4. The Phnom Penh Post celebrates 20 years July 6, 2012 • www.phnompenhpost.com4
Timeline of our era
Over the last 20 years, The Phnom Penh Post has been
Cambodia’s newspaper of record, documenting the rapid
changes in this country. Here, we take a snapshot of some of
the highs, and lows, of the nation during The Post’s era.
July 1992: First edition of the Phnom Penh Post
January 1993: UN civilian agencies and NGOs
request a public meeting to discuss election progress
and the misconduct of UN peacekeepers.
May 1993: General election brings Hun Sen and
Prince Ranariddh as co-prime ministers into
coalition government.
September 1993: New constitution promulgated,
UNTAC dissolved.
April 1994: Two young Britons and an Australian
kidnapped and killed by Khmer Rouge.
July 1994: Khmer Rouge murders an Australian, a
Briton and a Frenchman, because they were “spies”
forVietnam.
March 1996: Mine clearance expert Christopher
Howse and translator murdered by Khmer Rouge.
March 1997: Grenade attack in Phnom Penh kills 16,
injures 150.
July 1997: Prince Ranariddh leaves Cambodia for
France, accusing Hun Sen of staging a coup.
April 1998: Pol Pot dies.
May 1998: Prince Ranariddh pardoned by King
Sihanouk and returns to Cambodia.
April 1999: Cambodia becomes 10th member
state of the Association of South East Asian Nations
(ASEAN).
December 2001: First Mekong bridge opens in
Cambodia.
February 2002: Cambodia’s first commune
elections held.
March 2002: Actress Angelina Jolie adopts
Cambodian child.
January 2003: Rock star paedophile Gary Glitter
deported from Cambodia.
January 2003: Military planes fly hundreds of Thais
out of Phnom Penh after violent demonstrations over
the control of AngkorWat.
August 2003: Prime Minister Hun Sen and
Cambodian People’s Party officially win general
election.
January 2004: Labour leader CheaVichea, affiliated
with an opposition party, is shot dead in Phnom
Penh.
June 2004: Cambodia’s two main political parties
announce a power-sharing deal, ending an 11-
month political deadlock.
October 2004: National Assembly ratifies
agreement with the United Nations to establish a
tribunal to try senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge.
October 2004: King Sihanouk abdicates.
October 2004: Norodom Sihamoni becomes
king.
February 2005: Opposition leader Sam Rainsy
goes into self-exile.
March 2005: 20 convicts killed escaping from jail
in Kampong Cham.
June 2005: Two-year-old Canadian boy killed at
international school in Siem Reap after gunmen
take dozens of pupils and teachers hostage.
July 2006: Khmer Rouge “butcher” Ta Mok dies.
June 2007: 22 people killed when a plane crashed
near Bokor Mountain.
December 2007: Michael Hayes sells The Phnom
Penh Post to Ross Dunkley, Bill Clough, Kevin
Morphy.
August 2008: The Phnom Penh Post goes daily.
February 2009: Trials of senior Khmer Rouge
leaders begin.
September 2009: The Phnom Penh Post starts its
daily Khmer edition.
October 2009: Overloaded ferry sinks on the
Mekong, 17 killed.
July 2010: Comrade Duch found guilty of crimes
against humanity.
September 2010: War crimes tribunal indicts four
former Khmer Rouge leaders.
November 2010: Diamond Island tragedy; more
than 350 people die in stampede.
July 2011: Cambodia’s stock exchange opens.
February 2012: Cambodia takes the chair of
ASEAN.
April 2012: Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority
becomes the first company to list on the
Cambodian Stock Exchange.
April 2012: Environmental activist Chut Wutty
shot dead.
July 2012: The Phnom Penh Post celebrates 20
years.
5. The Phnom Penh Post celebrates 20 yearswww.phnompenhpost.com • July 6, 2012 5
Ifourreaderstrustuswe’reonthe
waytobecomingagreatnewspaper
Aproudmomentasweenterourathirddecade
ByPostPublisherRossDunkley
ORE than ever a success
oriented society is hungry
for information in their own
language.
Our readers too are faced with an
overload of options. However, amid
many diverse and competing voices,
these
readers want what they’ve always
wanted: a source they can trust.
The Phnom Penh Post in both
languages, offers some 300+ pages and
2.5 million impressions that matter
every week.
With this many pages the newspaper
is consistently able to report and tackle
issues on many fronts and with close
to a 100-strong news gathering team it
has the depth and experience to tackle
the big picture.
The characteristic of great
newspapers in the past was a sense of
reliability and accuracy, and we intend
to continue that sense of trust with
our readers and advertisers in both
languages. The main battleground is
in the vernacular. In contemporary
Cambodia no newspaper is yet to
reach the standard of being classified
as great, but if any publication has a
chance, it will be us.
With technology leaping ahead all
around us many perceive the day of
the newspaper as being doomed.
Newspapers are doomed. Their
problem is that they think that our
business is only printing on dead trees,
but our real business in the decade
coming will be giving our readers class
journalism and great judgment. That’s
where we will win in Cambodia.
At The Phnom Penh Post we are
always debating how to deliver
our news via new forms in order to
increase circulation. And while we are
celebrating our 20th anniversary,
and it is certainly a momentous
event for us, significant gains in
circulation in the future will come
through our web
pages
and online
versions.
In the future
we may be
sending news
alerts by emails
and delivering
customised news
and advertising by
RSS feeds, Twitter,
blogs and onto
mobile phones.
While
newspapers are
contracting in
many parts of the
world, in Asia they
are booming.We
believe Cambodia
is no exception and
that we can create
sizeable circulation
because of the
good journalism
we produce.
But, we need
keep our reality
firm and clear.
Newspapers won’t
die and become
old fashioned versus the internet.
What may go are the editors, reporters
and owners of publications who have
forgotten a newspaper’s most precious
asset: the bond with its readers. In
other words, we need to focus on the
desires and wants of the reader, both
informing and entertaining them.
A new order is definitely underway
as new technology supersedes the
status quo. Equally disturbing though
is complacency and vested interests
which act like an infection festering in
the background.
Political influence and commercial
bias have no part in fair and objective
reporting – not for the readers and
certainly not for The Phnom Penh Post
and all its readers.
This week we are celebrating 20 years
in the business, 20 years of loyalty to
our readers as well as being fair and
as independent as possible. Thus the
celebration is an acknowledgment of
the future of journalism.
The Phnom Penh Post’s staff of
reporters and editors – some of the
country’s most experienced – will
raise the bar on what is acceptable
journalism for today’s readers.
They will open the door for a
younger generation of reporters to
learn from the best and continue the
tradition of journalistic excellence that
began two decades ago.
They will be caretakers of this
newspaper’s bond with its readers and
will remain our most precious asset.
M
Post publisher Ross Dunkley with his partner and fellow director Bill Clough
displaying The Phnom Penh Post’s first ever international awards, in Hong Kong,
July 2009 at SOPA’s Asian Publishing Awards. Both men have been instrumental in
the creation of independent media companies in Myanmar and in Cambodia.
6. THESTARTOFTHEP
A young backpacker arrives to
ichael Hayes made his
second trip to Cambodia
in 1991, looking for work
and wanting to see what
had happened to the country he
had first visited in 1974. He wasn’t
a journalist by profession, so
starting a newspaper was the last
thing on his mind, but that soon
changed.
Q:When you returned to Phnom
Penh in 1991, you were looking for
work with NGOs or whatever you
could find. How did you end up
starting a newspaper?
A: I checked into Le Royal Hotel
– then called the Samaki – which
was US$10 a night, and in the
morning I went down for breakfast
and asked “Do you have any news-
papers here?”, because I always
liked to read newspapers. But they
said, “No, there are no (private)
newspapers in the country”, so I
thought somebody should start a
newspaper.
Q:What made you think that
starting an English-language
newspaper in a country that had
been devastated by war was a
good idea, particularly at a time
when very few people spoke
English?
A: The Paris Peace Accords were
imminent, and I knew the details
of the plan: there was going to
be 26,000 peacekeepers coming
in here, the country was going to
open up and all the NGOs and dip-
lomats would start pouring in, and
that’s where the idea came from.
Q: From a business point of view,
were you confident a newspaper
would be viable?
A: I met an old friend from the
Peace Corps, and he and I sat
around and talked about starting
a paper: can we start a paper, can
we do it as a business or should
we do it as an NGO? I was lean-
ing towards doing it as a business,
because I didn’t want to deal with
fund-raising any more. I thought
that as a business, the paper would
work. I was asking a lot of people,
and there were a lot of people
coming into Cambodia to look – a
bit like Burma now. This was in
October ’91.
Q: So how did you go about setting
up the business?
A: I went back to Bangkok and
thought about it. Then, to cut a
long story short, I wrote a letter
to then-Prince Sihanouk because
he was president of the Supreme
National Council, which was the
oversight body set up as part of the
Paris Peace Accords.
I came back here on January 1,
1992 delivered the letter through
a friend of mine who knew
Sihanouk, then checked into the
Renakse hotel and waited.
About five days later, I got this
letter back, in French, saying:
“Cher Monsieur Hayes, you can
start a newspaper immediately.” It
also said I had to comply with the
formalities of the State of Cambo-
dia, which was what the Hun Sen
regime was called back then.
Q:You weren’t a trained journal-
ist and had never worked in the
media business, so how did you
start the paper?
A:Well, I thought, what the hell do
I do now? It was a bit un-nerving.
I’d met Nate Thayer, who was
running the AP (Associated Press)
office, and he said, “I’ll help you
out.” So through Nate, who had
become a friend – I knew nothing
about journalism except that I read
newspapers – and we started off.
Nate was taking me around and
introducing me, and he invited
me out on some interviews. He
was always out there interview-
ing people. This was in January
and February of 1992, and I met a
woman named Sara Colm and told
her: “I’m starting a paper, and I
need a managing editor.”
She had been the editor of a paper
in San Francisco that was pub-
lished in Khmer, Lao,Vietnamese
and English. It was called The
Tenderloin Times, and it circulated
in the area of San Francisco where
the refugees lived.
