A Few Words from Andrew Califf

Thanks to the support of the Overseas Press Club Foundation, I was able to spend summer 2023 working in Phnom Penh covering environmental conservation and indigenous rights for the independent media outlet Cambodian Journalist Association or CamboJA. 

These topics keenly interest me and my Khmer colleagues and I traveled by bus, dugout ferries and mainly mopeds to communities beyond cell service and indigenous villages barely on any maps. We mopeded through forests, mud holes and rivers to see Bunong indigenous people sacrifice a pig to protect their land from the World Bank, we confronted Chinese gold mine officials trying to kick us out of a village, we spoke to agitators in a 300-plus person mob that burned a government office because Environment Ministry officials treated villagers “like the Khmer Rouge.”

My time at CamboJA began with a bang as I randomly uncovered the only public document revealing that Human Rights Watch was investigating the Southern Cardamom Mountains REDD+ Project administered by Wildlife Alliance. This article is the third-most read of all time of CamboJA’s English articles according to their public statistics and it illustrates the intersection of how foreign investment in environmental conservation can undermine indigenous rights and the livelihoods of local communities. It was a random document breaking an international story. This is a developing story as the Human Rights Watch report has yet to be released.

After returning from a massive industrial Chinese gold mine legally operating in Cambodia’s biggest protected area and following trucks from an iron ore mine associated with a sanctioned tycoon family, I found out that one of Cambodia’s last bastions for independent media took a major blow from government pressure. 

In September a letter from the Agriculture Ministry silenced the newsroom, it accused CamboJA for disseminating false information regarding Ny Nak, “a vocal critic of government policies,” who was beaten along with his wife on September 12 by a gang of baton wielding motorcycle bandits after loosely criticizing the new Agriculture Minister, Dith Tina, and his ministry. 

English editor Jack Brook and reporter Khoun Narim were behind the article and the letter from the ministry accused them of implying that the Minister was behind the attack and argued they had no evidence to support the attack was politically motivated. The article did not make these claims but merely contextualized Nak’s political comments and previous incidents with  motorcycle-riding, baton-wielding masked men attacking opposition activists earlier in the year.

Cambodia’s election this year occurred in what many countries condemned as a “restrictive political space,” and former Prime Minister Hun Sen won with absolutely no competition in the polls only to put his son in charge a month later, solidifying what the New York Times called a “dynastic rule.” While CamboJA’s lights remained on in the months leading up to the election, independent media Voice of Democracy (VOD) was shut down in February after being censored by the Information Ministry.

CamboJA continued publishing investigative pieces while other independent media outlets were censored. When I arrived, CamboJA touted itself as the last independent media outlet based in the country. 

The letter even referenced the fate of VOD in a thinly veiled threat, encouraging “CamboJA to take steps to ensure that such malicious intentions and defamatory speculations do not recur in the future which would result in legal actions that could lead to the same outcome of the then VOD.” 

It came down to an interpretation of Ny Nak’s original Facebook post. The ministry claimed it was not referring to Minister Tina because Nak never wrote out the name even though he used a photo of the minister and referenced the minister. CamboJa was forced to change the article. 

Government media the Khmer Times called it a “bid to defame the minister” in their headline and along with a few other outlets quoted CamboJA executive director Nop Vy as referring to the situation as “a technical error on the part of the reporters.” Vy also said the request was “acceptable” to another media outlet, essentially legitimizing the censorship.

Brook was fired within the week after publicly criticizing Nop Vy’s comments and defending the reporting.

Alas my last week was spent convincing CamboJA to allow Brook to finish editing my last investigative articles during a somber fall for independent media in Cambodia. 

Andrew Califf
New York University
Stan Swinton Scholarship Winner 2023