The Last Two Weeks
What with Easter and Khmer New Year, there has been little time left for anything else. Two things that come to mind are:April 08, Kampong Samakki (means, Solidarity Crossing village).
This is an amazing Kampot community. In June 2008 the villagers marched through the streets of Kampot to demand the return of mangrove forests given over to wealthy business persons by the authorities. Amazingly, the land was returned to the villagers - actually, the governor simply held onto the land transfer documents and never gave them over to the "new" owners. More recently, a Cambodian phone company have been sniffing around the same area asking for people interested in selling their land to the phone company. No one is quite sure why the phone company needs land in quite that location, except as a front to the businessmen trying to access ownership to the mangrove forests. It might be something like if they buy up all the land surrounding the mangroves, who's going to stop them taking the mangroves, too? I led a short excursion down to the community for a German human rights organisation primarily concerned with food security and human rights. If the community lose access to the mangrove forest, they lose their fishing grounds, too.
