Land Rights

Cambodia’s notorious Khmer Rouge regime swept to power in 1975, emptying the capital city Phnom Penh of its inhabitants within days of their victory against Government forces.  Cambodia then went back to the ‘year zero’. Private property was abolished, and inhabitants were forced into camps in the countryside to live in an agrarian society. It is estimated that between one and three million people died between 1975 and 1979 from starvation, torture, and illness under the Khmer Rouge regime.

After the Khmer Rouge lost power in 1979, Cambodians began to return to Phnom Penh, and squatter communities sprang up all over the city as people occupied whatever vacant land or buildings they could find.  Recently, people are finding that the land they have lived on for decades, and thought was rightfully theirs, (some hold legal titles to the land) is being sold off by the Government to big local and foreign business and governments.

Thousands of poor residents (owners and renters) all around the country are being forced (often violently) off their land and dumped in ‘relocation sites’, often significantly distant from their homes. These ‘relocation sites’ are often located on empty land, prone to flooding and disease, with no sewage, schools, electricity, health services, sanitation, fresh drinking water, employment, or transportation.  These people have effectively become ‘internally displaced’.