Advertising
For help, call:
The road crosses the forest like a black belt, until you reach the sea and what will be one of the tourist projects of the world.
Fifteen years after its debut, there is still much to see at the Dara Sakor Seashore Resort in southern Cambodia.
It is a grandiose commission by a Chinese company to build an autonomous tourist city. A Chinese colony, some call it a place of “feasting and rejoicing,” according to the company, with an airport, a deep-water port, power plants, hospitals. , casinos and luxury villas.
The airport is still unfinished. A single casino, with a five-star hotel and adjacent apartments, is situated near the sea, facing an unpaved road and surrounded by a structure.
As a tourism business, it has barely begun, but it has already had a negative effect on one of Asia’s richest natural environments and the thousands of people who live there.
China’s economic footprint in Cambodia now dwarfs that of any other country. It provides part of all direct investment and maximum of its foreign aid.
Cambodia is an enthusiastic partner of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), President Xi Jinping’s strategy to expand Chinese-built and financed infrastructure around the world. Much of this is obviously beneficial. But much of China’s investment is speculative, rushed and poorly planned. .
The once-sleepy seaside town of Sihanoukville, for example, across the bay from Dara Sakor, has been redeveloped in just a few years to turn it into a massive structure to meet China’s casino demand.
This fueled a crime wave and then a collapse of the Covid gaming economy, filling the city with half-built empty towers. There is a clever explanation for why Dara Sakor should face similar problems.
“It’s like cooking without flour,” says Sophal Ear, a Cambodian professor at Arizona State University. “Sustainable development depends on unsustainable practices. What about China’s housing bubble? When China sneezes, Cambodia catches a cold. “
Dara Sakor is the candidate favored by former Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen.
It’s a big project, but conceived almost in total secrecy. The BBC found that there is little consultation or assessment of the human and environmental cost.
The Chinese corporations involved provide very little data about themselves and some have questionable backgrounds. The mission has also sown suspicion abroad about other targets China has in this part of Cambodia.
China’s “no questions asked” strategy toward aid and investment attracted Hun Sen, a self-proclaimed strongman who, after ending three decades of devastating war and revolution in the 1990s, sought dizzying expansion to keep up with his country’s neighbors.
But much of this expansion has been achieved with generous concessions, adding huge parcels of land, to privileged friends and foreign companies.
“There are no institutions,” Sebastian Strangio says of what is possibly Hun Sen’s definitive e-book on Cambodia. “The formula is based on the satisfaction of tough people. “
This is the first in a series of articles examining Chinese investment ten years after Xi Jinping introduced the Belt and Road Initiative.
Dara Sakor’s assignment dates back to early 2008, when UDG, a private Chinese corporate structure founded in the northern city of Tianjin, granted a 99-year lease (the maximum term allowed by Cambodian law) with a one-time deposit of $1 million. This is the right to initially expand 36,000 hectares and then add another 9,000 hectares.
The UDG did not have to pay anything more for 10 years, and then only a measly million dollars a year: an impressive generosity deal for a fifth of the entire Cambodian coast.
As the land lies within the Botum Sakor National Park and far exceeded the legal limit of 10,000 hectares for any project, this would have been highly debatable, had anyone else known.
But since no data on the deal was published at the time, the Cambodian media did not report on it.
Som Thy, a local fisherman, took the BBC on his motorbike along sandy forest paths to see where he lived, in the UDG area. Much of the forest cover has disappeared. In some places, there are still some solitary giants left, surrounded by a barren wasteland.
Since 2008, the national park has lost about 20% of its main forests, according to the NGO Global Forest Watch. More than 1,000 families have been uprooted and forced to leave their villages. One such family is that of Som Thy.
“My eyes fill with tears to see him like this, completely covered in weeds,” she said as she gazed at what was once her home and rice fields. There were still some cashews left from the garden on which his circle of relatives depended for food. their source of income from agriculture and fishing.
Cambodia’s elections “were a crowning achievement”
Asia’s longest-serving minister manipulates vote, again
Like the other citizens of the 12 villages displaced by Dara Sakor, Som Thy moved in 2009 to a small logging area built by the company several kilometres from the coast.
