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Impacts of Journalism
Excerpt from Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Eastern_Economic_Review
Journalism and impact
Derek Davies, editor during those glory years, and Richard Hughes, the Australian doyen of the Foreign Correspondents Club, were part of the Review legend. Davies, a hard-charging Welshman, defied numerous Asian governments and big businesses and provided a frontline forum for many talented reporters: Emily Lau, Gary Coull, Bertil Linter, David Bonavia, Ian Buruma, Nayan Chanda, Nate Thayer, Susumu Awanohara, Christopher Wood, Philip Bowring, as well as dissidents TJS George and late Mike O'Neill, who went on to launch rival, Asiaweek.[1][4]
Other legends include the late MGG Pillai and Tarzie Vittachi and his son Nury Vittachi, who delighted thousands by keeping up a steady patter as the guiding light of "Traveller's Tales", its humour column. TJS George wrote a nasty little book taking a sceptical look at Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore, and then founded Asiaweek. Alas that too went by the wayside eventually.
K. Nadarajah was felled with the enforced departure of a generation of some of the brightest from The Star, Malaysia's most widely-read English language daily. The late K. Das did yeoman work as the Kuala Lumpur correspondent of the Review through the late 1970s and 1980s. Morgan Chua, a discovery of the Singapore Herald, took his cartooning skills to the Review after the Herald fell foul of Lee Kuan Yew & Co. (The brightest and the best always did.)
Ho Kwon Ping of the Singapore Times went on to the Review, and ended up being detained for his "pro-communist" reports. Anything nasty or sceptical was automatically labelled pro-communist in those days by Singapore's Straits Special Branch. Canadian-born Murray Heibert, the Review's Kuala Lumpur correspondent, was jailed for reporting that a judge's wife filed a $2.4 million suit against her son's school because the school dropped him from the its debating team. The Malaysian judicial system decided that Murray had besmirched the "honour" of the judiciary.
In its 60-plus years, the Review hammered away at the walls of Asian despotism, shining a light through the chinks. It was regularly banned, especially in Singapore. And it was regularly sued. Especially, of course, in Singapore where the political family of Lee, Lee, Lee & Lee brooked no interference. A press law was promulgated in Singapore because of the Review.[17]
Its journalists have a long and honourable record of being locked up or expelled from countries throughout Asia for incurring the wrath of regional leaders whose sins or foibles it exposed.
Many of the magazine's reporters came from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. But they were people who made Asia their home and whose clear-eyed reporting grew from a long and intense love affair with the region. They had a reputation for knowing the countries in which they worked better than any foreign correspondent and often with greater insight and better connections than local journalists.
In 1997, the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge and author of the "killing fields" genocide, was interviewed by Nate Thayer, then the Review's Cambodia correspondent. Pol Pot was in hiding for 18 years, and Nate was the first reporter to track him down. The story was an international sensation.
"For someone who grew up dreaming about swashbuckling journalists reporting from far-flung places, there was no greater model than the Far Eastern Economic Review," wrote one journalist. The article recalls John McBeth who, battling Suharto's oppressive regime in Indonesia, continued reporting even after losing a leg to disease. In 1975, FEER's Calcutta-born Nayan Chanda was the last reporter left in the presidential palace in Saigon when North Vietnamese tanks broke through the palace gates and unplugged the telex, cutting Chanda off mid-broadcast.[18]
Salil Tripathi, a former regional economics correspondent for the magazine, reminisces, "FEER was special because it stared back at Asia's businesses and politicians at a time when few journalists in the region could speak truth to power. Some of FEER's foreign correspondents were tried, jailed, expelled, harassed or followed; some were accused of sedition, contempt of court and defamation; its editors fined, its issues banned. Leaders resented the magazine because it would not bow or kowtow. An invading army might march in, but Nayan Chanda would continue to type his story till the North Vietnamese switched off power supply. Unfazed by the malarial jungle, Nate Thayer would not give up looking for Pol Pot. With calm forbearance, Bertil Lintner would bring the Myanmarese story to the world. Ian Buruma would cast light on culture, revealing nuances the region's elite often preferred leaving unsaid. FEER's intrepid financial reporters would figure out who hid what assets where. I remember the sleepless week in Jakarta when the Suharto regime tottered: Margot Cohen talking to people on the streets, John McBeth checking on troop movements, Michael Vatikiotis chasing politicians and academics, while I was with Anastasia Fanny Lioe in Glodok and Tangerang, where Chinese-owned shops and malls were burnt and ransacked, prompting ethnic Chinese people and capital to flee."[19]
The golden age of the Review was the 25 years from 1964 when former British spy in Vietnam, Derek Davies, was editor. His weekly "Traveller's Tales" column is still some of the most delightful journalism of the last half century.[10]
BBC reports that the closure will mark the end of an era for challenging journalism in Asia. Because of FEER's independent reporting, many authoritarian governments used to black out its pages or ban it outright, the report said. "It was a tremendously exciting place to work," said Philip Bowring, "It was the place where up-and-coming journalists would go, because they were given an opportunity to prove that they were good."
Posted by Nate Thayer on September 30, 2011 in Archive, Cambodia, Cambodia Video/Film/Documentaries/TV News, Journalism, Journalism--A Free Press, KR Personalities--Pol Pot, Nate Thayer, Nate Thayer--Articles referencing Nate Thayer, Nate Thayer--What they say about Nate Thayer, Pol Pot Interview, Pol Pot Trial 1997, Publications--Far Eastern Economic Review | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
In Khmer Rouge controlled Jungles North of Angkor Wat-1990
Posted by Nate Thayer on September 28, 2011 in Cambodia 1990, Journalism | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I am a foreign correspondent and investigative journalist
Here I will post a selection of archived published articles and random musings. It is a work in progress so there will be frequent new postings as I gather and enter what amounts to several thousand published documents, in over 200 publications and mediums which include print, radio, broadcast, photography, video, and online in various mediums, and a number of languages, from my files. I have lost track of many of the original files and will post them as they become available to me.
Please feel free to comment on the individual posts or blog, contact me directly, or subscribe to the blog. I own the copyright to each of the articles I have posted here. Please request permission before republishing. And any republishing of portions or quotations of the material under 'fair use' clause of Copyright law must include sourcing and citation.
The purpose of the blog is to provide access to the small part of the historical record of the issues I have written, researched, and contributed to, and I encourage its use if it contributes to a more empirical record of these events. I also encourage any criticisms, comments, corrections, or any communication that fosters civil, legitimate debate. I can be contacted throught the comments section on this blog, Facebook, or by email at: thayernate0007@gmail.com
I am an award winning freelance investigative journalist and foreign correspondent with 25 years of experience reporting from around the globe, with a focus on Asia, and a specialization in modern Cambodian political history, with a noteable expertize on the Khmer Rouge. I specialize in military conflict, politics, civil unrest, human rights, corruption, defense, intelligence, transnational organized crime, and transitions from dependency political cultures to nation states attempting to establish political stability through rule of law and emerging democratic structures. I have covered all of Asia, as well as Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Cuba, Albania, North Korea, and Mongolia, among many others areas. I have been a special correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, The Associated Press, Jane's Defence Weekly, the Phnom Penh Post, the Washington Post, Agence France Presse, Soldier of Fortune Magazine, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. In addition I have published, written and reported for more than 200 other print publications, television, radio, and online media, as well as documentary films, in Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, North America, and South America. I have published more than 500 photographs and video in various mediums. I was a visiting scholar in residence at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC. My work has been recognized with the World Press Award; the Overseas Press Club of America Award; the "Scoop of the Year" British Press Award; the Francis Frost Wood Award for Courage in Journalism, given to a journalist "judged to best exemplify physical or moral courage in the practice of his or her craft."; The Center for Public Integrity's, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting. The judges noted: "He illuminated a page of history that would have been lost to the world had he not spent years in the Cambodian jungle, in a truly extraordinary quest for first-hand knowledge of the Khmer Rouge and their murderous leader. His investigations of the Cambodian political world required not only great risk and physical hardship but also mastery of an ever-changing cast of factional characters." According to the BBC, "Many of the region's greatest names in reporting made their mark in the pages of the Review, from the legendary Richard Hughes of Korean War fame, to Nate Thayer, who found Cambodia's Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot"; A Peabody Award as a "correspondent" for ABC News' Nightline, which I rejected for ABC's unethical journalistic behavior, the first person in 57 years to turn down a prestigious Peabody Award; The SAIS-Novartis Prize for Excellence in International Journalism for "exposing the inside story of the Khmer Rouge killing machine."; Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize by the Wall Street Journal; and the Society of Asian Editor's and Publishers Award for Excellence in Reporting, among several others .......I lived and was based in Asia for more than 30 years, but am now based in Washington, D.C.
Politics, Writing, Journalism, Current events, International affairs, History, Civil and Military conflict, Reading, Swimming, Humour, Civil debate and dialogue, Smiling.
