Lim Marong pointed at a rusted truck wheel sitting in a trash-strewn alley of Borei Keila, a 14-hectare squatter community in the middle of Phnom Penh.
“It’s very effective,” he said.
When hoisted and struck, the wheel will sound throughout the crowded community as a fire alarm or a call-to-arms, Lim Marong, 42, said.
Then residents will come out of their cramped, motley homes, and community leaders will tell them what to do.
On Thursday the alarm was used to rally residents to knock down the sign of the company that has big plans to redevelop the area.
Municipal officials announced in September that the Borei Keila community was being handed over to a private company for redevelopment.
But, unlike previous cases in which City Hall has set its sights on squatter-occupied real estate, the people of Borei Keila have been told they can stay.
The new construction will include 10 apartment buildings that will house the 1,776 families currently occupying the land, officials have said.
In addition, those families will be given titles of ownership to their new homes.
“These people are lucky,” Mann Chhoeun, chairman of the Municipal Cabinet, said Tuesday.
But some residents disagree.
Phanimex Co Ltd, the company contracted for the $7 million project, posted a sign at the edge of the site last week. The sign told of the company’s designs.
That evening, the wheel rang, and residents tore the sign down.
“People are concerned the authorities will force them out of the area. That’s why they came and knocked the sign down,” a neighborhood vendor said.
On Tuesday, some residents had different notions about what City Hall and Phanimex might have planned for them.
“People here are very afraid of fire,” one man said, suggesting the suspicious fate of past Phnom Penh squatter villages.
He mentioned the truck wheel and said there are two more in the community that residents will use to raise the alarm if arsonists strike.
Every family in Borei Keila keeps a large water jar full for extinguishing flames, he said.
The man declined to give his name, saying he had already been targeted by authorities.
Another man, who also declined to give his name, said, “The prime minister promised to sign over the land titles to the people and Mann Chhoeun promised to develop the city better with new buildings.”
But, “what has happened and what is happening is cheating,” he continued.
Paul Rabe of the UN Habitat Urban Poverty Reduction Project said Tuesday that the residents’ distrust was understandable, given the municipality’s previous relocation of squatters to areas outside the city.
It is his office’s job to help explain to the residents that the “upgrade” of their complex is in both their interest and Phnom Penh’s, he said.
He said the residents will get new housing units and services, such as waste management, which they don’t have now.
“These people are getting a pretty good deal,” Rabe said.
Mann Chhoeun attributed the unrest in Borei Keila to about 30 or 40 “very aggressive” trouble makers. But he also credited their distrust to the project’s novelty.
One problem facing the project, though, is trying to decide who should get a housing unit. After all, some people have lived in Borei Keila for 10 years or more. Others just arrived.
A lot of families have settled there since last year, after they heard about the promised housing, to get a free unit, Rabe said.
He said Prampi Makara district is now trying to categorize residents, and seniority will likely figure into whether they are housed.
According to Mann Chhoeun, the recent arrivals who drive luxury cars will have to look elsewhere.
“Whatever happens, the 1,776 families must have a home to live in,” he added.
Housing aside, one land law specialist on Tuesday called the project’s legality into question.
State land is classified either as public or private, he said.
The public classification means it is designated for a specific purpose, such as a road or a school. Private means it is sitting idle and can be possessed by citizens who occupy it for five years, according to the 2001 Land Law.
Borei Keila—the concrete buildings, not the squatter community that has grown around them—was built near Olympic Stadium during the 1960s as dormitories for athletes.
After the Khmer Rouge was driven from the city in 1979, now-Senate President Chea Sim turned the compound into a training facility for Interior Ministry officials and allowed the families of 10 of those officials to reside there. They still do.
The land law specialist said it was debatable whether the real estate today is public or private state land, though in his opinion much of it is private and therefore eligible for ownership by the squatters, he said.
“One way or the other, the municipality has no right to do anything with that land,” he said.
Efforts to contact a representative of Phanimex on Tuesday failed.
