Indigenous minority communities in Cambodia are located in 14 different provinces including Kratie, Mondolkiri, Ratanakiri, Stung Treng, Kompong Thom, Koh Kong, Pursat, Kompong Speu and Sihanoukville. While the majority of Indigenous minority people live in the largely forested areas of the north and north-eastern part of the country many other provinces have indigenous people’s in some villages and sometimes even within villages of predominantly Khmer people.
There is a growing awareness that indigenous people are an important consideration in the development of Cambodia. Because indigenous people face barriers of language and non-mainstream culture they are often more vulnerable to negative impact of development. Because of this, the treatment of indigenous people can often be used as an indicator of the degree to which development is taking into account equity, governance and participation.
The Royal Government of Cambodian (RGC) is required to protect the rights of indigenous peoples under obligations derived from several international instruments[1]. In 2001 the RGC formed the Department of Ethnic Minorities within the Ministry of Rural Development. This department has become responsible for the progress of the General Policy for Highland Peoples Development first drafted in 1997. The policy has recently been revised and a draft of the National Policy on Indigenous People Development has been submitted to the Council of Ministers in December 2005.
In addition to the draft National Policy on Indigenous People Development, the National Strategic Development Plan (NSDP) contains language recognizing the specific needs and protecting the rights of indigenous peoples:
w RGC is committed to pursue strategies and actions that will target the most needy and least served people, including indigenous people (para. 4.05).
w NSDP strategies should recognize the specific needs of indigenous peoples covering complex inter-linkages of economic, social, cultural, legal, political and other issues (Annex III).
Registration of indigenous people’s land rights is among the priority actions envisaged for the land reform process (para. 4.50).
Land Rights: Numerous land studies have shown that indigenous minority people operate a well-developed land allocation and land management system that relies on communal decision making through traditional structures. Individual land titling and land sales bypass this system, threatening the collective nature of indigenous minority communities. Because individual land ownership undermines the collective solidarity of indigenous communities, and because it is this collective nature of communities that counterbalances a high degree of vulnerability created by being minority cultures and languages, the opening up of communal lands to individualisation is seen as a trend inherently destructive of indigenous communities therefore an abuse of collective rights and the individual rights of the majority within indigenous communities.
Provincial governments in Ratanakiri and other provinces have been working with partner organisations on programs to promote land security through community based natural resource management. In Ratanakiri, this has resulted in provincial recognition of many community natural resource management areas. This is a positive step for initial land security. These agreements have, however, been seriously undermined by individualisation of land ownership brought about by illegal sales and grabbing of land.
In 2001, the RGC passed a new Land Law that contains provisions for indigenous minority communities to gain title to their land, either in the form of individual titles or as collective title. In this law an indigenous communities land can be defined as residential land, agricultural land and land kept in reserve as part of the traditional rotational cultivation system. This must be respected if there is any hope for equitable and effective development for indigenous peoples.
Legal instruments that define the requirements for legal recognition of communal land ownership have yet to be written. The first required are those to allow recognition of indigenous communities as legal entities. The Ministry of Interior has recently been active and supportive in developing model statutes that indigenous communities can adopt or adapt for use in the legal registration process. It is essential that this drafting continues as rapidly as possible.
The Ministry of Land Management, Urban Planning and Construction has already implemented a pilot project in order to register the lands of indigenous communities. A national task force was created which continues to work on the pilot project. Unfortunately this process has been exceedingly slow and a large amount of indigenous community land is being lost in the meantime. It is essential that the process be speeded up.
Despite these initiatives with regard to drafting legal instruments, land alienation remains an exceedingly alarming and ever-growing problem. Of particular concern are a proliferation of “land concessions” issued by the RGC in provinces like Kompong Thom, Stung Treng and Kratie. These land concessions aim at establishing industrial agricultural plantations like rubber and cashew nut. They remove native forest and reduce indigenous minority people into positions of subservience and poverty, their natural resources being removed from their management and use.
Also of concern is the continuing growth of land “sales” that involve misinformation, coercion, threats, bribes to officials and other illegal mechanisms.
These problems have almost always been seen to arise from local officials, often in collaboration or under threat from higher level officials or business people, starting the illegal sale of land. Many know that it is illegal but that knowledge is undermined by outside business influences offering large incentive for illegally approving land sales. When this happens it opens the door for widespread and anarchic selling of community land, something that is illegal under the 2001 land law. In some cases whole communities have “become drunk” and have entered into a cycle of self-destructive land selling that has started with a local authorities sanction, it has ended in near-total dissolution of some communities and has also resulted in the blaming of indigenous people for the problem.
