Source - Bangkok Post Website (Eng)
July 1, 2006

LIVING ON THE LAND / THE ENVIRONMENT AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Dressed in a simple cotton shirt and traditional woven skirt, Kam Prae Nang Lao, a 65-year-old villager from Cambodia's northeastern province of Ratanakiri, seems out of place standing in the lush carpeted foyer of a luxury Phnom Penh hotel.

Looking slightly dazed, she scans the crowd of foreign and Cambodian NGO workers, intellectuals and journalists who have convened at a conference here to grapple with the interrelated issues of human rights and protecting the environment.

These are two things the wizened old woman knows plenty about as her community has been hard-hit by land grabbing.

Traditionally, villages have communal ownership rights to their land, but villagers like her have no actual title to the land. The government, in collusion with village chiefs who get kickbacks, has been selling concessions to loggers.

The community has felt the impact. Livelihoods and homes have been lost. Even a young child expresses worry. If they allow the land to be sold, where will we live?
That is why Kam Prae and a group of villagers from Ratanakiri have travelled hundreds of miles to the capital to tell their story and find out what they can do to fight back.

But Ratanakiri faces threats not only to its land, but also its water. A few years ago, the Vietnamese government dammed the province's Se San River.

Nang Noy, a local woman who lives along the river, recounted the Se San used to be bountiful in fish and many relied on catching fish for their livelihoods. But after the Yali Falls dam was built, fish stocks declined by 70 per cent. The height of water in the river also changed and became unpredictable.

"Our rice growing depends on the seasonal rising and falling of the river's level. So we lost both our occupation and food source," said Nang Noy.

Worse, the flash floods caused by the dam led to loss of animals, property and even human life.

Such tragedies dramatically highlight the link between the environment and human rights violations. It's a connection that makes compelling sense once drawn, yet it has only gained credence in recent years.

The Phnom Penh conference, sponsored by the Norwegian development organisation Fredkorpset (FK), Swedish NGO Forum Syd and the NGO Forum on Cambodia, was the first such meeting in the region that highlighted this connection. Nearly 200 participants from the Mekong sub-region, China, Australia, the US, the UK and Scandinavia were in attendance.

"Human rights cannot be fully expressed without environmental preservation," said Carol Ransley, assistant director of Earth Rights International, an NGO that deals with both human rights and the environment.

A healthy environment is necessary to safeguard socio-economic and cultural rights - the right to make a living, to food, health, an adequate standard of living, the preservation of traditional ways of life and to decide the best way to use natural resources.

Conversely, people need human rights particularly political and civil rights - to ensure a healthy environment.

Margo Picken, the head of the Cambodia office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, stressed that environmental protection requires such rights as freedom of speech, assembly and information concerning environmental matters.

Yet the extent to which this "linked rights" theory is expressed in actual laws is limited. As it stands, environmental law is still conceived and instituted separately from human rights law, said Tyler Giannini of Harvard Law School's Human Rights Programme.

Much like the lawyers, development financiers at such institutions as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank (ADB) also lag behind in their recognition of the interrelation, given what some see as their outdated approach to development.

"We need to change the paradigm of development. The ADB is promoting a high growth model of development. This rhetoric is believed so much by governments. But it is disastrous if governments have that utopian aspiration and disregard human rights. We need to slow down rapid change," said Montree Chantawong, campaign coordinator of the Bangkok-based NGO, Towards Ecological Recovery and Regional Alliance (Terra).
While being defenders of financial institutions Terra asserts that its people do sincerely work to reduce poverty. Nonetheless, when initiating development projects, the banks do not adequately consider the affected communities' interests. While environmental impact assessments have in recent years been incorporated into project approval procedures, they remain perfunctory.

In effect, villagers like those in Ratanakiri are not consulted on decisions that will affect them, such as the building of dams or selling of land. And once the projects are underway, they often only benefit governments and private companies, not the affected communities, said Touch Sokha of the NGO Forum on Cambodia.

Kim Sangha of the Sesan Protection Network, a local NGO, clearly expressed the community's view: "Our supermarket is the forest and the river. We don't need development destroying our culture and natural resources."

Despite their valid claims, they are threatened by authorities and companies if they do not cooperate.

Even NGOs are criticised for not listening enough to the people in the affected communities. One strong message that came out of the conference was the need for all involved parties - NGOs, lending institutions and local communities - to talk to each other more constructively in order to work together more effectively.

A crucial way NGOs and governments alike can usefully serve communities is by improving their access to information about development projects, their rights and the law.

The villagers also need training in how to assert their rights.
"The shortcoming of traditional aid is giving only money, not developing human resources," pointed out FK chairman Per Kr Lunden, whose organisation emphasizes development through international professional exchanges.

Training and information were precisely what Kam Prae had come looking for, not only for herself but for her community.

Kam Prae's gentle demeanour was offset by the resolute cast of her weather-beaten face.

"I want to go back to teach others in the village. I need to defend the land for my children. They have a right to live on it."

 

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