Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER EIGHT
“A City With No Smoke and No
Sound”
The police came at dawn, with truncheons and tear gas. Roused by her grandson, Noch Ch-
houn barely had time to get out of her home before the fighting started and the bulldozers
arrived, demolishing her house and burying her family's possessions under an avalanche
of rubble and splintered wood. “If I didn't wake up I would have died there,” the 72-year
old said, standing outside the forlorn shack she now occupies at a resettlement site on the
outskirts of Phnom Penh, a flimsy assemblage of thin wooden poles, blue tarps, and strips
of corrugated iron.
On January 3, 2012, Chhoun and several hundred others were violently evicted from
Borei Keila, a derelict former sporting complex in central Phnom Penh. The eviction fol-
lowed months of standoffs between residents, city authorities, and security guards in the
pay of Phanimex, a well-connected Cambodian firm with permission to develop the site.
Eventually the police moved in, firing rubber bullets and tear gas in a bid to dislodge
the defiant residents, who responded by hurling bricks and setting tires alight. When the
people retreated the bulldozers came, smashing down dozens of wooden homes and level-
ing two concrete apartment blocks. All that remained were smoking heaps of debris, which
weeping residents picked over for clothes and other belongings.
“Our property was totally destroyed. We couldn't bring anything with us,” said Chhoun,
a feisty old lady in a grey singlet and floppy white fisherman's hat. The displaced families
were then trucked 45 kilometers out of town, dumped in an open field, and left to fend for
themselves. Another woman, Sok Saroeun, wiped away a tear as she described her arrival
at the desolate resettlement site. “Before we came it was still forest here,” she told me.
“The families who didn't have tents slept under the sky.”
A year later around a hundred families still eke out an existence at a sunbaked resettle-
ment zone known as Srah Po village. The small community sits within sight of Cambod-
ia's precolonial capital, Oudong, a hilltop bristling with historic stupas and spires where
