Police Broke off Protest at Premier’s Mansion

On August 8, 2010 around 100 villagers from Kois Kralor district, Battambang province came to Phnom Penh to hold protest in front of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s mansion in order that they could request the premier to intervene on their problem of which their land has been grabbed by a group of officials. However, instead of getting support, they were prohibited and forcedly forced to move out of the area by a group of about 50 police officers, garden securities and plain-clothes officials from Daun Penh district.

At around 11:30 AM, those people were forced to get on a bus, which was prepared to transport them back to their home town. During the act, some elderly women and infant children; one by one, they were violently jostled by those Daun Penh district police and unidentified plain-clothes security officials, onto the bus from where they had been sitting down to demonstrate at the park in front of the premier’s house near the Independent Monument in Phnom Penh.

Regarding to this issue, these people were coming on behalf of approximately 400 families in Kois Kralor distric, Battambang province, who were involved in a land conflict of 1,672 hectares with RCAF Captain Soam Bunthoeun and military police Lieutenant Colonel Long Sinareth. Those local villagers accused the officials of selling their land to an unnamed Chinese company in 2006. In addition, one of their representatives, Hen Sengly, has been arrested since 2008 on the charges stemming from a 2008 protest against the alleged land grabbing.