Cambodian students have fanned out across the impoverished nation to help grant land titles to villagers in an ambitious, but contentious new scheme spearheaded by the prime minister.
When Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen announced his titling plan in June, apparently without first consulting local authorities and communities, it was billed as a way to clamp down on land conflicts, seen as Cambodia’s most pressing human rights issue.
However, the prime minister later backtracked, saying the more than 1,600 student volunteers recruited would not be measuring land in disputed areas at all, baffling campaigners who already lamented a lack of detail about the plan.
“For those in non-conflict areas it’s very good, but it doesn’t address the major problem. People who are most in need of land titles won’t receive them,” said Nicolas Agostini of local rights group ADHOC.
The university students are now tasked with demarcating 1.8 million hectares of uncontested territory so officials can issue titles to 470,000 families within the next few months.
In the project’s first major milestone last month, Hun Sen personally delivered more than 500 property titles to families in Kratie Province, the eastern province where security forces shot dead a 14-year-old girl during a land battle with villagers in May.
Land ownership is a highly controversial issue in Cambodia, where the communist Khmer Rouge regime banned private property in the late 1970s and many legal documents were lost.
Many observers have welcomed the land tenure security offered by the new scheme, but Agostini said serious questions remained and attempts to silence or sideline independent observers were “not acceptable.”
Hun Sen, 61, who has been in power since 1985 and is seeking re-election next year, has boasted of paying the students a monthly salary of about US$220 out of his own pocket — double what the country’s garment workers earn.
Rights groups say privately the scheme reeks of an election ploy by one of the world’s longest-serving leaders, who has vowed to stay in power until he is 90.
However, campaigners face “a significant risk” if they go public with their concerns, a Western diplomat who did not want to be named said.
CRITICS THREATENED
When a well-known land rights advocate expressed reservations about using inexperienced students and suggested the scheme was an attempt to boost Hun Sen’s image, he was threatened by a government-affiliated youth group.
“They told me if I continue to criticize government policy, they are not responsible for what happens to me,” Sia Phearum said.
Local rights organizations voiced dismay at the threat, though long-time Cambodia watchers say it is not uncommon.
EVICTIONS, PROTESTS
The government, in its haste to develop the impoverished nation, has in recent years come under fire from rights groups and the UN for granting swathes of land to well-connected firms, prompting a spate of evictions and increasingly violent protests pitting villagers against developers.
In some of the strongest comments yet on the new land titling scheme, UN human rights envoy Surya Subedi said in a report last month that non-governmental groups had been warned “not to intervene.”
“Harassment and intimidation of individuals involved have been widely reported. The absence of civil society organizations has left many communities, families and individuals unaware of their rights,” he wrote.
Subedi also said that the titling project fails to address “the crux of the problem” by avoiding disputed land, and echoed concerns about the deployment of volunteers who often get just two days of training and are confusingly clad in military fatigues.
Cambodian land ministry spokesman Beng Hong Socheat Khemro dismissed Subedi’s comments as having “no value,” saying the students’ role was to prevent future land conflicts and not to solve existing conflicts.
The youngsters are ideally suited to help because they have the skills to operate the satellite navigation system equipment used to measure land and because they are “honest,” he said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion