Welcome to HaRDstories 2.0
A view of Angkor Wat temple, Siem Reap, Cambodia. Photo: Kong Raksmey/HaRDstories
Cleared from one of the world’s most visited heritage sites, thousands of Cambodian families were resettled in a city built for them from scratch. Years later, they are still waiting for it to become what they were told it would be.
Loeum Yean wakes each morning at 5 a.m. to make breakfast, pull on her uniform and get her 13-year-old daughter ready for school. Then the two of them drive 30 kilometres to Siem Reap city, where Yean spends eight hours as a groundskeeper at Angkor Wat – the ancient temple that drew nearly one million foreign ticket-buyers in 2025.
Her workplace and her daughter’s school used to be around the corner from the temple. Yean lived in Rohal village, inside Angkor Archaeological Park, for most of her life. Then, like tens of thousands of families who had spent generations in the park’s shadow, she was ordered out. Now she commutes back across the distance to tend a monument she can no longer afford to live beside.
“If I don’t go to Angkor Park, I don’t know what I can do to make money here,” she said of her new home, where jobs are scarce.
After protests and petitions for clarity, families evicted from Angkor Archaeological Park accepted resettlement packages in 2022 and 2023 to move to Run Ta Ek. The farming village, legally reclassified as a city roughly 30 kilometres outside the Unesco World Heritage site, was meant to become a new tourism hub. Years later, residents say they are struggling with debt and economic stagnation in a resettlement zone that has yet to become what they were promised.
The campaign to clear residents from Angkor traces back to concerns raised by Unesco’s World Heritage Convention in the late 2000s about mounting threats to the temple complex from uncontrolled urban expansion.
Sporadic evictions occurred throughout the 2010s. Then, in 2022, Apsara Authority – the Cambodian government body overseeing the park – ordered residents to demolish shops and restaurants inside the park, a campaign backed by then-Prime Minister Hun Sen. By early 2023, Apsara Authority reported that more than 10,000 families had been removed. ICC Angkor, the international coordinating body for the park, said it supported the move in a leaked report.
The Cambodian government has since rejected allegations that the evictions violated international law. In a 2024 report to Unesco, it argued that those relocated were illegal occupants, not residents of the more than 100 traditional villages recognised when Angkor was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1992. Unesco, for its part, has said it never requested or supported forced evictions.
The quiet city
When residents were told to move to Run Ta Ek and given titles to their new plots of land, officials promised that the rows of houses would grow into a satellite city – complete with roads, plumbing, electricity, schools, hospitals and the infrastructure to draw local and international tourists to a destination 30 kilometres outside Siem Reap city.
Some of that has arrived. The roads are paved. There is electricity, running water, a school and a hospital. Man-made ponds catch the light at the edges of the settlement, and a central square offers a bus stop and an open-air market pavilion.
But the market is empty, and few motorbikes drive past on an afternoon in January – what’s supposed to be part of the high season for international tourism in Siem Reap.
Doeun Doeum, 56, opened his motorbike repair shop here in 2022, when vehicles still kicked up red dust on the unpaved road outside. In those early months, as families arrived and settled in, he had steady business. Now he estimates that the majority of the population has drifted away – some selling their land titles, others simply living somewhere else.
“Since 2023, there have not been many people here,” he said.
Doeum said he accepted the compensation offered to residents of Angkor Park, receiving a 20-by-30-metre plot of land with a nationally-recognised “hard” land title, about one million riel in cash (about 250 USD) and zinc sheets to make a roof for his house. But his family had to invest in moving his business and rebuilding life in Run Ta Ek.
“We lost a lot of property after coming here – pots, plates, household items broken in the move, the house itself damaged,” he said. “We are not satisfied.”
•
He survives partly because he still farms a rice field closer to Angkor Park, supplementing the thin income from his repair stand with what he grows.
Som Sitha, 75, and her daughter Tao Sreykhouch made the same move in 2023, from Mondul 3 village in the shadow of Angkor Wat. They felt they had little choice. Renting in Siem Reap city was too expensive, so Sreykhouch opened a small coffee shop in front of their house in Run Ta Ek, hoping the view of a man-made pond might draw customers.
“I still continue to survive here,” she said. “If they develop this place, our life will be better.”
In Mondul 3, her shop had drawn enough tourists and city residents to keep the family afloat. Here, almost no one comes.
“At the old place we had more sales, there were students, lots of travellers,” Sreykhouch said.
Chhuon Im, chief of the Run Ta Ek commune, said officials had conducted a social impact assessment before the relocations to anticipate residents’ needs. She pointed to recent improvements: two libraries built, a plant nursery established, and ongoing efforts to attract new investors and businesses to the city.
According to Im, 2,308 families have since left Run Ta Ek, though others remain or commute to Siem Reap city for work in farming, tourism and other trades. She maintained that the move had given residents more safety and comfort than life inside Angkor Park.
“People have a better life than before,” she said.
Rebuilding with debt
For many who resettled in Run Ta Ek, starting over meant taking on debt: to build a house, open a business, or simply furnish a life from scratch.
In spite of its pleasant location near the pond, Sreykhouch said few people come to buy coffee from her shop. “Some people don’t have money to buy [coffee], they can only afford their food,” she said.
The family took out a loan to build the house and the shop. To secure it, Sreykhouch’s mother Sitha used her IDPoor card as collateral, a social equity card issued by the Cambodian government to Run Ta Ek residents as the evictions peaked, valid for ten years and entitling holders to free public health services and a monthly stipend.
