Rights Group: Indigenous Peoples Exploited in Rush for Resources

Boonrian Chinnarat holds a net he once used to catch giant catfish at his house in Chiang Kong district of Chiang Rai province, northern Thailand, Feb. 7, 2011. He blames the disappearance of the fish partly on China's upstream dams. (Photo: by Ron Corben, VOA)

Friday, 29 June 2012
Ron Corben, VOA | Bangkok

“In Cambodia’s Prey Lang Forest region, home to the Kuy indigenous people, official land grants of tens of thousands of hectares of forest for mineral extraction, timber and rubber plantations have forced many people to give up traditional livelihoods."

BANGKOK -- Human rights organization Minority Rights Group International says unprecedented demand for natural resources globally, but especially across Asia, is leading to ethnic conflict and displacement of indigenous communities.

In its annual report released Thursday, the group says the demand for resources covers such areas as logging and dams, oil, gas or mineral extraction, coastal tourism, commercial fisheries, conservation parks and large scale agriculture.

Carl Soderbergh, a spokesperson for Minority Rights Group International, says the global economic downturn, pressures to boost revenue sources, the emerging bio-fuel market, and resource exploitation has created a "perfect storm" in which minorities and indigenous peoples bear the brunt of demands.

Cambodian Government Approves Controversial Titanium Mine

Monday, 14 February 2011
Source: Wildlife Alliance

Prime Minister Hun Sen has approved a land concession to United Khmer Group, a private mining company. The prime minister's approval came ahead of a meeting on Friday, February 11 at the Council for the Development of Cambodia that was meant to discuss the proposed mining project. United Khmer Group had exploration rights to search for titanium in 20,400 hectares of densely forested land in the Southern Cardamom Mountains.

The decision to approve the mine threatens to devastate one of the last remaining elephant corridors on the continent, put more than 70 endangered and vulnerable species at risk, and degrade one of the world's largest remaining carbon sink reserves. Months after local villagers initially discovered construction workers bulldozing access roads in June 2010, the Cambodian government's decision will allow the mining company to exploit the land.

Suwanna Gauntlett, Wildlife Alliance CEO, led the fight against the mine, representing the views of local communities and other environmental groups. Local villagers recognized the mine as a threat to the growing ecotourism industry, agricultural initiatives, forests, and a habitat for one of Cambodia's largest wild elephant populations.

Apocalypse in Our Time

‘Upon arriving at Angkor the visitor feels as if transported from darkness to light, from barbarism to civilisation. ... It is grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome’: Henri Mouhot's description of Angkor Wat
The centre west entrance, Angkor Wat (Drawn by M. Theroud from a Sketch by Mouhot)

Saturday, September 04, 2010
Op-Ed by MP

POLICY makers in Cambodia could do better to consider other urgent priorities that would also bear direct impact upon or impart impetus for the country's development, beside building sky scrapers to rival other landmarks in Asia at this point in time.

A few posters in this forum have already mentioned the need to boost tourism infrastructure by way of building appropriate facilities and logistics in places throughout the country to improve the overall quality of tourism experience and thereby attracting greater influx of visitors into the Kingdom.

The said priorities involve at least 3 areas that remain critical to sustainable tourism and national development in the longer term:

1- Phnom Penh: The capital relies heavily upon its colonial era heritage as its main selling point to visitors, much of which like public buildings and architecture are under threat from dereliction as well as demolition to make way for building new houses or commercial apartments. Some travellers also like to explore souvenir markets and a handful pluck up their courage to study genocide museums/memorials in addition to visiting the small Museum of Fine Arts and the Royal Palace.

This means that extra incentives are needed to persuade tourists to jot down Phnom Penh as a major itinerary item who otherwise opt to bypass the capital altogether travelling from Saigon/HCM or Bangkok directly to Siem Reap by air or coaches.

Building an entertainment type theme park (not Freedom Park!) that combines a sea life aquarium, cultural village and the like would add enormous value to the education and enjoyment of home and foreign visitors alike.

2 - Preah Vihear: I have yet to visit this site, but from what I gather it is a real challenge even with a four-wheel drive to go up the steep road. I think it is a worthy investment to look into providing alternative means of transporting visitors to the famed historical site such as having a cable car transport system at affordable cost to use. People might also be attracted by the novelty of being transported in this way!

3 - Eco-tourism: The term is deployed to encompass a wider extent in quality and experience of tourism as such rather than being limited to bird-watching tourists on guided tours. While what ultimately qualifies as good or bad touristic experience depends largely on the perspective held by individual tourists themselves, it is clear from research that most tourists flock to locations with the capacity to cater for their tastes and safety. A region with a record of social stability and unpolluted environment stands to command a greater share of international tourists or visitors with multiplying economic impact upon both the tourism industry itself (which is very much a global phenomenon) and a whole range of related social services providers within the destination country.

