Landgrabbing Hounds Cambodia’s Ethnic Groups

RATANAKIRI, Cambodia, Jun 27 (Newsmekong) - The wording of the two-page document in Dam Chanthy’s hands may be vague and legalistic, but the meaning is crystal clear. It details yet another land concession covering nearly 7,000 hectares that a company wants to plant with rubber and acacia trees.

Chanthy, coordinator of a local indigenous non-government group called the Highlander Association, does not know the company, Oryung Construction, or where it is from.

The first that the affected people in the remote Andong Meas district of Ratanakiri province in Cambodia’s north-east heard about the deal was when bulldozers turned up to start clearing the land.

“There has been no consultation,” claimed Chanthy. “(The bulldozers) were the only reason the three ethnic minority villages affected by the plantation found out about it.”

It is an increasingly common scenario in this remote but resource-rich province, which borders Laos and Vietnam.

 Ratanakiri’s isolation has been shattered by rapid economic growth and a government policy known as the Triangle Development Strategy, which aims to develop the country’s northeast.

According to the 1994 census, Cambodia’s 24 Indigenous groups comprise approximately one percent of the country’s 14 million population, though the number is likely to be higher due to people’s reticence to identify themselves as ethnic minority – a legacy of the Khmer Rouge who savagely persecuted them.

Although spread across 15 of the country’s 24 provinces, ethnic minorities are most highly concentrated in Ratanakiri and the adjoining province of Mondulkiri to the south. 

Previously neglected with poor access to services, low levels of schooling and literacy rates, and little understanding of their rights, indigenous people now find themselves sitting on valuable land. Ratanakiri boats of fertile volcanic soil, which is the colour and texture of ground coffee, making it much sought after for large-scale agribusiness. Mining, tourism and biofuel interests are also moving into the area.

Chanthy is not exactly sure about her age. “I think it is around 52,” she speculated. Her mother was from the Tampuen minority group and her father, Lao and Jarai.

Her uncertainty about the letter in her hands is generally reflective of the situation in Ratanakiri.

Rumours and gossip about possible concessions and new land deals are everywhere, accompanied by speculation about what companies are involved and which powerful interests in Phnom Penh and locally back them.

Getting information about these is difficult because nothing is made public, least of all to the locals who could be affected. “The local people only have this letter, and even this they did not want to give us. But we insisted,” said Chanthy. “There are many documents that we have not yet received, including the contract for the concession.”

She is fairly sure land covered by the concession is classified as state public land, meaning it cannot legally be sold under Cambodian law.

According to a 2007 report on land concessions in Cambodia by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights in Phnom Penh, a South Korean firm, Oryung Construction, received a concession in April 2006 although the area covered is unclear.

The company’s representative office in Phnom Penh did not return a request for comment on the issue.

The letter “clearly states that the deal is acceptable only if the community agree. But they have not followed this and have started clearing the land,” said Chanthy. “This is just one example. There are cases of land grabbing throughout the province.”

Most of the eight ethnic minority groups represented in Ratanakiri use land collectively and all of them practise traditional subsistence shifting cultivation.

This is breaking down as companies clear and fence off land, prohibiting local people from accessing it. This has major social and cultural implications and is leading to decreasing agricultural yields in some areas.

An August 2006 report produced by Cambodia’s NGO Forum states that the problem of land alienation in Ratanakiri “has progressed to the stage where some communities have disintegrated”.

It is a similar story in neighbouring Mondulkiri. 

A recent report in the English-language ‘Cambodia Daily’ said the Interior Ministry is negotiating disputes between ethnic minority people and companies involving at least four land concessions in the province.

A report by Amnesty International earlier this year documented a case in Mondulkiri where local Phnong people affected by a pine tree concession were not consulted prior to conclusion of a concession agreement between the government and a company in 2004.

Once the two parties had reached agreement, Amnesty said local elders were pressured to thumbprint their approval on a map, which then constituted the agreement. One person told of how he had to sign at the house of a high-ranking official in the presence of military police and company representatives.

Another elder was confronted on a remote road and asked for his thumbprint.