Q: So you started to get profes-
sional help?
A:Yes. So I hired Sara and I went
around and tried to figure out what
I had to do to start a paper.
I needed a building, so I went
around looking for one, then
found this place and we moved in
here on May 1, ’92.We slept on the
floor the first night; we didn’t have
any furniture yet.
But I still needed final permission
(to start a newspaper) from the
State of Cambodia. I went to sub-
mit my letter, and they said: “You
need to tell us what you want to
do.” I said I wanted to be publisher,
editor-in-chief and owner.
That was in January. In March, I
had to go to the US, and when I
came back the State of Cambodia
had passed a new law saying that
foreigners could not own, publish
or edit newspapers.
Q:What did you do then?
A: I sent a letter to Sihanouk, who
was in Beijing, saying: “I can’t start
my newspaper.” So Sihanouk came
back from Beijing and, in about
late April, the Supreme National
Council was having these monthly
meetings. Sihanouk raised the
issue directly with Hun Sen, and
said: “What about this newspa-
per?” I had been using the name
Cambodia Times. Sihanouk had
even said in January, “If NewYork
has The NewYork Times, Cam-
bodia will have The Cambodia
Times”, so people knew a paper
was in the works.
So Hun Sen said if there were any
laws that contravened the spirit
of the Peace Accords they would
be scrapped and the new law was
shelved. Then I got a letter from
the Council of Ministers saying
I could start a newspaper, but
someone else had already regis-
tered that name. I was at (journal-
ist) Jim Pringle’s house, Nate was
there with some other journalists,
and we all put our heads together
and came up with the name The
Phnom Penh Post.
Q: So that’s how the paper was
named?
A:Yes, it seemed like a better name
to me anyway. In a lot of places
they name newspapers after coun-
tries, and some of them are kinda
klunky, like China Daily and USA
Today.
Q: So what about the people who
owned the name The Cambodia
Times?
A:Well, then The Cambodia Times
rented a building downtown,
and they had big banners across
Monivong Blvd that said “Cam-
bodia Times coming your way”. I
was ticked off because we’d already
spent about $500 on stationery,
bumper stickers and business
cards, and there were these guys
who’d stolen my name.
Then they announced the day
their first issue was going to come
Q: Michael, when did you
first come to Cambodia?
A: In November, 1974, I
came to Cambodia as a
backpacker and stayed
for six weeks. It was very
chaotic, and the war was
going badly for the govern-
ment. You couldn’t drive
to town; you had to fly in.
Phnom Penh was cut off by
road, but the river was still
open. I flew in from Bat-
tambang for US$5. There
must have been 20 airlines
at the time.
I came to Phnom Penh and
later flew out to Siem Reap.
I had been backpacking
throughout Asia and had
been all through South
Asia and I came overland
from Italy, through Afghan-
istan – the strangest place
on the planet – and all
sorts of interesting places
along the way.
Q:What was your first im-
pression of Cambodia?
A:Well, I’d never been in a
country at war, so it was a
real eye-opener for me every
day. There were about two
million people in Phnom
Penh, mostly refugees.
A lot of buildings were
sandbagged and there was
barbed wire everywhere. It
was very chaotic and the
Khmer Rouge were across
the river, firing rockets in
here once a week or so.
There weren’t any KR on
the peninsula, but on the
other side of the Mekong.
You could stand on rooftops
and watch the Cambodian
air force attack the Khmer
Rouge.You’d see these fights
at night and you could see –
I forget which colours were
which – but you could see
blue tracers going down and
red tracers going up. Lon
Nol’s air force consisted of
T28s – trainer planes.
It was both scary and excit-
ing. There was a curfew at
night, and I didn’t really feel
in that much danger. But,
ah, I didn’t tell my parents I
came here.
Q: Did you see the action up
close?
A: I met this American guy
and we went out to the
front lines – probably a very
foolish thing to do – but
you could go right out to
where the troops were and
say, ”How’s the war going?”,
and they would quickly say,
”What are you doing here?”
Then they would urge you to
get back to Phnom Penh.
You could drive to Udong,
and a big base north of there
at Lovek, and you could
drive to Nhek Leung and the
Route 1 ferry crossing, where
you could go across the
river, and the Lon Nol gov-
ernment controlled a couple
of miles out from there.
Nhek Leung, of course,
had been destroyed by US
bombing by mistake. It was
mostly rubble with a few
people trying to scrape by.
You could see the aftermath
of the US bombing when
you flew in to Phnom Penh.
When we flew from Battam-
bang to here you could see
craters.
Q: After Phnom Penh, where
did you go?
A: Then I flew toVietnam
– I flew from Thailand to
Vietnam – and a lot of the
delta looked like a bad case
of small pox from the air.
I stayed just a week. There
was a sense of doom, be-
cause I was there in Febru-
ary, 1975, and I could just
Michael Hayes and his then-wife Kathleen co-founded The Phnom Penh Post and,
to the present owners in December, 2007. He talked with Alan Parkhouse,
M
TheoriginalofficesofThePhnomPenhPostwhichMichaelHayesstillcallshome.TIM PAGE
AyoungMichaelHayespicturedoutsidetheoriginalPostoffice.TIM PAGE
The Phnom Penh Post celebrates 20 years July 6, 2012 • www.phnompenhpost.com6
7. PHNOMPENHPOST
o see his first war zone in 1974
out – July 13 – so Sara and I hired
our first employee, Chap Narith,
and my wife Kathleen and the
team sat around and said: “We’re
going to beat these guys.We’re go-
ing to come out first.” But we didn’t
tell anybody, because we weren’t
sure we could do it.
Q: So the race was on to beat the
other paper and be the first to
publish?
A: First we had to rewire this whole
building, because there was no
usable electricity here – there were
these little holes in the wall where
you could shave the plastic off the
wires and stick it in to get some
juice.
We had to rewire the building
and buy a generator. We had to
find a friend in California who
could buy the computer equip-
ment we needed; we sent her the
money, and she went around and
bought a laser printer. We also
got her to buy three Macs, and
we paid her to fly out here with
the equipment. Because back
then you couldn’t find anything
here. You couldn’t even find fax
machine paper.
I already had a Toshiba computer
and Kathleen had a laptop. Then
we had to find a printer.We had
bought $800 worth of news print
paper at the Ministry of Education
print house as there were no pri-
vate printing houses here.We were
going to use them but the govern-
ment eventually said it couldn’t
take on private jobs.
So we got the money back for the
paper, but the thing was, what do
we do? So I flew to Thailand and
found a printer there.
So we got everyone organised and
computers set up.We were racing
to beat these other guys, and the
short of it is we managed to do it.
Q: How big was the first edition?
A:We did eight pages in the first
issue, and I flew to Bangkok with
the flats pasted together. The ads
were done separately; we sprayed
glue on the ads, then placed them
on the page.We did that process
for years.
So I flew to Bangkok on July 8,
1992, and got the paper printed.
We did 6,000 copies and flew them
back here as extra luggage.We had
to drive to the airport in a pick-
up truck, hump all these boxes
through the check-in counter and
get them on the plane.
We came out on July 10, so we beat
The Cambodia Times by three
days. That was our first edition.
Q:You also had some professional
help from some of the journalists
based here then, but you had no
distribution network. How did you
get the paper out on the streets?
A: I took the first issues. The lead
story, by Leo Dobbs – he was
working for Reuters, but he could
freelance – was ‘Traffic woes
plague Phnom Penh’. So I went
downtown with the papers, and I
was holding them up and shout-
ing: “Extra extra, read all about it!
Traffic woes plague Phnom Penh.”
Lots of people were buying it. It
was great fun.
It was the first paper sold on the
streets of Phnom Penh since before
the Khmer Rouge. And it may have
been the first English-language
paper, because I’m not sure if there
was an English-language paper
here before that. There were a
bunch of French papers, but I don’t
think there had been any English
ones.
We did eight pages for a couple of
issues, and we came out every two
weeks.
Q: It must have been exhausting
flying to and from Bangkok and
putting the whole thing together
with such a small team.
A:We were so exhausted after the
first issue that we had to take a
break, because we were printing in
Thailand. If we were to go weekly,
we would have had to release a
paper on Friday and then go back
to Bangkok with the next one in
five days.We just didn’t have the
staff to do it.
Q: Did those first editions make
any money?
A: The first issue made money, but
the second, third, fourth and fifth
didn’t, and I was running out of
dough. Then issue six took off and
we started making a profit, so we
expanded from eight to 12 pages,
then eventually got up to 24 pages.
We pretty much kept it at 20 or 24.
Eventually we hired some more
reporters, and a lot of them were
really good and went on to bigger
and better things.
Q: I remember seeing you in
Bangkok in those early days, and
you always complained about
making no money.
A:We never really made any
money – we generally just broke
even. At our peak, we had 22 full-
time staff and lots of interns. The
unpaid intern program was very
robust.
Q:What sort of reputation did the
paper have in those days?
A: The Cambodia Times was a
pro-CPP paper, and Cambodians
were clever enough to realise that.
We were getting more ads, but we
weren’t pro or anti anybody. People
liked our independence.
So we were going gangbusters on
sales, and the ad revenue started
to come in because more people
were reading it.
Q:You also had some very talent-
ed journalists writing for you.
A: Nate (Thayer) was very valu-
able because he’d been covering
Cambodia since about ’84-85 and
he knew all the guerrillas on the
border; he knew everybody. He
didn’t have many sources inside
the CPP, but he certainly knew
everybody else. He became the
bureau chief for The Far Eastern
Economic Review in early ’92, but
he was writing for me for free. But
The Far Eastern Economic Review
was his bread and butter.
Q: One of the columns you did
that became very popular was
called the Gekko. How did that
come about?
A: I did the Gekko column, and
it ran for at least 16 years. People
loved it because it was gossip,
political gossip, and all kinds of
bizarre tales and if you couldn’t
stand a story up you could put it
in that column and people knew
what you were talking about.
It was stuff you couldn’t write as
stories, but people understood
what it was about.You didn’t have
to mention names, because people
knew who you were talking about.
