This episode covers the New Year, Sahmakum Teang Tnaut (STT) coming out of suspension, the first eviction in Phnom Penh during my placement, further frustrations (and some developments) to do with the eviction analysis maps, the next steps for the Urban Voice web map and my first scientific publication.

First up, the five month suspension period for STT is over, as of the first day of 2012. The most salient change is that we have all shifted back to using our teangtnaut.org email addresses, although we did make the news (that link takes you to one of STT's blogs which has a copy of the article, strangely the link to the actual Phnom Penh post article is now broken). Additionally, I have changed the logo on the maps back to the STT one. I was not expecting this to be so uneventful. I thought there would be an effort by the government to prolong the suspension, although there has been no official word that it has ended either. Perhaps there is something still making its way through the beaurocracy. Us no longer being suspended makes me more comfortable talking about my work. I can certainly do without exciting the law enforcement of a place like Cambodia, beyond the inevitable infractions concocted by the traffic police.

I have given up predicting when the eviction analysis maps will be complete. There was a spreadsheet's worth of improvements required by the program coordinator when I submitted them all last fortnight. I have dutifully applied all of the changes, although some were not simple fixes. One of the problems identified was some uncertainty over the status of some communities in the eviction dataset. The coordinator thought that at least one of them might only have been threatened with eviction, rather than containing evicted families. I therefore reviewed the status of all 80 communities with one of the staff, although this took a lot of patience as he had many other things to attend to first. I realised that I have a lot to learn about these datasets and my productivity is completely dependent on access to staff members with the appropriate knowledge at times.

When he became available, I learned a lot about each of the communities as we went through them one by one. We found that we are actually missing one evicted community and there is possibly one too many in the dataset of communities that have received formal eviction notices. We hope to resolve this early next week by contacting the community. The review process also revealed a number of inconsistencies in the locations of points in the three datasets I'm using. We have generated two of them, the locations of evicted communities and the locations of communities threatened with eviction. The third is villages where no plots have been registered and titled under the World Bank's Land, Management and Administration Project (LMAP). There were a number of locations around Boeung Kak (a large lake north of the CBD drained in 2008 for property development) which were represented across the three datasets. Unfortunately, they sometimes did not match up such that points adjacent one another had different village names. I dithered about this for a week as I had not generated the data and thought there might be a reason it was this way rather than a mistake. It turned out to be an easy fix when the relevant staff member helped me out at last and we just shifted the points around, using the LMAP layer as the reference. It was nice to feel like I was finally collaborating with the right person and able to operate with some certainty.

Another interesting outcome of the dataset review process was that half of the communities in our eviction dataset are not totally evicted. In some cases only some families have been forced to leave. We therefore decided to rename it in the legend as 'Former location of displaced families'. An interesting fact I discovered this fortnight is that our NGO is the only one to have provided an estimate of the number of people evicted from Phnom Penh. Or at least that's what one of the coordinators said today, I just read in the WSJ that Amnesty International also provided an estimate, matching our's in time frame and number of evictees. In the 21 years from 1990-2011 it has been found that 30,009 families were evicted. The actual number of people can be estimated using a number of methods. STT's Facts and Figures report, linked above, used the average rural household size of five (from the Cambodia Inter-Censal Population Survey 2004) to arrive at a figure of ~150,000 people evicted from Phnom Penh since 1990. I think this could be different, especially because the survey states that the average urban household size is 5.5, for an estimated 165,050 evictees. Yet another figure one could use is the total fertility rate (TFR), or "a measure of how many children a woman will have in her lifetime on average" (source). This source states that the TFR for females in Phnom Penh in 2000 was 2.1, for a family size of 4.1 assuming two parents. Given that the families that STT reports on are from Phnom Penh and the middle of the time period of the report is about the year 2000, I wonder if ~123,000 evictees is closer to the mark. Estimates of Phnom Penh's population also differ. The 2008 census website appears to put it at 1,327,615 although STT used 1,573,544 (from Geonames, from whose list of sources the origin of this number was not readily apparent). Wikipedia just says it's over 2M, listing the census as the source, funily enough. I'm going to go with the census webpage's estimate and the lower bound family size of 4.1. This produces an estimated 9.27% of Phnom Penh's population having been evicted, pretty close to the 9.5% listed in STT's report. Let's just say it's not more than 10%, but that's still a large proportion of the population of a city, the capital city, to have their lives messed with in such a fashion.

