WHITE GOLD: Much of the indigenous land that gets illegally sold through economic concessions goes to individuals and companies interested in investing in lucrative rubber plantations. Southeast Asia is today's main source of natural rubber, accounting for more than 90 per cent of global output in 2005.04/25/2007
STORY & PHOTOS BY LUKE BROCKI
The Powell River Peak (www.zwire.com, BC, Canada)
PART THREE OF A SERIES
Powell River Peak reporter Luke Brocki travelled to Cambodia and Vietnam after winning a fellowship administered by the Jack Webster Foundation and funded by the Canadian International Development Agency.
The third installment in his series of development-related stories explores land alienation in indigenous minority communities in Cambodia's Ratanakiri Province. In his travels, Brocki found a collective of non-governmental organizations and human rights advocates fighting illegal land sales and rampant government corruption that threatens the livelihoods of these rural communities.
Alienation
The remote forests of Ratanakiri Province, the same ones that housed Pol Pot's main party encampments in the 1960s, are on the front lines of Cambodia's newest struggle--the struggle to stop the land grab.
Indigenous minorities, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, are losing their land and livelihoods to land concessions sanctioned by a government blinded by economic development.
The World Rainforest Movement, an international network of citizens' groups involved in efforts to defend the world's rainforests, reports that by 2004, private companies had taken control of 2.7 million hectares of land under concession contracts in Cambodia.
The land grabs threaten to destroy Ratanakiri's ecosystem as forests are razed and replaced with monoculture plantations of rubber and cashew.
Human rights advocates say there is no clearer example in Cambodia today of the rich and powerful exploiting the poor and marginalized. The demands of lawyers fighting the land grabs are simple: return the land to the communities to which it rightfully belongs and punish those who stole it, but the accused don't feel they're breaking any laws and, given a serious lack of detail in the country's legal framework, this is proving difficult to disprove.
"Previously all the natural resources in the area have been protected, but this protection was war and political instability," says Graeme Brown, Ratanakiri coordinator for Community Forestry International (CFI), an organization that helps rural communities stabilize and regenerate forests by designing, organizing and facilitating policy dialogues at various levels of government.
"If you look regionally, you see Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma. War across that whole region has finished and political stability is coming about. All the resources in the Mekong Region have become available."
Brown is an Australian volunteer based out of Ratanakiri for the past seven years. His program, now localized into a Cambodian organization that CFI continues to support, deals with indigenous rights. Specifically, his team is studying and mapping indigenous systems of land management in hopes the mainstream system will recognize the differences.
"The farms are owned by the community, but there are individual family rights within that. Same thing with the forest; it is owned and used collectively. The mainstream systems don't cater well to that because they're based on individual land ownership."
The communities Brown studies practice a form of slash and burn agriculture, which, to the untrained eye, leaves large portions of land vacant and unexploited.
"The problem is that communities would be using shifting cultivation within a rotational system," he says. "They'd clear an area, farm it for three to five years, then move to another area. In the interim, it allows the forest to regrow."
But when villagers leave their fallow farm plots, they face a risk of outsiders taking the land. Companies eyeing the land for its fertile soil appeal to a government obsessed with economic development and are often granted the land in a concession. It is usually planted with rubber trees, thus being removed from the agricultural cycle. Resulting disputes erupt into bitter battles, since indigenous people don't have documents to prove the land belongs to them. In a defensive strategy, some plant cashews on the fallow land to strengthen their claim of tenure; it becomes harder for outsiders to claim the land isn't used for productive means when villagers are seen harvesting nuts for export to neighbouring Vietnam. But, either way, the land leaves the rotational system so important for indigenous agriculture.
"It's anarchic," says Brown. "If the ownership of land is not clear, it cannot be sold. It's a fundamental legal principle. And, according to the [2001] Land Law, they must manage the land according to traditions. That was put in there to stop land grabbing. If you translate that, it means the sale of indigenous people's land is not legal, because it's not a traditional form of management. But those protection measures are not enforced."
There are lessons to be learned from the recently devastated Amazon, but they're not positive ones: the rich and powerful got away with it and they want to do the same here, says Brown. "There's not a lot of distinction between government and business in Cambodia. This concept of a trickle-down economy doesn't work because the legal systems don't work. It's a suck-up economy. Because of the kickbacks through informal fees, resource exploitation is further centralizing power. Poor people are being told they have to develop, but in fact they're having their resources extracted away from them."
