Trying to Koan-quer the world
**It’s a normal Wednesday morning on campus. You’ve missed your first lecture, you’re a little hungover and you drag yourself to the kitchen for the home comfort of a much-needed cup of tea. Then you see a sign under your flat door. EVICTION, you have 24 hours to pack your bags and get out. **
In a day’s time your room won’t be your room and your building will have disappeared. You paid your rent on time this term and you didn’t even get a noise complaint. But your government who just sold this land without telling you and the multi-national company that just bought it don’t care about that, or about you. And tomorrow you are homeless.
Really put yourself in that situation. How do you feel? Panicked? Betrayed? Or can you not even fathom this because, with all the contracts you’ve signed and the entrenched rights you have, a government that tries to kick you out of your home would surely find itself in big trouble?
The rural farmers of Cambodia, Uganda, Sudan and Indonesia don’t have this kind of assurance. Despite the fact that they have cultivated the land they have been living on for generations, they lack the paperwork to prove this.
Often it is due to terrible recent history leading to archive destruction or an opportunistic government keeping the land titles for themselves.
Take the Cambodian example: the historical tragedy of the terrifying rule of the Khmer Rouge for 14 years during the 1980s and 1990s. The regime completely shook up the ownership of land by abolishing private property and reclaiming all the land. When it all finally ended, after a destructive genocide killing ¼ of the country’s population, people moved back to their lands and started their cultivations again.
But the government did not give them the land titles. Most farmers of the Koh Kong province didn’t see the urgency in proving their entitlement: they could not expect that their government would sell their land to Tate & Lyle without any notice.
Recently, Warwick Oxfam-Outreach organised a stunt campaign on campus against land grabs by grabbing the Koan in front of the Arts Centre. Wrapping tape around themselves and surrounding the ‘monument’ while chanting through a megaphone, the bright green activists demanded the attention of passers-by to discuss with them the issue of land grabs.
Ironically, only 20 minutes later, the University who own this land demanded that they immediately leave their private property and campus security arrived to enforce this demand. We had not damaged the land in any way, but the law and the paperwork seemed clear: we only had right of passage.
The contrast here is stark. While years have passed since the Cambodian, Ugandan and Sudanese farmers have had their land taken away without a blink from any authorities, the Arts Centre’s private property was safe and sound within half an hour of Oxfam’s invasion. But do we deserve our right to secure land any more than they do?
More importantly, do they deserve it any less?
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