Cambodian Forestry Campaigner Awarded 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize
Chit Samlot
Cambodian Forestry Campaigner Awarded 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize
He dedicated the award to his countrymen who are fighting to preserve Cambodia’s remaining forests in the face of rampant illegal logging and damaging government policies.
Leng Ouch is a longtime environmental activist who was named as one of the winners for the 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize. He has been investigated and documented illegal logging across Cambodia over the past 20 years. (Courtesy Photo of GEP)
Ten Soksreinith, VOA Khmer
18 April 2016
WASHINGTON DC—
Activist Ouch Leng has received international recognition for his work documenting illegal logging and land abuses in Cambodia over the past two decades.
The Goldman Environmental Foundation on Monday announced that Ouch Leng was among six grassroots campaigners from around the world to be awarded the 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize, which recognizes their efforts to protect the environment and means more financial support for their causes.
“It’s an honor for Cambodia and its people,” Ouch Leng told VOA Khmer after hearing about his award.
He dedicated the award to his countrymen who are fighting to preserve Cambodia’s remaining forests in the face of rampant illegal logging and damaging government policies.
“I would like to appeal to the government to reform its environmental protection policy to ensure the forest is saved for the next generation,” he said.
“I promise to utilize resources and knowledge to continue the fight and preserve the forest, and I call on people to stand up against illegal loggers, while the government is blindly allowing it to happen.”
The endorsement is all the more meaningful given Ouch Leng’s life story, which mirrors Cambodia’s own journey from the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime through years of poverty to the ongoing crisis of landlessness.
Leng Ouch is a longtime environmental activist who was named as one of the winners for the 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize. He and his team have been investigating and documenting illegal logging across Cambodia over the past 20 years. (Courtesy Photo of GEP)
Ouch Leng was born in the 1970s in rural Takeo province to a family of peasant farmers. The family survived the Khmer Rouge regime by hiding out in the forests just south of Phnom Penh. His memory of the sanctuary the wilderness provided at that time would drive Ouch Leng later in life to strive to conserve Cambodia’s forests.
When the war was over, Ouch Leng’s family found themselves landless, and moved to Phnom Penh in the early 1980s. “My mother became beggar with mental illness,” he recalled, “while my father worked as cyclo pedaler to earn a living and support my studies.”
Left largely on his own, Ouch Leng would work Phnom Penh’s streets collecting garbage to make small amounts of money that helped fund his education, he said. He made an arrangement where he could attend school if he helped out the teachers and cleaned the classrooms.
Despite this adversity, Ouch Leng graduated high school in 1993 and won a scholarship to study law at the Royal University of Law and Economics. Since completing his degree in 1997, he has dedicated himself to addressing what he saw as Cambodia’s two most damaging problems: land grabbing and deforestation.
Under a program intended to draw investment in industrial-scale agricultural projects, the government has since the early 2000s issued hundreds of economic land concessions, or ELCs, to private companies and individuals.
Corruption and poor oversight of this program led to mass evictions—often enforced through state violence—as well as deforestation when concessions were handed out for areas covered by forest. Additionally, concessions have been used as a cover for illegal logging in supposedly protected forests, with illegal timber smuggled into concession areas and passed off as legally felled wood.
Ouch Leng’s approach to this problem was to shine a light on the murky goings in the forests.
He went undercover, posing at various times as laborer, timber dealer, driver, tourist and cook to document illegal logging. He went after Cambodia’s largest timber magnate, Try Pheap, publishing photo and video evidence of the plunder that went unimpeded thanks to links between loggers and high-level government officials.
Doing so has meant taking considerable risks with his own safety.
In 2012, Ouch Leng’s sometime colleague Chut Wutty was gunned down while guiding journalists to investigate forestry crimes in Koh Kong province. And in November last year, a park ranger and a police officer were gunned down in Preah Vihear province while patrolling forests for illegal logging and poaching. Ouch Leng has been subjected to threats against himself and his family that have forced him into hiding more than once.
Despite the perilousness of confronting those involved in deforestation in Cambodia, he promotes an approach to conservation that mobilizes communities to stand up to loggers and authorities.
Leng Ouch is a longtime environmental activist who was named as one of the winners for the 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize. He and his team have been investigating and documenting illegal logging across Cambodia over the past 20 years. (Courtesy Photo of GEP)
“We all work voluntarily as a community because of the unresponsiveness from the government to help us,” said Ouch Leng, who founded the Cambodia Human Rights Task Force, and has also worked with the country’s established rights groups Adhoc and Licadho.
The work of Ouch Leng and others has gained some traction in recent years, and the government has begun to respond. In 2013, the government called an end to the policy of awarding economic land concessions, and later returned some land to its former occupiers.
He vows to keep up his work, however. “I am going to live up to this recognition,” he told VOA Khmer of the award. “I call upon the people of Cambodia to join me and the community to protect our forest for younger generations.”
Defender of Cambodia's dwindling forests wins Goldman Prize
AP ELAINE KURTENBACH
April 18, 2016
In this Feb. 3, 2016 photo, Cambodian environmentalist Ouch Leng speaks during an interview with the Associated Press in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. Ouch Leng, a former government official who has spent two decades helping poor villagers fight poaching of precious tropical forests, is among this year's winners of the $175,000 Goldman Environmental Prize. (AP Photo/Elaine Kurtenbach)More
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — The latest crackdown on illegal logging in Cambodia is "just a game" and big timber traders are winning, says Ouch Leng, a former government official who has spent two decades helping poor villagers fight poaching of precious tropical forests.
