Chhay Channyda, Phnom Penh Post, Aug. 28 2012
About 100 villagers from Pailin province travelled to Phnom Penh
yesterday to ask Prime Minister Hun Sen to intervene in their 70-hectare
land dispute with the provincial governor, a village representative
said.
Dem Deam, 40, a resident of Pailin’s Stung Trang commune in Sala Krao
district, said that the villagers came to Phnom Penh to pass along a
petition to Hun Sen’s cabinet, asking it to send volunteers to issue
them titles for the more than 2,100 hectares of land they have farmed
for more than a decade, including 70 hectares which villagers say were
recently cleared and converted into cassava fields by Governor Y Chhean.
“We requested the land title from the authorities because we have
lived there for 12 years, but they said our land is private state land
and protected state land, so the land volunteer students did not go to
measure,” said Deam. “We suggested to the prime minister to urge the
students to do it for us because we’ve lived there for a long time.”
“Local authorities said it belongs to Y Chhean, who did not allow students to measure land for us,” he added.
On June 14, Hun Sen issued a sub-decree giving authorities across the
country six months to measure parcels of land for people embroiled in
land disputes in protected forests and on lands given as economic
concessions to companies.
According to Deam, the villagers’ land had never been disputed
before, but in February, workers bulldozed the land to plant cassava
believed by villagers to belong to Chhean.
Kong Chamroeun, a complaint officer in Hun Sen’s cabinet, said that he accepted the petition yesterday evening.
“I received [the petition], and am working with them,” he said.
Prak Sophima, the Pailin provincial co-ordinator for the rights group
Adhoc, said yesterday that the land in question affected five villages
in Stung Trang commune, and confirmed that some parcels had been cleared
for plantations.
Y Chhean could not be reached for comment.
