The Hun Manet regime in Cambodia continues to weaponize the legal system in a bid to quash international visibility of the human realities of land grabs in Cambodia.
Koeut Saray, a former Buddhist monk and president of the Khmer Student Intelligent League Association (KSILA), was arrested on 5 April by a squad of 10 police officers in Phnom Penh. KSILA works to encourage student participation in social and political issues. Koeut Saray is being held in pre-trial detention on charges of “incitement to cause serious chaos to social security”.
His “crime” is simply to make the consequences of land grabbing by Cambodia’s ruling elite known outside of Cambodia. The land dispute at Preah Vihear in northern Cambodia dates back to 2011 when rubber plantation company Seila Damex was granted a 9,000-hectare Economic Land Concession (ELC).
In March 2022, in Preah Vihear province’s Kulen district, provincial authorities razed 60 houses and about 450 hectares of crops out of a total 650 hectares. People who had lived there for 10 years were left living in tents. In December 2023, the Kulen district administration ordered 131 families to leave the disputed area by 10 January, 2024.
Those people, of course, had nowhere to go. In March 2024, police and forestry administration officials attacked people remaining on the land using live ammunition, smoke grenades and tear gas.
Radio Free Asia has reported that the children of the detained protesters are staying in a makeshift shelter and begging for rice from nearby villagers. A 59-year-old woman who was living on the affected land, Hem Ley, died after attempting to commit suicide on 9 March. She was taken by her family to hospital where she died on 17 March.
Koeut Saray spoke to reporters about the developments leading to coverage of the dispute by Radio Free Asia (RFA). Koeut Saray told RFA that some of the villagers had gone into hiding in the forest, without even mosquito nets for protection. The villagers took their children with them, so they aren’t going to school any more. Koeut Saray posted photos of the villagers struggling to survive in the forest on Facebook.
“Your land is your land, but state land is state land,” Preah Vihear provincial governor Kim Rithy told villagers in March. His words carry the echo of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s, which made all land the property of the state. Clear private property rights were never re-established under Hun Sen’s successor regime. The result was a two-tier system where regime insiders have hard property rights, but ordinary people remain at risk of forced displacement at any time.
The system of ELCs was set up by Hun Sen’s government in 2001. ELCs allow those holding the concessions to clear land for “industrial agricultural exploitation”. The government declared a moratorium on ELCs in 2012 given the dangers of social unrest being triggered. But repression to enforce the ELCs already granted continued under Hun Manet, who took over as prime minister from his father in August 2023.
Koeut Saray was previously arrested while still a Buddhist monk in September 2020 for taking part in a peaceful gathering calling for the release of Cambodian trade union leader Rong Chhun at Freedom Park in Phnom Penh. He was defrocked by the authorities and sentenced in October 2021 to 20 months in prison, before being released in November 2021.
The government must immediately release Koeut Saray and drop all charges against him. The villagers who are being treated by the regime as cannon fodder must have their land restored with compensation. Cambodia’s international partners must make it clear that they cannot trade with or give legitimacy to a regime which treats its people in this way.
