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The newspaper was staffed by a handful of Westerners and Khmers, but it became an essential part of the fabric of the country over nearly a quarter century.
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The Devastating Shutdown of the Cambodia Daily
| 12 September 2017
In the summer of 1994, I got off a plane in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and took a taxi to the offices of the Cambodia Daily. I had made a deal with the newspaper’s publisher, Bernard Krisher, to contribute occasional pieces in exchange for room and board in a villa dubbed “Medical House,” so named because Krisher aspired to start a hospital in addition to the newspaper, which he had been publishing for about a year. I had been put up to this adventure by a friend, and my contact with Krisher involved a couple of faxes followed by a brief phone call, much of which was spent discussing what I should pay the taxi-driver for the ride from the airport to the newspaper’s offices, in the Renakse Hotel, across from the Royal Palace.
“It should cost five dollars,” he said. “Agree to five dollars beforehand. He’s going to ask you for more at the end, but don’t pay more than five dollars.” Krisher returned to this point again before our short conversation came to a close.
I had been too young to have any awareness of the Vietnam War while it was waged, but I was the right age for Vietnam War movies. As my plane descended toward Phnom Penh, I looked down at the verdant landscape of palm trees, rice paddies, and jungle and felt as though I were arriving into the last reel of “Apocalypse Now.” When I later read Joan Didion’s account, in “Salvador,” of a writer who goes to a country at war and can’t leave the hotel room for a long period of time, I thought back to my early days in Phnom Penh.
I came down the steps onto the tarmac. The heat disoriented me. I got my suitcase in a terminal that could have been mistaken for a small-town bus station. Then I chose a taxi-driver from among a throng waiting at the curb. We agreed on the price of five dollars in advance.
My driver was slender, with thick black hair combed back in something almost resembling a pompadour. His English was rudimentary, but he asked where I was from and tried to be agreeable as he guided his Toyota Corolla down the main road into the capital. Mopeds, pedestrians, and bicycles crowded the road, along with the occasional oxcart. I saw families of four piled onto a single moped, sometimes with cargo laid across the driver’s lap—produce or dead livestock, such as chickens or a pig. Eventually, we arrived in the city. There were broad boulevards, and soon we were driving along the long yellow wall of the Royal Palace. We turned into the lush driveway of the Renakse Hotel. The driver then asked me for ten dollars.
“We agreed on five,” I said.
“Please, sir,” he said. “My whole family was killed in Pol Pot time.”
“We agreed on five,” I said.
“Please, sir,” he said. “My mother was killed. My sister.”
“We agreed on five.”
“Please, sir. My brother was killed in Pol Pot time. My father.”
“Yes, but we agreed on five dollars,” I said.
We went back and forth like this for a while. I held out. I stayed strong.
In the end, I gave him ten. I felt ashamed both for caving and for holding out.
I went upstairs to the hotel’s attic and pressed my face to the glass doors of the Cambodia Daily. No one was in the office. It was a Saturday. I sat for a long time outside in the hallway, with the toneless rhythm of the driver’s refrain ringing in my ears.
I have thought about this strange episode on and off ever since, wondering why Krisher made such a production about the five dollars. The narrow, verifiable explanation is that Krisher was a micromanager, and at times very tight with a dollar. But I am sure that, intuitively, he knew this interaction would provoke some necessary reckoning.
The encounter would, perhaps, deliver the news that you had to assimilate many realities at once to function in this environment. That you walked on the dust of hundreds of thousand of skulls as you went about your business in the city. That you were participating in an experiment, courtesy of the United Nations, of creating a democracy from scratch. That you would write for a newspaper whose motto was “All the news without fear or favor,” and which would look as flimsy as a mimeographed student newspaper. A newspaper that was staffed by a handful of Westerners and Khmers but became an essential part of the fabric of the country over nearly a quarter century.
I thought about that taxi-driver exchange again, ten years later, when I reviewed a book, “Cambodia: Report from a Stricken Land,” for the Daily. The author, Henry Kamm, had been reporting on Southeast Asia for the Times for decades, and the book was full of personal anecdotes. In 1980, just after the horrible genocide of the Khmer Rouge regime, Kamm visited Youk Kun, the only person working at the National Library:
“He was rearranging the few books that the Khmer Rouges had left, so that the humble colonial building would again deserve the high flown title engraved on its facade. I asked what food rations he received for himself and his family. His voice neither rose nor fell when he answered quietly, ‘My wife and six children were killed by Pol Pot.’ ‘Killed by Pol Pot,’ in French or English or the voice of my interpreter, still resounds in my ears many years later. I dreaded the moments in conversation when once again the fatal phrase became suddenly unavoidable.”
