In what police said was compliance with a 2-year-old court order, nine people were arrested, one man was shot and roughly 250 families were left homeless Tuesday after a forcible eviction turned violent in Phnom Penh’s Russei Keo district, villagers and human rights workers said.
About 200 police advanced on Phnom Penh Thmei commune around 8:30 am, firing shots that sent villagers running from their houses, said villagers and Chan Soveth, an investigator with the human rights group NGO Adhoc. Three hours later, about 250 homes on three adjacent plots of land in Thmei village and another plot in neighboring Pong Paiy village had been bulldozed, Chan Soveth said. Residents’ household goods were destroyed along with their homes, villager Leng Vuthy said.
“The villagers are in chaos and are missing their children, their belongings,” Leng Vuthy said Tuesday afternoon. “The police forces acted like thieves.”
Mom Dara, 20, suffered a gunshot wound through the calf, and nine villagers were arrested and taken into district police custody, Chan Soveth said. Mon Dara is recovering at a local clinic, villagers said.
Deputy Municipal Police Chief Reach Sokhon, who led the police forces into the villages, confirmed Tuesday that the nine were in custody but denied that police used guns.
“Police did not shoot the villagers,” Reach Sokhon said. “We only carried out the court’s orders.”
The order in question is an Aug 8, 2002, ruling by Phnom Penh Municipal Court, ordering villagers to vacate the four plots of land that the court ruled are the private property of a woman named Lim Khy, 47, said Phnom Penh Thmei commune chief Chorm Dara.
A telephone number provided for Prosecutor Seam Sok Ol was not in service Monday.
Police tried on three previous occasions to warn residents that they were considered squatters and must leave the land, Reach Sokhon said, but each time were turned back by villagers hurling rocks and gasoline-filled bottles.
“We warned them, but those people were cruel against our police,” Reach Sokhon said. Tuesday’s eviction “is the fourth time we tried to carry out the court’s order. Now we have success in all four places,” he said.
Leng Vuthy, however, said he paid $2,000 in 2002 for his 4.5 meter by 12 meter plot of land in Thmei village, and that other residents had paid between $400 and $2,000 for their land.
Evicted residents planned to remain on their land in the rubble of their destroyed homes, and are calling for compensation for their property, Chan Soveth said.
“They are crying out to solve the dispute through peaceful compensation,” he said. “We cannot accept the court’s order, because it is cruel.”
