A well-known community representative who has long battled alleged land-grabbing by economic land concessionaire Pheapimex Group was arrested on fraud accusations and jailed in Pursat province’s Krakor district yesterday.
Fellow community representative Lun Sivy, 42, said Kuch Veng, a member of the Cambodian Peace Network, was arrested in the forest at about 9 am by commune and district police officials. …
A local official and four ethnic minority Tompuon villagers appeared in a Ratanakkiri court on Friday to face accusations of land-grabbing and protesting against a private company that purchased their land in 2007, authorities said yesterday.
Rocham Pheun, an assistant to the chief of Keh Chung commune in Bakeo district, told the Post that the provincial court put out 15 warrants, summonsing himself and 14 other villagers to court after the company filed a complaint, though only four villagers appeared. …
The company is listed in court documents as Ly Sokkim Co, Ltd, though a Ministry of Commerce database does not list any registered business under that name. …
The Ratanakkiri Provincial Court yesterday charged two staffers of Vietnamese rubber concessionaire Hoang Anh Ratanakkiri (CRD) with causing intentional damage for allegedly setting fire to several homes belonging to a landowner with whom they were embroiled in a land dispute, deputy prosecutor Mom Vanda said. …
Ly Sok Ngim, owner of the plantation where the buildings were set ablaze, said she had filed a complaint with police seeking $200,000 in damages from Hoang Anh Ratanakkiri, which she said was the parent company of CRD. …
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 down on our village,” she said yesterday. …
Pho said villagers had been left without farmland and wanted to return to plant cassava but wasn’t sure if authorities were building a military base in the area, as reported by the Post in February. …
Prior to the eviction, villagers had been locked in a dispute with the company Casotim. …
Around 30 residents from Boeung Kok, Borei Kei and Thmor kol communities gathered and knelt down Monday in front of the Royal Palace to seek intervention from the King to release jailed land activist Yorm Bopha. …
In the petition, they asked him to intervene the Ministry of Justice to release Yorm Bopha and find solutions for the land disputes in their communities. …
There were no clashes between authorities and the residents. …
Human rights group Adhoc yesterday criticized a commune official in Pursat province’s Veal Veng district for accusing one of its staff of incitement and spreading disinformation after villagers traveled to Phnom Penh in March to protest over a land dispute with well known businessman Try Pheap. …
As part of his work Mr. [Phuong] Sothea had provided the families with information on land rights and advocacy methods. On March 15, he had also helped a workshop in Pursat city with families and local authorities to discuss the situation.
Mr. Sothea said yesterday that he was innocent and had not incited the villagers. …
In its statement, Adhoc said that Mr. Sothea had merely provided the affected families in the land dispute with information on land rights and advocacy methods, and “at no time did he engage in legal activities.” …
The Thai owners of a pair of sugar plantations in Koh Kong province accused of forcing hundreds of farmers off their land will give the land back if it can be proved that those evicted legally own the land, rights workers and a village representative said on Sunday.
Thanakorn Borintarachat, the new general manager of Koh Kong Sugar, whose major shareholder is Thailand’s Khon Kaen Sugar, reportedly made the offer at a March 29 meeting in Koh Kong with NGOs and local families. …
The dispute dates back to 2006, when Koh Kong Sugar and Koh Kong Plantation, both majority owned by Khon Kaen, started forcing families out of their homes and off the land. Both the families and local rights groups insist the families’ farms and homes were taken over illegally, and claim that some of the families were shot and beaten by plantation guards in the process.
Khon Kaen is currently under investigation by Thailand’s National Human Rights Commission for its alleged human rights violations in Koh Kong. …
Rough[ly] 40 representatives of some 370 families locked in a years-long land dispute with a rubber concessionaire in Pursat province’s Veal Veng district demonstrated outside the Phnom Penh offices of Adhoc yesterday to publicise their situation.
The villagers, many of whom are family members of soldiers stationed along the Thai border, maintained that they had occupied their land legally until 2010, when it was granted to a rubber plantation called MDS Company, owned by tycoon Try Pheap, without an adequate survey of who was occupying the land to begin with, an assessment Adhoc echoed. …
A bail hearing for imprisoned Boeung Kak lake land activist Yorm Bopha, 29, will be held this morning at the Supreme Court, her husband, Lous Sakhorn, said yesterday. …
Bopha was arrested on September 4 last year and charged with intentional violence over the assault of two motodops. …
Prime Minister Hun Sen, however, has accused Bopha’s supporters of turning a crime into a land-dispute case. .
More than four years after the violent forced eviction of about 800 families from Dey Krahorm in the capital’s high-rent Tonle Bassac commune, small-scale construction is finally beginning on the site.
In the past month, the skeletons of a future barbecue restaurant and a beer garden have risen up on the eastern side of Dey Krahorm, while on the site’s south side, on a plot sold to another company, foundations are being laid for a Sou Sou Suki Soup restaurant.
But this is not much to show given the time that has passed since the heavily criticised eviction of the 3.7-hectare site’s residents in January 2009 to make way for real estate company 7NG, which once promised large-scale development of the site, activists said. …
Staff in 7NG’s office on the eviction site said yesterday they believed the land next to the office had been sold to other companies but could not say when, or for how much. …
Phnom Penh Municipality spokesman Long Dimanche said he was unsure of the land’s status, adding that the city required the company to submit a master plan for the site’s development but 7NG had not submitted any such plan.
