Asean Tribune

Jailed Vietnamese land activist Trinh Ba Tu was brutally tortured in detention as part of a bid by authorities to force him to plead guilty to charges of “anti-state activities,” a relative said Thursday, prompting calls by rights groups for an immediate investigation into his case.

Trinh Thi Thao, Tu’s elder sister, told RFA’s Vietnamese Service that she met with her brother’s lawyers on Monday and learned that he had been so badly beaten during an interrogation following his June 24, 2020 arrest that he required hospitalization for kidney inflammation.

After receiving treatment, he was returned to detention and told to sign a false statement confessing to the crime of “creating, storing, disseminating anti-State materials” under Article 117 of Vietnam’s Criminal Code related to posting online content critical of the government’s brutal response to a long-running dispute over a military airport construction site about 25 miles south of the capital Hanoi.

“My brother Tu said that the prosecutor insulted him during the interrogation—the prosecutor’s name is Minh and he’s a prosecutor from Hoa Binh province,” Thao said.

“During the investigation process, investigators promised Tu that if he pleaded guilty, he would be jailed for only six years, otherwise he would have to serve eight.”

Tu and his mother Can Thi Theu, who was arrested the same day and similarly charged, were sentenced on May 5 to eight years in prison and three years on probation each.

His brother Trinh Ba Phuong and another land activist named Nguyen Thi Tam were separately arrested on June 24 on charges of propagandizing against the state for posting online articles and livestreaming videos condemning the government for its handling of the military airport dispute. Phuong and Tam remain in detention pending a trial expected to begin on Nov. 4, Thao told RFA.

Speaking to RFA on Thursday, Ming Yu Hah, deputy director of London-based rights group Amnesty International, said that if the reports of Tu’s torture are true, the Vietnamese government must be held accountable.

“Beating by the authorities under such circumstances would likely constitute torture or other ill treatment, which is absolutely prohibited by international law,” she said, adding that Tu should never have been convicted and sentenced in the first place.

“These serious allegations of torture and ill treatment must be investigated by the Vietnamese authorities immediately and the perpetrators must be brought to justice without delay.”

Ming Yu Hah noted that Tu, Theu, and Phuong are all recognized as prisoners of conscience by Amnesty International and called for them to be freed.

“They have committed no recognizable crimes and have instead been punished for raising awareness of human rights violations committed by the Vietnamese Government,” she said. “They must be released immediately and unconditionally.”

Trinh Ba Tu and his mother Can Thi Theu, who Thao told RFA in July were being held in solitary confinement at a detention center in nearby Hoa Binh province, are currently awaiting a trial to appeal their convictions. The two have also been refused family visits since their trial, although authorities have yet to explain why.

Dong Tam incident

On Jan. 9, 2020, around 3,000 security officers conducted a raid on Dong Tam commune’s Hoanh hamlet to intervene in a long-running dispute over a military airport construction site about 25 miles south of Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi.

Dong Tam village elder Le Dinh Kinh, 84, was shot and killed by police during the operation, and Kinh’s sons Le Dinh Chuc and Le Dinh Cong were sentenced to death on Sept. 14, 2020 in connection with the deaths of three police officers who were also killed in the clash.

In an earlier flare-up of the Dong Tam dispute that goes back to 1980, farmers detained 38 police officers and local officials during a weeklong standoff in April 2017. Three months later, the Hanoi Inspectorate rejected the farmer’s claims that 47 hectares (116 acres) of their farmland were seized for the military-run Viettel Group—Vietnam’s largest mobile phone operator—without adequate compensation.

While all land in Vietnam is ultimately held by the state, land confiscations have become a flashpoint as residents accuse the government of pushing small landholders aside in favor of lucrative real estate projects, and of paying too little in compensation.

International organizations have voiced concern about the Dong Tam case, calling on the Vietnamese government to hold an independent and transparent investigation.

