Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land

by Joel Brinkley

  In April, representatives of the Phnom Penh Tonle Bassac Group 78 (G78) met with Phnom Penh Governor Kep Chuktema regarding a 2006 eviction notice. While authorities claimed the land was state land, the government did not provide documents classifying it as state property, and the land did not meet the 2001 land-law definition for state land.

  According to the 2001 law, the land was eligible for transfer by the state into private land. Many of the families had lived on the land since the 1980s and claimed ownership under the 2001 law. G78 community members stated that the municipality offered compensation that was approximately equal to 2 percent of a November 2007 independent assessment of market value, plus one plot in a Phnom Penh eviction resettlement site per family. The community remained under threat of eviction.

  Then, in July 2009, security forces forcibly evicted the residents.

  Watching all of this, the World Bank decided to step into the fray. After its deforestation debacle, it now tried to fight the land-seizure problem. The bank began buying land titles for poor people all over the country. “We’ve paid for teams to research these land titles, and almost 1 million have been granted!” a senior World Bank official in Washington boasted in 2008.

  Stephane Guimbert, senior economist in the bank’s Phnom Penh office, explained how his office chose the plots of land. “This is driven by the government,” he acknowledged with a dry tone. In other words, the government told the bank which pieces of property it could title for its residents. Wasn’t it obvious that the government would steer the bank away from land it intended to seize? Guimbert nodded. “We have done some of the easiest areas—areas that are not controversial,” he said matter-of-factly. A year later his office got into trouble once again, for ignoring perhaps the most brazen, audacious land seizure thus far.

  Right in the center of Phnom Penh sat a beautiful lake of about 220 acres, called Boeng Kak. Green islands of morning glories floated on the surface. On the east side sat a gold-domed mosque. Metal and wood shanty homes for more than 4,000 families ringed much of the remaining perimeter. Over the past thirty years, they had been built out over the water on piers, and a sinuous network of wooden-plank walkways wound among the homes and businesses. Lake water glistened beneath. One resident operated a boatyard. Another worked in a studio weaving rattan artwork. Most others eked out a living on the streets.

  Right from under these people’s feet, the Phnom Penh city government leased the entire lake and surrounding land to a private developer. That was in 2007, and the Chinese government news service, Xinhua, issued a press release saying that officials from “the Yunnan Southeast-Asia Economy and Technology Investment Industry and the Cambodia’s Shukaku Company signed agreements in the presence of Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister Sok An and Governor of China’s Yunnan Province Qin Guangrong. Under the agreements, the two sides will cooperate to develop the Boeng Kak Lake area in Phnom Penh into a multi-purpose living and recreation center called the New City of the East.” No one knew exactly what that meant, but everyone knew that a prominent CPP senator, Lao Meng Khim, and his wife, owned Shukaku. Lao Meng Khim was the same oknya who bought rights to the last remaining forest in Pursat Province, where he professed an interest in planting eucalyptus trees. Now the government had given him a ninety-nine-year lease on 330 acres—the lake and the surrounding neighborhoods, where thousands of people had lived for decades.

  A year later the developer made his intentions plain. With no notice or explanation, the company ran a fat pipe from the bottom of the Tonle Sap River, through Phnom Penh neighborhoods, and into Boeng Kak. When a worker flipped a switch, heavy-duty pumps began pulling sand from the river bottom, carrying it through the city, and then dumping it into the lake. Though no one said anything publicly, suddenly the goal became plain: Fill the lake with sand, obliterate it, and suddenly the developer would have 220 acres of new prime real estate, right in the middle of the city. The price Lao Meng Khin paid for this: $79 million. Journalists could find no record of a deposit for that amount in the national treasury.

  By the summer of 2009 a tongue of sand reached more than halfway across the lake. Of course, the water level was rising, and the city began telling Boeng Kak residents that they needed to leave. Early in 2010 the sand reached the sewage intake pipe and blocked it off so that raw waste began backing up under the residents’ homes. “The sewage water is rising day by day, and I worry my house will be flooded,” one resident told the Cambodia Daily. The residents complained of a terrible stench, and some were getting sick. Several residents showed reporters documents showing that they had lived in their homes since 1979—more than long enough to claim ownership under the Land Law. But that didn’t matter.

