Women On The Eviction Frontline

More women are facing forced evictions in Cambodia, threatening family welfare in the nation.


Women are increasingly bearing the brunt of forced evictions in Cambodia where they face beatings, imprisonment and the loss of their homes, according to an international rights group.


Amnesty International

Hoy Mai with her two sons in Oddar Meanchey province, March 16, 2011.


The London-based Amnesty International said in a report released Thursday that the government must end the practice of forced evictions for commercial and other development and instead listen to the plight of women who face grave dangers in protecting their homes.

“In Cambodia, women are at the forefront of the fight against forced evictions. Many have taken the lead in their communities’ struggle for justice, putting themselves at risk to defend their communities,” said Donna Guest, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific Deputy Director.

“The Cambodian authorities must bring about an end to the practice of forced evictions, which contravene international human rights treaties and tear families apart.”

“They must ensure that genuine consultations are held with the people affected, and that residents receive sufficient notice and compensation or adequate housing where there is no alternative to eviction,” she said.

Tens of thousands of people have been forcibly evicted across Cambodia, in both rural and urban areas while indigenous people face expulsion from their traditional land, according to Amnesty International.

“Women not only face impoverishment from forced eviction but threats and imprisonment when they try to resist, with no protection from the law,” Guest said.

Urban eviction
In the Boeung Kak Lake area of central Phnom Penh, nearly 20,000 people have either been evicted from their homes or are at risk of losing them since a commercial development company was granted a 99-year lease in the area in 2007.

Despite assurances that Prime Minister Hun Sen had granted a portion of the land to the remaining 800 families with legal titles of ownership, they are having sleepless nights.

Tep Vanny, a 31-year-old Boeung Kak resident who helps lead community resistance to the eviction, said she feels insecure about the possibility of being kicked off of her land.

“When I leave my house, I don't know whether I can expect to come home or not,” she told Amnesty International.

Vanny was recently charged with defamation by the Municipality of Phnom Penh, which she says was a result of the work she has done to protect the community.

And despite her activism, eight more homes on the edge of Boeung Kak Lake were destroyed by bulldozers on Sept. 16, leaving the families homeless.

Evicted and jailed
Hoy Mai, 48, an indigenous mother from northwestern Oddar Meanchey province, was five months pregnant in 2009 when her home was set aflame as part of a forced eviction.

“My house, possessions, clothes, all went up in smoke. Nothing was left.”

Her home and 118 others in Bos village were bulldozed and burned to the ground by 150 police, military, and others believed to be workers employed by a company that was granted a concession over a large swath of land for a sugar plantation, the report said.

Days later, Mai was imprisoned for eight months for violating forestry clearing laws when she traveled to the capital Phnom Penh to complain to Prime Minister Hun Sen about the eviction.

She gave birth after three days of labor in prison and for two months nursed her son in a prison cell that she shared with seven other women. Rice rations were spoiled and barely edible, leaving Mai and her son in poor health.

She was released in June 2010, but only after signing an agreement to relinquish the rights to her land and accepting a resettlement plot.

But Mai told Amnesty International that she has still not received the replacement property and now has little to provide for herself and her eight children.

Ongoing issue
Cambodia’s land issue dates from the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge regime, which forced large-scale evacuations and relocations throughout the country.

This was followed by mass confusion over land rights and the formation of squatter communities when the refugees returned in the 1990s after a decade of civil war.

An estimated 30,000 people a year in Cambodia are driven from farmland or urban areas to make way for real estate developments or mining and agricultural projects.

“Tens of thousands of people across Cambodia are unlawfully losing their homes because of the demands of big business,” according to Amnesty’s Guest.

“The Cambodian government must not sacrifice human rights in the name of economic development.”

Forced eviction often leads to loss of possessions and livelihood, the breakup of communities, and the deterioration of a family’s mental and physical well being, Amnesty said.

The rights group said that victims of forced eviction are likely to lose access to education and health services, receive inadequate compensation and are resettled in remote areas.

Husbands are often made to spend long periods of time away from home seeking work, leaving their wives to cope alone.

“The loss of one’s home and community is a traumatic experience for anyone, but women in their role as primary caregivers for their family face a particular burden,” Guest said.

“Forced evictions also threaten the gains made in reducing poverty in Cambodia over the last 20 years.”

Reported by Joshua Lipes.
Read more!

No Request of Sihanouk Summons: Khieu Samphan Team

"I think we will not proceed with this request.”

A journalist listens to Khieu Samphan, center, former Khmer Rouge head of state, as he appears on TV screen at the court press center of the U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal in Phnom Penh, Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2011. The trial for three top Khmer Rouge leaders Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan and Ieng Sary began on Monday.

Defense lawyers for jailed Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan say they will not file a request to summon Cambodia’s former monarch to the UN-backed court, following a hearing in which the defendant asked the court why he was not also questioned.

