Connect to share and comment  Cambodia pushes out the poor  In
the rapidly developing Southeast Asian country, forcible
evictions are an all-too-common way to make room for the new.
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Rumbling bulldozers at 2 a.m. sent
residents of the Dey Krahorm community scrambling from their
beds. The time for eviction had come — not of an individual, or
of a family, but as the final stage in the demolition of a
1,400-family neighborhood.  Neighbors and family members tried
to stop the bulldozers and excavators from tearing down their
homes by linking arms and forming a human wall around their
neighborhood. But they could not withstand the tear gas. They
broke ranks, choking and coughing. Besides tear gas, police beat
residents with electric batons and fired rubber bullets into
crowds.  The January 2009 incident was caught on videotape and
set the tone for a year that brought the largest number of mass
evictions in Phnom Penh since 1975, when Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge
evacuated the entire city in the pro