Dey Krahorm community member Chan Vichet said yesterday he was not surprised the land where he used to live had been divided and rented to small businesses, despite 7NG’s claims before the eviction that it would build a 52-storey, income- and investment-generating commercial building. …
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. …
Two ethnic Banong communities in Mondolkiri province’s Keo Seima district have completed the final stage in the process to receive rare collective property titles, and are set to receive ownership documents early next month, an official at the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) said.
Kan Vibol, project field manager at CIDA, said the O’Chra and Kati communities in Sre Preah commune successfully concluded their monthlong “public display” – used to show that the groups are not in conflict for the land with outside developers – on January 26. …
A group of Phnom Penh residents locked in a long-running land dispute with a real estate project owned by CPP Senator Lao Meng Khin are pitching City Hall a plan they hope will prevent them from being evicted and keep them close to home. …
“We brought the map to show City Hall that we studied the 12.44 hectares and there can be 401 titles on vacant land that can be given to the 61 families,” said Chan Puthisak, one of the neighborhood residents hoping for one of the titles. …
A group of opposition lawmakers have written to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen urging action against a sugar factory owned by a ruling party official accused of exploiting child labor and grabbing land from villagers.
Six Sam Rainsy Party (SRP) parliamentarians sent a letter dated Jan. 23 through National Assembly President Heng Samrin, calling on Hun Sen to “take serious measures” against the Phnom Penh Sugar Co., which runs the factory in central Cambodia’s Kompong Speu province. …
The company belonging to ruling Cambodian People’s Party Senator Ly Yong Phat has been at the center of a long-running dispute with villagers who say they were offered inadequate compensation for land they had farmed for years which was taken over by the sugar project.
“Ly Yong Phat’s factory is using child labor from workers who are under 18 years of age,” reads the letter, demanding that Hun Sen take actions to “improve working conditions in this factory, which is abusing the rights of children.” …
It also called on the sugar company to resolve its land dispute with the more than 1,000 villagers in Kompong Speu province.
Member of Parliament Mu Sochua, who described the company as a “’blood sugar’ producer known for encroaching on villagers’ land,” said she and her fellow SRP lawmakers had discovered that the factory was employing underage children through an “investigation,” without providing further details. …
Ethnic minority Jarai families in Ratanakkiri province locked in a land dispute with Keat Kolney, the sister of Finance Minister Keat Chhon, yesterday marked the sixth anniversary of inaction in the court compliant they filed accusing Ms. Kolney’s firm of taking 450 hectares of their land. …
UP AND down a 4km stretch of highway on the northern outskirts of Phnom Penh, about 3,000 of Cambodia’s Cham minority have built a life. Their distinctive Muslim culture thrives in conditions of close-knit community, a stark contrast to the shattering days the country endured through the rule of the Khmer Rouge and the civil war that followed. For a generation the Cham were isolated and, at times, slaughtered.
Since those wars ended in 1998, political stability has brought Cambodia many of its usual rewards. The economy has expanded on the back of foreign aid and fledgling industries like garment manufacture and tourism, as well as by timber and other natural resources. …
Yet for this cluster of villages strung along the highway, the future is cast under shadow. Property prices are soaring everywhere and their tract has been picked for expropriation. This section of the national Route Five, which links Phnom Penh with the provincial city of Battambang in the north-west, has been earmarked for an upgrade. The highway will be widened by between eight and 25 meters on each side of the road. The surrounding land is to be re-zoned for industrial use. …
Prosecutors yesterday recommended that the Ratanakkiri Provincial Court drop charges against two human rights activists and a radio reporter accused in 2009 of inciting villagers involved in a land dispute against agro-business firm DM Group.
Deputy prosecutor Ros Saram told the Post that because he had been unable to find sufficient evidence, he had recommended to presiding Judge Lock Lao that he drop charges brought by a previous judge against Pen Bonnar and Chhay Thy, of rights group Adhoc, and Radio Free Asia reporter Sok Ratha. …
More than 8,000 hectares of land was cut from economic and forest land concessions owned by some of the country’s biggest tycoons and awarded to villagers last month, according to documents from the Council of Ministers.
Four sub-decrees signed by Prime Minister Hun Sen order that land from four high-profile disputed areas be divided among nearly 3,500 families in four provinces.
The land is from controversial concessions in Pursat, Stung Treng, Siem Reap and Preah Sihanouk provinces — each of which has been involved in long-standing land disputes. …
Nearly 2,000 families in Stung Treng’s Thala Barivat district were awarded 3,553 hectares from concessions granted to Pheapimex Fuchang.
The re-assignment follows months of land demarcation undertaken by cadastral officials working for provincial land management committees on behalf of Hun Sen’s large-scale land-titling initiative.
In May, amid mounting pressure, the premier issued a moratorium on economic land concessions and called for a reexamination of existing concessions. …
The government’s Human Rights Committee has visited villagers in a long-running land dispute in Battambang province to find out whether members of their community have been unfairly imprisoned in recent years for land encroachment, local authorities and villagers said yesterday.
Officials from committee, which is headed by Anti-Corruption Unit chairman Om Yentieng, interviewed villagers in Bavel district’s Khnach Romeas commune yesterday and Wednesday over their claim to 161 hectares of disputed territory with local businessman Eang Oeun, commune chief Lam Vanny said. …
