Cambodia: Indigenous Bunong community struggles to secure collective land titles, facing competing claims from Chinese-owned Huayue Group's rubber plantation
"Stung Treng Bunong Community Fights for Collective Land Title Years After Deluge of Lower Sesan II dam" 12 August 2024
The 62 families of the old Kbal Romeas village have committed themselves to staying put after the Lower Sesan II dam inundated their homes in 2017, driving them to shelter about five kilometers away on higher ground just above the reservoir. The dam – an $816 million, 400-megawatt joint venture between Cambodian, Chinese and Vietnamese entities – permanently altered a broad swath of rural watershed traditionally inhabited by Bunong, Kuoy, Lao, Jarai, Kreung and Tampuon ethnic and indigenous minorities...
...as a collective land titling process for the indigenous group grinds at a years-long impasse against the competing interests of a neighboring agribusiness, the holdout families may find themselves stranded in their fight to retain land and cultural heritage...
...the process has been long and difficult for the people of Kbal Romeas. Though they’ve been officially recognized as an indigenous community by the Ministry of Interior...much of the land they’ve sought is subject to a rival claim from a company called Huayue Group, formerly Siv Guek Investment...Siv Guek was later purchased by the Chinese trading company Huayue, which maintained the land concession and rubber plantation. The company did not respond to requests for comment...
The relocation of most of the Kbal Romeas Bunong due to displacement by the dam reservoir has further complicated their efforts to gain a title to land around the old village...“relevant provincial departments and local authorities proposed to postpone because they said the village will be moved to a new location after damming.”...
In the meantime, with no official rights to the land, the community that has remained near the old Kbal Romeas village lives in a state of vulnerability...some lament that they don’t even receive electricity from the dam that displaced them...
Even more pressing, the villagers say their officially unsettled state may leave them at risk of incursions from those who they are squatting on their ancestral lands. The community has already alleged this in the past, claiming that Huayue has cleared land important to their cultural practices...