Speaking in an opening statement to the court on Wednesday, as a major trial for former regime leaders got under way, Khieu Samphan said he was not aware of the mass atrocities taking place throughout the country, despite being the nominal head of the movement.




He also asked why former king Norodom Sihanouk was not summoned to the court, for his role in the leadership of a coalition that helped bring the Khmer Rouge to power.

“I think we will not proceed with this request,” one of his Cambodian lawyers, Kong Sam On, said Thursday. That decision rests with the prosecution and investigating judges at the court, he said.

Khieu Samphan was the third man on trial to address the court this week, following statements from Nuon Chea, Pol Pot’s lieutenant, and Ieng Sary, the regime’s foreign affairs minister. All three are being tried for crimes that include genocide, for their roles as the leaders of a movement that oversaw one of the 20th Century’s worst atrocities.

Norodom Sihanouk was ousted in a US-backed coup in 1970, and from exile formed a partnership with the ascendant Khmer Rouge guerrillas in a bid to return to power. In 2007, court officials denied a request from the former king to meet with him outside the court, but he has never been officially summoned.

In the past, Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary’s defense officials have requested he be summoned, to no avail.

“Whether there is a need to summon new witnesses is at the discretion of the judges of the Trial Chamber,” tribunal spokesman Neth Preaktra said Thursday.

Currently, the case against the three leaders has more than 3,800 civil party applicants and more than 1,000 witnesses.

Its first week was dedicated to the opening statements of the prosecution and rebuttals of the accused. Proceedings will begin again on Dec. 5.

Speaking as a guest on “Hello VOA” on Tuesday, tribunal spokesman Huy Vannak said the opening statement by Nuon Chea had been “great” and full of detail.

Khieu Samphan’s statement before the court found less favor. His denials left some in disbelief.

Gregory Stanton, a research professor in genocide studies at George Mason University, in Virginia, called the statement “beyond belief.”

“He was the head of state,” Stanton said. “How on Earth could he not have known about it?”

“He’s a liar,” Stanton said. “I happened to know, because we’ve looked at the documentation. He made speeches directly to people, to cadres, calling upon the cadres to exterminate all the enemies of the people. I mean, directly. He made these speeches himself in 1977 and at other times too.”

“This is unacceptable, because he ruled the country, and now he has said he did not know the people got killed,” said Chap Sem, a 70-year-old farmer from Takeo province, who was attending the trial. “It’s not compressible that he didn’t know.” Read more!

Amnesty Calls for Halt to Cambodian Forced Evictions

Cambodian people pass the time in the ruins of a house at the Boeung Kak Lake in Phnom Penh. The World Bank called on the Cambodian government to halt the eviction of another 10,000 people at a controversial real estate development and offered to help those who had lost their homes, (File).

Amnesty International called on the Cambodian government Thursday to halt a wave of forced evictions affecting tens of thousands of people, a problem that shows no sign of letting up. Amnesty says women are increasingly putting themselves at the forefront in standing up for land rights.

Amnesty’s report tells the story of five women from across Cambodia who have been affected by forced evictions.

The rights group says the Cambodian government is ignoring its international obligations by pushing ahead with forced evictions, and says Phnom Penh risks reversing 20 years of hard-won gains in reducing poverty.

“Amnesty International has been calling for an end to forced evictions for several years now. We’ve documented this extensively and of course the vibrant civil society in Cambodia has also been documenting and reporting on this practice which is unlawful under international law,” said Donna Guest, the deputy director of Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific department.

Women tell their stories
Guest says Amnesty wanted to focus on women and tell their stories as human rights defenders, as mothers and as wives.

"And this is to show the more human face - that these people are not just a statistic, these people have lives," she explained. "These people have had very adverse consequences - some of them have lost their homes, all their possessions, families have been split up. So that is why we are here today - to show the human face.

At the launch of the report, Guest was flanked by three Cambodian women who have been affected by evictions.

One of those women, Hong Mai, was evicted from her home in northwest Cambodia two years ago to make way for a sugar concession awarded to a ruling party senator.

She says armed authorities destroyed her house and all her possessions when they burned down her village and evicted the residents.

Hong Mai was five months pregnant, yet when she traveled to the capital days later to seek help from Prime Minister Hun Sen, she was accused of violating the Forestry Law and put in jail.

Eight months later she was released after signing an agreement to withdraw her claim to her land.

Hong Mai has not seen her husband since, and she and her five children are destitute.

Sanctions requested
She wants consumers in the European Union to boycott Cambodian sugar because, she says, "it is made from the land, life and blood” of people who have been thrown off their land.

Guest says Amnesty does not take a position on issues such as sanctions, but the organization is adamant that development should not come at the expense of human rights.

And as a European-based organization, Amnesty’s staff will continue to meet policymakers in Brussels and other European countries.

“We will ask our membership in the European countries - which are extremely active on this issue - to appeal to their members of parliaments, and also to raise awareness. I think part of any advocacy strategy must be to raise awareness so that people are aware of what’s going on. A lot of people have no idea what’s going on in Cambodia and this report today is an attempt to raise this profile, bring it to international attention, including in the EU countries,” Guest stated.

