Excavators have started digging a waste-water treatment reservoir off a wastewater canal in Boeng Tompun I commune, with Phnom Penh authorities telling the land’s claimants they had no claim to the land.
They feel intimidated by authorities, and a village official was detained and questioned over the weekend for standing up for the community, but residents protesting the new airport have built a small barricade of branches and cursed the developers in a ceremony.
Cambodia has in recent months privatized more than 120,000 hectares of land, lake and sea, according to a review of decrees published this year. In Kandal, developer Khun Sea has received a Mekong island, where some inhabitants are previous evictees of Phnom Penh’s Diamond Island.
Floating fish farms floated 5 km north temporarily, those without fish worked to dismantle their homes, and some moved onto a wooden platform on shore, as the deadline for Phnom Penh floating communities’ evictions passed this weekend.
After City Hall threatened to evict residents living on floating houses with less than two weeks of notice, the families are torn on what to do, some rapidly disassembling their floating houses and others stalling for time ahead of Saturday’s deadline.
KrisEnergy announced that it has filed a “winding up” petition just six months after producing Cambodia’s first drops of oil, citing low production in Cambodia’s beleaguered Apsara block and the company’s compounding debt.
Four provinces outside Phnom Penh saw more than 100 daily Covid-19 cases each, four among the most affected administrations have stopped posting daily counts, and several previously little-affected areas are seeing an uptick in cases.
A long-standing land dispute involving a CPP lawmaker, jealous neighbors armed with slingshots, and the alleged presence of shadowy land brokers in the background ignited into protest and a man’s arrest this week in Kandal province.
A prisons department spokesperson on Wednesday confirmed there were Covid-19 cases in Phnom Penh’s PJ prison but would not say how many, while the mother of a prisoner there said her daughter had heard of widespread transmission.
Storm surges this month have ripped through a fishing community on the riverbanks of Phnom Penh, sinking boats, belongings and stores of food. Amid warnings of intensifying storms amid climate change, the families, who live on boats along the shore, speak of their anxieties about the future, and say they can only endure.
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