Breaking News: Slum Flattened

This is just a quick post to bring you up to date on yesterday's events here. At 2 am Saturday January 24 police and military began to secure the perimeter of the slum where Kung Nai lived until earlier in the week (see my prior post) and where many families--perhaps as many as 100--still were living. At daybreak a group of workers in red shirts moved in with heavy equipment to start knocking everything down. Here is a link to the article, with some pictures, in today's Phnom Penh Post, the English language daily. http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/200901

I did not see this personally. I wasn't up early enough to go along with Charley, who did go out to the site and try to find the CLA students who are still living there. Some have relocated temporarily to the CLA house, I think. He was kept out of the site along with other observers but could watch from the open stairs in the adjoining building that you see in the background of some of the pictures. Not sure of how violent the scene would be, I chose not to go out alone. Apparently violence was relatively minor--though not, I'm sure, to those directly in the line of it.

It's likely that the red shirted workers were men bussed in from the country side and paid a few dollars each and a bottle of water and the T shirt and then bussed back to their villages.

Land rights here are chaotic at best which leaves the poor vulnerable to this kind of action. Note that many of these people are the working poor, with jobs in PP, who don't have sufficient income to get to those jobs from the relocation site 16K outside the city. It seems too that the relocation site is not ready for occupation: no reliable water, for instance. There is also considerable debate as to what is legal, as you can tell from the accompanying article.

I believe the whole site is fenced off as of today.

Karen