By Thomas Beller
The Cambodia daily

Henry Kamm, the author of “Cambodia: Report From a Stricken Land,” does not mince words when it comes to delivering bad news.

The first chapter of his book, which tracks the country’s modern history up until 1996, is called, “Hope Is For The Unborn.” It begins with a quote from a Cambodia-based UN official—a job that often requires “determined optimism”—who says, “I don’t think there is a good outlook for this generation. The hope is for the generation not yet born.”

“Cambodia: Report From a Stricken Land,” is in many ways a pessimistic document except for the fact of its existence, which seems to attest to a fascination with and even devotion to Cambodia and Cambodians.

Kamm spent nearly 50 years as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, for which he reported extensively on Cambodia and Vietnam. He was especially engaged with Cambodia during the period of 1970 to 1973, and is also the author of a book on Vietnam called “Dragon Ascending.”

“Cambodia: Report From a Stricken Land,” published by Arcade Publishing in 1998, is narrated with a controlled intensity and specificity. Though the book is written in the first person, its attention rarely dwells on the author’s thoughts or feelings, preferring instead to shed light on the development of the country, its slide into horror, and its current state of corruption.

Every now and then, however, his story is spiced with tales of reportorial enterprise, such as when he booked a first class seat on an airplane out of Bangkok on a tip that a Khmer Rouge official would be on it.

Ieng Sary, who had been foreign minister during the Khmer Rouge regime, boarded the plane, and Kamm sat next to him and spoke with him at length. When he walked back toward the bathroom he saw two well-dressed Westerners who he recognized as being from the US Central Intelligence Agency. They asked him what he had been discussing with Ieng Sary, and he replied, “I write for The New York Times. You can read about it in tomorrow’s paper.”

Kamm was a refugee during World War II, when he fled his native Poland for the US. Only after I contacted him about this interview did I discover that he arrived in the US in 1943, in the steerage hull of a Portuguese ship filled with Jewish refugees which happened to include Bernard Krisher, now the publisher of The Cambodia Daily.

When I suggested that his experiences with German xenophobia—the exact definition of which is “fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners”—had made him more sensitive to Cambodian xenophobia, he curtly corrected me. “The Germans were anti-Semites, not xenophobes,” he said. “I was just as German as they were.”

I spoke to him by telephone from the small town in the South of France where he lives

Q: Why did you choose to write this book?
A: I had a ringside seat to the events in Cambodia, especially in the years 1970 to 1973. It was an engrossing tale that I could not fully tell in The New York Times. There are limits to space, and to the personal interpretation. In The New York Times you cannot say, “That man is a shit.” The rules of American journalism are that the reporter is the fly on the wall.

Q: Although it was a very small part of your book, I was struck by the intensity of your condemnation of Cambodian xenophobia toward the Vietnamese. Usually that is reported as fact, but you really focused on it as an abuse.
A: The pogrom against the Vietnamese of April 1970 was the closest I have ever seen to my own experience as a child in Breslau.

Q: When did you leave Breslau?
A: I left in 1941, with my mother. My father had died in a concentration camp.

Q: Have you received feedback on your book or your articles from Cambodians?
A: I sometimes received angry letters from Cambodians living in the States. That the Cambodians were liberated by a country they most hated was a very hard fact to digest.

Q: Why do you suppose there isn’t more writing, either as memoir or fiction, coming out of Cambodia?
A: This is a country which lives in endless repetition of very beautiful traditions, mainly in music and dance, and to a certain extent art and architecture. The innovative spirit is not a burning flame in the Cambodian mind. And the country has been drained cruelly in the last 30 years, and what was lost is not easily replaced.

Q: What is your view of Cambodia’s future?
A: I have a gloomy view of Cambodia, it is a nation at the end of its parabola of life. There will always be Cambodians. I am not sure there will always be a Cambodia.