The stipend is modest. Doeum, for example, receives 200,000 riel, roughly 50 USD, each month to support himself, his wife and a grandchild.
Sreykhouch’s mother Sitha was not the only one to borrow against her card. Many families in Run Ta Ek did the same, she said.
“I never dare to eat anything [special],” she said. “I save [the money] to repay the bank.”
The cards have not always delivered what was promised. Lem Vanna, 30, who works at Doeum’s repair shop, said some residents received less each month than they were originally told they would. He himself was cut off from the programme entirely sometime after the first year, losing support for several months before his payments were eventually restored.
More than 400 residents from the Run Ta Ek area protested over shorted IDPoor payments in 2024.
“Some people are afraid about their loan payments, as people depend on the IDPoor card payments,” to meet the monthly interest payments, Vanna told HaRDstories. “There will be problems when the IDPoor card has been cut off.”
Vann Sophath, business and human rights project coordinator for the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, which has monitored the Run Ta Ek evictions, said many families ended up in poverty as a result of the relocations.
“Many fall into debt or are forced to migrate for work to sustain their lives if their income and living conditions cannot match what they had before,” he said.
Under international standards, communities that are relocated are meant to end up in conditions at least equivalent to where they came from. When that standard is not met, Sophath said, the consequences reach into every corner of a family’s life.
“All human rights of relocated people are affected: their living conditions, their ability to earn income, children’s access to education, and their right to care and support,” he said.
Rooted in Angkor Park
The hardest part of leaving, Doeum said, was not the loss of income. It was the loss of the land itself and the memories attached to it.
For Doeum and other residents, Angkor Archaeological Park is more than the place they called home. It is one of Cambodia’s most cherished national symbols, and for those from Siem Reap province, a landscape woven into family history across generations.
“I have known Angkor since I was born, [our land] was passed down from my grandparents’ generation,” he said. “I miss my old house and the land that was full of crops and coconut trees. My wife cried when she saw our old place, where we used to live, where we were born.”
Unlike Doeum, So Povthyda, 29, and her husband Noun Sovitou decided to stay on the land in Angkor Park where she was raised. The plot had been passed down to her by her mother.
The couple live in a small shack beneath the forest canopy, surrounded by the sculptures and handicrafts that Sovitou makes by hand. After Povthyda left her job at a local school, the trade became their main income. It is a modest living, but she calculated that moving to Run Ta Ek would cost more than staying: loans to build a house, loans to start a business, debt passed down to children who had nothing to do with any of it.
“It’s not just me who’ll end up poor; my children will be poor too. And if my children try to rise up, it will be like a tree, just a plant trying to grow without enough water,” she said.
Staying is a gamble. One evening Povthyda watched a palm tree burn near their shack. If the flames had spread, she knew, no one would have compensated her – she had violated the eviction order. She has no legal standing and no safety net.
She also fears what will happen when the authorities come back. A 2023 report by the Cambodian Center for Human Rights (CCHR) documented cases of threats, violence and intimidation in forced evictions across Cambodia. Povthyda believes that because she did not leave when first ordered, they will be crueller when they finally arrive.
“We’re afraid they’ll come and vandalize our house and our belongings. If we’re not home, they might just burn the place down. We even worry they’ll release wild animals, snakes, into our house when we’re away,” she said. “They’re trying to scare us because we live here. They will come to destroy our house.”
She and Sovitou said they might consider resettling if the compensation were fairer and the land offered closer to Siem Reap city, where they work and where their family lives. But the offer has not changed, and so neither has her decision.
She and Sovitou said they may be willing to settle if they were offered more fair compensation, and land that is closer to Siem Reap city, where they work and keep up with their friends and family.
But Povthyda also said she feels comfortable with her decision because of her ties to her homeland.
“As a memory, we cannot erase it easily,” she said. “I love everything here the same as my life, [this place] is not just temples or land.”
A future in Run Ta Ek
Sophath, of the CCHR, said the relocations cannot be undone. But the government could still act: stimulating the local economy with new businesses and offering residents meaningful support in building livelihoods. Neither, he said, has happened at any sufficient scale.
“Their living conditions should improve to match or at least be close to the conditions they had before relocation, if not better.”
Vanna, the mechanic, has not given up on Run Ta Ek. He remembers an initiative from 2019 that would have involved levelling a nearby mountain to build a road and factories in the area, creating jobs for young workers like him. Nothing came of it.
“Previously, there were plans to build factories and to make this area a transit route,” he said.
Yean, the single mother, would rather work close to home and spend more time with her daughter. Instead, she makes the 30-kilometre drive to Angkor each day, because there is nothing for her in Run Ta Ek yet. Like most of her neighbours, she took out a loan to build her house. The debt is one more reason she cannot afford to wait.
She hopes it will be different for her daughter, who will one day inherit this land.
“I want to request the government to build factories quickly, so that people who have gone to the city can come back and work here,” she said.
Kong Sreyrath is a Cambodian freelance journalist and fixer whose work has been published in local and international outlets. Her work focuses on gender equality, disability, and social inclusion (GEDSI), child protection, indigenous rights, environmental sustainability, and peace and conflict resolution.
Kong Raksmey is a Cambodian photographer and filmmaker based in Phnom Penh. She graduated in International Studies from Pannasastra University with her work focusing on issues related to social change and gender equality.
Get our latest stories direct to your inbox.
