Did Hun Sen avoid visiting the evictees in Tuol Sambo on purpose?

Srey Leak, 10, a member of one of many evicted families, stands in her house in Toul Sambo, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh September 7, 2009, while her parents work as garbage collectors near the capital. Cambodia said on Monday it had pulled out of a World Bank project aimed at settling land disputes, raising further concern about forced evictions in the impoverished Southeast Asian country. Prime Minister Hun Sen said the World Bank's administrative procedures were too complicated and Cambodia no longer wished to be part of the project. REUTERS/Chor Sokunthea
Dang Saren, 12, a member of one of many evicted families, plays with his neighbour in Toul Sambo, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh September 7, 2009, while his father works as a taxi driver in the capital. Cambodia said on Monday it had pulled out of a World Bank project aimed at settling land disputes, raising further concern about forced evictions in the impoverished Southeast Asian country. Prime Minister Hun Sen said the World Bank's administrative procedures were too complicated and Cambodia no longer wished to be part of the project. REUTERS/Chor Sokunthea
Dang Saren, 12, a member of one of many evicted families, plays with his neighbour in Toul Sambo, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh September 7, 2009, while his father works as a taxi driver in the capital. Cambodia said on Monday it had pulled out of a World Bank project aimed at settling land disputes, raising further concern about forced evictions in the impoverished Southeast Asian country. Prime Minister Hun Sen said the World Bank's administrative procedures were too complicated and Cambodia no longer wished to be part of the project. REUTERS/Chor Sokunthea

AIDS patients struggle in isolated Cambodian town

Many Cambodian AIDS patients and their families have been relocated to this community outside Tuol Sambo.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009
By Miranda Leitsinger

TUOL SAMBO, Cambodia (CNN) -- Van Thy says the government evicted her from her home in the Cambodian capital and trucked her and others out to a town an hour away where she now lives in a hot green metal shed with no running water and dim prospects.

Before the move, she had a job as a dishwasher, but now the 36-year-old woman is unemployed, penniless and her health has taken a turn for the worse. She has AIDS like many of the others in the 40 AIDS-affected families that were resettled here.

"We were called for a meeting and when I got there, a lot of trucks were already prepared. There was no meeting. They told us to prepare our stuff for moving out," she said, her voice trembling as she detailed her departure from the Phnom Penh shantytown she called home for nine years. "Everybody cried the day we left."

As Cambodia emerges from the 1970s Khmer Rouge genocide and decades of conflict, evictions for development purposes have become a hot issue, with rights groups and upset villagers living on desirable land launching protests in recent years. But what sets the families apart at Tuol Sambo is that they have AIDS.

"The problems that this community face are not unlike problems that people face throughout the country," said Kathleen O'Keefe, an independent consultant focusing on HIV/AIDS and land issues.

"What has made these problems extreme is that they have been isolated and treated as a community" and their relocation has added "additional problems, like real health risks of many immune compromised people living far too close together. This place would be a health risk to healthy people."

This is the second relocation for many of these families. They had been living in a shantytown in the Cambodian capital, an area called Borei Keila that was across the street from a hospital where they received medical care and where they could find jobs to earn $1.25 or $1.50 a day.

O'Keefe said they had lived dispersed throughout the community but were forced to move into one building there in 2007 when the area started to undergo development.

"They were segregated into a green building, which very quickly became known as the ... AIDS village," O'Keefe said. "This AIDS colony in Tuol Sambo is the second time they are being even further isolated ... it's been an extremely traumatic situation for them."

O'Keefe said most of the families that were moved to Tuol Sambo told her they have lost their jobs, their health is worsening due to a lack of clean water and food, and they face discrimination from their new neighbors because of their illness.

"We feel very ashamed to go outside, they look like they discriminating against us," Van Thy said.

Phnom Penh Deputy Governor Mann Chhoeun said those who were relocated got a plot of land, a house and $275. He also noted they were provided rice, electricity and said, "when the water supply can be connected to this area, then we can connect it for these people."

Mann Chhoeun said the people were illegally squatting in the Phnom Penh shantytown, but they were not forcefully evicted.

"They proposed to go ... because living in that area (their previous shantytown) they had floods and they have no proper business to do in there, so that's why they proposed to us to go there," he said. "They think that when they go there (to Tuol Sambo), they can own the land, they can own a house and they can make some business or something like that."

He also said he did not believe there was discrimination in the area, "but there is some feeling when they (people) learn that someone has been living with HIV/AIDS."

Van Thy said her new home has brought many challenges and a recent blood test showed that her CD4 count -- a marker of decreased immune function that is often used to demonstrate how well anti-HIV drugs are working, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- had gone down.

