The Thai-Cambodian border battle is simply one of many many tales going underreported within the nation as Trump’s funding cuts go away residents and journalists scrambling.
A army truck transporting the belongings of a resident previous the Angkor Wat temple in Siem Reap province.
(Tang Chhin Sothy / Getty)
At 65 years previous, Hob Contact lived via a genocide that erased 1 / 4 of his nation’s inhabitants, two brutal civil wars, and a long time of uncompleted rebuilding. Then, in 2022, the Cambodian authorities seized his dwelling at Angkor—a house he’d held for generations—and compelled his household to maneuver out.
In Run Ta Ek, a relocation website 25 kilometers northeast of Angkor, Contact leaned towards a plastic chair. Deep wrinkles circled his eyes, his pores and skin leathery from years of farming within the scorching solar to assist his household. However in Run Ta Ek, there’s no land to farm.
“Through the Khmer Rouge, I may at the very least develop rice to eat,” he mentioned, his bracelet now strands of thread slipping down his wrist. “Right here, there is no such thing as a rice to develop, no jobs. Life is harder.” Since he was compelled to maneuver right here, members of the federal government have but to go to, he mentioned.
Siem Reap is the Cambodia most People know: temples, tuk-tuks, selfies at Angkor Wat. However since 2022, more than 40,000 Cambodians—a few of them Indigenous households who’ve lived for generations on the land—have been compelled out of their properties round Angkor to make room for vacationers. The area is Asia’s most visited UNESCO World Heritage website; 214,529 People got here to marvel on the ruins in 2024.
Now the identical area has turn into a website of flight as many a whole bunch of refugees have poured in and round Siem Reap to flee the deadliest Thai-Cambodian border battle in a long time. Girls give delivery in makeshift camps with out correct medical care. Villages are break up in half by barbed wire. All of the whereas, impartial native journalists wrestle to inform the tales of these in Run Ta Ek and throughout the nation as funding for his or her reporting runs dry.
In January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an order to droop overseas help—leading to a devastating drop in funding for impartial media, significantly in fragile or authoritarian contexts the place assist is most wanted. He referred to as these cuts a blow towards “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Present Concern
In Cambodia, they hit laborious. Practically $7 million marked for the nation’s media growth evaporated in a single day. The transfer coincided with a pointy drop in Cambodia’s press freedom rating and the closure of Voice of America, a vital supply of reporting for Cambodians at dwelling and overseas. That funding supported teams such because the Cambodian Heart for Impartial Media (CCIM), which educated citizen journalists in 20 provinces. Chhan Sokunthea, CCIM govt director, put it plainly: “We don’t have the price range to extend capability, to coach our citizen journalists, and even to purchase fundamental reporting tools.”
The Cambodian authorities successfully controls all nationwide TV and radio stations broadcasting in Khmer in addition to newspapers reporting in Khmer, the nationwide language. In July, former Prime Minister Hun Sen shut down one in every of Cambodia’s final remaining impartial media retailers forward of nationwide elections. And with US funds gone, the Cambodian Journalists Alliance Affiliation, one of many final impartial on-line newsrooms within the nation, misplaced over half its price range. Nop Vy, the newsroom’s govt director, mentioned they will assist solely three reporters. The three who stay tirelessly produced 240 tales final 12 months, however vital protection of labor rights, trafficking, and environmental crimes has been suspended. Investigative tasks have been shelved. Reporters have been compelled to take jobs as tuk-tuk drivers or wooden loggers.
These cuts have already compelled a few of Cambodia’s final impartial newsrooms to cut back operations, leaving citizen reporters to fill the hole at nice private threat. In September 2024, army police arrested Mech Dara, an award-winning Cambodian investigative journalist, whereas he was in his automotive along with his household charging him with “incitement” for allegedly spreading pretend information on social media. Human rights teams have denounced the accusations as politically motivated, calling the case one other blow to Cambodia’s quickly dwindling press freedom.
