Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ing of a highway overpass in late 2012. Looking back to 1979, he said, “there were sec-
tions where people [could] sleep for a week without any car to disturb them. Now Phnom
Penh is a city of heavy traffic.”
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Many of these developments have been overwhelmingly positive. But the city's growth
has been unplanned and chaotic, the result of a system of economic incentives that mar-
ries the maximum of rapacity with the minimum of regulation. The profit motive reigns
supreme, to the detriment of the old, the jerry-rigged, and the informal. City officials of-
ten refer to the urban poor and their settlements with the Khmer word
anatepadei
, mean-
ing “anarchy.” The word fills official statements and crops up in the speeches of muni-
cipal officials, who denounce “slums” (
samnang anatepadei
, “anarchic constructions”)
as “illegal” settlements standing between Phnom Penh and its modern, developed future.
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 trans-
formation 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 loc-
ation 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 conglomer-
ate owned by his wife, Choeung Sopheap, which controls 7.4 percent of Cambodia's total
un-Cambodian name—
shukaku
means “harvest” in Japanese—was clearly chosen to de-
ceive. 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. Resid-
ents 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 mar-
