Despite Land Loss, Minorities Back Status Quo

Romam Gvin could be described as a counterintuitive voter. Intuition might lead you to believe that Mr. Gvin blames the government for the loss of his land to the Vietnamese rubber company that now owns everything for as far as the eye can see here in remote Talav commune—and quite a bit beyond. Using that same intuition, you might think that Mr. Gvin will vote on July 28 to change the ministers and the local bureaucrats he blames for consigning his family of seven young children to certain poverty. Well, you would be wrong. Mr. Gvin, a 35-year-old member of the Kachak ethnic minority, is voting for Prime Minister Hun Sen’s ruling CPP. Why? Because Mr. Gvin trusts what he sees, not what is promised. … Even though the CPP didn’t help him save his land, and he and the other members of his village protested more than 10 times, he casts blame firmly on the rubber plantation company, a subsidiary of Hoang Anh Gia Lai, and not the government that gave them the license that has turned this entire area into one huge agro-industry farm. … In 2004, the Cambodia-Laos-Vietnam Development Triangle area was created by the three governments as a way to tap the economic potential of their relatively remote highland border provinces, and to bring the minority populations into the cultural and economic mainstream. In the near decade since the signing of the Development Triangle agreement, Ratanakkiri has transformed from a sleepy and difficult to access province to one of the fastest growing regions in the country as Khmer and foreign investors pour in to buy up land for rubber, cassava, pepper and cashew plantations. Huge swathes of the province’s forests, which were predominately the richly bio-diverse “secondary forests” that the ethnic minorities cultivated in a fallow rotational system, have simply disappeared. … Romam Thvel, 54, a Jarai ethnic minority member, has not benefited from the windfall in the emerging “rubber triangle”—though hundreds of hectares of land that his village once owned is now producing a steady stream of valuable latex. He and dozens of other residents of Kong Yu village in O’Yadaw district have fought for nine years in the courts to get 450 hectares of land back that they say was grabbed from them by the sister of Finance Minister Keat Chhon. … “Why would we vote for anyone else? Hun Sen built the roads, built the schools. What’s the use in voting for the opposition,” said Romam Net, 42, a neighbor of Mr. Thvel who also lost land to Keat Kolney’s plantation. …

http://www.cambodiadaily.com/elections/despite-land-loss-minorities-back-status-quo-34786/