Phnom Penh's Eviction Epidemic

Far Eastern Economic Review
http://www.feer.com

by Geoffrey Cain
Posted June 16, 2009

Sewage scraps blow through the alleyways of Andong, at the outskirts of Phnom Penh, giving it a putrid scent accented by damp air and daily floods. Just outside a line of crammed huts, across a garbage-strewn field with cows grazing, the town well too is contaminated, making life doubly hard for the poor souls forced by the government to live here. The village chief, donning a camouflage jacket and flashing his gold teeth, eyes the video camera of the United Nations film crew I’m traveling with. “We don’t need anything here, he says. “Only to stop the flooding.”

The villagers, like 58-year-old Teth Neang, aren’t so optimistic. After she was evicted from her slum in 2006 for a private development, she claims soldiers “dumped” her in this field without a house, land title and access to health services. Authorities promised her all of these. “They said they would reimburse us with $250 each, but the village chief went to every family, and demanded the money,” she recalls. “If we didn’t give him the money, we didn’t get housing after the eviction.” She slept in the field for a week, swashing through mud and floods.

Even after Phnom Penh’s recent property boom dwindled, the once-bare capital is developing at breakneck speed, and the city's poor are being displaced at an alarming rate. Activists are calling it the largest epidemic of evictions since the Khmer Rouge emptied all of Phnom Penh in 1975. Last week, local rights group Licadho blasted the government in a report for failing to control land-grabbing, claiming 133,000 people, or 10% of the population, have been evicted in Phnom Penh since 1990. That’s not counting the 250,000 victims of land-grabbing in 13 other provinces.

Modern Phnom Penh is a young city, the bulk of its population consisting of countryside migrants who came after the Khmer Rouge were toppled in 1979, and during the United Nations peacekeeping operation of 1992-93. Slum squatters, who according to some estimates number nearly a million, are swelling a city designed under French rule for 200,000 residents. Today, Phnom Penh is crammed beyond repair, and the fact that many squatters live on prime real estate means the government needs them out quickly.

Of course, governments all over the world use the power of eminent domain, meaning they can evict people for the public good. But in Cambodia, land-grabs come more with the promise of fattened wallets that actual development projects. Most land is ceded in secret, for government-connected moguls building hotels and high-end condominiums, sometimes by intimidating local residents with armed force or arrest. Like in Ms. Neang’s case, the evictees are often thrown into squalor outskirts without health-care services, clean water and sanitation, in remote areas where they can’t commute to the city.

At the center of Phnom Penh’s eviction epidemic is Boeung Kak lake, once integral to the city’s broken drainage system, but now being filled by Shukaku Inc., a secretive property development firm owned by a senator. Residents around the lake have been locked in a four-year battle with the company, which plans to evict them to build hotels on top of the filled lake. Cambodia’s land law, however, declares that lakes are public property and cannot be destroyed. Needless to say, reports of intimidation against activists and journalists surface regularly. City officials have reportedly tried to disrupt NGO gatherings around the lake by threatening to close local guest houses who host them. When I went to the filling site last month with a the U.N. film crew, a guard threatened to take our equipment if we stayed.

Meanwhile, in central Phnom Penh, a community of HIV-positive families awaits the arrival of police this week, after the government announced they too will be evicted to the outskirts. Many residents say they haven’t been provided with documents guaranteeing them new flats, even though officials have promised a portion of them housing. If all follows the pattern of most other evictions, they’ll be left far away from the medical care they need, and, like Ms. Neang, without proper sanitation and housing—a point that nongovernmental organizations have repeatedly raised without much response.

Not surprisingly, the government has dismissed NGO concerns, and doesn’t seem to admit there even is a problem. Phnom Penh Deputy Governor Mann Chhoeun lashed out on Monday at Licadho’s report, telling the Phnom Penh Post that the organization is “not Khmer.” Yet despite tooting slogans of stability and growth under the current regime, even Prime Minister Hun Sen has warned of the dangers of land grabbing. As one evicted villager bemoaned to former Special Representative for Human Rights in Cambodia Peter Leuprecht, “Under Pol Pot we died quickly, but we kept our forests. Under the democratic system it is a slow, protracted death. There will be violence, because we do not want to die.”

Geoffrey Cain is a freelance journalist based in Ho Chi Minh City and Phnom Penh.