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| Photo: Srey Neuk, 44, works in the ever-shrinking waters of Boeung Tompun. (ABC News: Athena Zelandonii) |
Cambodia's water people pushed out of Phnom Penh sewer for billion-dollar ING City
| 12 January 2017
| 12 January 2017
Setting out in the early morning, Sok Pov paddles her canoe across Phnom Penh's sewage as she heads to work.
For
decades, the vast lakes and wetlands fringing Cambodia's capital have
been home to thousands of people making a living from the water —
fishing and harvesting vegetables for market.
Now they face eviction, as politically well-connected land speculators push them out.
"If
they fill in the lakes I am not sure where we will go," says Pov as she
works along the ropes strung on the water's surface, cutting mimosa and
morning glory.
Pov first started making her living here a decade
ago, and even though the lakes form the city's main sewerage treatment
system, she says the water was clean enough to bathe in.
"It smells now. In the past it was not like this,"
Pov says while breaking off handfuls of mimosa and throwing them in a
pile in her boat.
"Some of us get strange itches. A friend's hands, arms and legs became swollen because of the water."
Phnom
Penh is in the grip of a real estate explosion, with sky-high glass
towers rising from millions of tonnes of sand pumped from the Mekong and
other rivers into what was once a chain of huge wetlands.
Pov and
the hundreds of others eking out a living on Boeung Tompun (Lake
Tompun) are watching as the sand-pumping draws nearer, and her stretch
of water shrinks further.
Under Cambodian law, waterways are owned
by the state. However, in 2006, in a behind-closed-doors deal, the Hun
Sen Government gave one of the country's most powerful tycoons, Ing Bun
Hoaw, the go-ahead to fill Boeung Tompun and the adjoining Boeung
Choeung Ek.
The lakes are being developed into a
multi-billion-dollar satellite city known as ING City, three kilometres
from the centre of old Phnom Penh. It's the largest development in
Cambodia and rivals anything in South East Asia, at a staggering 2,752
hectares.
'You have to wonder how much is being paid to who'
Bun Hoaw is a former secretary of transport, and a
businessman whose trading company grew from a start-up in 1993 to make
him one of Cambodia's most powerful movers and shakers. His honorific
"Oknha" (equivalent to "Lord") is bestowed on people who have donated at
least $135,427 to the ruling Cambodian People's Party. A boulevard in
central Phnom Penh is named in his honour.
Questions submitted by the ABC to the Government and to Bun Hoaw about this land grant have gone unanswered.
Since
2012, Bun Hoaw's family company ING Holdings has been pumping sand into
the lakes. A new highway named after Prime Minister Hun Sen is nearly
finished, along with residential precincts and a new campus for one of
the most expensive private schools in the country.
Government
critic Sophal Ear describes the deal paving the way for ING City as "yet
another shady deal in the Kingdom of Wonder".
"You always have to
wonder how much was paid, or even to whom. It's just shameless," says
Associate Professor Ear at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
Photo:
Construction workers shovel gravel on the filled-in Boeng Kak lake. (Supplied: Gareth Bright)
Many of the capital's lakes have been filled in. The
loss of Boeung Kak (Lake Kak) in the middle of Phnom Penh in 2010
triggered international headlines. The developer Shukaku, owned by
another powerful Oknha, reportedly paid $106 million for a 99-year lease
on the wetlands that covered 133 hectares.
Thousands of residents were evicted from their homes with inadequate or no compensation. Many still seek a just outcome.
Little hope of compensation for lost homes, jobs
Pov is worried. The narrow spit of land on which she and her neighbours live doesn't appear on the maps of ING City.
"The
communities have not yet been delivered any clear information by the
local authority or the company," says urban rights advocate Ee Sarom.
"They are concerned they will not receive adequate, or any, compensation for the land that is being taken from them."
Local
officials say the residents will be treated fairly, but after scores of
evictions across the country, the villagers are mistrustful.
But the city's poor are not the only casualties of rampant development.
Phnom
Penh was founded on a floodplain and low lying areas acted as a sponge
in the rainy season harbouring flood waters. With so many lakes now
gone, the city is frequently inundated by flash floods.
Government may expect international aid to fix problem
There's also the city's sewage.
At the same
time as the torrent of fetid blackwater is increasing, the area of
wetland that naturally filtered and purified the waste is drastically
shrinking. It's a catastrophic health and environmental mess — right in
the Government's own nest.
A multi-million-dollar conventional
treatment plant has been recommended to the city, but authorities are
crying poor, saying they lack the necessary financial resources.
Associate
Professor Ear says it would be typical for the Cambodian Government to
expect international aid dollars to fix a problem it has been hell-bent
on creating.
"Donors should refuse to help," he says, "it would
just mean the Government avoids the costs of the harm it does. It's a
moral hazard."
ING City contains plans for a 560-hectare reservoir
which the company claims will help with flood-mitigation. However, the
problem of the city's sewage remains, and the people who currently make a
living from it feel they are up the creek, without a paddle that can
help them.
"I will stay working until they fill in the lake," says Pov.
"Here, I can still earn enough to make a living, day by day … but after that, who knows?"
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