Cambodia's Stung Treng Bunong Community Fights for Collective Land Title Years After Deluge of Lower Sesan II Dam
More than seven years after being displaced by a major hydroelectric dam reservoir, a community of Bunong Indigenous people of Cambodia’s northern Stung Treng province are still determined to hold on to what remains of their flooded homeland.
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.
The Cambodian government has urged the Bunong of old Kbal Romeas to move to join their kin at a resettlement area more than 50 kilometers away. But 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. For now, however, that isn’t stopping them.
“We sacrificed for the nation, but we have not received [any] benefit from the dam,” said Dam Somnang, 39. “We lost our homeland and ancestral tombs in the bottom of the rivers. We gave them everything we had.”
At the urging of the state, about 67 Bunong households relocated to the new Kbal Romeas village. Officials gave those who relocated a base compensation of $6,000 for lost property, with the possibility of additional payments bumping some totals up to $10,000.
Srang Lanh, 47, Kbal Romeas’s sub-village chief and the community leader for the land registration process, said the money wasn’t enough for the holdouts to abandon their traditional lands. Instead, they’re pushed for a collective land title – an option for officially recognized land ownership available to Cambodian Indigenous groups, who historically held land as a communal asset and used it for hunting, foraging and rotational, swidden-style agriculture, as well as religious and cultural purposes.
Bunong groups elsewhere in Cambodia’s northern provinces have received such titles, but 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 – an important step in the collective titling process – much of the land they’ve sought is subject to a rival claim from a company called Huayue Group, formerly Siv Guek Investment.
The company already enjoys government backing through a 2006 economic land concession, a since-halted government program that awarded vast swaths of land ostensibly for large-scale agricultural development. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries granted the 10,000 hectare concession to Siv Guek Investment to establish a rubber plantation.
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 long struggle for a collective title
The Lower Sesan II dam has attracted controversy from its earliest days due to its major societal and ecological impacts. The dam sits on the Sesan River, which, along with the Srepok and Sekong rivers, makes up what geographers call the 3S River Basin.
This is a key watershed that feeds into the mighty Mekong River system, but is also of major local importance to the various peoples who inhabit the area. Conservationists say wide scale hydroelectric damming has cut off sediment flows, fish migration routes and other vital river processes that help sustain all manner of life – including that of millions of people who live along the banks. For Indigenous groups such as the Kbal Romeas Bunong, the dwindling natural resources offered by the rivers had already dealt a blow long before the loss of property on solid ground.
As the years have gone by, the old Kbal Romeas community has gradually cut the amount of land requested in their bid for a collective title. The group originally pressed for more than 7,000 hectares in 2017, but reduced this to about 5,000 by 2020 in the face of official resistance. By 2023, they cut their request down to 3,000 hectares, which Lang and others feel is the minimum required for the group’s traditional way of life.
Stung Treng provincial authorities made a counter-offer in 2020 of just upwards of 900 hectares around the site of the old Kbal Romeas village. Lanh said this offer is unacceptable to the holdouts above the reservoir, and though the group has since filed numerous appeals to provincial officials, their requests have gone unanswered.
“If [they] give us only 900 hectares, it is likely to kill us,” she lamented. “Where would be the rotational plantation sites? Where is the sacred forest?”
Yun Mane, president of the civil society group Cambodia Indigenous People Organization, agreed the limitation to just 900 hectares could be problematic, even to the point of running against national and international legal frameworks.
“Providing this collective land registration helps them to be very secure in protecting their land against companies and outsiders,” said Mane, who is herself a Bunong woman from Mondulkiri province. “Collective land is not just used for plantations. Some lands are protected for worship, such as religious sites, cemeteries, forests and wildlife sanctuaries that belong to both indigenous communities and the state.”
No room for compromise?
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.
Kry Solany, project coordinator for the non-governmental organization My Village Organization at Stung Treng province, said his organization began working to prepare the titling documents with the community at Kbal Romeas as early as 2010. However, Solany said, as development began for the Lower Sesan II dam, “relevant provincial departments and local authorities proposed to postpone because they said the village will be moved to a new location after damming.”
According to the Cambodian Land Law on Immovable Property of Indigenous Communities, the lands associated with said communities are where they have built their homes and where they practice traditional agriculture. Though the old Kbal Romeas village area would have fit this criteria, the holdouts who have remained just above the reservoir are not officially recognized as a village, even though provincial authorities have allowed them to stay put.
Stung Treng Provincial Hall Spokesperson Men Kong said officials have supported the Bunong’s attempts to gain collective titling but said the overlap with the economic land concession awarded to the Siv Guek company has been the main sticking point.
Kong said working groups from several levels of government have visited the community to address this but that, ultimately, “there has been no agreement between the company and community” on how to compromise.
“We still cannot solve it because the area we can work with is only more than 900 hectares,” he said. “We cannot do [what the old Kbal Romeas community wants] because the remaining land in that area already has its legal owner, and we have no more land.”
Generations yet to come
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. Though they’ve built new homes and are making the most of their conditions, some lament that they don’t even receive electricity from the dam that displaced them – instead of having power lines to their homes, they rely on personal solar panels to light their homes.
Even more pressing, the villagers say their officially unsettled state may leave them at risk of incursions from those who believe 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.
Bruch Rithy, 29, is the acting president of the group’s community fishery and forestry patrol. He said he’s always been passionate about protecting natural resources.
“Because we do not know how development and the impact on natural resources will be for future generations, I am still motivated to continue doing this work for [those yet to come],” he said.
Rithy shared a plea to officials to continue to collaborate with the community to expedite the collective land titling process so the old Kbal Romeas Bunong will not face eviction in the future.
“We are really scared and live anxiously,” Rithy said. “Every day, the company claims that the land in this area belongs to the company, while we, the local owners, do not have the right to live here.”
This story was supported by the Earth Journalism Network. The article was first published in CamboJA News on August 12, 2024.
Banner image: A snapshot of Kbal Romeas village’s name tag in Sesan district on May 25, 2024 / Credit: Try Thaney.
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