At 75, even jail can't keep Mommy from Cambodia's land-rights fight

Street vendor-turned-rights activist Nget Khun, known locally as "Mommy", is a leading figure in Cambodians' fight against forced evictions. And at 75, she's just been jailed for a year.

"Keep struggling to save our home," the feisty septuagenarian told her daughter Eng Sokha during a recent visit to prison, where stress and loss of appetite weighs heavily on the veteran activist.

Other activists say the sentencing of Mommy and other women from her Boeung Kak Lake community on "trumped-up" charges is the latest wave of repression against land-rights activists. Last week the United Nations called on Cambodia to stop "judicial harassment for political purposes" while European ambassadors met wit authorities over the jailings.

But for now, Mommy is in a cell with two fellow activists. "She is in prison but she has no fear," said Sokha, an accounting student who lives in the family's modest house alongside six sisters, a brother and their children.

Mommy has been a constant presence at land protests in the capital Phnom Penh.

This time her crime was "obstructing traffic" during a protest against the flooding her community suffers due to a huge real estate project, headed by a close ally of the premier.

Phil Robertson, of Human Rights Watch, said Cambodia's "kleptocratic ruling class" had taken over the land of thousands of poor Cambodians - a capitalist version of the Khmer Rouge's mass expropriations in the 1970s.

But if the Khmer Rouge abolished land ownership in an ultimately disastrous attempt to create a communist utopia, the current elite simply aims to control resources from forest to farmland, activists and NGOs claim.

Some 770,000 Cambodians, or 6 per cent of the population, have fallen victim to eviction since 2000 with about 22 per cent of the country's land confiscated.

The Boeung Kak Lake site is languishing, with no sign of the promised high-end development as the flooding goes on.

After a long battle, Mommy and her family - along with 770 others - were offered nearby plots of land as compensation. But Mommy's family remains at home as they say they cannot afford to build a new house on the plot they have been given.