CNRP blamed for land woes

A senior environment official yesterday alleged that the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party and human rights groups should shoulder much of the blame for the destruction of the country’s protected areas. Speaking at a seminar in Phnom Penh, Srun Sarith, a deputy director in the Ministry of Environment, said the government faced serious difficulties in solving land disputes because the CNRP and rights groups had encouraged people living near national parks and wildlife sanctuaries to go into the logging business by supporting their claims to the land.

“To put it simply, a group enters and occupies land illegally and they start to protest for the land. They [the CNRP and rights groups] prepare documents for their protests,” he said. “This causes serious problems for us to deal with these cases.” In September, a leading resource monitoring group, Global Forest Watch, estimated that the rate of deforestation in Cambodia had accelerated faster than any other country in the world since 2001.

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