Selected Reviews and Commentary of Nate Thayer's Work:
*BOMBORRA ..."East Asia: The Last Foreign Correspondent" By Dan Boylan on August 30, 1997 : "Considered the decade's biggest international scoop and the last major interview in Asia, Thayer's meeting was Pol Pot's first with an outsider in 18 years and ended up being the last...Thayer's stories forced world leaders to finally consider trying the murderer before international courts for crimes against humanity. A week before Pol Pot's death, Bill Clinton even admitted serious interest in the issue. Now, it's too late. Thayer hunted 10-years for the story. During the quest, he trekked 700 kilometers of jungle, was hospitalized 16 times with cerebral malaria, suffered land mine injuries, and led a now mythical hunt for Cambodia's bizarre endangered cow – the Kupray. Thayer once finagled $478 out of the Associated Press for gin and tonics. "Medical reasons," he said with a laugh. "You know, tonic contains anti-malarial agents." He split UMASS Boston in 1988. "I looked at my life – school, a job and a fiancée from hell – and decided it was all wrong…it was fucking boring." Thayer scraped by month-to-month, working for Soldier of Fortune magazine and the AP before freelancing for the Far Eastern Economic Review weekly magazine. For the Review, Thayer linked Cambodia's key political figures to Southeast Asia's massive heroin trade, and uncovered the last army still fighting the Vietnam War. "I was the first white guy they'd seen in 17 years," he said. "When I showed up the head of the tribe asked, 'where are our guns?'" People here say Thayer's an inspiration. His Pol Pot story took 10 years of grunt work, an impossibility for reporters who drop into Cambodia only when it's on the verge of war.......Thayer believes everyone, including corporate types, want to know more. According to the Review's sales figures for 1997, the two Pol Pot cover stories were last year's best sellers. "It's complete bullshit that business people are only interested in investment news," Thayer said. "People everywhere want to know what the hell's really going on in the world." Michael Hayes, editor of the Phnom Penh Post, Cambodia's leading English language paper, who arrived lacking journalism experience himself, said fresh blood can be a good thing. Since the Post's first edition in 1992, he's relied largely on a pool of freelance talent, led by Thayer, to put out a bi-weekly paper that's tackled issues no one else will touch. "These guys are the lifeblood of reporting coming out of the third world these days," he said.... Back at the Foreign Correspondents Club they know this. They'll tell you Thayer may have been passed over for last year's Pulitzer Prize earlier this month, but everyone knows it was his work that brought the tragedy of Cambodia back into the world's headlines. Pol Pot may be dead, but his legacy lives – child soldiers, rocket launchers, jungle warfare…senseless death. Those stories will likely come from the freelancers."
*"Rebel Who caught Pol Pot", The Times of London,July, 30, 1997, By Andrew Drummond: Last Friday, Nate Thayer achieved every journalist's dream when he scooped the world by meeting, and obtaining footage of, Pol Pot....So how did this self-deprecating American journalist become the first Westerner to see Pol Pot in almost 20 years? By those most old-fashioned of reporting methods, he says — a combination of having the right contacts and "being in the right place at the right time". It was not his ambition to become a journalist. He arrived in South Asia in the late 1980s, initially as an academic... soon switched his interest to rebel armies....his intimate knowledge of the rebel factions in Cambodia could be put to other uses, and he filed freelance stories to the Associated Press bureau in Bangkok, the Phnom Penh Post and the Far Eastern Economic Review....Thayer had already built up many contacts among the rebel groups on the border before the UN-brokered peace deal in Cambodia in 1991. He marched with two rebel armies for months through the Cambodian jungle....Thayer — his father was a former American Ambassador to Singapore — has always played down the dangerous side of his work. "I don't go looking for danger, but it sometimes happens," he says. Perhaps this sang froid is in his genes. Five years ago, while travelling on top of a six-wheel truck in Cambodia the passengers either side were killed when it ran over a landmine. More recently he had to pack his bags quickly and depart Phnom Penh after naming a Cambodian businessman as an international heroin trafficker. Thayer has been described as a "wild man" — an image he cultivates, with his head shaved bald. He does not mind that this leads to inevitable comparisons with Marlon Brando in the film, Apocalypse Now. Old Asia hands — myself included — remember his days at the Phnom Penh Post well. It was said that you could get to the office by following your nose: "Just follow the whiff of marijuana," newcomers would be told. Thayer was star player at a party in which a soup was concocted that laid out several newspaper bureau chiefs for more than 48 hours...Despite wearing combat fatigues and acquiring a nickname — "The Don with the Gun" — Thayer has become known as a stickler for detail and he has a healthy cynicism for government authorities and non-governmental organisations alike. In the past he has upset people by being too close to the Khmer Rouge but his knowledge is taken very seriously in journalistic and academic circles.
By Andrew Sherry, Former Far Eastern Economic Review Regional Editor, on his blog: http://bit.ly/q3LmlB: "As much as I loved reporting, the highlight of my years at the Far Eastern Economic Review was editing Nate Thayer, one of the greatest investigative reporters of his generation. Nate broke the story in 1997 that Cambodia's ex-dictator, Pol Pot, was still alive and had been purged from the Khmer Rouge, the movement responsible for the deaths of some 2 million Cambodians when it held power from 1975-1979. He followed up a few months later with the first interview with Pol Pot in 18 years, shedding light on how utopian leftism absorbed in university classrooms and cafes in Paris translated to genocide back in Cambodia. Pol Pot committed suicide after he heard Nate's report, picked up by the Khmer service of VOA, that the Khmer Rouge were about to turn him over to international authorities for trial. In an era of instant communication, when scoops are matched in hours and sometimes minutes, the Pol Pot stories went unmatched for months. That's because Nate had spent years developing contacts within the Khmer Rouge, Thai intelligence, and elsewhere to gain this access, and seized an opening when the movement turned in upon itself. By no means a Khmer Rouge apologist, he presented a straight, unvarnished picture of the past and present, and confronted Pol Pot with the evidence that he was a mass murderer. With journalism dominated by repackaged content, reporters spoon-feed by anonymous sources with agendas, and few publications besides The New Yorker and The Atlantic willing to back long investigations, these stories stand as journalistic monuments I feel privileged to have helped build. With the Pol Pot exclusives, Nate came exhausted out of the jungle, disgorged his notes, pictures and video, and we shared the writing. It was great teamwork, and it would not have been possible without the support of another legendary journalist, then Review editor Nayan Chanda. The stories... represent an important contribution to the historical record on Southeast Asia and on genocide. I also hope to see Nate complete his book about that era -- the chapters I have read are very strong. Nate and I actually first met when we were competing reporters in Cambodia in 1991, him for AP and me for AFP. Then after we both joined the Review, I helped him pull together a package of stories that exposed how Cambodia was failing as a state, with a major Sino-Thai drug dealer paying a third of the defense budget and using the apparatus of state to grow his business -- much the way Al Qeda took over Afghanistan a few years later. We remain close friends."
Posted by Nate Thayer on September 24, 2011 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Freelancers' Vital Role in International Reporting
The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard
Nieman Reports
With the rise of media conglomerates, foreign news has been shoved aside.
Thayer in a Khmer Rouge controlled area of Cambodia. Photo by Roland Eng.
At an annual gathering of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in July, I sat with Ahmed Rashid, a renowned Pakistani journalist, and discussed the decreasing appetite for international news. Rashid has spent a lifetime writing about Afghanistan. He spoke then of diminishing interest from editors for his stories. "No one is interested in Afghanistan anymore," he concluded. His brilliant book, "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia," was newly published and was meeting with a good response from those who maintained an interest in this "irrelevant" corner of the world.
Typical for an accomplished and respected freelance journalist, Rashid writes for a number of publications, relying on a core handful of news organizations to make a living. But, he said in July, even these were rejecting stories they once would have published. The Islamabad-based Rashid said it was a struggle to get anything published on Central Asia in the British- and American-owned publications he relied on.
Only weeks later, after the events of September 11, I smile as I pass my small-town bookstore and see Ahmed Rashid's "Taliban" prominently placed on a rack next to the cash register—number one on The New York Times bestseller list. I see Rashid regularly on television and quoted copiously by journalists now descending on the region—22 years after he began reporting full time from and about Afghanistan.
The pleasure is mixed with melancholy for the state of international reporting. Hundreds of freshly arriving foreign correspondents obscure the fact that they are often dispatched by major news organizations to cover international events only after they are overtaken by them. And their presence obscures the crucial role that local and freelance journalists play in ensuring that these otherwise forgotten places are properly covered in the absence of a major media presence.
Further, the key role played by "foreign" freelance journalists in providing the backbone of international coverage highlights the importance of the principle of a press free from the influence of any government. Many, if not most, of those who gather information for the American-owned press are not American. And many of those who read or view the American-owned press are not American. And for those who are, so what? The concept that reporters should have some allegiance to their government is not only fundamentally contrary to the role of a credible and independent press, it presupposes a false premise: that news organizations are homogeneously comprised of nationals of the country of which they have their primary audience.
It is freelancers and local journalists who are now playing a crucial role in Central Asia in ensuring that the world understands these events as they have rocketed to the forefront of international attention. When a story forces media executives to react to events, their reporters must turn to those who are informed and on the ground. Invariably, those they turn to are freelance local journalists such as Ahmed Rashid.
At the same time, the events of September 11 should have sent a cautionary signal to major media conglomerates, which increasingly are controlled by people who have demonstrated an insufficient commitment to the role of a free press and well informed public in world affairs. These news outlets are increasingly driven by their marketing departments, public relations people and lawyers, whose values too often infiltrate the newsrooms and effectively seize control. Non-journalists are increasingly determining what is news and treating it as a commodity, selling it like shampoo or cars.
The world press has indeed been absent from Central Asia since the Soviets and the CIA pulled out a decade ago. Before September 11, how many news organizations had staff reporters in Islamabad, much less in Kabul, or in the countries just north of Afghanistan? Precious few. Not The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, nor any other American news organization except The Associated Press (often staffed by "local hires," usually nationals). Nor did the three American broadcast networks—which eviscerated their foreign news operations during the past decade—have staff correspondents in the region.
Lessons From Cambodia and Afghanistan
There are useful comparisons to be made between what is happening now in Afghanistan (and with Rashid's reporting) and the decade I spent as a freelance reporter in Cambodia. Both Rashid and I had chosen areas of focus that often held marginal interest in the ebb and flow of international attention. Neither of us was a staff correspondent, though each was listed as a "senior writer" on the masthead of the Far Eastern Economic Review, the leading Asian weekly newsmagazine, owned by Dow Jones. Our compensation came primarily from our published words.
