Cambodia's Curse (42 page)

That made Nai Chineang and the others lucky indeed—until the city changed its mind. A developer named 7NG decided it wanted the land, paid whomever it needed to get a deed, and then tried to buy the land out from under the legal owners, Dey Krahorm’s residents. The company’s Web site showed Hun Sen hanging a gold sash over the CEO’s shoulder. Its caption said, “Cambodian National Award from Samdech Akka Moha Sena Padei Techo Hun Sen, Prime Minister of Royal Government of Cambodia.”

Hundreds of residents took the offer, generally about $3,500 and a home of sorts almost twenty miles away. But hundreds refused, so 7NG and its allies in the government began harassing them—driving bulldozers onto the property and knocking down buildings.

Foreign human-rights groups and others took up Dey Krahorm’s cause. A German filmmaker moved into a vacant home there as an act, he said, of “pure solidarity.” Yash Ghai, the UN human-rights representative for Cambodia, marched with the Dey Krahorm residents, prompting Hun Sen to say, “You are regarded just as a long-term tourist” and should leave the country because “I will not meet with you even if I live 1,000 years.” Soon after, Cambodia media reported, police and 7NG employees pelted the residents with rocks and bags of urine. “It’s too obvious now,” Kek Galibru, head of Licadho, the
human-rights group, said in the summer of 2008. Licadho was providing legal representation for the residents. “They can’t say the land belongs to the state, so now they try to scare them. Now it seems they changed a bit their method. Now in the last year, when their reputation is so bad, they are trying both the carrot and the stick” by offering more money.

She and other human-rights advocates began to believe they were winning. The government had finally realized the law was not on their side. Buoyed by this optimism, the remaining residents refused to take the new cash offers. “They want to kick us out, want to take our land,” Nai Chineang said. “They offered me $7,000. I can’t do anything with that. I want to stay here, in the city.”

They were wrong. In January 2009, three years after 7NG made the first offers to buy Dey Krahorm property, company enforcers showed up to expel the remaining 152 families. The residents had barricaded the streets and were lobbing stones at the police, but eventually they were rounded up, loaded on trucks, and carted away. As bulldozers knocked the houses down, the Council of Ministers’ land-grant documents were still tacked above the doors. More than a year later two dozen evicted families were still living in tents on the outskirts of town.

 

As the clamor about land seizures from the United Nations, human-rights groups, and foreign governments grew louder and more frequent, Hun Sen up a new government agency whose stated purpose was to ensure that evictees were treated fairly. He named it the National Land Authority and appointed Chum Bun Rong as deputy director. He was an older man, plump, confident, and self-satisfied. He’d been a second lieutenant in Lon Nol’s army. “I took off my uniform and ran” when the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh, he said. “I lived a lot of years in the jungle and ate insects.”

After the Vietnamese invasion he had served as spokesman for the Foreign Ministry. He started there while Hun Sen was still the foreign minister. More recently, he said, Hun Sen had assigned him to “act against negative information from outside the country. I am sort of a
quick-response person, the national spokesman.” A great deal of negative information coming from the outside now related to land seizures, and he said he was continuing to act as a special spokesman, even in his new job.

Chum Bun Rong said his agency had received more than 3,000 land-seizure appeals since he took office. Of those, he admitted, only about 50 had been judged in favor of the impoverished people whose land was seized. But the National Land Authority was not the final authority. Those 50 cases were sent on to the Cadastral Commission. There, the deputy director said, “some of those cases were resolved. Some were not. Sometimes they are resolved in a day. Sometimes the cases disappear.” When that happens victims call him, not the Cadastral Commission, he said. “But if a land concession is not organized properly, it’s the role of an NGO or a journalist to make sure the victims are heard.”

Boeng Kak, Andong, Dey Krahorm, and all those other terrible stories of evictions, “you have to think this is a case of propaganda,” he insisted. “There are different kinds of people who use these issues for their own political interests. We can say we are not doing perfect. But if you don’t like what we are, don’t vote for us. If the government does bad things, the people will rise up. Sometimes we protect the people. Sometimes we protect the interests of investors.” After all, he added, eyes wide, “some millionaires are behind some of these projects!” Thank goodness Hun Sen has his national spokesman on the job to protect evictees.