If the problem is to be addressed it is imperative that responsibility for the problem lies with the local authorities and the law enforcement agencies. According to a number of community land forums in 2005, however, it is these local authorities and the law enforcement agencies who are the source or the main agents in the illegal sale of land. In recent time it has also been apparent that some people in higher level authorities, some business people, military and police have been a major source of the problem. The courts too have been seen to be protecting the interests of the rich and powerful at the expense of respecting the law.
Indigenous community leaders and indigenous rights workers agree that unless there are real reforms in the legal systems and unless perpetrators of all the illegal sales face the retribution and punishment within the laws, there will be no improvement in the situation. If that is the case the National Strategic Development Plan will have little meaning in the face of the illegal dispossession and exploitation of indigenous communities.
Forestry issue: Like all communities using forest for livelihood support in Cambodia, indigenous minority people do not have secure management rights for the forest areas they traditionally use and manage. Land alienation means that indigenous minority people shift their agricultural areas into forest areas. They are then blamed for forest clearing. It is true that indigenous people are often initially seen as the people involved in this sale of land and clearing of new forest areas but it is important to remember that it all comes about as a result of a failed implementation of the legal system.
Forest coupes intimidate indigenous minority communities and deprive these communities of developing their own secure and sustainable livelihood support. The logging coupe for timber for the national assembly was set up without proper consultation with indigenous communities. Although a step in the right direction in the way of more professional forest management, the process clearly shows a lack of respect for cultural and social forestry matters. It goes ahead without sufficient strong efforts to stop illegal logging and land grabbing in other indigenous people’s areas. Indigenous people therefore think that they are supporting the national government and are happy to do that but they also feel let down by the RGC in other ways and areas.
The guidelines to support the Sub-decree on Community Forestry has been delayed but are nearing completion. This may offer more scope for indigenous minority people’s management and use. There is a strong need to carefully monitor this to ensure that the community forestry actually serves the needs of poor communities.
● It is imperative that the community forestry sub-decree implementation includes community traditional management rights in mature forest and forest concessions, not just degraded forest.
● It is imperative that community forestry be granted over larger areas of traditional domains of indigenous people and not just restricted to token areas close to villages.
● Many areas of forest, especially spirit forest, burial forests and small areas of forest exist amongst agricultural land need to be included in the collective land title. It is important that these areas be allowed to enter into communal title and not be separated out as “community forestry”. The latter is insignificant recognition of the importance of these areas to indigenous communities. Excluding these forest areas will also have the effect of drastically slowing the mapping processes required for communal land, reducing land security for the majority of indigenous minority people.
Education:
The overall educational situation in Cambodia is slowly improving as a result of the ongoing Education Sector Program (ESP), which is annually reviewed and adjusted. Especially the abolition of school fees has increased the enrolment figures. The Priority Action Planning has improved the quality of school environment and teacher training. Having said that, progress is only slow and the drop out rate is still high in the first three grades of primary education. The gender disparity becomes higher in secondary education where fewer girls participate.
There is a lack of qualified teachers who are willing to be posted in remote places. This is particularly the case in areas with indigenous populations. In many of the state schools the attendance of the students is poor, teachers are often absent and textbooks not always available.
Plans have also been recently made for the commencement of a teacher training facility in Ratanakiri, which will provide in-service training. The supply of teachers who can speak local languages as well as Khmer should expect to increase in the future and this is considered a positive development for education for indigenous people in Ratanakiri. The Cambodian Ministry of Education is keen to expand the work that has been done on bilingual education to state schools in the whole north east of Cambodia. Workshops involving education officials and NGOs have already taken place and further implementation plans are in discussion.
Non-Formal Education (NFE) — both bilingual and monolingual — continues to produce positive results, possibly reinforced by the deficiencies within the formal education system. This form of education remains literacy based and has had much success, as indigenous minority communities have been given the flexibility to manage classes at the time most suited to their seasonal and daily lives. Another feature of the NFE has been indigenous minority people have been the teachers and have been able to use indigenous languages to support Khmer literacy.
On the less positive side, post literacy NFE materials and classes remain seriously lacking. These classes would be to support people developing their literacy skills past very basic Khmer literacy.
Hydro Electricity Dams: In previous years extreme problems have been reported as a result of hydro-electricity dams located on the Sesan River in Vietnam that flows through Ratanakiri and Stung Treng provinces in the northeast of Cambodia. The dams have resulted in deaths from flood and irregular river flows.
These dams are being built without adequate assessment of past impacts, rectifying the problems or first conducting serious future environmental and social impact assessments. International donor agencies and multilateral banks continue to support and validate their construction by supporting associated projects like power line construction. In this way, large international institutions effectively undermine the lives of indigenous minority people in northeast Cambodia. There are very strong local concerns that large-scale industrial power generation and the model of industrial development that it supports have profound and long-term negative impacts on the lives of indigenous minority people.