Ngy San, deputy executive director of the NGO [non-governmental organization] Forum on Cambodia, an umbrella organization seeking to build cooperation between Cambodia's NGOs on issues affecting Cambodia's development, agrees. "If you focus on the free-market economy, competition is not fair to people without education and power, to those who don't understand the laws. Land is getting taken before completion of the titling process and it's a few hundred people who have had the opportunity to buy land, people with strong connections to the party."
Under the 2001 Land Law, which was passed to provide a legal framework for land matters, an ancestral claim to the land is enough to prove ownership, but that's not the case in practice, says Ngy. What's worse, he says, is that most of the articles in the Land Law are too general to be implemented in the absence of sub-decrees and regulations. And waiting for those sub-decrees to fall into place requires time the communities don't have. Unless something changes, there'll be little land left to be titled in the future, he says. "The government doesn't care about sustainable development of the country. They just want to export the resources and make money and protect their power. Under the current government, it will change for the worse. The history of Cambodia will come back again."
Kong Yu
One village in Ratanakiri has been making recent headlines in Cambodia's English newspapers since it decided to fight for the return of land it lost to a shady deal several years ago. Kong Yu, located in the O'Yadao district, some 40 kilometres from provincial capital Banlung--two hours by car along a bumpy dirt road--has attracted the attention of human rights and legal advocacy groups and become the poster child for the fight against land alienation in Cambodia's northeast.
About 45 families in the village of Kong Yu are affected by an illegal land sale finalized in 2004. These families are part of the Jarai indigenous group and rely on the seized land--500 hectares--to practice traditional swidden or slash and burn agriculture, cattle grazing and collection of non-timber forest products.
According to the Phnom Penh-based Community Legal Education Center (CLEC), a local NGO dedicated to the promotion of the rule of law, democracy and development in Cambodia, commune officials met with Kong Yu villagers in March 2004 and attempted to persuade them to sell communal land to a person in Phnom Penh, claiming the land legally belonged to the state and later explaining the seizure was necessary to give the land to disabled soldiers from Prime Minister's Hun Sen's army--a lie designed to deceive and threaten the villagers.
These meetings took on an increasingly hostile tone and the villagers, threatened and unfamiliar with government institutions and practices, agreed to give away about 50 hectares. Families in Kong Yu then received gifts of $400 and a sarong, but local officials did not tell them this was in exchange for their land. The deal was sealed at a feast organized by authorities in August 2004. CLEC reports authorities got villagers drunk on rice wine and had them thumbprint documents written in Khmer script, a language largely foreign to Ratanakiri's indigenous people. No copies of the documents were provided to the villagers.
Villagers subsequently learned they had signed away not 50 but 500 hectares of communal land and not to Hun Sen's soldiers, but to a well-connected buyer.
The buyer, Keat Kolney, is the sister of the senior minister at the ministry of economy and finance, and the wife of the secretary of state at the ministry of land management.
Since the land deal went down, bulldozers have cleared about 300 hectares of communal land, company workers have replanted the razed area with rubber trees, and villagers approached CLEC for help and formal legal representation. The case, filed as a joint complaint by 12 signatories on January 23, 2007, accuses the buyer and seven others of tricking villagers out of about 500 hectares of land in August 2004. Villagers have requested the prosecutor take legal action against the suspects for fraud, faking private documents, bribery and the abuse of the land of indigenous peoples. The case is moving its way up Cambodia's legal system, having been first heard in provincial court in early March.
CLEC lawyers say this case, despite being one of the smaller land grab conflicts in the country, is one of the most egregious examples of a recurring pattern of land grabbing in ethnic minority regions: powerful individuals from Phnom Penh identify desirable lands and work through corrupt local officials to circumvent the 2001 Land Law and illegally acquire the land.
But the buyer remains unrepentant. Keat Kolney's assistant representative Nou Prieh, feels the land sale was legal, since each villager thumbprinted a document agreeing to sell his or her individually managed plot of land. Furthermore, he feels the complaint doesn't represent the feelings of the village, but those of a few unhappy individuals. "The other villagers are happy with the company because we provide them jobs," he says at his estate on the newly created rubber plantation bordering Kong Yu village. "During the crop season, villagers come here to clear the grass and get paid from 7,000 to 9,000 riel per day."
