Land activist taking on a new campaign
themselves in the way of bulldozers and confiscating the company’s machinery.
This resistance is now embodied in Khum Rany, the 27year-old Cambodia National Rescue Party commune chief candidate, who has staked her campaign on the issue.
The third of four children, Rany left school in sixth grade to work in her family’s rice fields. Her parents decided her working would allow her older brother and sister to finish their respective educations.
Rany only took notice of Rui Feng’s activities in 2013, when the company cleared 5 hectares of her family’s rice fields to make way for the sugar plantation.
Distressed by her feelings of powerlessness, she began looking for opportunities to educate herself, attending workshops hosted by Ponlok Khmer – an organisation that advocates for the land rights of ethnic minorities – and by the rights group Adhoc in Preah Vihear and Phnom Penh. At these conferences, Rany began learning about ELCs and their surrounding conflicts, as well as about the rights of Cambodia’s ethnic minorities living on their ancestral lands.
“All of my rice field was completely cleared and grabbed. I have pain from losing the land, so I joined community work and have tried to learn laws involving indigenous people and ELCs,” she said.
By 2014, she was fully engaged in the effort to stop the company, sleeping near rice fields with other villagers to prevent Rui Feng bulldozers from clearing them in the night.
In December 2014, nearly 200 villagers, including Rany, surrounded two Rui Feng bulldozers preparing to clear a rice field.
They mounted the bulldozers and demanded the drivers head to the commune hall. The drivers initially refused but, likely realising the odds were not in his favour, soon relented.
Intending to hold the bulldozers for as long as they could, the villagers removed the batteries and camped around the vehicles overnight, saying they would only return them if Rui Feng, whose representatives declined to comment for this article, agreed to return what the villagers consider stolen farmland to the community.
When provincial court officials arrived with police and six mechanics, insisting they were just there to repair the bulldozers, they found villagers holding petrol-filled containers.
“We held gasoline [as a threat] to burn [the bulldozers], killing them and us if they had managed to fix [them] and drive away,” she said.
Today, Rany speaks of the event not as a great victory, but as a bittersweet lesson.
“Hundreds of machines have been clearing the farmland and we always try to stop it and sleep at our rice fields,” she said. “We managed to seize only two and brought [them] to the commune hall.”
“[The bulldozers] are a legacy for the next generations, the machines that destroyed their farmland.”
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In late 2016, Rany and her family once again found their land under threat. This time, however, it did not come directly from Rui Feng, but the state. In addition to the 5 hectares they lost to Rui Feng in 2013, Rany’s family says it has the right to farm on 6 hectares of land across the road from the processing plant.
In order to protect the area from potential land grabs, Rany’s family, along with 18 other families with plots of land nearby, started constructing small wooden homes from which they could watch over their land.
On October 15, the Preah Vihear Forestry Administration’s then-director, Ith Phomara, arrived at the scene with a group of Forestry Administration officials, police and Military Police officers to tell the villagers they had built the homes illegally on land belonging to the government.
Although the villagers protested that a former Brame commune chief granted them written permission to farm the area in 2007, the Forestry Administration officials began tearing their houses down. Unbeknownst to Rany and the other villagers, a change to the boundary of neighbouring Chheb district had invalidated their claim to the land.
Rany attracted Phomara’s attention when she began photographing the wreckage of six homes with her cellphone. She accuses Phomara of slapping her twice in the face when she refused to stop.
Two days later, lawyer Sek Sophorn said Rany approached him at his Phnom Penh office to ask for help in filing a complaint against Phomara. Sophorn agreed to help her and went to the Preah Vihear Provincial Court in early November, where he submitted six witnesses for the prosecution’s consideration.
But on May 9, he received notice from the court that Rany’s case had been dismissed. Phy Sithorng, a spokesperson for the Preah Vihear Provincial Court, said that while she could not comment specifically on Rany’s case, the dismissal signified that “the court could not find evidence” to support the claims.
Phomara, who now works as an official in Preah Vihear’s Provincial Agriculture Department, said he was unaware of the case’s dismissal before cutting short the conversation.
Rany said that she will likely appeal the case after the elections. The small house her family built to protect their farmland remains standing. “We will never leave the land,” she said. “I agree to die on it.”
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Bat Dom, head of the CNRP in Brame commune, said he first asked Rany to run for commune chief nearly a year ago. “Rany is brave and has the ability to lead the community to protest against the land grab,” he said. “It is time we gather real nationalists as candidates to compete with the ruling party.”
For CNRP Preah Vihear’s working group chief, Thuon Put, Rany’s campaign has an obvious PR appeal.
“Rany is very popular, she is a female, she gets support from the community and is a good advocate for community rights, and she can solve the problems of the community,” he said.
Brame’s current commune chief, Miech Saing of the opposition, though, said he was not completely prepared to trust her. He took office nine months ago after the commune chief Brame elected in 2012 defected to the CPP, but Saing said he decided not to run again.
“Rany volunteered to run [for commune chief ]; she is loyal to the party, but I do not believe in her 100 percent yet,” said Saing. “But if she is elected commune chief and she does not do good, if she betrays the party, people will remove her from the position, like the previous [commune chief ].”
Despite his reservations, Saing sees Rany’s candidacy as an opportunity to “strengthen the party”.
“I am 55,” he said. “I want to promote the lady.”
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Thean Heang, 58, who will oppose Rany as the CPP’s candidate for commune chief, seemed unconcerned about the upstart activist, declaring that he would win “90 or 100 percent” of the votes in the commune.
A former provincial police officer and father of four adult children, Heang, with his grandfatherly charm, potbelly and welcoming smile, indeed resembles an easygoing smalltown cop.
Sitting in mud-flaked trousers on a table beneath his stilted home, Heang shrugged off the CNRP’s anti-Rui Feng grievances.
The villagers of Brame commune, he said, voted for the CNRP in the last commune elections because they thought the opposition party would force the company out of Preah Vihear.
“They lied that if the CNRP won they would have dismissed the company, but it won and could not dismiss it.”
Heang said he and Rany enjoy a“simple”, neighbourly relationship, though he dismissed her as the inexperienced and naive product of an NGO-engineered ideology. “Some NGOs propagandised to villagers to protest and dismiss [the] company from developing sugarcane, but they could not because the government permitted the company to invest,” he said.
Instead of resisting, Heang said, the villagers should instead lobby Rui Feng to contribute to the local community by financing the construction of additional roads and schools. Heang said that he would further pursue a developmentfriendly agenda as commune chief by seeking government resources to electrify the entire commune. At present, only residents living near the main road have reliable electricity, he said.
Asked about Rany’s alleged mistreatment by Phomara, Heang said he was unaware of the situation, and argued that she and the other villagers had no right to be on the land in the first place. Some villagers, he contended, saw the ongoing land dispute with Rui Feng as an excuse to occupy land and claim it as their own. “I hope the company and the people