Cambodian Farmers Demand Stop to Land Grabs, Evictions

By Robert Carmichael Aug 14, 2009, 6:46 GMT

Phnom Penh - 'The land is our rice pot,' a rural villager told a packed hall in the Cambodian capital.

The speaker, Leng Simy, arrived in Phnom Penh this week from a village in western Cambodia, one of 300 villagers representing 15,000 people from across the kingdom who came in a coordinated move to get the government and international donors to listen to their concerns about evictions and land grabs.

The numbers are significant. Organizers said 700,000 hectares of mainly communal land are at risk for this group of petitioners alone. Amnesty International last year estimated that 150,000 people across Cambodia were at risk of being forcibly evicted in land grabs generally perpetrated by the politically powerful, the military and companies awarded land concessions

One purpose of the trip to Phnom Penh was to deliver thumb-printed petitions protesting the land grabs to government ministries, the prime minister, parliament and the national land dispute authority. Another purpose was to be heard, which for people in Cambodia's rural areas is difficult.

Leng Simy told the meeting and media Wednesday that her village had lost its communal land to a company growing cassava and palm oil.

Her experience was a common one, and one shared by Chann Na from Kampot province in southern Cambodia. Clutching the microphone, she told the audience how a company took land that villagers used for grazing cattle. She said she hopes the national government would resolve the problem, but she said she also knows the petition might make no difference.

'If there is no solution, then the representatives from all the provinces and cities will come again to Phnom Penh until at last we have a solution,' Chann Na told the audience. 'And we will not come in ones and twos - we will all come together. I hope that will generate a solution.'

Her comments generated an enthusiastic round of applause from a worried and frustrated audience of villagers. The reason for their concern is easy to understand: More than 80 per cent of Cambodia's 15 million people live in rural areas. To lose your land is to lose your livelihood, and there is no social safety net.

The story of Cambodia's land is not straightforward. Under the catastrophic 1975-1979 Khmer Rouge regime, private property was abolished and land records destroyed. To this day, more than 90 per cent of the nation's land parcels do not yet have legal title, which makes it easy for the unscrupulous to take them.

And as stability returned in recent years after decades of strife, land prices rocketed. The result is that evictions and land grabs have also soared.

One local human rights group recorded 335 land dispute cases last year alone. And remedies are hard to come by: The courts typically favour those with power, which limits the options for ordinary people, and the military and police are regularly used to put down any dissent.

Loun Sovath, a monk from the western province of Siem Reap, told how villagers in his area had 100 hectares stolen by 'rich and powerful people' earlier this year. During a protest at the disputed site, several villagers were shot and wounded by authorities. Others were arrested 'just as the Khmer Rouge did,' he said, and 11 are now in jail.

'Previously, people would file a complaint with the local and provincial authorities, but they didn't get resolved until they came to Phnom Penh,' Loun Sovath told the hall. '[The government's] solution now is that they arrest more people. I am asking that the government please consider the land issue. This is not a game.'

It is not only the country's majority Khmers who are losing land to a scourge that runs the length and breadth of the kingdom. Soal Nak is from the Jarai tribe, an ethnic minority in the north-eastern province of Ratanakkiri, where land, forests and religion are wrapped together in tribal culture and livelihoods.

'Our people remain worried about losing our land and our forests and our traditional way of life,' he said. 'If we lose our forests or our land, then our traditional ways go, too, and more than that, we will lose our togetherness as a tribal community.'

It was too early to say whether the petitioners' concerns would be addressed, but early signs were not encouraging. The government was caught off-guard by the collaborative effort and was trying to find out whether civil society groups were involved - a classic case of shooting the messenger, said a long-term member of one of these groups.

At least one villager has decided not to return home. Ngou Leang is a representative from a village in the western province of Banteay Meanchey whose commune chief colluded to grab land used by 280 families.

She spoke by phone Wednesday to fellow villagers who had stayed behind. They told her the authorities had come to the village and threatened to arrest everyone for protesting about land issues.

'So for now,' she said, 'I cannot go back home.'

Cambodia Court Cases Mount Against Opposition

By SETH MYDANS

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Cambodia’s courts have been busy in recent weeks with cases of defamation, disinformation and incitement brought by the government in what critics say is part of a broad assault on civil liberties.

“If you’re just walking into the situation, it seems like a series of ridiculous lawsuits,” said Sara Colm, a senior researcher for the New York-based rights group Human Rights Watch, who said at least nine lawsuits have recently been filed against critics and political opponents by Prime Minister Hun Sen and his supporters.

But she and other analysts say the targets seem carefully chosen to send a chill through the free press, independent judiciary, political opposition and civic organizations that were introduced by the United Nations in the early 1990s.

The surge in lawsuits amounts to “a serious threat to democratic development, which may undermine the efforts of the past 16 years to rebuild a tolerant and pluralistic environment in Cambodia,” the United Nations human rights office in Cambodia said in a statement in June.

In the most prominent cases, two opposition politicians have been stripped of their parliamentary immunity and sued for libel by Mr. Hun Sen and his associates. Threatened with a lawsuit and disbarment, their lawyer has abandoned the case, apologized to the prime minister and pledged allegiance to the ruling party.

The editor of one of the country’s last opposition newspapers was sent to prison in June for articles he had published, and another, soon afterward, apologized and agreed to shut down his newspaper to avoid court action.

A young political activist was convicted of defamation in June and jailed for spray-painting slogans critical of the government on the walls of his house.

“The court has always been used as a political tool,” said Theary C. Seng, whose leadership of a human rights group, the Center for Social Development, is being challenged in what she says is a politically motivated court case. “But recently, there is a concentration of cases which seem to be very political and which seem to use the court as a political tool to silence opposition voices.”

Mr. Hun Sen dismisses, and even appears to parody, his critics, declaring earlier this month that he was acting in the interests of democracy by stripping the two lawmakers of their parliamentary immunity so that they could face prosecution in the courts.

“From now on we are strengthening democracy and the rule of law,” he said. “This is not an anarchic democracy. Democracy must have the rule of law.”

Together with land seizures that are driving tens of thousands of people from their homes, analysts say these actions demonstrate a sense of impunity in a government that has resisted efforts to strengthen the rule of law in Cambodia.

In the most recent evictions, about 150 poor families were forced from their homes on prime land in Phnom Penh on Thursday and Friday, part of what the World Bank called “a major problem” in Cambodia’s fast-growing cities.

The court cases come at a time when countries in the region are looking increasingly toward China as a political and economic model and questioning the democratic and humanitarian values of the West.

In recent years, China has become a major donor and investor in Cambodia in projects that do not place the kinds of demands on governing and management that generally accompany assistance from Western nations and aid organizations.

“We have been fearing all along that Cambodia’s government is looking eastward toward China and Vietnam as models,” with their strong central governments and intolerance of dissent, said Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights.

“Now there are a lot of activities recently that confirm our fear, and so it’s pretty scary,” he said. “What they are trying to do is to have only one strong party, and ultimately probably only one party.”

The aggressiveness of the government has been matched by what appears to be resigned acquiescence among many of its opponents to the dominance of Mr. Hun Sen and his ruling elite in the Cambodian People’s Party.

Nothing demonstrates this more sharply than the apologies that Mr. Hun Sen apparently requires as the price of leniency.

“I ask permission to demonstrate deep respect and bow down to apologize,” said Dam Sith, editor in chief of Moneaksekar Khmer, a pro-opposition newspaper, as he promised earlier this month to cease publication of his 10-year-old newspaper.

“I have in the past committed inappropriate acts again and again,” he said, adding that his only hope to avoid a defamation conviction is the “compassion and forgiveness” of Mr. Hun Sen — which he duly received.