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SCOTS CHARITY HELP VI Under attack on all sides, local people find unlikely source of support in a life and death struggle to save the jungles they have tended for generations

FROM the mutilated stump of a rosewood tree in northern Cambodia, 12-year-old Sokmean Cheun surveys the ravaged forests of her forefathers.

Her grandfather, Weng Van, grieves for a lost heritage of the once dense jungle, now ground to dust by the corporate greed of the rubber plantations.

Weng, 62, said: “Before the big companies came, there were elephants and tigers in this forest, now there are not even deer. “So much has been lost. “Future generations, like my grandchildren, have had this land stolen from them. I worry. What will they do? Where will they go?”

For centuries, the indigenous subsistence farmers of Stung Treng Province used the forests to hunt and to extract resin to make varnish they sold to make ends meet.

When rice crops were poor, they foraged there for edible roots and wild mushrooms and drank its pure spring water.

And the forest sheltered ancestral burial grounds and sacred spirits villagers prayed would deliver protection and happiness.

Their prayers seem to have gone unanswered as there has been no respite from struggle for the people of Cambodia.

Their history is an exhausting list of suffering, from poverty, the decimation of US bombing, and the genocide of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime.

Being crushed by corporate might is yet another cruelty, but one Scottish antipoverty charity, SCIAF, are helping mitigate the disaster it brings.

SCIAF are working to obtain title to the land for the indigenous people, to save their forests for Sokmean’s generation and beyond.

The forests of Stung Treng, like much of rural Cambodia, had been passed down as collective property. With 65 per cent illiteracy, legal deeds were rare. The Khmer Rouge destroyed the few there were.

In farming the forests, tribes always protected them, rotating crops to allow the land to recover.

In contrast, the Economic Land Concessions, granted by the government to rubber tree and cashew producers, degrade the land and bestow on Cambodia the ignominy of the world’s highest deforestation rate.

A blind eye is turned to illegal logging of Siamese rosewood, dubbed blood wood after the “timber mafia” and criminal gangs murdered villagers and environmentalists who got in their way.

Wood from the centuries-old trees, now nearing extinction, is coveted by wealthy Chinese who will pay up to £40,000 a cubic metre to have it carved into ornate statement furniture. One bed can carry a £750,000 price tag.

In their concession in Stung Treng, the rubber company has destroyed paddy fields and polluted natural wells that once supplied clean fresh water for drinking, washing and irrigation.

Weng said: “People went hungry because they lost rice fields and access to the forest. The clear spring water turned red like rust. It was polluted and we got sick with diarrhoea and skin rashes. What happened here was truly terrible.”

When the rubber company first came, 25 locals from Weng’s village of Katot stood in front of the bulldozers but were told the business had been granted 10,000 h th v S c C fr s s e li p a T in p c t s h v C T w s fr h v th r a