In the late 2000s Phnom Penh was booming, and when a developer spotted a choice piece of land, he simply paid off the proper official to win a newly minted land title. “What happens is they bribe the judge, and then they have the title,” said Javier Merelo de Barbera Llobet, who served as an aid worker in Battambang. “Then they can prove the land is theirs.”
“It’s a very effective way for developers to do it,” said Yeng Virak, of the Community Legal Education Center. The government has “the paper, and you pay for it.” After that, the victim’s only choice was to take the case to court. But the land’s new “owner” had bought the deed from Hun Sen, and, and if forced to, he would defend it in Hun Sen’s courts.
When that was done, the new owner had only to rid the property of its residents—almost always poor, uneducated people. Once the
developer had paid for the new title, the government sometimes charged the residents with trespassing and vandalism and threw them in jail. In one typical case soldiers helped the Heng Development Company expel residents from a piece of property the company had “bought” in Kandal Province. Soldiers opened fire and wounded several residents who refused to leave. The
Phnom Penh Post
reported that the developer bought 9,900 acres and then decided he wanted some adjacent property, too. When those residents refused to sell, the developer went back to Phnom Penh and bought another title for that land as well. Soldiers opened fire again as they chased these new victims away.
The Land Law, enacted in 2001, attempted to address this dilemma by giving anyone who lived on a piece of land for at least five years ownership and the right to a legal title. Well, like so many of these laws, the government never wrote the enabling regulations and chose not to enforce or abide by it. And as property values rose—in 2007 land in downtown Phnom Penh cost about the same as land in downtown Chicago—the land seizures escalated into an epidemic.
NGOs and other donors took up the cause and tried to hold workshops to apprise villagers of the Land Law’s protections. The government would not countenance that. On more than one occasion provincial authorities sent a fire brigade to disperse the workshop by spraying everyone with a fire hose. “Fire brigades is one way they do it,” said Youk Chhang. “But they also disperse crowds with electric batons, kick you with their boots, beat you. It’s so wild! There are cases where they beat people to death.”
As the eviction problem grew to a frenzy, the nation’s newspapers carried two, three, four, or more stories about land seizures every single day. Human-rights groups cataloged evictions affecting 79,155 people in 2007, and the number rose in following years. The seizures grew ever more brazen. The State Department’s 2009 human-rights report recounted one episode in dry diplomatic language:
In April, representatives of the Phnom Penh Tonle Bassac Group 78 (G78) met with Phnom Penh Governor Kep Chuktema regarding a
2006 eviction notice. While authorities claimed the land was state land, the government did not provide documents classifying it as state property, and the land did not meet the 2001 land-law definition for state land.
According to the 2001 law, the land was eligible for transfer by the state into private land. Many of the families had lived on the land since the 1980s and claimed ownership under the 2001 law. G78 community members stated that the municipality offered compensation that was approximately equal to 2 percent of a November 2007 independent assessment of market value, plus one plot in a Phnom Penh eviction resettlement site per family. The community remained under threat of eviction.
Then, in July 2009, security forces forcibly evicted the residents.
Watching all of this, the World Bank decided to step into the fray. After its deforestation debacle, it now tried to fight the land-seizure problem. The bank began buying land titles for poor people all over the country. “We’ve paid for teams to research these land titles, and almost 1 million have been granted!” a senior World Bank official in Washington boasted in 2008.
Stephane Guimbert, senior economist in the bank’s Phnom Penh office, explained how his office chose the plots of land. “This is driven by the government,” he acknowledged with a dry tone. In other words, the government told the bank which pieces of property it could title for its residents. Wasn’t it obvious that the government would steer the bank away from land it intended to seize? Guimbert nodded. “We have done some of the easiest areas—areas that are not controversial,” he said matter-of-factly. A year later his office got into trouble once again, for ignoring perhaps the most brazen, audacious land seizure thus far.
