For many years land grabbing has claimed many victims among the poor and the weak in Cambodian society. Land grabbers, mostly the rich and powerful, have scarcely resorted to the due process of law. They simply secure, though illicit means, government eviction orders and law enforcement agents to force those victims out of their homes and lands, offering them compensation, if at all, well below the market prices of their lands.
To overpower any resistance, arrest is used to break the spirit of protesters, they are threatened with heavy mechanical equipment that will pull down and demolish their dwellings, and violent force to eject them from their homes and lands. Such measures have attracted, though, a lot of criticism and bad publicity for the government. Now a new measure has been used, at least in several of the latest evictions. Land grabbers, with the connivance of public authorities, or these authorities themselves, have resorted to blockades and economic strangulation to put pressure on evictees to leave their homes and lands.
In the Dey Kraham zone in the centre of the capital Phnom Penh, hundreds of families have resisted their eviction for several years and demanded compensation commensurate with the market price of their lands. A company named 7NG, to which the government has given a land concession for development, has refused to accede to their demand. In connivance with the authorities, 7NG has used carrots and sticks, short of all out use of force, to evict the residents resisting them. On 16 December 2007, it sent around 30 workers to wall up the entire Dey Krahorm zone by building a closure of corrugated iron sheets around their dwellings to isolate the entire community. They also blocked all access roads to the zone.
The residents protested and prevented the construction, and a confrontation ensued. In this incident company workers assaulted a woman resident, causing injuries to her head, and a worker struck the foot of another woman resident with a hammer, almost breaking her bones.
This first blockade failed, but efforts to pressurise the evictees has continued. On 3 January 2008 the authorities of the district in which the zone is located, notified stallholders in the Dey Kraham garden market inside the zone, on which the livelihood of the evictees depends, to dismantle their stalls and clear out of the garden. The authorities claimed their trade affected the environment, hygiene, health and public order, and they were going to rebuild the garden. Their decision at this particular juncture of on-going evictions was hardly a mere coincidence when it is considered that the market has been there for years.
The company attempted another blockade on 6 January when it sent its workers to place oil drums to be filled with water to block all access roads to the zone and supplies to the market. A mixed group of 30 to 40 armed police officers were posted at the edge of the zone to protect those workers. The evictees again resisted the blockade by pushing the oil drums out of the way and preventing the workers from filling them with water. A confrontation between the two sides over the blockade ensued on 7 January, in which a truck belonging to the local authorities parked at the blockade was set on fire.
The blockade and economic strangulation failed again. However, there was no victory and peace for the evictees. The police were then seeking a court warrant to arrest six of them, for allegedly setting the fire to the truck, while eye witnesses at the scene said it was company workers who had deliberately done it to have an excuse to arrest evictees. In this eviction case, over a dozen evictees already faced criminal lawsuits prior to the latest incident.
It has lately been reported that the authorities have been making preparations for the use of force to evict the recalcitrant Dey Kraham residents.
The blockade and economic strangulation was also used to evict some 180 families of disabled war veterans, widows and orphans in a remote area called Banteay Lo-Ngeang in Kro-Year commune, Santuk commune, Kompong province in central Cambodia. It is alleged that these families have occupied the land which the government had given to a company for rubber plantation. But they have claimed their settlement in the area had been duly approved by the local authorities in 2003 and the government land concession was not known to them until 2007.
On 10 January 2008 a mixed force composed of 36 military, civilian police, military police and forestry officers, armed with assault rifles, was posted along the only access road to the community to seal it off from the rest of the country, in order to force the people out of their lands. These people have been allowed out but not allowed to return to their community. Nor have they been allowed to secure food supplies from outside either, which puts them in danger of starvation since they have not been able as yet to grow their basic foodstuffs in their area. Furthermore, those officers have put pressure on them to leave their homes and lands, threatening to burn down their homes and arrest their leader.
More recently, on 22 January, in the seaport of Sihanoukville on the Gulf of Thailand, a company named Thai Bun Rong sent some 60 armed police officers to build fences around the area of 13.75 hectares in Village No.1, Commune No.3, Mittapheap district, where 125 families claim to have been living in since 1988 and which the company claim is part of its bigger land where it has planned to build an international market” since 1991. These officers had with them cement fence posts and started the construction of fences around the area. The residents protested and prevented the construction work. A confrontation ensued but no damage has been reported.
The action taken by Thai Bun Rong company with connivance of the military police, does not seem to differ much from that taken to evict those hundreds of families in Dey Kraham zone in Phnom Penh and in Banteay Lo-Ngeang in Kompong Thom province. Had there been no resistance, the military police would have built the fences around the area to fence it off and then impose economic strangulation on the residents to force them to leave their homes and lands.
In the three forcible evictions above, there has been no due process of law to which the companies or the authorities, or both, had had recourse to secure any eviction order from court. There have been no decision by a court of law or any other independent adjudication institution set up by law to determine the ownership of the contested lands or fair compensation to be given to evictees. There have been claims of government concessions to companies and these companies have secured cooperation from the authorities and law enforcement agencies to forcibly execute the government decisions and evict residents from the lands in question.
Furthermore, the use of blockades, closure and economic strangulation as an instrument to force people to leave their homes and lands against their will very much amount to a violation of the right to food. The use of this instrument is very much against an obligation under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) which the government of Cambodia is a state party to. It is an obligation for state parties to respect the right to access to food and not to take any measures that result in preventing this access as interpreted in General Comment No. 12 (1999) on the right to adequate food stipulated in Article 11 of the Covenant.
It also amounts which is prohibited by Article 16 of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment to which Cambodia is a party. If it is to lead to any starvation, the same action amounts to torture which is absolutely prohibited by Article 1 of the same Convention.
The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) strongly urges the Cambodian government to honour its obligations under the two international human rights instruments and put an end without delay to the use of blockade, closure and economic strangulation against the Cambodian people. AHRC also urges it to have recourse to the due process of law to determine the ownership of the lands in question, justification of their use and the ensued eviction, and fair compensation, and if such use is so justified based on Article 44 of the Constitution of Cambodia on confiscation of land for public interests.