Chum Bun Rong said 200 people worked in his office. They had more than 700 appeals in hand just then, waiting for disposition. He gave a tour. Perhaps two dozen workers sat in offices. Some were looking at papers. Others appeared languorous, indolent. In 2006 Japan gave the Land Authority $615,000 for a departmental computer system, to help speed up the work. Japan, unlike the United States, then gave money directly to the government. During the tour, I saw a dozen ordinary desktop computers, worth perhaps $30,000 altogether. Asked about that, Chum Bun Rong grew agitated and said, “Oh, but there’s a
server in the basement!” He didn’t show it, but a server for a dozen personal computers would have to be gold-plated to cost $585,000.

 

By the summer of 2008, two years after the residents of Sambok Chap had been dumped in the rice field, physicians working for Licadho, the human-rights group, had visited Andong hundreds of times and performed almost 15,000 medical consultations, the group said. The residents’ most common health problems, the doctors found, were “malnutrition, typhoid, dengue fever, hepatitis A or B, hypertension, respiratory-tract infections, gastro-intestinal illnesses including stressrelated ulcers, depression and anger management problems.”

With all of those afflictions, the largest outside presence at the eviction site was a church, built by a Korean philanthropist who had decided what those Buddhist refugees needed most was a Christian church. So he built one, the only masonry building there, at the entrance to the Andong camp—the Happy Church, a sign out front announced. The preacher, thirty-four-year-old Thong Sopheak, could not identify the church’s denomination. He spoke vaguely of Protestantism and wore a yellow T-shirt that said in bold letters, “You! Man of God.” He said he did not deliver sermons.

The church started a school, and the preacher said 160 children attended. The teacher, twenty-eight-year-old Touch Vireak, said, “Last year we sent 12 students to junior high school. Two of those say they are preparing for high school.” But then he acknowledged that, perhaps, a Christian church may not have been the answer for these people. “The biggest need here is food. Food is very important. Some people don’t have enough, so they borrow from neighbors. Some of them are deeply in debt.” The preacher added: “They are still angry. They need help. They need electricity, they need water. They bought power from a local man who had a generator. But he charged very high prices. But the generator has been broken for two months. In my house I use candles and car batteries.”

By 2009, three years after the eviction, Andong had settled into a community of sorts, shambling bamboo huts sinking into the mud
along soggy, rutted dirt paths, most too narrow for a car to pass. Un Phea was gone, working in Pailin Province, harvesting corn and cassava. Sam Nhea, her twenty-three-year-old brother, was staying in her house. He was asleep on a front porch, a wooden platform he had added to her house two weeks earlier. Only shreds remained of the dengue-fever warning poster that had been tacked to the side of the house. Sam Nhea said he’d tried to tear it down. But he was an indolent sort and hadn’t finished the job. He said he worked construction but had stopped work to take care of his son. “He has a cold; he is not so healthy.” The boy lay naked on the wooden porch beside his father. He was five years old but looked to be about the size of a three year old. At noon, he was motionless, lapsing in and out of consciousness. When awake, his face offered only a blank stare. His father lifted the boy up by his hands. He was only about thirty inches tall. Here was malnutrition and stunting in the flesh. The boy could stand on his own as his father held his hands. But he was mute, and his big brown eyes did not evidence any awareness of his surroundings. His father let him down slowly, and once again the boy lay flat on the hard wooden porch and closed his eyes.

A tiny three-year-old girl laying in a hammock looked to be in the same shape. She was the size of an infant. “My wife usually breastfeeds her,” Sam Nhea said, pointing to the tiny, motionless girl. “That and some rice and maybe a sweet cake. But she’s not here now, so we just eat rice. I buy rice every day, one kilogram. This feeds four people, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Since my wife is away, I’m too busy to take them to the hospital.”

How would he take them even if he had time? “I would have to borrow a motorbike.” But he acknowledged he did not even know where the health clinic was. As we left, he lay down on his new porch and fell asleep again. Passing by an hour later, he still slept as his sick children lay quietly beside him, barely conscious.

