We all know that large parts of the world have poor international media coverage. We also know that history is always in the making and that incidents that in the future may be recognized as decisive can at first pass by unnoticed.
Parts of South East Asia have for some time been poorly covered in Western media. However, possibly because Thailand is a magnet for tourists, we can follow the political crises there, while the tragic development as concerns democracy and human rights in countries like Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia are very sparingly covered – if at all. This is paradoxical; forty to fifty years ago these countries were at the centre of world politics. Especially Cambodia had the sympathy of a whole world until this sympathy began to wane in the aftermath of the attempts to reconstruct a whole society that had first been ravished by U. S. bombings and then by the Khmer Rouge’s regime of terror in 1975-79 that killed two to three million people. The destruction of a society’s whole infrastructure and the terror regime’s deliberate extinction of academics and intellectuals left the question unanswered as to how it is possible to reconstruct a whole civic society – and a whole literary tradition.
Amnesty International has drawn attention to the Cambodian Government’s increasingly harsh treatment of those in opposition and of human rights workers; a treatment that has led to indiscriminate arrests and show-trials. Reporters Without Borders place Cambodia as number 132 in their freedom of press index (out of 180 countries in total) and they note that in the country important media are completely controlled by the state and that journalists’ attempts to report about corruption and environmentally hazardous industries (such as the exploitation of forests) are being hindered. Just as in many other parts of the world without a free press, blogging and Facebook have come to play an increasingly important role – and therefore the Government, according to RUG, are creating laws to regulate and control the Internet.
