Boeung Kak Evictees Ask City Hall For Better Compensation
About 100 women forcibly evicted from Phnom Penh’s Boeung Kak neighbourhood protested outside City Hall yesterday asking for upgrades to the compensation they accepted under duress to give up their homes. The women said they were representing 739 of the more than 3,000 families forced out of their Boeung Kak homes since City Hall leased the area in 2007 to Shukaku Inc., the private firm owned by CPP Senator Lao Meng Khin and his wife Choeung Sopheap, with plans to turn the area into an upscale satellite city. Under the threat of having their modest, untitled homes demolished with nothing in return, they took what they could get: $8, 500 cash, ill-equipped housing on the outskirts of town or an empty plot of land outside the city. ... About 20 women still living at Boeung Kak protested in front of a metal building Shukaku has started building among their homes. Little more than a tall metal roof at the moment, the building sits inside a 12.44 hectare area Mr. Hun Sen himself cut out of Shukaku’s project in 2001 so that the 600-plus families still living there could receive land titles and keep their homes. It is also the first thing Shukaku has built since stopping work about a year ago, only months after breaking ground. ...
