Losing Ground - Human Rights Party.

Losing Ground
“Maybe We Will Walk Again”
“We didn’t have enough money to get the bus to Phnom
Penh. We had to walk. It was our last hope. We had to see
Hun Sen or we would lose our land,” explains Mrs. Chim
Sarom, 45.
She, along with her husband and their four boys, aged
11 to 17, were among more than 200 members of farming
families from four villages in Battambang who walked more
than 300 kilometers along Highway 5 to Phnom Penh in
May 2008 to ask Prime Minister Hun Sen to solve their
land disputes before it was time to harvest the rice they had
sown. Many were in debt to money lenders for the purchase
of their seeds, Mrs. Sarom said. “Every day we walked. The
closer we got, the more hope we felt,” she said.
Another villager told his nine children they were going
to Phnom Penh to visit the Royal Palace. By the time they
reached the entrance to Hun Sen’s estate he felt “100 percent
sure” the prime minister would help them, he said.
The march gained national attention. One participant
said it was encouraging to listen to the hourly updates on
Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. Contrary to claims
that the farmers had been incited to march by a provincial
representative of a Cambodian Human Rights Group, Mrs.
Sarom described the decision as a “community idea” agreed
upon during telephone conversations three or four days
before the walk began. Farmers from her village had met the
others during a provincial forum and kept in contact via cell
phone. “We talked about going to court again, but we had
“The children were crying all the time. They
were hungry and thirsty. Sometimes we could
carry them, other times they had to walk.”
done that so many times and it hadn’t worked. We agreed it
was hopeless,” she said.
They gathered at a temple on Highway 5 east of the
provincial capital on May 24 and started walking at about
9am that day. “I thought the government might try to stop us
because there were so many of us. I was surprised so many
people showed up from the other villages,” Mrs. Sarom said.
Almost all the 141 residents in her village either walked or
were carried by their parents. “We had no one to leave the
children with,” she said.
“We didn’t know how long it would take, so we ran out of
Left: Residents of Chrouy Sna village gather
in a show of unity two weeks after an apparent
assassination attempt, on April 16, 2009, of a
community leader.
Right: Residents say they will walk to Phnom
Penh again to try to save the land they have been
farming since 1990.
8
Forced Evictions and Intimidation in Cambodia