Losing Ground - Human Rights Party.

Losing Ground
Fighting Back with Hand-painted Signs
From his wooden stilt house along newly built Road 48, Mr.
Kong Song can gaze across the lush green valley and see the
plume of gray smoke rising from the new sugar cane factory
built by his province’s biggest politician and businessman.
All around the factory lies the nearly 2,000 hectares of
farmland and orchard that used to belong to him and his
neighbors and is now being cultivated for sugar cane.
“We are afraid they might grab more land,” said Mr. Song,
a soft spoken man who has lived along the road since 1979.
“ We need someone to help us very soon.”
Although no one had official titles to the land, under
Cambodia’s Land Law, Kong Song and his neighbors have
legal possession rights. (See appendix on the land law.)
Despite this, about 400 families who moved there in the
years after the Khmer Rouge era ended 30 years ago lost
their land in March 2006 when it was quietly transferred as
two national Economic Land Concessions to as senator and
tycoon. The residents claim they knew nothing about it until
bulldozers began clearing their land.
The first agro-industrial effort in this undeveloped area of
southwest Cambodia has been accompanied by illegal land
grabbing, livestock kidnapping, an apparent ax murder, and
three years of harassment that turned a decade of hard won
peace in the villages to uncertainty and fear. It has pushed
once thriving village families to the edge of poverty.
Value of the land
With the construction of bridges to the province over the
last few years, the ferries that hampered development have
been grounded and forest and pasture once worth very little
has risen in value. Although many of the families whose
land was taken settled with the company for a few hundred
dollars, others said the land is worth 10 times that. The 248
families remaining want fair compensation so they can buy
other land to replant and graze their livestock.
Cambodian and international rights groups have
condemned the evictions.* They said the company only
offered US$50 per hectare when the fair market value was
$500 to $1,000 per hectare. Most families had three to seven
hectares taken from them.
The 247 families have taken their protest up the government
* Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Global Witness, FORUM-ASIA, the Asian Human Rights Commission and the International Federation for Human Rights.
14 Forced Evictions and Intimidation in Cambodia