There was a lot of funny stuff
happening for the Gecko column.
(Managing editor) Jon Ogden (see
story page 54-55), I think, started
the police blotter. Or maybe it was
Allan Pierce, I’d have to check.
Q: I’ve heard you had some tough
times financially.
A: After ’97, it got tough finan-
cially.We had to drop colour for
a while, and no staff got raises for
almost a decade. Around ’04, when
the economy picked up, things
improved.
But all these other publications
then started up, including two
more weekly papers in English and
two glossy monthly publications. I
started losing money because we
were stuck in a fortnightly cycle; I
never had the cash to go weekly.
We started losing staff to the oth-
ers, and it became impossible to
compete.
Q: So you decided to get out?
A: I’d been looking for investors
since ’97, then Ross (Dunkley)
called me and we did the deal
in December, 2008. I had been
to Australia and tried to get the
Packer family to invest, as well as
the Bangkok Post, the Straits Times
and Business Day in Bangkok, but
no one was interested.
We stopped printing in Bangkok
in ’97 because we couldn’t fly to
Bangkok right after the fighting in
July.We used a Japanese printing
house from July ’97, which gave
us an extra two days to finish the
paper. The rest is history.
feel an enormous sense of
national fatigue. TheViet-
namese had been fighting
off and on since the 1930s,
so it was pretty depressing.
And not long after that, the
whole place collapsed.
Q:What did you do after
you leftVietnam?
A: I spent a year in Japan,
then went back to US and
finished a bachelor’s degree
in international conflict
management. That, in hind-
sight, seemed appropriate.
I ended up working at the
Peace Corps in the Near East
and Asia office inWashing-
ton for a year. Then I moved
to an organisation called the
National Peace Academy
Campaign, whose purpose
was to create a new govern-
ment institution called the
US Institute of Peace, which
was eventually established.
We were a lobbying institu-
tion to encourage the US
government to create the
institute. It was supposed to
be inaugurated last year, and
I went toWashington, DC,
and I emailed the institute’s
president because Obama
was going to speak there,
but they ended up canceling
the inauguration for various
reasons.
But I did go to the institute
last September, and I got a
tour as I’d never seen it. It
was a beautiful new build-
ing on the Mall, near the
Lincoln Memorial, and they
had all kinds of programs
and researchers. They fund
research on conflict and
post-conflict issues, and
they do some training.
It was ironic because the
president is Richard Solo-
mon. He was in involved
in the Paris Peace Accords,
so he knew a fair bit about
Cambodia.
Q: At what point did you
decide to come back to
Cambodia and start a news-
paper?
A: I went to grad school in
Washington, DC, at George-
town, then I worked for a
year in Houston, for a guy
who was the chair of the
Asia Society, which was in
New York. He had an oil
company, then the price of
oil dropped and he said: ‘I
gotta let you go.’
I ended up working for the
Asia Foundation in San
Francisco as a fund-raiser,
and I worked there for
seven years. For the last
two years, I was based in
the office in Bangkok. They
weren’t a refugee relief
organisation, but they were
providing funds to train
Cambodian refugees in the
refugee camps. So, at that
point, I was back involved
with the Cambodian story.
Q:What sort of work did you
do there?
A: The purpose of the pro-
gram was to train Cambo-
dians with various skills, so
that when they came back to
Cambodia, they could help
the county get back on its
feet. That was in ’89 to ’91.
In ’91, my contract ended, so
I didn’t have a job in Bang-
kok. I knew the Paris Peace
Accords were in the works,
so I flew here and came
over in early October ‘91.
Before the Peace Accords
were signed, I was thinking
I’d look for work. And I just
wanted to come and have a
look. So I flew in here with
all these resumes, looking
for work with NGOs.
for the next 16 and a half years, he was its editor-in-chief and publisher, then sold it
, the present editor-in-chief. The two have been friends for almost 20 years.
MichaelHayesonhislastdayatThePhnomPenhPost.ROSS DUNKLeY
The Phnom Penh Post celebrates 20 yearswww.phnompenhpost.com • July 6, 2012 7
8. The Phnom Penh Post celebrates 20 years July 6, 2012 • www.phnompenhpost.com8
HNOM Penh Post
Publisher Ross Dunkley
saw a society in transi-
tion when he made his
first trip to Cambodia in 2007,
after having lived and worked the
previous 15 years inVietnam and
Myanmar.
Michel Dauguet, who had
worked with Dunkley at the
Vietnam Investment Review and
later became the Post’s first CEO,
told Dunkley he had all his eggs in
one basket at The Myanmar Times.
“Having met Michael Hayes
about six or seven years earlier in
Bangkok, I then thought about the
possibility of the Phnom Penh Post
being a candidate for investment
because it was always rumoured
that Michael had the paper for
sale,” Dunkley said.
Dunkley and his partner Bill
Clough had owned The Myanmar
Times for seven years by then, the
only foreign joint venture in media
in that country.
In April 2007, Dunkley arrived in
Phnom Penh to meet Phnom Penh
Post founder Michael Hayes.
“After 15 years in the region,
strangely, I’d never been to
Cambodia.”
He started coming back about
once every two weeks to talk with
Hayes about the Post.
“I was amazed at the completely
dysfunctional Cambodia media
scene with an A4 English daily
and some down market tabloid-
style Khmer language papers
in broadsheet formats, married
to government propaganda,”
Dunkley said.
“I saw opportunity everywhere
in this sector. I was even more
excited when I found out that 100
per cent foreign ownership was
possible, and that convinced me to
negotiate with Michael Hayes.
“I then brought Michel Dauguet
into the discussions and we
concluded negotiations for
purchase of the Post and signed
the deal at a luncheon in Bangkok
on December 24, 2007.”
Present at that signing luncheon
were veteran China correspondent
James Pringle, Seth Mydans of
The NewYork Times, Post founder
Hayes, Michel Dauguet and his
wife, Dunkley and his wife Cynda
along with a young Tom Kean,
who was on his way to Myanmar
and now serves as editor of The
Myanmar Times.
“We took control at the stroke
of the NewYear 2008 with Michel
Dauguet the company’s first CEO.”
Having inherited about a dozen
people from Hayes’ operation,
Dunkley and his team set about
transforming the publication and
putting in systems to enable the
jump from a fortnightly newspaper
to a daily.
“Initially we continued on
with the fortnightly publishing
of The Post. Soon, some tensions
developed as I started to bring
on staff and sought to adjust the
existing style, which I thought
was not up to date with the new
Cambodia I was seeing,” Dunkley
said.
The seminal moment came
with an article by Peter Olszewski
about the murder of aVietnamese
prostitute by a foreigner.
“That story said to me that we
were prepared to run news on the
front page and we would chase
the news. The other moment was
the placing of the newspaper’s first
advertising supplement into its
pages. This then set us apart from
the old Post.”
During the eight months that
followed, Post Media Ltd acquired
commercial printing presses from
Australia and the United States and
began to hire wholesale.
Post Media settled on the
Phnom Penh Center, initially at
Kevin Britten’s business office
center. Britten now runs Top
Recruitment at the other end of
Phnom Penh Center. Shortly after
moving in, the Post shifted offices
up to the 8th
floor of building F
where it remains today.
“Gradually, we took the Post
over to our own set of guidelines. I
appointed Seth Meixner as the first
Editor in Chief and Kay Kimsong
as our first Khmer language editor.
I made a pact with Kimsong when
I hired him that he would become
the first Khmer editor in chief of
the Post, and I’m happy to say
that we have both honoured our
commitment to our word on that
issue.”
Dunkley said shipping the
presses into Cambodia and setting
them into concrete took some
time.
“Getting the presses in place was
our highest priority and delays
heightened the tension as we
approached the launch of the daily.
We had also contracted a French
designer to look at the newspaper’s
design.”
By June 2008, the editorial and
advertising teams were in place
on the top floor of Phnom Penh
Center and Dunkley’s team set
about making dummies and dry
runs for the new Post.
“That experience highlighted to
me just how far away from being
ready we were from doing a daily
newspaper, but enthusiasm levels
were high, and many long, late
nights were put in to iron out our
problems and operate in unison.”
A date for the launch of the daily
was finally set for August 8, 2008.
Dunkley saw the need
for something different in
the Cambodian publishing
landscape as the NGO era
began to give way to an era of
bootstrapping commercialism
and entrepreneurship.
“What I saw in Cambodia was
this incredible business activity
and I realised that the Post
represented an old NGO era and
didn’t really capture the heartbeat
of a new nation. Hayes’ paper was
focused on NGO activities, and it
was appropriate in his time. But
now Cambodia was a business
story and that’s where we felt
comfortable positioning ourselves:
as the business newspaper in
Cambodia.”
The first weeks were difficult in
the rush to launch the daily paper
and the fine tuning had not taken
place in the web press operation.
So, Dunkley brought in a team
from Myanmar to train Cambodian
printers on the use of the web
press.
“We also had a Myanmar graphic
design team to help publish the
paper in the early days. What a
remarkable situation to have, from
an incredibly tightly controlled
Myanmar media scene, it seemed
so strange to be operating in a free
press.”
Dunkley knew he had conflict
on his hands right from the earliest
days and close to launch day he
asked his team to contact Prime
Minister Hun Sen and ask for an
interview for the first issue.
“I received a stiff reaction to
that concept. I knew then the fight
for editorial neutrality would be
an important one for me as the
publisher of the paper. I found the
newsroom to be anti-government
and not so pro-business. That
created a lot of tensions over the
coming two years,” he said.
“I was always accused of being
a Rupert Murdoch clone. Even
mentioning him in the same
sentence with me is ridiculous
anyway. The notion that we were
dumbing-down the Post was one
I saw as laughable. My definition
was to inform and entertain, and
not judge what the readers needed,
rather cater to what the readers
wanted,” Dunkley said.
“I think the struggle that
happened in the newsroom
between the newsroom and
the publisher was a healthy one
but inevitably I represented the
shareholders and our modus
operandi was one that would
prevail.”
Around that time, Dunkley had
dinner with Cambodia’s Minister of
Information, Khieu Kanharith.
