AlisoninCambodia has released another fantastic archaeology in Cambodia post to her blog, which talks about subjects dear to my heart: complexity, land use, and Southeast Asia. Read it, read it, read it!.
Also, the Prime Minister has joined in: apparently unions are the reason the economy has collapsed. Right.
[photo by John Vink, taken from Ka-Set page]
The violent eviction of the residents of Dey Krahom in the early hours of Chinese New Year has been well-covered in a number of online fora and publications. It is horrific: the bravery of the residents in their attempts to resist the theft of their land and homes, the destruction of their livelihoods, and their safety was inspiring. The use of impoverished former evictees as workers ordered to violently evict others was tragic.
Dey Krahom was a deeply impoverished area – many called it a slum, though some residents objected to the term, preferring to call the area their home – located in an increasingly valuable part of Phnom Penh. Like previous evictees, the residents were violently intimidated over the course of years, threatened, and told they would be ‘compensated’ with kit homes in an area far outside of Phnom Penh that still lacks running water, sanitation, nearby markets, or anything else that makes life capable of being lived with dignity.
All for the new ‘owner’ of the land, 7NG, a large construction company. The company (or the police?) hired impoverished evictees from previous evictions to do much of the dirtiest and most dangerous work of demolishing the homes of the new evictees.
The entire situation reminds me of a well-known proverb:
ភ្នងដេញខ្មោច
ខ្មែរដេញភ្នង
ចិនដែញខ្មែរThe Pnong chase away the ghosts
The Khmer chase away the Pnong, and
The Chinese chase away the Khmer.
In this proverb, the “Pnong” stand in for every indigenous group living in land newly attractive to the lowland Khmer, who chase them off of the land after the Pnong are supposed to have chased away the spirits of the forests. But the chasing continues, for a stronger group then chases the Khmer off the same land. [I'd love to know more about this proverb - anyone have any ideas?]
You can read more about the evictions ay Dey Krahom in the following links. [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 - See also Flickr page here managed by Jinjadey krahom, ] But in the meantime, read this excerpt from the article in Ka-Set (English, below the fold). Read the rest of this entry »
Typical KI-Media style: turns out Cambodia’s population is booming. This has been well-known for years, and is in fact a major subject of study among demographers in general, who are fascinated by the much longer-than-usual post-war baby boom that Cambodia experienced from 1979-1984. See especially the work of sociologist Patrick Heuveline, who wrote the critical article on Khmer Rouge death toll numbers, “Between One and Three Million in Cambodia.” The relevant article there is “The Phoenix Population: Demographic Crisis and Rebound in Cambodia.”
There are all sorts of reasons for this population boom. But KI-Media’s reporters, as usual, seem to want to twist it into some sort of bizarre Cambodian Minutemen-style conspiracy theory about ‘illegal immigrants.’ Reposting an article that says absolutely nothing about increase in immigration, they retitle it “High Population Growth in Cambodia: Inflated by Illegal Immigrants?“
A different post on the same topic, reposted from Xinhua, also says nothing about immigration, but points to a different culprit for population increase: women!
According to the preliminary results, the population of Cambodia stood at 13,388,910 at midnight on March 3, 2008, consisting of 6,495,512 males and 6,893,398 females,” Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Interior Sar Kheng, who also chairs the National Census Committee, was quoted as saying in the Phnom Penh Post.
By the logic of KI-Media, this must mean that….women are illegal immigrants!
Speaking of crazed nationalists who engage in fear-mongering on the basis of population control issues, check out this absolutely untenable video out of California, put out there by the “Californians for Population Stabilization.” Yikes. Of course, all the numbers they cite are unsourced, and impossible. Nevertheless, this is airing in Cali [via racialicious]
In happier (?) news, here’s a new page which aims to ‘save boeung kak,’ currently being filled in to create new land for Phnom Penh developers. Check it out.
The title above is the title of the new song, composed by Dey Krahom villagers, to protest ongoing attempts to evict them from their valuable land int he heart of Phno Penh. The conflict over Dey Krahom (Sambok Chap) Commune has been going on for years at this point. It has involved violence and intimidation. The people of Dey Krahom are amazingly brave, however, and have banded together as a community to fight back.
I haven’t heard the song yet – still waiting for someone to post an mp3 or a version to youtube – but reported lyrics put me in mind of the proverb I posted a few weeks back, which inspired the title of my dissertation
. Those lyrics are:
“Why do rich people who have money, power, cars, land and villas… still want land from poor villager like us?”
An older video (with some unfortunate musical choices) is embedded below:
You can also read the Licadho report on the background to the Dey Krahom case by downloading this PDF here.
And a few good posts on the topic from DAS and Andy Brouwer.
Preah Vihear has been much in the news of late, much to my annoyance, Thailand’s shame, and to the possible detriment of many. The amazing Thongchai Winichakul wrote this piece, special to The Nation. Author of the justly famous Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation, Thongchai is perhaps unequaled in his authoritative and deeply humane and moral stance on this issue.
Preah Vihear can be ‘time bomb’
By Thongchai Winichakul
special to The Nation
Published on June 30, 2008Using the temple to fan nationalism can lead to much bigger tragedy
The nature of modern boundaries between Thailand and its neighbours is like a time bomb.
All boundaries today bear the legacies of old world politics that did not much care if a demarcation by a sharp line, or the unambiguous territorial sovereignty, carried repercussions.
