By LUKE HUNT
The New York Times
PHNOM PENH — In a union office for garment workers on the outskirts of the capital on a recent afternoon, Tith Srey Mom and her sister Mach were pondering what to do next. After losing a 10-year legal battle to keep their 200-square-meter plot of land, they were being evicted. All legal avenues had been exhausted. All they could do was wait for the police to come and forcibly remove them.
September 26, 2012,
PHNOM PENH — In a union office for garment workers on the outskirts of the capital on a recent afternoon, Tith Srey Mom and her sister Mach were pondering what to do next. After losing a 10-year legal battle to keep their 200-square-meter plot of land, they were being evicted. All legal avenues had been exhausted. All they could do was wait for the police to come and forcibly remove them.
Cristóbal Schmal
The
sisters are from Chrolang Village, about 30 miles south of Phnom Penh.
Tith Srey Mom’s grandparents assumed control of their land in 1979 as
the Khmer Rouge were retreating. The family tilled the patch of dirt for
decades, growing rice to subsidize their meager incomes.
Then in
2002 the police arrived and told them to leave, claiming that the
sisters no longer owned it. No one among the 32 families in Chrolang had
ever heard of Tep Menon, but the police said he was now the owner
of the plot. And so began the sisters’ decade-long fight in the courts
to keep their land.
Land grabbing — big and small — has become all
too common in Cambodia. Protests and violent confrontations with the
authorities have left a mounting death toll. Meanwhile, as more and more
poor Cambodians are being dispossessed, many fear the end of the
“communal rice bowl’’ and traditional village life that once guaranteed
food and a family home for all. With no more land to go home to, village
life is being decimated.
All
land titles, along with nearly a third of the population, were destroyed
by Pol Pot’s regime, and farmers moved swiftly to repopulate the land
when the Khmer Rouge collapsed. Later, the Cambodian government
recognized ownership of land occupied prior to 1989, when the Vietnamese
occupation ended.
The land grabs can be traced back to 2001 when
laws were passed that allowed the government to usurp any “private state
land” and grant
up to about 25,000 acres to companies and private individuals. The
shady deals escalated sharply after 2008 as property prices soared and
well-off businessmen, local and international companies took control of
grants for development.
A spate of violence has been one result. This year alone a prominent anti-logging activist was murdered, a teenage girl was killed by the police during an eviction and 13 women were jailed, and later freed, for protesting against a concession that cost them their homes with little recompense. A journalist
with a history of reporting on illegal logging and land grabs was found
this month in the trunk of his car. He had been hacked to death.
Elections
must be held by mid-2013, and land-grabbing has provided Prime Minister
Hun Sen with his worst political headache. The issue will come to the
fore at the annual donors meeting this week in Phnom Penh, at which
Cambodia’s benefactors decide how much to dole out to the Cambodian
government and what conditions to attach. Made-up largely of Western
nations and international institutions, donors routinely provide about one billion dollars a year, almost half the government’s annual budget.
Nongovernmental
organizations are urging donor countries to pressure the government to
rein in its wayward authorities. The U.N.’s Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights said in its annual report
that of particular concern was the increased use of force and live
ammunition on people protesting the land grabs. “These instances of
violence were predominantly unprovoked, and primarily related to land
disputes,” the report said.
This is cold comfort for Tith Srey
Mom. She and her siblings have little choice but to take a menial job in
a garment factory six days a week, working 8 to 12 hours a day for a
minimum wage of about $90 a month, producing apparel for big-name
brands.
Similar tales were told by Yong Eaon, a 41-year-old mother
of three who is preparing a legal challenge after her neighbors — armed
with knives and political connections — annexed a plot that she brought
from her brother in 1997.
“They turned it into an access road,’’
she said. “So, one daughter goes to work, makes garments. She can only
send home $25 a month, but it helps and I will fight.”
Luke Hunt is a journalist based in Southeast Asia.
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