The Hearing and the Visit

18 June 2007
Phnom Penh and Surrounding Countryside
Sangkat Toule Bassak
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On Monday 18 June 2007 I had an opportunity to attend a rally that raised concerns about development and land conflict in Phnom Penh.

The community hearing was fairly powerful. About 200 people attended the hearing, including community representatives from Group 78 in the Sangkat Toule Basak, Khan Chamcar Mon in Phnom Penh. The Group 78 community is being forced out of their homes to pave the way for development. The Cambodian Center for Human Rights (my internship site) and other closely aligned NGO’s such as LICADHO (http://www.licadho.org/) were also in attendance with representatives from the national assembly that represent the Sam Ramsey Party (SRP) and FUNCIPEC Party.

100 affected community members – as well as delegations from 9 provinces were also able to attend and speak at the hearing. Their enthusiasm was a credible demonstration that the issue of land conflict is quite widespread. Mind you, i don't understand Khmer more than the pleasantries. I had quite a time listening to empassioned testimony that I couldn't understand a lick of. Thankfully, a few Cambodian observers I know were able to translate snippets - otherwise I would have been completely in the dark.

After the hearing, I was invited to travel about 20 km out of Phnom Penh to visit the relocation settlements populated by families that had been forcibly relocated in the past. Last year at around this time, a settlement of 1000+ people were forcibly and violently removed from their settlement, transported, and dumped there. When members of the Sambok Cham community got forcibly removed last year on June 6, 2006 they got relocated to three sites.

None of the relocation sites had anything substantial for the displaced people…
- no houses
- no sanitation
- no clean water
- no schools
- no access to employment or a market to sell goods
- nothing

At this moment, most of the houses are rickety structures, built from scavenged materials - stuff you can grab from local trees, scavenge from a dump or rescue from scraps. There are some positive signs of progress, but a year on?

From this visit, I’ve gained a sense of the human rights dimension at stake here - big time.

I’m in Cambodia.