Guardian: Cambodian elections: The women who lost their land and are now fighting for power
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Guardian: Cambodian elections: The women who lost their land and are now fighting for power
Cambodian elections: The women who lost their land and are now fighting for power
https://www.theguardian.com/global-deve ... r-politics
continue reading.Holly Robertson
Saturday 3 June 2017 09.00 BST Last modified on Saturday 3 June 2017 10.24 BST
For as long as she has been able to vote, Sok Da has supported the Cambodian People’s party (CPP). But on Sunday, the 44-year-old will turn on the party that has ruled Cambodia for decades: not only is she supporting the opposition in local commune elections, she’s standing as a candidate.
For Da, it is the last resort in her long battle for justice after her family’s 8.5 hectares of farmland were seized and their home demolished in 2014. “I shouted that they should kill me if they want to clear my land,” she says, adding that she was detained for four nights by police after the incident. “Now I am living with my younger sister, because I do not have my own land any more,” she says. “I’m so heartbroken.”
Like many Cambodians, Da has been caught on the twin prongs of a patchy national land registry system (the Khmer Rouge abolished private property ownership and it has not really got back on its feet since) and a long-running government policy of granting large tracts of land to private firms to encourage development, which led to more than 2.1m hectares being handed out as economic land concessions (ELCs).
Da’s commune has been bound up in a government grant to the timber magnate Try Pheap; they accuse his company of forcibly evicting them to make way for his MDS Special Economic Zone. Da’s last hope is that ousting the incumbent CPP commune chief will help them all get back their land. (Try Pheap did not respond to requests for comment.)
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Re: Guardian: Cambodian elections: The women who lost their land and are now fighting for power
I remember Sok Da in the media in 2014 - good on her, great way to fight back. Hope she stays alive.
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