Q: What did you think about “The Gate,” by Francois Bizot?
A: I found it a splendid book. The essence of the book was the extraordinary relationship between the prisoner and his guardian [Duch]. I found it a splendid account of his personal experience.
The evil was not at all as visible to a Western prisoner of the Khmer Rouge in 1971 as it became later. Bizot saw Duch [his jailer and, in an odd way recounted in the book, eventually his friend] as a man who had joined the cause possibly with some idealism in mind, and found himself becoming gradually a cog in an immensely brutal machine. But that wasn’t yet evident.

Q: What did you think about the James Fenton review of “The Gate,” in the New York Review of Books?
A: Fenton’s review was totally misguided. He tries to discredit Bizot’s work because of one item of author’s omniscience to which he was not entitled. But that was not the essence of the book.

Q: Fenton discussed, somewhat defensively, Bizot’s anger at Western journalists who, at the time, were sympathetic to the Khmer Rouge. Since that is a category to which he might have been included, do you think Fenton was being vindictive?
A: Anybody who has observed Cambodia as dispassionately as possible will have a view of those who defended the Pol Pot regime as another “liberation movement.” There was some totally wrongheaded universal support among some Westerners for all the “liberation movements” in Southeast Asia.
I have neither admiration for the US, nor the regimes they supported, and equally spare sympathy for those who so fully embraced those “liberation movements.”

Q: It seems that among those interested in Cambodia, there is a lot of score-settling about who was right and who was wrong during the time of the war in Vietnam.
A: It’s difficult to forgive events for not having been what you had taken them to be. But a handful of observers, whether they have been right or wrong, are quite inconsequential in the fate of a people who have lived through hell, and who are still living through a different kind of hell.
The people of Cambodia today are totally disenfranchised, totally unempowered. The country is in the hands of a clique of thugs who drain the country of all that is valuable and don’t give a shit about the Cambodian people, the great majority of whom live in abject misery. There is no light at the end of the tunnel.

Q: Do you think the international community will turn its attention to Cambodia at any time in the near future?
A: It seems to me that the Paris Peace Agreement and the $2 billion spent has removed Cambodia from the agenda. The sovereignty of the country is to be respected. The UN even tolerated the fact that Hun Sen, who lost the [1993] election, seized, with utmost illegitimacy, control of the country.
The CPP kept quietly murdering opposition people all over the country, opposition people all over the place. The UN, having tolerated that, will tolerate anything, it seems.

Q: Your view of Untac in the book is dim.
A: Untac was a very uncritical organization. Mr Akashi was a very good man but probably a bit too Japanese and yielding for the job.

Q: Can you talk about the way you worked in your years as a correspondent?
A: I had a very adventurous foreign editor at The New York Times, Jim Greenfield. I did six years as the roving correspondent of the paper, starting in 1970. The paper felt we were living in a “Jet Age” and they wanted a correspondent who was able to get up and go to wherever things were happening.
Then I was asked, in late 1976, whether I would like to concentrate on Africa or Asia. Indochina had been the center of attention for all those years, and all of a sudden no one gave a shit about Asia. So I chose Asia and moved to Tokyo. I found Tokyo not very interesting; I then lived in Bangkok. But I was always on the road, so the place I have lived has never been terribly meaningful in my journalistic life. Except possibly the years as Moscow bureau chief in the 1960s, when I spent all my years in Moscow.

Q: You remark in your book that Western journalists in Cambodia often treat Cambodians with a degree of condescension. Can you elaborate on this idea?
A: Cambodians seem to invite this. It is one of the few countries in the world where the foreign minister would outline his problem, and then ask you what you would do in his place. There is a certain humility before the Westerners—which the French are responsible for in part—which invites a degree of condescension, which journalists take full advantage of, particularly British journalists.

Q: That humility could be seen as refreshing.
A: Depends on who is being humble. A person in a position of authority has no right to be humble. They have a duty to affirm what they intend to do.

Q: How do you feel when you visit Cambodia now?
A: In Cambodia, wherever I go, I walk with shadows. I made a good many friends in Cambodia in the years between 1970 and 1973, and none of them have survived. One or two got out, but most of my friends were victims of the regime.
And so Cambodia for me is in many ways is a depressing place, for personal reasons. Personal reasons are not very important, but everyone has their own personal reactions.