2 October 2009
Phnom Penh residents facing the largest forced displacement of Cambodians since the Khmer Rouge era have filed a complaint to the World Bank Inspection Panel stating that they have suffered serious harm from a Bank-funded land-titling project.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 1, 2009
Phnom Penh, Residents facing the largest forced displacement of Cambodians since the Khmer Rouge era have filed a complaint to the World Bank Inspection Panel stating that they have suffered serious harm from a Bank-funded land-titling project. The complaint, submitted by the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) and registered on 24 September, alleges that the Bank breached its operational policies by failing to adequately supervise the Land Management and Administration Project (LMAP), which has denied urban poor and other vulnerable households protection against widespread tenure insecurity and increasing forced evictions in Cambodia.
A major report about the Bank-financed project, “Untitled: Tenure Insecurity and Inequality in the Cambodian Land Sector,” was also released this week by three international human rights organizations, Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), Jesuit Refugee Services (JRS) and Bridges Across Borders Southeast Asia (BABSEA).
“The principal finding of the report is that, despite a seven-year, multi-million dollar effort to reform the land sector, Cambodia’s land administration institutions have failed to improve tenure security for vulnerable groups, who are routinely and arbitrarily denied access to land titling and dispute resolution mechanisms,” stated Salih Booker, Executive Director of COHRE.
Despite having legitimate rights to the land under Cambodia’s Land Law, thousands of families residing around Phnom Penh’s Boeung Kak lake were denied titles when the area was adjudicated by LMAP in January 2007, the same month that a well-connected developer acquired a legally dubious 99-year lease over the area. Residents have since been subjected to intimidation and pressure to leave their homes by the developer and local officials. So far, an estimated 900 families have been evicted from their land to make way for the development, with more than 3000 families due to face the same fate.
The NGO report states that “[t]he fact that these households do not have title is often used against them as a justification for eviction, despite the fact that many have well documented rights under the law.” “Meanwhile,” the report continues, “the wealthy and well-connected have little difficulty in acquiring land title in high value areas in which poor communities reside due to their connections or their ability to pay the high ‘unofficial fees’.”
Both the complaint and the report cite numerous flaws of LMAP, including a failure to issue titles to vulnerable households in accordance with legal procedures, ineffective and corrupt dispute resolution mechanisms, and a failure to conduct essential public awareness campaigns and legal aid programs.
The report identifies the absence of transparent State land management as a key failure of LMAP, which has contributed to the problem of tenure insecurity throughout the country. It states that the lack of transparency and an unimplemented or inadequate legal framework has led to the loss of public spaces in both urban and rural settings, as well as the large-scale depletion of the country’s natural resources, especially forests.
“The mismanagement of State land has negatively impacted the poorest Cambodians most,” said BABSEA Director David Pred. “Rural and indigenous communities have been deprived of the land on which their lives depend in order to make way for Economic Land Concessions, and poor urban households have been denied the opportunity to secure their land tenure despite their legal entitlements, when they are wrongly labelled as squatters on State land.”
Boeung Kak residents who filed the complaint against the World Bank have requested to remain anonymous, citing concerns for their safety amidst increasing intimidation and harassment of human rights defenders and political dissidents in Cambodia.
The Cambodian government abruptly ended its agreement on the project with the World Bank last month after a disagreement about the applicability of World Bank social safeguards in cases like Boeung Kak. Despite the government’s termination of the agreement, human rights groups have demanded that the Cambodian government continue to be held accountable for its contractual obligations to adhere to the project’s policy on involuntary resettlement.
“In light of the serious problems with the design and implementation of LMAP, it is incumbent upon the World Bank to conduct a thorough investigation of this project and its overall assistance strategy in Cambodia,” said Pred. “After seven years of wholly inadequate supervision of LMAP, the Bank has a responsibility to investigate and remedy the harms that have been caused to the Cambodian families who have been unfairly denied recognition of their land rights.”
“The World Bank should reconsider its approach to land titling programmes that it promotes worldwide, especially in countries without strong rule of law and the political will to protect people’s rights against powerful interests,” Booker added. “Through the Inspection Panel’s investigation, the World Bank can and should learn important lessons from LMAP.”