He isn't worried about the case reaching provincial court. The goals of the rubber plantation are parallel to the goals of the government to develop industry, he says. "This is Cambodia, so I don't worry."
Sev Khem, one of the signatories of the complaint, disagrees. She feels the village stands united in its dissatisfaction at the 2004 sale. About 65 villagers gather around her during an interview and shout their disapproval. "Nobody has ever worked at the plantation," she says, adding the company's presence on their land has been detrimental to their safety as well as their livelihood. She says the company's bodyguards continue to utter threats and extort money from the villagers by taking hostage their farm animals.
History lessons
The history of Cambodia will come back again, warned Ngy San above. He wasn't talking about ancient, forgotten history. According to Ian Baird, a Victoria native making Southeast Asia his home for the past 15 years, happenings of the 1960s put into perspective the current political climate in Cambodia. "This particular point is very important for the land grabbing issue: the whole revolution against [Norodom] Sihanouk was largely based around rubber plantations," says Baird, executive director of Global Association for People and the Environment (GAPE), an international NGO that coordinates community development and conservation programs in Southeast Asia.
Sihanouk ruled Cambodia from 1954, a year after Cambodia gained independence from France, until 1970, when he was betrayed and overthrown by his close associate, Lon Nol. Sihanouk remains one of Cambodia's most controversial postwar figures. Followers admire his patriotism and neutrality, crediting him with keeping Cambodia peaceful through the 1960s in the face of war and revolution in neighbouring countries. Opponents see him as indirectly engineering the country's downfall into Pol Pot's murderous Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s.
"Essentially, you had a situation where he was expropriating people's lands and forcing people to work," says Baird, who recently returned to academia as a human geographer after a long stint in activism.
The high rates of return of rubber plantations were no secret to Sihanouk in the 1960s and neither were the fertile red volcanic soils of Cambodia's northeast, so he mandated the creation of an 8,000-hectare rubber plantation in Ratanakiri Province. Since urban Khmer were afraid of the area's tribal magic, spirit powers and malaria, they did not want to farm the plantation and Sihanouk forced locals to do the work. "The plantations were coming in and people were getting upset," says Baird. "The people were ripe for someone to come in and organize them against the government. They were ripe to be picked."
Unfortunately, the picker was Pol Pot, returning to the hills of Ratanakiri from a postsecondary education in France and establishing a foothold in Cambodia's underground communist movement.
Today, recent history is giving an encore performance. "Starting in about 1993, donor countries were pushing Cambodia's government to industrialize and it eventually took on a life of its own," says Baird. "And you can be sure Hun Sen is well aware of this. There've been recent amnesties where they've released all these villagers that have been jailed for fighting for their lands. Land issues is why the revolution happened before."
The problem continues to gather international attention; Donica Pottie, Cambodia's Canadian Ambassador, expresses similar concerns. "Indigenous people's rights to communal ownership of traditional lands are established under the existing Land Law," she states in a January release on the land sector.
"However, six years have now passed since the adoption of that law and still not a single indigenous group has been issued with title . . . there is a genuine risk that little land will be left to register once a regulatory framework for collective title is in place."
The race against time to pass sub-decrees and issue communal titling to Cambodia's indigenous minorities continues.
Summary of problems
The third installment in his series of development-related stories explores land alienation in indigenous minority communities in Cambodia's Ratanakiri Province. In his travels, Brocki found a collective of non-governmental organizations and human rights advocates fighting illegal land sales and rampant government corruption that threatens the livelihoods of these rural communities.
Alienation
The remote forests of Ratanakiri Province, the same ones that housed Pol Pot's main party encampments in the 1960s, are on the front lines of Cambodia's newest struggle--the struggle to stop the land grab.
Indigenous minorities, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, are losing their land and livelihoods to land concessions sanctioned by a government blinded by economic development.
The World Rainforest Movement, an international network of citizens' groups involved in efforts to defend the world's rainforests, reports that by 2004, private companies had taken control of 2.7 million hectares of land under concession contracts in Cambodia.
