News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
The Cambodia photojournalist Jay Mather visited in 1979 was a country in bloody chaos.
The murderous Khmer Rouge regime had slaughtered 1.7 million of its own people and was in turn being chased out of power by the army of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Refugees by the thousands were streaming into squalid camps along the nation's western border.
Mather and reporter Joel Brinkley's series of stories from the refugee camps earned their paper, the Louisville Courier-Journal, a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1979.
In June, Mather, now a Sisters resident, and Brinkley returned to Cambodia to work on a book. They found a country that they believe has squandered its opportunity to rise from the ashes of one of the most harrowing genocides in human history.
A constitutional govern-ment was founded in 1993, and the remnants of the Khmer Rouge, fighting as guerillas, laid down their arms in 1999. A new constitutional monarch was put in place in 2004.
"Cambodia kind of had a chance to reinvent itself," Mather said. "It didn't; it just kind of slid back to where it had been."
The economy is almost entirely agrarian, using extremely primitive means of cultivation and transport, and corruption is endemic.
"Corruption rules the country, from the youngest school kid to the highest government official," Mather said.
For Mather, the failure of the country to recover from the dire straits he witnessed 30 years ago, is a profoundly sad tale.
Finding the "local angle"
The Louisville Courier-Journal was, in the 1970s, one of the finest papers in the nation. It was small, with a circulation of 300,000 across the state of Kentucky, but it had a strong team of journalists, including Joel Brinkley, the son of legendary broadcast journalist David Brinkley.
The young reporters, working in the heyday of print journalism, thought big. The paper's staff was interested in covering the crisis in Cambodia, but they needed a local angle to justify the expense and effort of sending a reporter and a photographer to Southeast Asia.
They found it in a most unusual way.
Mather had recently photographed a Louisville emergency room doctor who was leaving Kentucky to join an International Red Cross mission to Somalia. Much to Mather's surprise, he caught a piece on the CBS Sunday Morning News featuring an interview with the doctor - not from Somalia but from a refugee camp on the western border of Cambodia.
Mather's heart started to pound. If he could track Dr. Ken Rasmussen down, he had his local angle.
Mather traced the doctor through his daughter and the doctor's church and flashed a cable around the world to Rasmussen.
"He cabled back to us and I'll never forget it," Mather said. "He said, 'The story is here. Come on ahead.'"
Mather and Brinkley flew to Los Angeles to pick up expedited passports, and on to San Francisco where they boarded a plane for Bangkok, Thailand. It was November 4, 1979 - the day that Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 53 Americans hostages.
They landed in Thailand, rented a car and plunged into the war-torn landscape of Southeast Asia - "two young upstart journalists somewhere where they really had no reason to be, other than them thinking they were doing what they should be doing."
Cambodian refugees were clogging camps of 75,000 to 200,000 souls, strung all along the border with Thailand. Mather and Brinkley spent two-and-a-half weeks on the border with Dr. Rasmussen, tracking the stories of survivors who had faced murder and starvation in trying to escape to the relative safety of the camps.
They returned to the United States, Brinkley with hours of notes and a raging case of typhoid, Mather with thousands of photographs.
"I probably had 100 rolls of black-and-white and maybe 30-40 of color," he said.
Mather spent the entire 72 hours of Thanksgiving weekend in the darkroom, with people bringing him food as he processed his trove of powerful images. He discovered that Dr. Rasmussen was sponsoring a Cambodian family in Louisville, so he tracked them down and added images of the family to his collection. (Mather's photographs from the 1979 trip are archived at http://www.jaymather.org. Go to Jay's photo archive, "Living the Cambodian Nightmare, 1979".)
Brinkley took two weeks to recover from typhoid and write the report, which ran as a five-day series in December 1979.
The paper entered the series in Pulitzer Prize competition in the category of International Reporting - and won.
"We always thought of ourselves as the Little Blue Engine That Could," Mather said. "We really felt like we'd done a project that was out of our league."
