Far from the bustle of Phnom Penh, in an area surrounded only by dusty stretches of land and reachable by one narrow dirt road, sits the Anlong Kngan relocation site.
Thousands of people live in this village, manufactured more than one year ago by the municipality and NGOs, who needed to find a new home for the 3,000-plus families left homeless by a Tonle Bassac commune fire in November 2001.
In that time, the site has turned from a dry, open plain into a fully functional village. King Norodom Sihanouk and various NGOs recently donated a five-building, 25-room primary school for the thousands of children who live in the village; a new library is set to open soon and a large hospital is currently under construction.
Further along the countless rows of concrete and wood houses is Phsar Sensok, a vacant market with more than 180 stalls in what is labeled the Anlong Kngan Development Quarter.
Beneath the newly constructed market and neat rows of houses, however, lies the unfortunate reality of Anlong Kngan: No one wants to live here.
“People are leaving this village because they have no work,” said one villager on Tuesday, a woman who has lived there for one year.
She points to an abandoned house adjacent to hers, and another next to that, and another next to that. All of the residents who lived in these newly constructed homes and were given official land titles have since returned to Phnom Penh in search of jobs, she said.
“My husband is a motodop in Phnom Penh, and we only have enough food to fill our stomachs for one day,” she said.
Six months ago, 14,106 people lived in this village, said Ly Vendredy, the appointed village chief for Anlong Kngan. Since August, at least 1,000 families have deserted their homes to live with relatives in the center of Phnom Penh, where it is easier to find employment, he said.
While the schools, health clinics and plots of land all provide suitable living conditions, the lack of nearby employment opportunities has fueled a mass exodus from the village, he said.
Because of its poor location—more than 15 km outside the heart of the city in an isolated area—Anlong Kngan is also considered by many to be a security risk.
Local police reported that an unidentified man was shot and killed in December as he was driving along the dark, sparsely populated dirt road leading into the village. Another villager, Sreu Tek, said that one of his neighbors had been robbed of almost all his possessions.
“At night, I feel scared because the security here is so bad,” he said on Tuesday.
Police in the area tell a different story. They claim that only two people have been robbed along the road leading from the city into Anlong Kngan, adding that the local authorities have assigned residents in the village to serve as an unofficial and unarmed crime monitoring force that alerts the local police to any problems, said Khim Davuth, deputy police chief for Khmuonh commune—the commune that supplies 13 officers to police Anlong Kngan.
“The road is not 100 percent safe, but we do not consider it unsafe as well,” Khim Davuth said.
Many Anlong Kngan residents, including village chief Ly Vendredy, have raised concerns about the safety of the road because almost all the residents living at Anlong Kngan must travel along it in order to get to their jobs as motorcycle taxi drivers, construction workers and day laborers in Phnom Penh. When they return after dark, they could be possible targets for bandits who operate in the area, Ly Vendredy said.
“The people feel very afraid,” he said, adding that at least three people fall victim to robbers or bandits a month as they travel home—a figure the police disputed.
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In the center of the village lies another potential problem, officials said recently. About 100 meters from the neat rows of houses is an enormous makeshift collection of squatter’s houses. More than 900 families have built shacks out of straw and blue tarpaulins, and for the past year have waited for the city to give them official plots of land in the village as well.
“We don’t know what to do with them—they are really the city’s responsibility,” Ly Vendredy said.
The 900 families living as squatters on the site have no official documentation to prove that they once lived at the former Tonle Bassac camp, making city officials dubious about their claims that they once resided at Tonle Bassac.
“We are investigating their claims, but until we can prove that they lived at Tonle Bassac, we cannot give them plots of land,” said Mann Chhoeun, chief of cabinet for the Phnom Penh municipality. He added that he suspected the squatters are actually from provinces like Kompong Cham, Kompong Chhnang and Takeo and are merely trying to get free property.
The city cannot simply move the squatters onto the abandoned plots of land in Anlong Kngan because the residents there return between once a week or once a month in order to maintain official residency, Ly Vendredy said.
Pim Kim Srun is one of the squatters in the camp. She said she has waited for more than a year to get a plot of land in Anlong Kngan, and will not leave until her and her three children are granted the land.
Originally from Kompong Thom, Pim Kim Srun maintained that she had lived at Tonle Bassac for at least 10 years, but said her documents were destroyed when a massive fire swept through the camp.
“Life out here is very hard—one day we work, then we eat,” she said. “But we will not move. We are going to wait to get land.”
