The Scramble for Cambodia - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 180

Koh Kong in 2009, I observed LYP's dredgers operating around the clock, scooping up
sand and piling it onto barges belonging to a Hong Kong-based partner firm. The vessels
chugged offshore and dumped their loads into a bulk carrier bound for Singapore. At the
height of the operation in 2009, Global Witness estimated that 796,000 tons of Cambodi-
an sand were being mined from Koh Kong each month by concessionaires including LYP,
a haul estimated to be worth $248 million at the time. 38
Environmentalists warned that untrammeled dredging threatened fish stocks and del-
icate mangrove ecosystems by churning up the seabed and spilling effluents into the wa-
ter. Fishermen spoke of similar disruptions. Hauling his net out of the deep green waters
of the Koh Pao River, 38-year-old Chun Doeun told me about the unusual behavior of
the local crabs, which had recently been paddling up to the water's surface. “[This] is a
strange habit for this kind of species. Crabs always dwell on the riverbed,” he said, as a
sand-filled barge puttered past, bound for a cargo ship glued to a blue horizon. Doeun had
been fishing the area for 15 years, and said his catches had never been so low.
Little of the province has been spared. Farther down the coast, the government has
carved out a huge chunk of Botum Sakor National Park and granted it to a Chinese com-
pany with plans to spend $3.8 billion on building a fantasy tourist resort. If things go
according to plan, large swathes of unspoiled jungle will become a self-contained city
featuring hotels, golf courses, a port, and a casino (“Angkor Wat on Sea”), linked by a
64-kilometer access highway. Forest and wildlife have already been destroyed, killed, or
displaced, as have more than a thousand local residents. 39
To the north, in remote corners of the thickly forested Cardamom Mountains, loggers
operate far from the reach of the law. The rivers that course through the jungle valleys
have been earmarked for hydropower dam developments which threaten to inundate the
homes of hundreds of villagers and create opportunities for the “removal” of old-growth
forest. 40 Back down in the plains, there is sugar. In September 2006, 250 families were
thrown off their land in Sre Ambel district to make way for a sugar plantation owned by
Ly Yong Phat. “The police destroyed the villagers' crops and houses with a bulldozer and
brutally attacked the villagers who resisted the eviction,” the Asian Human Rights Com-
mission reported. Five people were reported injured; another two were shot. 41 Hundreds
now toil in the sugar fields for small wages.
Contrary to the Cambodian government's claims, its economic land concession program
has failed to benefit most people in rural areas. The real result has been a spate of land dis-
putes which are seldom resolved fairly and have left tens of thousands of families home-
less. Historically, Cambodia never had a problem with landlessness. Life was harsh, but
there was almost always enough land to go around, and more could always be cleared.
When Cambodia adopted a system of private property in 1989, land distribution was rel-