THE NOTICE OF REGISTRATION OF THE COMPLAINT IS AVAILABLE AT:
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTINSPECTIONPANEL/Resources/Notice_of_Registration.pdf
READ THE REPORT:
Untitled: Tenure Insecurity and Inequality in the Cambodian Land Sector, Bridges Across Borders Southeast Asia, Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, Jesuit Relief Services, October 2009 (Acrobat PDF, 1.38 MB)
FOR MORE INFORMATION, GO TO THE LINK BELOW:
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SOURCE: Bank Information Center
Showing posts with label Phnom Penh. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Phnom Penh. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
World Bank in talks with Cambodia over evictions
PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - A senior World Bank official held talks with the Cambodian government over the forced eviction of people from their homes and said the development bank would continue to work with it on land reform to tackle the problem.
Land ownership is a controversial issue in Cambodia, where legal documents were destroyed and state institutions collapsed under the Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s and the civil war that followed.
The World Bank joined with other aid donors in July to ask the government to halt forced evictions and the problem was raised again by its vice-president for East Asia and the Pacific Region, James Adams, during a visit last week.
"A major focus of the visit was Cambodia's urban land sector and the increasing numbers of disputes and evictions of poor people in urban settlements," the bank said in a statement.
"The discussions on land reform were constructive and it was agreed to continue these discussions over the coming week to agree next steps," it said.
The bank has provided funding of $24.3 million for a land management and administration project from 2002 to 2009, and an estimated 1.1 million land titles were issued, said Bou Saroeun, a spokesman for the World Bank in Phnom Penh.
Other donors such as Germany, Finland and Canada have together provided more than $14 million to support the land title project, Saroeun added.
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Source: Article from REUTERS posted on Mon Aug 31, 2009 2:07am EDT(Reporting by Ek Madra; Editing by Alan Raybould)
Land ownership is a controversial issue in Cambodia, where legal documents were destroyed and state institutions collapsed under the Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s and the civil war that followed.
The World Bank joined with other aid donors in July to ask the government to halt forced evictions and the problem was raised again by its vice-president for East Asia and the Pacific Region, James Adams, during a visit last week.
"A major focus of the visit was Cambodia's urban land sector and the increasing numbers of disputes and evictions of poor people in urban settlements," the bank said in a statement.
"The discussions on land reform were constructive and it was agreed to continue these discussions over the coming week to agree next steps," it said.
The bank has provided funding of $24.3 million for a land management and administration project from 2002 to 2009, and an estimated 1.1 million land titles were issued, said Bou Saroeun, a spokesman for the World Bank in Phnom Penh.
Other donors such as Germany, Finland and Canada have together provided more than $14 million to support the land title project, Saroeun added.
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Source: Article from REUTERS posted on Mon Aug 31, 2009 2:07am EDT(Reporting by Ek Madra; Editing by Alan Raybould)
RIGHTS-CAMBODIA: Newest Evacuation ‘Biggest in Decades'
Written by Robert Carmichael
PHNOM PENH, Aug 28 (IPS) - Dozens of families this week started dismantling their homes and moving away from lakeside land in the centre of the capital after giving up on their lengthy struggle to remain. By the end of the eviction process at this site, around 30,000 people will have been moved off now-valuable land.
Human rights workers said it will be the biggest movement of Cambodians from their homes in decades.
Residents do not want to leave, but said they are being driven out by threats from the municipality. Some have not given up yet.
Sixty-seven-year-old Pol Vanna has lived at Village Four at the city centre site, called Boeung Kak, since the early 1980s. The former railwayman is adamantly opposed to moving to the relocation site û a field with no facilities some 30 kilometres away.
”We don't want to leave Boeung Kak,” he told IPS during a small demonstration outside City Hall earlier this month. ”The company should give us some land for us to live on instead of forcing us to move away. I don't understand why they can't give us the land.”
The company in question is Shukaku, which reportedly belongs to Senator Lau Meng Khin from the ruling Cambodian People's Party. His firm received a 99-year lease from the government last year in a typically opaque land deal. Since then, it has been pumping huge amounts of sand into the lake in order to fill it and create more land on which to build.
Evictions are nothing new in Cambodia. At least 100,000 people have been evicted from sites in this capital alone since 2001. The problem is widespread in rural areas, too. The rocketing price of land means there are huge profits to be made, says Naly Pilorge, the director of local human rights group LICADHO, or the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights. She said greed and impunity are driving the problem.