The on-going destruction of the natural environment and the harm done to the indigenous inhabitants of regions such as Rattanakiri and Mondulkiri among others through commercialisation and 'globalisation' has been nothing less than a tragedy, signalling a less than welcoming sign of a country in distress. These remnants of hill tribes - classified officially as ‘ethnic minorities’ - must be among the most endangered species on the planet; their plight and suffering easily ignored or forgotten by both the authorities and the media owing to their lack of representation and physical isolation in general. Yet it is through this very isolated nature that they have been able to preserve their largely undiluted ancient cultures and ways of life down the centuries. They could claim with far greater credibility and force than could most 'Khmers' today (mostly mixed through assimilation with other races) as direct descendants of the ancient Khmer-Mon linguistic group.

No matter how much pride one takes in one's national culture, one will always risk losing something more fundamental by failing to preserve one's own roots, for these are not just there on exhibition as amusement gifts to curious tourists, but are indeed living embodiments of one's identity and soul which give meaning and sustenance to one's existence.

Within this troubled context, I would urge policy-makers and patriots alike to resist the temptation and promise of short term riches by preserving what little the country has left of its natural eco-system. Like the pristine Cardamom in the North-West, Rattanakiri and Mondulkiri also once boasted dreams of fortune making in timber, rubber as well as minerals, in pursuit of which, the environment and the natives have been required sacrifices. And while the fortunes have indeed been made by the few, the sacrifices have also been far too great for the inhabitants surviving in the decimated regions. Few could have imagined a more fitting sequel to ‘Apocalypse Now’ scenes portrayed in Francis Coppola’s film.

As an emerging nation in terms of ‘development’ Cambodia is endowed with a rare advantage of being able to learn from the costly mistakes and experiences of other countries by pursuing a more holistic, quality oriented development that marries the worldly culture of material success or aims with cultural-spiritual imperatives that together in turn adhere to human society’s most basic demands: the well-being and security of every man, woman and child. Such demands have not been discovered features of modernity or inventions of our epoch, but in truth the principal preoccupation of every age. And few contemporaneous civilisations in history could have borne witness to these ideals more passionately or concretely than Cambodia’s own forefathers who conscientiously laboured to immortalise them in stone.

At the height of the Khmer Empire there were not just stone monuments and great armies being assembled, but also sophisticated irrigation systems, well constructed highways crisscrossing the diverse regions of the Empire along which many a traveller could find resting houses and public drinking fountains fragranced with the nourishing scents of lotus flowers and jasmine. There were also hospitals and treatment sanctuaries for the sick and invalid at a time when most of Europe was still gripped by destitution and vices. It is this thought that partly led early European explorers such as Henri Mouhot to reflect:

‘Upon arriving at Angkor the visitor feels as if transported from darkness to light, from barbarism to civilisation. ... It is grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome’.

NGOs Lack Resource For Protection Capacity

By Im Sothearith, VOA Khmer
Original report from Washington
09 November 2009

[Editor’s note: VOA Khmer recently spoke with specialists in the field of natural resource management in developing countries and learned that Cambodia is not alone in struggling to use natural resources to benefit its citizens. The resource curse, where natural riches fail to help the poor, is a worldwide scourge, the global experts told VOA Khmer in numerous interviews. Below is Part 10 of the original VOA Khmer weekly series, airing Sundays in Cambodia.]

While many civic groups have proven active in the realm of human rights, their involvement in protecting natural resources remains marginal, experts say.

“Not many non-governmental organizations act as watchdogs and write reports to inform either the public or the government” on resources, said Chea Vannath, the former head of the Center for Social Development, who is now an independent analyst.

People knowledgeable in the issues are limited, as is access to government information, while resource exploitation takes place in remote areas such as jungles or dangerous areas, she said.

“Most of the information is from international NGOs, who have been conducting research and writing about natural resource management in Cambodia,” she said.

The best known of these is Global Witness, she said, an environmental group that has written reports critical of the government’s exploitation of timber, oil and minerals.

Global Witness reports, which implicate senior officials and tycoons close family and friends of Prime Minister Hun Sen in the abuse of resources, are banned in the country.

Cambodia has 622 non-governmental organizations listed at the Cooperation Committee for Cambodia. Of these 418 are local, and 64 work on natural resources issues.

Cambodia’s civic groups “don’t have adequate skills” in resource protection, said Lao Monghay, a researcher for the Asian Human Rights Commission, which is based in Hong Kong. “In every sector we learn together. The government also learns, civil society also learns and the average citizen also learns.”

