A 75-year-old woman indigenous rights defender

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A 75-year-old woman indigenous rights defender

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Photo: Putla standing on the same road where she stopped the trolleys in 2009

15 May 2019

To counter this violence, some of the women from the villages volunteered to stand in front of blockades, as they were less likely to be beaten

If you drive two and a half hours West of Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh, you reach a community consisting of five small villages with a total population of around 1,350 people. They are the last members of the indigenous Souy people, who until recently, lived peacefully on their ancestral land. This is where the indigenous rights defender Putla has lived most of her life – except when she was forced to move away by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in 1979.

In the beginning of this millennium, the Souy people’s livelihood was under increasing pressure from newcomers who, illegally, entered their land and started cutting down trees. The illegal loggers were very effective, and, despite many attempts, the Souy people could not prevent a massive deforestation of their land and a dwindling harvest from their crops because of this. However, the situation deteriorated even more when a sugarcane company – with close ties to the President – was given the rights to around 200 hectares of the Kaoduntey village’s land; the village where Putla lives. The 200 hectares surrounded the village and covered many small waterholes that the villagers depended on to irrigate their crops.

The situation escalated in 2009, when the company tried to enter Souy peoples’ land in a surprise move one early morning. At that time, 65-year-old Putla was the first one who noticed the sound of the incoming trolleys. She immediately went out on the road and threw herself down in front of the trolleys to block it. As the trolley halted just a few meters from her, Putla yelled:

“I received many threats, but I didn’t care about it. I only care about my land. If I care about my life with my land, the life itself is meaningless without the land”, Putla explains, when asked where she got the courage to keep fighting for their rights.

In 2017, more than 400 environmental and human rights defenders were killed – and approximately 50 per cent of these were indigenous peoples.

Full https://www.iwgia.org/en/cambodia/3338- ... s-defender
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