According to Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF), state media in Vietnam are highly restricted, leaving bloggers and independent journalists as “the only sources of independently reported information” in the country, despite being subjected to “ever-harsher forms of persecution.”

Measures taken against them now include assaults by plainclothes police, RSF said in its 2021 Press Freedoms Index, which placed Vietnam at 175 out of 180 countries surveyed worldwide, a ranking unchanged from last year.

“To justify jailing them, the Party resorts to the criminal codes, especially three articles under which ‘activities aimed at overthrowing the government,’ ‘anti-state propaganda’ and ‘abusing the rights to freedom and democracy to threaten the interests of the state’ are punishable by long prison terms,” the rights group said.

Vietnam’s already low tolerance of dissent deteriorated sharply last year with a spate of arrests of independent journalists, publishers, and Facebook personalities as authorities continued to stifle critics in the run-up to the ruling Communist Party Congress in January. But arrests continue in 2021.

Reported by RFA’s Vietnamese Service. Translated by Anna Vu. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

North Korea is “encouraging” newly graduated military officers to take up harsh assignments on the front lines in yet another example of forcing less privileged people to “volunteer” for unpleasant duties, sources in the country told RFA.

As it is still technically at war with prosperous South Korea, North Korea makes every male serve at least seven backbreaking years in the armed forces after finishing high school, but those who are well connected or show promise can enter military academies and become officers with easier duties.

The 1^st, 2^nd, 4^th, and 5^th Corps of the Korean People’s Army are front-line units stationed in areas of North Korea closest to the Demilitarized Zone which separates North from South. Even for officers, service on the front is more difficult, more dangerous, and requires much more labor than other assignments.

“My son and most of his classmates in this year’s graduating class at O Jin U Artillery Academy have been assigned to the 1^st and 5^th Corps, front units in Kangwon province,” a farmer from Ryanggang province in the country’s north told RFA’s Korean Service Thursday.

“The academy’s political department forced them to volunteer, saying it was a request of the party,” said the farmer, who requested anonymity to speak freely.

The farmer said his son had previously been assigned to the 7^th Corps in South Hamgyong province in the country’s east, a relatively easy assignment in the rear.

“When he went to the military academy, he expected to return to his original unit, but when graduation approached… they gathered all the students from rear units and said, ‘You’ve had a comfortable time in the military in the rear. It is your duty as soldiers and members of the party to go to the front lines and follow the will of the Supreme Commander,” said the farmer, referring to the country’s leader Kim Jong Un.

“In a meeting ahead of graduation, the head of the academy told our son, ‘The General Secretary’s request is for you to go to the 1^st Corps, the main outpost of the country,’ basically forcing him to volunteer,” the farmer said.

The head of the academy told his son that it would be helpful for his future if he volunteered for duty in the 1^st Corps and would be a good display of his loyalty, according to the farmer.

“If he were to disobey the request to join the unit on the front line, it would leave a mark on his personal record and follow him for the rest of his days. Moreover, all his hard work over the past three years becoming a military officer as the son of a lowly farmer will have been in vain,” said the farmer.

All the graduates from the rear naturally volunteered for service on the front, according to the farmer. 

“Who could possibly dare to disobey the demands of the party?”

A former soldier who served in the 1^st Corps told RFA that frontline service is so bad that nobody wants to serve in those units.

“Kangwon province is very mountainous, so there are not many people, and the transportation situation is very inconvenient. Working and living conditions are awful,” said the former soldier, who now lives in North Hamgyong in the country’s northeast.

“Once assigned to a front unit, it’s almost impossible to be reassigned to the rear. The greatest wish for 1^st Corps soldiers and their families is to go to a rear unit north of Chollyong,” said the former soldier, who requested anonymity for security reasons.

Chollyong is an area of Kangwon province notorious for its 99 steep peaks and valleys. The rough terrain makes any assignment there extremely difficult, and anything north of Chollyong is a cushy rear assignment in comparison.