  The government, behaving as it usually did, forbade residents to hold a town-hall meeting to discuss their situation. As for the Land Law, the precise regulations had never been written. The developer did offer one public disclosure; he put out an environmental impact statement that said filling the lake was environmentally useful because the lake was “dead.” The residents, it asserted, “were living in anarchy.” So filling Boeng Kak would not have “major effects on the environment” or “major potential impacts on society.”

  Cambodia Daily reporters tried to get someone with the Shukaku company or the government to explain what was happening to this lake, a major landmark right in the middle of the city. “A visit to the municipal office of the Boeng Kak Development Committee on the northeast coast of the lake resulted in police, military police and what appeared to be undercover police racing to reporters, demanding that they immediately leave the office compound,” the paper wrote in the summer of 2009.

  “No entrance to the area around Boeng Kak,” said an employee who declined to give his name. “Want to ask questions? Ask city hall.” At city hall, “Municipal Governor Kep Chuktema could not be reached for comment,” and Deputy Governor Pa Socheatvong declined to discuss the lake, referring questions to Mr. Chuktema’s cabinet. Cabinet chief Nuon Sameth said he was too busy to discuss the lake, before hanging up on a reporter. Daun Penh District Governor Sok Sambath referred all questions about the lake to Shukaku, saying, “Our authorities will just continue to cooperate with the company in order to facilitate the development fast.” But “Shukaku officials, who have not once spoken to the press about the lake development, could not be reached for comment.” By the summer of 2010 so much sand had been pumped into the lake that water spilled out into the streets, flooding dozens of homes.

  As this saga progressed, human-rights groups began asking the World Bank: Why aren’t you offering legal representation to Boeng Kak lake residents? The obvious answer was that the government, not the World Bank, chose the out-of-the-way areas where the bank was allowed to represent residents—plots of land so remote that no developer would ever offer to buy them. All of that spawned a new World Bank internal investigation whose findings were a mirror of the office’s forestryprogram investigation a few years earlier.

  Investigators recognized “a disconnect between institutional, legal and policy achievements and insecurity of land tenure for the poor, especially in urban areas, and for indigenous people. This disconnect can be attributed in part to the design of some of the project’s components, in part to the way the project was implemented.” In other words, bank officials set up a program and allowed it to run for years, boasted about the number of titles granted—and ignored the egregious land seizures they could have seen if they had bothered to look out their office windows.

  The investigation cited “a decision, during design, in line with Cambodian law that the project will not title lands in areas where disputes are likely until agreements are reached on the status of the land. Clarifying the status of the land would have required the development and implementation of clear procedures for state land classification.” That was never done.

  Chastened by Washington once again, the bank asked the government to change the program so that it addressed some of these problems. It also offered t
o help resolve the Boeng Kak dispute. But the government refused, and in the fall of 2009 the bank canceled the program. All told, the bank had spent $24.3 million. And during the program’s course the government had evicted tens of thousands of its citizens from their homes. In one instance, on a vacant lot in midtown Phnom Penh, twenty families, every one of them HIV positive, had built a little shanty village for themselves, not far from the hospital where they got their maintenance medications. No one forced them to live together in this modern-age leper colony. They said they simply found it convenient. In 2008 the Tourism Ministry decided to build a new headquarters adjacent to this lot, and the next year the minister announced that he wanted to plant a garden beside his ministry, exactly where the HIV families lived. The new ministry headquarters was only half built, but a billboard in front of the construction site showed a grand Asian palace with happy people strolling in the plaza. The HIV families’village was off-frame.

