Editorials | Articles: - Cambodian Information Center

Development Leaves Cambodians Homeless

June 25, 2008
By Gaffar Peang-Meth (guampdn.com)

My June 11 column referenced The Guardian's Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark's "Country for Sale," which stated that "almost half of Cambodia has been sold to foreign speculators in the past 18 months." It also referred to Business Week's Susan Postlewaite's "Real Estate Boom in Cambodia's capital," in which she observed this boom "has led to widespread evictions of people" from their homes and land to accommodate development projects.

If you Google "land-grabbing in Cambodia" you'll see volumes written on the topic, from newspaper articles to columns and reports by human rights groups. Watch videos and listen to the voices of Cambodian evictees, even on YouTube.

They reveal how the poor, the underprivileged in Cambodia suffer unspeakable pain and hardship. After all, what's life anywhere when a person's home and land are dismantled and bulldozed without discussion, and one is beaten and kicked and faces jail for not moving out?

Radio Free Asia's "China's Growing Presence in Cambodia," published on its Web site May 28, takes the issue of land-grabbing to a higher level, alleging high officials' involvement. The Web site also recorded 29 land-grabbing cases in January and February alone.

Amnesty International's "Forced Evictions in Cambodia: Homes Razed, Lives in Ruins," published Feb. 11, states "forced evictions are one of the most widespread human rights violations affecting Cambodians in both rural and urban areas." It asserts, "At least 150,000 Cambodians across the country are known to live at risk of being forcibly evicted in the wake of land disputes, land grabbing and development projects."

"In sharp contrast to the rhetoric of the (Cambodian) government's pro-poor policies and in breach of international human rights laws and standards," the Amnesty International article states, "thousands of people, particularly those living in poverty, have been forcibly evicted from their homes and lands."

On June 12, a Hong Kong-based regional non-governmental organization that monitors and lobbies human rights issues in Asia, The Asian Human Rights Commission, posted an online petition, "End Land Grabbing in Cambodia," and urges "the public to join" the petition, which can be read at http://campaigns.ahrchk.net/landgrabbing.

The online petition is addressed to Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen. It expresses signers' deep concerns "about the suffering of the hundreds of thousands of Cambodian people who have been, and who are known to live in fear of being evicted as a result of development projects, land disputes and land-grabbing." It asks the premier to "immediately end the suffering and fears ... by halting all evictions, ... and by suspending all land concessions for development projects that affect people's homes and lands."

I don't know if the petition will move the 55-year-old Cambodian ruler to comply, nor do I know if it will incite the world community to help the Cambodian poor and end the land-grabbing.

Action needed

I used to recite to my students at the University of Guam Edmund Burke's words: "All that is needed for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." And I write often in this space that unless one takes action, one cannot expect anything to happen the way one wishes. I have discussed the problem of "free riders" who expected "others" to act for the common good.

So I added my name on the AHRC petition, and my computer screen showed that it was sent electronically to the prime minister's cabinet.

Six days before the AHRC's petition, the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (Licadho) put online, complete with photos, "Two Years After their Eviction from the Center of Phnom Penh, Villagers are Still Living in Squalor." It was about the June 6, 2006, eviction of more than 1,000 families from their homes in Sambok Chap village in inner-city Phnom Penh by "police and military police armed with guns, tear gas, batons and riot shields."

"The residents were forced onto trucks and taken to be dumped in an open field at Andong, 22 kilometers from central Phnom Penh -- their new 'home'," reads the text. "There was no shelter, electricity, running water, schools, health services or readily available employment nearby."

June 6, 2008, marked the two-year anniversary of the eviction.

"The site of their former homes in Sambok Chap -- slated for commercial development by a private company -- remains bare and unused, while the evictees continue to live in squalor at the Andong relocation site," Licadho stated.

Licadho refers to Sambok Chap as "just one case in a wider pattern of rapid, unregulated and often illegal development across Cambodia. ... It is exacerbated by a culture of corruption and impunity and, all too often, by an international donor community which turns a blind eye to such abuses."

Yet, in less than four weeks this international donor community can be expected to congratulate the region's longest-serving premier for his forthcoming July 27 election victory, to continue his reign, which Agence France Presse says he vowed publicly to keep until he turns 90.

A. Gaffar Peang-Meth, Ph.D., is retired from the University of Guam, where he taught political science for 13 years. Write him at peangmeth@yahoo.com.

