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Cambodia feels China's hard edge
By Yin Soeum
councilors Sen Monorom and Phoeul Tret refused to sign, the officials
threatened to remove them from their official positions, he said.
The Cambodia Human Rights Action Committee issued a statement this June calling
on the government to intervene and ensure that Wuzhishan respected local laws
and called on Wuzhishan to stop all activities on the land until an independent
environmental and social impact assessment was undertaken.
Reacting to international pressure groups, Nout Sa An, a representative of the
government's inter-ministerial committee, on July 8 met with community
representatives and promised that the Chinese company would stop its activities
while the government solved the problem. He also promised to move police
officials from the area who had served as the company's security guards.
As of October, villagers still complained that Wuzhishan was actively working
the contested land.
"We have no recourse," said villager Dos Prek, 37. "The company and government
officials use threats and intimidation. Now we fear arrest for trespassing on
land that was taken from us. Even when we complain, they continue to encroach
on our grazing land, spiritual forests and burial areas."
Resurrecting the past
After decades of war and years of lawlessness, Cambodia's land ownership and
usage laws are often arbitrarily enforced. The country's transition toward more
capitalism has been marred by a growing number of cases of corrupt government
officials and politicians grabbing land for personal gain from villagers. And
increasingly, Chinese companies find themselves in the middle of controversial
land deals.
As the controversy mounted in Mondolkiri province, Hun Sen announced in a
speech last year his intention to amend land laws that limited the size of land
concessions for development purposes. Wuzhishan, which manages a massive pine
plantation on China's Hainan island, has quickly emerged as a major player in
Cambodia's timber, pulp and paper industry.
The Chinese plantation giant has close ties with Cambodia's politically
connected agri-industrial conglomerate Pheapimex, which helped to grease the
wheels for Wuzhishan to win a 315,000-hectare plot in Pursat and Kampong
Chhnang provinces for a eucalyptus-tree plantation. Environmental groups claim
more than 100,000 people could lose their homes to make way for that project.
The issue has become a political hot potato and threatens to resurrect
Cambodia's now latent anti-Chinese sentiments. Sun Chhay, an opposition
politician with the Sam Rainsy Party, contends that Chinese investors'
willingness to pay above local market prices for Cambodian land is fueling a
nationwide land-grabbing phenomenon where local officials claim to appropriate
public lands for development projects but in reality sell to Chinese investors
for personal gain.
If that is so, it tracks a similar pattern to China's capitalist development
model, where corrupt officials frequently lay claim to land that under the
communist system was owned by the state but with the infusion of more
capitalism is often in legal limbo. Land grabs have contributed heavily to the
growing rural unrest in China, and now Chinese investors in cahoots with
unscrupulous Cambodian officials threaten to unleash a similar restive
phenomenon that could undermine Cambodia's transition toward a market economy,
some analysts say.
That's a particularly risky course for Chinese investors, particularly
considering the two countries' recent political history. Beijing's support in
the 1980s through the early 1990s for the murderous Khmer Rouge regime,
including supplies of weapons and ammunition, fueled and sustained the
country's damaging civil war against the ruling communist regime implanted by
Vietnam.
Many Cambodians still harbor bitter feelings toward China for its strong
support of the genocidal Maoist regime, which stands accused of killing more
than 1.7 million people. More recently, China has transcended its often
unfortunate history in the region by placing emphasis on bilateral economic
relations over political and strategic concerns. Yet in Cambodia, that
diplomatic strategy is being undermined by certain investments that put profits
before the local people Beijing is supposedly trying to win over.
Yin Soeum is a freelance journalist based in Phnom Penh.