  The city gave each family 10,000 riel, or $2.50, and with only a few hours’ notice trucked them to an eviction site about fifteen miles from town. There, the government had put up new housing for them: a complex of large green corrugated-metal buildings divided into several dozen rooms. Each family got one bare room, roughly fifteen by twelve feet, that looked like the inside of a garden shed. The site offered no kitchen, no bathrooms, no electricity or running water, though there was a water pump outside. It pulled up murky water that tasted like chemicals. Farmers working a flooded rice paddy behind the site had probably been using fertilizer.

  Four days after they had arrived at the eviction site, forty-one-year-old Suon Davy, thin as a rail, sat in a hammock and lamented her state—ill and dispossessed. “All of us are sick,” she said. “We lived at the old site since 2000 but never registered it because I was always too sick. Since we have been here, no authorities have come to see us. They dumped us and ignored us. They left us out here to die.”

  They were hardly the only ones. Nai Chineang’s home in central Phnom Penh sat in the shadow of a ten-story apartment building put up in 1960. The spot was called Dey Krahorm. It sat just down the street from the parliament building. Nai Chineang’s house was built of scrap wood, corrugated metal, and blue plastic sheeting. In the early 1990s the United Nations had handed out thousands of these blue plastic tarps, to be used for cover. Among the poor they were still in service.

  The house looked like other shanties around town but for one thing: A government document was tacked over the front door, dated July 2003. Hun Sen’s Council of Ministers wrote that the government had granted “land concessions for the poor communities in the following locations.” One of them was “Dey Krahorm, which is a former public park” of about twelve acres where “there are 1,220 houses, 1,465 families with 5,854 people. They shall be provided a land concession” of about nine acres.

  That made Nai Chineang and the others lucky indeed—until the city changed its mind. A developer named 7NG decided it wanted the land, paid whomever it needed to get a deed, and then tried to buy the land out from under the legal owners, Dey Krahorm’s residents. The company’s Web site showed Hun Sen hanging a gold sash over the CEO’s shoulder. Its caption said, “Cambodian National Award from Samdech Akka Moha Sena Padei Techo Hun Sen, Prime Minister of Royal Government of Cambodia.”

  Hundreds of residents took the offer, generally about $3,500 and a home of sorts almost twenty miles away. But hundreds refused, so 7NG and its allies in the government began harassing them—driving bulldozers onto the property and knocking down buildings.

  Foreign human-rights groups and others took up Dey Krahorm’s cause. A German filmmaker moved into a vacant home there as an act, he said, of “pure solidarity.” Yash Ghai, the UN human-rights representative for Cambodia, marched with the Dey Krahorm residents, prompting Hun Sen to say, “You are regarded just as a long-term tourist” and should leave the country because “I will not meet with you even if I live 1,000 years.” Soon after, Cambodia media reported, police and 7NG employees pelted the residents with rocks and bags of urine. “It’s too obvious now,” Kek Galibru, head of Licadho, the human-rights group, said in the summer of 2008. Licadho was providing legal representation for the residents. “They can’t say the land belongs to the state, so now they try to scare them. Now it seems they changed a bit their method. Now in the last year, when their reputation is so bad, they are trying both the carrot and the stick” by offering more money.

  She and other human-rights advocates began to believe they were winning. The government had finally realized the law was not on their side. Buoyed by this optimism, the remaining residents refused to take the new cash offers. “They want to kick us out, want to take our land,” Nai Chineang said. “They offered me $7,000. I can’t do anything with that. I want to stay here, in the city.”

  They were wrong. In January 2009, three years after 7NG made the first offers to buy Dey Krahorm property, company enforcers showed up to expel the remaining 152 families. The residents had barricaded the streets and were lobbing stones at the police, but eventually they were rounded up, loaded on trucks, and carted away. As bulldozers knocked the houses down, the Council of Ministers’ land-grant documents were still tacked above the doors. More than a year later two dozen evicted families were still living in tents on the outskirts of town.