She said the doctor told her she needed to eat more, but she said having little money means eating less: "It means that my health is getting worse," she said.

The water in their new home is from a well and is undrinkable unless it is boiled or purified.

"We are patients, we need some clean water," she said. "They said the water cannot be drunk, just for using to wash clothes and things like that."

Another man, Chheang Toma, takes the temperature inside his green shed at noon every day. On average, it is 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) but one time spiked up to 50 Celsius (122).

"This area is very difficult," he said. "I am always sick and I always have a headache. The weather is so hot even my son has gone to the clinic two times already."

Fact Box
HIV/AIDS in Cambodia

• The estimated number of people living with HIV/AIDS 67,000
• Vulnerable groups: Entertainment workers, men having sex with men, injection drug users

SOURCE: National AIDS Authority of Cambodia

Home care specialist, Oum Vicheth, has been working with this community since 1998 and holds a clinic at Tuol Sambo once a week. He said the move "has strongly affected them."

"This is a long-term effect, not a short-term one, because medicine alone cannot help them. It combines with other factors like food, eating enough, sleeping enough, and a good environment, so all this can help make their health stable," he said.

"The problem is right now that what these people are facing is about their food, about their sleep and about the heat. It's very hot. Sometimes this affects the quality of the medicine they keep."

Chheang Toma said his son, who is in first grade, heard that parents of local children told them not to play with him because he has HIV.

"He just told me that he wanted to play with those children but when they saw him they just run away," he said. "I know right now some parents they just learning and understand about us, and they start to tolerate, but some others keep us in isolation -- like they still look at us, treating us very bad by not coming very close and not making friends with us."

Oum Vicheth said he was providing health care to the villagers as a way to bring them closer to the group and they have held meetings with them about how HIV is contracted.

"There was very little thought given to integrating the community into the larger resettlement area of Tuol Sambo," said Tony Lisle, the UNAIDS country coordinator for Cambodia. "By basically settling the community in one contiguous place it opens the community up to discrimination."

The UN team in Cambodia also "was disappointed that the relocation was carried out before the site was made habitable" and monitors would visit the site in late August, Lisle said.

Tang Kunthy, secretary-general of the Cambodian government's National AIDS Authority, said the Tuol Sambo group's worries were about the housing, not their health care, since he said they still had good access to treatment, including home-based care, medicine and the help of charities.

He said the housing situation could not be changed overnight, but it would improve "step by step," and he also noted Tuol Sambo was an area the municipality wants to develop.

"The municipality has a plan for the future," he said. "I asked the government to explain to them (the Toul Sambo residents), to provide more information to them."

He also noted there was "no serious discrimination" in Cambodia against people with HIV/AIDS, but that the AIDS authority would try to ensure any such problems did not arise in the future.

Back at Tuol Sambo, people think of the future and how they will make ends meet.

One man in the community who has AIDS lost one job in the move but still has part-time work. He said things have improved with their new neighbors.

"When we first arrived here, the villagers around the area just said look at AIDS people living here and so they did not allow their children or relatives to come and play in this area and they don't talk to us. But now after seeing the home care specialist," things seem to be getting better with them, he said.

Still, he and his friends from the old shantytown are not happy with their new lives.

"We are living with disappointment," he said.

Cambodia’s AIDS colony

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
By Mong Palatino
Global Voices Online

Various human rights groups have accused the Cambodian government of setting up a de facto AIDS colony when it resettled 40 families with HIV and AIDS to a village 25 kilometers outside Phnom Penh City.

The families were from Borei Keila in Phnom Penh. They were evicted from their homes to make way for an urban development plan of the government. The families are now living in Tuol Sambo village.

The families are complaining of their situation in the “AIDS village”:

With inadequate sanitation and no running water, the area is not a health sanctuary for HIV-infected patients, who require personal attention and care.

HIV-infected people living in the village say they have not received any official recognition of ownership rights nor government compensation for their old homes.

Details are Sketchy wants to find out the responsible authority for this drastic move:

Who is responsible for this decision? The media should find out. And prosecutors should start preparing a case. Because it’s all but certain that at least one of those 40 HIV-positive people will die as a result of the move. That’s negligent homicide, at least, if not outright premeditated murder.

The Global Network of People living with HIV is urging the Cambodian government to address the humanitarian concerns of the evicted families:

• Cease moving HIV-affected families to the Tuol Sambo site;
• Improve conditions at Tuol Sambo to meet minimum standards for adequate shelter, sanitation, and clean water;
• Ensure full access to quality medical services, including antiretroviral treatment, treatment of opportunistic infections, primary health care and home-based care;
• Work with relevant agencies and consult with the families already at Tuol Sambo to address immediate and long-term concerns regarding housing, health, safety, and employment, and reintegration into society in a manner that protects their rights and livelihoods; and
• Employ a transparent and fair screening process to determine eligibility for on-site housing at Borei Keila, and allow eligible families to move in immediately. For those found ineligible, authorities should provide other adequate housing.

