Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
years' jail for assaulting two men, despite thin and contradictory witness testimony.
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The protests snowballed. Amnesty International declared Bopha a prisoner of conscience.
Protesters burned fake $100 bills and hurled chili peppers at the municipal court in an
attempt to put a curse on the judiciary. Later, they symbolically burned sarongs outside
the CPP headquarters on Norodom Boulevard and dragged puppets representing corrupt
government officials through the dunes of Boeung Kak. The disappearance of Boeung
Kak lake had become the focus of an increasingly potent popular movement against urban
land evictions.
The residents had a strong case. The legality of Shukaku's lease hinged on Boeung
Kak's status under a new Land Law passed in 2001. The law defined Boeung Kak
as “state public land,” a category of land with a public interest use—including roads,
schools, hospitals, and natural resources such as forests, lakes, and rivers—which cannot
be legally transferred unless it has lost its “public interest value.” In August 2007, to get
around the law, the government arbitrarily reclassified the lake as “state private land,”
thus retrospectively legalizing its lease to Shukaku. The legal conjuring act was conduc-
ted without due process. As one land rights activist told me at the time, “we have no clue
whether Boeung Kak has been properly inventoried as state public property. They pick
and choose what is state private land and what is state public land in a manner that is con-
venient to them.”
But the reclassification created legal complications. Under the Land Law, residents liv-
ing on state private land for five years prior to 2001 had the right to apply for legal title
to the land. By reclassifying the lake in order to provide cover for an illegal lease, the
government now arguably activated residents' property rights. Either the lake and its sur-
rounds were state public land, and the Shukaku lease was illegal, or it was state private
land, and the residents could claim ownership. Legally speaking, the city couldn't have it
both ways. But with the waters creeping upward, the law would eventually become moot.
In this sense the Boeung Kak case reflected a wider failure. In 2002 the World Bank
and other major donors had set up a program known as the Land Management Adminis-
tration Project (LMAP), which aimed to create an efficient and transparent land adminis-
tration system in Cambodia and to “reduce poverty, promote social stability, and stimulate
economic development.” The $38.4 million project envisioned the creation of hundreds
of thousands of land titles in Phnom Penh and elsewhere around the country. But from
the beginning LMAP struggled to fulfill its mandate. While nearly a million titles were
handed out across the country between 2002 and 2009—a creditable achievement—it re-
fused to issue titles for disputed land, leaving conflict resolution to the Cambodian courts,
which ruled inevitably on the side of big business.
LMAP's backers were easily seduced by the mirage. The World Bank and the other
donors involved in the project seemingly made little attempt to assess the government's