The number of people affected nationwide is not clear. Amnesty International said last year that 150,000 were at risk of eviction. LICADHO, which operates in 13 of the country's 24 provinces, says the numbers of land grabs, evictions and threatened evictions reported to its staff have climbed from around 2,600 cases in 2003 to more than 16,000 in 2008.
Pilorge said that equates to more than a quarter of a million Cambodians in just six years. The true number is certainly higher, she added. ”I bet you anything if we had twice as many (staff), we would have twice as many cases.”
Uprooting people and relocating them to distant sites where there is no work and few facilities is hardly conducive to poverty alleviation even if that is a stated key concern of government. Pilorge said many evictees at relocation sites outside the capital have been pushed below the poverty line.
One such group of residents was violently evicted in January from a city centre site called Dey Krahorm, which means ‘Red Earth'. There were two broad categories of people at Dey Krahorm: Those who could show they had a legal right to their land because they had lived there for an extended period, and those who were renting.
The evictees from Dey Krahorm were taken to a site called Damnak Trayeung, located outside Phnom Penh. Those who had an entitlement to land at Dey Krahorm received a simple one-room brick home, the size and design of a single garage. Families who were renting received nothing, and are still living under rough tarpaulin lean-tos on a muddy scrap of land next to a road.
There is very little work at Damnak Trayeung. And because the site is more than 20 kilometres from the centre and it would cost a day's wages to travel to and from work, many people no longer have jobs. According to Licadho, two-thirds of the evictees who used to earn an income now earn nothing.
Luy Sinath is a 41-year-old seamstress who used to earn eight US dollars a day at Dey Krahorm. Now she earns just 25 cents. That means her three children cannot afford to go to school, and her family is no longer self-sufficient. She relies on food handouts from charities to survive.
”We have no food to eat sometimes so people share what we have with each other,” she said. ”When I was in Dey Krahorm, I was hopeful that my children would get a good education, but now that we are here, I have lost hope.”
It is those experiences that worry Pol Vanna and his son, Touris, a 26-year-old construction worker. The latter has visited the proposed relocation site for the evictees from Boeung Kak, which he said lacks any facilities.
”It is very far from the schools for our children and from where we work. Most of us are construction workers,” he said. ”It is a long way to the nearest hospital. We can't afford to pay for transportation for our children.”
LICADHO's Naly Pilorge said conditions at some relocation sites outside Phnom Penh are dire, with practically no health care, no schools, no running water, no sanitation, and no jobs. At the Andong relocation site, for example, the human rights group's doctors go door-to-door because some residents are too ill or old to come to the medics.
”We are seeing malnutrition, beriberi, discolouration of the hair, extended bellies,” she said. ”They have sores (on their legs) at Andong û these huge infected wounds û because they are constantly walking in stagnant water that is mixed with sewerage.”
Back at Boeung Kak, the air is heavy with the sound of hammering as people dismantle homes they have lived in for up to 30 years. They are the first of an estimated 30,000 who will eventually be evicted from the surrounds of the lake.
It is still too early to say how their lives will be affected by the country's latest dubious land deal. But the experiences of Luy Sinath and others suggest the lives of the people from Boeung Kak will likely get a lot harder in the coming months.
********************
Source: Australia.To News
Link: http://www.australia.to/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=13959:rights-cambodia-newest-evacuation-biggest-in-decades&catid=116:breaking-news&Itemid=202
PHNOM PENH, Aug 28 (IPS) - Dozens of families this week started dismantling their homes and moving away from lakeside land in the centre of the capital after giving up on their lengthy struggle to remain. By the end of the eviction process at this site, around 30,000 people will have been moved off now-valuable land.
Human rights workers said it will be the biggest movement of Cambodians from their homes in decades.
Residents do not want to leave, but said they are being driven out by threats from the municipality. Some have not given up yet.
Sixty-seven-year-old Pol Vanna has lived at Village Four at the city centre site, called Boeung Kak, since the early 1980s. The former railwayman is adamantly opposed to moving to the relocation site û a field with no facilities some 30 kilometres away.
”We don't want to leave Boeung Kak,” he told IPS during a small demonstration outside City Hall earlier this month. ”The company should give us some land for us to live on instead of forcing us to move away. I don't understand why they can't give us the land.”