Like Afghanistan, Cambodia was, after a spurt of international focus, relegated to the dustbin of obscure civil wars. Interest in both countries always had little to do with the country itself, but rather the proxy role each played to larger global players. Once epicenters of cold war conflicts that served as a hot theater for foreign power interests, by the mid 1990's neither Afghanistan nor Cambodia had much economic, political or strategic value to the world—or to its media.
Like the Taliban and bin Laden in Afghanistan, the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot continued to play a major role in Cambodia's politics after outside interest diminished. And, despite the absence of international attention, the domestic dynamics of these conflicts continued largely unchanged, ready to erupt. Like bin Laden, Pol Pot was seemingly an inaccessible enigma, directing a monstrous political movement and hiding in impenetrable terrain. And similar to Rashid's predicament this past summer when I was a freelancer covering Cambodia, editors at my primary news outlets constantly discouraged me from pursuing stories and often rejected ones I wrote. These stories were dismissed as too obscure, costly, dangerous, or merely "uninteresting to our readers."
Such reactions explain why there has developed such a dearth of in-depth international journalism. This essential yet expensive genre of reporting has few institutional supporters. Fortunately, as a freelancer I had the latitude (if not the expense account) to ignore those who urged me to stop my investigations. Had I been a staff reporter covering Cambodia—and therefore required to abide by instructions of those who had the right to dictate what stories I could pursue—I would not have kept reporting many stories that were deemed "important" as time went on.
The absence of coverage of these regions is usually a reflection of the skeletal resources that major media organizations devote to foreign coverage. And that is a decision often dictated by the business side. The Afghans and Cambodians, after all, aren't likely to be promising advertising targets or subscribers. Therefore, the argument goes, there is little "reader interest." And, in the absence of staff journalists based in such places, it can often appear that there is little of newsworthy significance. But, as the events of September 11 made clear, this is not necessarily true. There are important stories to tell and it is crucial for news organizations to be prepared to cover news properly when events demand.
The author standing next to the body of Pol Pot.
The Role and Life of a Freelance Journalist
While publications naturally like to take credit for work they publish, any modicum of journalistic accomplishments I might have had were not wholly supported—financially or otherwise—by any publication. Freelancers usually must pay the expense of research, travel and phone upfront with no guarantees of having their work published or expenses reimbursed. Given the substantial costs of reporting, many stories go unreported for the simple reason that there aren't journalists to do them.
It is true that properly covering many obscure and complicated conflicts often bears little immediate fruit. I emerged from most forays with precious little, often after weeks of work, an empty wallet, and thousands of kilometers of travel. But even though a meeting or trip would often not bear fruit worthy of an article, it all added up to a body of unique knowledge and access. My persistence, like the work of many freelancers, left me in good position to write knowledgeably when newsworthy events happened. Like most "local" journalists and freelancers, I had what visiting journalists did not—the essential context for any story, pertinent background and, after years of cultivation, well developed sources in place. At such moments, I could usually offer plausible and well informed analysis of what a news story meant.
Like many other reporters, I prefer to work as a freelancer, even though it's a job that is often like being a mistress. The editors' attitude: "Why buy the cow, if you can get the milk for free?" They compliment me profusely after each encounter and give me little stipends to keep me feeling wanted and coming back. They speak wistfully of how much they wish they could hire me and that someday we might have a permanent relationship. Like two illicit lovers who can't look each other in the eye, we both generally leave our encounters satisfied. We each accept the arrangement as good under the circumstances. And I am fully aware that the focus of my reporting makes me rather unemployable by nature—not marriage material.
In June 1997, I was still a freelance journalist when Cambodia, again, imploded in civil war. Hundreds of journalists descended on the country. There were reports from the jungle suggesting Pol Pot was on the run, and fighting raged on several fronts throughout the country. I'd already spent years reporting in inhospitable jungles (though I'd been based in Phnom Penh and Bangkok), attempting to find Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge.
I called editors seeking plane fare to go back to Cambodia. "I believe I might be able to get to Pol Pot," I said. I was flatly turned down. I borrowed money and got on a plane that day. Six weeks later, I emerged from Khmer Rouge-controlled jungles having gotten to Khmer Rouge headquarters and been the only reporter to attend the "trial" of Pol Pot, one of the century's most sought-after mass murderers. In 18 years he hadn't been seen or photographed. For a couple of days, it became the biggest story in the world. And as a freelancer, I had the only firsthand reporting, still pictures, and video of the story.
I received thousands of calls from media wanting my pictures and story. As I sat in my office in Bangkok, journalists from the world's major media descended like vultures. And before I'd even finished writing my story, these events were front-page news around the world. Ted Koppel of ABC News flew to Bangkok from Washington, and he returned home with a copy of my videotape. I gave it to him in exchange for his strict promise that its only use would be on "Nightline." However, once he had the copy of the tape, ABC News released video, still pictures, and even transcripts of my interviews to news organizations throughout the world. Protected by its formidable legal and public relations department, ABC News made still photographs from the video, slapped the "ABC News Exclusive" logo on them, and hand delivered them to newspapers, wire services, and television. It also released the transcripts of my interviews to The New York Times and placed pictures and video on its Web site with instructions on how to download them. All of these pictures demanded that photo credit be given to ABC News.
Even though ABC News does not have a correspondent in Southeast Asia, it looked as though ABC News had gone and found Pol Pot. The Far Eastern Economic Review ran my story in its weekly edition a couple of days later. But already thousands of newspapers, magazines and television stations had published or broadcast the story, thanks to ABC News. The story won a British Press Award for "Scoop of the Year" for a British paper I didn't even know had published it. The Wall Street Journal (also owned by Dow Jones), for which I'd never written about this story, also won several awards for its coverage. I even won a Peabody Award as a "correspondent for 'Nightline.'" But I turned it down—the first time anyone had rejected a Peabody in its 57-year history. No one noticed, since ABC News banned me from attending the ceremony after I told Koppel I would reject the award.
When I watch the Afghan coverage and think about the U.S. military and American news reporters now looking vigorously for bin Laden, I remember that he has been interviewed and photographed seven times by local and freelance journalists. And when I see the American networks play "stolen" footage—obtained by Al-Jazerra and lifted off satellite transmitters—I think of the Al-Jazerra correspondents in Kabul, risking their lives and developing sources to obtain information and develop access. I am outraged that a U.S. smart bomb targeted their offices and there was scant protest. And when I see the Ken and Barbie news celebrities in their color-coordinated flak jackets reporting from the "front lines" (microphone in one hand, aerosol hair spray nearby), I picture them pouring at night over the life work of Ahmed Rashid to try to get an understanding of what the hell is going on.
With the war in Afghanistan, it is important to remember the invaluable role played by freelancers and local correspondents whose commitment to reporting gives substance to the current coverage. They play a pivotal role in maintaining a free press by delivering knowledgeable, firsthand, Wells information from the field. It is their dedication to this vital enterprise that creates the foundation for what we read and view, not the efforts of slick corporate hucksters and their willing agents who would substitute an agenda that betrays what should be our singular allegiance. That allegiance should not be to Pennsylvania Avenue, or to Wall Street, or to Madison Avenue. It should be to Main Street.
Nate Thayer was the Cambodia, then Southeast Asia, correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review. He has written for more than 40 other publications and news services and has won numerous awards, including the 1999 SAIS-Novartis prize for Excellence in International Journalism and the first award given by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Posted by Nate Thayer on September 21, 2011 in Archive, Cambodia, Cambodia 2000-2011, Current Affairs, Journalism, Khmer Rouge, Nate Thayer--Published Articles | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
King talks of taking power
B EIJING - King Norodom Sihanouk, watching from Beijing with increasing alarm the failure of peace negotiations and continuing civil war, is planting the seeds for retaking the reigns of power in Cambodia.
But he stressed he would only assume control if invited by parliament and with the agreement of the leaders of the Royal Government, particularly Hun Sen and his Cambodian People's Party who Sihanouk said must agree to his taking real power or such an effort would be "useless."
In an interview with the Post on June 11, Sihanouk unveiled a detailed plan to assume real power from the Royal Government and forge a national reconciliation government that gives high positions to the Khmer Rouge in order to halt the civil war.
"It is true that the current government has shown that it is not capable of stopping the process of deterioration of the situation - the overall situation," Sihanouk said in a three-hour interview at his Peking palace.
"I hope the situation of Cambodia will not be in anarchy, but if the situation is one of anarchy I will be obliged to intervene. But I will not intervene unless the parliament says that, for one or two years, we have to stop the constitutional system, like in ancient Rome, we have to let a national leader, a traditional leader return to power in order to save the situation and lead the country. If I am not too weak physically I will certainly say 'yes.'
"I must be frank. Because I love Cambodia too much I cannot let Cambodia sink like that. I cannot let it and I will have against me [co-prime ministers] Prince Ranariddh and Hun Sen. Sure, sure, but how can I avoid intervening in a few months time or one year's time if the situation continues to deteriorate?"
Sihanouk currently holds the title of head of state as the constitutional monarch, but acknowledges it is a largely powerless role.
His efforts at brokering a peace accord between leaders of the government and the radical Khmer Rouge collapsed earlier this month in Pyongyang with no sign of progress. A new round of talks was to begin on June 15 in Phnom Penh, but little hope is held for any breakthrough.
Pleas by the government for international military assistance to fight the Khmer Rouge have been largely rejected by major Western powers, and instability in the countryside has gravely hampered hoped for private investment and international reconstruction aid that is needed to help bring economic improvement and political stability to the struggling regime.
Such a situation has helped the Khmer Rouge strengthen their position in recent months. A five-month government military campaign against the guerrilla faction met with no success with the government in control of less territory than before their military push.