Trying to institutionalize this wretched camp, the CPP appointed a village chief, Chhin Sarith. He built a real house with a concrete foundation and sat at a table in his two-car garage, beside an old Toyota.
“Sam Nhea, he worked as a street sweeper,” he said. “He was a drug addict. Amphetamines. He says he gave them up in 2008.” The chief ragged on his neighbor without restraint. “He was also a trash scavenger. Sometimes he worked as a beggar.”

Almost 1,400 families now lived at Andong. Directly behind the last row of homes, the rice paddy picked up again. But out by the highway, some rich person, probably an
oknya
, had built an eighteen-hole golf course, the Royal Phnom Penh Golf Club. Hun Sen played there from time to time.

Chhin Sarith talked up the benefits of this evictee camp. “Yes, people say they are still angry. It’s normal in this community for people to feel that way. But they know that where they lived before was not legal. Here we have the right of ownership. I consider myself lucky because I now have a piece of land—my own personal property. Here we are far away, yes, but in the old place my children did not go to school. Here they do. There are no drugs, no crime here, unlike the old place. Living here is far better.”

Un Sophal disagreed. She was Sam Nhea’s mother and lived down the road. All of her five children lived in Andong. She was forty-five and missing half of her bottom teeth, all on the right side, as if someone had slugged her. “I have no choice but to live here. I have no place else to live.” Without being asked, she told of the day, still fresh in her mind, when they were evicted from their homes. “The police, 300 or 400 of them, were there. They said if we refuse to leave they would bulldoze down our homes. They put us on trucks and took us out here and dumped us. There’s no business out here except picking bamboo and other wild things from the forest or shellfish out of the lake, three or four kilometers from here.”

A friend was making dinner as Un Sophal talked. She had mixed mashed rice with water until she had a thin gruel, a batter. She poured it into a frying pan resting on a three-arm concrete fire pit stuffed with burning twigs. As the batter hardened into a yellowish crepelike form, she filled it with bamboo sprouts that Un Sophal had cut up with a little knife. Then she folded over one side of the rice crepe.

“I am still angry, but I can’t do anything to them,” Un Sophal said, her voice hard-edged, more than three years after she and the rest of her family had been violently evicted. “I just keep it in mind. The CPP kicked us out of there, mistreated us a lot.” She was waving the knife over her head. “No electricity, no power, no water. Nothing!”

Thousands upon thousands of people, evicted from their homes, lived in makeshift camps like Un Sophal. Meanwhile, the government’s enablers were meeting regularly in Phnom Penh, helping ensure that Hun Sen could continue abusing his people at will.

I
n March 2008 the assorted NGOs, donors, and foreign governments that had been giving money to Cambodia since 1992 met in Phnom Penh once again to make their pledges for the coming year. As usual, the U.S. ambassador addressed the group, which included Hun Sen and almost every cabinet member.

Ambassador Mussomeli had thought about what to say, and in the end, addressing Hun Sen and the rest of his government, he told them, “In all candor, we, your development partners, are perplexed by the apparent lack of priority given to the anticorruption legislation. Anticorruption is the base of your development strategy and central to everything you hope to accomplish—yet, after ten years, the law remains in draft.” Since Charlie Twining’s time in office, most of Mussomeli’s predecessors had said more or less the same thing.

In fact, by the time Mussomeli took his turn, the anticorruption law had become a uniquely Cambodian chimera lost in a shell game. Thirteen years had passed since Hun Sen, trying to mute growing donor concern about corruption, had first promised to approve the law—thirteen years since Ambassador Twining had warned, “We are not threatening to cut our support at this time, but it is true that there is a
lot of competition for our aid dollars.” For the following few years nothing much happened but more promises—until no one was paying attention any longer as the nation fell into chaos culminating in 1996 and 1997, with the grenade attack, the “coup,” and the ugly aftermath. Soon after, however, pressure to pass the bill resumed. Donors, NGOs, and interest groups began publishing reports that were reflections of their growing frustration. In 2000, for example, the International Crisis Group published a widely read report entitled
Cambodia: The Elusive Peace Dividend
. “Cambodia remains a strongman state,” it asserted, “replete with lawlessness, human rights abuses, grinding poverty, corruption, bloated security forces, and an economy thriving on prostitution, narcotics trafficking, land grabbing and illegal logging.” The government, it insisted, must enact the law.