A year to the day since armed soldiers stormed into the remote village of Pro Mar in Kratie province, killing a 14-year-old girl, arresting her husband and evicting hundreds of families, Sreng Pho still has nightmares.
“I’m really scared when I think back to that day the authorities came to crack... continue
Provincial authorities in Ratanakkiri have warned ethnic Jarai villagers that they will be arrested if they continue to stop bulldozers belonging to a Vietnamese company from clearing forest in O’Yadav district’s Paknhai commune, community leaders said yesterday.
Sav Finh, leader of Lom village’s forestry protection committee, said provincial and forestry administration officials visited the cleared area late last week to warn villagers not to take direct action against the company again. …
O’Yadav district governor Dork Sar said the forest belonged to the state and that, if the company had been granted the land, the villagers had no right to stop the company’s activities. …
In the wake of a new report from environmental rights group Global Witness rebuking the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Deutsche Bank for investing in rubber plantations accused of illegal logging and forced evictions, both institutions have denied responsibility and deflected the blame elsewhere.
But the investments targeted in the new report are not the first projects for which both the IFC and Deutsche Bank have received criticism in Cambodia.
Local NGOs filed a complaint with the IFC’s compliance ombudsman in 2009 on behalf of 79 families worried that the expansion of Sihanoukville airport was moving forward without their consultation or guarantees of compensation should they be evicted.
Since 2003, the IFC has helped finance Cambodia Airports, which is owned by French construction giant Vinci Group, for projects involving runway expansions at Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville airports.
In July, 387 families living along the outskirts of the Phnom Penh International Airport were served with eviction letters due to expansion plans to the runway. The families insist they have legal tenure to their homes, but the government disagrees and has refused their demands for compensation.
Though the evictions have yet to take place, families have been told by local authorities that the eviction will take place. It was not known yesterday if the ombudsman is monitoring the Phnom Penh airport expansion plan. …
According to Equitable Cambodia, a land rights NGO, Deutsche Bank through DWS [Vietnam Fund] was also invested in KSL—a Thai firm that owns two sugar plantations in Cambodia, which are accused of causing the eviction of hundreds of local villagers. DWS divested from KSL in 2011. …
Mark Moorstein knew little about Cambodia before he got involved in a lawsuit on behalf of land owners there. But as it’s turning out, the suit could end up affecting most every country in Asia.
Moorstein is a land-use lawyer in Northern Virginia who, like many lawyers, was looking for some pro-bono, charitable work to do on the side. …
Across Asia, almost every country is guilty of baldly seizing its citizens’ land without significant compensation and then selling it to corporations or developers, leaving the owners homeless and often destitute. …
Finally in 2001, Cambodia enacted a Land Law intended to curb these seizures. But like so many measures passed to mollify the Western donors who keep the government afloat, the government immediately began ignoring its own law. Now, as one major Cambodian human rights organization put it: “In Phnom Penh and the 12 provinces” around it “land-grabbing has affected an estimated 400,000 Cambodians since 2003, helping to create a sizable underclass of landless villagers with no means for self-sustenance.” …
It turned out that the land he [Mark Moorstein] focused on — two plots of about 25,000 acres each — is used to grow sugar cane, primarily. A wealthy and powerful Cambodian senator took possession of it after evicting residents from about 200 individual plots. Many of the evictees held identification cards the United Nations had given them when it set up a protectorate in Cambodia 20 years ago. Under the Land Law, that meant they held legal title to the property. …
Once the suit was filed, Tate & Lyle seemed to panic. Very quickly, it sold its entire sugar unit to American Sugar Refining, better known here in the United States for its name-brand product: Domino Sugar. That company is now the defendant, and when contacted for comment, the company declined.
But last Thursday, the company did file its response to the suit. It said Tate & Lyle had no knowledge of any prior ownership of the land in question. The villagers had no claim to the sugar cane grown on the land, even if they did previously own it, because they had not paid for the seeds or production costs. And finally, the defendants claimed, “The English court cannot adjudicate or call into question” matters of Cambodian law dealing with land concessions.
Nonetheless, the British court had already accepted the suit. The case is moving forward, and that all by itself is already encouraging many people. …
The father of three children attacked with wooden sticks and steel poles by employees of well-connected DM Group in Ratanakkiri province has filed a lawsuit against the firm, and is asking for tens of thousands of dollars in compensation. ..