With little exception, claims to exclusive “ownership” rights of borderlands longer than the past 100 to 130 years are probably false and historically impossible to support.
Given the explosive foundation of the modern boundary, maps, treaties and courts have provided settlements of such areas.They are the ground rules used by modern nations to co-exist.
For the boundary around Preah Vihear, the International Court of Justice in 1962 provided a settlement without which military might and heavy loss of lives would have been the only other option.
We should respect the settlement provided by the court since Thailand has no better justifiable claim than Cambodia.
Despite that, the talks about “losing territory” have been common among thoughtless nationalists in the region.
Lao nationalists talk about losing the Isaan region to Thailand. Cambodian ones talk about losing territories to Thailand and Vietnam.
They produce maps of lost territories like Thai nationalists did for generations.
Thais have been taught their territories were lost as well. Every country lost territories. The idea of loss is a powerful tool used to whip up nationalism, especially in domestic politics.
The dark side of nationalism is dangerous as ever. It has now become a weapon in today’s Thai politics.
Nationalism is like fire and it can be destructive.Another kind of “fire”, according to Buddhism, generates greed, hatred and delusion. Read the rest of this entry »
At this point, everyone has at least heard that we have rice problems. The world’s second-most consumed cereal crop (after maize): we don’t have enough of it. That causes prices to rise, sometimes by over one hundred dollars a ton. However, this has little to no positive impact on the farmers themselves-they aren’t getting more money for their product:
Since December, prices of all grades of rice have shot up by more than US$100 (Bt3,150) per tonne, such as $646 to $755 on March 12 for jasmine rice and from $336 to $556 for grade B white rice.
“Rice now has comparable value with gold. Farmers have not gained from the peak prices as before. They sell only one tonne of paddy rice and can purchase one baht weight (15.16 grams) of gold ornaments worth Bt14,000 now,” said Pramote Vanichanont, advisory president of the Thai Rice Millers Association.
Unharvested rice has been stolen from farms, causing villagers to keep watch over their fields day and night.
Thailand, India and Vietnam share the same problem. Their farmers are the poorest of their people. [via]
All around Asia this is causing serious concerns. Activists in the Philippines are even warning about food riots [via]. India stopped exporting rice in January, which caused enormous supply problems in the rest of the world. India’s role here is important: as their national grain consumption switches to higher status (and slightly more nutritive) wheat, they still grow and export an enormous amount of rice to the world markets. When they saw the shortages coming up, they stopped exporting. Their citizens will have more rice to eat, though many will still starve and commit suicide – an epidemic of farmer suicides in India has been going on for nearly a decade thanks to declining farm profits and the destruction of local methods – the last wave of the Green Revolution. Read the rest of this entry »
Alt.Map.Cambodia (AMC) just published a map documenting the area of Ratanakiri destined for logging wood to be used in the construction of the National Assembly, however as described in the Global Witness Report, the expected timber yield from such a cut would far surpasses any conceivable furnishing requirements.
Click here to view the AMC map of this logging area
[via KI-Media]
A week ago these families had homes. Tonight they shelter in tents. They lived on “contested” property. The local government threw them off and the army destroyed what was left. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve often thought of the Tonle Sap catchment area of the Mekong River as the Liver of Asia. The Tonle Sap, for those who don’t already know, is the name of both the lake and the river system which connects that lake to the Mekong, a convergence that happens right in Phnom Penh.
The Tonle Sap system is unbelievable: because of heavy rainfall during the Summer Monsoon, the Mekong becomes engorged, to the point where it cannot accept extra water. Luckily, the Tonle Sap river can. So, this river changes direction, flowing ‘upstream’ and into the Tonle Sap lake, which expands to many times its breadth and depth.
This flooding of the lake brings with it tons of silt and other precursors to a healthy ecosystem, to the point that many academics have pointed to flood recession rice in the region as a form of sustainable agriculture indigenous to Cambodia. ((Fox, Jeff, and Judy Ledgerwood. 1999. Dry-season flood-recession rice in the Mekong Delta: two thousand years of sustainable agriculture? Asian Perspectives 38 (1):37-50. Note that this article is not actually about the Tonle Sap recession but about a site on the Mekong itself. The theory is largely the same, however)) The floods inundate bordering forestland, so that every year the forest becomes a magnificent place for fish to breed, making the Tonle Sap lake one of the most (the most?) productive freshwater fisheries in the entire world.
But of course, this is all changing rapidly. I have been writing jeremiads about the coming ecotastrophe for years now, to the chagrin of my friends (and possibly both of my blog readers), but even I had little understanding of the hard numbers behind the challenges we are all facing. Read the rest of this entry »
In a recent article on Mindhacks, Vaughan decided to use a picture of the collected skulls at Choeung Ek to signify ‘trauma,’ even though the article wasn’t about Cambodia at all. It is annoying to see Cambodia continue to serve as a floating signifier of trauma, almost an iconic commodity.
Meanwhile, Dengue Fever has claimed over 300 lives so far this season, and the entire region is in danger of a real epidemic.
And in the ‘cynical links roundup,’ Zoellick has declared that Cambodian poverty is the result of a poor land titling process. While the current land titling process is unbelievably corrupt and bad, it is obviously not the dominant cause of poverty in Cambodia, and to claim that improving this process will result in a more just country is just, frankly, dumb.
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