Paul Collier, an Oxford University economist and author of “The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It,” told VOA Khmer by phone that there’s no substitute for an informed society to watch the government’s natural resource management.

An informed society comprises a “critical mass” that understands the issue well, and civil society is one part of this, he said.

Seeing the absence of transparent management and weak role of civil society, a group of organizations joined to form Cambodian Resource Revenue Transparency, or CRRT, to report on resource management.

“Giving the public an opportunity to participate in public debate is an opportunity for them to participate in decision-making and monitor natural resource management,” Mam Sambath, the group’s director, said. “CRRT will try to seek important information for the people. They will receive information they deserve through all public forums. If there’s a public forum at the national level on natural resource management or the impact of the extractive industry, we plan to invite civil society representatives, government representatives or community members to participate.”

Chhit Sam Ath, executive director of the NGO Forum, which has projects dealing with natural resources, stressed the important role played by civil society in promoting the people’s awareness of resource management.

“First we help publicize laws or decrees concerning natural resource management to the community so that they are aware of their rights in managing natural resources,” he said. “The second is, some NGOs who are working in the community to help build capacity in the community, especially helping create natural resource communities, such as forestry communities and fishery communities, so that community members can work together to preserve and protect their natural resources.”

Kong Kimsreng, senior program officer for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, said his group has two main conservation projects: the Peam Krasaop site in Koh Kong province and the Ramsar site in Stung Treng province.

“We work with rural communities on natural resource conservation from the grass-root level to find out their concerns about participating in utilizing the natural resources,” he said. “When we know their concerns, we pass on the concerns to policymakers so that they can take the concerns into consideration and give some rights to people to use the natural resources in their areas.”

Cambodia's last frontier falls [-Everything for sale under Hun Sen's watch]

Jun 16, 2009
By Stephen Kurczy
Asia Times (Hong Kong)

RATANAKIRI – The remoteness of Cambodia's northeast once made it an ideal hideout for Vietcong, Khmer Rouge, wildlife poachers and illegal loggers. The same isolation had in recent years drawn adventure travelers to the once jungle-covered province, which is now struggling to strike an equitable balance between eco-tourism and sustainable natural resource extraction.

After decades of civil war and lawlessness, Cambodia is now politically stable and promoting tourism to generate foreign currency earnings. Bordering Laos and Vietnam, Ratanakiri now has the infrastructure - a paved road that stops 96 kilometers from the provincial capital, Banlung - and a range of accommodations to host amateur explorers.

The Lonely Planet guidebook refers to the province as "a colorful hotchpotch of natural beauty and cultural diversity". The Wall Street Journal Asia recently labeled it "one of the last frontiers of Asian adventure travel". Those picture-perfect assessments have drawn bigger and bigger crowds: according to the Tourism Ministry, visitors to Ratanakiri surged from 6,000 in 2002 to over 105,000 in 2008.

However those expecting to find pristine forests teeming with wildlife are increasingly disappointed to find lifeless patches of freshly cut tree stumps. Officials say they are doing everything in their limited powers to protect the areas, but the market forces driving resource extraction are often too powerful to resist.

"Forests everywhere are a frontline between conservation and development. It's not easy to say which way to go," said Chheang Dany, deputy director of the Forestry Administration's Wildlife Protection Office. That frontline is slowly but surely receding in resource-rich Ratanakiri.

En route to the province's picturesque waterfalls, unregulated gem mines pockmark the landscape. Recently the government approved a Spanish company's 100,000-hectare plan to establish a game reserve, drawing ire from conservationists who fear it will lead to over-hunting in the area. Meanwhile the mystical "spirit" forests of minority hill tribes are yielding to the commercial impulse of rubber and cashew nut plantations.

The competition between development and conservation is exemplified inside the province's 3,325-square kilometer Virachey National Park. Conservation International, a US-based group that strives to empower grass roots communities in jungles and deserts to make conservation part of their livelihoods, has called the park "potentially one of Cambodia's most biologically diverse protected areas".

Yet many of those tasked with protecting the park, including police and rangers, are known to supplement their meager official salaries through collusion with loggers and poachers. Asia Times Online recently took a three-hour boat ride up the SeSan and Ta Bok rivers, followed by a seven-hour trek along the leech-infested Ho Chi Minh Trail inside the park.

There, a freshly cut tree blocked the path. So Sokoeun, a guide and part-time park ranger, speculated that military police likely cut the log to sell on the black market. "The military police don't make enough money, so they need to do illegal activities," So Sokoeun said, adding that each two-meter-long section of the log could sell for several thousand dollars.

His assessment of police abuse of power is supported broadly by documentary evidence. According to a 2007 report compiled by British environmental watchdog Global Witness, "The police are frequently implicated in forest crime and border police units played a lead role in the massive illegal logging of the Virachey National Park in Ratanakiri in 2003-2004."

