A Change of Guard

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Wednesday 30 April 2014

Cambodian woman run over by harvester at ANZ-linked Phnom Penh Sugar development

Updated Mon 28 Apr 2014, Watch the video here.
Nineteen-year-old Tha Seng Hak cannot get the images of her mother's gruesome death out of her head.
"When I close my eyes, I see all these images of what happened to her," she said, standing beside a sugar cane field in Kampong Speu, a two-hour drive west of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh.
"Her arm and leg were detached."
Just six weeks ago, Ms Hak was working with her mother in the sugar can fields, which are owned by Phnom Penh Sugar.
The company is owned by ruling party senator Ly Yong Phat, who, with the help of a loan from ANZ Bank, has transformed this area into the largest sugar operation in Cambodia.
But the development has come at a cost to the local people, and none have paid a heavier price than Ms Hak's family.
After being forced to leave the land they occupied to make way for the company's sugar plantation, Ms Hak says her mother, Hol Mom, was left with no option but to accept a job working in the fields for Phnom Penh Sugar.
Six weeks ago, with her daughter just metres away, Ms Mom was run over and killed by a sugar harvester while she slept in the fields during a work stoppage.
"When they reversed a little bit the driver thought something was stuck in the machine, and when one of them tried to look inside the machine he saw arms and legs stuck inside it," she said.
She says she then told her supervisor to conduct a head count and went looking for her mother.
"I ran back and saw my mother's scarf and then I fell down. I saw that my mother's arm and leg was inside the machine," she said.
"My mother was a big woman when these things happened to her, her whole body was in small plastic bags, not even 20 kilograms."

Company had no policies for employee health and safety

Ms Hak recalls the scenes, standing on the edge of the cane field where her mother died.
She points to a distant tree, close to where her mother went to sleep, perhaps in search of some shade as respite from the baking Cambodian sun.
The general manager of Phnom Penh Sugar, Seng Nhak, admitted to the ABC that his company did not have a work health and safety policy for its employees.
But such a policy was one of the key recommendations of a 2010 audit of the project commissioned by ANZ before it decided to help fund the company's operation.
Mr Seng told the ABC that implementing the recommendations in the 2010 report was a condition of ANZ's loan.
The chairman of the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights says that ANZ should have investigated previous allegations that senator Phat had been involved in land grabs in the past.
"He's involved in many other land grabs, many other land deals, many other questionable deals ... these are quite publicly known information," Virak Ou said.

Senator Phat involved with another controversial sugar project

In 2006, another company owned by senator Phat was involved in a sugar project in Koh Kong province that allegedly saw hundreds of families dispossessed of their land.
Mother of nine Sum Tea was one of them.
"Ly Yong Phat is not a good person. He took all my land and did not give me any money, so I do not have any business now," she said.
Ms Sum says she was forced to send her son, Ly, far from home to find a job and provide food for his brothers and sisters after the majority of her land was taken in the sugar deal.
Last year, Ly ended up in neighbouring Kampong Speu province working in Phnom Penh Sugar's cane fields.
On just his fifth day of work he was run over and killed by a harvester while sleeping in the fields.
"I was so upset when I heard, I couldn't breathe I felt like I was going to die myself," Ms Sum said.
"Other children also work but they are still alive. My son is dead."
ANZ says it is continuing to work with Phnom Penh Sugar and the local community to seek a resolution to the land dispute.
The bank said it has exited funding relationships in the past when its customers have not met the bank's standards.
In a statement, the bank said that it is "continuing to actively and closely review the way Phnom Penh Sugar is addressing its social and environmental obligations."
"ANZ will always look to work with our customers to meet internationally accepted standards of good practice and support and encourage them to engage with local communities, governments or other interest groups, such as NGOs," the statement said.
Do you know more? investigations@abc.net.au

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Please my Khmer friends, pray for the family and all the suffering Khmer. Let's unit to make Cambodia a better place for all the Khmer people to live in.