61 Even before the election, Prime Minister Hun Sen acknowledged land-related problems. He decided to stop granting new ELCs in 2012 and limited the duration of future leases to 50 years. He insisted that local people deserve protection and promised to redistribute one million hectares of land to poor and dispossessed families. Serious efforts were made to resolve ongoing land conflicts by MLMUPC through different mechanisms. National and provincial committees have been established to consider these matters. However, the conflicting parties’ interests tend to be hard to reconcile, especially as the rights of ELC companies are defined in their contracts. ADHOC says that the situation has generally been improving and no new conflicts have emerged since the government stopped granting ELCs. The unresolved conflicts are tough, however, and in the long run, it is expected that new conflicts will arise. Government officers argue that the land law is good and will work out well in the long run. They admit that not everything is in place yet, but insist that the problems are being dealt with.  To some extent the government is blaming problems on opposition forces. It has stated that “political parties have manipulated the current land issue shamelessly for their own political gain”. In the eyes of human-rights defenders, however, the successful resolution of land issues depends on “the political will of the government” (Sun, 2017). Distribution and size of land conflicts Legal activists point out that powerful elites, including high-ranking government officials, are involved in most land conflicts. On the other hand, some 400,000 to 1 million people have been personally affected by land disputes, according to estimates. ADHOC reckons that 60,000 people have been forcibly evicted from their homes. The data for this study was collected from official social media (Radio Free Asia) and official reports from MLMUPC between 2016 and 2018. The Radio Free Asia (RFA) report covers the period January 2016 until 20 November 2018, and the MLMUPC report is from January 2016 to June 2018. Cambodia Land Conflict Monitoring Report by nine percentage points to slightly below 49 percent in the general election of 2013. It still has the majority of legislative seats.

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