“After we’d polished off a bottle
of Johnny Blue and slurped into
some local clams and got into a
bottle of red, it was then that I
realised that the government was
going to be welcoming of us. ‘KK’
(the minister) made the comment
that he truly welcomed us to the
journalist community and that he
would never have a problem with
the Post as long as we had our facts
and figures correct.
“And up to today our relationship
with the government has always
been a workable one, although I
ChristmasEve2007:Dunkleyand
Post Publisher Ross Dunkley tells Stuart Alan Becker how the newspaper was purchased in late
2007 and how changes in Cambodian society were reflected in print and in newsroom culture,
up to the present and with a glimpse of a vision for the future.
P
Dunkleysaidshipping
thepressesinto
Cambodiaandsetting
themintoconcrete
tooksometime
PostpublisherRossDunkleyshortlyaftertakingoverthePost.Dunkleywasdeterminedtotakethepaperinadifferentdirection,butretainthePost’sindependence.photo supplied
9. The Phnom Penh Post celebrates 20 yearswww.phnompenhpost.com • July 6, 2012 9
associatesacquirePhnomPenhPost
am sure they often grimace when
they see the morning’s headlines.”
And so the big day came.
“In our first edition we stated our
intention to paint a truer picture
of the situation in Cambodia.We
made a promise to our readers and
advertisers that we were uniquely
positioned to report on the rapid
changes taking place in Cambodia
and we promised them humour
as well as in-depth writing and
incisive reporting,” Dunkley said.
“We had by then a 100-strong
team with regional correspondents
and international wire services.
We were able to keep people in the
picture.We promised to do this
with integrity and professionalism
that readers demanded .
“And, as a community
newspaper, we would continue to
defend the rights of the community
and we would use our website and
new technologies to make it easy to
interact with us.”
Dunkley, along with the private
owners of the newspaper, Bill
Clough and his Australian family’s
trust, as well as Kevin Murphy’s
Pacific Capital Group, made it clear
the newspaper would be run on an
integrity basis.
“We promised we had no
allegiance to any political party,
NGO, advocacy group, religious
body or foreign agency of any type.
Furthermore, as owners of the Post
we had extensive Asian business
experience and a long-term
perspective.”
Dunkley says he’s proud of the
commitment from the start to
promote Khmer staff through to
the ranks of upper management.
“I’m proud to say we’ve done
that.”
But what the company had not
counted on was the global financial
crisis of 2008, only a few weeks
after the paper had gone to a daily.
“We were stunned by the news,
but felt that perhaps Cambodia
could be insulated from it.
However, it did not take long for it
to strike Cambodia like a cyclone,
and GDP growth fell from 10 per
cent into minus territory for a
period of about a year.
“While we thought we had
picked the right moment,
circumstance out of our control
had dealt us an ugly hand.We were
facing a train wreck.”
In characteristic style, Dunkley
and the Post Media board decided
that the best form of defence was
attack.
“We decided we would fast-
forward our plans to bring on a
Khmer-language daily, replicating
what we have done in Myanmar, so
we built our team toward a launch
of the Khmer language paper on
September 9, 2009.
“It was also the time when I felt
the whole expatriate newsroom
was against me and it soon
became obvious that I was a bigger
defender of the Khmers than them.
I was determined to show the
expats that the Khmers had just as
many skills as they did.”
Dunkley worked most closely
with Kay Kimsong and with Neth
Pheaktra, the Post Khmer’s first
managing editor.
“I taught Pheaktra everything
I knew about layout and design
and we set our own dummy front
pages against the English edition
every day for a good month or so
before we started and then on a
daily basis we voted on which was
the best front cover, the English or
the Khmer dummy. I’m proud to
say that 20 out of 22 of those front
pages beat the English edition
hands down,” he said.
“In all of my career I’d say that
Pheaktra was the most talented
layout person I’d encountered, and
this was a good sign.”
Kay Kimsong became the first
Khmer Editor in Chief when the
Khmer edition launched.
“To our delight we had Khieu
Kanharith on the front page
reading the launch edition and
he gave an impromptu press
conference in our newsroom,”
Dunkley said.
“We had completed the task of
creating two national dailies in just
over a year. It was a remarkable
achievement that had other papers
in the region looking at us in
astonishment. That did not come
without certain trauma though.
“We were suffering a lot of
growth pains. Our staff had grown
from 15 to 150 or 200 and we were
creaking at the seams. Today we
have 250 people.”
Dunkley is also proud of the
international media awards
that have been won by The
Phnom Penh Post, first in July
2009, which was the occasion of
Cambodia’s first newspaper to take
international honours. “Since then
we’ve won 11 international awards.
Not a bad effort from a small
regional daily.”
As the publisher of a newspaper
with a large staff, all of whom
had strong ideas about what the
editorial direction should be,
Dunkley often felt alone in his
opinions. He set out to find a
newspaper mentor, someone who
had been involved in the media for
many years.
That’s when Dunkley met David
Armstrong, former editor in chief
of The Australian and the Group
Editor in Chief of The South
China Morning Post, who had just
stepped down as President and
Chief Operating Officer of the
Bangkok Post Group.
“My struggle with the newsroom
sent me out on a journey where
I met David Armstrong. I sought
his opinions to confirm from a
seasoned newspaper veteran,
whether my strategies were
correct. His views and mine
Incharacteristicstyle,DunkleyandthePost
Mediaboarddecidedthatthebestformof
defencewasattack
continued page 11
10.
11. The Phnom Penh Post celebrates 20 yearswww.phnompenhpost.com • July 6, 2012 11
continued from page 9
were almost identical, which
was to my great relief because I
was pretty much isolated in my
perspective about where the paper
should be going,” Dunkley said.
Dunkley invited Armstrong to
join Post Media Ltd as chairman.
“Then we set about cutting the
cancer out of the organisation,”
he said.
“We brought in Bernie Leo, who
was a lot more business friendly
and had serious exposure to daily
newspapers with a business edge.
Then we started to re-jig a ship that
was veering off badly to the left.
“That took a great deal of effort
and willpower to achieve. I was
backed up by Bill Clough and Kevin
Murphy, my fellow shareholders.
As owners, we were determined
the paper would reflect our own
business perspective and that
business was the major re-shaper
of society; that the free market
would prevail.”
Today, Dunkley said Post
Media Ltd is very close to having
reached the goal, even with some
heartache along the way.
“Now we are in a position with
the largest news gathering force
in the nation to play a prominent
role in the documenting of a
changing Cambodian society. It
is often said that a newspaper is
a reflection of a society we live in.
Today’s Post exemplifies that, with
a focus on business, remarkable
diversity of culture and the
freewheeling excitement of this
small country.”
Dunkley says The Phnom
Penh Post is vastly different from
any other news organisation in
Cambodia.
“We are truly independent. Our
journalists and team act with a
sense of ethics.We take our job
seriously and are not beholden
to anyone, yet we are close to
the government’s vision for the
future because we believe it has
to be a business-led future, and
despite all the criticism of Prime
Minister Hun Sen, he has achieved
remarkable success in his 23 years
as ‘the boss’.
“We don’t shy away from the
sensitive headlines, but we also
give praise when it’s due and I
think that makes us a really good
paper for this country.” Despite
the ups and downs, Dunkley says
he thinks the signals are bright for
the future and that Cambodia is
on the move.
“We expect that Cambodia will
be one of the great success stories
in this decade ahead, and will lead
the region in GDP growth.We’re
right at the center of documenting
that rise upwards and upwards
and these are compelling reasons
why we intend to expand our
business over the coming years.”
Dunkley said Post Media Ltd
had always been on the lookout
for a local partner to invest and
become part owner.
“Our priority remains to identify
a local partner because we don’t
believe it is appropriate in the long
term to be a 100 per cent foreign-
owned media organisation. That
search continues and as yet we
have not found a Cambodian
partner that matches our own
ideals of what we want.”
Dunkley said he would like to
see Post Media Ltd listed on the
CSX, the Cambodia Securities
Exchange.
“Over the coming five years, our
ambition is to head Post Media Ltd
towards a public listing because
we believe the mums and dads
of Cambodia who will become
shareholders will be the ultimate
protector of the paper and thus
strengthen the fourth estate as the
fourth pillar of democracy.”
DunkleysaysThe
PhnomPenhPost
isvastlydifferent
fromanyothernews
organisationin
Cambodia
Postgetsnewowners,direction
DunkleyaimstoeventuallyseePostMedialistedontheCSX.PHOTO SUPPLIED
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Email: aplus@aplusgroup.biz
TEL: 023 991 003 | 078 808 333
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ChrisBurslem
N early 1993 there was
probably no better place
in the world to be a
foreign journalist than
Cambodia. Here was a country
that had been closed off for almost
20 years, one with a tragic his-
tory that the world knew so well
and felt slightly complicit in, and
which, it was hoped, would serve
as a test case for a new world order.
The UN, after decades of Cold
War-imposed ineffectuality, would
finally have the opportunity to
right one of the world’s most
egregious and conscience-grating
injustices.
There were other aspects that
made the story irresistible: The
original villains of the piece – the
Khmer Rouge – continued to
menace the population from
the hills, there was a charismatic
former king (inevitably described
as “the mercurial Prince Sihanouk”
in every dispatch) who flew in
and out, dropping quote-worthy
admonishments of just about
everyone, and a long-suffering
people that had known nothing
but hard-men rulers but which
was finally getting the chance
to freely choose its own fate –
something unprecedented in
history.
And at the center of it all, to tell
all these stories in English, was
a small independent newspaper
founded by an American
couple with limited journalistic
experience that published only
every second week.
Maybe the rest of the world
didn’t really see it that way, but as
a fairly green journalist in his mid-
20s, it certainly seemed to be the
case. Almost every day reporters
and camera crews from North
America, Europe, Japan, Australia,
South Africa and elsewhere
would drop by The Phnom Penh
Post’s office, a renovated villa on
Street 264, along with diplomats,
UN officials, military observers,
independent filmmakers, writers
and the big names of Cambodian
scholarship (Shawcross, Chandler,
Vickery, Kiernan), as well as
characters from the Indochina war
years, such as Tim Page, Al Rockoff
and Roland Neveu.
