How an American Journalist Saved a Renegade Jungle Army in Cambodia

[geovalin]

GREENSBORO, N.C. — Late in the summer of 1994, as the hot season was finally breaking in Cambodia, three scraggly men in flip-flops showed up at the Phnom Penh Post’s compound looking for American journalist Nate Thayer.

 

The trio, members of Vietnam’s oppressed Montagnard hill tribes, had initially snuck across the border looking for fellow freedom fighters in the decades-long battle against the communist government. But those hopes had given way to weeks of living on the city’s streets and sleeping in pagodas. Their hair was long and stomachs empty.

 

They were paranoid that they would be discovered by Vietnamese agents in Cambodia and returned home to face prison or worse. Now they wanted to secure asylum in America, where hundreds of their people had found safety and a new start. The United Nations refugee agency wouldn’t help them. So a Montagnard contact in America said they should find Thayer.

 

They arrived at the Phnom Penh Post’s office — also the home of the newspaper’s owners and Thayer — and nervously asked for the journalist. Thayer, with a college swimmer’s build and a bald head, walked outside and saluted the men. He welcomed them inside like old friends.

 

For the next few months, the three Montagnards lived with Thayer, his girlfriend, and the Post’s owners, Michael Hayes and Kathleen O'Keefe. They largely kept to themselves, wary of bothering their hosts and limited in their ability to communicate across languages. But it was the nicest place they had ever lived, and they could eat and sleep soundly.

 

Months went by with no progress on securing refugee status. Eventually, Thayer and O’Keefe tearfully told their new friends that they couldn’t help, and the trio covertly made their way back across the border into Vietnam.

 

Even before the U.N. brokered a peace deal in 1991 that restored Cambodia’s monarchy and paved the way for internationally-observed elections in 1993, Thayer had established himself as a journalistic force.

 

He had spent much of the late 1980s on Cambodia’s border with Thailand, where the civil war was raging between the Vietnamese-backed government in Phnom Penh, remaining elements of the Khmer Rouge, and royalist forces loyal to Norodom Sihanouk.

 

Thayer developed close relationships with hardened guerillas during treks through the jungle and with U.N. officials during extended stays at the refugee camps housing tens of thousands famished and shell-shocked Cambodians. Andy Pendleton, a career humanitarian officer who oversaw Thai refugee camps in the 1980s, remembers Thayer showing up on his 125 cc motorbike in areas where U.N. officials would go out in Land Rovers.

 

“He would come in and his little motorcycle would break down on the way, and he’d run and jump in a ditch when the artillery started,” Pendeleton recalled. During one trip across the border, Thayer was in a truck that drove over an anti-tank mine, and Pendleton was called to respond. “I went over and he was limping across the border with bandages on his feet. He was the only surviving person in that truck when it got hit. So pretty brassy.”

 

By the time Cambodia opened up to the foreign press in the early ‘90s, Thayer had a running start.

“The vast majority of the journalists on the ground there, they were good and professional, but they didn't know the territory, they didn’t know the layers, and they didn't know the players like Nate did,” Pendleton said. “And when Nate put the screws on something, he had a good chance of making it happen, because he was the number one journalist in Southeast Asia. He was the man to listen to.”

 

While Thayer would become most famous for being the last foreign journalist to interview Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, just months before his death in 1998, perhaps his most impactful story came years earlier.

 

In the summer of 1992, two years before the Montagnard trio showed up at Thayer’s doorstep, the United Nations became aware of nearly 400 members of the Degar hill tribes hiding deep in Cambodia’s northern jungles. It was a politically volatile discovery, coming as the international community was attempting to steer Cambodia from Vietnamese occupation and civil war to a sovereign multi-party democracy.

 

An UNTAC military official told Thayer at the time: "We have enough problems in Cambodia dealing with the four factions, and now this army we never even heard of turns up.”

 

read (a lot) more https://www.voacambodia.com/a/7068904.html

 

 

[John Drake]

Should try to link this somehow in Thailand News, because nobody is going to look at it in Cambodia News. Great story.

[my friend I]

35 minutes ago, John Drake said:

Should try to link this somehow in Thailand News, because nobody is going to look at it in Cambodia News. Great story.

Or not

[n00dle]

read more link is dead

 

https://www.voacambodia.com/a/7068904.html

[John Drake]

20 minutes ago, n00dle said:

read more link is dead

 

https://www.voacambodia.com/a/7068904.html

No, it's not.

[n00dle]

Just now, John Drake said:

No, it's not.

odd i tried it twice, but yes, now it works. Thanks.

its all the more interesting because I met Thayer back in the day and remain friends with a few of the folks metioned as regards the video recording of the Pol Pot interview..