Labels: "country for sale", Cambodian capitalism, eviction, Kob Srov, landgrabbing, Long Chhin

Kith Meng (Owner of Royal Group of Companies: CTN, MobiTel-012,
the Camlot lottery company and a 45% stake venture with Australia's ANZ Bank
and the head of the Phnom Penh Chamber of Commerce)

By Shawn W Crispin
Source: Asia Time Online

PHNOM PENH – Kith Meng's is the bold new face of Cambodian capitalism. Widely considered the country's richest entrepreneur, the Sino-Khmer businessman presides over a sprawling business empire held under his Royal Group of Companies which has leveraged into and helped drive Cambodia's recent economic boom.

With impeccable political connections - including not least his role as a personal advisor to Prime Minister Hun Sen - Kith Meng, 37, has secured a growing trove of lucrative government concessions, licenses and land deals that his Royal Group has in sometimes controversial fashion translated into big business profits.

Those include his controlling stakes in CTN television, mobile telecom leader Mobitel, the Camlot lottery company and a 45% stake in a commercial banking joint venture with Australia's ANZ Bank, where he serves as board chairman and reportedly drives strategic decision-making.

Last year he purchased the swanky Cambodiana Hotel, newly established the Infinity Insurance company and accumulated extensive property holdings and development concessions in the capital Phnom Penh, in what his critics contend are often opaque deals brokered with various line ministries. (Kith Meng could not be reached through his Royal Group for comment.)

His growing service sector empire has drawn both favorable and unfavorable comparisons to neighboring Thailand's telecom tycoon-cum-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra's commercial and political ascent. He reportedly will seek a seat on the national senate at upcoming elections and some Phnom Penh-based analysts see him one day as a potential successor to the 55-year-old Hun Sen, who they note rose to political prominence through his military prowess rather than business acumen.

A former refugee from political violence, Kith Meng's is one of Cambodia's most compelling rags to riches stories. His father, Kith Peng Ike, a Sino-Khmer businessman and landlord, was singled out as a "class enemy" during the Khmer Rouge's genocidal purges and he reportedly died from starvation in one of the radical Maoist group's labor camps.

Kith Meng and his family fled the country for Australia, where he was raised and educated. He returned to his war-torn homeland in the early 1990s to help his elder brother, Sophan Kith, to develop the resurrected family business, which upon reestablishment was first known as the Royal Cambodia Company. The enterprise started modestly, supplying furniture, food and office equipment to the United Nations authority that ushered Cambodia's rocky transition from civil war to parliamentary democracy.

In 1991 the Royal Group won the rights to distribute exclusively Canon copiers throughout the country and it quickly spun those monopoly revenues into a joint venture in 1993 with Motorola to establish one of Cambodia's first wireless communication networks. It later did a deal with Luxembourg's Millicom International Cellular, which over the years has grown into the country's leading mobile telecom outfit, Mobitel.

In 1994 Sophan Kith died under mysterious circumstances and, peculiar to cultural norms of seniority as the youngest sibling, Kith Meng took control over the family business. He now serves as both the company's chairman and chief executive officer and his cut-throat approach to business expansion has rapidly transformed the Royal Group into Cambodia's leading service sector conglomerate.

Young gun
As a Western-educated, 37-year-old entrepreneur, Kith Meng's resume stands out among the older generation of ethnic Chinese businessmen who dominate Cambodia's traditional economy. Cambodian politicians have long relied on Sino-Khmer businessmen to run crucial sectors of the national economy, similar to the ethnic-based government-business nexuses seen in Thailand and Indonesia.

In Cambodia that privilege comes with a royal title known as Okhna, which is bestowed on those who make sizable financial contributions to the royal family. Kith Meng is believed to be one of the youngest businessmen to ever receive the honorific and his meteoric commercial rise includes his recent selection as the head the Cambodian Chamber of Commerce.

As Cambodia becomes more integrated into the global economy, Kith Meng has emerged as the government's de facto spokesman for selling the country to potential foreign investors as a profitable and desirable place to do business. He is regularly seen on local television wining and dining foreign business delegations. On the Royal Group's website is a pitch to potential foreign investors to help build its proposed Royal Caesar Casino, which it's billing as "the largest and most dazzling gaming facility in the Cambodia hemisphere".

Beyond the diplomacy and hype, there is much more at play to Kith Meng's growing prominence than mere spin-doctoring. Some political analysts contend that Hun Sen has played an instrumental role in cultivating and mobilizing the young entrepreneur's modern business image in a vigorous public relations effort to shirk his and his government's notorious reputation as the "Mafia on the Mekong".

Cambodia emerged from nearly three decades of civil war only to become known as a regional hub for illicit business, including rampant money laundering, drug smuggling, human trafficking and illegal logging. Hun Sen and his Cambodia People's Party's (CPP) have been directly linked to shadowy figures reputedly involved in illicit businesses, including his established ties to businessman Theng Bunma, who has contributed millions of dollars to the premier's past election campaigns and also implicated by US authorities for alleged drug trafficking.

