The Phnom Penh Municipality on Sunday agreed to allow more than 250 squatter families to remain on a plot of land in Tonle Bassac commune for at least two years, despite previous attempts to forcibly remove them.
District officials tried to move some families from the site in early September and tore down at least 10 makeshift houses. On Sept 11, the municipality gave them a 10-day stay, which was recently updated.
“We will let them stay for two or three years…until we find them a place to be relocated,” Phnom Penh Governor Chea Sophara said on Sunday.
The city will send a team to the site today to survey the area and ask the residents what they need to survive, Chea Sophara said.
The situation at the site, however, remains “dangerous,” according to one Western observer. The seasonal rains have left approximately one-third of the houses in the village half-submerged, and access to fresh drinking water is still a problem.
“The city has not aided us at all,” said Pheng Sina, a woman who has lived on the site since her house burned down in a November 2001 fire that demolished a nearby former squatter camp.
Pheng Sina said city officials asked her on Saturday to relocate to another plot of land on the site because her house is now almost completely flooded. She said she cannot afford to move to a dry plot of land.
“I don’t have enough money to build a new house,” she said.
Another resident, Kim San, said city officials had asked him and his family to stay on the site “until they find us a new area to move to.” Unlike Pheng Sina, his house is not flooded.
Yet while Kim San and his family wait for the city to relocate them to another, drier plot of land, they must endure the floodwaters that every day creep further towards his wood-shack house, he said.
Kim San also lost his home in last year’s fire and has since shuffled back and forth between Tonle Bassac and the remote relocation site that was given to the squatters displaced by the fire. At this point, he said, he just wants a permanent place to settle.
“I want to ask the city to find land for me,” he said.
