Phnom Penh has been developing at breakneck speed. Infrastructure dots the capital. The result of this property boom is the sad and sorry reality that the city’s poor are being displaced at an alarming rate. ‘Activists are calling it the largest epidemic of evictions since the Khmer Rouge emptied all of Phnom Penh in 1975.’ The government has also been failing ‘to control land-grabbing.’ It is said that ‘133,000 people, or 10% of the population, have been evicted in Phnom Penh since 1990. That’s not counting the 250,000 victims of land-grabbing in 13 other provinces.’

Phnom Penh, today, is a young city with a population that mostly came in as countryside migrants. The wave of internal migration came after the Khmer Rouge was toppled in 1979, and during the United Nations peacekeeping operation of 1992-93. It is one of the most glaring cases of destructive migration and unsustainable urbanization. The city is an ocean of slum and squatter colonies whose population is estimated to number nearly a million.

Governments all over the world, using the power of eminent domain, have ‘the right to evict people for the public good.’ Cambodia is not an exception to the practice. ‘But in Cambodia, land-grabs come more with the promise of fattened wallets. Most land is ceded in secret, for government-connected moguls building hotels and high-end condominiums, sometimes by intimidating local residents with armed force or arrest.’ The result is hundreds of forced evictions where poor city residents are ‘often thrown into squalor outskirts without health-care services, clean water and sanitation, in remote areas where they can’t commute to the city.’

Via Far Eastern Economic Review