cambo law

[greedisgood]

Land rights the preserve of Cambodia's elite

Tue Nov 22, 2005 08:04 PM ET

 

By Ek Madra

KBAL SPEAN, Cambodia (Reuters) - For Noun Savy and her family, the end of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in her tiny corner of northwest Cambodia did not mean the start of peace.

 

Instead, she and hundreds of villagers found themselves under attack from police and soldiers in the pay of powerful businessmen bent on evicting them from their homes along the Thai border in the shadow of giant casinos which have sprung up there.

 

Earlier this year, her 48-year-old husband Tham Buthin was shot dead in the sort of clash over land ownership that is increasingly common in the impoverished southeast Asian nation.

 

"I am so hurt. My husband survived the war but died defending our own land," said Noun Savy, the tears welling up in her eyes as she cradled her eight-month-old baby in her bosom in the village nestled in banana plantations.

 

In all, six people were shot dead when more than 200 military and local police moved in to evict Kbal Spean's 218 families from the village that had been their home since 1997 -- the year Pol Pot's ultra-Maoist guerrillas were chased from the region.

 

Villagers risked their lives to clear the Khmer Rouge landmines strewn across the farmland and jungle, as they rebuilt their lives after nearly three decades of civil war.

 

Bigger changes came in 1993 with the opening of the land border with Thailand, paving the way for an influx of Thai high-rollers desperate to get round their own country's ban on gambling.

 

The advent of the casinos and investment turned border communities such as Kbal Spean into mini-boom towns catering to the vast hotel and leisure complexes.

 

But it also made the land that men like Tham Buthin had been living on incredibly valuable to the businessmen running the gambling enclave.

 

When villagers armed themselves with sticks, knives and petrol bombs to repel the evictors and protect what they believed was theirs by right, the police opened fire.

 

"When the price of land is cheap we live in peace. When it is high, we live in fear," said 47-year-old Sim Chev, a heavily tattooed former soldier who was shot in the right leg during the confrontation.

 

RIGHTS CONCERNS

 

As the most serious in a growing number of violent evictions, the incident raised concern among Cambodia's donors, who fear the lack of respect for property ownership is acting as a brake on democracy and economic growth in one of Asia's poorest nations.

 

"Victims should be settled to live on the land where they are now and any relocations must be fairly compensated," Miloon Kothari, the United Nations special rapporteur on adequate housing, said on a recent visit to Phnom Penh.

 

"Any relocation should be purely voluntary," he said.

 

Cambodian authorities charged two police officers, a soldier and a civilian with voluntary manslaughter after the incident but -- to the outrage of human rights workers -- all charges were dropped in August due to "lack of evidence."

 

To critics of Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge soldier who has been in charge for the last two decades, it was just another signal that democracy remains merely a shaky facade, despite billions of dollars in international aid.

 

"The corrupt and opaque power structures, inequality before the law, impunity, collusion and lack of transparency and accountability are among the main obstacles in the way to genuine democracy," said U.N. human rights envoy Peter Leuprecht.

 

LAWS? WHAT LAWS?

 

Although land disputes are common in many developing countries, the problems in Cambodia are particularly acute, the U.N. says, due to the excessive turbulence of its past.

 

During Pol Pot's rule between 1975 and 1979, when 1.7 million died, roughly a quarter of the population, nearly all land ownership documents were destroyed. Private property was deemed inimical to the communist agrarian utopia the Khmer Rouge hoped to create.

 

Property rights were also outlawed in the decade that followed, when Cambodia was occupied by troops from neighboring communist Vietnam.

 

After a massive U.N.-backed reconstruction effort in the early 1990s, Cambodia's fledgling parliament eventually passed a new land law in 2001, but rampant corruption in the courts has rendered the legislation useless, human rights workers say.

 

The result is law of the jungle, often right in the jungle.

 

In June, scuffles broke out in the northeastern province of Mondolkiri between Phnong indigenous people and employees of a Chinese company called Wuzhishan L.S. Group, which was promised 200,000 hectares (495,000 acres) of land to plant pine trees.

 

In the western province of Pursat, eight people protesting against Pheapimex, a company they accused of grabbing more than 300,000 hectares of forest, were wounded by a grenade. According to the Cambodia Daily, no arrests have been made.

 

"My friends get killed and our houses are burned to ashes. Where is the justice?" asked Toun Aung, 39, who was involved in the Kbal Spean incident.

 

(Additional reporting by Ed Cropley)

[Flashermac]

The Cambodians really must have some forked up karma. They should beg the French to come back and run the country for them again.

 

Uh, no ... on second thought France is having its own problems at the moment.

[kamui]

As mentioned in another thread on Cambo the Khmer oligarchs don't know no shame in selling their own people and their own country. Since Angkor and the Killing Fields are already leased only the Royal Palace has not been touched *yet* (hopefully the roumors are wrong that actually a part of the palace area is on sale).

 

A life of an ordinary or even famous citizen (politicians e.g.) is much less worth than in LOS. Who interferes with the bureaucrats, military or oligarchs will be jailed or killed.

 

In contrary to Thailand even the king is not untouchable. A few weeks ago the PM Hun Sen threatened the king that he will dissolve the royal house if the king opposes the hand over of Khmer soil to Vietnam - why a country should give away a part of it's country for no obvious reason is another question , it was probably only a question of the right reward.

 

The current ruling class is probably the worst enemy of Cambodia...

[Guest]

Yeh, do it legally ( like in usa) with eminent domain laws