The report cited an infamous illegal logging case that involved a former park ranger, Yerb Sat, whom police allegedly got drunk on rice wine and forced to sign papers allowing logging in his section of the park. "Police threatened to kill him if he didn't sign," his wife said during an interview at her stilted home on the southern edge of the park.

Yerb Sat was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison as part of a bust that implicated the province's former governor and military chief, who both fled Cambodia to escape arrest. Because much of Virachey's timber and animals are sold to Vietnamese buyers, illegal activity focuses in the park's so-called Dragon's Tail - where Cambodia comes to a point between Laos and Vietnam.

Denuded dragon

During a three-month patrol of the Dragon's Tail during early 2008, So Sokoeun arrested eight groups of poachers and loggers, he said. Kham Phon, another guide who accompanied Asia Times Online through Virachey, is a former trader of illegal timber and live animals taken from the park. He said in the 1990s he would stack cages filled with sun bears and monitor lizards on the back of his motorbike and drive clandestinely by night to meet buyers along the Vietnamese border.

Police caught him once, he said, but he paid a bribe and drove on. A decade ago, a live sun bear sold for US$200; now, as the animals become more rare, the same creature fetches $1,500 on the black market, he said. "Many of the animals now are gone," said Kham Phon, who gave up his illegal trade in 1998 to become a park ranger.

The price of illegal timber has also skyrocketed, quadrupling in the past year to between $4,000 and $8,000 per cubic meter, said Pen Bonnar, the provincial coordinator for local rights group Adhoc. To deter illegal logging and trapping inside Virachey, from 2000 to early 2009 the World Bank provided about $2.8 million for additional rangers, training and environmental studies.

In an October 2008 report, the bank stated the program "probably contributed to poverty alleviation by providing community grants and creating local employment opportunities in the [park]. On the other hand, it probably reduced income generation from lucrative illegal activities such as hunting, fishing, logging and unregulated collection of non-timber forest products."

However the bank ended its support for Virachey in March, partly in response to the Cambodian government's controversial decision in 2007 to grant a mineral exploration license to Australia-based Indochine Resources that covered 60% of the 3,325-square-kilometer park. Indochine's geologists have since sent numerous helicopter expeditions to take rock and soil samples.

Virachey park director Chou Sophark said in an interview that he hasn't enough resources for dedicating a ranger to monitoring Indochine Resources' activities. Without World Bank funding, the park had to reduce its number of rangers from 70 to 55 and cut monthly salaries from $70 to around $30. The cuts, environmentalists note, coincide with rising prices for animals and timber on the black market, raising the incentive for illegal poaching and logging.

Even if the World Bank continued its financial support for Virachey, Adhoc's Pen Bonnar said illegal logging and trapping would continue "because all the local authorities - the police, courts, provincial authorities - are part of the problem".

With the tourism industry suffering from the global economic downturn, it will likely be even harder for locals to see the long-term benefits of conservation over the short-term profitability of natural resource extraction.

International arrivals to Cambodia fell 2.2% year-on-year in the first four months of 2009 and Ratanakiri-based guides and guesthouse owners say arrivals have slumped. Pierre-Yves Clais, owner of Terres Rouges, an upscale lodge in Banlung, said he has nearly lost hope that Ratanakiri can be saved from resource extraction-led development.

Clais said he watched as the long road to Banlung - once hidden beneath a canopy of old growth trees - was transformed by illegal logging into open fields. Independent estimates show that Cambodia lost 29% of its primary tropical forest in the five-year period spanning 2000 to 2005.

"Whenever I see a nice piece of forest, I know it's doomed," said the former French soldier, who first came to Cambodia with the United Nations-backed peacekeeping authority in 1992. Clais said that he loved Cambodia's pristine forests and native cultures so much that he decided to stay.

"It was so nice back then. But I don't have the same feeling about it because of the destruction of the local environment and local cultures, primarily by the Cambodian people," said Clais. "Every day they destroy it more."

Chheang Dany, the official at the government's Wildlife Protection Office, said if conservation and development are to find equilibrium, provincial authorities must respect the law, locals must protect the environment and businesses must invest in tourism.

"Virachey National Park, bigger than Singapore, only generates 10 to 20 tourists a day. How can we generate the revenue for the rangers to guard the park?" he said. "We want to preserve the natural resources and promote the sustainable use for the economy. It's not easy to find a solution, to do it equally."

"I'd love to say it's not too late," said Clais, "but who's going to enforce that policy? If there is going to be hope for Ratanakiri, who is going to bring it? Superman?"

Stephen Kurczy is an Asia Times Online contributor based in Cambodia. He may be reached at kurczy@gmail.com.