CAMBODIA: Communities fight back against land grabbing
KOH KONG, 13 September 2010 (IRIN): Forced evictions (tvangsudsættelser) and land grabbing (jordtyveri) are nothing new in Cambodia, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), but it is new for communities to fight back.
– If we don’t have our land, we cannot live, Yi Kunthear said. In August, she was reportedly beaten unconscious by sugar plantation workers while trying to defend her land. – We will block our land if the company tries to take it again, said she.
Kunthear, 25, grew up on her family’s small farm growing rice, cassava and cashew nuts in the rural district of Sre Ambel, Koh Kong Province. But in 2009, the Supreme Court ruled that her family’s land, along with that of her 34 neighbours, belonged to Heng Huy, a local businessman.
On 27 August, Sre Ambel villagers blocked the road as Huy’s bulldozers rolled in, joined by Kompong Speu provincial farmers also made landless by Senator Ly Yong Phat’s giant sugar company purchase.
According to Cambodia’s revised 2001 land law, if farmers prove they have worked their land for five years, they are entitled to own it; nevertheless, about 90 percent of the country’s 14,5 million inhabitants do not hold title deeds (skøder) to the land they live and work on, the OHCHR reports.
Village documents show Sre Ambel’s farmers have worked the land since the 1980s. However, Huy says he bought the title for the 779ha land concession in 1993.
And while national organizations such as the Community Legal Education Center (CLEC) have defended the landless in court, Sre Ambel’s farmers have stepped up their resistance by registering a lawsuit in Koh Kong’s provincial court against the Heng Huy Company, along with its UK buyer, Tate & Lyle.
Challenging the EU
Community representatives from sugar-growing provinces – an industry dominated by ruling party member Phat – have challenged the European Union’s “Everything But Arms” tax-free policy for Cambodian sugar exports.
They are supported by national human rights watchdog, Licahdo, the grassroots activist Community Peacebuilding Network and land-rights INGO, Bridges Across Borders Cambodia (BABC).
Læs videre på http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=90453