Dara, then 36, had been recognized by the State Department for his latest stories on human trafficking and cybercrimes that have been vital of the federal government’s position. His reporting introduced worldwide consideration and enhancements within the Cambodian authorities’s anti-trafficking response. After his arrest, he was barred from leaving Cambodia and required to report back to the police each month.
A number of months later, a citizen journalist was murdered by an unlawful logger amid escalating threats to reporters covering environmental crimes in Cambodia. The federal government revoked the visa of a British journalist for equally reporting on environmental extraction.
Months later, the stakes have solely grown. The US funding cuts got here amid the deadliest clashes between Cambodia and Thailand in a long time. The border has lengthy been greater than a line on the map; within the Nineteen Eighties, the borderlands have been dotted with camps housing Cambodians fleeing the Khmer Rouge and subsequent Vietnamese occupation. Trump as soon as boasted of “fixing” the Thai-Cambodia disaster; now his administration has ensured that hardly anybody is left to explain it. Susceptible communities, together with refugees of the battle, mentioned they really feel profoundly unheard. “Impartial journalists and newsrooms are unable to match US help with various donors or commercializing,” Sokunthea mentioned.
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With out impartial reporters embedded in these communities, the image People get is a distorted one: official statements, elite views, and a sanitized narrative of “regional stability.” The lived actuality—households displaced, farmers dropping entry to ancestral land, youngsters operating barefoot throughout militarized zones—hardly ever surfaces. After all, the deeper tragedy isn’t that People stay oblivious—it’s that total communities may vanish in plain sight, their silence solely helped alongside by the slashing of US funding.
In July, Hun Dimo, a former village chief turned citizen journalist, interviewed a lady who had fled her ancestral land to a makeshift camp in Siem Reap along with her disabled youngster. “She frightened much more about her different son,” Dimo recalled, “as a result of he was a soldier stationed at Takrabei Temple, the place the battle between the Cambodian and Thai armies was sizzling.”
Official accounts describe the border as “steady.” Refugees who spoke to Dimo say in any other case. A lady who fled from the battle zone delivered a child within the camp, Dimo recalled. Often, within the camp, there are not any medical amenities or locations appropriate for supply. Households use rope to connect a tarp between two timber for shelter, and meals are made between makeshift brick ovens.
Citizen journalists like Dimo cowl what authorities information websites won’t: the evicted households, the fact of refugee camps, the gradual grind of dispossession. He leads the Siem Reap affiliation for citizen journalists, a small group virtually single-handedly overlaying the households in search of refuge from the border battle within the metropolis. After excessive price range cuts gutted his guardian group, CCIM, Dimo mentioned he’s right down to an iPhone and a laptop computer. After I met him at a restaurant early one night, he mentioned he’d slept for simply an hour. The evening earlier than, he spent 10 hours modifying a broadcast video from the refugee camps—one other girl had given delivery with no correct medical care.
Washington’s abandonment doesn’t punish solely Cambodians. It leaves People much less protected, much less knowledgeable, and extra weak to the very transnational scams their leaders declare to battle. In 2023, the Workplace of the UN Excessive Commissioner for Human Rights reported that at the very least 100,000 individuals in Cambodia have been enslaved for the aim of finishing up on-line scams. These on-line scams and trafficking networks proceed to siphon cash from People. But, as Nop Vy, director of the Cambodian Journalists Alliance Affiliation, put it, “If native reporters can not examine, how will the worldwide group even know the place these scams are based mostly?”
With out impartial reporters on the bottom, accounts of skirmishes and displacements are dominated by state media, leaving companies, NGOs, and overseas governments with out dependable data to gauge threat. Analysts argue that Washington’s retreat creates a credibility disaster, complicating Washington’s skill to place itself as a mediator in Southeast Asia. Am Sam Ath, operations director of LICADHO, told the Phnom Penh Publish that the US has typically criticized the decline of press freedom in Cambodia, but its personal actions—equivalent to freezing or chopping off funding for VOA and RFA—have considerably impacted the media sector, particularly impartial journalism worldwide.