The plantation has enveloped and partly destroyed farmlands, forests, crops, ancestral forests and traditional burial sites.

Amnesty and other rights advocates say lack of information and the contradictory role played by government officials is often backed up by the threat of police and military force.

In late May, a plan by hundreds of minority people to hold a march through the provincial capital of Ratanakiri to protest landgrabbing and illegal logging in their ancestral lands was shelved after threats of arrest.

“The main issue is that Indigenous people have a very low level of education and they are easily cheated out of their land,” said Chanthy.

The majority of Cambodia’s ethnic minority people do not read, write or speak Khmer, let alone understand their legal rights or concepts like a contract or land title.

“Many Indigenous people do not have the traditional tools to measure land in the way we would understand it or to understand the implications of selling,” said Sek Sophorn, coordinator of the International Labor Organisation’s (ILO) indigenous programme in Cambodia.

LEGAL PROTECTION

There are mixed views about the protection afforded to Indigenous people by the country’s land laws. 

“The land laws are good in theory but they have not been implemented,” said Chanthy.

Many legal advocates maintain the 2001 land law gives clear protection to ethnic people who manage land through traditional customs, but not everyone agrees. Some have questioned whether Indigenous communities manage land according to customs, because they may possess a mobile phone or motorbike.

The key aspects of the law relating to minority people are not enforceable pending a sub-decree on the registration of Indigenous collective land. This has been drafted but is yet to be passed by the country’s National Assembly.

“The process is very slow and there is mounting concern that there will be little Indigenous land left to title by the time the decree has been adopted and the titling process begins,” said Amnesty in its February report. 

But some Cambodian NGOs are critical of the sub-decree, which they believe undermines the progressive aspects of the 2001 law. They want its passage delayed further so changes can be made.

Other observers argue that powerful people actually have a vested interest in keeping the laws vague.

“The issue here is resource exploitation,” said one legal expert familiar with the situation. “If you define Indigenous people’s rights more clearly, you give them greater power over who can come onto their land and what they can do. A lot of people are not interested in doing this.”

Cambodia’s weak judiciary, the worst in Asia after Burma according to a World Bank report released this week, compounds the situation. 

Officials in Ratanakiri’s provincial administration “do not help”, Chanthy said diplomatically. Indeed, many locals claim local officials are themselves heavily involved in land speculation.

In response to requests for support, local and provincial authorities reportedly told the Angong Meas people that the concession had already been issued and that villagers had no right to complain.

Chanthy said local police had recently visited the Highlander Organisation, and pointedly inquired whether the NGO was properly registered and how many members it had.

COLLECTIVE APPROACH 

While broader legal changes are needed, many argue something must to be done now to help reconcile private market forces with ethnic people’s traditional communal ways of managing land.

One answer involves registering them as a community, part of a pilot programme run by the ILO and the Ministry of Interior’s Department of Local Administration.

This is aimed at speeding up registration of Indigenous community as legal entities, using a similar process to the one used to register NGOs. This involves every person in the village making a decision about wanting their land to be administered collectively. They must then draft by-laws, nominate and elect a group of elders and take minutes of these proceedings. Everyone over the age of 18 is required to fill out paperwork agreeing to give up personal possession of land.

Sophorn acknowledges that the process is time consuming and difficult, given that all the required paperwork must be in Khmer.

“It is very complicated and is not really the Indigenous way. Not many villagers understand it, even a lot of NGOs do not understand it,” he said. “At least it is a start and we hope to be able to correct or improve some aspects of the process.’

“From a grassroots level, we need to equip these communities with basic documents to prove they are an indigenous community and provide some legal training so they have a voice,” he added.

Still, Chanthy is optimistic. “The most positive change I can see is that communities are slowly gaining more knowledge about their rights.”

Several days later, ethnic minority villagers from Andong Meas and other areas affected by land problems organised themselves to get to Phnom Penh, where they lodged a complaint with government and company representatives.

“I always tell the villagers that you will be poor if you let them take your land,” Chanthy cautioned. “We are not afraid any more. We have to be brave.” (END/IPSAP/NMKG/AN/JS/08)