Losing Ground - Human Rights Party.

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Losing Ground Thumbprints to Prison Village chief Touch Ly was arrested on April 28, 2009 after being called to a meeting at the Ministry of Interior. She was charged with falsifying information after assisting residents of her village certify a petition in a land dispute with a company owned by the wife of a minister. On the edges of the massive nine-year-old Pheapimex concession, smaller companies have nibbled away from time to time at local residents’ land. One old dispute blew up again just after Khmer New Year 2009, resulting in the arrest of a woman from La Peang village in Kampong Chhnang who was sent to the Prey Sar prison in Phnom Penh after helping her neighbors thumb-print a letter attesting to the loss of their land. The arrest of La Peang village chief Touch Ly, 48, came when she was called from her province to Phnom Penh for a meeting at the Ministry of Interior on April 28, 2009. She had helped certify a letter in a land dispute with KDC International Company, which claims about 600 hectares of land in the area. KDC is owned by the wife of a government minister. She is also a member of the Cambodian Red Cross, run by the wife of the prime minister. Mrs. Ly was arrested at the Ministry of Interior, taken to Phnom Penh Municipal Court, charged with falsifying information, and put in prison, according to human rights investigators. Human rights groups condemned the arrest, which they said follows a pattern of intimidation and misuse of the courts that is increasingly common in land cases. Human rights investigators said they believed that the municipal court had no jurisdiction to arrest Mrs. Ly, and that investigators went to the village to check the names of the people on the petition and found that they were correct. One NGO planned to provide the woman with an attorney to contest the court’s jurisdiction, an investigator with that group said. According to media reports, the dispute has its roots in the late 1990s when the village chief in Ta Ches village, on behalf of a businessman, went around his village and offered to buy people’s land. Some families sold; others didn’t. The cadastral office later issued ownership titles to KDC that overlapped with people’s land, LICADHO said. Mrs. Ly, the chief of nearby La Peang, was initially fearful of getting involved in the petition drive, although many families in her village were contesting KDC’s claim to own the land. In January 2009, however, she agreed to help with the petition. She was initially called to a Ministry of Interior’s Serious Crime Department meeting on February 21, 2009. When she emerged from the closed-door meeting she made an apparent about face and authorized an agreement saying she would stop representing the families and recognize that all the disputed land belonged to KDC. Not only that, she agreed to give up her own land to the company. She was arrested about two months later. Mrs. Ly is at least the third person arrested and jailed in this dispute. Two others arrested in November 2007 are Sa Sor, 55, and Oun Tum, 60. Mr. Tum was arrested for trespassing and jailed. He was released a year-and-a-half later, in May 2009. Mr. Sor is still serving a 10-year sentence for trespassing and attempted murder of a KDC laborer. Their lawyer from the Cambodian Defenders Project has said the hearings took place without the presence of either the accused or their lawyer. 30 Forced Evictions and Intimidation in Cambodia
Losing Ground Shock at Dawn Phnom Penh Families living in the Dey Krahom community of Phnom Penh pleaded with police in the early hours of January 24, 2009 to let them retrieve their possessions before their homes were leveled by bulldozers. Within a few hours the 29-year-old community was demolished. Photo by Peter Harris The Case: Dey Krahom • Social Land Concession extinguising possession rights • Date, size: July 2003 concession for residential development is 3.7 hectares of the total 4.7 hectares of land at Dey Krahom. • Company: Property developer 7NG Construction Co. Ltd. • Development plan: Initially, mixed-use development that sets aside part of the land for housing for low-income residents. • Area: The Dey Krahom community between Sothearos Blvd and the National Assembly in Phnom Penh. • People affected: 800 to 1,465 families living in Dey Krahom in 2005, including about 400 who were forcibly evicted in January 2009. Forced Evictions and Intimidation in Cambodia 31
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