GETTING IT WRONG - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 78

evicted from there. The government then sold the land to private developers who prom-
ised to replace the hovels with clean modern apartments for the poor. That didn't happen.
The dispossessed were never given market value in return for their land and only half re-
ceived new apartments. A Cambodian nonprofit organization trying to help the evicted
said it was difficult to find any proof that money made from the sale ended up in the na-
tional treasury.
The Ministry of Tourism was given a large parcel of the newly empty land in Borei
Keila. In 2009 the ministry constructed a brand-new home—an imposing, pink-toned
modern building on a large piece of property on Monivong Boulevard, the main artery
in the capital. Forty-seven families were thrown out to clear the land for the new ministry
building. Most of those families ended up under tarpaulins near their old homes or in
camps far from the city center, not in the promised new apartments. When Prime Minis-
ter Hun Sen cut the ribbon for the ministry's grand inauguration, a video on the Internet
showed how the evicted families were still living in green tin sheds with no electricity, no
running water and garbage strewn in their narrow living space. A father begged Hun Sen:
“We are Khmer residents. We have rights, please save us.”
The video was filmed by LICADHO, a Cambodian human rights organization that
represented the residents before the government and courts. Founded by Kek Galabru, a
Cambodian doctor who played a critical role in bringing peace to her country, LICADHO
is one of a handful of human rights groups whose research and advocacy has laid bare the
enormity of the land-grabbing by the country's elite and its ties to tourism.
“This group had a very strong claim on their property based on the law of Cambodia.
They were discriminated against. They were moved, 'relocated,' to animal stalls. That was
their compensation for losing their homes,” said Mathieu Pellerin at LICADHO.
This is a distortion of a government's right of eminent domain for the public good.
Cambodia uses those powers to the opposite effect, creating the multimillion-dollar racket
that grabs land from the nation's poor to enrich the elite.
There is nothing hidden about this epidemic. In 2009 the United Nations Office of the
High Commissioner of Human Rights called for a moratorium on further evictions and
said it was “gravely concerned over reports that since the year 2000, over 100,000 people
were evicted in Phnom Penh alone; that at least 150,000 Cambodians continue to live un-
der threat of forced eviction; and that authorities of the State party are actively involved in
land-grabbing. . . . ”
Global Witness, the nonprofit British advocacy group, has documented how 45 percent
of the country's land has been deeded to private interests through these land grabs. (Land
is also grabbed to sell to agribusinesses as plantations, to mining companies, to logging
firms and, recently, to oil and gas companies.)