The Post’s big draw was Nate
Thayer, the larger-than-life
self-schooled journalist who
had spent much of the previous
decade working along the Thai-
Cambodia border building up an
unrivalled network of contacts.
Nate, of course, would go on to win
a Peabody Award for the ultimate
scoop – an interview with Brother
No 1 himself.
In return for a room on the third
floor and access to a telephone
line (a huge plus in those days),
Nate regularly provided the paper
with its big Page 1 round-up
on what the Khmer Rouge was
planning, the maneuverings of the
State of Cambodia government,
as well as often longer versions of
the articles he worked on for The
Far Eastern Economic Review and
other publications.
It was an education to watch
Nate work, whether he was on the
phone to Paris to talk to his Khmer
Rouge contacts, or as he was
welcoming a visiting US statesman
at the door: the politician gray-
suited and with a garland from
his airport reception still hanging
from his neck; Nate shirtless, often
in not much more than a sarong.
He was a one-man information
exchange doling out his views
for the inside dope on what the
US Embassy, Thai military or
Funcinpec was thinking.
The Post also benefited from the
contributions of a number of other
journalists, photographers and
academics who offered us great
material in exchange for the public
forum we provided or just to help
out a small, struggling paper.
The Post had its own team
of intrepid and hard-working
reporters, led by the manic Kevin
Barrington (who would later take
over the AFP bureau) and the
unflappable Ker Munthit (later of
AP).The highlight of Kevin’s time at
the Post was probably a pre-election
interview with Prime Minister Hun
Sen, from which he returned with
a string of surprisingly unguarded
quotes including:“If they throw
grenades into their own offices,
what can we do?” and“They are
old time corrupt. My government is
newly corrupt.”
Hun Sen appeared to stop giving
interviews so frequently after that.
With the sexy big stories – the
sporadic fighting in the northwest
and the political maneuvering
in Phnom Penh – covered, I was
free to tackle the “leftovers”,
which were no less fascinating.
There were whimsical stories,
like the Polish diplomat hoping
to introduce Esperanto, the
“language of peace” to Cambodia,
the returning donut-store owners
from California who wanted
to introduce Orange County
Republicanism to Cambodia,
as well as more straightforward
articles such as rice crop outlooks
(again, it was hard to escape
the long historical hand of the
KR; almost 20 years after they’d
had been deposed their grand
agrarian experiment to turn the
country into one huge rice paddy
was still causing havoc in terms
of disrupted natural irrigation
systems).
There were endless human
interest stories to do – whether
it was taxi drivers running the
gauntlet of drunk soldiers on
provincial highways, the mine
clearers who woke up to a day’s
work prodding through an
unmapped field, or evenWestern
scholars returning to a country
that had been off limits to research
for so long. (One of the more
interesting people I remember
talking to was an American self-
described “dirt guy” who had taken
soil samples from a volcanic lake
in Ratanakiri – and come up with
a bounty of previously unknown
pollens and other ancient climate
markers.)
One of the great benefits of
working in a UN-administered
land – aside from the tax-free
beer and cheese that flowed into
the country – was that accredited
journalists could use its fleet of
helicopters and planes (in addition
to hitching rides on its boats,
trucks and SUVs) to fly for free
anywhere in the country. There
was also an instantly available
army of expert sources to provide
data, quotes and other background
information for stories.
It was a system that was easy to
abuse – I flew with my vacationing
brother, also a journalist – to Siem
Reap one morning to show him
AngkorWat. It was shortly after
some fighting nearby, and we had
theWHOLE complex to ourselves,
along with a few not particularly
bothersome beggars as escorts.We
flew back in the evening.
For the most part, though, I’d like
to think I was pretty responsible
about taking advantage of the
UN infrastructure. The highlight
of such trips was one I took to
Mondulkiri to see one of the UN
election education teams in action.
The border province, pretty
much inaccessible for the previous
two decades, was a mind-blowing
time capsule.War junk was
everywhere. Discarded shell
casings from an old US firebase lay
everywhere while the rusting hulks
of jeeps and other army vehicles
still lined the dirt air strip in the
provincial capital Sen Monorom;
we even came across the remains
of an old 1930s-era Citroen in the
jungle.
There were surprisingly few
modern encroachments – people
got around in bullock carts or
walked, there was little in the way
of prefabricated building supplies
– most of the houses were built
with bamboo and wood … or the
ubiquitous artillery-shell casings.
One of the most successful
tactics deployed by the UN
education teams to attract people
to their sessions was to play
cartoon videos. The local villagers,
mostly minority people, would
walk for up to three hours, we
were told, to watch the evening
screenings.
It seemed to say something
about the universality of mankind
that five-year-old Phnong kids
and their parents, who had likely
Thegreatestplacetobefor
I
Oneofthegreatbenefitsofworking
inaUN-administeredcountry ...
washitchingrides
FormerManagingEditorChrisBurslem’stravelstookhimtoal
Chris Burslem managed to get out into the countryside at every opportunity.PHOTO SUPPLIED
The Phnom Penh Post celebrates 20 years July 6, 2012 • www.phnompenhpost.com12
13. never seen a TV before, never seen
an animated feature before and
never seen mechanized garden
tools, would be in hysterics as Jerry
chased Tom with a lawnmower
around a stylized suburban
American lawn.
Mondulkiri was also a good
place to see the two sides of the
UN mission. At Sen Monorom we
met career UN administrators who
had come out of retirement, lured
by the large UNTAC pay cheques
(the word was $13,000 to $20,000
a month), sitting around the local
restaurant lamenting being stuck
in a backwater like Mondulkiri,
while the most-talked about
plays of the season were making
their premieres on Broadway,
or complaining how difficult it
had been to find storage for their
launches in the south of France.
The next three days we spent
with extremely hard-working
electoral staff and UN volunteers
who were seriously dedicated to
the bigger mission of bringing
the idea of one man one vote to
people who had grown up in very
communal, “we survive by doing
what we’re told” societies.
During my time in Cambodia,
no topic was more hotly discussed
among foreigners than the
salaries and benefits the UN staff
enjoyed. Stories of permanent-
staff secretaries or bookkeepers on
six-figure contracts who regularly
flew to Rome for a weekend of
shopping on UN chartered flights
were commonplace – and no
doubt exaggerated. As much as
these stories outraged everyone, it
can’t be denied, most of us would
have jumped on the gravy train if
we’d had the opportunity.
Back in the Phnom Penh office it
wasn’t exactly all harmony either.
Indeed, the local staff seemed
to reflect the divisions of the
wider Cambodian society. The
receptionist, a widow of an officer
in the Lon Nol army who had been
killed by the Khmer Rouge, refused
to speak to the cook, who it was
said, was the sister of a senior
Khmer Rouge official (her soup
and curry recipes certainly had a
provincial authenticity – huge cow
bones and chunks of pumpkin
stirred in a rich orange curry
stock).
One of the reporters it turned
out was also filing copy with the
SOC. A driver disappeared one
day, and was seen shortly after
in a CPAF (Cambodia People’s
Armed Forces) officer’s uniform;
apparently he had been assigned
to watch over us.
More than one person
whispered to me in a bar that I
might not be aware I was working
for a CIA information-gathering
operation. It struck me at times
that Michael Hayes did have a
certain inscrutability that Langley
would approve, and that Kathleen
– a human Swiss Army knife – had
a surprisingly wide range of skills;
when she switched out a fuse from
an old radio to keep the printer
running it had me wondering if
that was agency training.
Peter Huttenmoser, the paper’s
long-serving graphics whiz, and
I would joke that the flat roof
of the villa seemed perfect to
accommodate a last-minute
helicopter evacuation (we didn’t
expect to be on the last flight
out.) But I ultimately came to the
conclusion that spies probably
wouldn’t work as hard as Michael
and Kathleen – they would
have insisted in a better-funded
operation.
Michael’s insistence on not
taking money from anyone –
whether it was government
sources or charitable foundations
– to support the paper’s
independent credentials actually
put the paper at a competitive
disadvantage when the Cambodia
Daily came along.
The big news event of 1993
was the election in May. And
for that one-week period, the
world’s press really was in town.
Among them was the British
photographer Tim Page, who
decided that the eve of the poll,
also his birthday, would be the
perfect time to whip up the
world’s largest bowl of Happy
Chicken soup. It contained so
much marijuana leaf – obtained
from the local market – it tasted
like boiled lawn clippings.
While the atmosphere that night
was pretty relaxed – there was a
lot of uncertainty in the air. Nate
had been writing that the Khmer
Rouge might well follow through
on their implied threats to use
force to disrupt the poll. He also
mentioned rather ominously that
a KR contact had told him: “Nate, I
tell you, as a friend, you should get
out of town.”
Only a few hours after Page’s
party, that warning came to me
as I was awoken by an enormous
explosion, followed by a flash of
light and more ominous thuds.
Nate was right, I thought. People
doubted him, but the Khmer
Rouge really are attacking. I need
to climb under this spinning bed.
Outside, an almost horizontal
rain lashed the house, and the
explosions and flashes of light
seemed to be getting closer …
I guess this is it then, I thought.
KR soldiers will be entering the
town at any moment. Pinned
to the bed is not a way to go …
It took me a full five minutes to
actually realise we were being
attacked by a particularly ferocious
thunderstorm.
Ultimately, the KR was a bit
of a sideshow (tip of the hat to
Shawcross). It was the angle
everyone could relate to, it was
what made Cambodia a story
of international interest. But
ultimately the big story was the
Camodian People’s Party refusal to
relinquish power, and second, the
UN’s inability to really affect the
course of history.
The factions weren’t disarmed,
the will of the people at the ballot
box was essentially ignored,
the refugee populations weren’t
resettled properly, and almost 20
years later Hun Sen remains in
power. Thoughts of a newWorld
Order died pretty quickly after
Cambodia.
In contrast, I think The Phnom
Penh Post really did make a
difference – it provided a genuine
independent take on what was
happening in the country, a forum
outside the constrained walls of
the UN bureaucracy for issues to
be debated, while also collecting
a non-official history of the time.
