Bureaucratic tangle worsens problem

As with many land disputes in Cambodia, the Trapeang Krasaing case highlights the near total lack of documentation -- common in countries where landownership has largely been historic and traditional -- to determine who owns what property.

Land records in Cambodia were largely destroyed during the 1975-79 rule of the communist Khmer Rouge, which abolished private ownership.

A land titling programme has made little headway in restoring ownership records, which even when they do exist are often simply ignored by those handing out eviction notices.

Tangled bureaucracies elsewhere have also exacerbated the problem, making land grabs easier to pull off and harder to resolve.

In Indonesia, the grabbing of long-neglected plots of land has led to a mushrooming of disputes that are only made worse by rampant corruption and a poor registration system.

One particular type of grabbing on the rise involves the encroachment of agricultural fields and settlements into protected forest areas and parks, a serious cause of environmental degradation.

Chalid Mohammad, executive director of Walhi, the country's leading environmental watchdog, said the grabs have become "a major problem found in almost all forested areas in Indonesia".

In the densely-populated province of Lampung at the south end of Indonesia's Sumatra island, illegal encroachment has reached critical levels, said Sutono, the deputy chief of the Lampung forestry office.

"In Lampung, this encroachment has been going on for a long time, even back 30 to 40 years," he said, adding there were now even registered official villages inside what should have been protected natural forest areas.

He estimates about 65 percent of a million hectares of protected forest area in Lampung has been grabbed and converted to settlements and farmland.

"The root cause of this illegal occupation is the absence of work opportunities, and most of the people involved in this usually are willing to leave the forest if they can get jobs or livelihoods elsewhere," Sutono said.

Ownership disputes have also led to an explosion of court cases in Thailand after the 2004 tsunami displaced thousands of villagers from the Andaman coast.

Many either had no documents to prove they owned the land, or lost their property deeds in the waves.

Some 387 court cases have been filed by companies against villagers since the tsunami, with more than 200 still before the courts.

Another 800 eviction notices are in mediation, according to Suttipong Lyetip of the National Human Rights Commission.

Most of the cases that have been settled were resolved through compromise, often with the companies paying out some compensation.

But that is an unlikely outcome elsewhere.

Worsening violence has come to characterise the growing number of disputes that erupt in China, where at least half of all land deals are thought to be illegal and the victims get nothing from the transaction.

"The crux of the issue is that governments at all levels plunder the land resources, the commoners see little if any of the money," said Hou Guoyan, a retired professor from the China University of Political Science and Law.

"Violators get off scot-free and the (central) government is at a loss to solve the problem."

Beijing has issued a series of regulations aimed at increasing scrutiny over land deals, experts say, but has little power to enforce the law in the provinces.

"The main problem is that standard compensation levels for villagers are too low," said Liu Xiaoying, a rural issues researcher at the China Academy of Social Sciences. "This is very difficult to solve."