On 8th May, 2010, a group of armed forces escorted tractors to destroy people’s houses area in O’ Ponlork, Omlaning commune, Thporng district, Kg. Speu province. This destruction occured without any permission or respect of the guidelines of the sub-committee for land resolution. They didn’t have any permission or decision from the court either.
On 8th May, 2010, some villagers from Oral district, who were also affected by this land dispute, attempted to burn the bulldozers to stop them from clearing their lands, but failed beacause the soldiers took the gasoline away from them. Then, the soldiers threatened the villagers, saying that if anyone tries to disturb the company’s work, they would be arrested.
On April 20th, 2010, there was a meeting between the villagers and the Provincial Authorities in Omlaing commune office in which no one from the company participated. Deputy Provincial Governor, Mr. Pen Sompo, District Govenor, Mr. Tuon Suong, Provincial Cadastral officer, Commune Council members and the director of Deum Ampil news center, Mr. Soy Sopheap attended that meeting. This meeting was not part of an official resolution mechanism of the ELC at all : the authorities just made the statistics of the numbers of families who attended the meeting to recognize them as victims and recorded the size of their lands as affected areas, which made up 842 families and 2154.5 hectares of land in total. Then, they set up the working group to measure those lands directly.
After this meeting, the working group went to the disputed land area to measure the villagers’ land according to the statistics made on 20th April. However, they decided not to measure the land under the size of 0.5 hectares, neither the land which has no rice stubbles, saying that the land without rice stubbles or the land under the size of 0.5 hectares are the state land already. This made the people very upset. Even though the working group was proceeding measuring the land, the company has been continuing clearing the people’s land, which made people so worried that they would lose their land and lead them to attempt to burn down the company’s tractors. In this land dispute, there is another big problem that the district authorities in this area do not manage their boundaries of land clearly. The company has got the permission to clear the land from Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries but the people have legal documents to occupy customary land there which was issued by Oral district authority, which means that those lands overlaps each other. Until now, villagers has being very worried about losing their farming land because the process of the measurement is slow and not done for all land during one month period. Human rights groups are also concerned that the measurement will be useless because we have seen the company already set up the new lands of relocation site for affected people which are located along the Hill of Pis Mountain. There are also more than 20 houses on the relocation site so that anyone cannot refuse this eviction to relocation site arranged by company.
Recently we have seen an increasing number of armed forces, gendarmes, soldiers and police deployed surround the land in order to protect and prevent people from entering into the farm. The setting up of these armed forces has started since 18 March 2010, when people burned down company’s shelters. According to the villagers, those armed forces get salaries from the state, from the company as guards and as workers, which means they get salaries three times and this is a serious problem. It is totally illegal that the national soldiers serve to protect a private company rather than the nation. During the measurement, we got information from the people that if any one dares to stand up or organize protest again, he/she will be arrested, because authority also has been trying to resolve problem and distributed land to people. This warning made people scared and fragile in helping each other.
Conclusion:
The land measurement by the sub-committee seems to be a pretext of the company and the authorities to break down people’s solidarity and to prevent them from protesting.
Recommendations;
ADHOC should submit a report to the government to urge the company to respect the guidelines of notice from Council of Ministers No.175 dated on 25th February 2010.
Phnom Penh, 11 May 2010
ADHOC
The Land and Natural Resources Rights Program
