Rough (In)Justice

The former main entrance to Sihanoukville's market - Psar Leu

A few days ago we were in the town of Sihanoukville on the southern coast of Cambodia. In the middle of one night I woke up to sirens, an uncommon sound I recalled hearing only a couple times during our months in the country. The next morning our French host told us that the city's market had burned, "Zayr iss no moah mahket."

When we went by to take a look, we were speechless. We'd shopped at this market before and complained that it was scruffy, even by Cambodian standards. It was where the city shopped, though. All over Southeast Asia, people buy almost all of their food from central or district markets - sprawling covered warrens filled with stalls of produce, meat, fish, dry goods, clothes....you name it. Each stall is owned by a family and, at least in Cambodia, that stall provides the main or sole income supporting a LOT of people.

Piles of clothes smolder

It's no wonder that people pored through every scrap of their burned belongings trying to salvage anything of value. I saw one woman carrying the melted remains of a fan. I assume she was going to try to pull the copper out of the motor to sell it for scrap. Very few Cambodians can afford to waste anything.

Over the subsequent few days, we heard from several different people that the local government had tried to "influence" the vendors at the market to move to a new facility. The land where the existing market stood in the center of downtown Sihanoukville had been sold for another purpose. Most of the vendors chose not to move because rents at the new market were too high. Then, after functioning in the same place for decades, the market burned entirely a few nights ago.


Not one person we talked to was surprised that the market burned. They weren't happy, but they seemed resigned because they knew they have little or no recourse. This type of eviction happens with sad regularity in Cambodia. As cities become crowded and the economy slowly grows, land formerly deemed not worth much can, over time, become coveted. Squatters, small-business people, anyone not connected to the powers-that-be are forced to move, often to places distant from their former locations.

And no, you can count insurance among the many things that these people do not have.