“The 1^st and 5^th Corps are all-round corps, larger than the others and are the core units that the party is most focused on,” the former soldier said.

Kim Jong Un’s father and predecessor Kim Jong Il visited the 1^st and 5^th Corps during the 1994-1998 North Korean famine to encourage them to prevent any unexpected chaos at a time when the country was on the brink of collapse, the former soldier said.

“I don’t know how I endured more than 20 years at the base in that mountain range in Kangwon province. I still get goosebumps thinking about that time,” the former soldier said. 

The former soldier said that all the officers at the front are always trying to transfer to the rear, and nobody wants to serve there when they graduate from the academy, so therefore authorities are forcing them to volunteer.

“In the end, the reality of this country’s military is that the children of the poor and powerless have no choice but to serve at the front.”

Reported by Chang Gyu Ahn for RFA’s Korean Service. Translated by Leejin Jun. Written in English by Eugene Whong. 

Chinese officials have denounced a former Uyghur internment camp detainee who was forcibly sterilized about three years ago and has spoken publicly about her ordeal, as part of an ongoing smear campaign to discredit those who have exposed abuses against the mostly Muslim minority group.

Zumrat Dawut, who came to the U.S. with her family via Pakistan in 2019, had testified about her experience in the camps, where she was subjected to forced sterilization, providing news outlets and human rights organizations with strong evidence of the Chinese government’s alleged genocidal policies.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs denounced her in April along with other former residents of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) who had testified about abuses in the region while living abroad as liars, criminals, terrorists, and persons of “bad morality.”

At a press conference Monday in Beijing, XUAR government officials defended their policies concerning Uyghur women and responded to recent reports that they had sold the assets of detained Uyghur businesspeople online.

Chinese officials hold periodic press conferences to counter condemnation of a litany of documented abuses against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang, including confinement in mass internment camps, sexual assaults, forced abortions and birth control measures, and forced labor.

China has held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and others in “re-education” camps since 2017, while dismissing widely documented evidence that it has mistreated Muslims living inside and outside the camps, including testimony from former detainees and guards describing widespread abuses in interviews with RFA and other media outlets.

Chinese officials say the camps are vocational training facilities where Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities are taught skills in an effort to prevent religious extremism and terrorism in the region, where about 12 million Uyghurs live.

At the press conference, Xinjiang government spokesman Xu Guixiang discussed what he called the “protection of women’s rights and interests” in Xinjiang.

“Some anti-China forces falsely claim that Xinjiang has severely violated the rights and interests of ethnic minority women, and spread lies about the so-called forced birth control and forced labor by ethnic minority women,” he said.

“Facts have proved that with the continuous enhancement of the protection of women’s rights and interests in Xinjiang, the development environment of women of all ethnic groups has been continuously improved, the level of education has been significantly improved, the awareness of rights protection of marriage, family and property has increased significantly, and people’s livelihoods and welfare have been steadily improved,” Xu said.

‘They wanted to attack me psychologically’

When discussing policies on Uyghur women, Xu attacked Zumrat, who was forced to undergo sterilization surgery three years ago.

He rejected statements that Zumrat previously made that she had been held in a “training center,” that she and other detained Uyghur women were forced to take contraceptives, and that she had been forced to undergo sterilization surgery. He also denied that her “relatives”— Han Chinese assigned to monitor the homes of Uyghurs — had forced her to eat pork.

Xu also said that Zumrat’s father had never been questioned by police and did not die in custody.

Additionally, Xu told the audience that the woman’s older brother said that her Han “relative” was actually a relative of Zumrat’s brother, Abduhelil Dawut, and that his “relative” never once spent the night in the house.

Xu went on to say that in January 2018, Zumrat’s brother’s “relative” invited Zumrat, along with her brother and sister-in-law, to come to his house, and that the relative’s mother was an ethnic Hui Muslim, which meant that that it was impossible that she would have served pork to the guests.