Amnesty’s focus on women and land rights was bleakly highlighted when a prominent land rights activist at the huge Boeung Kak eviction site in central Phnom Penh committed suicide this week.

Chea Dara, the mother of two children, threw herself off a bridge Tuesday - reportedly after her family was refused land at the lakeside site after a five-year battle.

At the release ceremony for the Amnesty report, Chea Dara's fellow activists wore black in tribute to her. Read more!

CAMBODIA: Schools and students struggle post-floods

Students outside a temporary school set up after flooding in Anlong Chrey village

PHNOM PENH, 24 November 2011 (IRIN) - Schools damaged in Cambodia's worst monsoons in more than a decade may take up to a year to recover after flooding delayed the start of school for thousands of students nationwide, say aid workers and officials.

As of late October, 323 schools out of 1,400 damaged ones were closed; some have since reopened. Though flood waters have receded, how well those schools are functioning and how many remain closed is still unknown, as the government continues its damage assessments in a dozen flood-hit provinces.

At least 77 schools are beyond repair, while students and teachers were still pumping water out of dozens more, said the director of the education ministry's construction department on 21 November, Song Yen.

"We have not yet completely assessed the damage," he added.

Sam Sereyrath, general director of education at the Ministry of Education, estimated some 20,000 children remained out of school, based on the number of schools destroyed.

Meanwhile, teachers warned that flooding had exacerbated the chronic shortage of books and other study materials. Purchases of 47,000 textbooks for 12 grades are under way while some schools simply opened their doors in October with no teaching materials, said the president of the Cambodian Independent Teachers' Association, Rong Chhun.

It will still take months for the school system to recover, he added.

Disruption from the flooding will have a "huge impact" on drop-out rates, absenteeism and enrolment, said Keo Sarath, education programme manager at Save the Children Cambodia.

MDG progress
The country's progress on the Millennium Development Goal for primary school education is mixed: 94 percent of primary school-age children were enrolled for the 2009-2010 school year; 83 percent of students enrolled in primary school completed the 2008-2009 year; and there was virtually no gender disparity in enrolment. Lower secondary education goals cannot be achieved by 2015 at the current pace, according to a preliminary UN analysis from September 2010.

To mitigate the risk that the floods may derail progress on primary education, existing guidelines to make up lost school hours must be enforced, said Denise Shepherd-Johnson, head of communications for the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Cambodia.

A downward trend in government spending on education - 19.2 percent of the budget in 2007 to 15.9 percent in 2012 - limits the Education Ministry's ability to respond to the flooding, she added.

Almost 10 percent of the country's population, about 1.6 million people, was directly hit by the flooding, about one-quarter of a million people fled to higher ground and about 250 people died, according to the National Committee for Disaster Management's most recent data from 28 October.

The flooding began in mid-July in the upper Mekong River, and then spread to 18 of the country's 24 provinces as Cambodia's largest lake, the Tonle Sap, more than doubled its monsoon-season size.

Almost 20 million people have been affected since June in Thailand, Cambodia, Philippines, Vietnam and Laos.

Stop-gap schooling
Save the Children and the Education Ministry have set up more than 400 temporary schools in four of Cambodia's worst-hit provinces, reaching more than 12,000 primary-school students.

"Every day a child is not in school increases the risk they drop out permanently in a disaster like this. If we can quickly get them back in school-like settings, the chances of this happening are reduced," Jasmine Whitbread, CEO of Save the Children International, told IRIN.

In recent visits to the flood-hit provinces, Battambang and Kampong Cham, residents of villages who lost their annual rice crop, or remain isolated by flooding, told IRIN they were struggling to feed themselves and keep their livestock alive.

Flooding destroyed some 265,000 hectares of rice, about 10 percent of the total 2.5 million hectares planted, according to the government.

A rice-growing village, Anlong Chrey, in Kampong Cham Province, has become an islet reachable only by an hour's boat ride.

It had been entirely submerged for about one month, after the Mekong River, 8km west, and the Tonle Sap River, 35km east, overflowed their banks and converged in mid-September, said residents.

The village has two temporary primary schools - attended by about 140 children - but older students are among the hundreds who have been forced to leave the village of about 380 families in search of work.

Some children have gone as far as Thailand and Malaysia, residents said. A recent assessment by Save the Children Cambodia in 20 villages raised concerns of increased child labour and migration as adolescent girls search for work.

Soy Chet, 16, lives alone in Anlong Chrey village in a hut surrounded by knee-deep water. Orphaned three years ago, she managed to remain in school and support herself before the floods.

She said she hoped to finish primary school, but did not know what she would do afterwards as her neighbours had told her they could no longer support her.

"Maybe I will go to look for work in a sewing factory," she said, adding that if she did, it would be the first time she had ever left her district. Read more!