August 13, 2009
ABC Radio Australia

A group of 300 Cambodian people affected by land grabs and evictions - and representing thousands more - gathered in Phnom Penh yesterday to tell the government of their concerns, and to call with a single voice on the government and donor nations to act to protect their land.

Presenter: Robert Carmichael in Phnom Penh
Speaker: Leng Simy, villager; Loun Sovath, monk; Soal Nak, Jarai villager

Click here to listen to the audio program (Windows Media)

CARMICHAEL: It's hard being heard in Cambodia, particularly if - like 80 percent of Cambodians - you live in the countryside. It's harder still if you want to speak out against rich or powerful people trying to take your land. That's not something the government encourages, and the courts are seldom much help. That leaves few options. But this week in Phnom Penh a group of 300 Cambodians from 19 of the Kingdom's 24 provinces and municipalities joined up to petition the government, the prime minister, parliament and the national land dispute authority, to help them keep their land.

This is an agricultural society, and for rural Cambodians land is life. Organisers of the petitioning event say the amount of land under dispute for the 15,000 people they represent totals more than 700,000 hectares. It is commonly acknowledged by rights organisations that rising landlessness could prove the country's biggest challenge. In recent years Cambodia experienced a boom in land prices, and a similar rise in evictions, land grabs, and the granting of huge concessions to often-shadowy companies. That result works against the stated desire of government and donor nations to reduce poverty.

The government, ever wary of dissent, seems to have been taken off-guard by the petitioners. Authorities are trying to find out if civil society organisations were behind the collaborative effort. Whether or not there was help from civil society is beside the point. The voiceless rural people whose land is being taken from them - often with official collusion - got the chance to be heard. People from across the Kingdom stood up and told the media and each other of their experiences and fears.