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| A woman walks through polluted water in Boueng Kak Lake, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Residents living around the lake fear they will be forcibly evicted by developers. Photograph: Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP |
Residents lose homes around Phnom Penh lake to make way for real estate development
Tuesday 29 March 2011
Jon Gorvett
Guardian Weekly
“I spent three and a half years living in hell under the Khmer Rouge,” said Ngin, surveying the half buried remains of her home of 32 years. “And now I am in hell again.”
It was early in the morning when housewife Ngin Savoeun woke to cries for help from her neighbours. A survivor of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime – whose soldiers had murdered her husband in 1979 – she had not imagined she would hear such cries again in her lifetime.
Yet on that night in November, she heard the screams of neighbours as they rushed from their homes around the shore of Boeung Kak Lake, located in the heart of the country’s capital, Phnom Penh.
And then she had to flee as well.
This time, however, her home was not under threat from Khmer Rouge guerrillas, but was instead demolished by armed construction workers, hired by a land development corporation to carry out one of the capital’s most ambitious new property developments.
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