In Cambodia, protest runs in the family – and so does prison
Nget Khun survived the Khmer Rouge, rebuilt her life from nothing, and thought she’d finally found security at 65. Then the government took her lakeside home. At 86, she’s still fighting – and so is her daughter, who just finished a year in prison.
Nget Khun, 86, walks along a street which used to be Boeung Kak Lake. She has been protesting for almost two decades since her lakeside home was taken. Photo: Choulay Mech/HaRDstories
The posters barely fit in the tuk-tuk. Nget Khun rolled them carefully, one showing her youngest daughter’s face, another demanding justice, and a third displaying a photograph of herself from a decade ago, blood streaming from a gash in her head.
At 86, she has the routine down. Every week, sometimes twice, she packs these banners and makes the seven-kilometre journey across Phnom Penh to stand outside the municipal court.
On this May morning, three of her grandchildren climbed into the tuk-tuk alongside her eldest daughter. Her son took the handlebars. The sun was already fierce. By the time they reached the courthouse, its bright yellow gates shimmering in the heat, Khun was ready.
“Where is the peace?” she called out, holding her signs high. “Why are only the victims imprisoned?”
The immediate cause of her anger sat in a cell less than an hour’s drive away. Her youngest daughter, Eng Sokha, was serving a 12-month sentence for destroying public property – a charge the family insists was false. Sokha’s crime, according to the court: breaking a window during a scuffle with a security guard whilst livestreaming a protest at this very courthouse.
But Khun’s fury ran deeper than one unjust conviction. It stretched back nearly two decades, to when she first learned that the pleasant lakeside neighbourhood where she’d finally found a home was about to disappear.
A life of survival
Khun was born in 1940 in Tram Kak district, Takeo province. She married Eng Seang when she was 17. With few prospects in rural Takeo, they moved to Phnom Penh and made their living selling num banh chok – the traditional Khmer breakfast of fresh rice noodles topped with fish curry and herbs.
They were living in the capital with their children when the Khmer Rouge seized power in April 1975. The regime forced them back to Takeo province.
For nearly four years, Khun’s family worked in the rice fields from before dawn until after dark. They ate almost nothing. “The soup had only leaves, no meat or fish, just a pinch of salt from the cooperative,” she recalled.
Khun had 12 children. She lost four sons and one daughter during the Khmer Rouge years and the chaos that followed – to violence, starvation and disease in a country where healthcare had collapsed.
When the regime fell in 1979, the family returned to Phnom Penh with their surviving children: six daughters and one son. They moved into an abandoned house near the Olympic Stadium and began rebuilding their lives from nothing.
Khun went back to selling num banh chok. Every morning, she hoisted a 20-kilogram yoke across her shoulders and walked the city streets, offering breakfast to residents in a capital still scarred by genocide.
“It was so hard,” she recalled. “I walked long distances to sell noodles, and I kept the leftover noodles for my children to eat.”
By 2005, she could no longer afford to live so centrally. That’s when she bought a wooden house at Boeung Kak lake for 4,000 USD, with a land title signed by village and commune authorities. After surviving the Khmer Rouge and raising seven children through civil war and poverty, she thought she’d finally found security. She was 65 years old.
Two years later, the government gave her lake away.
The lake that vanished
Boeung Kak was a 90-hectare lake in the heart of Phnom Penh. Wooden houses on stilts lined its shores. Families fished from small boats and grew water mimosa in the shallows. Tourists came for the cheap guesthouses and lakefront restaurants.
In 2007, the government granted a 99-year lease on 133 hectares – the lake and surrounding land – to a private developer called Shukaku Inc. The company was owned by Lau Meng Khin, a senator from the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, and his wife, the controversial business tycoon Choeung Sopheap. Their plan was to fill in the lake and build a new commercial district.
Khun’s house, on the eastern shore, wasn’t marked for immediate eviction. She joined the protests anyway. “Even though the authorities said my family would not be evicted, I understood that the next victim was my family,” she said. “So I had to join the protest.”
At its peak, more than 4,000 families took to the streets. They marched to City Hall, to government ministries, to the Phnom Penh residence of Prime Minister Hun Sen. When Cambodian officials ignored them, some activists travelled to Washington and other capitals to raise the alarm.
It worked, for a while. International journalists covered the controversy around Boeung Kak. By 2011, the World Bank had temporarily suspended new loans to Cambodia over the environmental destruction and mass evictions.
But the lake kept disappearing, lorry by lorry, filled with sand.
Khun threw herself into the fight. Between 2007 and 2012, she volunteered almost full-time, which meant she couldn’t work. Her husband and seven children struggled financially. The worries kept Khun up at night.
“Sometimes it was midnight and I could not sleep,” she recalled. “I walked to the houses of other protestors to find a way to get to Hun Sen’s house.” They were planning another demonstration outside the prime minister’s residence.
The Boeung Kak 13
In May 2012, police arrested Khun along with 12 other women after a protest. They became known as the Boeung Kak 13.
The court convicted all of them for occupying state land and obstructing public officials in aggravating circumstances. Each woman was sentenced to a year in prison but released on bail after serving one month.
That month changed everything for Khun’s youngest daughter. Sokha was in her final year of secondary school, but she stopped attending classes to bring food to her mother in prison.
“I was very upset when I found out my child had stopped school,” Khun said. “Sometimes I didn’t want to eat all day in prison.”
Sokha never went back to finish year 12. Instead, she also became an activist.
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The protests had an effect. In 2011, the government carved out 12.44 hectares from the Shukaku lease, promising to grant small plots to some of the Boeung Kak families. But the promise sat on paper and the land didn’t materialise. So the protests continued.
