Events in Cambodia bring back images of forced evictions seen by our Publications Manager as a young journo working in apartheid South Africa.

Fire. For me that will always be the smell of forced evictions. Not the pleasant smoky smell of a campfire but the stench of wet charcoal in the morning.

That, and the image of a woman weeping under a thorn tree on an African hillside, a broken transistor radio in her lap spilling yellow wires through a cracked casing.

The image is as sharp today as I write about forced evictions in Cambodia as it was when I photographed her silent tears under a threatening sky.

We called them "squatter camp removals" in Apartheid South Africa. But they're no different to what's happening right now in Cambodia, in Angola, and so many other places across the world.

Somebody's home, somebody's life, gets in the way of progress; a development, an urban renewal. And with little or no consultation, inadequate if any compensation, and no regard at all for how the people make their living and how they'll do so after they're moved, the powerless are disappeared.

In South Africa it was back to the "homelands" they'd fled in search of work.

Rounded up in the night by police with dogs, they watched their makeshift shelters burn before being trucked hundreds of kilometres to scratch a living from infertile soil barren of hope.

In Group 78, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, they're being moved to a camp 20 kilometres from where they work and live, turning poverty into a desperate fight for survival.

Recently I saw photographs of the Mittapheap 4 evictions in Cambodia during 2007. They show residents fleeing armed police as their homes are burnt.

Group 78 may be too built-up to burn as it stands. So front-end loaders will move in first - as I watched them do so many years ago in Cape Town - crushing lives as the voiceless cry out.

But always the remains are burnt. And the next morning you'll see the owners, if the soldiers let them come, picking through the smouldering ruins of their lives.

For me, overlying the image, will be the face of a woman, black tears coursing silently down her cheeks. And the bitter smell of wet charcoal.

Ian Wynne is Publications Manager at Amnesty International Australia and editor of the Human Rights Defender magazine.