The Overseas Cambodian Investment Corporation (OCIC) finished clearing out a cluster of 16 shacks Monday morning on its sprawling development site on Phnom Penh’s Chroy Changva peninsula, paying the last four families living there $500 each to leave their homes.
The poor community of squatters in Doeum Kor 2 village was residing on a 387-hectare land concession slated to be the site of a $3-billion satellite city named “Chroy Changva City, City of the Future.”
Eight families agreed to take the $500 payout when OCIC showed up with bulldozers and excavators on Friday morning, and another four took the cash and moved out on Sunday.
Local authorities, along with OCIC representatives, told the remaining four families to move out by Monday morning or receive nothing, as their shanties would be dismantled and the plot of land filled with sand.
Khan Sokun, 53, a blind amputee and former soldier, was among the holdouts.
On Sunday, he said that, in the end, he had no choice but to take the money.
“If I didn’t accept it, they would keep pumping, and then we would be under the sand, but I accepted [the compensation] because I need my family to survive in the future,” he said.