By then, though, the movement was fracturing. Families began accepting cash settlements – between 500 and 2,000 USD – and leaving. The crowds thinned, except for Khun and some others, they kept up the protest.
In June 2014, she and other activists learned that military police planned to build a post in Village 22, a disputed area of the former lakeside. When the women confronted the officers at the construction site, a local official began throwing rocks, according to Khun.
One struck Khun in the head, opening a deep gash in her thinning hairline. A photographer captured the moment: blood streaming down her face, her expression more furious than pained.
She printed that photograph onto a banner and still carries it to court.
The rock-thrower was never punished. Five months later, in November 2014, Khun was arrested again, this time during a demonstration outside Phnom Penh City Hall. The court sentenced her to a year in prison. She served six months.
From one fight to many
When Khun left prison in 2015, her view had widened. She’d met other activists inside, heard their stories. The Boeung Kak battle had taught her something: land grabs weren’t unique to her lakeside neighbourhood. They were happening everywhere.
She began showing up at other people’s protests. Rice farmers from the Lor Peang community in Kampong Chhnang province, fighting to reclaim land from the wife of a former mines and energy minister. Indigenous Bunong villagers in Stung Treng, displaced by a hydropower dam and struggling to stay near their ancestral territory. Workers sacked by the NagaWorld casino after they tried to form a union.
Wherever activists gathered outside the Phnom Penh Municipal Court, Khun tried to be there, unless her health prevented it. Other protesters began calling her “Grandma” or “Mammy.”
“I joined their demonstrations and encouraged them to continue protesting peacefully until they received appropriate compensation,” she said. “I say we must protest for our rights. We must not be violent or insult others. Why do they have to arrest us?”
‘We are all victims, so I need to encourage them. I tell them not to be afraid.”
Sokha often stood beside her mother at these protests, chanting, holding signs. The grandmother and the daughter, side by side at the courthouse gates.
Kin Chantha, another former Boeung Kak activist, said he was impressed that they showed up even when the issue didn’t directly affect them. “Her family has always helped others seek justice,” he said.
As for Khun’s own fight, progress came slowly. The government had promised her a plot of land back in 2011, but it took seven more years to materialise. In 2018, she finally received it: a piece of ground about 200 metres from her original home on Boeung Kak lake, plus 9,000 USD in compensation. Enough to build a concrete house. She also received a hard title – official government recognition that safeguarded her rights to the property.
She saw it as vindication. Those who’d accepted early settlements had received as little as 500 to 2,000 USD.
“I encourage activists that we must continue to fight,” she said. “I will die for my land. If we leave the place where we live, we don’t know where to live. Obviously, those who receive compensation and decide to move are very miserable. I have seen it with my own eyes.”
A daughter follows her mother
Sokha continued protesting alongside her mother, defending not just their own case but standing with other activists at the courthouse gates. Then, on 31 January 2025, she went alone. Her mother stayed home that day.
Sokha was livestreaming her protest when a security guard tried to stop her filming. According to Khun, the guard pushed her daughter. Sokha resisted. In the struggle, the guard shoved her into a window, shattering the glass.
Police arrested Sokha that day and charged her with destroying public property. On 11 June, the court sentenced her to a year in prison.
When contacted for comment, Justice Ministry spokesman Seng Dina said he was busy and referred questions to the Phnom Penh Municipal Court. Spokesman Y Rin stated that the verdict was based on “facts and law.”
For the months Sokha was inside, Khun kept up her weekly routine. At least once a week, she made the journey to Prey Sar prison, bringing rice, dried food and medicine. Each visit cost between 100,000 and 200,000 riels – roughly 25 to 50 USD.
“I’ve been in prison before,” she said. “I know how hard it is to live there, especially for political prisoners who are often mistreated.”
Life after prison
On 2 February, Khun and her family waited outside Prey Sar Prison from morning until 5pm before the authorities finally released Sokha. “I was so scared that they would detain my daughter for longer,” Khun said. “I sat in front of the gate and waited.”
It’s been almost a month since Sokha walked out. She’s back home with her six-year-old daughter and her elderly mother. But prison left its marks – scars on her arms and legs from beatings, she said. “They used violence once or twice a month.”
The early months behind bars were the hardest. Other prisoners shouted and smoked. Guards used abusive language. When Sokha protested or tried to see the prison administrator, she said she was blocked and beaten by both guards and other inmates.
Then she was transferred to a cell with Theary Seng, the Cambodian-American human rights lawyer who is herself a prisoner of conscience. Seng helped her, brought her complaints to the attention of human rights officials, and made life inside more bearable.
“Besides my mother, I respect and love Theary Seng because she helped me, and she is an American citizen, but she is willing to advocate in Cambodia,” Sokha said.
Sokha is 38 now. Her dream of becoming a doctor disappeared when she was 17, when she stopped going to school to bring food to her mother in prison. It’s a loss she still feels. But she’s proud of her mother, she said.
Despite the year in prison and the future she lost, Sokha said she hasn’t given up. She plans to continue demanding justice for her mother, for land activists, for environmental campaigners, for political opposition figures.
She knows exactly what continuing means.
“As an advocate, I know that there will be days when I will be arrested, but I never thought I would give up.”
Meng Kroypunlok is a freelance journalist based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He is a former reporter at Voice of Democracy (VOD) and has previously worked with Mekong Eye and Mongabay. He is interested in topics related to human rights, democratic rights and environmental justice.
Choulay Mech lives and works between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, Cambodia. She is a freelance photojournalist, passionate about environmental and animal rights issues, with a strong focus on human-interest storytelling.
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