banlung town, Ratanakkiri province – On the night of July 16 two men armed with an AK-47 arrived at the Bokeo district farm of Dam Chanthy and asked for her, telling her brother they were hired to kill her and shooting one round between his legs.
Luckily, she was away that evening.
The next day a police officer was shot and killed while attempting to apprehend one of the suspected assassins, known as Ny, who escaped that day but was subsequently killed in a gun battle with police Aug 4.
Highlanders Association President Dam Chanthy is still afraid because the suspected assassin was gunned down before he could reveal who had hired him. And she believes the assassination plot, which sent her into hiding for a short time, was related to her work educating the province’s ethnic minorities about their land rights.
“During my days in hiding…
some people were saying ‘the highlanders are all alone now, their work will disappear,’” 51-year-old Dam Chanthy, an ethnic Lao-Tampuon, said last week.
“But in fact the work goes on.”
The Highlanders Association still holds meetings for planning and information dissemination among minority communities, but Dam Chanthy concedes that she is too afraid to work in the same way she did before.
“I have started working again, but I work differently,” she said. “I used to go everywhere alone. Now I always travel in groups of at least three. I dare not go with my husband to our plantation anymore. I have only one life, and if I die, nobody will take care of my children.”
Dam Chanthy said that her organization was also changing tact. “Before we had a direct policy of educating people about land rights and the dangers of land loss.”
“Now we do it a different way. We changed the strategy to focus on agricultural development,” she said, noting that the new approach improves livelihoods and anchors them to their land.
Advocacy work in Ratanakkiri province has become more treacherous not only for Dam Chanthy, but for others, too, said Pen Bonnar, provincial coordinator for local rights group Adhoc.
“When she went into hiding, it only encouraged her attackers and others to intimidate human rights workers here,” Pen Bonnar said.
Though it is good that Dam Chanthy is back to work, changing the focus of the association’s work was lamentable, he added.
“What she is doing now destroys her reputation and wastes her hard work,” Pen Bonnar said. “Before she was working on land rights; now she is just helping to develop agriculture.”
Non-Timber Forest Products Project Coordinator Gordon Paterson said that although the assassination attempt was a real scare, the ensuing publicity may help protect Dam Chanthy.
“It’s kind of catapulted her a little bit into the limelight,” he said. “She’s had several invitations to regional events representing indigenous people and indigenous people’s issues, so that might be one solution for her to start advocating at national and higher levels because…that kind of exposure provides some protection.”
This is not the first time that Dam Chanthy has changed the focus of her work. In the 1980s she began working for the provincial Women’s Association and rose to its presidency. She continued working on women’s issues until the mid-1990s. She then worked for the Non-Timber Forest Products Project until she began the Highlanders Association in 2000.
The association now has 10 staff as well as members and activists from more than 20 communities—made possible in part because Dam Chanthy speaks 10 languages and dialects.
Despite her critics, Dam Chanthy said her goals, if not her tactics, remain the same.
“We want the people to run their own communities, to preserve the ecology, protect land rights and improve agriculture,” she said. “Our goal is to safeguard the land.”