The provincial court has charged the four employees and released a Royal Cambodia Armed Solider, Colonel Srey Thoeun who was at the scene, on the grounds that he did not take part in the beatings. …
Mr. [Ry] Saron [the victims' father] said he was also preparing to ask local authorities to endorse the land certificate he was recently issued for the farm his children were protecting when they were attacked in order to secure a $2,000 loan to pay his son’s hospital bills in Vietnam. …
On Sunday, however, Mr.[Ven] Vibol [DM Group spokesman] attributed Saturday’s altercation to a misunderstanding because the firm’s employees were not clear about who the land belonged to.
“I don’t know how to protect the territorial integrity [of the nearby Cambodian-Thai border] – even my three hectares of land I cannot protect,” said Bun Chanthorn, 54, one of hundreds of retired and active soldiers who since 2010 have been battling the local authorities and a rubber company over thousands of hectares of land in Pursat’s Veal Veng district. …
“When the country has a war, they need us, but when it is peaceful, they threaten to seize our land without considering our seniority, without considering how we sacrificed our lives for the nation,” he said.
Though Chanthorn has long farmed this land, he has been barred from continuing to do so in the past year by Oknha Try Pheap’s MDS Import-Export Co, Ltd, which was granted a 4,373-hectare concession in the area in December 2010. The new commune chief, said Chanthorn, refused to accept a receipt of ownership issued by his predecessor on the pretext that the area lay inside a conservation zone.
When volunteer students came to the area starting last June, they measured the company’s land, avoiding the villagers, locals told the Post. …
Khoy Sokha, Pursat provincial governor, insisted that the government was working on a solution to the dispute. …
“If they are really soldiers’ families, they will get their social land concession. I will find it for them,” he said. …
Hundreds of indigenous minorities in Ratanakkiri province are being made worse off by Prime Minister Hun Sen’s land-titling scheme which, rather than securing their property rights, is contributing to the loss of their ancestral lands, according to a new report.
The report supports complaints aired since last year by minority communities in the country’s northeast that the prime minister’s land-titling initiative, known as Directive 01 and launched in June, is depriving them of their rights to communal land titles.
Produced by seven organizations, including the Community Legal Education Center and the Center for Study and Development in Agriculture, the authors of the report surveyed 79 villagers in Ratanakkiri province where indigenous communities had started the application process for communal titles.
The survey found that 26 of those communities, or roughly 1 in 3, had all or parts of their land demarcated for private land titles under Directive 01, and 25 of those 26 communities were disappointed with the project and the private titles on offer.
“One of the their most common reasons for dissatisfaction was because the policy did not secure their communal land, and in fact caused them to lose more land,” the report says. …
Besides jeopardizing their traditional farming practices and very ways of life, Mr. [Chhay] Thy [Adhoc's Provincial Investigator] said, indigenous families were worried about making ends meet without their communal lands and on the low salaries offered at rubber plantations. …
A U.K. firm being sued by 200 Cambodian farmers over the loss of their land to two sugar plantations has defended its business dealings, claiming that the affected families were dealt with legally and were properly compensated for the loss of their properties.
Local farmers and human rights groups accuse two sugar plantations—both majority owned by Thailand’s Khon Kaen Sugar, a subsidiary of the KSL Group—of forcing some 400 families in Koh Kong province off their farms or out of their homes since 2006, some of them violently. …
Hundreds of Cambodian families are suing the British sugar firm Tate & Lyle in one of the U.K’s highest courts over a pair of plantations in Koh Kong province they accuse of violently forcing them off their land and out of their homes.
The British law firm Jones Day, which has offices in dozens of cities across the world, filed a complaint on behalf of the 200 families with the U.K’s High Court of Justice on March 28, claiming Tate & Lyle owes them for the sugar it has been buying from the plantation owners since 2010. …
“Pursuant to Cambodian Law, the claimants are the owners of and/or entitled to possession of the sugar cane,” the claim states. “The defendants have wrongfully deprived the villagers of the use and possession of the sugar cane processed into the raw sugar and converted the same to their own use. Accordingly, the defendants are liable to the claimants in conversion for the value of the sugar cane.”