Visiting journalists picked up on
themes, and sometimes just lifted
the quotes from our stories and I’d
like to think we influenced overall
coverage.
After my stint at the Post, I
spent several years working
for Bloomberg and Dow Jones
Newswires in Singapore.Whether
it was reporting or editing, I don’t
remember one shift from the other
– share prices go up and come
down, one colourless business
entity makes money, another loses
it, corporate jargon drains life
out of all communication. In all I
spent about three years doing such
work and have only the vaguest
recollections of individual days.
In comparison, the 10 or so
months I was at the Post have left
me with a seemingly endless pool
of stories to draw from. There were
characters like David Morris, the
UN contractor who shipped in live
crocodiles and emu and kangaroo
meat for a barbecue at the Le Royal
Hotel, and who would later be
killed in Somalia.
There were tales like the AFP
reporter whose was saved from
a bullet wound by a can of pate
in his back pocket, there were
the escapades of the notorious
Bulgarian soldiers at the original
Martini bar and so many more
stories.
Neil Davis, the legendary
Australian cameraman and
Cambodia-phile who died in a
Bangkok coup, had theWalter
Scott quote “One crowded hour
of glorious life is worth an age
without a name” inscribed in his
journals. It later became the title of
a biography about him.
I can’t say I subscribe fully to the
view. But my time in Cambodia did
give me an appreciation that a life
is what you remember. So thanks,
Post, for all the great memories.
aforeignjournalistin1993
‘Onecrowdedhourofglorious
lifeisworthanagewithout
aname.’
llsortsofregionsinCambodiathattouristsarestilldiscoveringtoday.PHOTO SUPPLIED
The Phnom Penh Post celebrates 20 yearswww.phnompenhpost.com • July 6, 2012 13
14. StuartAlanBecker
HEN 10-year-old Chap
Narith looked up at the
airplanes in the sky, he
didn’t know they came
to drop bombs. “I was so excited
to look at the plane, and then, they
came through my village, circling,
and then the sound of explosions.
“I couldn’t believe planes came
to drop bombs on innocent
people. I was not afraid at all; just
look at that, and wondered why
they dropped bombs on us while
we did not do anything wrong to
them,” he said.
Narith was born in Ponsang
village, in the south-eastern part
of Takeo Province, close to where
the Mekong River crosses into
Vietnam, on April 15, 1960. His
house was built from wood and
stood on stilts four metres high
and the village is only about 10
kilometers from theVietnam
border and thus was subject to the
spillover from theVietnamWar.
His father was a French-speaking
teacher in the village and principal
of the village school.
“I learned to speak French at age
8 or 9, influenced by my father, and
I had a chance to read the French
magazines.”
Young Narith saw the South
Vietnamese soldiers come into
the village and the noise of the
helicopters along with a convoy of
tanks.
“The soldiers tried to find some
jewelry and did terrible things.
Many women were raped at the
time.What they couldn’t take they
would destroy. I was very scared
at the time. During the night they
fired in a few artillery rounds and
kept everybody scared and tense.”
Narith’s father was invited to join
the Khmer Rouge, but he wouldn’t
join, instead taking the family to
live in Phnom Penh, with mother,
father and five children.
On March 18, 1970, Cambodian
Army general Lon Nol took over
Cambodia with a coup d’état,
displacing Prince Norodom
Sihanouk, starting a chain of events
that would lead to a terrible time
for the Cambodian people.
“Lon Nol was a nationalist,
but he could not fulfill his dream
because he got handicapped with
sickness at the time. If you look
back at the time, people hated
America because of the bomb-
dropping on Cambodia. The
people who were aligned with
Lon Nol, they thought liberty and
democracy were the best things.”
Narith’s family moved to Phnom
Penh in 1970, settling in the area
currently called Beng Toumpun.
His father found a job with the
Ministry of Education as a teacher.
His mother sold off all her jewelry
and used the money to buy a plot
of land for the family to live on.
He remembers the early morning
of April 17, 1975, when the Khmer
Rouge marched into Phnom Penh.
“A group of black uniformed men
marched through the front of my
house and my father told me to go
and see what they were.”
One of Narith’s uncles who lived
next door had a nephew who was
serving as a Khmer Rouge soldier.
That nephew arrived later that
fateful day of April 17. The uncle
asked his nephew what he should
do, and his nephew suggested he
just go back home.
“That was a big mistake. They
ordered us to leave the city. It was
lucky for people who didn’t go to
their home towns because if people
didn’t know who you were, you
could lie to them. Everybody knew
at home my uncle was a police
officer and a father and a director
of the school. My uncle was taken
away, although we didn’t know at
the time.”
Luckily for Narith and his family,
his grandparents had been stuck
with the Khmer Rouge in Kampong
Speu and had come to live with
them. That grandfather’s brother
knew the Khmer Rouge character,
strategy and tactics, knowledge
that would save some of their
lives. Narith’s father, older brother,
younger brother and sister all died
during the Pol Pot regime.
“My father got malaria and we
had no medicine.”
Narith was sent to boy’s camp in
Battambang near the Thai border
to work as a farmer. He survived
because of his rural upbringing,
applying his country skills to great
effect.
“I knew how to catch fish with
my bare hands and play around
with buffalo because my father’s
relatives lived near the mountain,”
he said. “I knew how to survive in
the forest, catch the wild chicken,
and how to train a dog. I knew how
to work in the fields with the cow
and the ox and I knew how to make
rope from the palm tree from the
ivy,” he said.
“People were excited by me
because I was from Phnom Penh
but I knew how to do everything
for farming. I owe my survival to
my grandfather who taught us how
to be quiet.”
Narith credits his family with
the luck of being country people
which helped them survive the
deprivations of the Khmer Rouge
regime.
“My family was lucky because
my father knew how to do
everything in the village, including
how to speak with ordinary people
and help them.”
One of Narith’s greatest
triumphs during the Khmer Rouge
period was making fire purely from
bamboo. He had read about it in
a fairy story, how a man made fire
from bamboo.
“One time in the forest we had
no fire so I actually made fire from
bamboo. Oh my God!” he laughed.
That’s how things went until
January 1979 when Phnom Penh
fell to theVietnamese. Still up in
the northern part of Cambodia,
Narith was able to join the
Khmer Rouge cadres at the local
commune for a poignant moment
listening to the famous voice of a
blind Khmer singer who scolded
the Khmer Rouge and announced
that theVietnamese had come to
Phnom Penh.
“This was a special moment,”
Narith said.
As a result of the news, many
of the Khmer Rouge members
tried to flee to Thailand. Many
of the people who had earlier
supported Lon Nol also tried to
exit Cambodia for Thailand.
Narith thought it might be a
mistake to flee to Thailand and one
of the neighbours asked Narith’s
mother to come to Thailand.
“My mother asked me if we
should go, and suddenly one
decision came into my brain: I
don’t care how bad theVietnamese
are, I will go to theVietnamese, not
the Khmer Rouge.”
Thus, Narith and his family never
set foot in Thailand, unlike so
many at the time who were scared
of what theVietnamese invaders
might do.
“After this decision, we went in
the opposite direction, east to road
number six and by coincidence
we found ourselves faced with a
convoy ofVietnamese soldiers.”
TheVietnamese soldiers fired
their rifles into the air and ask
Narith and his group where they
wanted to go.
“We want to go with you.Where
are you going?”
TheVietnamese soldiers could
see that Narith and his group were
poor and hungry, so they gave
food, assistance and medicine.
“People were still going to the
Thai border, but for me it was clear,
enough with the Khmer Rouge; no
more.”
When he first arrived back in
Phnom Penh they stayed near the
airport as people were not allowed
to enter the city yet.
Narith remembers a meeting of
about 100 people withVietnamese
soldiers and Cambodian leaders
that was different. One was
the famous Heng Samrin, who
helped lead the rebellion against
Pol Pot and the man who would
later become President of the
Cambodian Senate, Chea Sim. One
other figure, was a tall and thin
man, blind in one eye, who we now
know as Prime Minister Hun Sen.
After that meeting, Narith
found a job as district leader of
the revolutionary youth, making
speeches and trying to persuade
young people to join the army and
fight against the Khmer Rouge.
But Narith was not suited to that
role, so he went back to high school
and got a scholarship from the
German Democratic Republic, also
known as East Germany, in 1981,
where he arrived as a 21-year-old
Cambodian, for a period which
Narith describes as perhaps the
best time of his life.
Afullcirclestorythrough b
ThePhnomPenhPost’slongestservingemployee,20yearveteranAccountDirectorChapNarith,
recountshislife,fromtheairattackagainsthishomevillageneartheVietnambordertohisreturnto
CambodiafromEastGermanyandhowtheendoftheColdWarchangedCambodia
Narithwassenttoboy’scampinBattambang
neartheThaibordertoworkasafarmer.He
survivedbecauseofhisruralupbringing,
applyinghiscountryskillstogreateffect
ThelongestservingmemberofthePhnomPenhPost,ChapNarith.STUART ALAN BECKER
W
The Phnom Penh Post celebrates 20 years July 6, 2012 • www.phnompenhpost.com14
15. bothsidesoftheColdWar
He studied in Leipzig, learned to
speak German and really enjoyed
the fellowship of all those East
Germans, earning an engineering
degree in 1986.
“I would say that was the
best time of my life.We were all
communists together,” Narith
laughed.
In East Germany he had the
chance to study Marxism and
Leninism in depth.
“The socialist ideology is not
so bad, but what I saw was the
difference between the theory and
practice.” He remembered reading
a letter from Lenin to a subordinate
and somehow it revealed the huge
difference between Marx and
Lenin.
Back home Narith found a job
with the Cambodian Ministry of
Industry at an aluminum factory
in Phnom Penh making plates
and pots for the people and some
equipment for the military.
“Every year we got 100 tons of
aluminum sheets from the Soviet
Union.
Then came the collapse of
the Soviet Union in 1991, which
changed everything for Cambodia.