It may not just be a problem in Phnom Penh. This Guardian article argues that perhaps half of Cambodia has been sold by the prime minister et al. I'll contrast a couple of responses. Surya Subedi, The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Cambodia, advised that land rights is now a major concern in Cambodia. From the other end of the spectrum, a senior (as in 70y/o) ruling party MP was bashed by his security guard in 2008 with an iron bar. The guard obtained the position as part of a plan to carry out revenge for having land confiscated by the government... land he would have used to fund his getting married. If half of Cambodia's land has been sold, how many people have they annoyed to such an extent? How many more are likely to retaliate, and what will happen if/when they form a coalition?

** Updated to add ...Speaking of evictions, the first one to occur during my placement happened at Borei Keila community (map) on Tuesday 3rd January. Two staff from STT went to monitor the situation, and a freelance journalist/blogger tells the story well here. Note that it's not the first time evictions have occurred here, the first was 2005. When the land was first sold to a property developer, 1000+ families were evicted, with 8 apartment blocks built for them to live in. These blocks accounted for all but 300 families, whom the government evicted on last Tuesday rather than forcing the property developer to build the remaining two apartment blocks to house them. The eviction was violent, with riot police attacked by molotov cocktails, stones and fists. STT staff advised me that children attacked the police as well with stones and they were punched and shoved by police but batons and tasers were not seen being used on them. Surprisingly (even by the standards of Phnom Penh evictions), residents' homes were destroyed the same day. Residents were not given a chance to retrieve their belongings. This supposedly occurred due to provocations from residents although it's hard to see how it wasn't pre-empted given that it might take a bit of planning to gather the required demolition equipment to raze all of their buildings. Adding insult to injury, 8 of the residents were arrested for their efforts to protect their homes and, effectively, livelihoods.

It might seem strange that I initially failed to include this event in this latest update. A condition set by EWB of my being here, though, was that I not attend evictions. This is because I am not here in an advocacy capacity but as a technical advisor. Additionally, there are obvious safety risks. Nevertheless, it's motivating to hear about and, unfortunately we now have to switch Borei Keila from 'partly evicted' to '100% evicted' in our evictions dataset. Perhaps my neglecting to write about this initially is a good indication that I'm focusing on my role!

Ok, on to other things. The web map has swiftly moved into contract negotiations for phase 2. The site is functional now in terms of accepting reports from citizens and displays data. There are a number of tweaks I'd like to make though, principally displaying it in Khmer script. Now that we have our own web developer we're hoping to fix that up quick smart. The web design firm that did the map is going to be training him up for a week so he knows how to modify the site. I hope to learn a thing or two about the code as well so that improvements can be made more quickly. I also came up with a quick and dirty way to provide a 'get directions' functionality on the site. Hence, users who wish to investigate points for themselves may use Google Maps to get directions to it from their location. I won't go into any more detail, this post is long enough already. I'll detail the improvements as they are made in coming months. Another good thing about the site though is that it is open source and can be used by any group facing land rights issues. Just a few basic changes would be required to the title of the site, language and map start point for example and you'd have a tool for both getting the word out and gathering information from citizens.

Making Trouble in Phnom Penh

It was interesting to spend Xmas and New Year in a non Xian, non Western country. They look on Xmas and NY as mere novelties, having their own Khmer New Year in April. There were apparently some half hearted fireworks on the riverside, I did not see them as my friends decided to spend the countdown at the Drunken Sponge on Pasteur at the last minute for some silly reason. At least it wasn't in the tuk tuk on the way there! Although that might have been fun given there were about 7 of us in it! I should say this period was where I felt the most lonely since coming from Australia. I think because the gulf between cultures became most apparent. At least I had some lovely people to celebrate it with and the 20m long Xmas buffet at the Cambodiana certainly meant I wasn't hungry!

Disregarding the lack of family contact and Western cultural formalities, the last few days of 2011 were actually pretty fantastic. My first scientific paper was published. I am seriously considering getting the DOI, 10.5311/JOSIS.2011.3.43, tattooed somewhere (I have been mulling what tattoo to get for about 8 years). That was a huge relief and well worth the year of effort on top of my master's thesis to produce it. Last, Jim 1, 2 and I did two motorcycle trips. The PPCTMC is well and truly up and running. We did ~700km in two days. The first trip went west to Kampon Speu, a nice blast up the mountain to Kirrirom then back to PP via Udong. The second trip went south down through Takeo province to Kampot, Kep, the Vietnam border and back to PP. Note that the routes of both are approximate (particularly the first) as Google Maps has an incomplete Cambodian road network. All up it's been a great end to 2011 and start to 2012.