During those early years there were many protests. Today, Som Thy is part of a small organization that still refuses to pay reimbursement through the company.
He says that it is to live off the small plots of land they have been given and that the sums of money they have been given are only a fraction of the real price of their land of origin.
He sneaks into Dara Sakor to take his boat fishing. He also went to Thailand in search of work. His persistent opposition to the commission prevented him from finding work, as his brother did, in the structures around the casino.
UDG has produced dazzling brochures for potential investors, with attractive photographs of well-maintained golf courses, neat rows of villas and satisfied families enjoying recreation on the beach. There are complex maps showing the other parts of this style holiday city: the domain of the new clinical and educational city, the center city of global industry and the domain of forest and elegance.
But all this is a cry of the devastated forests, the displaced people and the half-finished roads and buildings we still see today.
According to the Chinese environmental organization GEI, which published a detailed study on Dara Sakor in 2016, there is no evidence that the company has conducted environmental impact assessments, as required by Cambodian law.
GEI was also unable to locate data on how forests, which were meant to be protected, have been redesignated as development-friendly. GEI says it has raised its considerations with the UDG.
“They didn’t respond to those points,” the programme’s director, Ling Ji, told the BBC. “They simply insisted that they had complied with all applicable laws and regulations. They don’t see the problem. This has a very negative effect on China’s image. “Many countries will think that Chinese corporations are only there to plunder resources. Chinese corporations do not. They have the conscience or the ability to deal with local grievances in other countries, because in China, those are dealt with through the local government. . Abroad it is very different, for them it is still a learning process.
The magnitude of the task has sounded alarm bells in the United States.
In 2020, the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on the UDG, highlighting human rights abuses against others expelled from their villages, but also China’s possible use of the new airport for military purposes. The runway is much longer than mandatory for small aircraft intended to serve a faraway tourist destination.
The United States has already taken care of a naval base near Sihanoukville, which is being renovated with Chinese state investment and which, according to Washington, could be used in the long term through the Chinese navy.
The United States is increasingly involved in Chinese-built infrastructure because of Xi’s emphasis on the dual use of the civilian military — what China calls “army-civilian fusion” — in his economic planning, and the official requirement that Chinese projects meet military standards.
“The People’s Republic of China has used the plans of the UDG in Cambodia to advance its global force projection ambitions,” the accompanying sanctions read.
China: spender or usurer?
The UDG called the sanctions unjustified. The company claims that the United States is acting on the basis of “fabricated facts and rumors,” claiming that it has “always religiously followed the procedures required by law” and that those living within its concession were illegal settlers.
He says the airport is being built on this scale to make Dara Sakor a “global transport hub”. He supported this for very ambitious purposes. By 2030, the company’s online page says, it aims to have 1. 3 million long-term residents. Only about seven million tourists stop over each year and provide employment for one million people.
These are staggering figures when you consider that tourist arrivals to Cambodia are still well below the peak of six million arrivals in 2019. The UDG also questioned the description of the United States as a public entity: We are a personal company, Array said.
This is possibly true, but Chinese state agencies have been strong from the early stages of the project.
China’s most sensible economic plan-making body, the National Development and Reform Commission, gave its approval even before the agreement was signed and continued to monitor it. The head of the Communist Party in Tianjin, Zhang Gaoli, was also concerned from an early age and traveled to Cambodia in late 2008 to participate in the rite of signing the contract.
Later, Zhang became one of China’s most sensible leaders and since 2015 headed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Although Dara Sakor predates the BRI by five years, it is now officially described as a flagship task of the BRI.
The UDG has also reached out to senior officials in Cambodia’s ruling party. He made several giant donations to the Cambodian Red Cross, led by Hun Sen’s wife, Bun Rany, and donated one million dollars to fund the structure of a monument glorifying Hun Sen’s achievements. .
He has close ties to former Defense Minister Tea Banh, who heads one of Cambodia’s toughest political factions.