“I can remember well when I
discussed the Marx and Lenin
philosophy with my classmates,
the conclusion was saying the
communists and capitalists might
meet each other at the end of time
and now it came true.”
Then came a period of people
trying to scrap everything and sell
public assets for money. Narith
and others listened to the news
from Paris, Hanoi, Beijing and
Pyongyang trying to figure out
how the result of talks between
Prime Minister Hun Sen and Prince
Norodom Sihanouk would be.
Narith’s job at the aluminum
factory was sold off for cash and
he had nowhere to go and no work
to do. So, he stayed home for a few
days.
When the first UN team came
to Cambodia, he managed to get a
job as an assistant manager at the
International Guest House and had
a chance to meet a lot of different
nationals of UNTAC staff.
He was working as a waiter that
day in the guest house restaurant
when who should walk in but the
founder of The Phnom Penh Post,
Michael Hayes.
“He said he came to start a
newspaper. We spoke to each
other and he told me about his
goal to open a newspaper, and I
said okay, I will join you.”
He went to work at the offices at
number 10A on Street 264. Early
advertisers in The Phnom Penh
Post included Standard Chartered
Bank, Credit Agricole and Thai
banks.
He remembers a grenade attack
at 8am one morning during a Sam
Rainsy Party gathering.
“What I liked about the Post
is that they dared to write the
true story. The story about the
grenade attack, they wrote about
the victims who tried to get help
from the hospital, but they closed
the hospital’s gate. The Post wrote
about that and that’s good.”
Narith remembers the 1997
factional fighting with exploding
bombs and the Post writing the
truth about that.
“I think as a newspaper we have
a duty to bring the truth to the
people.We do that at The Phnom
Penh Post.When the newspaper
brings reliable news, when we
bring truth to the audience, we
always got higher circulation.”
Narith regards the Post’s founder
Michael Hayes as a pioneer.
“He’s one of the best Americans
who have come here to create a
reliable newspaper for Cambodia
after the CivilWar. That’s good for
Cambodia to have him here and
for Cambodia to have the Post
here.We were proud to have an
independent newspaper. Press
freedom is important for our
society.”
Narith says The Phnom Penh Post
is stronger than ever now.
Chap Narith and his wife Pa
Sampheary have four children.
Their eldest daughter, Pheananika,
works at KPMG accounting
firm. Their second daughter,
Pheananira, is a student at EFI.
Their third daughter, Pheananimul,
is a student at Pannasastra. Their
adopted son Sopatina, 10, is
enrolled in secondary school.
Contrasting the difference
between communist and capitalist
systems and ideologies he lived
through during the many years of
the cold war, Narith says it comes
down to different approaches to
the same problem of trying to keep
people happy.
“What I see in both systems
is that they want people to have
happy lives, but the way they do it
is different.”
He remembers noticing the
difference between the application
of Chinese aid in 1993 for the
rebuilding of Mao Tse Tung
Boulevard and the aid given by
the Americans during the Lon
Nol regime. “They cared more
about the life of the people before.
But there’s more good now than
bad. Now we are going in the
right direction and even if we are
slow, we are still going in the right
direction,” he said.
Narithremembersthe1997factionalfighting
withexplodingbombsandthePostwriting
thetruthaboutthat
The Phnom Penh Post celebrates 20 yearswww.phnompenhpost.com • July 6, 2012 15
16. LukeHunt
WENTY years ago
Michael Hayes arrived
in Cambodia with his
life savings of about
US$50,000 and his then-wife Kath-
leen just as the United Nations
began pouring into the Southeast
Asian nation to oversee elections
and hopefully end decades of war.
Armed with a royal seal from
King Norodom Sihanouk, he
founded The Phnom Penh Post
from scratch, and for the next
16 years was responsible for
a newspaper that enjoyed a
reputation for telling the truth
while maintaining a sympathetic
ear for this country’s plight and its
tragic history.
But this reputation came
at a price. Several Khmer
contemporaries were assassinated
and there were many sleepless
nights from the top floor of his
home and office in Street 264.
Hayes literally slept one floor above
the newsroom that produced every
issue, once every two weeks.
By the time I returned to
Cambodia as bureau chief for
Agence-France-Presse (AFP)
in mid-2001, his marriage had
collapsed and financial insecurity
was a constant. The wars were over
and efforts to put the surviving
leaders of the Khmer Rouge on
trial were dominating headlines.
In those days tribunal detractors
were loud, not unlike now, and
too often the people bellowing
about the tribunal’s perceived
inadequacies would hog the kind
of attention that others thought
belonged to Pol Pot’s many victims
who had become an important
part of the paper’s focus.
As such, the Phnom Penh Post’s
reputation was largely borne out
of the Khmer Rouge and how these
ultra-Maoists wiped out a third
of their own population between
1975 and 1979. But covering what
had happened all those years
earlier could prove tiresome,
especially when seen through the
prism of the late 1990s when a low-
level civil war persisted.
With conflict topping the
agenda the economy became
the most underplayed story in
the country, particularly in light
of the never-ending aftermath
of the 1997/98 Asian financial
crisis which dominated news
everywhere else in the region.
Hayes often complained about the
lack of economic coverage, and he
understood the fiscal realities of
the day first hand.
During the 10th
anniversary
of the newspaper, he quipped:
“Basically I’ve spent the last 10
years not getting paid to worry
about money every day, how this
paper survived is an absolute
mystery to me.”
In his own words Hayes also
“daydreamed about finding boxes
of cash” and once told me that “if I
had a buck for every time I worried
about money I’d be a millionaire”.
Things were tight, but Hayes was
also being modest.
The secret of the Post’s survival
and its great successes was largely
due to Hayes’s ability to attract
young and talented journalists
who were prepared to live on a
shoe-string and work their hearts
out. As a result the paper became
a giant stepping stone to wider
careers.
The likes of Ker Munthit, Sarah
Colm, Leo Dobbs, Liam Cochrane,
Rob Carmichael, Nate Thayer,
Matthew Granger, Jason Barber,
Hurley Scroggins and Peter
Sainsbury along with scores of
other seasoned journalists have
spent time at the Post.
They earned rich praise from
heavyweight academics and
commentators including David
Chandler,William Shawcross,
Milton Osborne, Peter Maguire
and Craig Etcheson and this would
continue through much of the first
decade of this century when news
coverage changed dramatically.
The US-ledWar on Terror had
its own specific consequences
on individual countries around
Southeast Asia as al-Qaeda affiliate
Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) made its
presence felt with a series of
bombings, like the 2002 Bali blast
which left more than 200 people
dead.
In Cambodia the flak held added
dimensions. Amid this post 9/11
atmosphere and its borderline
paranoia, Phnom Penh was for
the first time about to chair the
Association of South East Asian
Nations (ASEAN) and host leaders
from around the world. Conditions
in the capital were rough,
politicians blissfully ignorant of
what was expected and Islamic
extremists were using Cambodia
as a hideout.
The Bali bombing was
masterminded by Hambali, who
had entered Cambodia after
passing himself off as Thai, a
decision he would later fear and
regret, and he spent much of the
year plotting that bombing from
a guest house behind the Phnom
Penh Mosque on Boeung Kak Lake,
which is now little more than a
very big sand pit.
Following the blast Hambali
held his ground in Cambodia until
he panicked in late January 2003,
after witnessing the wholesale
destruction that erupted amid the
anti-Thai riots that effectively shut
down the country, spawning the
memorable front page headline in
the Post: Mobs Go Berserk.
Hambali fled and was soon
captured in Thailand.
A year later I was on sabbatical,
working regularly for the Post
and investigating stories about
hard-lineWahabi groups from
Saudi Arabia allegedly funding
Muslim Cham conversions and
building opulent mosques in the
Cambodian countryside where
locals had known little more than
traditional stilt houses and maybe
a cow shed.
During a series of interviews,
Cambodian Muslims came
forward and told how they had
been ordered out of the Madrassas
in Southern Thailand where they
had studied. Trouble was brewing
and from his contacts in Thailand
and Phnom Penh, Hayes had also
heard of a military crackdown.
The Post was all over the
story and ahead of the game on
the outbreak of a conflict that
continues to this day, just as it
had been during the years of civil
war and when history was being
written, such as the coup in 1997,
Pol Pot’s death and the arrest of his
cohorts.
There were lighter moments, like
the time Hayes confiscated a gun
he gave to his guard after he was
caught firing it at the next door
neighbour’s property for target
practice. The guard agreed to give
it back and added the gun didn’t
work anymore. He put it to his
head and pulled the trigger – there
was a bullet in the chamber but it
had jammed.
As AFP bureau chief from
2001 to 2004, the Post and its
competitor, The Cambodia Daily,
were highly prized sources of
information. The internet was only
just making its presence felt as a
news source and Cambodia as a
hunting ground for journalists was
all about primary reporting.
This meant reporters had to
spend time in the field. Good yarns
didn’t arrive in press releases,
government handouts and junkets.
To be fair, this has not totally
changed in Cambodia like it has in
most parts of the world.
But back then Phnom Penh was
just a two paper town and the
Post’s ability to produce highly
informative, in depth articles
without fear or favour was as
appreciated as they were difficult
to produce, and the staff on the
paper held the respect of their
peers and a community.
Luke Hunt is a regular contributor
to The Phnom Penh Post
TheheadyheydayswithMichaelHayes
Goodyarnsdidn’tarriveinpressreleases,
governmenthandoutsandjunkets
LukeHuntsitsonthetoppledstatueofSaddamHusseininBaghdad,readingthePost’sstoryaboutfakeIraqimoneyfloodingCambodia.PHOTO SUPPLIED
T
The Phnom Penh Post celebrates 20 years July 6, 2012 • www.phnompenhpost.com16
17.
18. AndrewDrummond
have just come back to
Bangkok from Phnom
Penh, Cambodia, where
you can actually sit on
the boulevard, sip cheap wine, or
espressos, and view the talent pa-
rade in front of you every evening
as it gathers itself for a stroll along
the side of the Tonle Sap River. I
love Phnom Penh.
