| Chut Wutty: gunned down (Photo: The Phnom Penh Post) |
| Heng Chantha: killed by government soldiers (Photo: The Phnom Penh Post) |
| 13 Boeung Kak Lake residents unfairly arrested and jailed |
July 18, 2012
By MU SOCHUA and CECILIA WIKSTRÖM
Op-Ed Contributor
The New York Times
PHNOM PENH — An anti-logging activist
is murdered, a teenage girl is shot and killed by police during a
forcible eviction, 13 women are sentenced to up to two-and-a-half years
in prison simply for holding a protest on land from which they’ve been
expropriated. These are recent examples of the all-too-familiar human
rights abuses that result from the Cambodian government’s disastrous
land policy.
Investment in Cambodia’s
agriculture sector is long overdue. But instead of passing reforms that
would help the country’s many farmers and villagers better use their
land — 80 percent of the total population is rural — the government has
signed off almost 11,600 square miles of Cambodia’s arable land to
investors, including major Chinese and Vietnamese companies and local
firms with ties to the governing Cambodian People’s Party (C.P.P.).
That’s more than two-thirds of
all arable land in Cambodia, according to a senior adviser at the human
rights group Licadho. What’s more, according to Amnesty International,
in 2008 some 150,000 Cambodians were at risk of being evicted, meaning
that some 420,000 Cambodians have been affected by evictions since 2003.
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