Leng's tenacious and perilous crusade to stop illegal logging and stop land concessions from forcing Cambodians out of their homes has won him a Goldman Environmental Prize, which honors grassroots environmental activism.
The award follows recent announcements that Cambodian authorities plan to expand protected areas of the Southeast Asian country's forests by about a third. Long-ruling Prime Minister Hun Sen, whom many consider a backer of the biggest logging group, Try Pheap, recently said he had authorized rocket attacks on illegal loggers.
But Ouch Leng (ook leng) and other critics say reports of raids and other high-profile shows of force against illegal loggers belie the lack of arrests or prosecutions of those cutting and trading in illegal timber.
Asked if the crackdown is for real, he said, "It's just a game."
"Nobody was arrested. The media was set up," Leng said during an interview. "The Ministry of the Environment doesn't care. They never go inside the jungle to patrol or arrest illegal loggers."
Much of the timber trade is protected by military units that profit from deals with the loggers, and the stakes of fighting it can be deadly. At least five deaths in Cambodia have been linked to illegal logging since 2007, including that of Leng's fellow environmentalist Chut Wutthy, who was fatally shot in 2012 while showing journalists a logging camp in the southwest's Koh Kong province.
It's a risk shared with other environmental crusaders defying powerful companies and government backers around the world. Honduran indigenous leader and environmentalist Berta Caceres, a winner of a 2015 Goldman Prize, was killed by assailants who broke into her home last month. She had received death threats from police, soldiers and local landowners for her efforts to block construction of a dam.
Leng said he accepts the risks as part of his mission.
"I don't expect the government to allow me to live long," he said.
Leng wins $175,000 for this year's Goldman Prize, as do five other winners:
— Zuzana Caputova, a lawyer who led a campaign to shut down a toxic waste dump in Slovakia.
— Maxima Acuna, a Peruvian farmer fighting major mining companies' efforts to take her land for a gold and copper mine.
— Destiny Watford, a Baltimore, Maryland, student who helped prevent construction of a trash incinerator in her area.
— Edward Loure, a Tanzanian communal land rights leader.
— Luis Jorge Rivera Herrera, who campaigned to create a nature reserve in Puerto Rico to protect endangered leatherback sea turtles.
Leng travels into the forest armed only with a camera and a GPS locator, tracking illegal loggers. At times he works undercover by cooking for loggers, hauling cargo on docks or posing as a tourist.
Showing determination early on, Leng excelled in his studies in mostly rural Takeo province. When his village chief denied him a permit to travel to Phnom Penh to take university exams, he says he hid on a sugar cane train to get to the city. After studying law, he was assigned to the Foreign Ministry, and later to the Ministry of Planning. Drawn into politics, he moved to a nongovernmental organization and began investigating illegal logging.
Marcus Hardtke, a German environmentalist who lives in Cambodia, says the prize is well-deserved.
"Ouch Leng is one of a handful of people fighting to stop forest destruction in Cambodia," Hardtke said. "It is up to activists like Leng and affected local communities to make a stand against the short-sighted, greed-driven policies of the Phnom Penh elite. They are doing just that, often at great personal risk."
Lately, Leng's attention has focused on a conflict between local villagers and a Chinese company that is developing a massive resort on a choice swath of coastland near the Thai border in Koh Kong province.
Residents complain they were forced off their land and lost their main livelihood of fishing when they were relocated inland after the government granted a 99-year land lease to China's Tianjin Union Development Group Co., which has built a golf resort and plans a yacht club, casino, villas and other luxury facilities.
"Before, those people could earn $2,500 a year, or about $100 a night fishing. Now they cannot fish because the Chinese company grabbed everything. They have nothing to eat," Leng said.
The United Nations says land rights conflicts have become Cambodia's No. 1 human rights issue. Land concessions have forced villagers to make way for plantations and other projects. Meant to promote development, such arrangements often have left communities worse off, critics say.
They've also accelerated the loss of precious, diverse forests of increasingly rare tropical timber, as loggers push ever deeper into protected areas and also clear-cut land of less valuable wood that is sometimes sold as fuel for factories.
Cambodia remained heavily forested until relatively recently, thanks in part to lingering battles with Khmer Rouge guerrillas and massive use of land mines during the Vietnam War.
As the economy opened in the early 1990s, investment from China poured in. Forest cover dropped to 48 percent in 2014 from 57 percent in 2010 and 73 percent in 1990, a loss of nearly 3 million hectares of tropical forest. Rosewood, known as "hongmu" in Chinese, is especially prized, and loggers can get $5,000 for a cubic meter of the brightly-hued timber.
Leng, who chairs the Cambodia Human Rights Task Forces organization, says the Goldman Prize money will help support forest patrols and community-level efforts to combat illegal logging.
Like many in Cambodia, he views the government's record with skepticism.
"The poverty-reduction policy of the government seems to be just to kill the poor people," Leng said.
"Their 'master plan' to improve living standards is set up very well and looks very beautiful. To provide jobs with fair competition and construction of schools, roads, bridges. ... To provide land for the people and conserve their houses," he said. But he added that such talk is generally not put into practice by private companies or the government.
Still, Leng believes he is making headway in convincing the public to resist the loss of their livelihoods and homes.
"Many political parties, government officials, students and monks are involved in forest issues," Leng said. "The revolution will come from the land and from the forest."
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