A road runs through them [-It's the Chams' turn to suffer Hun Xen's wild-east development]

Cambodia’s Cham (Picture credit: The Economist)

Jan 23rd 2013
By L.H. | PHNOM PENH
The Economist

Mr Sun Ham said that traditional loyalties were being torn and this could hurt the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) and the prime minster, Hun Sen, who has scheduled a general election for July 28th.

UP AND down a 4km stretch of highway on the northern outskirts of Phnom Penh, about 3,000 of Cambodia’s Cham minority have built a life. Their distinctive Muslim culture thrives in conditions of close-knit community, a stark contrast to the shattering days the country endured through the rule of the Khmer Rouge and the civil war that followed. For a generation the Cham were isolated and, at times, slaughtered.

Since those wars ended in 1998, political stability has brought Cambodia many of its usual rewards. The economy has expanded on the back of foreign aid and fledgling industries like garment manufacture and tourism, as well as by timber and other natural resources.

Some of the foremost leaders of the Khmer Rouge are now sitting in judgment before a war-crimes tribunal, some of them to be tried on charges stemming from their persecution of the Cham. In other quarters, the Cham have been sought out and praised as examples of an Islamic community that is now situated peaceably within a non-Muslim majority.

Yet for this cluster of villages strung along the highway, the future is cast under shadow. Property prices are soaring everywhere and their tract has been picked for expropriation. This section of the national Route Five, which links Phnom Penh with the provincial city of Battambang in the north-west, has been earmarked for an upgrade. The highway will be widened by between eight and 25 meters on each side of the road. The surrounding land is to be re-zoned for industrial use.

You Sos is the elderly caretaker and spokesman for a local mosque. Old, shirtless and looking pious under a prayer cap, he keeps to a small hut at the rear of the Kilometre Nine Mosque (named for its place on Route Five). He says that everyone will have to go. It is a heartbreaking decision, as he sees it: sure to split up the community, and irreversible.

Mr You Sos says that a few of the enclave’s more established families—those with larger holdings—can expect to receive some form of compensation. The majority, who have only tiny plots of land, will probably receive little if anything. Mr You Sos sounds resigned. “The government has said nothing since we were initially told that we would have to make way for a road project about a year ago. Some have land they can move to, many have nothing. Some should have realised that we could not be here forever.”

Land-grabbing has hit crisis reached epidemic levels in Cambodia over the past year, with large swathes, known as Economic Land Concessions (ELCs), leased to foreign consortiums. The construction of industrial sites, high-end housing developments, roads, dams and railways is dislocating village life.

Protests and ugly confrontations between villagers and the authorities have become almost daily occurrences. Villagers tend to claim that financial compensation, where there is any, is a pittance. When land is offered as compensation it is isolated, barren and often lacks access to water, electricity, sealed roads and the like.

Last year a storied environmental campaigner, Chhut Vuthy, was shot dead following a confrontation at an ELC. Then a 14-year-old girl was shot and killed by police during a protest over an alleged land grab.

On the east side of the highway between Kilometres Five and Nine, fear of the pending eviction orders is especially acute. This strip of land divides the road from the Tonle Sap, the freshwater heart of Cambodia. Thousands of the local Cham live in dilapidated huts lining its bank. Men fish for their livelihoods and, as the river recedes from its annual flooding, women and children go about tilling the alluvial soil for cultivation.

Most are dressed in their traditional bright colours. Some of their clothing reflects more recent influences from Islamic countries in South Asian and the Middle East; men wear salwar kameez and some women wear headscarves. Nearby, there are three large established mosques and several smaller ones.

“The Cham can’t be divided and spread among the Khmer, it simply can’t work,” said Sun Ham, a 48-year-old local businessman. “There are no mosques among the Khmers who are Buddhist. And the Khmer eat pork: we do not—we eat fish and need to be beside the river.”

Mr Sun Ham said that traditional loyalties were being torn and this could hurt the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) and the prime minster, Hun Sen, who has scheduled a general election for July 28th. Villages here have remained loyal to the CPP since Hun Sen, who alongside Mat Ly, a revered leader of the Cham, led the Vietnamese-backed invasion of Cambodia in 1978. Their troops ousted the Khmer Rouge from power and the Cham, disproportionately cursed by their rule, have been grateful in the decades since.

But splitting up extended families can be tricky, politically, in parts where the overwhelming majority live a hand-to-mouth existence from shared farmlands. “There should be two choices: land or compensation. But the terms have not been disclosed,” said Mr Sun Ham. He lacks the dispassionate calm of the Kilometre Nine imam. “Nothing is clear about compensation…What is clear is that they will develop the road and take the land. It’s all the residents—we all have to go, and I will move too, and we may get nothing.”