All
over Asia, poor communities are forced to house themselves in informal settlements often
referred to as squatter housing, because governments fail to cater to their housing needs.
They invest their hard earned money in building houses, acquiring infrastructure and
services, establishing businesses and sometimes developing health, education and
recreational facilities. But due to a powerful politician-bureaucrat-real estate developer
nexus, which supports the multi billion dollar business of real estate development in
expanding Asian cities, hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses are bulldozed every
year, making a mockery of all national laws and international covenants. Furthermore,
grandiose development projects, often supported by loans from international agencies but
considered unnecessary for ‘national development’ by an increasingly large
number of development experts, also displace hundreds of thousands of people.This remarkable report, second in a series, documents the process of forced eviction in Asian cities during 1996-97. It also examines the role of Asian governments in the perpetuation of this enormous tragedy and their failure to enforce national and international human rights laws related to evictions. In addition, it deals with the psychological, social and economic repercussions of forced evictions and the human and physical degradation that accompanies them. But, the report also gives hope as it illustrates the growing movement against evictions in certain sections of Asian societies and of the determination of low income communities to struggle for their rights.
The compiler of this report has a very rich experience related to low income informal settlements. He has worked for several years for the Catholic Social Services and later for the Urban Resource Centre in Karachi. Currently he is based in Cambodia as Regional Coordinator of the Eviction Watch Programme of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR). In this report, he has used his experience to bring together previously uncollected or unavailable information regarding forced evictions and produced an analysis that is a necessary reading for all housing related development activists and policy makers.