Phnom Penh Post
By David Boyle and May Titthara
Rubber plantations
sprawl across the concession owned by Vietnamese firm Tay Nam inside the
Snuol Wildlife Sanctuary in Kratie province. Photograph: Heng
Chivoan/Phnom Penh Post
‘I heard a f—ing crazy dog say that we can’t dock in Kampong Saom, but
we definitely can do that,” a crackling voice declares boisterously.
The speaker, captured in video obtained by the Post, is part of an illegal timber syndicate.
As
he brags about selling timber to people he refers to as “long nose”,
Khmer slang for foreigner, he parades around a timberyard filled with
container after container packed with luxury wood.
Posing
in front of an open container of what is identified as either luxury
Thnuong or rosewood logs, a man referred to as the owner, beams with a
greedy smile.
“The most important thing is that everything is
agreed from there, when [it] arrives here, they will take all
[varieties],” a voice says.
There are at least 37 container
loads – hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of dollars worth of
illegally logged timber in the yard.
The identity of the speaker
is unknown and he could be anywhere in the country – indeed, this type
of luxury wood harvesting is happening all over Cambodia.
But
nowhere is it more blatantly visible than along the national roads,
endlessly lined with rubber plantations, that bisect the northeastern
provinces of Kratie, Mondulkiri and Ratanakkiri.
From the sky, it
is clear that the multi-million dollar timber trade has already
decimated Kratie’s 75,089 hectare Snuol Wildlife Sanctuary.
Imagery
from two of NASA’s Landsat satellites compiled by the Post from photos
snapped between 2009 and 2013 suggests that about 60 per cent of the
entire sanctuary’s evergreen forest has become cleared land.
Just
a small fraction of the 55,135 hectares of known granted economic land
concessions − with eight in total accounting for more than 70 per cent
of the protected area – remain green, and there is little reason to
suggest that forest coverage will stay for much longer.
Like a
bad joke, a sign for one of the Snuol Wildlife Sanctuary’s ranger
substations stands surrounded by hectare after hectare of clear-felled
forest, some of it still smouldering.
The rest of the land within this ELC granted to Vietnamese firm Tay Nam K has already been turned into rubber plantations.
But
at the gates of the nearby Binh Phuoc Kratie Rubber 2 Company’s
concession, at the start of the adjacent 305,647 hectare Seima
Biodiversity Conservation Area (SBCA), access is blocked. This protected
area, to date relatively well preserved, is going next.
Binh
Phuoc Kratie Rubber 2 also employs what could be read as satirical
signage. Under one of the rubber company’s billboards is written
“Investor: Tien Dat Furniture Corporation Binh Dinh”.
In June of
last year, Prime Minister Hun Sen ordered three rubber firms, including
Binh Phuoc, which holds an adjacent 10,000 hectare concession inside
the SBCA, to stop logging some 85 per cent of their ELCs that remained
evergreen or semi-evergreen forest.
The Landsat pictures show
that, if anything, the firms Binh Phuoc Kratie Rubber 1 Company, Binh
Phuoc Kratie Rubber 2 Company and Eastern Rubber (Cambodia) only
intensified the rate of clearing.
It is hard to put precises
percentages on the extent of forest clearance revealed through the
satellite images but easy to see that huge swaths have disappeared in
the three concessions since Hun Sen’s directive.
The prime
minister’s green thumb intervention to save the sanctuary from the fate
of its southern neighbour was seemingly reversed just months after he
signed off on the order on June 28.
Snuol District Deputy
Governor Men Vanna told the Post that after Hun Sen’s order was handed
down, a joint research committee headed by Deputy Prime Minister Yim
Chhaly was established.
The committee determined that because
Binh Phuoc Kratie Rubber 2 Company was not threatening any existing
forest, the firm would be given back 5,000 hectares – or half of their
total original concession, he said.
“The forest that has been
cleared by company is damaged forest, it is not evergreen forest –
before the government granted both to the company,” Vanna said, but
conceded even his officials had to gain permission to enter the area.
It’s
an old excuse – that companies granted concessions in protected areas
are just clearing already degraded forest – and one that flies in the
face of what is clearly visible from space. The logging here, the
satellite imagery shows, has specifically targeted evergreen forest.
While satellite imagery can be ambiguous when analysing the destruction
of deciduous forest, because the trees shed their leaves during the dry
season, making it difficult to identify them, the results are far more
conclusive when it comes to evergreen forest.
None of the three
companies ordered to stop logging by the premier list contact details
online. When the Post contacted the Cambodia office of the largest state
Vietnamese rubber firm, Vietnam Rubber Group, an employee said he did
not have the authority to speak about the firms, then declined to say
whether the company was in any way linked to VRG. He told a reporter not
to call back and directed questions to VRG’s Hanoi office, which could
not be reached.
Deputy Prime Minister Yim Chhaly did not answer his phone.
Rather
than the rubber company, Vanna put most of the blame for the logging of
the protected forest on an influx of settlers who had moved in after
the prime minister’s national land-titling scheme was launched in July.
In
the time since, a population of 49 families that contested between 60
and 100 hectares of land also claimed by the company had swelled to 405
families, he said.
“The land that they take over is forest land;
it is not land that they used to plant crops before. They are newcomers,
and the reason that they take over the forest land that belongs to
company is because they hope that the government will measure the land
for them,” Vanna said.
Mom Sakin, 54, has fought for the
protection of the SBCA since 2000 through the community forest program
and led a direct intervention this week when villagers seized chainsaws
and a bulldozer from Binh Phuoc Kratie Rubber 2 Company’s concession.
She
is frustrated by the migrants who have flooded into the area since the
prime minister’s land-titling scheme was initiated, but is far more
concerned by the ruthless actions of a foreign company she said was
destroying any natural resource in sight.
“Before, we lived with
green fresh forest, but now we live with nothing. We see only the base
of the trees and the smoke as they burn,” she said, lamenting that
company employees had even shot most of the monkeys in the area to feed
themselves.
Sakin painted a picture of anarchic destruction,
whereby villagers were co-opted into logging for the company, which was
protected by military police and soldiers, who in turn extorted money
from illegal loggers at six “checkpoints” set up in the area.
She
alleged that they charged loggers $2.50 per ox cart, $45 per chainsaw
and $125 per truck load, while the company intimidated those who
resisted their plans.
“The company always shoots into the sky
to threaten people who don’t want to move when they come to clear the
land,” Sakin alleged, adding that some villagers eventually agreed to
move for between $250 to $500.
Officials from the Snuol district
Forestry Administration, which is responsible for protecting the SBCA,
and the district military police did not answer their phones when
contacted by the Post, while National Military Police Spokesman Kheng
Tito said he was unaware of the issue.
One person who is aware of
the issue is Prime Minister Hun Sen, who in February said he was
joining the battle to protect luxury rosewood and crackdown on illegal
logging.
Unfortunately, most of the rosewood in Cambodia is
already gone, but there are many more varieties of lucrative trees left
for the pilfering.
Meanwhile, for the masterminds of such operations, business continues with little fear of any repercussions.
“Hey,
my friend, go and stand over there, I will film you in close up to let
other people know you are a timber owner,” the voice on the illegal
logging video sales pitch says.
“I film video; I will put in
[digital] memory. Here, a timber owner, a rosewood owner. He owns the
rosewood. Now you know him. If you need rosewood you can contact him.
He is the right guy,” the voice says as the owner poses in front of the camera.
No comments:
Post a Comment