Andong (Photo: Carole Vann)
12 September 08 - With cheap manpower and generalized corruption, Cambodia is a Garden of Eden for Asian companies. Several thousand citizens have been forcibly expelled to make room for gigantic commercial centers or casinos.
Carole Vann/Human Rights Tribune – In front of the shed lies an old metal bedframe, completely rusted. On top, a hodgepodge of pots and pans, clothes, plastic cups and plates, some knives and spoons. Further on, a hammock has been nailed to a wall. ‘We must take the essentials if they set fire to the neighborhood,’ explains Malai, a lovely woman in a sarong, who lives nearby with her husband and three children. ‘They’ are the Cambodian authorities.
On the banks of Boeng Kak lake, in the suburbs of Phnom Penh, the neighborhood is poor, there is no sanitation, everything flows into the lake.
Homes are wooden huts attached to each other with beaten earth for floors. Here 4,250 families have lived for years in a sort of eviction repreive. They know that one day, very soon, they will be expelled by force. An improvement project will fill in the lake and transformer the place into a gigantic commercial zone with deluxe appartments. One and a half years ago, the municipality of Phnom Penh granted a 99 year least to a South Korean company (Shukaku) for the entire lake and its banks.
‘They have offered us several thousand dollars if we leave voluntarily, explained Malia. But the price of land is exorbitant. Rents also. It’s not enough to relocate us.’ Malai is a seamstress working at home, her husband unemployed. Like all their neighbors, they are refusing to leave.
Malai, her family and the inhabitants of Bang Kak are among 70,000 Cambodians – of 150,000 across the country acording to Amnesty International – threatened with forced eviction. ‘If they refuse to leave, the authorities come and set fire to their homes, beat the inhabitants and arrest those who protest,’ said Kek Galabru, founder of LICADHO, one of two main organizations (along with ADHOC ) defending human rights in Cambodia. Last year, in Sihanoukvile (a southern port city), the military police arrived at dawn with automatic rifles, electric prods and bulldozers. They set fire to the houses and brutalized the inhabitants.’
The events in Sihanoukville shocked the Cambodian press [?], so violent was the repression. ‘The men were detained and forced to sign release papers before being freed’ added Kek Galabru.
This Khmer, married to a Frenchman, is a figurehead in the Cambodian human rights movement. She is one of the rare persons who has dated, at the risk of her life, to denounce the disfunctions in her country.
According to her, the problem with forced evictions is that it is a delayed bomb for the country. The problem is linked to the modern history of the country. At the end of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, people returned to their villages. They settled on their small plots of land and refused to budge. In 2001 a tax law came into force that stipulated that anyone living on a piece of land, uncontested by others, for five years, would become a landowner. But to get a deed to the property proved an unending battle. A multitude of officials had to be appeased, something most people could not afford.
The tax law also stated that the state could requisition land for ‘community development’. But the government plays with these terms. Luxury commercial centers, unaffordable to the majority of Kmers, are thus labeled in the public interest, to the point that the public wants to hear no more about ‘development’.
Kek Galabru and Thoun Saray, the President of ADHOC, were in Geneva last week to bring their story to the 9th session of the Human Rights Council. Amnesty International and the Geneva based NGO, COHRE (Center on Housing Rights and Evictions) consider that forcing evictions and confiscating land is high on the list of current problems in Cambodia.
More than 100,000 people were dislodged in the capital over the past ten years. The conditions in which they were rehoused are also tragic. Families find themselves parachuted miles from their villages onto vast open spaces. In February, 100 families were transferred by force from Sabok Tchap, a quarter in Phnbom Penh, to Andong, a no-man’s land located 30 kilometers from the capital. Each family received a 12x5 meter parcel of land, no water, no electricity, no sewers. When it rained the terrain was transformed into mud and filth.
No work, no schools, no medical centers and no transport. And no property deed either. The state can retake this land at any moment. Isolated from everything, the relocated people have become ‘phantom citizens’, deprived of all elementary rights, according to Thoun Saray.
Translated from French by Pamela Taylor
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UN complaints, government denials
There has been no love lost between Cambodia and the Secretary General’s human rights representatives for a long time. Whether the current Rapporteur, Yash Ghai, or his predecessors, the government of Hun Sen has always reluctantly received this arm of the UN that was negotiated during the Paris accords of 1991.
During the current session of the Human Rights Council, at the demand of Cambodia, the mandate of the UN expert will replaced by that of a Special Rapporteur for Cambodia. The difference ? The first is nominated by the Secretary General who submits his report to the General Assembly in New York while the second is appointed by member states of the Human Rights Council and reported to Geneva.
This change increases concerns among human rights defenders who fear that reports delivered in Geneva don’t have the same impact as those destined for New York.
The main Khmer NGOs have come in force to Geneva to demand support from member states that the mandate of the Special Rapporteur not be modified. Japan (a main supporter) is shuttling between the Khmer Mission and the militants to reach a resolution acceptable to both sides.
‘We want the resolution to mention the necessity for strict cooperation between the Special Rapporteur and the government and that the government agrees to implement the recommendations of the Rapporteur’, said Kek Galabru.
Carole Vann/HRT