Right in the center of Phnom Penh sat a beautiful lake of about 220 acres, called Boeng Kak. Green islands of morning glories floated on the surface. On the east side sat a gold-domed mosque. Metal and wood shanty homes for more than 4,000 families ringed much of the remaining perimeter. Over the past thirty years, they had been built out over
the water on piers, and a sinuous network of wooden-plank walkways wound among the homes and businesses. Lake water glistened beneath. One resident operated a boatyard. Another worked in a studio weaving rattan artwork. Most others eked out a living on the streets.
Right from under these people’s feet, the Phnom Penh city government leased the entire lake and surrounding land to a private developer. That was in 2007, and the Chinese government news service, Xinhua, issued a press release saying that officials from “the Yunnan Southeast-Asia Economy and Technology Investment Industry and the Cambodia’s Shukaku Company signed agreements in the presence of Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister Sok An and Governor of China’s Yunnan Province Qin Guangrong. Under the agreements, the two sides will cooperate to develop the Boeng Kak Lake area in Phnom Penh into a multi-purpose living and recreation center called the New City of the East.” No one knew exactly what that meant, but everyone knew that a prominent CPP senator, Lao Meng Khim, and his wife, owned Shukaku. Lao Meng Khim was the same
oknya
who bought rights to the last remaining forest in Pursat Province, where he professed an interest in planting eucalyptus trees. Now the government had given him a ninety-nine-year lease on 330 acres—the lake and the surrounding neighborhoods, where thousands of people had lived for decades.
A year later the developer made his intentions plain. With no notice or explanation, the company ran a fat pipe from the bottom of the Tonle Sap River, through Phnom Penh neighborhoods, and into Boeng Kak. When a worker flipped a switch, heavy-duty pumps began pulling sand from the river bottom, carrying it through the city, and then dumping it into the lake. Though no one said anything publicly, suddenly the goal became plain: Fill the lake with sand, obliterate it, and suddenly the developer would have 220 acres of new prime real estate, right in the middle of the city. The price Lao Meng Khin paid for this: $79 million. Journalists could find no record of a deposit for that amount in the national treasury.
By the summer of 2009 a tongue of sand reached more than halfway across the lake. Of course, the water level was rising, and the city began telling Boeng Kak residents that they needed to leave. Early in 2010 the sand reached the sewage intake pipe and blocked it off so that raw waste began backing up under the residents’ homes. “The sewage water is rising day by day, and I worry my house will be flooded,” one resident told the
Cambodia Daily
. The residents complained of a terrible stench, and some were getting sick. Several residents showed reporters documents showing that they had lived in their homes since 1979—more than long enough to claim ownership under the Land Law. But that didn’t matter.
The government, behaving as it usually did, forbade residents to hold a town-hall meeting to discuss their situation. As for the Land Law, the precise regulations had never been written. The developer did offer one public disclosure; he put out an environmental impact statement that said filling the lake was environmentally useful because the lake was “dead.” The residents, it asserted, “were living in anarchy.” So filling Boeng Kak would not have “major effects on the environment” or “major potential impacts on society.”
Cambodia Daily
reporters tried to get someone with the Shukaku company or the government to explain what was happening to this lake, a major landmark right in the middle of the city. “A visit to the municipal office of the Boeng Kak Development Committee on the northeast coast of the lake resulted in police, military police and what appeared to be undercover police racing to reporters, demanding that they immediately leave the office compound,” the paper wrote in the summer of 2009.
“No entrance to the area around Boeng Kak,” said an employee who declined to give his name. “Want to ask questions? Ask city hall.” At city hall, “Municipal Governor Kep Chuktema could not be reached for comment,” and Deputy Governor Pa Socheatvong declined to discuss the lake, referring questions to Mr. Chuktema’s cabinet. Cabinet chief Nuon Sameth said he was too busy to discuss the lake, before hanging
up on a reporter. Daun Penh District Governor Sok Sambath referred all questions about the lake to Shukaku, saying, “Our authorities will just continue to cooperate with the company in order to facilitate the development fast.” But “Shukaku officials, who have not once spoken to the press about the lake development, could not be reached for comment.” By the summer of 2010 so much sand had been pumped into the lake that water spilled out into the streets, flooding dozens of homes.