"I warned Prince Ranariddh and Hun Sen that we could not go to war in such conditions, but Mr. Hun Sen, he is definitely against my warning because he is aware of the fact that the King reigns but does not govern."
But Sihanouk said the country's two prime ministers "believe that they are able men and should not be replaced, even by Sihanouk"
And, he warned, "I must tell you frankly I think seriously of a secession", if Sihanouk attempted to take power. Without prior agreement by Hun Sen "there would be bloodshed."
"I know that Mr Hun Sen will be red in the face....when he will read your article he will say that 'we were absolutely wrong to elect Sihanouk as King, it is extremely bad, extremely dangerous and now he wants to retake power and to take the Khmer Rouge again in his government. It will be a catastrophe'. Mr Hun Sen will attack me very, very violently. I know that. But it is my duty now to tell you today that I cannot accept the death of Cambodia and the Cambodian people and race. I cannot before I die. I prefer to die at the service of my nation to help save it rather than to die in Peking and in the hospital and letting my homeland sink completely and disappear from the map of the world.
"As Prince Ranariddh used to say to me 'please let me go on governing Cambodia because I have taken power for just a few months. You have to wait until next year to see the results. But there is another opinion among the people and among the politicians. The other opinion is that if they allow this government to go on for one year Cambodia will completely collapse-not just the government but the country itself."
Sihanouks comments come amid a backdrop of popular discontent, including among leading figures in the government, military, and national assembly who are frustrated at their own party leaders inability to achieve stability since last year's elections.
Sihanouk said that a number of senior "politicians, military figures, and in the administration" had come to him asking him to seize power in recent months.
Sihanouk stressed that a return to power would require the approval of the parliament. The constitution allows the parliament-with two thirds approval of the 120 member body-to give "extraordinary" powers to the King during a time of crisis.
It is this fact that supporters of the move to bring Sihanouk back to power are attempting- essentially a constitutional coup that would be led by members of the two major parties in the coalition government behind the backs of their own leaders.
But Sihanouk is well aware that without the support of the CPP - which controls the bulk of the army, security services, and state administration - his efforts would be doomed.
"I will accept to return to power, but I need also Hun Sen's support. If he does not support me it is useless for me to go back to Cambodia because I do not want to shed blood to fight a secession led by Hun Sen.... I need Hun Sen. I need his support. I need the approval of his party. I cannot return to power to go back to Cambodia unless I have the assurance that Hun Sen and his party will join me in my government."
"I want my power from the parliament....I will not let them have a pretext to condemn me as a dictator....I will accept power on the condition that the parliament will give it to me and I will return to Cambodia only if Mr Hun Sen's party joins me."
"As far as Ranariddh is concerned, I am sure that my son will not betray me...He will accept certainly. Not with joy. With sadness certainly. With anger certainly," Sihanouk said, "But he will I am sure not rebel."
Aides say that Sihanouk will try to come back to Cambodia in July or August, depending on the outcome of current medical tests in Beijing to assess the state of his cancer. He said that he has suffered from lymphoma - now in remission - bone marrow cancer, arteriosclerosis, and heart and liver ailments.
But sources say that, to date, his medical condition has responded well to treatment, and he appears strong and lively to his many visitors. "I still have cancer cells in my bone marrow - but I feel quite normal. It is in my nature. I don't like to appear like a man who is physically ill. I used to be dynamic...but in fact I have very, very, serious health problems."
"So like Charles DeGaulle from his small village of Colombay Les Deux Eglises in 1958...I may retake power.... I may imitate DeGaulle. But not now. I must wait for further deterioration of the situation."
Sihanouk outlined a detailed structure of a government that he would lead, including himself "as head of state and head of government with strong powers" and four vice presidents, which include the First and Second Prime Ministers, Sam Rainsy, and Khmer Rouge president Khieu Samphan.
He said that he has been thinking for some time of the possibility of retaking power. "I do not improvise. It is not just because you ask me a question. No,no, I have been thinking of this for many nights. In the nights I do not sleep well because I am thinking of the fate of my country."
He stressed that "I have no plan to take power now," and that the situation "is not desperate enough", but "in case the situation will become anarchic and desperate I would have to take power for one or two years. I did it in 1952 and 1953 to put an end to the anarchy of the Kingdom....so why not now before I die, the last mission....If Mr Hun Sen, instead of making secession, if Mr Hun Sen's party decides to join me I would be too happy to accept their support."
"My plan is very simple. I will be the head of the government. Not just the head of state, but the head of government. That means my own Prime Minister."
"I repeat I want national reconciliation and my government can only be one of national unity with all parties and I will give important portfolios to the Khmer Rouge," he said, "The program is this: the rehabilitation and reconstruction of the country and a non-war situation, national reconciliation, and together with the Khmer Rouge and non-Khmer Rouge we join to rebuild our nation, and besides that I repeat we will maintain the parliament," he said, "The only difference is I will make a radical change in my non-war policy. No war with the Khmer Rouge and the Khmer Rouge in my government. It is the only change! The only change! But it is the very, very basis of my process of saving Cambodia."
But, he said, even his own wife Queen Monineath - considered Sihanouk's closest political advisor and confident - is opposed to his return to the reigns of state. "I reveal to you my wife says: 'I am definitely against your return to power. I am not your supporter in case you retake power.' So, you know I will lose even my wife. But to lose my wife,to lose Mr Hun Sen is nothing compared to Cambodia.
"For me Cambodia is my life. If Cambodia sinks I have no reason to survive. I have no reason to live. I prefer dying...."
"Outrage over report" Letter to the Editor: Phnom Penh Post
Outrage over report
A fter having read Nate Thayer's reports for several years now, I suppose I should not have been as surprised and outraged as I was on reading his latest pieces "Army blank check undermines budget" printed as the lead story in the Post dated March 11-24.
The notion that the fight against the Khmer Rouge would undermine Cambodia's budget and jeopardize aid is breathtaking. May we ask what humanitarian projects the budget and aid would be devoted to if the Khmer Rouge were able to regain power in Cambodia?
Thayer goes on to blame the victim for the "failure by the government to win new international military assistance". Why not speak of the failure of the international community to support the new government of Cambodia? Why not criticize the Thai government for its continuing sanctuaries and trade with the KR, and China and the Western powers for supplying the arms that are today being employed by the KR? Thayer's own companion story shows a German anti-tank missile supplied through Singapore in 1989 being used against government troops.
The same accusation is put by "KR Ambassador" In Sopheap in an interview by Thayer published on the following page: "There is no money to increase the salary of teachers, they say themselves that 20 percent of the people have no housing, but they spend money on fighting". This must taken some gall to report straight-faced considering the KR's record on education and housing, leaving aside civil servants' salaries!
- Helen Jarvis, Sydney, Australia
By (Phnom Penh Post) Publisher Michael Hayes
By Michael Hayes
T HE most ambitious effort in more than four decades to document the existence of Cambodia's national animal, the Kouprey, has determined, with a high degree of certainty, that the world's rarest bovine does in fact exist in small numbers in remote corners of Mondolkiri province.
More importantly, the Thayer Expedition has documented categorically the existence of other species in signifacent numbers including the gaur, banteng, barking deer, wild pig, Asian wild dog, red headed vulture, whooly-necked stork, red junglefowl and peacock, all of which are rapidly approaching "endangered species" status throughout Asia.
While the Kouprey was not actually sighted by the Thayer expdition, evidence collected from animal tracks and recent sightings indicates that the Kouprey is alive and extremely endangered with perhaps as few as six to 10 animals surviving precariously in virtually unhabited jungle areas in one of the Kingdom's most isolated districts.
Based on this new information, the Royal Government has a unique opportunity to act quickly and definitively to safeguard an important national symbol, a step that would not only guarantee the survival of the Kouprey but which in the long run would be of immense benefit to the nation.
His Majesty The King, the Royal Government, the recalcitrant Khmer Rouge and all friends of Cambodia must act now to save the Kouprey. To wait even one minute longer would be sheer folly.
To the point, the government needs to declare the northeast corner of Mondolkiri Province as a national reserve or wildlife park and take whatever measures necessary to protect the animals which still exist there .
The animals in Mondolkiri are rapidly vanishing from their shrinking enclaves. However, Cambodia, unlike many other nations in this part of Asia, still retains significant populations of rare species which stand head and shoulders above what exists eleswhere regionally.
The most saleable argument, among many, for safeguarding this wildlife is the long-term potential for engendering revenues as a result of the worldwide intersest in wildlife tourism, of which the Kingdom is still well-placed to take advantage. In a nutshell, people all over the world are willing to spend thousands of dollars to see rare wild animals in their native habitat.
The opportunity for a bold expression of visionary leadership is
waiting to be grasped. The Khmer people will only reap the benefits of such action for centuries to come.
What better reason is there to grab (gently) the cow by the horns? And, more to the point, which Khmer will go down in history as the individual who had the forsight to protect for eternity one of the Kingdom's most treasured national symbols?
Posted by Nate Thayer on September 19, 2011 in Cambodia, Cambodia 1994, Kouprey, Nate Thayer--Articles referencing Nate Thayer, Nate Thayer--What they say about Nate Thayer, Publications--Phnom Penh Post | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Foot soldiers from rival armies share cynicism about leaders
NORTH OF HIGHWAY SIX, Cambodia. From a trench in abandoned ricefields in Kompong Thom province, young conscripts of Phnom Penh's army peered wide eyed from their foxholes as two journalists and a score of heavily armed guerrillas emerged from enemy controlled jungles and approached them.
Popping up from camouflaged foxholes, they grabbed automatic rifles, and curiously approached the group. The soldiers-from rival factions-greeted each other warily.
For the guerrilla fighters, it was the first time they had spoken to the enemy in more than 13 years of war, although some knew each other by reputation.
