Farming the fields of injustice

FOR five years, the farmers of Benxi county in the northeast province of Liaoning occupied the office of their local government and held protests and sit-ins in the provincial capital, which left 60 of them injured in clashes with the police. Nine of their representatives went to Beijing and threatened to cut off their index fingers and present them to the State Council as a sign of their anger at their failure to obtain justice. What the 25,000 farmers wanted was compensation of 12,000 yuan (about HK$11,200) each, which they say is owed to them for the loss of their homes, land and businesses due to construction of a reservoir that began in 1992. After more than eight bitter years of struggle and a law suit against their own government, they have obtained an average of 3,090 yuan. Of the 5,405 families involved, 1,000 have no land, the others have less land than they did before and many have been reduced to begging. 'I joined the People's Liberation Army in 1947 and was forced to fight in the Korean War for a year,' said Liu Qinghai, 71, his wrinkled face testimony to a life of work on the land. 'The Nationalist army we fought in the 1940s looted and burned villages. The communists are no better. Look at how they destroyed the homes and schools in my village,' he said, pointing to pictures of the devastation. He wept as he recounted the suicide of his wife, by taking poison, because she could not endure the pressure brought by the authorities to move. 'The chief of our village bought the position for himself. We hated him so much that, when his second son died in a car accident, all of us villagers made dumplings to celebrate.' The problems began in 1984, when the Government started to plan a reservoir north of Benxi - an industrial city in the centre of Liaoning - by damming the Taizi River to control flooding and provide clean drinking water to cities downstream. The reservoir would flood five counties, 23 villages and 2,300 hectares of good arable land on which 25,190 people lived, at a cost of 1.8 billion yuan. Japan was to provide a loan for the project but this did not materialise, so Liaoning had to bear the entire cost. On March 27, 1992, the province signed an agreement to provide 315 million yuan to the county for the project, of which 120 million was allocated for the farmers who would be resettled. 'We were happy to support a project that is good for the nation,' said Li Gongsheng, chief representative of the farmers. 'But we were not ready to be tricked and cheated and not paid what we were owed. We were driven from our homes by all means possible, including violence. Some people got no land and no homes and have no way to live. They became beggars. 'The county did not tell us what compensation we were entitled to. Officials refused to explain how the 315 million was being used,' he said. 'They stole some of it and spent some to build five new factories.' From late 1992, the villagers' campaign of protest began. They conducted daily sit-ins in the office of the county government. In October, when the vice-governor of Liaoning came on an inspection trip, more than 1,000 farmers blocked his car and forced him to get out to hear their grievances. In March 1995, 2,000 blocked the car of another senior official who refused to come out and meet them. Finally, his driver lost patience and drove forward, wounding the old man. Then, he reversed the car, pinning another protester below. The outraged crowd lifted the car, freeing the man. Then they attacked the driver, who fled for his life. In November, 1996, nearly 500 held a two-day sit-in outside offices of the provincial government in temperatures of minus 20 degrees Celsius. The governor refused to come out, sending his secretary instead. By the end of 1996, the county had given out 74.82 million yuan in compensation, far short of what the farmers wanted. Despairing of direct action, they decided to challenge the government in court. No lawyer in Liaoning dared to represent them, so they went to Beijing to ask lawyers from Qinghua University, whom they had seen on television. Two agreed to take on the case, without a fee, and filed a case in May, 1997, in a Benxi court, accusing the county of administrative incompetence. More than 600 farmers attended the first hearing on January 16, 1998, half inside the courtroom and half outside. On May 15, 1998, when the three judges ruled against the farmers, 200 old men and women knelt for an hour in protest in the courtroom, preventing the three from leaving. Two weeks later, the lawyers appealed to the Liaoning High Court. Its senior judge intervened with the province's governor, who agreed in November last year to make an ex gratia payment of three million yuan - which works out to 103.2 yuan per farmer. On February 18 this year, the farmers signed an agreement accepting the money and ending the law suit, while the two courts involved agreed to waive the legal fees. For Mr Li, Mr Lui and fellow farmer and campaigner Zhang Gongsheng it was a partial victory. 'We are pleased that the provincial government took an interest in our case. 'But the money is less than we want. About half of the farmers are living below the poverty line. The land we had before was high-quality, and what we have now is wasteland. But we do not plan any more protests,' Mr Li said. For its part, a spokesman for the county government denies it paid the farmers any less compensation than they deserved. 'The amount each household received varied according to the quality of their previous home, whether they had assets like trees and warehouses and the size of the family,' he said. 'The standards of compensation are set by the provincial government, I cannot tell you what they are.' Asked how the county had spent the original 315 million yuan, he declined to reply. Huang Xinhua took the case on with fellow lawyer Huang Baohua. He said they took the case because they were moved by the honesty of the farmers. 'For them to take their grievances to court and not the streets is a remarkable thing. It is a complex case. Liaoning is a poor province and the costs of the reservoir increased greatly from the original estimates. 'We are unhappy about many aspects of the result,' he said. 'The farmers received too little money. But it took 100-200 years to build the legal system in Britain and the United States. This is a long process.' The farmers sued Benxi county under a law passed in 1990 that allows individuals and institutions to take the government to court for administrative incompetence. Since then, more than 1,000 suits have been filed, of which this case has the largest number of plaintiffs. 'President Jiang Zemin has often used the slogan yifa zhiguo - use law to rule the country. I hope that our case can be a model for China,' Huang Xinhua said. But that is doubtful. Only a handful of mainland newspapers have reported the case and others are not likely to, since it might encourage other people to sue the government. While Mr Li and his fellow farmers have the satisfaction of an agreement with the provincial government, they are just 103.2 yuan richer for three years of painstaking legal work and many face a life of poverty worse than before the reservoir was built. Mark O'Neill is a member of the Post's Beijing bureau