Up to their ankles in grey-colored sludge filled with trash and reeking of human waste, residents cross from one end of Andong village to the other one step at a time.
It is raining again and the low-lying relocation site made up of ramshackle homes and narrow passageways floods quickly. Without drainage, rainwater puddles quickly fill up and mosquitoes move in.
Last week alone, according to Licadho doctors who visit the site three times a week, two children died: A 3-year-old girl from dengue fever and a 13-year-old who is suspected of succumbing to the same disease.
There is no reliable garbage collection and residents say that when they don’t have 100 riel to pay bathroom attendants at one of the few proper toilets on site, they either go to a nearby field to relieve themselves or use plastic bags that they then throw away.
One year since their forced removal from land in Phnom Penh’s Tonle Bassac commune, conditions at this Dangkao district relocation site continue to border on catastrophic. Even the land-allocation process of the promised 4-by-6 meter plots to families who can prove they previously rented accommodation at Tonle Bassac has come to a standstill.
Andong village residents remain, quite literally, in a quagmire.
Following the June 6, 2006, mass eviction of the Sambok Chap community in central Phnom Penh, residents who could prove they were legitimate renters were promised plots of land at the 1.5-hectare relocation site in Andong, which lies 20 km away from city center.
Accounts vary, but somewhere between 360 and 500 former renters received plots of land early on in the allocation process. However, almost 1,000 families remain in limbo at Andong village, still waiting to be assigned land.
Despite the fact that she has yet to receive a plot, In Toan, 68, says she is better off now than she was last year when she first arrived at Andong.
“It was raining the first night we got here, and we had to sleep on the ground on tarps. We had nothing,” she said, watching the sludge lap at the edges of her flimsy home.
In the section of Andong where people have received plots of land, the rooftops of their modest homes reach higher and some houses are made of brick, corrugated steel or painted wood.
Ung Oeun, 55, sits on the shiny new tile floor of her concrete home in Andong.
“I am happier now,” she said, remembering how she cried every day this time last year before she had her plot. “But I am still worried because I had to pawn my documents to get a loan [to build] this house.”
Government officials claim that all the renters relocated to Andong would have received their plots by now had people not cheated in the allocation process.
Pa Socheatvong, deputy governor of Phnom Penh, said the municipality purchased enough land in Andong for 777 families to each receive a 4-by-6 meter plot.
This should have been more than enough for the 700 registered renters, said Andong community chief Heng Deur, but problems arose when it became evident that outsiders had crept onto the land.
“The allocation stopped because of too many cheating families,” said Pa Socheatvong, adding that suddenly during the allocation process, the numbers of families claiming to be renters grew and there wasn’t land enough for everybody.
“We cannot find a solution as fast as you wish,” Pa Socheatvong said last week by telephone.
The first misstep at Andong, according to UN Habitat’s program manager in Cambodia Somethearith Din, was not properly registering everyone in Sambok Chap prior to the eviction.
“It was a mistake of the government. There was not clear planning,” he said.
Mathieu Pellerin, a consultant at Licadho, said there may have been a conscious effort to not register residents in order not to have to deal with them.
NGOs attempted to do a proper registration at the time of the eviction, but the government wouldn’t allow the registration to take place, Pellerin said.
“They rushed the process, and for what? They haven’t done anything with the land in Sambok Chap. They have built a road there—that’s it,” he said.
Deputy Municipal Governor Mann Choeun denied that the Sambok Chap eviction was rushed. He said the people of Sambok Chap had been notified of the relocation months ahead of time.
“It is not correct to say they were dumped [at Andong],” he said Thursday, adding that the municipality provided financial aid and clean water services to families at the site for some months after the eviction and plans next week to give $23,000 to more than 40 families there.