The dispute dates back to 2006, when the plantations started clearing the families’ rice paddies and forcing many of them out of their homes.
In 2009, Tate & Lyle signed a five year deal with the majority owner of the plantations, Thailand’s Khon Kaen Sugar, and started shipping the sugar to its UK refineries the following year.
Since then, it has imported 48 million kg of the sugar, worth more than $32 million. …
The complaint goes on to state that abuses included “multiple instances of battery and criminal violence, resulting in significant injuries to seven of the villagers, with at least two villagers being shot and wounded.”
It also accuses the plantations of destroying their crops, razing homes and killing or confiscating their cows.
It even pins on them the murder of villager An In, an outspoken activist who had been documenting the land clearing. …
In Washington today, attendees of the World Bank’s Annual Conference on Land and Poverty will hear a flattering account of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s ambitious project to furnish nearly half a million Cambodian families with new private land titles just in time for July’s national elections.
But in a small village in rural Kompong Chhnang province, local farmers are among a growing list of communities worried that the project is cheating them of their land rights.
According to the villagers and officials in Rolea Ba’ier district, two separate survey teams showed up in Kraing Leav village earlier this month only days apart to measure the same 45 hectares of rice paddy being tended by 76 families.
The first team of provincial cadastral officials were there on April 2 and 3 to measure land on behalf of the families.
The next day, another team of cadastral officials showed up with student volunteers, who are part of the prime minister’s titling project, to measure the land on behalf of Moul Engly, a local businessman that villagers accuse of trying to steal their land.
Villagers say the student volunteers had measured the land for Mr. Engly despite a decision by Supreme Court awarding the land to the villagers in November.
Provincial counsellor Dunoung Chantra… said the student volunteers should not have come to measure the land for Mr. Engly.
“Local authorities should not have done this by working with the student volunteers to measure the land in favour of the businessman since the villagers do have legal right to the land,” he said.
Mr. Chantra said he would take up the villagers’ case with the government at national level. …
Since Prime Minister Hun Sen announced an ambitious new plan some 10 months ago to make nearly half a million families official land owners, hardly a week goes by that a rural community does not complain of local officials trying to scam the project.
But when Franz-Volker Muller, who heads the land rights program for the German development agency GIZ, addresses the World Bank’s annual conference on land and poverty in Washington on Tuesday, he will paint a very different picture. In the most comprehensive report on the prime minister’s land titling project to date, Mr. Muller, with a few reservations, will anticipate a resounding success.
“In a period of only one single year, almost two million people, most of whom were illegally using state public land before, will see their land rights secured. This can be considered a tremendous step towards the progressive realization of human rights of Cambodia’s vulnerable and poor populations in rural areas,” he said.
Mr. Hun Sen first announced the project- dubbed Directive No.1- in mid June. Vague on details at first, Mr. Hun Sen said the new titles would be going specifically to families living in state forests, economic land concessions and former timber concessions. The target is to reach 4,700,000 families living on 700,000 parcels of land covering a total 1.8 million hectares by June this year, just one month before the national elections. …
His praise of the project is not without its caveats. He calls his report only a “preliminary” look at an unfinished project, and said that his high marks for the project are “overshadowed” by problems the prime minister’s scheme is causing communities of indigenous ethnic minorities- some of the most vulnerable groups of people in the country. …
Mr. Muller notes, too, the “political calculus” Mr. Hun Sen has surely worked out in timing the land titling project to wrap up just ahead of July’s national elections. …
“The outcome is of course positive for the people who did receive land titles,” said Nicolas Agostini, a legal adviser on lands issues for local rights group Adhoc. “However, the scheme does not address the needs of those people and communities who are most in need of land tenure security: people who live in disputed land areas in the countryside or areas coveted by investors, people who live in the informal urban settlements and indigenous people.” …
Ever the optimist, Mr. Muller still believes that other developing countries in Cambodia’s situation can take some positive lessons away from the project when he delivers his report to the World Bank conference. …
Nearly 50 families in Koh Kong province’s Kiri Sakor district will finally receive official titles after repeatedly requesting – and being denied – student volunteers to measure their land, the villagers’ commune chief said yesterday.
