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Hut Heap, 13, drowned in May.
Richard Baker and Nick McKenzie
November 1, 2010
ON A hot afternoon in May, 13-year-old Hut Heap and her nine-year-old brother Hut Hoeub left their makeshift family home near Battambang in western Cambodia to search for fresh water. Hours later, their bodies were found at the bottom of a deep pond.
It was just four days since the children, their family and 50 others had been uprooted from their homes and moved to a resettlement site so work could begin on a rail project partly financed by the Australian government and operated by Melbourne firm Toll Holdings and its joint-venture partner, Cambodia's Royal Group of Companies.
According to Pay Lin, an elder brother, the pair went to the pond because there was no fresh running water at the resettlement site for washing dishes, cleaning clothes or bathing.
Hut Hoeub, 9, also drowned. ''The younger one drowned first. The bigger one went to help, but couldn't. The water was too deep,'' he told representatives of aid group Bridges Across Borders Cambodia.
Months later, there is still no fresh piped water and people have to draw water from the pond or an adjacent rice field polluted by chemicals that burn the skin.
''If there were people coming to install water and electricity before I moved to live here, my siblings would not have died. There is no water … that's why my siblings came here [to the pond] to get fresh water for dish-washing,'' Pay Lin said.
David Pred, executive director of Bridges Across Borders Cambodia, and Australian human rights lawyer Natalie Bugalski, told The Age the resettlement site also did not have affordable electricity and was far from places of work, forcing already poor families to borrow money to survive.
The deaths of Hut Heap and Hut Hoeub raise uncomfortable questions for Australian government aid agency AusAID, which contributed $21.5 million to the rail project, and Toll Holdings, whose Cambodian joint venture with controversial tycoon Kith Meng holds a 30-year contract to build and run the rail network.
Mr Pred and Dr Bugalski want to know what measures AusAID, the Asian Development Bank - the project's major financial supporter - and the Toll/Meng joint venture took to ensure the relocated families would have access to basic services and livelihood opportunities.
They want to know why elderly widows - survivors of the Khmer Rouge's rule in the 1970s - have not been given compensation or their own plot of land at the resettlement site and survive only through the support of family and neighbours.
They want to know why families forced to leave their established home have in some cases been given a mere $200 as compensation.
Mr Pred and Dr Bugalski believe the Australian government has a moral and legal obligation to ensure those affected by the development projects it funds are afforded the basic essentials of life.
''The often disastrous displacement impacts of infrastructure projects are well known,'' Dr Bugalski said.
''AusAID is being negligent in failing to ensure that Australian aid is not being used in a way that harms poor families in developing countries.''
Mr Pred said AusAID should have conducted a human rights impact assessment before committing funds to the project, which will cause the displacement of thousands of people.
AusAID was informed by Dr Bugalski and others on October 4 of the deaths of the two children and of concerns about conditions at the resettlement site.
After waiting for a reply from AusAID for more than two weeks - but not receiving one - a coalition of non-government organisations wrote a letter to AusAID deputy director-general Richard Moore on October 21 informing him of the deaths and urging him to conduct an investigation and provide reparation to their family.
An AusAID spokeswoman said the Cambodian government was responsible for the site. She said an AusAID-funded adviser was monitoring the resettlement and concerns had been raised with Cambodian authorities since July.
Asked about the drownings, the spokeswoman said investigation of them was a matter for the Cambodian government.
Toll Group also said questions should be referred to the Cambodian government and the Asian Development Bank. ''It's not part of our responsibility under the concession,'' a spokesman said.
The controversy over the Battambang relocation site is not the first in Cambodia involving the Australian government or Toll's joint-venture partner, Kith Meng.
In June last year, Australian diplomats moved into a new embassy in Phnom Penh on land the federal government bought from Mr Meng for $15 million.
Two weeks later, armed police surrounded adjacent land and evicted several poor families who had lived at the site for years.
As the evictions took place, the Australian embassy signed a petition calling on the Cambodian government to stop the forced removal of people from disputed land, prompting accusations of hypocrisy from rights groups which viewed the response as ''too little, too late''.
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