Mai’s story

Mai, 48, a mother of eight from Oddar Meanchey province, north-west Cambodia, was five months pregnant when she watched her home and all her possessions go up in flames.

In 2008, the Cambodian government granted three economic land concessions to three affiliated companies for an agro-industrial sugar plantation in Oddar Meanchey province.

The authorities did not consult the families living in the area and began threatening and intimidating them to leave their homes and farming land. In April 2008 workers alleged to be company workers destroyed some 150 homes.

In October 2009, Mai watched helplessly as her home and 118 other houses in her village, Bos, were bulldozed and burned to the ground by a force of 150 police, military police, and other individuals believed to be workers from the Angkor Sugar company. Many of the families were left destitute, some made homeless as a result of the forced eviction. "My house, possessions, clothes, all went up in smoke. Nothing was left," said Mai.

In October 2009, Mai travelled more than 250km from her home in Oddar Meanchey to Phnom Penh, to ask Prime Minister Hun Sen to help her community get its land back. For her efforts, she was accused of violating the forestry law and arrested. Eight months later, in June 2010, Mai was released, but only after she signed an agreement to withdraw all claims to her land.

Today, nothing remains of Mai’s village. Instead, armed company workers guard a sugar cane plantation surrounded by empty fields. Over the past decade, the government has increasingly granted land concessions to Cambodian and foreign private investors. Challenges to the legal validity of economic land concessions have generally not been successful.

Mai has been left destitute and struggles to provide for her eight children. She feels abandoned by the government and blames the local authorities: "I do not know what to hope for anymore," she says. "It is all gone."

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