Koh Pol commune chief Ev Kosal, who participated in the meeting between local authorities and land department officials at Koh Kong City Hall, confirmed that authorities had indeed agreed to send youth volunteers to demarcate villagers’ land, cementing what villagers feared was becoming a tenuous living situation.
Villager representative In Chron, 52, said the families’ land had gone unmeasured since the start of the volunteer-titling program, raising fears among residents that their homes and farmland would be forfeited unless they could prove their legal ownership. …
People applying for land titles in urban areas are at a huge disadvantage compared to their rural counterparts due to the higher percentage of property disputes with powerful officials and businesspeople in the country’s cities, a new report on land registration has found. …
To improve the situation, the report says the government should respect legal possession rights, as stated under the 2001 Land Law, rather than granting newly approved projects on such land. The report also recommends that the government conduct research to find out how many households have been unfairly excluded from registering their land in the country. …
Beng Hong Socheat Khermo, spokesman for the Land Management Ministry, said the government was addressing all the recommendations put forward in the report. …
Seventy-two ethnic minorities Banong families received communal titles to a combined 1,008 hectares of ancestral land in Mondolkiri province yesterday morning in a ceremony attended by Land Management Minister Chhun Lim.
Communal titles were designed to protect the ancestral lands of the country’s minorities from outside developers, and yesterday’s titles were only the fourth or fifth to be issued since they were established by the 2001 Land Law. …
Besides the spirit forests, the titles will protect the communities’ traditional rotational farmland, residential land and land held in reserve for future generations for farming and living. …
Twenty-one families whose houses were demolished during an eviction on Tuesday said yesterday that they planned to refuse an offer of houses, land and cash from the tycoon who now possesses their land. …
Villagers, however, will continue to discuss the offer in another meeting scheduled for today, commune chief Nong Dinara said. …
Some 200 Koh Kong farmers locked in a long-running land dispute with two sugar plantations met Tuesday with a representative of the Thailand-based owners for the first time since the land dispute began in 2006.
Khamrom Phochai, a Thai national and representative of Thailand’s Khon Kaen Sugar Industry, the firm that holds a 70 percent stake in the two 10,000-hectare plantations, said he was appointed only recently to investigate the land dispute and had visited the area to follow up on a report from local government officials. …
“After today’s meeting, I realized that there are 200 families still in dispute and asking for their land back,” he said. …
Representatives of nearly 200 ethnic Kreung families living in Ratanakkiri province’s O’Chum district on Tuesday filed a complaint with local rights group Adhoc, accusing a Vietnamese rubber company of clearing their ancestral land, local officials and a rights worker said.
Chhay Thy, provincial investigator for Adhoc, said that since late last year, employees of the CRD rubber company have bulldozed the boundaries of a 700-hectare area the firm intends to turn into a rubber plantation. The destruction has spread to the property of 31 ethnic minority families living in La’ak commune’s Kaim village. …
According to the Ministry of Agriculture, in 2011 CRD was granted a 7,591-hectare concession that cuts through the province’s O’Chum, Bakeo and Andong Meas districts. …
Twelve ethnic Tampuon families living in Ratanakkiri province’s Lumphat district yesterday filed a complaint with the provincial land management department, accusing the owners of a Vietnamese rubber plantation of clearing their farmland, local official said.
Tun Vantham, chief of Samuth Loeu village in Seda commune, said that since January 18, employees of the Kao Su Ea Lev BM Yoy Stock company have cleared more than 10 hectares of farmland belonging to 12 of the indigenous families, all of whom live outside the company’s 8,400-hectare, government-awarded economic land concession. …
Some 300 villagers from the Andong Trabaek community in Svay Rieng province’s Romeas Hek district will accompany two representatives who have been summonsed to the provincial court Tuesday to clarify allegations of illegal logging that villagers say were fabricated by Forestry Administration officials in order to steal farmland.
Representative Soun Seyha said 86 families had been wrapped up in a dispute over 71 hectares with forestry officials since 2008, and had filed multiple complaints to no avail. The current case began when people returned to the disputed land to grow cassava and rice – without disturbing the acacia trees – Seyha said, maintaining the Forestry Administration had “used the court system to threaten us”. …
