GETTING IT WRONG - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 79

Land for the Cambodian tourism industry was opened up in 2005 when Prime Minister
Hun Sen said he was resuming his land concession program despite earlier pledges to wait
until those already evicted could be resettled.
“I have to make a decision for my country's development,” he told a group at the
Government Private Sector Forum in Phnom Penh, a government group that coordinates
private investment, especially foreign investment. “I can't wait. So I have gone ahead to
provide concession land to investors. This is a necessary way to attract investment.”
The government then revoked the protected public status of the southern coast and its
pristine islands, putting the property up for sale to private, largely foreign, investors. This
breathtaking breach of the public trust put on the market the country's coastline along the
Gulf of Thailand, which had been declared state public land by the coalition government
of the 1990s. Reversing that designation was as shocking for Cambodians as it would be for
Americans if the government in Washington suddenly put most of the U.S. national parks
up for sale to foreign bidders.
Adding to the insult, the government sold the land at bargain prices and gave foreign
investors extraordinary financial enticements, including nine-year tax holidays. The coun-
try already had a reputation for lax enforcement of money-laundering laws, and it allows
holding companies in Cambodia to be 100 percent foreign-owned.
Within three years the entire coastline and most of the islands were privately owned,
and resorts for tourism were under construction everywhere. Cambodia's natural heritage
of coral reefs, endless stretches of empty, palm-fringed beaches, and sapphire-blue waters
had been sold off.
The human cost was enormous. Whole communities were summarily evicted despite
a 2001 law that requires due process and full compensation in these cases. Farmers and
fishermen fought back as police and the army burned down their villages on government
orders, bulldozing fields and orchards and tearing down docks.
Photographs of the evictions are heartbreaking. In one series, a khaki-clothed official
orders everyone to lie on the ground facedown as police officers torch their thatched huts.
Helmeted police with shields and batons beat back anyone who protests. Fires burn away
everything but villagers' large earthen water jars. With their plastic bags and confused chil-
dren, the newly homeless villagers are forcibly marched away.
Those villages and wild open spaces were replaced by a mix of seedy hotels, private lux-
ury resorts, and rampant sex tourism. Coastal resorts from Sihanoukville, the largest and
the least attractive, to Kep and Koh Kong, exploded with tension as the new private own-
ers took control of the land. Stories of evictions and clashes over ownership are common-
place. More than 100 families fought eviction from the homes overlooking Serendipity
Beach and lost. Now that beach is famous among the Lonely Planet crowd as the Waikiki
of Cambodia.