The land grabs threaten to destroy Ratanakiri's ecosystem as forests are razed and replaced with monoculture plantations of rubber and cashew.
Human rights advocates say there is no clearer example in Cambodia today of the rich and powerful exploiting the poor and marginalized. The demands of lawyers fighting the land grabs are simple: return the land to the communities to which it rightfully belongs and punish those who stole it, but the accused don't feel they're breaking any laws and, given a serious lack of detail in the country's legal framework, this is proving difficult to disprove.
"Previously all the natural resources in the area have been protected, but this protection was war and political instability," says Graeme Brown, Ratanakiri coordinator for Community Forestry International (CFI), an organization that helps rural communities stabilize and regenerate forests by designing, organizing and facilitating policy dialogues at various levels of government.
"If you look regionally, you see Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma. War across that whole region has finished and political stability is coming about. All the resources in the Mekong Region have become available."
Brown is an Australian volunteer based out of Ratanakiri for the past seven years. His program, now localized into a Cambodian organization that CFI continues to support, deals with indigenous rights. Specifically, his team is studying and mapping indigenous systems of land management in hopes the mainstream system will recognize the differences.
"The farms are owned by the community, but there are individual family rights within that. Same thing with the forest; it is owned and used collectively. The mainstream systems don't cater well to that because they're based on individual land ownership."
The communities Brown studies practice a form of slash and burn agriculture, which, to the untrained eye, leaves large portions of land vacant and unexploited.
"The problem is that communities would be using shifting cultivation within a rotational system," he says. "They'd clear an area, farm it for three to five years, then move to another area. In the interim, it allows the forest to regrow."
But when villagers leave their fallow farm plots, they face a risk of outsiders taking the land. Companies eyeing the land for its fertile soil appeal to a government obsessed with economic development and are often granted the land in a concession. It is usually planted with rubber trees, thus being removed from the agricultural cycle. Resulting disputes erupt into bitter battles, since indigenous people don't have documents to prove the land belongs to them. In a defensive strategy, some plant cashews on the fallow land to strengthen their claim of tenure; it becomes harder for outsiders to claim the land isn't used for productive means when villagers are seen harvesting nuts for export to neighbouring Vietnam. But, either way, the land leaves the rotational system so important for indigenous agriculture.
"It's anarchic," says Brown. "If the ownership of land is not clear, it cannot be sold. It's a fundamental legal principle. And, according to the [2001] Land Law, they must manage the land according to traditions. That was put in there to stop land grabbing. If you translate that, it means the sale of indigenous people's land is not legal, because it's not a traditional form of management. But those protection measures are not enforced."
There are lessons to be learned from the recently devastated Amazon, but they're not positive ones: the rich and powerful got away with it and they want to do the same here, says Brown. "There's not a lot of distinction between government and business in Cambodia. This concept of a trickle-down economy doesn't work because the legal systems don't work. It's a suck-up economy. Because of the kickbacks through informal fees, resource exploitation is further centralizing power. Poor people are being told they have to develop, but in fact they're having their resources extracted away from them."
Ngy San, deputy executive director of the NGO [non-governmental organization] Forum on Cambodia, an umbrella organization seeking to build cooperation between Cambodia's NGOs on issues affecting Cambodia's development, agrees. "If you focus on the free-market economy, competition is not fair to people without education and power, to those who don't understand the laws. Land is getting taken before completion of the titling process and it's a few hundred people who have had the opportunity to buy land, people with strong connections to the party."
Under the 2001 Land Law, which was passed to provide a legal framework for land matters, an ancestral claim to the land is enough to prove ownership, but that's not the case in practice, says Ngy. What's worse, he says, is that most of the articles in the Land Law are too general to be implemented in the absence of sub-decrees and regulations. And waiting for those sub-decrees to fall into place requires time the communities don't have. Unless something changes, there'll be little land left to be titled in the future, he says. "The government doesn't care about sustainable development of the country. They just want to export the resources and make money and protect their power. Under the current government, it will change for the worse. The history of Cambodia will come back again."
Kong Yu
One village in Ratanakiri has been making recent headlines in Cambodia's English newspapers since it decided to fight for the return of land it lost to a shady deal several years ago. Kong Yu, located in the O'Yadao district, some 40 kilometres from provincial capital Banlung--two hours by car along a bumpy dirt road--has attracted the attention of human rights and legal advocacy groups and become the poster child for the fight against land alienation in Cambodia's northeast.
