Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER NINE
The Scramble for Cambodia
It was an idyllic scene: an English garden with a gravel path and hedges trimmed square.
Superimposed in the center of the photograph, under an arch of pink roses, was a 13-year-
old girl in red Hello Kitty pajamas. Heng Chantha seemed tall for a girl her age. The sev-
enth of ten children born into a large farming family in Broma, a poor village in the back-
woods of Kratie province, Chantha had been forced into adulthood at an early age. Each
day she worked hard with her parents on the farm and helped her sisters prepare daily
meals. When she could find the time she studied at a nearby pagoda. This grainy photo,
snapped on a camera phone and set in a gold plastic frame, was now a valued family pos-
session. A year after it was taken, hundreds of soldiers and military police had stormed
into Broma to evict villagers from land belonging to a foreign rubber company. As she ran
to hide, Chantha was caught in the crossfire and killed.
For miles around Broma the land is barren, scraped clean by bulldozers belonging to
Casotim, the firm holding a 15,000-hectare rubber concession in the area. The village it-
self, on the edge of the concession area, is spread out along muddy roads that wind their
way through the chewed-up landscape. Ever since the concession was granted in 2010,
Broma's 1,000-odd families have been fighting with Casotim for farmland they claim was
included in the plantation zone; a month before the raid 700 people had blocked a national
road to protest the arrest of one of their community representatives.
The soldiers arrived on the morning of May 16, 2012. Chantha's mother, Houy Lai Han,
was planting beans when she saw them marching through the village. From what she could
recall, a group of villagers confronted the armed men, and tried unsuccessfully to block
their way. The soldiers responded by firing warning shots. As the crowd swelled there were
more shots, and the troops started advancing toward Lai Han's small home, a cramped
heap of wood and corrugated iron strung with blue tarps. Lai Han and her children ran
and hid, but Chantha sought cover away from the others, behind a wooden ledge near the
family's home. As a soldier approached, Chantha got up to see what was happening, and
the soldier fired a shot. The girl fell to the ground. “She said that she'd been injured,” her
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