As Cambodia's aboveground economy booms, state concessions are no doubt providing rich new sources of legitimate revenues for Hun Sen's government. It is unknown whether Kith Meng contributes funds directly to his CPP, but his concession payments to line ministries are no doubt bolstering state coffers. One Phnom Penh-based Western businessman who spoke on condition of anonymity and claims to have personally conducted the due diligence research on the Royal Group's recent joint venture with Australia's ANZ Bank says that his in-depth investigations failed to turn up any "dirty laundry" in Kith Meng's past or present business dealings.

Reborn landed gentry
That's not to say his business practices lack for controversy. Kith Meng's style has reportedly ruffled feathers among the more established Okhna represented in the Cambodia Chamber of Commerce, whereby the older generation of Sino-Khmer businessmen have bristled at his perceived patronizing lectures about globalization and at what some of them reportedly view as his overly direct Western-style of interaction.

Whether those complaints stem from genuine pique or instead heartfelt fear of Kith Meng's expanding reach into other Okhna's once monopolized markets is unclear. One Western aid agency representative, who spoke with Asia Times Online on condition of anonymity, says that soon after launching last year’s joint venture with ANZ Bank, Kith Meng pushed to expand the bank's local branch network much faster than ANZ first planned. That aggressive strategy, it turns, has paid off handsomely through a fast growing market share of deposits and the lion's share of loans in the nascent home mortgage market.

Other times, critics say, Kith Meng's Royal Group pushes too hard. In June 2006 police armed with batons, tear gas and AK47 assault rifles evicted at least 20 families from a contested land plot worth several million dollars next to Phnom Penh's Preah Monivong Hospital which the government had controversially awarded to the Royal Group for development. The resident families were reportedly given US$500-$1,500 in compensation and trucked to a relocation site 30 kilometers outside the capital which lacked electricity and water.

Similar complaints have arisen from his plans for the landmark Bassac Theater. In 2005, the culture ministry granted the concession, which called on the Royal Group to rehabilitate the damaged structure in exchange for the rights to outfit the theater's surrounding land with new offices and a conference center. The company has since decided to demolish the historic building and evict the scores of artists who after the Khmer Rouge's "class enemy" purges took refuge in the old theater.

Those same artists have resurrected the traditional Khmer art forms that the Maoist movement aimed to destroy and after squatting at the historic site for over a decade, each has received $300 to abandon an area where land prices now top $1,000 per square meter. The irony of such deals is not lost on Kith Meng's critics, who contend that the Royal Group is capitalizing on the legal vacuum for adjudicating land ownership rights created by the Khmer Rouge's destruction of the national land registries.

On the Royal Group's website, Kith Meng says in a statement that the company's origins trace "back to the early days of the Khmer Rouge occupation" – meaning, presumably, the property and businesses his father maintained before the radical Maoist movement killed him and drove his family, including a young Kith Meng, into exile. In Cambodia's latest capitalist incarnation, government connections often trump historical claims and reassert old social class divisions, of which Kith Meng's and the Royal Group's fast expanding commercial domain is living proof.

Shawn W Crispin is Asia Times Online's Southeast Asia Editor.

=======

Cambodia's MobiTel to buy telecommunication materials from Singapore
September 05, 2007
Source: People's Daily Online

MobiTel, Cambodia's largest mobile phone service provider, signed an agreement to purchase 150 million U.S. dollars worth of telecommunication materials from the Singapore-based Alcaltel-Lucent Company, officials said on Wednesday.

"Today we signed the purchase agreement of telecommunication materials from Alcatel-Lucent Company to further advance the availability of world-class cellular phone services in Cambodia," said Kith Meng, chairman of MobiTel.

The agreement will allow a major expansion of MobiTel's rural network, increasing the access to modern communication for many more people throughout Cambodia, he said.

Pierre-Alain Cadillon, vice president and head of the South Asia regional unit of Alcatel-Lucent, said that the expansion over the next four years will bring a new range of mobile communication services, ranging from voice mail, video transmission, mobile TV to internet access, to more three million subscribers in Cambodia.

Kith Meng said that MobiTel borrowed money from banks of the United States and Australia to finish the purchase, and the Cambodian government also provided support.

Kith Meng and Pierre-Alain Cadillon signed the agreement here Wednesday in the presence of Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister Sok An.

Cambodia opened the mobile telecommunication sector to private capital in 1992. Currently, around 21 percent of the kingdom's 14 million population adopt mobile phone as their major communication solution.

Labels: Cambodian capitalism, CTN, Kith Meng

Editorial | Articles about Cambodia | Khmer

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Development Leaves Cambodians Homeless

Thursday, September 06, 2007

The rise and rise of a Cambodian capitalist

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