Though the Kampong Speu provincial governor has promised to demarcate the boundaries of the contested Metta forest of Oral district, residents say loggers have continued to clear-cut the vanishing woodland.
After a few months of rapid deforestation, tree-cutting activity at Kampong Speu’s Metta forest has slowed down in recent days as clearings reach the boundary limits of land allocated to families from the military’s tank unit.
As Kampong Speu’s Metta forest is rapidly destroyed, locals’ allegations against Brigade 70 soldiers are multiplying: a monk’s phone confiscated to prevent photos of forest clearing, seven Buddha statues destroyed, and the land sold to tycoons for dirt mining.
Prom Thomacheat, living in Oral district’s Metta forest, said the small hut where he had slept was burned to the ground on Monday.
Monks and villagers say that a group of people purportedly hired by the military to cut down Kampong Speu’s Metta forest are continuing to destroy a densely forested area full of wildlife, and are now only about 200 meters from a pagoda inhabited by a nature-protecting monk.
Locals attempting to protect the Kampong Speu forest say ten trailers full of logs per day are being removed with the oversight of soldiers.
Kampong Speu’s Metta community forest, home to a monk who has been helping locals protect the woods, is seeing rising violence and clearing by soldiers, including warning shots fired at the monk, residents have alleged.
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