Jordan Chantha is a 19-year-old Cambodian-American residing along with his grandmother in Massachusetts. His grandfather lives in Cambodia, in addition to his uncle, who just lately celebrated the delivery of his youngster.
Chantha’s grandmother stopped consuming for days after July 25, when combating on the Thai-Cambodia border flared. “She’d sob watching the information on Fb,” Chantha mentioned. He mentioned it was a standard response amongst elders in his group — the era who had lived via conflict, genocide, and displacement, who had sought refuge in America. It was, Chantha thought, her means of returning—if not in physique, then in grief. His grandma doesn’t cease tuning in to Cambodian information from individuals on the bottom. Most are movies from untrained sources, containing misinformation, which Chantha checks for her. A lot of her fear, Chantha mentioned, is now for her son, her daughter-in-law, and their new child youngster.
“She needed to listen to information from individuals in her nation,” Chantha recalled her saying. “Not from outsiders on one other continent.”
Impartial journalists are essential to getting native information to audiences. However getting information from the bottom to worldwide audiences can imply questions of safety, direct demise threats or imprisonment on doubtful grounds, impartial journalists mentioned.
Presently, Dara is on the Thai-Cambodia border translating for overseas retailers. It’s a miracle that he’s capable of report in any respect, he mentioned, after being persecuted and prosecuted by the Cambodian authorities. He’s formally nonetheless below courtroom supervision from his most up-to-date arrest, he mentioned.
The federal government, Dara mentioned, is withholding permission to let Cambodian journalists close to the border even when they’ve licenses. However the plight confronted by impartial journalists goes deeper than a license. He mentioned reporting on the Thai border is “actually, actually tense.” However there’s a niche: “We don’t see, for instance, any worldwide media overlaying the implications of the Cambodian immigrant staff getting back from Thailand,” Dara mentioned.
Dara mentioned publications have been unable to offer him with assist for medical care after years of hardship and exhaustion from his reporting. He was advised by the publication he labored for that it solely had psychological well being help as a result of that was all the help tasks would pay for. This exterior help, he mentioned, had its limits: Funding priorities may ignore what individuals truly wanted, and paperwork typically diminished survival to classes on a ledger.
Nonetheless with out this funding, even with strings connected, impartial media could be left with even fewer choices. Over time, Dara has seen educated journalists compelled to turn into wooden loggers or tuk-tuk drivers to earn a living. “You’ve got all of the elements, however you don’t have a pot to cook dinner. There isn’t a market right here,” Dara mentioned, referring to the job marketplace for impartial journalists. The slashing of US funding has solely exacerbated the discount in citizen journalists at an important second.
In Run Ta Ek, Contact watches his grandchildren swing in hammocks hung beneath the stilts of a steel shack dwelling. He has eight grandchildren. His youngest grandchild is 3 years previous; his oldest is 20. “I really feel very hopeless. My father offered 9 hectares of land for me. The land I can present for my son and daughter is a half-hectare. What is going to occur to my grandchildren? There isn’t a land.”
His solely requests of the federal government: to go to the positioning to see the situations for themselves and to permit factories in Run Ta Ek so residents can earn wages. When Dimo reported on this displacement, the federal government quietly responded by offering buses so residents may at the very least journey to Siem Reap metropolis for work. However extra is required: poor households nonetheless trip for hours below the burning solar, packed three to a motorbike, to succeed in the kids’s hospital in Siem Reap.
For now, it’s nonetheless the new season in Cambodia. Shacks line the dusty roads in a wierd, nonetheless quiet as households sit inside to keep away from the scorching solar. Canine sniff round Contact’s toes. One tears right into a shredded plastic bag, its meal for the day. The price of under-coverage is not only ignorance however human lives forgotten. “Overseas help is messy,” mentioned Vy, “however proper now, it’s essential to maintain the final impartial media alive in Cambodia.”
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