A surprise victory for the Phnom Penh lakeside protests

After four years of courageous protest, residents living around Boeung Kak Lake in Phnom Penh have won their struggle against an illegal, but officially sanctioned, land grab. But this victory against unlawful eviction by rapacious developers was not sufficient to save one of the Cambodian capital's most picturesque lakes.

Tom Fawthrop

IN an extraordinary turnaround, about 3,000 Cambodians threatened with mass eviction from land skirting Phnom Penh's once-beautiful Boeung Kak Lake scored a landmark victory in August.

Shortly after the World Bank had taken the unusual action of freezing all future loans to Cambodia over this issue, Prime Minister Hun Sen, who heartily dislikes conditions attached to aid or loans, surprisingly issued a sub-decree on 17 August awarding 12.44 hectares to lakeside residents.

The many months of rolling protests and complaints filed by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) against the World Bank's original collusion with the authorities over mass evictions had brought about two dramatic policy reversals: 1) the Bank was forced to change course by 180 degrees; and 2) an equally dramatic change by the Cambodian authorities.

David Pred, Cambodian director of the NGO Bridges Across Borders, hailed this sudden change of government policy as 'a human rights victory that has stopped a massive forced eviction and a land grab.'

In March this year thousands of residents received eviction notices. Investors backed by the governor of Phnom Penh  were determined to clear the way for a controversial new 'City of the East' designed to replace a park and urban poor area with a posh residential and leisure complex.

Land prices in central locations in the Cambodian capital have soared on the back of a business and speculative boom. Local tycoons have worked with the government to clear areas occupied by the urban poor, leading to a wave of mass evictions.

The Housing Rights Coalition of NGOs has repeatedly appealed to the municipal government to examine the land claims of these urban poor communities and negotiate, instead of  treating them as de facto 'squatters'.  However, all appeals for justice had fallen on deaf ears, until this victory for residents around Boeung Kak Lake.

This pattern of arbitrary eviction with only paltry offers of compensation was succinctly summed up by Pred: 'Phnom Penh is rapidly being transformed into an exclusive city for the rich, devoid of public spaces, while the poor are deported to the periphery of the capital, where there are no jobs and no amenities.'

The demise of Boeung Kak Lake

Boeung Kak Lake, once a major attraction in the heart of Phnom Penh, is dying a lingering death as it is gradually filled with sand paving the way for an upmarket residential and shopping complex.

Back in the 1980s, Phnom Penh residents flocked to the lake as the biggest green space in the capital to enjoy picnics, live open-air music and theatre performances. But that is now no more than a nostalgic memory for the besieged residents.

In March around 10,000 people were served with eviction notices to make way for China's Erdos Hongjun Investment Corp to build the so-called 'City of the East'. There has so far been no public disclosure of the plans. This obscure Chinese company can neither be found in business directories nor discovered via a Google search.

Local authorities granted 133 hectares (330 acres) of the Boeung Kak site on a 99-year lease to a ruling party senator, Lao Meng Khin, director of Erdos Hongjun's joint venture partner, Shukaku. He is closely linked to the prime minister's right-hand man Sok An, the minister in charge of the cabinet and foreign investment.

Lao Meng Khin made a killing acquiring the 133 hectares for a mere $79m - about 4% of its estimated true market value.

Shukaku is strongly linked to Pheaphimex, a company well known for its huge land concessions.

As it is illegal to lease out public land, the nature of the land surrounding the lake was re-classified by a dubious sub-decree without any reference to parliament. Hence an important protected park zone was made available to dubious investors and speculators without any public debate or accountability.

Mok Mareth, the environment minister, initially raised concerns that filling in the lake would do serious damage to Phnom Penh's drainage system. An Australian study has also shown the lake has played a crucial role in reducing flooding of the inner city during the rainy season.

The city authorities offered the lakeside residents only meagre compensation, much less than the true market value of the land, with resettlement far out of the capital with few amenities and bleak prospects for employment.

The angry residents defied the eviction notices and refused to leave. Angry protestors took to the streets and demonstrated outside the City Hall.

One of them, Mrs Pol Nay, can well remember how Hun Sen had promised in an election speech over 20 years ago that the people would be recognised as the legal owners after five years (of occupancy). This principle was later enshrined in the 2001 Land Law.

However, Hun Sen and other Cambodian People's Party leaders readily ditched their pledges and promises to the urban poor when the land values around the centre of Phnom Penh soared, and the authorities excluded the lakeside residents from the rights bestowed by the new land law.

World Bank collusion

The stench from uncollected rubbish, rubble of destroyed tenements and lack of proper sewerage around the lake today, is matched by the foul smell of dubious deals and a land-grabbing scandal.

What made matters far worse for the people protesting the land grab was the complicity of the World Bank's Cambodia Land Management and Administration Project (LMAP), which had colluded with the Cambodian authorities in the arbitrary exclusion of the Boeung Kak Lake residents from the Bank's programme of mapping land claims, rights and titles.

One of the many terrible legacies of Khmer Rouge rule in the 1970s is based around the regime's abolition of money and private property. Nearly all documents about land claims and titles have been either lost or destroyed since 1979.

After liberation from the genocidal Pol Pot regime, there was a restoration of family life and the basic norms of society. Many lakeside residents had settled around the lake way back in the early 1980s.

The 2001 Land Law in theory allowed them to apply for a land title for the first time, and it appeared the World Bank's programme in partnership with the government would assist them. However, the authorities arbitrarily declared various urban poor sites in the centre of the city off-limits in 2007, and the Bank accepted without protest this erosion of the programme's integrity.

 Housing rights groups were furious about the Bank's complicity. David Pred from Bridges Across Borders and other NGOs filed complaints to the Bank headquarters, prompting an internal audit and investigation. The report on the investigation, released in March, concluded that 'poor management and a lack of monitoring by the World Bank had left thousands of Cambodians at Boeung Kak Lake vulnerable to forced eviction.'

This stinging criticism prompted the Cambodia office of the Bank to move into reverse gear and apply pressure on the government to stop further evictions and provide for on-site land rights, as the condition for future loans. A lack of response from the government led to a very unusual policy move by the Bank - in July it froze all future loans to Cambodia.

It appears that the 17 August sub-decree by the government to finally recognise the land claims of around 3,000 lakeside residents is the successful outcome of four years of courageous protest combined with NGO pressure which forced the eleventh-hour change of World Bank policy.

The victory was hailed by Pred as 'an incredible testament to what an organised, empowered community can achieve against the forces of unbridled greed and power.'

Sadly the protests were not able to save the lake itself, but at least 3,000 residents will no longer be forcibly dumped on the outskirts of the city with little or no compensation.

NGOs argue that this outcome flies in the face of the conventional wisdom among Cambodia's international donors, who are ever reluctant to hold the government and themselves accountable when flawed development projects end up harming people and violating their rights.  

Tom Fawthrop is a journalist and filmmaker who has been based in South-East Asia for 30 years. His latest documentary is Where Have All the Fish Gone?: Killing the Mekong Dam by Dam (Eureka Films).