In late August this year, the news arrived that the Daily was being threatened with closure—the finance ministry had presented the publishers with a spurious tax bill of over six million dollars, and the paper was given two weeks to pay it or shut down. The government had also threatened fifteen radio stations with shutdowns unless they stopped broadcasting Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. N.D.I., a pro-democracy N.G.O., was told to shutter its operations. Most ominously, Hun Sen, the strongman ruler of Cambodia for the last thirty years, gave a press conference in which he labelled the Cambodia Daily the “chief thief.”
The situation, for me, immediately took on the emotional rhythm of a hostage negotiation, perhaps because kidnappings were a major theme during my time in Cambodia. Was this a threat or a bluff? A way of leveraging the concession of some painful but manageable sum? Was it a warning shot to the Daily in advance of the national elections, meant to suggest moderation of any criticism of Prime Minister Hun Sen and his C.P.P. party? “This is clearly a tax bill that is not meant to be paid but whose purpose is to close down the Cambodia Daily,” said Deborah Krisher Steele, Bernie’s daughter and now the newspaper’s publisher. As has been pointed out in many quarters, this authoritarian crackdown has more than one source. There is the rise of Chinese influence in Cambodia, and the waning of Western money and attention. And then, as Eric Pape, a former Daily reporter, wrote in the Daily Beast, there is the fact that the violent rhetoric against the free press by President Trump has now had a ripple effect in faraway Cambodia.
The days ticked down to the Monday, September 4th, deadline. There were many news items about the threat to the Daily and the authoritarian turn away from democracy. On Sunday, September 3rd, the leader of the opposition party was arrested in the middle of the night, charged with treason, and taken to a remote prison. The following edition of the paper carried the headline “Descent into outright dictatorship,” above the fold. At the bottom was an article titled “Cambodia Daily faces immediate closure amidst threats.” That was the last issue.
It has been some consolation, in trying to find words for what the closure of the Daily means, to have the words of multiple alumni of the newspaper to consult as they eulogize it. Molly Ball, who now covers politics for The Atlantic, wrote in a series of tweets, “The crisis of Cambodian democracy is the important thing here, not some expats’ tender feelings. But . . . Living & doing journalism in Cambodia, as I did from 2001-2003, forever changed the way I see the world. In particular, I didn’t really understand the rule of law until I lived in a place where it was a novel & precarious thing. Writing about war-crimes tribunals & development issues was a thrill. But also taught me how much Americans take for granted.”
Ethan Plaut, who has recently completed a Ph.D. at Stanford, wrote:
“The Cambodia Daily was too young, at 24 years and 15 days of age, to find its end today at the hands of authoritarian thugs. But damn the Daily burned hot while it lasted. Six nights a week, the Daily was up late, sweating over every misplaced comma in the apparently endless list of things that happened that day, and every day: forests destroyed, refugees in hiding, soldiers run amok, women enslaved, government officials going about business as usual, such as it was, and is . . . The paper itself, as a physical object, was perhaps loveliest at its most dubious, when it was found in photocopy-bootleg editions, being resold by street children or draped over a motodop’s face to block the afternoon sun for a nap.”
Fergal Quinn, writing in the Irish Examiner, may have captured the most admirable aspect of the whole enterprise, which is the role the paper played in the working lives of Khmer journalists:
“I happily dived into the peculiarly fecund atmosphere you get in a newsroom which combined ambitious, hungry but green young journalists from the US and Europe and a much more experienced local staff who were utterly convinced of their journalistic mission . . . They were glad of the help and the layer of protection that they believed foreigners afforded them as they poked and prodded at those in power . . . The same theme emerged from conversations this week with Daily alumni, many of whom went onto careers with the likes of Reuters, The Associated Press and the New York Times. A profoundly-felt well of respect for the Cambodian colleagues who did their job day in day out, with much greater chance of punishment than we did and much less chance of a significant reward. Those Khmer reporters truly, madly, utterly believed that telling the truth and shining a light on corruption would inevitably change their corner of the world for the better.”
One example of this reporting is a story from 2012. Two Daily journalists accompanied the anti-logging activist Chut Wutty, the founder of the Natural Resources Protection Group, to the Cardamom Mountains. When several soldiers approached Wutty, he got in his car and tried to flee. Eventually, he was shot and killed in the car, but not before trying to start it. The car wouldn’t start. The journalists from the Daily present at the scene were briefly under the impression that they would be shot, too. They heard one of the soldiers say, “Just kill them both.”
The story ran in the Daily the next day without a byline; the reporters were too traumatized to write it themselves. I called one of those reporters, Bopha Porn, who is now on a Hubert H. Humphrey journalism fellowship at Arizona State University. “The closing of the Daily is like the slaughter of a big part of democracy in Cambodia,” she said. “It is like the beheading of an institution where journalists could go learn journalism and practice it. It’s devastating. It’s bigger than what you think.” I asked her about the piece that was published in the Daily. “I couldn’t write the piece myself. I dictated it because I was crying so hard. Someone had to keep asking me questions. They kept saying, ‘You have to say what you saw and what you heard. It’s important.’ ”
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