Veteran campaigner leads Cambodia eviction battle

PHNOM PENH — Street vendor-turned-rights activist Nget Khun, known locally as "Momm,y" is a leading figure in Cambodians' fight against forced evictions. And at 75, she's just been jailed for a year.

"Keep struggling to save our home!" the feisty septuagenarian told her daughter Eng Sokha during a recent visit to prison, where stress and loss of appetite weighs heavily on the veteran campaigner.

Activists say the sentencing of Mommy and several other women from her Boeung Kak Lake community on trumped-up charges is the latest wave of repression against land rights activists.

This week the United Nations called on the Cambodian authorities to stop "judicial harassment for political purposes" while European ambassadors met with local authorities over the jailings.

But for now, Mommy languishes in a cell with two fellow activists.

"She is in prison but she has no fear," said Sokha, an accounting student who lives in the family's modest wooden house alongside six sisters, her brother and their children.

Mommy has been a constant presence at land protests in the capital Phnom Penh. She has been hospitalised for injuries during demonstrations and was jailed for a month in 2012.

This time her crime was "obstructing traffic" during a small protest against the routine flooding her community suffers due to a huge real estate project, headed by a close ally of the premier.

Under authoritarian Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has run Cambodia for some 30 years, "powerful people have bought the land, lakes, and mountains," Chan Soveth of the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association (ADHOC) told AFP.

Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch said Cambodia's "kleptocratic ruling class" had taken over the land of thousands of poor Cambodians – a capitalist version of the mass expropriations under the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s.

But if the Khmer Rouge abolished land ownership in an ultimately disastrous attempt to create a communist utopia, the current ruling elite simply aims to control resources from forest to farmland, activists and NGOs claim.

Some 770,000 Cambodians, or six percent of the population, have fallen victim to eviction since 2000. Around 22 percent of the country's land has been confiscated, rights groups say.

The World Bank suspended new loans in 2011 over the evictions and a complaint is pending at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

But three years on little has changed. The prime Boeung Kak Lake site is languishing, with no sign of the promised high-end development, while the flood waters keep coming back.

The Chinese company backing the project has pulled out and the current developers could not be reached for comment.

After a long battle, Mommy and her family – along with 770 others – were offered nearby plots of land as compensation.

But Mommy's family remains at their Boeung Kak home as they say they cannot afford to build a new house on the plot they have been given.

Sokha says: "We don't have money to move our house."

They are also still waiting to be given the formal title to the new land – a protection against future evictions.

Other residents in Boeung Kak have been offered nothing.

The once vibrant community's problems began, she explained, when the government leased Boeung Kak – a lake vital to the city's drainage  – to Shukaku Inc.

Shukaku is headed by Lao Meng Khin, an influential senator who is close to Hun Sen and one of the ruling Cambodian People's Party's major donors.

In 2010, Shukaku began to pour tons of sand into the lake, causing the floods.