About 45 families in the village of Kong Yu are affected by an illegal land sale finalized in 2004. These families are part of the Jarai indigenous group and rely on the seized land--500 hectares--to practice traditional swidden or slash and burn agriculture, cattle grazing and collection of non-timber forest products.
According to the Phnom Penh-based Community Legal Education Center (CLEC), a local NGO dedicated to the promotion of the rule of law, democracy and development in Cambodia, commune officials met with Kong Yu villagers in March 2004 and attempted to persuade them to sell communal land to a person in Phnom Penh, claiming the land legally belonged to the state and later explaining the seizure was necessary to give the land to disabled soldiers from Prime Minister's Hun Sen's army--a lie designed to deceive and threaten the villagers.
These meetings took on an increasingly hostile tone and the villagers, threatened and unfamiliar with government institutions and practices, agreed to give away about 50 hectares. Families in Kong Yu then received gifts of $400 and a sarong, but local officials did not tell them this was in exchange for their land. The deal was sealed at a feast organized by authorities in August 2004. CLEC reports authorities got villagers drunk on rice wine and had them thumbprint documents written in Khmer script, a language largely foreign to Ratanakiri's indigenous people. No copies of the documents were provided to the villagers.
Villagers subsequently learned they had signed away not 50 but 500 hectares of communal land and not to Hun Sen's soldiers, but to a well-connected buyer.
The buyer, Keat Kolney, is the sister of the senior minister at the ministry of economy and finance, and the wife of the secretary of state at the ministry of land management.
Since the land deal went down, bulldozers have cleared about 300 hectares of communal land, company workers have replanted the razed area with rubber trees, and villagers approached CLEC for help and formal legal representation. The case, filed as a joint complaint by 12 signatories on January 23, 2007, accuses the buyer and seven others of tricking villagers out of about 500 hectares of land in August 2004. Villagers have requested the prosecutor take legal action against the suspects for fraud, faking private documents, bribery and the abuse of the land of indigenous peoples. The case is moving its way up Cambodia's legal system, having been first heard in provincial court in early March.
CLEC lawyers say this case, despite being one of the smaller land grab conflicts in the country, is one of the most egregious examples of a recurring pattern of land grabbing in ethnic minority regions: powerful individuals from Phnom Penh identify desirable lands and work through corrupt local officials to circumvent the 2001 Land Law and illegally acquire the land.
But the buyer remains unrepentant. Keat Kolney's assistant representative Nou Prieh, feels the land sale was legal, since each villager thumbprinted a document agreeing to sell his or her individually managed plot of land. Furthermore, he feels the complaint doesn't represent the feelings of the village, but those of a few unhappy individuals. "The other villagers are happy with the company because we provide them jobs," he says at his estate on the newly created rubber plantation bordering Kong Yu village. "During the crop season, villagers come here to clear the grass and get paid from 7,000 to 9,000 riel per day."
He isn't worried about the case reaching provincial court. The goals of the rubber plantation are parallel to the goals of the government to develop industry, he says. "This is Cambodia, so I don't worry."
Sev Khem, one of the signatories of the complaint, disagrees. She feels the village stands united in its dissatisfaction at the 2004 sale. About 65 villagers gather around her during an interview and shout their disapproval. "Nobody has ever worked at the plantation," she says, adding the company's presence on their land has been detrimental to their safety as well as their livelihood. She says the company's bodyguards continue to utter threats and extort money from the villagers by taking hostage their farm animals.
History lessons
The history of Cambodia will come back again, warned Ngy San above. He wasn't talking about ancient, forgotten history. According to Ian Baird, a Victoria native making Southeast Asia his home for the past 15 years, happenings of the 1960s put into perspective the current political climate in Cambodia. "This particular point is very important for the land grabbing issue: the whole revolution against [Norodom] Sihanouk was largely based around rubber plantations," says Baird, executive director of Global Association for People and the Environment (GAPE), an international NGO that coordinates community development and conservation programs in Southeast Asia.
