The Sart family was on holiday in Sihanoukville as a fire stormed through their squatter village Friday, eating wooden shacks and expelling a stack of black smoke into the sky.
They stood Sunday on the site where their house used to be, still dressed in the formal clothes they had worn to visit family in Sihanoukville.
“I just came back a few minutes ago. We haven’t even had anything to eat yet,” said Chea Sotheary, 28. Her husband, a motorbike taxi driver, scraped in the dirt nearby to find anything of value.
Their once teeming neighborhood of brothels, karaoke parlors, moto repair shops and laundry cleaners was little more than a field of debris by the time Friday’s fire died down. Neighbors said the inferno began in an apartment when someone set a moto on fire.
The blaze destroyed 547 homes and left an estimated 2,700 people homeless as it cut a deep swath into the heart of the Chamkar Mon district neighborhood near the Tonle Sap.
Despite the massive damage, no one was seriously injured, police said. A boy was slightly hurt when he fell from a roof while throwing water on the fire, police said. The only casualties were a few household pets and countless rats, which were surrounded by swarms of flies on Sunday.
The fire came just as the city government is pushing a resettlement plan on the squatters that would see them relocated to a remote development some 20 km from Phnom Penh along National Road 4. The city has plans to turn the squatter area into a city park.
The timing of the fire fueled suspicions Sunday that the fire was intentionally set to force people out of the area, though no one had evidence to support the rumor.
Phnom Penh Governor Chea Sophara said he already had promises from 292 families to move to the new development. Asked if the city would force the rest of the squatters to go, he said no, but added that the city would negotiate to convince them to move. He said it would be safer for the people to move out of the squatter village, saying there has been seven fires there in as many years.
“This place is not safe,” he said.
Chea Sophara said criminal charges may be filed against the person who set the moto on fire.
Pin Pen, 55, owns the house where the fire started. She said she rented a room to a young couple less than a month ago. Most of the neighbors only knew them by their nicknames. The local Rasmey Kampuchea newspaper reported their names as Lam Botha, 23, and Sok Sopheak, 20.
Their neighbor Sok Sreng, 41, said the fire broke out at about 4:50 pm Friday. He saw Sok Sopheak run from the apartment crying, wearing only a sarong. He and his neighbors threw water on the blaze but could not stop it. He ran away as the fire spread, saving only the clothes he was wearing.
The squatter area has a history of spawning devastating fires among the wooden shanties. People’s recollections of the fires vary, but from three to seven blazes have occurred there in the past ten years, according to people who live there.
Pen Sothy, 40, said she has lost her home to major fires twice before, in 1994 and again in 1997.
On Sunday she held a plastic mat over her head to shade herself as her husband used charred timber and nails he found in the rubble to build a temporary shelter.
“I want to live here,” she said, “but we believe that a fire will happen again. We have discussed with others that we should build with brick so that no one gets burned down again, but people here are poor and cannot afford it.”
She may not have much choice. The city’s plan to move the squatters out of Phnom Penh was already proceeding when the fire broke out, according to Chea Sophara.
The city plans to build a school, market, health clinic and community center at the spot, according to a map of the project. In exchange for moving to the settlement the squatters would get a plot of land 7 meters by 14 meters large, a 50 kg sack of rice, a tarp, some noodles and a small amount of cash, according to Seng Tong, first deputy governor of Phnom Penh.
The government expects 600 families from the region where Friday’s fire burned to move to the new settlement, he said. Just 472 plots of land are available right now, however, so it will have to be expanded. Everyone with a house title in the squatter village is eligible for the resettlement program, according to government officials.
The government’s offer has been met with skepticism by the city-dwelling villagers. Few of them want to move to the countryside. Many of the men work as moto drivers and could not afford to commute to Phnom Penh every day for work, said Chhim Theurn, 34.
“We need to live near the city; we can’t pay transportation to go back and forth,” he said. He posted three signs on one of the buildings that survived the fire, including one that read “We cannot leave this place because the new place that you gave us has no school, no market and no hospital and it’s too far from the city.”
“We don’t want to oppose the government but we want to establish our own committee to negotiate with the government,” he said.
Others were less conciliatory.
“There’s no water, no electricity, nothing. They just abandon us and go away,” said Chuop Sareun, 52.
His neighbor Ek Dara, 32, said a similar plan to move squatters near the Russian Embassy to a farming village on National Road 4 last year failed, and that many of the people returned to their old homes in Phnom Penh.
He said the government plan had 100 people move to the site some 150 km outside of Phnom Penh to harvest palm oil and make flour for bread.
“They promised those people they would have a salary and food, and after a few months it was cut, so they came back,” he said.
As for his own future, he was unsure.
“So now I just wait to see what the people decide,” he said.
