‘Slaves’: migrant speaks of abuse

By May Titthara
The Phnom Penh Post

EIGHT migrants who said they were forced to work like “slaves” on a Malaysian fishing vessel were returned to Cambodia Saturday after spending five months in immigration detention, officials and rights groups said.

The migrants reported that they had each been held as virtual servants on the vessel for between one and three years before making a harrowing escape last December. Their stories are part of what rights groups say is an alarming trend of male migrant workers leaving the country in search of job opportunities, only to find themselves marooned on foreign fishing vessels with few resources and little chance of escape.

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Officials to make call on Kraya handouts

By May Titthara
The Phnom Penh Post

OFFICIALS in Kampong Thom province’s Kraya commune say they will decide this month whether to grant plots of farmland to villagers evicted from their land in December, but affected families remain concerned they will not be able to plant crops ahead of this year’s wet season.

The evicted villagers – many of them military veterans – have been shifted to a relocation site at Kraya’s Thmor Samleang village, where they have built homes, but are still awaiting replacement farmland promised by the authorities.

Kampong Thom Deputy Governor Out Sam On said there had been a delay in the granting of the land because officials were checking to see that prospective plots did not have other owners.

 

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Monk free on bail following alleged rape

By May Titthara
The Phnom Penh Post

PREY Veng prison officials have released on bail a chief monk accused of raping the wife of a business tycoon, after thousands of Svay Anthor district villagers gathered outside the prison to protest his detention.

Bun Sa Em, the chief monk at Prey Chraing pagoda, which is located in Svay Anthor, said on Thursday that provincial court officials had summoned him for questioning on May 5 in connection with the alleged assault, at which point he was charged with rape and arrested.

Both he and several of the villagers who protested said the complaint had been brought by a Phnom Penh-based tycoon who had grown jealous of the monk’s success at the pagoda.

“This chief of the monk is a really good monk, and he is good at constructing the pagoda and helping the villagers’ children. All of the villagers here don’t believe that he did what they said,” villager Lim Cham Nan said.

“The real reason that one family accused him of rape is because they are jealous of him,” he added.

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Villagers accuse media of bias in land dispute

By May Titthara
The Phnom Penh Post

VILLAGERS involved in a land row with the Heng Development Company in Kandal province’s Kandal Stung district publicly accused Deum Ampil News publisher Soy Sopheap of disseminating disinformation Tuesday after he published and broadcast stories that the villagers say demonstrated bias towards the company.

A print story, published Tuesday, quoted at length the owner of the company, Seang Chan Heng, as well as two letters issued on May 7 by Prime Minister Hun Sen’s cabinet.

The letters stated that on October 5 of last year, Hun Sen decided that the Heng Development Company was the rightful owner of the 200 hectares of disputed land because the company had obtained the proper land titles.

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Summonses reportedly issued in forest spat

By May Titthara
The Phnom Penh Post

SIEM Reap provincial court has reportedly summoned 11 community forest monitors and three soldiers involved in a March altercation over land in Oddar Meanchey province that officials say has been settled illegally.

Word of the summonses came Tuesday from those who were involved in the March altercation, though the prosecutor handling the case denied that any had been issued.

Sa Thlai, the provincial chief of community forests, said the summonses, received Tuesday morning, order him and 10 members of his staff to appear at the court on May 25, when they will be questioned individually between 8am and 2pm.

He added that all who had been summoned would appear.

“We will be on time to appear at the court to clarify about how soldiers clashed with our monitors when we went to ask them to tear down their illegal settlements in the protected forest area on March 11,” Sa Thlai said.

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Police destroy cassava crops in Svay Rieng

By May Titthara
The Phnom Penh Post

POLICE burned 8 hectares of newly planted cassava on disputed land in Svay Rieng province on Saturday, one day after the provincial court issued 10 new arrest warrants in the case, villagers said.

Officials and police in the Romeas Hek district, where farmers are engaged a dispute with the Peam Chaing Rubber Company, denied any knowledge of the burning, and the provincial court declined to comment on whether arrest warrants had been issued in the case.

But district police chief Chum Ry said that at least 10 warrants had been issued by the court on Friday for illegal detention and destruction of property belonging to police and the company.

About 400 families in Romeas Hek district have accused the company, which in 2007 was awarded a concession totalling nearly 4,000 hectares, of threatening to impinge on their farmland. On May 2, Yea Yeoung was arrested after police accused him of destroying police property and “briefly kidnapping” a representative of the company during a protest. Police said last Thursday that they had tried and failed to arrest four other alleged “ringleaders”.

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Tension still runs high in Kampong Speu

By May Titthara & Will Baxter 
The Phnom Penh Post

RIGHTS groups and villagers from Kampong Speu province’s Thpong district have warned that violence could erupt again if action is not taken to resolve an ongoing dispute between local residents and a sugar company in Omlaing commune.

On Saturday, about 50 additional soldiers, most of whom are from Royal Cambodian Armed Forces Battalion 313, arrived at a disputed area in the commune to provide security for employees of the Phnom Penh Sugar Company, who on Sunday continued to clear land despite protests by about 600 residents. Roughly 100 soldiers were already stationed there.

On Saturday “soldiers came in strongly to defend the equipment of the company”, said Mathieu Pellerin, a consultant for local rights group Licadho.

“We are extremely worried about the potential for violence. When you bring the military into the equation, there is just that much more of a chance for violence,” he added. 

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