A soldier was dispatched to seek a superior's approval for a request for the journalists to pass into Phnom Penh territory. While waiting, the young men exchanged cigarettes and asked about each other. It turned out a guerrilla and his government counterpart came from the same village in the far away province of Prey Veng.
"You see what the war has done to us," said Meas, a guerrilla fighter, pointing to the Phnom Penh soldier. "We could be related and we wouldn't know it."
Meas had fled Cambodia's turmoil to the Thai border more than a decade before, eventually joining the guerrilla faction led by Prince Norodom Ranariddh. The Phnom Penh soldier had been drafted into the army some three years earlier and sent to the jungle.
Another Phnom Penh soldier said that he had recently found out that his brother, who had been missing since the Vietnamese invasion in l979, was a soldier with the guerrillas.
"Do you know my brother and if he is well?" he asked the guerrilla.
Another young fighter said, "Now in Cambodia, a whole generation must ask our elders if we are related, because we don't even know who we are since the war split us apart."
"In Cambodia, all our leaders are getting rich while we suffer," another soldier added. Everyone nodded in agreement. It was a theme we heard everywhere.
A photographer from Impact Visuals photo agency and I had rented a Soviet jeep in Phnom Penh and set off alone on a 15-day journey that would take us through nine provinces, across dozens of minefields and frontlines to territory under the control of all four Cambodian factions.
Many Cambodians living under the control of, or working for each of the four factions expressed deep cynicism and resentment towards their leaders whom they blame for incompetence, corruption, and continuing a conflict largely for personal gain. Soldiers from all four factions said they had not been paid for months, and worried about what would happen to them in a post-war Cambodia.
No commanding officer could be found that day, and after some debate, we were allowed to pass, for the 100 kilometer trip back to Kompong Thom city.
Soon after our arrival, two Phnom Penh interior ministry police officials arrived at our guesthouse. Initially, they were not happy.
"My job is to protect the party," the young intelligence officer announced rather cheerfully. "You have no permission to be here and I have to ask you some questions."
After an hour of interrogation, the intelligence officer asked whether we could talk as friends. "I hear that maybe I will not have a job after cantonment and demobilization," he said, "Is journalism a good job? How is the pay? I think we have similar jobs. We both have to ask a lot of questions and find out what is going on."
In Banteay Meanchey province, large tracts of land have been made uninhabitable by mines planted during heavy fighting for control of the area.
Soldiers guided us through oxcart paths snaking through mined ricefields, across frontlines, delivering us to forward checkpoints of their erstwhile enemies.
During more than a score of such transfers, we would request a couple of soldiers from a forward position to accompany us for security until we reached another faction's base.
There was never a shortage of volunteers, most eager for a break from the boredom of isolated outposts. Because of the abundance of mines and bandits, it was good to have guides with weapons who were familiar with the terrain.
Killings and robberies were daily events in the area where rogue bands of former soldiers from each of the four factions routinely ambush anyone with valuables.
The young fighters in the guerrilla zones would pepper us with questions: Are there a lot of Vietnamese in Phnom Penh? Are there jobs for people like me? Do you think we will be safe and welcomed back now that the war is over?
It was not unusual for our Soviet jeep, which we rented from an army officer in Phnom Penh, to be filled with a half dozen fully armed uniformed soldiers from different factions. We would discuss politics but mostly their fears for the future and being able to provide for their families after years of living in the jungle.
In scrubland north of the district capital of Banteay Meanchey, we drove to isolated villages under the control of the Khmer Rouge, where villagers and Khmer Rouge cadre spoke about their hopes for the future.
"We must rid the country from the Vietnamese first before the war can stop," said one Khmer Rouge cadre. "But we all want peace. Everyone has suffered enough."
"I don't know why so many people died when we were in power," said one young Khmer Rouge fighter, who seemed genuinely perplexed by the issue.
A Khmer Rouge medic we met at a Khmer Rouge division headquarters near the Dongrek mountain escarpment asked if we could give him a ride south so he could pick up some medical supplies.
"You are American," he said cheerfully. "Do you know my sister? She lives in New York." He said that he had spent three years in China training as a medic, and was proud of his skills.
"I can do any kind of operation, but mostly amputations," he said.
I asked him how many amputations he had performed. "Oh, too many to count," he said, "At least 200."
In the bustling market town of Tmar Pouk, under control of the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, government soldiers in uniform mingled easily with their former enemies.
"We don't have any problems with each other," one said. "We are just regular soldiers. It's our leaders who can't get along."
One KPNLF soldier asked whether he could accompany us back to Phnom Penh controlled town of Sisophon. He could not cross the frontlines by himself, but he said with foreigners he had a chance. He wanted to catch a bus from Sisophon to visit his mother near Siem Reap, whom he hadn't seen in ten years.
"I left home to join the KPNLF when I was 12," he said. Quickly removing his jungle fatigues and switching to civilian clothes, he got in the back of the jeep, sharing the seat with an elderly woman who was returning to her government-controlled village after visiting her son, a KPNLF officer.
A guerrilla fighter guided us to an oxcart path. "Just drive along the tracks of the oxcart," he said, "Don't leave the path. Both sides are mined."
Further down Highway 69, where hundreds died in recent years' fighting for control, rogue soldiers piled mortars on the road in a crude roadblock. Soldiers with grenades in one hand and assault rifles in the other, stopped the rare vehicle demanding money.
"They don't get paid enough to eat," said the soldier in the back, after we passed.
"I'm glad I'm with you," the mother said, "They would have taken everything I had if I was alone."
We left the two passengers in Sisophon. "I don't even know if my mother is still alive," the soldier said.
Posted by Nate Thayer on September 19, 2011 in Archive, Cambodia, Cambodia 1992, Cambodia elections, Cambodia Human Rights, Cambodia United Nations, Khmer Rouge, Nate Thayer--Published Articles, Publications--Phnom Penh Post | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
KR envoy opposes 'entente'
Khmer Rouge Ambassador In So-pheap, the faction's current representative in Phnom Penh, gave an interview to the Post on 8 March. He articulated the KR position on these issues to Nate Thayer:
Peace talks: They [the government] have no support from the people. They are very weak.
Their only resource is military means. All their stock is in military means. Their aim is to destroy the five point peace plan. They do not want peace. The five point peace plan means the unity of all the forces in the government. That means Cambodia will be run by the four parties and a truly national government....only national reconciliation on the basis of the five point peace plan can solve the problem. Because they cannot win and we cannot win because the western countries will never let the DK win the war like in 1975, but the Vietnamese and the two headed government cannot win either.
Western powers: Their [government] soldiers are fighting against their will. This war is financed by western powers. What we call the "entente". They give money. When you give money and the money goes to fighting, that is supporting the war. The so-called humanitarian assistance like demining - all this is for fighting against Anlong Veng and elsewhere. About medical assistance, it is also for the fighting. The blood banks are used for the fighting....they cannot win militarily or politically so, one day when the "entente" sees there is no way out, they will accept the five point plan. We hope they will realize this sooner rather than later...who can put pressure on Funcinpec but the western powers? Only the CPP wants the fighting. The majority of Funcinpec do not want it. So why do they fight? Because there is pressure form the "entente". In the "entente" we cite three countries - the United States, France, and Australia.
Funcinpec: It is not to late for HRH Prince Ranariddh and Funcinpec to come to the five point peace plan. If they support it our people will support them. But if they continue this way our nation and people will not have peace and also they will have no political future. If Ranariddh chooses to follow the CPP path of fighting he will not be very popular. Peace is always popular.
Foreign Aid to Cambodia: The donor countries can do very very good things for our people, if they use their aid to put the pressure on the two-headed government to make peace. But to help a government you should make peace. But if they just give money, what percentage of that money do they use to buy armaments to fight? There is no money to increase the salary of teachers, they say themselves that 20 percent of the people have no housing, but they spend money on fighting.
Posted by Nate Thayer on September 19, 2011 in Archive, Cambodia, Cambodia 1994, Khmer Rouge, Nate Thayer--Published Articles, Publications--Phnom Penh Post | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Chakrapong resurfaces, tells govt to go
The Prince pulled no punches in his first interview since leading a secession movement last year. He talked to Nate Thayer.
CPP heavyweight Prince Chakrapong has finally emerged from nearly a year of self-imposed silence to make a withering attack on the government.
In a wide-ranging interview he also gave his views on the Khmer Rouge question and explained his role in the secession movement in the days after the election last year.
It was, he maintains, instrumental in the formation of the coalition and prevented a full-scale civil war.
On the state of the government
Now the government is very weak. We are more than malarial, but the leaders think they are Hercules. They attack everybody - inside the government, outside the government, everywhere.
They open the front of fighting within the government. They open the front with the Khmer Rouge. They open the front with the countries to the east and west of Cambodia. They oppose everybody, but they forget they are very weak. And now what is the result? Everybody observes now it is the beginning of the collapse.
What is their consciousness vis a vis the people? What is their consciousness vis a vis their performance....The government should resign as a team. They should leave the chair open for others who can solve the problem. The government should realize they are not untouchable. The leaders of the country can resign and keep the team.
The tactic of the government is to keep quiet. But we must do something. A political solution or change to a new government. They must give something, or they will lose everything. The problem is to strengthen the government.
On defending his role in the secession movement.
I wanted to defend democracy. I am really for liberal democracy. I wanted justice. During the election, more than 1,000 ballot boxes were opened. We asked Untac why they were opened. In any other country it would not be acceptable. If something is irregular it must be canceled.
Hundreds of boxes in each province were opened. What would the reaction be in your country? If this happened in your so called liberal western democracies, it would not be acceptable. I cannot accept it.....the CPP complained about the result of the elections, and Funcinpec said they won the elections. But don't forget that Funcinpec used the name of my father. But the election law said that you cannot use the name of Prince Sihanouk or the picture of Prince Sihanouk. Untac created the law, but did not respect it. 24 hours after the election, we [the CPP] agreed to give full power to Prince Sihanouk. But Funcinpec said "no, we were elected". If it continued like that it would have been like Bosnia.