While these problems continue, they are likely to be increased by more dams already commenced or being planned in Vietnam. The situation is getting critical and could see the decimation of indigenous communities along these rivers.
Tourism: There is currently the opening up the north-eastern provinces of Cambodia to rapid and large road access and extensive tourism development. The Asian Development Bank has funded, via loans, the development of an international airport in Ratanakiri under the guise that rapid economic and tourism development will reduce property.
This model, in relation to tourism, is however, based on the concept that indigenous minority people will have access to and want tourism development. Without access to education and training services it is unlikely that indigenous minority people will be able to have a sufficient voice in neither tourism management nor access to tourism incomes.
Another alarming thing has been that land alienation in areas of tourism attractions has been pronounced. It is essential that land security and education be strengthened before further promotion of tourism into indigenous people’s areas. To do otherwise can be seen as promoting too-rapid development and social destruction.
In this context, tourism could further contribute to the marginalisation of indigenous communities.
● Tourism development needs to be controlled and managed until barriers to sustainable and equitable tourism development are removed. Current policies of rapid expansion of tourism are misplaced and potentially highly destructive.
● Education in relation to issues associated with tourism needs to be provided in a culturally appropriate manner as a matter of priority. There is huge potential for dispossession, illegal land trading, social disruption, human trafficking if this is not addressed.
Decentralisation: Dependency or self-management: Much is made of the decentralization processes now underway within the RGC which intends to offer real opportunities for promoting indigenous peoples’ self-management. However, in many indigenous minority peoples’ areas much money is being directed into ‘development’ without adequate support for true community development and human development support. In many areas predominantly non-indigenous minority people in government and NGO projects deliver sometimes nationally or regionally designed projects in non-indigenous languages. In this scenario, per diems and similar financial support are being used to acquire participation in the activities of development agencies.
It should also be noted that many times, in the process of illegal land sales commune councils and other local RGC officials feature prominently. In many cases this has been representative of an extension of poor-governance down to local level and has eroded trust of local authorities by communities.
The effects of this are starting to be seen in the form of dependency, loss of community self-management and community disempowerment. Without indigenous minority people being actively involved in their own development and without local alternatives to the industrial development models now being promulgated many severe social and economic problems can be expected to arise, as they have in other indigenous communities in the world with similar conditions.
● A major review of the impacts on indigenous minority people from different development approaches is required.
● Local authorities need to respect the traditional management structure of indigenous communities and not follow the corrupting and personal interests of outsiders if they are to be effective in supporting community development of their own communities. It is imperative that the higher levels of the decentralisation process are aware of the situation and put a stop to it, holding wayward local authorities accountable to the law.
● In many cases the process has gone so far that some villages have basically disintegrated. To avoid this cultural revitalisation programs need to be developed and implemented in a way that will help people in communities come together again in a way that allows them to move forward and pursue their own development in a culturally appropriate but progressive way. These, will, however, require an improvement in governance in local authorities.
w It is absolutely essential for indigenous people’s development and survival that the anarchic land sale and forest logging situation be addressed. It is having severe and catastrophic effects on indigenous communities and is undermining the potential for community development into the future. If the land law is not properly implemented many marginalised, dispossessed and lost communities will be the consequence. This will result in a loss of cultural diversity and create a great burden on the Cambodian society at large.
w The Royal Government of Cambodia should ensure the speedy adoption of the National Policy on Indigenous People Development recently submitted to the Council of Ministers. This is essential, as Cambodia needs a National Policy for allowing indigenous peoples to guide their own development. Any possible impediments to ratifying this policy need to be identified and openly debated.
w Many development visions being implemented in indigenous minority people’s areas are based on economic development models and do not follow the self-determination principles of the Highland Peoples Development Policy drafted by the IMC in 1997 nor international conventions related to indigenous peoples’ rights. A careful review of development philosophies and strategies needs to be undertaken to correct this situation.
w Donors have developed safeguard policies with regard to indigenous peoples and the impact of projects on indigenous communities. It is important that the donors remind the different actors and the public that these operational policies and procedures exist and need to be followed.
For more information on the issues raised in this paper, please contact:
The Indigenous Peoples Project at the NGO Forum on Cambodia
Tel: 023 994 063, Email: ngoforum@ngoforum.org.kh
[1]This includes the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). Cambodia is a signatory to all three conventions. The Royal Government of Cambodia is currently also considering the ratification of the International Labour Organisation’s Convention 169, the main international instrument wholly dedicated to the protection of indigenous peoples.
[TOP]