Page 1 of 2 Cambodia feels China's hard edge
By Yin Soeum
MONDOLKIRI, Cambodia - Chinese investments and contested land acquisitions in
provincial Cambodia are stirring resentment and in some instances full-blown
unrest, revealing a seldom-seen hard edge to Beijing's soft-power economic push
into Southeast Asia.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has prioritized luring Chinese investment into
his war-torn country to mitigate its historic reliance on Vietnam and more
recent dependence on Western aid
to keep the economy afloat. Chinese investors have recently filled large
sections of Cambodia's private-sector gap through building infrastructure,
establishing factories, and overseeing the construction of a new government
Council of Ministers building in the capital Phnom Penh.
China's economic assistance to Cambodia has stood out as a showcase example of
Beijing's growing clout in the region. But those growing ties are now becoming
more complicated, as China's economic penetration into more remote corners of
the country starts to spark emotionally charged foreign-versus-local land
conflicts. Legal uncertainty concerning Cambodian land ownership and usage
rights combined with China's sometimes rough-and-tumble business practices have
resulted in a volatile mix in the northeastern province of Mondolkiri.
In August 2004, the Cambodian government agreed in principle to grant China's
Wuzhishan LS Group a 199,999-hectare land concession for a period of 99 years,
including an immediate allocation of 10,000 hectares to develop into a
commercial pine-tree plantation in this remote, impoverished province. The
problem: the original 10,000 hectares earmarked for an experimental phase of
the project has gradually widened to encompass lands settled by villagers, who
were not consulted by government officials about the terms and conditions of
the land concession.
Local protest groups contend that the government failed to undertake an
environmental or social impact assessment before approving the Chinese
development project, and the local population and authorities were not
consulted about the state-backed plan. Nor did local authorities make publicly
available maps delineating the areas where the Chinese company was officially
permitted to operate.
The World Rain Movement, an international environmental group, contends in a
report that the government awarded Wuzhishan a land area 20 times as large as
is permitted by Cambodia's 2001 Land Law. Other environmental and human-rights
groups contend that the controversial concession overlooks provisions in the
same law that grant collective ownership title to indigenous groups that have
inhabited lands for generations. About half of Mondolkiri province's population
consists of the animistic Phnong tribe, which claims the lands Wuzhishan aims
to develop.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Cambodia, meanwhile,
has gently waded into the controversy, confirming the details of the
controversial deal without publicly passing judgment. Wuzhishan declined
several interview requests for this article.
This land is my land
The month after the concession was granted, Wuzhishan began spraying large
amounts of noxious herbicides to clear the land for planting, prompting local
concerns that the chemical runoff might contaminate rivers, flora and fauna.
Villagers who spoke with Asia Times Online claimed that the company quickly
transcended the ill-defined 10,000 hectares and began to encroach on and in
certain instances destroy shrines and graves on ancestral burial sites.
On April 4, 2005, 70 villagers from the nearby Sen Monorom commune protested
against the company's activities at its designated Site 1, which Nga Narim, a
26-year-old villager, claims impinges on the commune's centuries-old
traditional burial grounds, forests and communal grazing areas. Cambodian
authorities, however, have so far sided with the Chinese investor, and police
dispersed that particular protest with fire hoses. A deputy governor finally
intervened, promising to respond to the people's demands, but failed to follow
up, Nga Narim contends.
In June 2005, a larger group of 650 villagers demonstrated outside of the house
of the Chinese company's technicians and supervisors. According to local
villagers, the company representatives that day acknowledged their mistakes,
promised to cease many of their operations and return contested land to
villagers. Yet more than a year later, those pledges still had not been honored
as the company continued to develop the land, they allege.
In a sign of the times, Cambodian officials have consistently sided with the
Chinese over the local population. When the first local protests kicked up in
January 2005, provincial authorities summoned the relevant commune councilors
and pressured them to sign and approve a map of the concession area that
encompassed more than 86,894 hectares of land and was often illegible,
according to a person familiar with the meeting. When