CPP cannot accept - not that we are bad losers - but we would have had civil war. Don't forget that at the time the CPP had full state powers. There would have been civil war, our people would not accept to be thrown out of power. Untac should thank me for saving Cambodia from civil war. It was the only thing that would solve the problem, to save the blood of the people, to save Untac. We had no choice. Look at what I did. During the secession, not one dead, not one wounded.
From the outside it looks negative. But from the inside, it is very positive. You must look at the results. I saved the blood of many people because we would have had civil war, fighting in the streets of the cities. I saved all the money which Untac spent on the peace plan, because their was no civil war. The results are here. I prefer to keep a low profile now because my goal was achieved. Before Hun Sen and Funcinpec were fighting every day, but now they kiss three times a day.
On the Khmer Rouge question and the state of the military.
In Anlong Veng and Pailin the Khmer Rouge have gained politically, Now the world - everybody - must take into consideration the fact of the Khmer Rouge. The revolutionary must use his mind, not only his forces. The Khmer Rouge are using political, psychological, and economic warfare. They are using terrorism, and they are using the battlefield.
The least important is the battlefield. It is economic war - who dares now to invest?...when the enemy advances, they withdraw - it is the theory of Mao Tse-tung....the morale of the country is very low-not only the military, but the whole people. Everybody knows. Everybody keeps quiet, but everybody is talking.
The military must know not just the enemy, but they must know themselves. But they overestimate themselves, and they underestimate the Khmer Rouge. There are two many officers. The system of the army is a pyramid, but the pyramid is reversed. The real problem of Cambodia is what is the performance of the government, the morale of the military, the reality of the battlefield?I pray for things to get better but with a situation like this - I don't think that the Khmer Rouge will wait for the next elections...we must change the strategy of the military completely. We must solve the problem of the confidence of the people first. Why should we believe the same people after one year?
There is no unity in the government. There is no unity in the chain of command of the military. How can they succeed?There were more than 1,000 soldiers killed in the last months. They lost the battles, but no one takes responsibility. The parliament does not ask anything about this, but only [asks about] Chakrapong and Sin Song.....our soldiers are being asked to go and die to defend what? Their families are looking at the government and saying 'what are we sending my family, my father, my son to defend? 'If they asked me to join the army I would say " please explain to me, for what purpose am I going to die. To defend what?" I am sure the soldiers are asking the same question.
On his political ambitions
My only goal is to just stay in the parliament. They asked me to join in the government and to join the army, but I said no. I think the time for me is not yet. My duty is to be near with the people, to serve the people. It is more interesting to me than talking about power......I don't think that parliament plays enough role as the representative of the people. It shouldn't be just yes, yes to the government, but at least yes, Why? We don't want to create an opposition in parliament, but to [use the parliament] to correct the problems. You can destroy or you can construct. I want to criticize for construction, not to destroy....If I was in the government I could not accept this situation. I prefer to stay outside. If I was on the team I would be responsible.
On those opposing his inclusion in parliament
They are afraid of Chakrapong and Sin Song more than the Khmer Rouge. It is not comparable, because we have no blood on our hands. Everybody is talking law, we must respect the law. But what law doesn't allow Chakrapong and Sin Song to enter parliament? And since when does the government respect the law?.
Everybody needs the CPP for national reconciliation. In reality what do they want? The question is that. They want to destroy the CPP....The fact is who controlled Cambodia during the war, during the peace agreement and now? The CPP.
They are afraid that I am going to make revolution in the parliament. It is true that I will have many questions. But I will be just a simple member....I said during the elections that I am not a 100 percent perfect man. If I said I was perfect, I would be lying. But if you weigh the positive and the negative, I can contribute to my country and people.
Posted by Nate Thayer on September 19, 2011 in Archive, Cambodia, Nate Thayer--Published Articles, Publications--Phnom Penh Post | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Articles about Nate Thayer
From the blog of Andrew Sherry, former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, and AFP and USA Today correspondent, now a mucky muck with the Washington DC think tank Center for American Progress
As much as I loved reporting, the highlight of my years at the Far Eastern
Economic Review was editing Nate Thayer, one of the greatest investigative
reporters of his generation. Nate broke the story in 1997 that Cambodia's
ex-dictator, Pol Pot, was still alive and had been purged from the Khmer Rouge,
the movement responsible for the deaths of some 2 million Cambodians when it
held power from 1975-1979. He followed up a few months later with the first
interview with Pol Pot in 18 years, shedding light on how utopian leftism
absorbed in university classrooms and cafes in Paris translated to genocide
back in Cambodia. Pol Pot died after he heard Nate's report, picked up by the
Khmer service of VOA, that the Khmer Rouge planned to turn him over to
international authorities for trial.
In an era of instant communication, when scoops are matched in hours and sometimes minutes, the Pol Pot stories went unmatched for months. That's because Nate had spent years developing contacts within the Khmer Rouge, Thai intelligence and elsewhere to gain this access, gaining an opening when the movement turned in upon itself. By no means a Khmer Rouge apologist, he presented a straight, unvarnished picture of the past and
present, and confronted Pol Pot with the evidence that he was a mass murderer.
With journalism dominated by repackaged content, reporters spoon-feed by
anonymous sources with agendas, and few publications besides The New Yorker and
The Atlantic willing to back long investigations, these stories stand as journalistic monuments I feel privileged to have helped build.
With the Pol Pot exclusives, Nate came exhausted out of the jungle, disgorged his notes, pictures and video, and we shared the writing. It was great teamwork, and it would not have been possible without the support of another legendary journalist, then Review editor Nayan Chanda. The stories are not available online, because Nate was a freelancer on retainer
with the Review, and he owns the copyright. But with his permission, I'll scan and post them on this site eventually, as they represent and important contribution to the historical record on Southeast Asia and on genocide. I also hope to see Nate complete his book about that era -- the chapters I have read are very strong.
Posted by Nate Thayer on September 18, 2011 in Archive, Cambodia, Khmer Rouge, KR Personalities--Pol Pot, Nate Thayer--Articles referencing Nate Thayer, Nate Thayer--What they say about Nate Thayer, Publications--Far Eastern Economic Review | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
In Search of Brother Number One
AUTHOR'S NOTEBOOK
After years spent tracking the elusive Pol Pot, journalist Nate Thayer emerged from the Cambodian jungle last summer with a scoop heard 'round the world.
P U B L I C P O L I C Y A N D I N T E R N A T L. A F F A I R S
In Search of Brother
By Dale Keiger
LAST JUNE, JOURNALIST NATE THAYER GAZED at a computer screen in Washington, D.C., and divined that the time was right to seek an interview with Pol Pot. By his own admission, he had thought the same thing about a hundred times before, but had yet to track down the elusive former dictator of Cambodia. His only consolation was that, since 1978, neither had anyone else.
But now he had a feeling. He was scanning an electronic newslist that circulates reports out of Cambodia on the Internet. Every day when he came to work at Hopkins's Nitze School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS), he'd log on to the Net and check the Cambodia list. And on this summer morning, Khmer Rouge Radio was reporting turmoil in the party's upper echelon. The defense minister, Son Sen, had been arrested as a traitor, then executed. Something big was going on, and Thayer sniffed an opportunity.
For much of the past 13 years, he had studied, lived in, and reported on Cambodia for Associated Press, the Washington Post, the Phnom Penh Post, and the Far Eastern Economic Review. When the Khmer Rouge overthrew the Cambodian government in 1975, Pol Pot, known within the party as Brother Number One, led his country into what has been described as autogenocide. The Khmer Rouge turned on its own citizenry, emptying the cities, forcing the entire population into slave labor as part of a radical economic scheme meant to create an agrarian utopia, and murdering anyone who stood in the way. Before the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia on Christmas Day 1978, and sent the Khmer Rouge fleeing into the jungle by early 1979, hundreds of thousands of people had died from torture, starvation, or an executioner's bullet. No one knows how many perished. Estimates swing wildly from one to two million. Were comparable percentages of the American population to die, 35 to 70 million people would be gone in less than four years.
No Westerner had seen Pol Pot since the day before Vietnam invaded in 1978. He was, in Thayer's words, "the last great interview on the planet," and Thayer wanted him. The 37-year-old reporter stood out at SAIS, which tends to be a sober, earnest place, populated by buttoned-down foreign policy experts and students who want to be the next Zbigniew Brzezinski, not the next Hunter S. Thompson. Thayer shaved his head. He preferred T-shirts to jacket-and-tie. He wedged tobacco up under his lip, and didn't mind being taken for a daring, hard-living foreign correspondent. He was on leave from Cambodia for a year to be a visiting fellow at the SAIS Foreign Policy Institute, to complete a book on the Khmer Rouge.
Excited by what he read on the Internet, he called the Review and requested airfare to Phnom Penh. The magazine, a weekly based in Hong Kong that reports on East Asian politics and economics, didn't share his conviction that this was the moment Pol Pot would reveal himself, and turned him down. So he borrowed the money for a ticket and headed to Cambodia anyway. Six weeks later, he emerged from the jungle with his friend, cameraman David McKaige, and the news that he had, indeed, gotten to Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge had slipped the two men into one of their enclaves near the border with Thailand, to witness a choreographed public denunciation of the former dictator. Thayer had quite a story, and for a few weeks last summer, he was the most famous journalist in the world.
When word got out that an unnamed Western reporter had found Pol Pot, ABC's Nightline called Elizabeth Becker, now assistant Washington editor for The New York Times. Becker was one of two reporters last to see the dictator in 1978. She recalls, "They said they didn't yet know who had gotten the story. I said, 'I know who got it. It had to be Nate Thayer.'"
