Bridges Across Borders Southeast Asia

Bridges Delivers Humanitarian Relief and Calls for Urgent Intervention for Displaced Families in Sihanoukville

Bridges Across Borders Southeast Asia delivered tarpaulins and rice today to 84 families illegally evicted from the Mittapheap 4 village in Sihanoukville more than one year ago. The families, who remain homeless and continue to live on the side of the road next to the site of their former homes, are in desperate need of humanitarian relief.

BABSEA and the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) called on the Royal Government of Cambodia to urgently address the humanitarian situation of these families. The organizations also urged the government to ensure the safe return of the displaced community to their former land and to conduct a criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding the eviction.

The Mittapheap 4 community is now facing their second rainy season living under tattered tarpaulins that fail to provide adequate protection from the elements. Displaced from their farm lands, the community has lost their primary source of livelihood. While nearly all the community children attended public school prior to the eviction, they are no longer enrolled because their required legal documents were burned during the eviction. Children’s health and nutrition, which declined rapidly in the wake of the eviction, has only gradually improved as a result of regular children’s health assistance provided by the local organization M’lop Tapaing. A further risk is posed to the safety of the children by the large trucks passing only metres away from where the families are forced to live on the side of a busy road.

A father of 8 that we spoke to this weekend had recently been released from a year’s imprisonment after he was arrested by the Cambodian authorities during the violent eviction from his family home in Mittapheap 4. He fervently denies any wrong doing to warrant his arrest and the severe beating he received which has subsequently left him permanently unable to work. The beating he received by the mixed police and armed forces damaged his eyesight, perforated his eardrum and left him with constant back and abdominal pain. The entire family of 10 members are now solely financially reliant on the mother’s extremely low wage as a construction worker and are struggling to survive under their plastic leaking roof.

Dan Nicholson, COHRE Asia and Pacific Programme Coordinator, said, “It is time to start recognising that these families, like thousands of others across Cambodia who are the victims of illegal land-grabbing, are living as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs).”

Natalie Bugalski, Legal Officer at COHRE, explained, “As persons who have been forced to leave their homes as a result of human rights violations but remain displaced inside State borders, the Mittapheap 4 families squarely fall under the international law definition of IDPs recognised by the United Nations. As IDPs they must be afforded their legal right to humanitarian assistance as well as the rights to return to their former land and to full restitution for their housing and property that was unlawfully destroyed.”

David Pred, BABSEA Cambodia Country Director, said “The Sihanoukville authorities have utterly failed to meet their minimum humanitarian obligations, so we have acted today in order to provide some temporary measure of relief while the families wait for their government to fulfil their responsibility.”

The organisations also called for a moratorium on forced evictions in Cambodia, supporting similar calls made earlier this year by Amnesty International and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH).

Background

On April 20 2007, over 100 families living peacefully in Mittapheap 4 village were illegally and violently evicted. The families had been living in the village since the 1980s and 1990s, and accordingly had possessory rights to the land under the 2001 Cambodian Land Law. The basis of the eviction was an unsubstantiated claim of ownership of the land by Peng Ravy, the wife of a senior advisor to a high-ranking government official.

The eviction was carried out by Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF), military police and police. During the eviction five women were injured and thirteen men were badly hurt, many of them knocked unconscious. Eighty houses were burned to the ground and 26 other houses were demolished. Today, the disputed land remains unused, fenced off and believed to have been sold to a third party.

In addition to the unlawfulness of the eviction itself, the excessive force used by the authorities was in plain violation of the Land Law. The law prohibits the use of violence to execute an eviction and mandates criminal sanctions where violence is used. Article 253 stipulates that “[a]ny person who uses violence against a possessor in good faith of an immovable property; whether or not his title has been established or it is disputed, shall be fined from 1,500,000 Riel to 25,000,000 Riel and/or imprisoned from six (6) months to two (2) years...” In addition “[i]f the violence was ordered by a person other than the perpetrator, who did not personally participate in the commission of such violence, he or she shall be subject to the same penalties as the perpetrators of the violence.”

The perpetrators and those who ordered the violent eviction of the Mittapheap 4 village on April 20, 2007, are criminally liable under these provisions of the land law.

View Joint Statement

Home or News Archives