Writing for Global Health, Alanna Shaikh reacts:

To me, this looks like a classic example of treating people living with AIDS as though they are disposable. They're going to die anyway, goes the logic, so there is no reason to treat them well. But people with AIDS are still human beings, with rights and skills and the ability to live full lives. Treating as less than human benefits no one.

More than 100 international and local groups wrote Prime Minister Hun Sen and Health Minister Mam Bunheng urging the latter to provide a better treatment to the evicted families:

The housing conditions at Tuol Sambo are grossly inadequate in terms of size, fire safety, and sanitation. Residents are crowded into poorly ventilated metal sheds that are baking hot in the daytime. There are no kitchens and no running water in the sheds, which are flanked by open sewers, and only one public well to service the evicted families.

While other homeless people from Phnom Penh are slated for relocation to brick houses at an adjacent site at Tuol Sambo, the HIV-affected families from Borei Keila have been placed in a separate settlement with inferior housing, distinguished by green corrugated metal roofing and walls. Even before the evictees were resettled there, local people referred to the green sheds as “the AIDS village.”

The living conditions at Tuol Sambo pose serious health risks, particularly to people with compromised immune systems. The risk to those people living with HIV can be life threatening. Residents report that the heat in the poorly ventilated metal sheds is so intense that they are usually unable to remain in their rooms during the afternoon and they are afraid that their ARV medication will deteriorate in the heat.

The situation of the evicted families in their former homes in Borei Keila was not also good as shown by this video by licadho [above], which was uploaded on The Hub.

Cambodia Pushes AIDS 'Colony' Far From City

August 16, 2009
National Public Radio (USA)
Weekend Edition Sunday

Click here to listen to the Story

Until recently, 40 Cambodian families with HIV and AIDS were living in the center of the country's capital, Phnom Penh. Then the government moved them to a site 15 miles outside the city. As NPR's Doualy Xaykaothao reports, the resettlement is viewed by many as a forced eviction, creating what some are calling an AIDS colony.

Cambodian government accused of creating 'Aids colony'

Open letter from human rights groups condemns 'life-threatening' conditions at settlement outside Phnom Penh

Tuesday 28 July 2009
Justin McCurry
Guardian (UK)

Aids campaigners and human rights groups today accused the Cambodian government of herding HIV-affected families into an "Aids colony" outside the capital, Phnom Penh.

In an open letter to the country's prime minister, Hun Sen, and the health minister, Mam Bunheng, more than 100 international and domestic pressure groups said they were deeply disturbed by the "life-threatening" conditions in the settlement.

Forty families are forced to live in sheet-metal sheds without running water or proper sanitation.

The government has spent the past two months moving people with HIV/Aids from the Borei Keila district of Phnom Penh to Tuol Sambo, a flood-prone area 15 miles (25km) away.

"By bundling people living with HIV together in second-rate housing, far from medical facilities, support services and jobs, the government has created a de facto Aids colony," Shiba Phurailatpam, of the Asia-Pacific Network of People Living with HIV/Aids, said.

Rebecca Schleifer, a Human Rights Watch spokeswoman, said conditions at Tuol Sambo posed "serious risks" to people who were already vulnerable to illness.

"People living with HIV have compromised immune systems and are especially vulnerable," she added. "For them, these substandard conditions can mean a death sentence or a ticket to a hospital."

According to Médecins sans Frontières, conditions at Tuol Sambo do not meet the minimum international standards for temporary housing.

The families were evicted from Borei Keila to make way for a commercial development, which was reportedly granted government approval on the understanding that the developer would place the residents, including those with HIV/Aids, into new housing.

The evictions continued despite protests from UN agencies, and the campaigners' letter said: "We have reason to fear that relocations of HIV-affected families are continuing even as we sign this letter."

They urged the government to stop moving families to Tuol Sambo, urgently improve living conditions there and ensure that people with HIV have access to antiretroviral drugs.

Local officials said they were aware of the concerns over the settlement and were trying to improve conditions.

"We are trying to find clean water for them," Phnom Penh's deputy governor, Mann Chhoeun, told the Phnom Penh Post, adding that plans had been made to distribute free medicine via the Centre of Hope mission.

In 2008, according to UNAids, an estimated 67,200 adults and 3,800 children in Cambodia were living with HIV/Aids.