I am praying it’s not going
to change. My prayers will be
ignored. My view across the river
had already been destroyed by this
monstrosity – a giant Sokha hotel
being built on the opposite bank.
I was actually there for the arrest
of Patrick Devillers, a Frenchman
who has been linked to the
murder of Briton Neil Haywood
in China.Well, I was not there
for the arrest. That was done in
secret. His whereabouts were also
kept in secret from the public,
as France and China fought over
him. So Devillers was not up for an
interview.
Had he been so, however, I
think he would have preferred the
option of giving an interview with
La Monde or Liberation rather an
anglais debilé from the Daily Mail.
The French and the English still
do not get on, despite endearing
reconciliatory headlines in the
London Sun such as Hop off
you frogs! whenever the French
displease the editors.
The only newspaper to have
done an interview with him was
the NewYork Times. The interview
consisted of him saying he was
not giving an interview, quoting a
Chinese proverb, and complaining
about the press.
I do not think wearing a kilt and
claiming to be ‘un écossais’ and
quoting ‘L’auld alliance’ would
have made a difference.
But what a great trip it was and
I managed to have a bite with
old friends Michael Hayes, the
founder of The Phnom Penh Post,
and also with its current Editor in
Chief Alan Parkhouse and his Thai
girlfriend. The newspaper, which
was founded in 1992, is celebrating
its 20th anniversary this year.
I knew its founder Michael
Hayes before he knew he was
going to found it. These were the
times when the Khmer Rouge
was still active and killing people
and Cambodia was the wild west.
I once went to a party at The
Phnom Penh Post where there
appeared to be a rich ganja soup
on offer.
I fell down the stairwell, three
floors, and picked myself up
without even a bruise. The London
Times actually recorded this bit of
news in a feature I wrote about an
old friend Nate Thayer – the guy
who found Pol Pot.
Years on I now went back to
the stairwell. It was quite clearly
impossible to fall three floors.
“If that happened,” said Michael
Hayes, “you’d be dead. But I
remember you falling.”
Jesus. Can’t you believe anything
you read in The Times anymore?
Perhaps it was just two floors.
The newspaper was founded
in the midst of mayhem. It is
continually showered with awards
– real ones – not the type Pattaya
newspapers award each other.
Journalists actually write for this
paper, and some very well known
ones often contribute for free.
International universities send
their journalism undergrads to The
Phnom Penh Post as interns to get
some hands on experience.
And they also criticise the boss –
and he’s Hun Sen for heaven’s sake.
Pardon my English, but what a
f….g difference from the Pattaya
rags.
Andrew Drummond is a Bangkok-
based journalist who has covered
some of the biggest stories in
the region over the past 20 years
for some of the most prestigious
newspapers in the UK and else-
where.
Agemfromthemidstofmayhem
I
Old commrades in arms, from left veteran British journalist Andrew Drummond, Post founder Michael Hayes and present Editor in Chief Alan Parkhouse in the old Post office. BENJAWAN SINGTHUEN
If similar tragedies are to be avoided
in the future, then students every-
where need to know the truth about
what happened ... Political objectives
outweighed humanitarian concerns,
and voices that told the truth to the
world were disbelieved or sidelined.
Courtesy DC-CAM
The Phnom Penh Post celebrates 20 years July 6, 2012 • www.phnompenhpost.com18
20. NicDunlop
N July 2010, Comrade
Duch, Pol Pot’s for-
mer chief executioner,
became the first Khmer
Rouge to be convicted in an
international tribunal. The Extraor-
dinary Chambers in the Courts of
Cambodia found the former prison
commandant guilty of war crimes
and crimes against humanity.
Duch was then sentenced to a
total of 35 years in prison for his
role in the murders of up 14,000
people.
Prosecutors had sought a 40-year
sentence but, because of mitigating
circumstances – time already
served in prison, his willingness to
assist the court, his stated remorse
and his repeated apologies to the
victims throughout the trial – his
sentence was reduced to 19 years.
Outside the courthouse, amid
assembled journalists, survivors
gave their reaction to the sentence.
Chum Mey, one of the few who
survived S-21, told The NewYork
Times he was outraged.“I am not
satisfied!” he said.“We are victims
two times; once in the Khmer
Rouge time and now once again.”
He talked of the conditions in
which Duch was being held, with
air-conditioning and three meals
a day, comparing it to his tenure
at S-21 under Duch.“I sat on the
floor with filth and excrement all
around,” he said.
There is a view, particularly in
the west, that the victims’ voice
is the only authentic one, to the
exclusion of almost any other. After
the complex and, at times, tedious
legal processes of the court, it was
perhaps understandable that the
reactions of the victims should
dominate the coverage of the trial.
And this was the vein in which
the trial was broadly reported; a
massive disappointment in the eyes
of the very people the court was
there to serve; the victims.
But one of the most important
aspects of the ruling had been
almost totally lost; the first
acknowledgement, by Cambodian
legal experts, of unlawful
incarceration.This was a landmark
ruling and an historic precedent
in Cambodian legal history.
Particularly in a country where
unlawful detention is a serious
problem and the abuse of suspects
a matter of routine. But instead of
highlighting this significant ruling,
the focus was on the victims, their
pain and their outrage.
There was an unspoken notion
that the sentence should somehow
match the grief and loss of the
survivors.
“Crimes against humanity has
been reduced to 11 hours per life!”
Theary Seng told the BBC. But how
do you meet the overwhelming
pain and loss that people have
endured at the hands of people like
Duch?The answer is you can’t.
As Judge Cartwright pointed
out, the court could never give
back what the victims have lost.“A
sentence can only be symbolic,”
she said. But the first verdict was
seen broadly to have been a failure.
Duch then appealed his sentence
and, in February this year, the
judges overturned the initial ruling
and sentenced him to life.They said
the first sentence did not reflect the
gravity of the crimes.
Prosecutor Chea Leng praised the
new ruling, saying:“We can say that
justice has now been served after
more than 30 years.” She added:“To
us and to the victims, this is a great
success.”
Many believed that a change in
verdict was due to the lenient term
handed down in the first ruling.
Amid continuing accusations
of corruption and political
interference and budget struggles
within the court, it was important
to show the donors that, at last,
justice had been served. But
there was no mention of unlawful
detention.
A great deal of time was spent
focussing on whether Duch’s
contrition was genuine. Perhaps
if Duch displayed a remorse more
in line with expectations, then
the first verdict would have been
easier to accept. But instead, what
compounded the victims’ agony
still further was Duch’s inscrutable
and, at times, bizarre behaviour
during the course of the trial.
Duch defied comprehension.
For the most part he was detached
and emotionless. Other times he
clearly enjoyed toying with victims
as they gave their testimony.When
he delivered his first apology –
which he read from a piece of paper
– he rose, placed two fists on the
table and took control. He was in
command of his audience and he
knew it.
It was his arrogance that had so
outraged the victims. And when he
asked to be released at the very end
of his trial, it was a further turn of
the knife.
In court, I brought a copy of
Camus’s L’Etranger where Mersault,
the central protagonist, is tried
not for what he is accused of, but
for the kind of person that he is.
Mersault lacks empathy and is
denounced a soulless monster,
incapable of remorse. And like
Duch, it is Meursault’s indifference
to what society thinks of him that is
so disconcerting.
Watching Duch in court, I
realised that we were judging him
in exactly the same way, wanting
him to fully acknowledge his
depravity and express the kind
of remorse that fitted the horror
he was accused of. But how can
someone who has devoted years
of his life to torture and killing be
expected to turn around and relate
to the pain of others?
It seemed ridiculous to me to
ascribe an emotion that he was
incapable of expressing.
Duch’s‘morality’ was totally
different to the one the court is
based upon. Duch believed that
people in positions of power have
to be obeyed.Those in inferior
positions are there to follow orders.
The mark of a devoted and
“good” servant is to carry out orders
efficiently and without complaint.
He regarded his victims as weak
and, although extreme, his outlook
is inseparable from the rigid
hierarchy of Cambodian society.
The rights and wrongs of those
orders – the way that we view them
– is irrelevant.
Chum Sirath, whose two brothers
were killed by Duch at S-21, scoffed
at the question of Duch’s contrition
being genuine.“I really don’t care
about his remorse,” he told me.
He wanted to learn about his
brothers’ fate and for justice to be
delivered.The purpose of the trial
was also to legally acknowledge
the crimes and demonstrate that
justice could be delivered free of the
interest of outside parties.
In Cambodia, few believe that
anything can be done for its own
sake; there is always the vested
interest of a powerful party.What
the tribunal failed to do is create a
realm independent of the power
structures that dominate every
sphere of Cambodian public and
private life; a place where the ideal
of due process could exist.
With accusations of direct
political interference and
corruption, most Cambodians I
spoke with believed that the court
was subject to manipulation of
one sort or another. At times it was
plainly obvious that it was. So was
this change in verdict a cave in to
public opinion?
When I asked Mol Saroum, a
farmer in Battambang, what he
thought of the trial, he said: “Why
do you come to ask poor, ignorant
person like me these questions?
You are a big man and you should
know what is right and what is
wrong. There’s no need to ask
ignorant people like me.”
Expressing opinions that may be
contrary to the interests of those
in authority is an alien concept.
And for many, the court had
already become part of the realm
of politics, and no longer part of
the realm of “law”. I wondered
what role we in the media played
in that?
Nic Dunlop is author of The Lost
Executioner,the story of how he
discovered Duch in 1999.
TheendofthetrialofComradeDuch
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He regarded his victims as weak and,
although extreme, his outlook is
inseparable from the rigid hierarchy of
Cambodian society
DuchlistensashissentenceisreadoutattheKhmerRougetribunal.Manysaidhissentencedidnotreflectthegravityofhiscrimes.PHOTO COuRtESY OF THE eccc
The Phnom Penh Post celebrates 20 years July 6, 2012 • www.phnompenhpost.com20
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23. The Phnom Penh Post celebrates 20 yearswww.phnompenhpost.com • July 6, 2012 23
Ieng Thirith with group of women on tour inspecting the slave labour camps in the northeast in the late 70s. Phnom Penh Post archive
