7/3/2023 0 Comments The Ailing Nation by Nate Link![]() But he also unearthed stories on renegade Montagnard combatants abandoned in Cambodia’s jungle, heroin trafficking networks linked to Cambodia’s elite, and factional fighting that saw tanks return to the streets of Phnom Penh after a few years of relative peace. No series of scoops was bigger than Thayer’s reporting on the trial of Pol Pot in 1997 and interview with him a few months later. “He was fearless in terms of his work style, and he was uncompromising when it comes to pursuing the truth, and then on a regular basis, he scooped the world with his stories on Cambodian political conflicts,” said Ker Munthit, a former Cambodian journalist who worked with Thayer at the Phnom Penh Post in the 1990s. Thayer arrived in Southeast Asia in the late 1980s as a stringer for the Associated Press on the Thai border amid a brutal civil war in Cambodia, and over the next decade established himself as a dominant deadline reporter covering one of the world’s most important stories - the end of the Khmer Rouge and emergence of “modern” Cambodia. Nate Thayer, a journalist who risked his life to confront Pol Pot and provided perhaps the most authoritative contemporaneous account of Cambodian politics in the 1990s, died at his family’s home in Massachusetts this week. ![]()
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