As this saga progressed, human-rights groups began asking the World Bank: Why aren’t you offering legal representation to Boeng Kak lake residents? The obvious answer was that the government, not the World Bank, chose the out-of-the-way areas where the bank was allowed to represent residents—plots of land so remote that no developer would ever offer to buy them. All of that spawned a new World Bank internal investigation whose findings were a mirror of the office’s forestryprogram investigation a few years earlier.
Investigators recognized “a disconnect between institutional, legal and policy achievements and insecurity of land tenure for the poor, especially in urban areas, and for indigenous people. This disconnect can be attributed in part to the design of some of the project’s components, in part to the way the project was implemented.” In other words, bank officials set up a program and allowed it to run for years, boasted about the number of titles granted—and ignored the egregious land seizures they could have seen if they had bothered to look out their office windows.
The investigation cited “a decision, during design, in line with Cambodian law that the project will not title lands in areas where disputes are likely until agreements are reached on the status of the land. Clarifying the status of the land would have required the development and implementation of clear procedures for state land classification.” That was never done.
Chastened by Washington once again, the bank asked the government to change the program so that it addressed some of these problems. It also offered to help resolve the Boeng Kak dispute. But the
government refused, and in the fall of 2009 the bank canceled the program. All told, the bank had spent $24.3 million. And during the program’s course the government had evicted tens of thousands of its citizens from their homes. In one instance, on a vacant lot in midtown Phnom Penh, twenty families, every one of them HIV positive, had built a little shanty village for themselves, not far from the hospital where they got their maintenance medications. No one forced them to live together in this modern-age leper colony. They said they simply found it convenient. In 2008 the Tourism Ministry decided to build a new headquarters adjacent to this lot, and the next year the minister announced that he wanted to plant a garden beside his ministry, exactly where the HIV families lived. The new ministry headquarters was only half built, but a billboard in front of the construction site showed a grand Asian palace with happy people strolling in the plaza. The HIV families’village was off-frame.
The city gave each family 10,000 riel, or $2.50, and with only a few hours’ notice trucked them to an eviction site about fifteen miles from town. There, the government had put up new housing for them: a complex of large green corrugated-metal buildings divided into several dozen rooms. Each family got one bare room, roughly fifteen by twelve feet, that looked like the inside of a garden shed. The site offered no kitchen, no bathrooms, no electricity or running water, though there was a water pump outside. It pulled up murky water that tasted like chemicals. Farmers working a flooded rice paddy behind the site had probably been using fertilizer.
Four days after they had arrived at the eviction site, forty-one-year-old Suon Davy, thin as a rail, sat in a hammock and lamented her state—ill and dispossessed. “All of us are sick,” she said. “We lived at the old site since 2000 but never registered it because I was always too sick. Since we have been here, no authorities have come to see us. They dumped us and ignored us. They left us out here to die.”
They were hardly the only ones. Nai Chineang’s home in central Phnom Penh sat in the shadow of a ten-story apartment building put up in 1960. The spot was called Dey Krahorm. It sat just down the
street from the parliament building. Nai Chineang’s house was built of scrap wood, corrugated metal, and blue plastic sheeting. In the early 1990s the United Nations had handed out thousands of these blue plastic tarps, to be used for cover. Among the poor they were still in service.
The house looked like other shanties around town but for one thing: A government document was tacked over the front door, dated July 2003. Hun Sen’s Council of Ministers wrote that the government had granted “land concessions for the poor communities in the following locations.” One of them was “Dey Krahorm, which is a former public park” of about twelve acres where “there are 1,220 houses, 1,465 families with 5,854 people. They shall be provided a land concession” of about nine acres.