Cambodia: The Forgotten Country
Brinkley left the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1982 to follow a path that led through a distinguished tenure as a foreign correspondent at The New York Times, to his current post as visiting professor of journalism at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
Mather, too, left Louisville after his paper was sold to the Gannett chain. He moved to the Sacramento Bee in Sacramento, California, where he worked on a range of projects, including the 1988 presidential campaign.
Cambodia gradually faded from memory.
"I didn't really maintain any depth of knowledge about what was going on (in Cambodia)," he said.
But he and Brinkley kept in touch, mostly through Christmas cards.
This year, Mather learned that Brinkley had returned to Cambodia and was working on a book exposing and explaining the failure of the nation to rise from its painful past. He invited Mather to return with him on a second trip, a 30-year anniversary recap of their prize-winning efforts.
Mather eagerly jumped at the opportunity, but funding the trip proved to be a challenge. Foundations were reluctant to fund the project, some because Brinkley had already tapped them for funding.
Kathy Deggendorfer, of the Roundhouse Foundation, heard about the project and told Mather that it fit perfectly into the foundation's mission of supporting the arts and artists in the Sisters community. Mather had found his funding.
"She was the guardian angel," he said. "Without her, we wouldn't be sitting here."
Mather and Brinkley spent three weeks in June and early July crisscrossing Cambodia and recording the plight of its people.
The relics of the trauma of the 1970s are readily apparent, both on the landscape and within the souls of its people.
Mather visited the site of the notorious SL 21 prison, where the Khmer Rouge tortured and executed thousands of "enemies of the people" in a demonic attempt to eradicate all Western influence in Cambodia - from education to medicine - and create a pure form of agrarian Communism.
The prison has been turned into a kind of memorial, displaying 14,000 photos of the dead. Processions of local people visit the site, gazing upon the photos in somber silence.
"It's like The Wall for Cambodians," Mather said.
The legions of people maimed by land mines are a constant reminder of the period of conflict in the 1970s. The country has been a major focus of international organizations dedicated to clearing conflict zones of land mines, with considerable success in many areas.
The present and future are not much less grim than the past, according to Mather.
In contrast to neighboring Vietnam and Thailand, Cambodia seems to be making no effort to modernize. The primary mode of agricultural transport remains the oxcarts that are depicted in 2,000-year-old carvings on temples.
"Basically, the country has bankrupted its future through lack of commitment to making their country part of the 21st Century. Everybody is just sort of resigned to the way it is," Mather said. "Becoming better rice farmers isn't going to solve Cambodia's problems."
Education is not mandatory, and it is not deep or widespread. Children pay off their teachers to pass tests.
That culture of corruption extends all the way up through the highest levels of government, Mather said.
He recalled an incident where a public official uprooted a camp in the capitol, Phnom Penh, full of people with HIV/AIDS.
"There was this big public building and this minister didn't want to be looking out on this encampment of people with HIV/AIDS," Mather said. "He wanted a garden."
The reporters, assisted by a translator, tracked the case of a man who was severely burned in a dispute over a rare species of wildlife. His attacker was a respected military man, and a prosecutor refused to pursue the case. The man was unable to pay a $250 bribe to be treated for his burns and eventually succumbed to massive infection. Hospital officials told the reporters that he had refused treatment.
"The health care system is deplorable," Mather said. "You don't want to get sick in that country."
Mather recognizes that his and Brinkley's story is not a pretty or inspiring one.
"It was so hard to find moments of joy - anything that had a positive note," he said.
But that's what makes the project important. Cambodia was once a focus of international attention. Now, eyes are turned to the Middle East and to other areas suffering their own horrific spasms of terror and violence, such as Darfur. Cambodia has, Mather fears, indeed become a forgotten country.
"I think the only thing that I can do is to raise awareness that Cambodia doesn't need to be forgotten," he said.
Mather expects Brinkley to finish the book and have it published within the year. Mather's photos will be featured.
Brinkley, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, has published two recent columns on Cambodia. They may be found at http://www.sfgate.com. Search "Joel Brinkley."
Jay Mather's photographs may be found at www.jaymather.org.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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