A FEW WEEKS AFTER PUBLISHING his scoop, Thayer is tired. He's on the telephone from a hotel in Bangkok, where the message slips have been piling up. A lot of people want the man who tracked down Brother Number One, and Thayer seems both stunned and pleased by the attention. He keeps bringing it up whenever a reporter succeeds in getting through to him. "I had 600 calls today," he told his friend Andrew Drummond of The Times of London. "I have gotten more than 2,000 calls in the last 72 hours," he said to Indira A. R. Lakshmanan of the Boston Globe. When Hopkins Magazine reaches him on his mobile phone, he notes, "I got more than 5,000 phone calls in a 72-hour period."
Some of the callers have offered cash, apparently a lot of it, for his story. Reports of how much Thayer might gain from his adventure have varied as widely as the other numbers that come out of Cambodia. Thayer says that he sold the first rights to the Review for its standard fee ($2,000 - $3,000); further sales have grossed more than $400,000, which he must share with agents, lawyers, and McKaige. He says, "This story was never about money or I would have sold to the highest bidder from the beginning. We wanted to do the story with integrity. That is why I chose to publish in the Review and go on Nightline."
The Review actually published five stories by Thayer, and ran his photo of a dazed Pol Pot on the cover. The lead piece is an I-Nate-Thayer-was-there account of the public denunciation: "After a series of furtive rendezvous, using coded messages over mobile phones, I slipped into one of the most impenetrable, malaria-ridden and land-mine-strewn jungles of the world: Khmer Rouge-controlled Cambodia."
You don't have to look far to find opinions about Thayer. Steven Solarz, former congressman and recently U.S. special envoy to Cambodia, says, "I've been deeply involved in the Cambodia issue for more than 20 years, and he stands head-and-shoulders above anyone else reporting on the country." Karl Jackson, now director of the Southeast Asian Studies program at SAIS, was a member of the National Security Council in 1990, where he followed Thayer's work; he says he found it more useful than reports from intelligence agencies. Alan Dawson, an editor at the Bangkok Post and former manager of the Saigon bureau for UPI, says, "In my opinion, which is shared by many colleagues, Nate is simply the best reporter to come to the Indochina scene since the fall of Saigon [in 1975]."
But other journalists and Cambodia watchers, many of whom seem personally fond of Thayer, say he's not skeptical enough, that he's too close to the Khmer Rouge and sometimes sounds--whether he means to or not--like a mouthpiece for the organization. Naranhkiri Tith, an expatriate Cambodian and adjunct professor at SAIS, says, "Nate tends to be lost in detail, and lose the analytical point of the big picture. He looks in the trees, but doesn't see the forest." A journalist who has reported extensively from Cambodia (and who requested anonymity--several of Thayer's critics were reluctant to be quoted) says, "He continues to be very soft on the Khmer Rouge. I think his analytical skills are missing. It's just awful. He can see things in front of his face, which not every reporter can do by a long shot--he sees a story--but someone should kindly tell him, 'Listen, you're a good reporter, but once you start analyzing....' I couldn't believe that the Review ran all that stuff. But that's what you do for prizes."
Friends and critics do agree on one thing: Nobody has persisted in covering Cambodia like Thayer. Says Becker of The New York Times, "If anyone deserved to witness Pol Pot's denunciation, he did, because he's put so much of his life into it."
THAYER COMES FROM A PROMINENT NEW ENGLAND family. Harvard University has a Thayer Hall; Webster Thayer, a Massachusetts Superior Court judge in the 1920s, presided over the infamous murder trial of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti; Nate's father, Harold, is former ambassador to Singapore. The younger Thayer began hanging around the Thai-Cambodian border in the mid- 1980s, at first on an academic project to research a group of Moslem refugees called the Chams. When he became fascinated by the various rebel factions across the border in Cambodia, he stayed on in Thailand and began trying to make a living as a freelance journalist.
He based himself in the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet and began roaming both sides of the border, establishing contacts with all the political factions that opposed the Vietnameseinstalled government. This roaming was dangerous business. The guerrilla fighters who controlled various parts of the jungle were unpredictable . The landscape was strewn with land mines. Mary Kay Magistad, now a correspondent in China for National Public Radio (NPR) but formerly a stringer covering Cambodia, remembers a United Nations official saying, "I keep telling Nate that he should wake up every morning and kiss his feet, because at this rate, he's going to wake up one day and find them gone."
The official was close to prophetic. In October 1989, Thayer, Magistad, and an Australian photographer, Philip Blenkinsop, planned to slip into Cambodia with an anti-government group known as KPNLF. Says Magistad, "We had to get clearance from the Thai special task force that controlled the border. Because they knew Nate, they granted him permission for this first trip, and told Philip and me that we could go later. A couple of days after, we got word that Nate had come out, much worse for wear. He'd been in a truck, sitting in front between two KPNLF guerrillas. The truck hit an anti-tank mine. The young men on either side of Nate were killed instantly. Those in back were thrown out--some killed, some seriously injured. Miraculously, Nate was able to walk away from it with shrapnel in his feet and what he believed was a fractured rib. Besides the trauma of being in such an accident, Nate emerged with a great story and a new cachet, certainly among the guerrillas."
Thayer used his doggedness and his new street cred to develop contacts that other journalists didn't. He began venturing further into dangerous territory. In July 1990, he was the first reporter to accompany guerrillas far into Cambodia, confirming in his AP dispatches that rebel troops were operating not just along the Thai border, but deep inside the country. He traveled up the old Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1992 and found a secret army of montagnard tribesmen who had remained loyal to their former American commanders. A few years later, he mounted, on elephants, an expedition to find a rare Cambodian bovine known as the kouprey. The trek failed to turn up any of its quarry, but entered the lore about Thayer, who laughs at himself when he recounts the story.
Leah Melnick is now a human rights observer posted in Sarajevo, Bosnia. But in the early 1990s she was a photojournalist covering Cambodia, and she recalls a trip with Thayer that was both farcical and harrowing. A ceasefire had halted fighting between the Vietnambacked government and the rebel groups (which included the Khmer Rouge and other factions). Thayer and Melnick were the first journalists to cross the battle lines from the government to the rebel side. Thayer was malarial at the time, weak and feverish, and as Melnick remembers, "spitting large wads of tobacco out the window, which somehow always managed to fly back in the car. His luggage consisted of a plastic bag with three cans of Camembert cheese, a towel, and a T-shirt--this for a trip that could have been up to a month. We set out from Phnom Penh in one of these Russian jeeps, which have the unique propensity for losing large pieces of their machinery every time you hit a bump. By the time we pulled up to where we were to cross over to areas held by the resistance, the steering wheel literally fell off in his lap."
She continues, "Things got kind of hairy as we were crossing the line. The government soldiers were a bunch of your typical 12-year-old kids, with very large automatic weapons and blank looks in their eyes. They seemed to know we were coming, and when they stopped us there was some extremely strange vibe. We went ahead and made it to the other side, where the resistance leader there met us. He looked very worried. He said, 'I can't believe you made it. We had received information by monitoring the radio that [government troops] were going to ambush and kill you.'" Thayer and Melnick later heard the same report from worried United Nations officials, and concluded that they'd had a narrow escape. Some of Thayer's reporting had angered the government, and apparently someone had seen an opportunity to rid the country of a pest.
Thayer cultivated a persona that Magistad characterizes as "a rugged, wild Heart of Darkness journalist." He began contributing pieces to Soldier of Fortune, a monthly magazine devoted to stories about weaponry, military operations, and adventure in the world's combat zones. He acquired a reputation as a hard partyer. When the peace accord signed in 1991 temporarily ended the guerrilla war, Thayer moved to the Cambodian capital, where he figured prominently in one bacchanal that, according to Drummond of the London Times, featured a concoction that flattened several bureau chiefs for two days and caused Drummond to fall down three flights of stairs at the Phnom Penh Post's office.
Thayer sometimes simultaneously plays down and plays up his image. On the phone from Bangkok, he says, "I've taken many, many risks in reporting wars in Asia over the years. I've been kicked out of Cambodia several times. I've had innumerable death threats. I've been wounded in battle. I've been literally on my deathbed from malaria and other illnesses. When you put it like that, it sounds dramatic, but it comes with the territory. You can overdramatize these issues. Of course it's risky, but frankly that's not a big issue."
Philip Gourevitch, a staff writer for The New Yorker, knows Thayer from Cambodia. "There's these two sides to Nate," he says. "There's Nate the cowboy character, the slightly spooky, great raconteur, of whom you're almost not sure what to believe, but most of it all turns out to be true and the exaggerations seem to be of the most small kind. And there's Nate the hardcore investigative journalist, who takes very seriously his effort to be a writer of exposés. The two are absolutely in balance. One of the important things that Nate does, one reason he's good, is that he has covered Cambodia not just for the outside world but also for the Phnom Penh Post. He looks at it from the point of view of the people whose news it really is, rather than from the narrow, Western-interest point of view that a lot of foreign coverage comes from."
"Pol Pot may not have been the worst tyrant of a century that witnessed Hitler and Stalin, but he was the most shadowy."
ALWAYS, THAYER WANTED TO INTERVIEW Pol Pot, who may not have been the worst tyrant of a century that witnessed Hitler and Stalin, but who was the most shadowy. For many years, no one was sure of his real name (it turned out to be Saloth Sar). Current press accounts still can't agree on his age, variously reported as 69, 71, and 72. After Becker (and Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) interviewed him in 1978, he dropped from sight.