The Xinjiang regional government has smeared other former Uyghur female detainees, including Tursunay Ziyawudun, Qelbinur Sidiq, and Sayragul Sauytbay, who have testified about the abuse they endured or witnessed.

Zumrat told RFA on Monday that she was surprised that Xu had discredited her at the press conference.

“They took advantage of a time when I was ill and weak,” she said. “It was as though they wanted to attack me psychologically. … On top of that, today is exactly two years since the day my father died. The time of my surgery occurred at the same time as the two-year anniversary of his death.”

Zumrat also said that she has ample evidence that she was in an internment camp, underwent forced sterilization surgery, and had Han Chinese “relatives” inside her home.

“Even now, compared to other survivors, whether we’re talking about the ‘relatives’ program or other things, I witnessed it all and have photographs I took with me when I left,” she said. “They cannot deny this.”

“There wasn’t only one [‘relative’] in my house. My daughter was five years old at the time, and even she had a Han Chinese ‘relative,’” Zumrat said. “I can’t remember their names right now, but I have photos of all of them. I even have photos when they were lying down and sleeping on the quilts in my home.”

Zumrat pointed out that Xu was correct in stating that the mother of her older brother’s “relative,” who is surnamed Zhao, was an ethnic Hui, but that the official failed to mention that Zhao’s father was Han Chinese.

Zhao renounced her own family and married a Han Chinese man, saying that she had become Han herself and started eating pork, Zumrat said.

“She gave us [pork],” she said. “She told us that it was necessary to slowly, gradually change Muslim [halal] rules. She said things like that, like it was nothing. And she was actually a police officer, this woman, Zhao.”

Hospital recovery

The press conference coincided with Zumrat’s recovery from a hysterectomy at a hospital in northern Virginia on Oct. 7. She had to undergo the operation because the forced sterilization surgery had damaged her uterus and endangered her life.

A written statement Zumrat submitted to her gynecologist said she had become infertile approximately three years ago after undergoing forced surgery in China.

Her physician, Dr. Devin Miller, said in a letter obtained by RFA that the forced sterilization left Zumrat unable to have children.

Uyghur human rights activist Rahima Mahmut said Uyghur women have been the greatest source of firsthand information about the internment camps in Xinjiang and that China is attacking those who have been released because they have exposed the government’s wrongdoings.

“It is primarily these brave women of ours who have spoken about the terrifying things inside [the camps],” she told RFA. “They have spurred discussion in the world by speaking in detail about intensely private things, things that people are normally too afraid to speak about. There has been a great power in this. This is why China is attacking them.”

Mahmut also said that China is using all means to cover up its crimes, including denouncing all former camp detainees as liars.

“Why are they attacking Uyghur women to this degree nonstop?” she asked “It’s because they have exposed China’s real motives. These women have done the best job in raising awareness of China’s crimes against humanity.”

The U.S. and other Western states have determined that the treatment of Uyghurs constitutes genocide and crimes against humanity. They also have imposed unilateral sanctions on relevant individuals and entities in Xinjiang.

XUAR government officials at the press conference also defended the seizure and online auction of property confiscated from detained Uyghur businesspeople.

The government has sold assets totaling more than U.S. $80 million, according to a Wall Street Journal report based on information compiled by the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) and published in September.

XUAR government spokesman Elijan Inayet defended the sales of the assets, telling attendees at the press conference that the individuals who owned them had been arrested and imprisoned on charges such as terrorism, extremism, inciting ethnic hatred, and disturbing the social order.

But the UHRP report said that the individuals detained for such charges had been jailed “in a highly secretive process of arrest and trial that appears to fall outside judicial due process, in violation of China’s own laws.”

Reported by Jilil Kashgary for RFA’s Uyghur Service. Translated by the Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

Chinese policies aimed at mitigating climate change on the Tibetan plateau are destroying traditional Tibetan approaches to managing the land, and serve only to further government efforts to move nomads from their grazing grounds, according to a report released this week.

