Centre ordered removed
AUTHORITIES in Koh Kong’s Chumnap commune have threatened to take legal action if a community centre built by villagers and Mother Nature activists is not dismantled next month to make room for a new commune office.
A notice from Commune Chief Meas Chrea, dated Wednesday and sent to the community centre, calls for the “removal” by April 25 of the community centre, the construction of which led to an arrest in 2015 of one of its backers.
“Commune authorities need the area to construct a standard commune hall soon in order to serve public services for the people,” the letter reads.
The notice further says that if the centre is not brought down by the deadline, authorities will “take legal action according to the law”.
The provincial court in 2016 foundVenVorn, a former Chumnap commune councillor for the Cambodian People’s Party, guilty of “forestry crimes” for harvesting forest products without authorisation and tampering with evidence that he had purchased timber illegally to build the community centre. He was hand a one-year sentence with seven months suspended.
Vorn’s conviction was characterised by at least one human rights worker as punishment f or his activism against a hydropower dam in the Areng Valley and his close association to Alex GonzalezDavidson, the exiled co-founder of the often-critical NGO Mother Nature.
Chrea claimed by phone on Thursday that authorities planned to build a new commune hall, which would house commune police, in order to meet a new development standard ordered by the Ministry of Interior since last year’s commune elections. The ministry’s new standards were aimed at making it easier to provide services to the public.
However, Chrea said no exact date had yet been determined for the construction of the commune hall.
“We are preparing . . . the proposal to ask for construction budget from district and provincial [officials],” he said.
Vorn couldn’t be reached for comment. His wife, Morn Samon, said she regretted the authorities’ demand to tear down the community centre, especially given her husband’s efforts to build it.
“We are still discussing to find a new location,” she said. “They said the current commune office is small, so they want us to relocate.”
Samun said authorities told villagers during a meeting on Thursday that they had no land to provide to them on which they could build a new centre. “I do not know their intention, and I do not understand,” she said.
Gonzalez-Davidson, meanwhile, claimed in a message that there was “ample land available in the commune of Chumnap, which makes this decision to order the dismantling of the center completely illogical”.