Cambodia Daily survived tanks but not descent into outright dictatorship (original) (raw)

When tanks started rolling down the streets in Phnom Penh in 1997, there was only one place to go: the old brothel that housed a scrappy start-up of a newspaper called The Cambodia Daily.

It was my first proper job in journalism, a crash course in covering corruption, elections, assassinations, genocide and, over the days to come, a bloody coup sparked by a power struggle over the final collapse of the Khmer Rouge.

None of The Cambodia Daily staff, half Khmer, half western, went home for a week, venturing out to report on the battle and returning to put together the paper, then retiring to sleep in the dank cubicles where prostitutes once serviced peacekeepers.

We slept on the floor, having already used the mattresses to shield the windows as the two sides engaged in an hours-long gunfight on the street outside.

Unable to reach our printers on the other side of the shifting urban frontlines, staff took turns to use the office photocopier all night to run off a newspaper ourselves. We delivered it by motorbike to the Hotel Cambodiana, whose ballroom had turned into a refugee camp for those sheltering from the street to street fighting.

Syd Schanberg, the veteran war correspondent made famous by The Killing Fields, was there and came by the office as soon as it was safe to do so, bringing us supplies that we hungrily fell upon.

That week, as always, the Daily was more than a job; it was a labour of love and an incubator for would-be foreign correspondents as well as a legion of Cambodian journalists now reporting on their country for the world’s biggest news agencies.

Hun Sen, Cambodia’s authoritarian leader, who snatched full control in the 1997 coup, was after the paper from the start. True to its mission to report “all the news without fear or favour”, it was a thorn in the side of Cambodia’s ruling class with celebrated stories about human rights abuses and corruption.

Over the years there were many threats to close us. The most memorable, for me, was delivered in person by an apoplectic Hun Sen, who spat in my face as he dressed me down for the misdeeds of the Daily on the tarmac of the airport as we awaited the arrival of King Sihanouk.

We often succeeded in irritating the King too, but he prized the paper as his “CIA”, the only means by which he could find out what was going on in his own country. And as our readership grew, more and more Cambodians felt the same.

Two weeks ago, I received a distress call from a Daily staffer telling me that Hun Sen was after the paper again. This time he looked likely to succeed.

The Daily went out with a defiant bang, with a front page warning of “Descent into outright dictatorship”. It sold out on newsstands across the country, which then moved to selling homemade photocopies to keep up with demand.

Former staff, like me, who have gone on to careers in international journalism owe it all to that tiny journal that started with a few flimsy pages in 1993, fast growing into the country’s bilingual newspaper of record.

The Daily was set up to foster a free press to train local Cambodian journalists, but it was they who turned out to be our teachers, helping us navigate a beautiful, perplexing country where truth lay iceberg-like, the bulk only to be found deep beneath the surface.

And they were braver, too, to stand up to power in a country where dissent is still too often silenced with a gunshot. “The Daily gave me the chance to be fearless,” said Leng Len, the paper’s newest reporter, who joined just two months ago. I hope she keeps that fearlessness. She will need it more than ever now.