“China has explicit and elaborate plans to empty Tibet of Tibetans, concentrating them in towns and cities, with few ways forward into the urban economy, and no way back to their lands,” says the report “Unsustainable Futures” by the India-based Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy.

“Nomadic families all over Tibet have, over decades, been gradually squeezed into poverty by ever-tightening restrictions on the size of land allocations,” says the TCHRD report, which comes ahead of a UN climate change conference to be held at the end of October and in November in Glasgow.

Other Chinese policies impacting traditional nomad lifestyles include the compulsory fencing of allocated lands and construction of houses on winter pasture, limits on herd size, and pressure to sell more animals at younger ages, TCHRD said.

Tibetan nomads have been blamed for decades for state failures in rangeland management, the rights group said, adding that official rationales for their forced relocation include poverty alleviation, wildlife protection, and carbon capture.

 “But Tibetan customary modes of production generate very little of the emissions that cause climate change,” the rights group said in its report.

China now declares huge watersheds on the Tibetan Plateau to be national parks in an effort to mitigate climate change and offset its reputation as a major world polluter, TCHRD said.

“[But] as the world’s biggest maker and user of coal, cement, steel, aluminium, copper, and much else, China is the primary cause of climate change emissions.”

China’s exploitation of Tibet’s natural resources has at the same time done serious damage to the region’s environment, said Lobsang Yangtso, a campaign and research assistant at the International Tibet Network, a global coalition of groups working on Tibetan issues.

“And this is certain to increase in the near future,” Yangtso said, speaking to RFA.

“Where mining has taken place, the landscape has been destroyed and land has been ruined for any kind of agriculture. Tibetans have been forced to relocate, and waste from the mining pollutes most water sources,” Yangtso said, adding that heavy vehicles and equipment used in mining also pollute the air.

Tibetans living in areas being mined have no say in what the Chinese government is doing, Yangtso said.

“The Chinese attitude toward mining in Tibet is that China has the exclusive right to exploitation, and this is clear from what the Chinese government has done in the past,” he said.

Also speaking to RFA, TCHRD researcher Tenzin Nyiwoe said that the forced relocation of Tibetan pastoralists from their grazing lands into urban settlements has greatly disturbed the nomads’ traditional ways of life.

“This is one of the most important points raised in our report,” Nyiwoe said.

China’s claims to be taking a leadership role in global climate management should be closely examined at the coming Glasgow summit, and their policies on the Tibetan Plateau should be questioned, said Mirza Rahman, an independent researcher on environmental issues from Northeast India.

“Tibet’s ecology is very important to climate security,” Rahman said.

Reported by Lobe Socktsang for RFA’s Tibetan Service. Translated by Tenzin Dickyi. Written in English by Richard Finney.

Southeast Asian foreign ministers will hold an emergency meeting Friday to discuss barring the Burmese junta chief from an upcoming ASEAN summit, Indonesia’s ambassador to the regional bloc said Thursday.

News of the meeting came after the Burmese junta spokesman confirmed that Erywan Yusof, the special envoy from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, had “postponed” a trip to Myanmar scheduled for earlier this week.

The Tuesday trip was postponed because Myanmar’s military leadership did not allow Erywan to meet with all parties, including deposed National League for Democracy (NLD) leader Aung San Suu Kyi, said Ade Padmo Sarwono, Indonesia’s ASEAN envoy.

“The meeting will be closed and limited to discussing the issue of Myanmar, especially information obtained from special envoy Dato Erywan,” Ade told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service, when asked if the bloc had decided on Min Aung Hlaing’s attendance at the Oct. 26 to 28 ASEAN summit.

He said Min Aung Hlaing, Myanmar’s junta chief, should not be invited to the ASEAN summit because the bloc does not recognize the junta administration.

Ambassador Ade declined to comment on whether the diplomat appointed by the Burmese junta as foreign minister would attend Friday’s meeting.

