner of the plot. And so began the sisters’ decade-long fight in the courts to keep their land.

Land grabbing — big and small — has become all too common in Cambodia. Protests and violent confrontations with the authorities have left a mounting death toll. Meanwhile, as more and more poor Cambodians are being dispossessed, many fear the end of the “communal rice bowl’’ and traditional village life that once guaranteed food and a family home for all. With no more land to go home to, village life is being decimated.

All land titles, along with nearly a third of the population, were destroyed by Pol Pot’s regime, and farmers moved swiftly to repopulate the land when the Khmer Rouge collapsed. Later, the Cambodian government recognized ownership of land occupied prior to 1989, when the Vietnamese occupation ended.

The land grabs can be traced back to 2001 when laws were passed that allowed the government to usurp any “private state land” and grant up to about 25,000 acres to companies and private individuals. The shady deals escalated sharply after 2008 as property prices soared and well-off businessmen, local and international companies took control of grants for development.

A spate of violence has been one result. This year alone a prominent anti-logging activist was murdered, a teenage girl was killed by the police during an eviction and 13 women were jailed, and later freed, for protesting against a concession that cost them their homes with little recompense. A journalist with a history of reporting on illegal logging and land grabs was found this month in the trunk of his car. He had been hacked to death.

Elections must be held by mid-2013, and land-grabbing has provided Prime Minister Hun Sen with his worst political headache. The issue will come to the fore at the annual donors meeting this week in Phnom Penh, at which Cambodia’s benefactors decide how much to dole out to the Cambodian government and what conditions to attach. Made-up largely of Western nations and international institutions, donors routinely provide about one billion dollars a year, almost half the government’s annual budget.

Nongovernmental organizations are urging donor countries to pressure the government to rein in its wayward authorities. The U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said in its annual report that of particular concern was the increased use of force and live ammunition on people protesting the land grabs. “These instances of violence were predominantly unprovoked, and primarily related to land disputes,” the report said.

This is cold comfort for Tith Srey Mom. She and her siblings have little choice but to take a menial job in a garment factory six days a week, working 8 to 12 hours a day for a minimum wage of about $90 a month, producing apparel for big-name brands.

Similar tales were told by Yong Eaon, a 41-year-old mother of three who is preparing a legal challenge after her neighbors — armed with knives and political connections — annexed a plot that she brought from her brother in 1997.

“They turned it into an access road,’’ she said. “So, one daughter goes to work, makes garments. She can only send home $25 a month, but it helps and I will fight.”

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Luke Hunt is a journalist based in Southeast Asia