  As the clamor about land seizures from the United Nations, human-rights groups, and foreign governments grew louder and more frequent, Hun Sen up a new government agency whose stated purpose was to ensure that evictees were treated fairly. He named it the National Land Authority and appointed Chum Bun Rong as deputy director. He was an older man, plump, confident, and self-satisfied. He’d been a second lieutenant in Lon Nol’s army. “I took off my uniform and ran” when the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh, he said. “I lived a lot of years in the jungle and ate insects.”

  After the Vietnamese invasion he had served as spokesman for the Foreign Ministry. He started there while Hun Sen was still the foreign minister. More recently, he said, Hun Sen had assigned him to “act against negative information from outside the country. I am sort of a quick-response person, the national spokesman.” A great deal of negative information coming from the outside now related to land seizures, and he said he was continuing to act as a special spokesman, even in his new job.

  Chum Bun Rong said his agency had received more than 3,000 land-seizure appeals since he took office. Of those, he admitted, only about 50 had been judged in favor of the impoverished people whose land was seized. But the National Land Authority was not the final authority. Those 50 cases were sent on to the Cadastral Commission. There, the deputy director said, “some of those cases were resolved. Some were not. Sometimes they are resolved in a day. Sometimes the cases disappear.” When that happens victims call him, not the Cadastral Commission, he said. “But if a land concession is not organized properly, it’s the role of an NGO or a journalist to make sure the victims are heard.”

  Boeng Kak, Andong, Dey Krahorm, and all those other terrible stories of evictions, “you have to think this is a case of propaganda,” he insisted. “There are different kinds of people who use these issues for their own political interests. We can say we are not doing perfect. But if you don’t like what we are, don’t vote for us. If the government does bad things, the people will rise up. Sometimes we protect the people. Sometimes we protect the interests of investors.” After all, he added, eyes wide, “some millionaires are behind some of these projects!” Thank goodness Hun Sen has his national spokesman on the job to protect evictees.

  Chum Bun Rong said 200 people worked in his office. They had more than 700 appeals in hand just then, waiting for disposition. He gave a tour. Perhaps two dozen workers sat in offices. Some were looking at papers. Others appeared languorous, indolent. In 2006 Japan gave the Land Authority $615,000 for a departmental computer system, to help speed up the work. Japan, unlike the United States, then gave money directly to the government. During the tour, I saw a dozen ordinary deskt
op computers, worth perhaps $30,000 altogether. Asked about that, Chum Bun Rong grew agitated and said, “Oh, but there’s a server in the basement!” He didn’t show it, but a server for a dozen personal computers would have to be gold-plated to cost $585,000.

  By the summer of 2008, two years after the residents of Sambok Chap had been dumped in the rice field, physicians working for Licadho, the human-rights group, had visited Andong hundreds of times and performed almost 15,000 medical consultations, the group said. The residents’ most common health problems, the doctors found, were “malnutrition, typhoid, dengue fever, hepatitis A or B, hypertension, respiratory-tract infections, gastro-intestinal illnesses including stressrelated ulcers, depression and anger management problems.”

  With all of those afflictions, the largest outside presence at the eviction site was a church, built by a Korean philanthropist who had decided what those Buddhist refugees needed most was a Christian church. So he built one, the only masonry building there, at the entrance to the Andong camp—the Happy Church, a sign out front announced. The preacher, thirty-four-year-old Thong Sopheak, could not identify the church’s denomination. He spoke vaguely of Protestantism and wore a yellow T-shirt that said in bold letters, “You! Man of God.” He said he did not deliver sermons.

  The church started a school, and the preacher said 160 children attended. The teacher, twenty-eight-year-old Touch Vireak, said, “Last year we sent 12 students to junior high school. Two of those say they are preparing for high school.” But then he acknowledged that, perhaps, a Christian church may not have been the answer for these people. “The biggest need here is food. Food is very important. Some people don’t have enough, so they borrow from neighbors. Some of them are deeply in debt.” The preacher added: “They are still angry. They need help. They need electricity, they need water. They bought power from a local man who had a generator. But he charged very high prices. But the generator has been broken for two months. In my house I use candles and car batteries.”