Last July, Thayer scrounged airfare and flew to Cambodia to pursue his latest hunch. While he was there, forces controlled by Hun Sen--a former Khmer Rouge officer who 20 years earlier had defected to the Vietnamese, been installed by them to run the country in 1979, and then lost the 1993 U.N.�supervised elections--seized power in a bloody coup. Thayer covered the coup for five days before fleeing the country on an evacuation flight. He went to Bangkok, where he started working his contacts again to gain access to Pol Pot.
What followed is murky, because the only person who can tell the story is Thayer, and he doesn't want to reveal too much. He says, "I can't get into specific details, but I can say this: It involved a very complicated and sophisticated underground network of Khmer Rouge covert operatives, who were ordered by their leadership to infiltrate me [and his friend McKaige] into the Khmer Rouge headquarters at Anlong Veng. It involved your traditional spy techniques of coded words and phone messages, and people in dark sunglasses and civilian clothes who picked you up and never talked and took you to hotel rooms, and then other people I didn't know came and knocked on the door and took me someplace else. It involved crossing international borders illegally."
When Thayer and McKaige arrived in Anlong Veng, they had no idea what they were about to witness. "I was hoping to meet Pol Pot," Thayer says. "We certainly did not know that we were going to see a people's tribunal. All of a sudden, there we were with Pol Pot, with no warning, no notice, in what was probably the only trial, or pseudo-trial, we will ever see of one of the world's most notorious mass murderers."
McKaige's video, and the photos taken by Thayer that appeared last August in the Far Eastern Economic Review, show a slumped, despondent old man seated in a wooden chair. Thayer says he immediately realized that the figure was Pol Pot: "Here's a man who I've been on the track of for years. Actually, David will tell you that when I turned around and said, 'That's Pol Pot,' he'd never seen a look like what was on my face, ever before."
Most press reports have called the proceeding a show trial, which annoys Thayer. Though one of his own Review stories employs the phrase, he says, "This was not a trial, in the sense that we understand it. It was not even a show trial, which actually has a definition in Asian communism. This was a classic people's tribunal, which is a mass meeting to denounce and humiliate political enemies. It's a very specific process for people who are trained in this kind of political culture." An audience of hundreds of Cambodians chanted and shook their fists in unison as a series of speakers denounced Pol Pot. The proceedings lasted about two hours, during which the former dictator never spoke.
Afterward, as Khmer Rouge soldiers led Pol Pot to a waiting car (the tribunal had "sentenced" him to lifetime house arrest), Thayer tried to ask him a few questions, but got no response. The dictator seemed barely able to walk, much less speak. Thayer had found Pol Pot at last, but he still didn't have an interview. He probably never will.
Thayer knew the Khmer Rouge had staged the people's tribunal. "It was put on specifically for us, to take the message to the world that Pol Pot had been denounced," he says.
THAYER KNEW THAT THE KHMER ROUGE had staged this show for him and McKaige: "It was put on specifically for us, to take the message to the world that Pol Pot has been denounced. They had reported on their radio, on June 19, that Pol Pot had been purged. No one believed them. After five years of lying over their radio, there was no reason anyone should take what they say credibly. It was clear to them that they needed an independent, credible witness to show what was happening."
But as soon as the tribunal ended, he and McKaige decided they'd better get out with the material they had. "It's common for things to go wrong in Cambodia," says Thayer. "We weren't sure that there was 100 percent Khmer Rouge military control [of the area]. We weren't sure but that loyalists to Pol Pot might try to take the film and kill us. We knew that what we had was of monumental historical, not to mention journalistic, import, and that we should do what we could to get it out to the world. It was frustrating, because it meant that we couldn't talk more to the top leaders, which is something we very much wanted to do."
Thayer made his way back to Bangkok, where he called his editor at the Review and said, "We did it." By July 25, word was out that Thayer and McKaige had an extraordinary story. Some of McKaige's video appeared on ABC television on July 28, and the Review published Thayer's story on August 7.
He appeared on Nightline right after he and McKaige released the video. For him, relating what he'd seen was an emotional experience. He says, "Remember, I've lived in Cambodia. Most of my friends have had their lives destroyed by Pol Pot. So it was a profoundly moving moment. Here was a man who had destroyed the lives of millions of people, including most of the people I know. For them, I knew that what I was witnessing was an opportunity for closure. I cried many times for everybody I knew. It's not unlike if Hitler had escaped his bunker and was living in South America and was captured 20 years later, what that would have meant to Jews. Even if this was a people's tribunal, Pol Pot was being denounced and was no longer a political player. For Cambodians it was a very personal thing to see this video and hear this story. At least he had been condemned somewhere, someplace, sometime."
IN THE AUGUST 18 ISSUE OF THE NEW YORKER, Philip Gourevitch quotes Thayer as saying of Pol Pot, "It was a tragic thing to watch any human being have to go through that, regardless of what he did to others." Thayer's sympathy caught the attention of an opinion writer in the Worcester, Massachusetts, Telegram & Gazette, who wrote, "Journalist Nate Thayer...actually came away expressing sympathy for the monster who turned Cambodia into a vast killing field in the 1970s. Say what you will about the ruthless Khmer Rouge, they certainly picked the right Western patsy to cover the jungle charade."
Other critics of Thayer's stories don't use the word "patsy," but they do point out that some of his work seems to uncritically disseminate the official line of the Khmer Rouge.
Pol Pot's fall, according to Thayer, spells the demise of the Khmer Rouge. But Thayer's critics disagree; some argue that he is "too soft" on the movement.
They wonder why, for example, were Khmer Rouge spokesmen allowed to promote the idea that by purging Pol Pot, the organization had renounced its bloody past? In his Review articles, Thayer wrote, "The fall of Pol Pot underlines the view that the Khmer Rouge movement that ruled Cambodia in the 1970s essentially no longer exists." Comments Magistad of NPR, "That's certainly what the Khmer Rouge would like people to think, because it's the best card they can play to try to end their pariah status and work their way back into a position of power. But Ta Mok, Khieu Samphan, and Nuon Chea all still hold top positions in the group- -and all played a central role in forming and carrying out the policies that killed up to two million Cambodians. How, then, is this suddenly a different movement?"
Addressing this question, Thayer sounds as if he were making only a semantic distinction in the Review. He says, "Those who we know are responsible [for the genocide] are so redistributed among virtually every sector of acceptable, mainstream political parties in Cambodia that the term 'Khmer Rouge' means nothing. What happened to those who are culpable for the reign of terror? The answer is they're back, but they're back redistributed in opposing political parties."
A Cambodia scholar, who requested anonymity, is critical of Thayer's account of his interview with Im Nguon (a Khmer Rouge general), which ends with this from Nguon: "Our movement is pure and clean. I hope the international community will help us." Comments the scholar, "Pure and clean? Not in the slightest. Thayer knows this, but alludes to that knowledge only in the most oblique fashion. This gives rise to suspicions that he is sacrificing honesty and clarity in his reporting in exchange for continued access to his sources in the Khmer Rouge."
But in his Review story, Thayer did write that Im Nguon "freely acknowledged that older leaders such as Gen. Ta Mok and Nuon Chea, who were key members of the murderous 1975-78 Khmer Rouge regime, still have a say in 'all important matters.'" He also wrote that "younger cadres' talk of 'democracy' rang hollow against the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution-style show trial."
Leah Melnick, the photographer who has worked with Thayer in Cambodia, addresses critics who hint that Thayer has been too close to the Khmer Rouge: "That's the typical sort of purist attitude that people who don't live in war zones tend to adopt. Nate did what good journalists do--you get your story firsthand, which means you talk to people, and you travel to where they live. When you cover a war, you have to do it from behind somebody's front lines, which means you accept their protection. That's just how it is. Anyone who tells you that it's different is completely full of crap. I think that Nate's perspective on the Khmer Rouge and what that organization is now is incredibly unique and privileged, and very important. He's one of the few people who understands that organization."
Naranhkiri Tith of SAIS, who was briefly a member of the elected Cambodian government, says, "I agree that the Khmer Rouge movement is dying since the Paris accords. No question about that. But the issue here is the remnants of the Khmer Rouge who are still around. Nate's not soft on the Khmer Rouge, he's romantic. Being romantic about something, you blur the picture. He's taken with them as material, on the border of fabricating a dream instead of reality. He doesn't put down his foot on the nitty-gritty of how bad they are, and how they continue to be bad."
BEYOND DEBATES ABOUT HIS STORIES and his credibility, Thayer has a new job as roving Asian correspondent at the Review. He hopes to finish his book on the Khmer Rouge sometime soon. He has everyone's attention now, and his work will be under even more scrutiny. He says, "I'm not sure which news clips you've read, but I've read some that have been faxed to me. I've learned more about myself than I ever knew. Not much of it accurate."
If reporters are good, they prove out over time. They either get important, accurate, previously unreported stories, or they don't. Says Philip Gourevitch, "Nate's the best journalist in Cambodia. Everybody over there waits for the Far Eastern Economic Review's next piece to know what's up. No one else is breaking those stories."
Dale Keiger is the magazine's senior writer.
RETURN TO NOVEMBER 1997 TABLE OF CONTENTS.
Posted by Nate Thayer on September 18, 2011 in Archive, Cambodia, KR Personalities--Pol Pot, Nate Thayer--Articles referencing Nate Thayer, Nate Thayer--Published Articles | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Dictators Are Mortal but Archives Live Forever
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Posted by Nate Thayer on September 18, 2011 | Permalink | Comments (0)
The reporting I did for the Far Eastern Economic Review never made it into the Dow Jones archives because I own the copyright. But the Cambodia stories in particular have historic value beyond the considerable news impact they made at the time, so I'm publishing them here, starting with the Pol Pot interview. The text can be used freely with attribution; the photos are governed by distribution restrictions so please contact me for permission to re-use them: thayernate0007 'at' gmail 'dot' com.
The posting of published articles is an ongoing process. It will be periodically updated