Myanmar’s military, led by Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, toppled the elected NLD government on Feb. 1, claiming that last year’s polls were rigged. Since the coup, Burmese security forces have killed close to 1,170 people, mostly anti-coup protesters.

Last week, the ASEAN special envoy told reporters the junta had “backtracked” on a five-point consensus agreed to by Min Aung Hlaing when he and other ASEAN leaders met in Jakarta on April 24.

Friday’s unscheduled meeting to discuss the participation of Min Aung Hlaing was initiated by ASEAN chair Brunei, Ade said.

Until now, Myanmar military-appointed officials have participated in all ASEAN sub-meetings since the coup and splashed photographs of these virtual gatherings on state media and social media.

Myanmar, which became part of the 10-member ASEAN in 1997, has been in a similar position vis-à-vis the bloc before.

It was to take over the revolving chairmanship of ASEAN in 2006 when the country was under military junta rule. But it was persuaded to give the position to the Philippines after Western countries threatened to boycott ASEAN meetings.

NLD denies junta’s claim

Meanwhile, the junta did not comment on this week’s upcoming meeting, but after news broke about it on Friday, the foreign ministry posted a statement on Facebook.

Detailing the chronology of its interactions with the ASEAN envoy, the statement essentially said that the envoy’s Myanmar visit did not take place because the ministry did not agree to certain requests from the envoy.

“Myanmar has demonstrated flexibility in any possible ways and means to facilitate the special envoy’s visit to Myanmar,” the statement said.

“As Myanmar has been prioritizing peace and tranquility in the country, some requests which go beyond the permission of existing laws will be difficult to be accommodated. In this respect, the special envoy and international community need to show some understanding on such a situation.”

Earlier, junta spokesman Zaw Min Tun told Radio Free Asia, a BenarNews sister entity, that the envoy could meet members of all parties who did not face trial, “including NLD members.”

He said Myanmar’s junta-appointed election commission had invited “all major parties” for the meeting on Oct. 12, but U. Bo Oo, a senior NLD leader, took issue with that assertion.

“I have not heard that the National League for Democracy (NLD) has been invited yet,” the vice-chairman of an NLD township committee told RFA.

Without referring to the trip or its cancellation, the ASEAN envoy had issued a statement Tuesday saying he “reiterates his commitment to making a visit to Myanmar, and to be accepted have access to all parties concerned in order to fulfil his role as mandated in the five-point consensus.”

The fifth point of that consensus says: “The special envoy and delegation shall visit Myanmar to meet with all parties concerned.”

In Washington on Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated that the Burmese regime must be accountable to ASEAN’s five-point consensus.

In a telephone call with Erywan in his capacity as Brunei’s second foreign minister, Blinken reaffirmed the need to “facilitate a meaningful visit by Foreign Minister II Erywan to Burma to include engagements with all stakeholders.”

ASEAN ‘leaders may need to step in’

Three ASEAN members may well assent to disinviting the Burmese coup leader from the regional summit later this month, based on recent comments by their top diplomats.

On Thursday, Philippine Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin said ASEAN’s credibility would be in question if it let the junta leader and representatives attend any more ASEAN meetings.

“Well, we can continue with this keeping … them [Myanmar junta] at a distance, but … if we do, if we relent in any way, our credibility as a real regional organization disappears,” Locsin said in a conversation on Friday with the Lowy Institute, an Australian think-tank.

If ASEAN doesn’t prevent junta representatives from attending the meeting, “we’re a bunch of guys who always agree with each other on the worthless things,” Locsin said.

Malaysia’s and Indonesia’s foreign ministers indicated last week that Min Aung Hlaing should not attend the ASEAN summit.

However, ASEAN takes decisions based on consensus, so keeping the junta leader out of the summit “would be a significant bridge for ASEAN to cross,” said Thomas Daniel, an analyst at Malaysia’s Institute of Strategic and International Studies.