However, the company publishes very little information about its finances, which makes it difficult to assess its ability to carry out an order of this magnitude.
One of the few known investments in Dara Sakor was a bond factor in 2017 backed by the China Development Bank, but it only cashed in $15 million, a fraction of the nearly $4 billion the UDG promised to invest.
And now it turns out that the leadership role of UDG has been assumed through another company, China City Construction Company or CCCC. He was almost unaware outside China when in 2014, for reasons still unclear, he inserted himself into the Dara Sakor project.
UNFCCC leaders now play a leading role within the UDG, and the UNFCCC claims that it, the UDG, is guilty of “designing the overall plans and progression programme for this special tourist area”.
CCCC is a public company. But it is a company that suffers.
In 2016, then under the direction of the Ministry of Housing, it sent shockwaves through Hong Kong’s money markets after it suddenly announced its privatization on orders from the Chinese government. He said they were buying him through a little-known stock fund called Huinong.
This scared off investors who had bought piles of millions of dollars in the CCCC’s so-called “dim sum bonds,” bonds issued in Hong Kong to circumvent Chinese capital controls. They tried to buy back the bonds, but the CCCC was able to raise enough. money to cover payments.
Are the Chinese a “ticking time bomb”?
Why the Chinese Stopped Paying Their Mortgage
The CCCC continued to face monetary difficulties. Her credit score is now tarnished and she has been forced to sell some of her most promising businesses.
It was also revealed that Huinong, the mysterious fund that took over CCCC in 2016, is owned by the Ministry of Finance, making CCCC technically state-owned again. This type of opacity makes it very difficult to assess the true monetary suitability of CCCC. which has likely been affected by the recent collapse of the Chinese real estate market.
“There was a frenzy of foreign investment in the initial era of the Belt and Road Initiative, from 2014 to 2016,” said Victor Shih, director of the China Center for the 21st Century at the University of California, San Diego. “By 2016, however, the Chinese government had become much more cautious. I was no longer wasting money or approving projects left and right. “
Another investor in Dara Sakor is a Chinese businessman named She Zhijiang, who gained notoriety for casinos along the Thai-Myanmar border, where large-scale fraud and human trafficking operations have been uncovered. He is most recently detained in Thailand awaiting extradition to China.
Several more people from Thailand, Taiwan and the Philippines had to be rescued after reporting that they were being forcibly detained in fraudulent centers operating inside the Dara Sakor compound.
Publicity about fraudulent centers operating in Chinese investment zones in Cambodia is now deterring Chinese tourists from visiting them. As a result, the expected recovery of tourism, one of Cambodia’s top sources of income, has been much slower than expected.
Lured and trapped in fraudulent slavery in Southeast Asia
But according to Sebastian Strangio, another one is unlikely under Cambodia’s new prime minister, Hun Manet, Hun Sen’s Western-raised son.
“He will be a prisoner of this system. It will have limited strength to curb its excesses, even if it does,” he said.
Last week, barely a month after succeeding his father, Hun Manet traveled to Beijing to meet with Xi and assure him that China and Cambodia are solid.
In fact, Dara Sakor is just one of many gigantic land grants in the region, most of which have been granted to local Cambodian corporations allied with the ruling party.
The sheer weight of vested interests in the rapacious progression style followed in Cambodia makes their replacement very difficult.
80% of the national park is currently commercially exploited and little attention is paid to repeated warnings from environmental activists that the country is about to waste one of its maximum herbaceous habitats.
One of those activists, a young woman in her twenties, traveled with us to see Dara Sakor. She is most recently out on bail after being sentenced to 18 months in criminal prison in 2021 for attempting to organize a protest against any other land grab. .
She had received a big threat by accompanying us to the UDG grant. “We have no choice,” he said as we gaze at the expanse of destroyed forest.
“We have to threaten ourselves with jail, or worse, see what is left for the next generation. “
Advertising
Advertising
Advertising
Advertising
Advertising
Advertising
Advertising
Advertising
Advertising
Advertising
Advertising