Hun Sen's Cambodia by Strangio Sebastian

Author:Strangio, Sebastian [Strangio, Sebastian]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Itzy, Kickass.so
ISBN: 9780300190724
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-11-28T05:00:00+00:00

Boeung Kak was once a lake. Now it’s a massive expanse of sand, dotted here and there with the shells of old buildings awaiting demolition—the first stage in its planned transformation into a futuristic matrix of leafy streets and luxury condominiums. When the Phnom Penh city authorities first announced plans to develop the lake in 2007, leasing it to an obscure company called Shukaku, Inc., the only thing standing in its way were the 4,000 families who lived around its edges. Many had called the area home since the 1980s, when parts of the lake’s shores were a public park. Boeung Kak was also the location of a strip of cheap tourist guesthouses and bars, where people could drink beer and eat shrimp while the sun set over the water.

Residents in one of the city’s prime undeveloped areas faced a looming collision with one of the captains of Cambodian industry. Lao Meng Khin, a powerful tycoon and CPP senator, had set up Shukaku as a front company for Pheapimex, a powerful conglomerate owned by his wife, Choeung Sopheap, which controls 7.4 percent of Cambodia’s total land area through controversial logging and economic land concessions.14 The decidedly un-Cambodian name—shukaku means “harvest” in Japanese—was clearly chosen to deceive. Shukaku had no permanent office address. Its lease was negotiated in secrecy, with no input from any of the people who would eventually be affected by it. In some ways it was no wonder: Shukaku’s plans for the lake envisioned the largest displacement of people since the Khmer Rouge emptied Phnom Penh in April 1975.

What happened next followed a familiar script. Water and electricity were cut. Residents received eviction notices. Then, on one morning in August 2008, they woke to the sound of a large iron pipe pumping a sludge of sand and water into the lake. Rather than opt for a mass eviction, Shukaku let the rising waters do their work for them, flooding residents’ homes with mud. As the waters rose, homes and businesses that had stood by the lake for years were gradually abandoned and demolished. In desperation many people accepted cash compensation payments of $8,600—an amount that fell far below the market value of the land. Others forewent cash and accepted compensation housing at a relocation site 25 kilometers from town, far from schools, jobs, and health care. Real estate agents estimated that the 133-hectare lakeside site could be worth more than $1.3 billion on the open market, and maybe twice that once developed. Shukaku paid just $79 million for its lease.

Lakeside resident Tep Vanny, then 27, remembers receiving a letter from the authorities informing people about the Shukaku lease and promising them they would not be affected by the project. “But they cheated us,” Vanny told me later. “The municipal government sold the land illegally to the private company without coming to negotiate with the villagers who live here.” Boeung Kak soon became a flashpoint for rising discontent about urban land evictions. Residents from the lake, led by a

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