Sihanouk ruled Cambodia from 1954, a year after Cambodia gained independence from France, until 1970, when he was betrayed and overthrown by his close associate, Lon Nol. Sihanouk remains one of Cambodia's most controversial postwar figures. Followers admire his patriotism and neutrality, crediting him with keeping Cambodia peaceful through the 1960s in the face of war and revolution in neighbouring countries. Opponents see him as indirectly engineering the country's downfall into Pol Pot's murderous Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s.
"Essentially, you had a situation where he was expropriating people's lands and forcing people to work," says Baird, who recently returned to academia as a human geographer after a long stint in activism.
The high rates of return of rubber plantations were no secret to Sihanouk in the 1960s and neither were the fertile red volcanic soils of Cambodia's northeast, so he mandated the creation of an 8,000-hectare rubber plantation in Ratanakiri Province. Since urban Khmer were afraid of the area's tribal magic, spirit powers and malaria, they did not want to farm the plantation and Sihanouk forced locals to do the work. "The plantations were coming in and people were getting upset," says Baird. "The people were ripe for someone to come in and organize them against the government. They were ripe to be picked."
Unfortunately, the picker was Pol Pot, returning to the hills of Ratanakiri from a postsecondary education in France and establishing a foothold in Cambodia's underground communist movement.
Today, recent history is giving an encore performance. "Starting in about 1993, donor countries were pushing Cambodia's government to industrialize and it eventually took on a life of its own," says Baird. "And you can be sure Hun Sen is well aware of this. There've been recent amnesties where they've released all these villagers that have been jailed for fighting for their lands. Land issues is why the revolution happened before."
The problem continues to gather international attention; Donica Pottie, Cambodia's Canadian Ambassador, expresses similar concerns. "Indigenous people's rights to communal ownership of traditional lands are established under the existing Land Law," she states in a January release on the land sector.
"However, six years have now passed since the adoption of that law and still not a single indigenous group has been issued with title . . . there is a genuine risk that little land will be left to register once a regulatory framework for collective title is in place."
The race against time to pass sub-decrees and issue communal titling to Cambodia's indigenous minorities continues.
Summary of problems
- The 2001 Land Law recognizes collective land ownership of indigenous communities and contains provisions for interim land security and the prevention of the sales of land in the absence of a titling process. But, following standard Cambodian legal practice, the law consists of general principles that lack sufficient detail for its application; the sub-decrees and implementing regulations needed for its effective implementation have proven difficult to attain.
- Severe land alienation, already affecting countless indigenous communities in Cambodia, is now gaining momentum in the face of peace and political stability, with large multinational companies taking an interest in the prospective economic gains from land grabs.
- Indigenous people are a small minority, disadvantaged by language, social and cultural barriers and highly dependent on their natural resource base for survival. Many are uneducated, unfamiliar with Khmer laws and concepts of individual ownership, and thus ripe for exploitation.
- Land loss, largely in the form of economic concessions, is fueling a breakdown of the social fabric and livelihood of indigenous communities and destroying future options and possibilities for community development and poverty reduction.
6 comments:
Is it time for the revolution again? Fucking CPP and ah Yuon. And fuck you the next reply yeah you motherfucker.
See what I mean, without the help
of the Vietcong, Cambodia will have
non-stop coup after coup. There
wont be any job or growth. It will
be the same as living in the KR
regime but with a different twist.
The Vietcong don't need to follow the Khmer Krom people all the way to Cambodia!!!!!
Yeh what job growth are you talking about Vietcong bitch!!!!Cambodian people work for 1 dollar aday and can't even feed themselves! Is this the kind of job growth are you talking about??
Tell me what have the Vietcong done for Cambodia??? Tell me who back the coup of 1997 preparing for AH HUN SEN Vietcong slave to take power until now???Isn't it the Vietcong themselves?????ahahah
I thought I was fool at the moment!! The Vietcong will pay for their sin!!!!!Uncle HO tomb will be burned!!!!
Hey, 1USD/day is better than
0USD/day. And there is nothing
wrong with coupe to end other
coups.
8:26 AM look fucker Khmer just want to fucking Yuon to get out and prevent you from stealing Khmer wealth. A coupe is to topple to fuckers, Khmer would live a free live and enjoy the wealth but you fuck head came along cos you got no fish motherfucker.
Bullshit, that will never happened.
Without the vietcong, Cambodia
would have faded into the sunset
long ago.
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