The company in question is Shukaku, which reportedly belongs to Senator Lau Meng Khin from the ruling Cambodian People's Party. His firm received a 99-year lease from the government last year in a typically opaque land deal. Since then, it has been pumping huge amounts of sand into the lake in order to fill it and create more land on which to build.
Evictions are nothing new in Cambodia. At least 100,000 people have been evicted from sites in this capital alone since 2001. The problem is widespread in rural areas, too. The rocketing price of land means there are huge profits to be made, says Naly Pilorge, the director of local human rights group LICADHO, or the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights. She said greed and impunity are driving the problem.
The number of people affected nationwide is not clear. Amnesty International said last year that 150,000 were at risk of eviction. LICADHO, which operates in 13 of the country's 24 provinces, says the numbers of land grabs, evictions and threatened evictions reported to its staff have climbed from around 2,600 cases in 2003 to more than 16,000 in 2008.
Pilorge said that equates to more than a quarter of a million Cambodians in just six years. The true number is certainly higher, she added. ”I bet you anything if we had twice as many (staff), we would have twice as many cases.”
Uprooting people and relocating them to distant sites where there is no work and few facilities is hardly conducive to poverty alleviation even if that is a stated key concern of government. Pilorge said many evictees at relocation sites outside the capital have been pushed below the poverty line.
One such group of residents was violently evicted in January from a city centre site called Dey Krahorm, which means ‘Red Earth'. There were two broad categories of people at Dey Krahorm: Those who could show they had a legal right to their land because they had lived there for an extended period, and those who were renting.
The evictees from Dey Krahorm were taken to a site called Damnak Trayeung, located outside Phnom Penh. Those who had an entitlement to land at Dey Krahorm received a simple one-room brick home, the size and design of a single garage. Families who were renting received nothing, and are still living under rough tarpaulin lean-tos on a muddy scrap of land next to a road.
There is very little work at Damnak Trayeung. And because the site is more than 20 kilometres from the centre and it would cost a day's wages to travel to and from work, many people no longer have jobs. According to Licadho, two-thirds of the evictees who used to earn an income now earn nothing.
Luy Sinath is a 41-year-old seamstress who used to earn eight US dollars a day at Dey Krahorm. Now she earns just 25 cents. That means her three children cannot afford to go to school, and her family is no longer self-sufficient. She relies on food handouts from charities to survive.
”We have no food to eat sometimes so people share what we have with each other,” she said. ”When I was in Dey Krahorm, I was hopeful that my children would get a good education, but now that we are here, I have lost hope.”
It is those experiences that worry Pol Vanna and his son, Touris, a 26-year-old construction worker. The latter has visited the proposed relocation site for the evictees from Boeung Kak, which he said lacks any facilities.
”It is very far from the schools for our children and from where we work. Most of us are construction workers,” he said. ”It is a long way to the nearest hospital. We can't afford to pay for transportation for our children.”
LICADHO's Naly Pilorge said conditions at some relocation sites outside Phnom Penh are dire, with practically no health care, no schools, no running water, no sanitation, and no jobs. At the Andong relocation site, for example, the human rights group's doctors go door-to-door because some residents are too ill or old to come to the medics.
”We are seeing malnutrition, beriberi, discolouration of the hair, extended bellies,” she said. ”They have sores (on their legs) at Andong û these huge infected wounds û because they are constantly walking in stagnant water that is mixed with sewerage.”
Back at Boeung Kak, the air is heavy with the sound of hammering as people dismantle homes they have lived in for up to 30 years. They are the first of an estimated 30,000 who will eventually be evicted from the surrounds of the lake.
It is still too early to say how their lives will be affected by the country's latest dubious land deal. But the experiences of Luy Sinath and others suggest the lives of the people from Boeung Kak will likely get a lot harder in the coming months.
********************
Source: Australia.To News
Link: http://www.australia.to/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=13959:rights-cambodia-newest-evacuation-biggest-in-decades&catid=116:breaking-news&Itemid=202
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Man denies penning leaflets
Claims he has gone into hiding for fear that authorities will try to arrest him.
A man whose name appeared on hundreds of leaflets accusing Prime Minister Hun Sen of corruption has been forced into hiding for fear of government reprisals.
The leaflets, penned by an anonymous author and posted around the streets of the capital in the early hours of Wednesday morning, condemned the premier as an "absolute leader" and "puppet of
Bearing a small picture of the prime minister, they accused him of destroying the Khmer regime's once-great reputation and "selling the nation".
