PHNOM PENH, Aug 28 (IPS) - Dozens of families this week started dismantling their homes and moving away from lakeside land in the centre of the capital after giving up on their lengthy struggle to remain. By the end of the eviction process at this site, around 30,000 people will have been moved off now-valuable land.
Human rights workers said it will be the biggest movement of Cambodians from their homes in decades.
Residents do not want to leave, but said they are being driven out by threats from the municipality. Some have not given up yet.
Sixty-seven-year-old Pol Vanna has lived at Village Four at the city centre site, called Boeung Kak, since the early 1980s. The former railwayman is adamantly opposed to moving to the relocation site – a field with no facilities some 30 kilometres away.
"We don’t want to leave Boeung Kak," he told IPS during a small demonstration outside City Hall earlier this month. "The company should give us some land for us to live on instead of forcing us to move away. I don’t understand why they can’t give us the land."
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