Making Phnom Penh an Eviction Free Zone
Please join us for the Phnom Penh solidarity event, hosted by the Housing Rights Task Force (HRTF), which will include speeches by activists, film trailers, video footage and photos of evictions, as well as a call to sign a petition to make Phnom Penh an Eviction Free Zone. John Vink to present photos of recent Boeung Kak Lake evictions.
Over ten percent of Phnom Penhʼs inhabitants have been displaced in the past two decades. As land prices have soared, 150,000 people have found themselves without home, in some cases traumatised by having watched their homes and belongings destroyed by excavators.
Not only Phnom Penhʼs inhabitants are at risk. At this very moment, a billion people all over the world are either threatened with homelessness or living in bad housing conditions, due to large-scale investments of financial and real estate capital, social, economic and racial discrimination, wars and natural disasters. Instead of diminishing by 100 million by 2020 as laid down by Objective No. 7 of the Millennium Development Goals, this figure is destined to rise by another 700 million by 2020.
What are the underlying causes for this situation? Under the title Resistances and Alternatives for the Right to Habitat, the World Assembly of Inhabitants encourages exploration of the common structural factors of the neoliberal system that lie behind the persistent and systematic violation of land and housing rights around the world.
From Sep. 15 to Oct. 31 2011, the Assembly calls upon all housing and land rights activists to organize and join in mass actions to demand genuine fulfillment of the right to housing and land for all, an immediate end to forced evictions and land grabbing, and a halt to the persecution and intimidation of activists.
Program:
6.00pm Snacks and Drinks
6.30pm Welcome by Long Kimheang and Neup Ly (HRTF)
6.35pm Phnom Penh and the Right to Habitat by Nora Lindstrom (The Urban Initiative)
6.50pm Trailers from the upcoming film The Cause of Progress by Chris Kelly (Little Ease Films)
7.05pm Photos of recent Boeung Kak Lake eviction by John Vink (Magnum Photographer)
7.20pm Film about the impact of development and forced eviction on women in Cambodia (Licadho Canada)
7.35pm Activist accounts by Tep Vanny (Boeung Kak), Lim Sambo (Group 78) and Chan Vichet (Dey Krahom)
8.10pm Q&A with the speakers
When & Where
October 22, 2011, 6pm
Metahouse
37 Sothearos Boulevard
Khan Chamkarmon, Phnom Penh
Cambodia
Phone:+855-(0)23 224 140