“Member states that have stubbornly clung to the convenience of non-interference, preventing a more effective response to the violence that followed the coup, are likely to continue to do all they can to keep the status quo,” Daniel told BenarNews.

Another analyst, Aaron Connelly, from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said foreign ministers alone may not be able to decide on barring Min Aung Hlaing.

“The [member-countries’] leaders may need to step in and come to a solution, particularly the Sultan [of Brunei] as ASEAN chair,” Connelly said on Twitter.

Reported by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.

Hundreds of Cambodian families on Thursday refused compensation for their land from a Chinese-owned resort developer, the latest wrinkle in a decade-long land dispute, the villagers told RFA.

The Union Development Group (UDG) is building the U.S. $3.8 billion Dara Sakor project including a seaport, resorts, and casinos in Cambodia’s southwestern Koh Kong province.

The company was last year sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act for alleged land grabs, rights abuses, and corruption.

Authorities scheduled Thursday and Friday as days when the villagers would accept compensation for their land and put an end to the 10-year dispute, but some of villagers called the compensation scheme unfair.

Villagers have now been divided into three groups according to how affected they are by the developer, Koh Kong Provincial Deputy Governor Sok Sothy said at a meeting with the villagers and the Ministry of Land Management on Oct. 11.

The first group of 247 families would get U.S. $9,000, half a hectare (1 hectare = 2.47 acres) of land for a house and three hectares of land for farming. The second group of 255 families would get two hectares of farming land, and the third group of 831 families would get one hectare.

Under the compensation scheme, the villagers would receive new allotments of land by lottery.

The lottery for group three was held on Thursday, but only 327 of the 831 families accepted the offered compensation.

Sam Thy, a villager from group three, told RFA’s Khmer Service that his family was among those who had refused to accept the deal, saying authorities had forced them to agree without a discussion with the villagers and with representatives of NGOs present.

He said that $8,000 per hectare would be a fair price for his nine hectares of land, but is being given only a single hectare by lottery instead. 

Another villager, Tith Tem, 63, told RFA she has 60 hectares of land, but the authorities are only giving her one hectare.

“This is very unjust, and I cannot accept it,” she said, adding that many families in her village have been working and living on their land since the 1980s. 

Tith Tem urged the government to provide proper compensation.

“We want a transparency. The land I can get is not even half of what I lost. We can’t accept it. We will protest,” she said.

RFA attempted to reach Deputy Governor Sok Sothy for comment, but he was not available Thursday. He earlier told local media that provincial authorities will continue with their offers and the villagers have the right not to accept it. 

UDG’s investment in the area has caused lost income to the villagers for the past 10 years according to Hour In, the Koh Kong provincial coordinator for the Cambodian rights group LICADHO.

“The authorities should consider the scope of what the villagers are losing,” Hour In told RFA.

“The villagers are now saying that if the authorities cannot afford to resolve the issue in accordance with their requests, they should allow them to return to their properties,” he said. 

The Dara Sakor project has been mired in controversy ever since UDG’s parent company, Tianjin Wanlong Group, was granted a 99-year lease to 90,000 acres along 20 percent of Cambodia’s coastline in May 2008.

The lease was handed to Tianjin Wanlong without an open bidding process and has provided the company with more than triple the size of any concession allowed under Cambodia’s land law.

UDG soon began clearing large swathes of forest from the Botum Sakor National Park, which was included as part of the land lease, and forced hundreds of families to relocate. Many have yet to receive the compensation they were promised as part of the deal 12 years ago.

China has stepped in to wield significant influence in Cambodia in recent years as relations between Phnom Penh and Western governments have cooled amid concerns over the country’s human rights situation and political environment following a broad crackdown on the political opposition in 2017.

Chinese investment has meanwhile flowed into Cambodia, but Cambodians regularly chafe at what they call unscrupulous business practices and unbecoming behavior by Chinese businessmen and residents.

Reported by RFA’s Khmer Service. Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.