Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the historic 1993 election, the 1997 coup, and the final days of Pol Pot. For Hayes and
his staff, each issue was “a labor of love and, at the same time, a pain in the you-know-
what.” 3
The newsroom of the Post , which took up the second floor of Hayes's villa in central
Phnom Penh, was a trove of Cambodian marginalia. Photos of old correspondents
crowded the walls. A letter to the editor from the gregarious former king, Norodom Si-
hanouk, was taped to the side of a bookshelf, its corners curling inwards. Old press re-
leases and reports lay in dusty piles on the floor. The back issues of the Post , bound in
great annual volumes, offered a detailed chronicle of Cambodia's recent past, charting its
twists and turns, its coronations and assassinations, the initial burst of democratic optim-
ism and then the gradual fade.
Fifteen years after the UN left Cambodia, the detritus of the democratic project could
be seen everywhere. The big international NGOs were comfortably entrenched, their em-
blems of brotherhood emblazoned on offices, signs, calendars, and reports, the last of
which washed up in great dusty piles around the fringes of the newsroom. Charities and
social enterprise projects abounded. International aid and its attendant foreign presence
had transformed Phnom Penh into a postmodern treaty-port city, a surreal settlement of
cafés, bars, and restaurants. In the countryside, NGOs pursued “community-based de-
velopment” projects and rice farmers wore cast-off NGO T-shirts proclaiming, “LET'S
BUILD A BETTER SOCIETY.” Some of the first ideas for this topic were sketched out
on a notepad from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, which
bore its blue flame-and-laurel insignia above the slogan, “Human rights for everyone,
everywhere.”
The strong international presence made Cambodia an easy place to work as a journalist.
Yearly business visas were available to any foreigner with fresh passport pages and the
necessary fee. Unlike most Asian countries, little was officially off-limits. Foreign report-
ers could wander into ministry buildings and knock on doors, or travel around the coun-
try interviewing the victims of land-grabs and other abuses. In few other countries could
publications like the Phnom Penh Post or the Cambodia Daily , our rivals and comrades
across town, be both foreign-owned and openly critical of government. In Singapore such
outspokenness would mean a rain of lawsuits; in Vietnam, a long jail sentence.
As journalists in Cambodia, our main frame of reference was the global human rights
regime, that patchwork of conventions and norms that had been reinvigorated by the fall
of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. We worked closely with the country's human
rights groups and NGOs, the other beneficiaries of the UN mission. Together, we formed
an informational symbiosis, generating huge quantities of data, much of it detailing Cam-
bodia's persistent failure to live up to its international human rights “obligations.”
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