The Cambodia Daily
January 25, 2013
The government arrested more than twice as many land rights
activists and handed out dozens more economic land concessions (ELCs)
in 2012 compared to the year before, new figures released by NGOs on
Wednesday show.
Pointing to a growing loss of land rights, human rights workers said
that many of the ELCs, which are blamed for mass evictions around the
country, were approved by the government despite a freeze Prime
Minister Hun Sen placed on the granting of new ELCs in May.
“2012 was the worst year because the number of people arrested
increased, like the arrest of political and land activists who stood up
and spoke out,” said Chan Soveth, deputy head of monitoring for rights
group Adhoc, at a conference organized by the NGO Forum in Phnom Penh
on land and housing rights.
Mr. Soveth said authorities arrested 201 land activists and
protesters last year, which is more than double the 98 they arrested in
2011, and higher than any year on record since 2007.
“It’s a confrontation between the government and the people, rather
than between the people and the private companies,” he said. “The
government tries to protect the companies.”
Among those arrested last year was Tep Vanny, along with a dozen
other fellow residents of Phnom Penh’s Boeng Kak neighborhood. Ms. Vanny
became one of a group known as the “Boeng Kak 13” when the municipal
court convicted them in May after a summary trial for peacefully
protesting against their evictions.
The court released the 13 from prison the following month under much
local and international pressure but upheld their convictions for
illegally occupying land and aggravated circumstances of rebellion.
“The authorities think the people are their enemy,” Ms. Vanny said at
the conference. “We women protesters are treated with violence and
arrested and painted as the opposition party.
“This is the solution they have for the people and they use the court
to oppress the people, to arrest them and send them to Prey Sar
prison,” she said.
Though Mr. Soveth did not provide exact figures on the number of
newly approved ELCs in 2012 because Adhoc is preparing to launch a
special report on the matter in a few weeks, he said the number of
approvals surpassed 100. That is compared to 68 ELCs handed out in 2011.
In November, Adhoc said that at least 32 ELCs had been approved after
Mr. Hun Sen enforced a nationwide moratorium on new land concessions
in May.
Government officials have repeatedly defended the ELCs handed out
after Mr. Hun Sen’s announced freeze, insisting that they did not break
the moratorium because they were in the pipeline for approval well
before the order was passed in May.
The government policy on ELCs maintains that industrial scale
agribusiness projects add to economic growth in rural Cambodia and put
people to work in paid jobs growing crops for local and foreign markets.
But those who have studied ELCs, including the U.N.’s human rights
envoy to Cambodia, Surya Subedi, have found little to no benefit from
ELCs reaching local, rural communities.
After a record year of 752,000 new hectares worth of ELCs approved
in 2011, according to Adhoc, land concessions now cover at least 2
million hectares in all, or about 10 percent of the country’s total
landmass. Adhoc also estimates that some 700,000 Cambodians have been
affected by ELCs since 2000.
Government officials said the picture being painted by human rights
groups was far from the reality being felt by villagers on the ground.
Beng Hong Socheat Khemro, spokesman for the Ministry of Land
Management, objected to the very word “eviction” when discussing land
issues in Cambodia.
“There aren’t any,” he said. “We don’t use the word eviction now.
That’s the term used during the Pol Pot regime. They [NGOs] just use
this as a political issue. They don’t speak the truth.”
Instead of referring to villagers as evicted, Mr. Socheat Khemro said the government preferred the term “resettled.”
Agriculture Minister Chan Sarun, whose ministry is responsible for
drafting the contracts for ELCs around the country, said he did not know
anything about evictions.
“I don’t know about the evictions,” he said without elaborating.
Though arrests of land activists went up in 2012, Housing Rights Task
Force director Sia Phearum said that evictions in Phnom Penh—mostly to
make way for upscale real estate projects—had dropped sharply, from
1,507 families in 2011 to 611 families last year.
Still, Mr. Phearum said he feared the number of evictions would rise again once this year’s July 28 national election is over.
“It’s similar to other [election] years,” he said. “The trend since
the 1990s is that when there is an important election, the number of
evicted families goes down.”
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