When Deputy RCAF Infantry Commander Mean Sarin returned home to Preah Vihear province in 1998, he found strangers living on his farm.
Mean Sarin, a Funcinpec loyalist, went away to fight CPP troops during the July 1997 factional fighting. While he was gone, local authorities redistributed his 3-hectare farm to former Khmer Rouge guerrillas.
“[They said] I went into the jungle during the factional fighting, so they took it for people who had no land,” Mean Sarin said in an interview this week.
At the end of 1998, Mean Sarin, who said he holds a title to the land, brought a complaint before the provincial court. Instead of allowing the court to resolve it, Provincial Governor Preap Tan then ordered a local land dispute committee to work on the case.
After more than a year, Mean Sarin got their response—the claim was rejected.
For a number of Funcinpec loyalists like Mean Sarin, the CPP’s victory three years ago has meant a seizure of their family land.
Some found their plots were confiscated by the government, co-Minister of Defense Prince Sisowath Sirirath said on Tuesday. Others found it had been redistributed by local authorities to their own supporters. Still others, like many in Cambodia, had no clear title to the land, although they had been living on it for years.
But in 1998, in an effort to make a lasting peace, Prime Minister Hun Sen promised to give the land back to the troops if they would return to their homes and reintegrate into RCAF.
Two years later, many former Funcinpec soldiers are claiming the government didn’t meet its end of the bargain. They say the majority of Funcinpec fighters who returned to the government have never gotten their land back, and their efforts to push their claims have been ignored or rejected by authorities.
“We do not want to create a problem,” said a former Funcinpec general who asked not to be named, “but they broke their promise.”
Chum Kanal, a member of the National Commission for Land Disputes, refuted this claim.
“The problem is that they send their complaints to the wrong place,” he suggested.
Land claims should be sent directly to the commission, a six-member body set up to deal with all land dispute cases in Cambodia. Sisowath Sirirath, along with Minister of Cabinet Sok An and Deputy Prime Minister Sar Kheng, are among the high-ranking officials who serve on the body.
At present there is no central clearing house to deal specifically with the cases of Funcinpec troops, Sisowath Sirirath said. And officials in both Funcinpec and the CPP declined to specify how many families have been affected. Their estimates range from “very many” to “very few.”
Many former Funcinpec soldiers said that if the government is serious about keeping its word, it needs to set up a special body to solve their land disputes. They say that under the current system, they may have to wait years before their cases are settled.
But Sisowath Sirirath said the soldiers will have to wait until the government gets through a backlog of cases.
“On my desk I have so many cases,” he said. “We are pushing this situation, but we have to do it in a very, very slow and careful way.”
Priority has been given to solving land disputes of high-ranking generals and members of the government, such as former RCAF commander Nhiek Bun Chhay and current Funcinpec Security Adviser Serey Kosal, he said.
Those cases had to be dealt with first in order to guarantee a smooth transition into the new government, Sisowath Sirirath said.
Meanwhile, many of those generals’ subordinates remain landless.
Five weeks ago Mean Sarin passed his complaint on to the Ministry of the Interior. He is still awaiting their response. If his appeal is turned down again, he said, he will take it directly to Prime Minister Hun Sen.
“I have no land for my wife and my children to farm since I returned to the government,” he said.
(Additional reporting by Alex Devine)
