PHNOM PENH, Cambodia-The murky waters of Phnom Penh's largest lake were once visible out the back window of Cham Pothisak's tin-roof-and-plywood shack. Today, a manmade sand dune taller than the home itself menaces like an ocean wave, filling up his crawlspace basement with putrid water and his family's life with clouds of mosquitos.
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It's squalid shelter at best, but in Cambodia, where 80 percent of the population depends on agriculture, logging, or fishing for their survival, land is wealth, and Cham said he has documents proving ownership to the 60-square-meter plot he bought 11 years ago. But now, along with thousands of others, he faces eviction in what may be the largest forced relocation of Cambodians since 1975, when the Khmer Rouge emptied virtually the entire capital. This time once again, it's the arbitrary power of the state at work: The government turned over some of Phnom Penh's priciest real estate, including Cham's land, to a close associate of Prime Minister Hun Sen. Developers are already moving in, pouring sand into Boeung Kak lake to fill it up, flood out shantytown homes, and prepare the site for construction. "It's like they're coming to kill us. They're taking our lives," Cham said. "We're angry but we can't do anything against them. It's like the Khmer Rouge all over again. We're helpless."
It wasn't supposed to be this way. About a decade ago, the World Bank began a program to codify property rights, with the goal of building system akin to what landowners enjoy in the West. The program was meant to make sure that people like Cham could defend their property from arbitrary expropriation. But the initiative has backfired. Instead of helping landowners, it has in many cases actually contributed to their displacement, forcing out residents who may well have had legitimate, longstanding claims to their lands and homes.
Cham's predicament is emblematic of the difficulties of bringing property rights to the developing world. Many development advocates, including at the World Bank and elsewhere, argue that property rights are a vital component of economic growth; they allow landowners to take loans, mortgage their assets, and plan economically for the future without fear of being kicked off their plot. But getting to that point is often messy in regions where overlapping claims are difficult to prove, the laws of the land are rarely enforced, and the wealthy and powerful are easily able to corrupt the system. Usually it's the poor who pay the price.
Cambodians have it worse than most, however, due mainly to the Khmer Rouge, the ultra-Marxist regime led by Pol Pot, one of the 20th century's most notorious tyrants. The Khmer Rouge, whose four years of misguided communist dogma and stunning brutality in 1970s formed the plot of The Killing Fields, outlawed private property and destroyed land records as they sought to create an agricultural utopia. Millions were uprooted from villages and cities, marched into the countryside and forced to build canals, plant rice, cultivate fields, and otherwise help create the Khmer Rouge's vision of a classless society. As many as 2 million perished from executions, starvation, disease or the violence spilling over from the war in neighboring Vietnam. In the aftermath, the thousands of Cambodians who had lost their land struggled to survive as refugees within their own country, squatting wherever they could.
The Khmer Rouge didn't last long; in 1979, Vietnam invaded the country and installed a puppet regime. But their dark legacy lives on, perhaps nowhere more than on the issue of land. The slow transition back to Cambodian rule eventually put power in the hands of Hun Sen, the current prime minister and a wily former Khmer Rouge military commander. Pushed by foreign lenders, including the Asian Development Bank, his government passed a law in 2001 laying the groundwork for a formal system of property titles or deeds to replace the ad-hoc mechanisms that had been built up over the years. The World Bank offered to help, setting up a $24 million Land Monitoring and Administration Program (LMAP) to build a system of hard paper titles and centralized registries. Germany, Canada and Finland also provided support for the effort.
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