Losing land in Cambodia

Approximately 150,000 Cambodians are at risk of eviction from their land because of development projects, land grabbing and land disputes. A majority of these people are among the most marginalised, poor and vulnerable people in the county and forced evictions means not only losing their house and their land, but their livelihood, security, family, health and community.

Local communities are not taking this lying down. Trócaire is supporting communities to document what is happening, empowering them to work together to protect their rights and expose what is happening at local, national and international levels, in addition to finding ways to get legal redress for these abuses.

But security has become an increasing concern for those who stand up to the authorities or companies taking their land. Intimidation, violence and harassment are frequently used to prevent communities exercising their rights to expression, association and their land. 

Saren’s Keth’s and Kong Song’s stories below are just two examples of some of the individual experiences of evictions and intimidation. These stories were documented by some of Trócaire’s partners, BCV and Community Networks Indigenous Rights Active Members, Community Peace building Networks, and form part of the report ‘Losing Ground’, published by the Cambodian Human Rights Action Committee (pdf of full report)

 Life has never been easy in this hardscrabble corner of Kratie Province in, Northeastern Cambodia, but until last year Saren Keth and his wife had about everything an indigenous farming family would expect: a wood home, fruit trees, a river nearby and lots of communal land to ensure a future for their five children and their village. Now he lives in fear of arrest or murder over a land dispute that is becoming increasingly frightening to him and his family.

Everything changed in his village in the rainy season last year when Mr. Keth and his neighbors found a big surprise in one of their fields: large yellow excavators clearing their cassava. Without their knowledge, 769 hectares of their forest and farm land had been leased in May 2008 by the provincial governor to an agro-industrial company planning a rubber plantation. The governor signed away their livelihoods and their future in an Economic Land Concession without informing the 270 families in four villages with legal rights to the land.

Mr. Keth, 48, sat cross-legged on the wood bed beneath the home he and his wife built two decades ago and explained the villages’ strategy. He became the leader because he had received training in Cambodia’s land law while working as a community forestry worker. When the residents saw the bulldozers he moved quickly to plan a strategy to regain control of their lands and called a meeting of four Stieng villages. He believed that if they stuck together they could fight the concession and win. He said one of the provincial officials offered him money to stop his activities. “The powerful people will try to break our solidarity one by one. It [our struggle] is for the benefit of the people, not money.”

From his wooden stilt house along the new Road 48 Kong Song can gaze across the lush green valley and see the plume of gray smoke rising from the new sugar cane factory built by his province’s biggest politician and businessman. All around the factory lies the nearly 2,000 hectares of farmland and orchard that used to belong to him and his neighbors and is now being cultivated for sugar cane.

 “We are afraid they might grab more land,” said Mr. Song, a soft spoken man who has lived along the road since 1979. “ We need someone to help us very soon.” Although no one had official titles to the land, under Cambodia’s Land Law, Kong Song and his neighbors have legal possession rights. Despite this, about 400 families who moved there in the years after the Khmer Rouge era ended 30 years ago lost their land in March 2006 when it was quietly transferred in two national Economic Land Concessions to a Senator and tycoon. The residents knew nothing about it until bulldozers began clearing their land. The first agro-industrial effort in this undeveloped area of southwest Cambodia has been accompanied by illegal land grabbing, livestock kidnapping and three years of harassment that turned a decade of hard won peace in the villages to uncertainty and fear. It has pushed once thriving village families to the edge of poverty.