DEVELOPMENT-CAMBODIA: Resentment Rises with Urban Evictions

By Robert Carmichael Reprint | | Print |

PHNOM PENH, Jul 28 2009 (IPS) - Tan Pho Yi, 65, has lived with his family in their corrugated iron home here in the Cambodian capital since 1992. Those 17 years came to an end in just 20 minutes when his family were evicted and their home torn down by City Hall’s workers on Jul. 17.

Standing outside his home as it was being demolished just down the road from the new Australian embassy, the teacher of modern art said he has had enough of living in Cambodia. “I don’t know where we will stay tonight,” he said, with tears in his eyes. “I want to go to Australia. I don’t want to be in Cambodia any more.”

The demolition team paused briefly while colleagues brought out Tan Pho Yi’s 63-year-old wife, Lok Sor, who was in a wheelchair. She watched the demolition of their house while seated next to a stack of corrugated iron, wood and their possessions.

As the morning wore on, the elderly couple’s belongings were loaded into the back of a truck, one of several dozen at the Group 78 eviction site in the heart of Phnom Penh. Tan Pho Yi said their property would go to a friend’s home while he and his wife work out how to rebuild their lives at the new relocation site outside the city.

Tan Pho Yi and his family are the latest of tens of thousands of mainly poor Cambodians who have been thrown off their land in the past few years. It is a nationwide problem, but is particularly acute in urban areas and tourist zones where land prices have climbed fastest.

The wave of forced evictions has reversed some of the gains from poverty alleviation programmes in the country, critics say.

The issue of land ownership in Cambodia is complicated, partly due to the legacy of the Khmer Rouge, which outlawed private ownership of property and destroyed all land records during its genocidal rule between 1975 and 1979.

It has been made worse by the rapid rise in land prices, which has resulted in entire communities being evicted in a scramble to pocket easy profits.

That links to the third problem, which is that residents who under Cambodia’s Land Law ought to be awarded legal title to their land are reportedly refused the paperwork by the authorities. In some parts of the country, there is too much money to be made by withholding legal title.

It is the lack of legal title that leads to the sights seen on the morning of Jul. 17, when dozens of red-shirted men from demolition teams arrived at 6 a.m., backed up by armed military police and riot police. The surrounding streets were blocked off, and although violence was not used this time – it has been in previous evictions – the threat was there.

The action had the unusual consequence of forcing Cambodia’s international donors, who fund around half of the country’s budget, to issue a statement calling on the government to halt forced evictions until “a fair and transparent mechanism for resolving land disputes is put in place and a comprehensive resettlement policy is developed”.

The statement was issued by the United Nations, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and a clutch of Western embassies. But the donor call came too late for G78’s residents, who originally numbered almost 150 families.

Human rights groups issued similar statements of concern. “Today is yet another black day for land rights in Cambodia,” said Naly Pilorge, the director of local human rights group Licadho. “Once more, some of Phnom Penh’s poorest and most vulnerable residents have been forced off their land in return for grossly inadequate compensation.”

“Group 78 was clearly cut off from due process and denied justice,” said Amnesty International country specialist Brittis Edman. “The Municipality of Phnom Penh made no attempts to properly consult with the affected community or explore any feasible alternative to eviction. This makes a mockery of the government’s obligations to protect the right to housing.” Amnesty said 23,000 people were forcibly evicted in 2008 alone.

Rights workers say a problem is the government’s refusal to honour the provisions of the Land Law, which requires that people who have right of ownership of their land are fairly compensated before eviction.

But deputy governor Mann Chhoeun was quoted as praising G78 residents for their reasonable attitude in leaving, and saying the eviction was done ‘with love’. But he did admit to the ‘Phnom Penh Post’ newspaper that the relocation site lacks amenities such as running water and electricity.

Asked about Phnom Penh’s response to the donors’ call to cease evictions, government spokesman Phay Siphan claims that the steps donors want are already in place. He says those relocated are offered compensation, low-interest loans and provided with a plot of land to live on.

But Phay says donors fail to look at evictions – which he describes as ‘relocations’ – as individual events. “They are mixing up facts and information, and putting everything in the same basket to evaluate it,” he said. “They should study it (better). It is the case that some people are not entitled to be compensated because they are living on state public land.”

Daniel King, an Australian legal adviser at a local NGO that advised the families at G78, says inadequate compensation is a major problem. G78 was independently valued this year at 15 million U.S. dollars, but the total compensation offered was just 500,000 or around 8,000 per qualifying family, plus a small plot of land outside the city.

The unfairness in the current system is transparent in the case of 66-year-old Lim Ly Kien, who had lived at G78 since 1994. He says he bought the land legally and has the documents to prove it.

According to independent valuation, his house and land were worth 330,000 dollars. The municipality eventually agreed to pay him 20,000 dollars, which was more than twice what he was first offered. “If I were staying on land that belonged to the (development) company, then I would not take one penny in compensation and I would leave,” Lim Ly Kien said in an interview. “But the land belongs to me – I bought it according to the law.”

Rights workers point out that the law is seldom on the side of the poor, so it is futile to pursue remedies through the Land Law. Evicted residents who had filed lawsuits lost, and the authorities successfully prosecuted them in return, says King.

If there is one bright spot in Cambodia’s land debate, it is that one million land title documents have been issued – around 8 percent of the total number of plots, according to the World Bank.

But rights activists complain that land titles have been issued mainly in parts of the country that are not contentious. The World Bank admits there is a very long way to go. Its land-titling programme will end later this year with more than 90 percent of the nation’s plots untitled.

Moreover, land title documents have yet to come up in any number against Cambodia’s judicial system.

*Our Mekong (http://www.newsmekong.org)