Scribbled in Khmer handwriting at the top of the papers were five names: Pan Sovanny, Sreng Vuthy, Chea Socheap, Chim Thoeun and Kem Sopheak. Although nothing is yet known of the identity of the first four, Kem Sopheak - who claimed to be a Sam Rainsy Party activist, on Thursday contacted the Post by phone to deny any involvement.
"I'm scared for my safety", Kem Sopheak said. "I don't know what to think. I have nothing to do with these leaflets. I didn't even know about them until my nephew saw one with my name on it at Wat Phnom and contacted me straight away."
Sopheak said he had been an SRP activist since 1996. On hearing of
their intervention, but was told by SRP headquarters that the party had no record of his membership and would have to hand him over to the United Nations.
SRP lawmaker and spokesman Yim Sovann confirmed the party had been approached by Kem Sopheak, but was unable to confirm his involvement with the opposition party.
Yim Sovann insisted, however, that the party would do everything in its power to help Kem Sopheak.
"We asked to see his party card, but he couldn't produce it", Sovann said.
"We don't know where he lives, so we cannot confirm whether he is a member of our party. However, we do not discriminate. He is Khmer, and if he was threatened in any way, we would take pity on him and help him. To that end, we have taken him to a human rights organisation."
Christophe Peschoux, head of the UN's Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights in
"We interviewed him already, and now we're looking into the story to establish what's going on," Peschoux said. "At this stage, it seems very murky."
I don't know why anyone would put my name on that leaflet.
Kem Sopheak told the Post he was in hiding and was afraid of having legal action taken against him.
"I can't tell anyone where I'm staying because I'm scared the government will arrest me", he said.
"I don't know why anyone would put my name on that leaflet. It couldn't have been me: I can only read a little bit and cannot write at all."
Posted in various public places in
Sen's "puppet regime". "I remember the time when Khmer glory was well-known all over the world," one leaflet seen by the Post reads.
"We were feared and admired for our civilisation, culture and fine arts, but all that has now disappeared because of the absolute regime of the present government."
The government Thursday insisted Kem Sopheak had nothing to fear.
Minister of Information Khieu Kanharith said the names on the leaflets were of no interest to officials, but that their creators were.
Three separate departments are now investigating, he said: the police, the espionage unit and the anti-terrorism squad.
Neither Phnom Penh Municipal Police chief Touch Naruth, who is heading the police investigation, nor Ministry of Interior spokesman Khieu Sopheak could be reached for comment on Thursday.
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Source: The Phnom Penh Post
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2009082127914/National-news/man-denies-penning-leaflets.html
Leaflets knock prime minister
The leaflets, bearing a small picture of the premier, warned Cambodian citizens that their present leader was single-handedly responsible for reducing the once-great Khmer nation to ruins.
Partly handwritten and partly typed in Khmer, they accuse the prime minister of "selling the nation" and called on the people of
"I am so proud that I was born Khmer," reads one, a copy of which has been obtained by the Post. "The Khmer race built
The leaflets were printed on A4 paper and appeared in prominent public places across the city - including Wat Phnom - before sunrise, but were swiftly taken down by police, witnesses said.
The government played down the leaflets' significance on Wednesday, insisting that Cambodians would not be swayed by acts of political subversion, and that the real test of their loyalty would be the ballot box.
"This is not the first time such a thing has happened," Council of Ministers spokesman Phay Siphan said. "This has happened many times before, but the result is always the same at the elections."
Police confirmed on Wednesday that they were investigating the incident, but said the allegations made in the leaflets were "out of date" and failed to take into account the government's current rate of development.
Kirt Chantharith, chief of general staff and spokesman for the commissioner general of the National Police, said: "[They] should not use words like this to insult the leader, but the leaflet is out of date. This game is very old and hasn't worked. National development has been thinking ahead."
Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights, was critical of the language used in the leaflets, warning that the use of such openly inflammatory rhetoric could be counterproductive.
"Insulting someone is not necessarily freedom of expression," he said. "Writers should have clear morals and avoid insulting the government."
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Source: The Phnom Penh Post http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2009082027881/National-news/leaflets-knock-prime-minister.html
Monday, July 27, 2009
No H1N1 Case at Olympic Market as was Rumored
(click on the image below to enlarge)
*******************Source: Deum Ampil News
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