Qualla: Cheay Areng Dam

Cheay Areng Dam: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In November 2013, about forty Buddhist monks walked twenty-five kilometres through Cardamom jungle carrying a strip of saffron cloth eighty metres long. They had eaten nothing since noon, monastic rule permitting no food after midday, and had brought very little water. Several of the older monks gave out on the trail and had to be brought in on the back of motorcycles, some arriving as late as four in the morning. When they reached the Areng Valley they unwound the cloth and wrapped it around the trees - a blessing, and a message to the people living there that this forest was not merely timber and flood margin. Somewhere on paper, the valley was already a reservoir.

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Cheay Areng Dam: The Project on Paper

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cheay Areng was a 108-megawatt hydroelectric scheme on the Areng river in the Cardamom Mountains of Koh Kong province, and by the standards of the Mekong basin it was not large - a fraction of the output of the big mainstream dams, in a country whose electricity demand was climbi...

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Cheay Areng Dam: The Walk In

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The march was organised by But Buntenh, and the monks who joined him were young. Koem Bunloerum was thirty, Ngim Saosam Khan thirty-three; both had come from Phnom Penh to a valley most Cambodians could not find on a map. What they offered was not a legal argument but a moral one...

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Cheay Areng Dam: The Valley Refuses

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The resistance was not imported. Roughly fifteen hundred people faced relocation from the valley, most of them Chong and Sui - Indigenous communities whose families had lived along this river for centuries - and they organised motorcade marches, petitions and sustained civil diso...

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Cheay Areng Dam: Shelved, Which Is Not the Same as Dead

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2017 Prime Minister Hun Sen shelved the project, citing the strength of local opposition - a rare outcome in a country where large infrastructure rarely loses. What the valley kept is considerable: intact forest holding thirty-one endangered animal species, and a stretch of ri...

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