Thread: Hundreds of Cambodian Villagers Halt Clearing of Land in Preah Vihear

What's the deal with land ownership in Cambodia ? No title, I guess.

There's a lot more of this going to happen. Unfortunately the government is organized and villagers living all over the place are not.



I just clicked on a few links and came up with something I found interesting :

One vivid memory I have is of the Fifth Congress of the National Council of the United Front for the Construction and Defense of the Motherland, held in Phnom Penh on 28 January 1986. Delegates from each province spoke of the situation and the needs of the people there.

But the ridicule from the floor was only too obvious when the head of the front in Stung Treng Province rose to address the gathering. Kham Teuan, and elderly delegate of Brao nationality, was a veteran revolutionary. But he was small in stature, and his earlobes were elongated and slit in traditional tribal fashion. He began by explaining, in thickly accented Khmer rather like that of the Cambodian minority in Thailand, that he was from only one of the twenty-two nationalities in Stung Treng's population of 50,000.

People could hardly understand him, and the mirth slowly subsided as curiosity got the upper hand and one by one all started to strain for his meaning. He went on to talk of the immense communication problems in this forested, mountainous, upriver frontier region. He called on the government in Phnom Penh to provide riverboats and trucks for Stung Treng. Now murmurs of comprehension rustled across the room as individual delegates grasped each phrase, nodded, and turned to pass on the meaning to one another. Ears eventually became attuned, and then complete silence enveloped the National Assembly hall.

Teuan outlined in some detail what he saw as the achievements of the people in Stung, Treng, in fields such as literacy, since liberation from Pol Pot. He ended on this theme, calling on the central government to rectify its neglect of such remote regions, and challenging it to send more representatives to Stung Treng not only to "educate our people," but also to encourage the local village officials and congratulate them for what they had already done. The audience by now was eating out of Teuan's hand and, in a final change of mood, it burst into sustained applause.


http://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourp...nic-minorities