Story

Government watches as developers evict poor

Joel Brinkley, for the Pulitzer Center
Andoung, Cambodia

Well past the city limits, beyond the sign that says "Bon Voyage; See You Again," after the paved roads end, down a rutted dirt track, Un Thea sits in the mud outside her shanty house, peeling bamboo shoots - and seething.

Two years ago, soldiers and police showed up in the middle of the night to throw her family and more than 1,000 others out of their homes on a plot in central Phnom Penh. The soldiers torched the crude houses before Un and the others had time even to retrieve their meager belongings. Then all of the residents were herded onto buses and ferried out here, about 15 miles away, and dumped in a rice paddy without so much as a bottle of water or a tarp for cover.

Then the soldiers left - though a few stayed behind to turn away the aid groups that came out to drop off emergency rations. Un's case is among several thousands more or less similar land seizures across Cambodia in the last three years.