Daring reporter Nate Thayer crossed jungles to interview Pol Pot

Restless, risk-taking Nate Thayer confronted Pol Pot with the unthinkable horror that was the Khmer Rouge in full communist flight.

Nate Thayer speaks at the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Bangkok after interviewing Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot in 1997. Picture: AFP

OBITUARY
Nate Thayer, journalist, born Washington DC, April 21, 1960. Found dead aged 62, Falmouth, Massachusetts, January 3.

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It is no surprise that woke warriors on Western campuses would prefer to cancel a debate – often violently – rather than subject their ideas to a contest. Future generations may come to call our age as The Unenlightenment. We knew things, but we lost them. Only the unenlightened could adhere their hands to beacons of Western accomplishment demanding a stop to oil production – using glues made from fossil fuels.

NateThayer, who failed with university, was determined to bypass that blabber.

He didn’t take risks; they were not so much there for the taking; he stole them with a Purple Heart fearlessness that saw him quite recklessly chase the truth. And sometimes he found it.

When, after years of living in Cambodia and collecting contacts most people would avoid, he sat with the genocidal dictator Pol Pot, who confirmed to Thayer the banal certainty behind the purest communism; it was an angry, self-loathing system in the prosecution of which the individual was sacrificed, over and over again.

There was nothing bucolic about Pol Pot’s agrarian socialism, a merciless fusion of Das Kapital and Mao’s Little Red Book. The Khmer slogan, “to spare you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss”, sums it up. Perhaps a quarter of Cambodians were killed during his four-year revolution starting in 1975. That’s 2000 people a day, often buried in fields to be fertiliser.

Still, Pol Pot had Western sympathisers, particularly on campus, notably University of London academic Malcolm Caldwell. In 1978, he and Washington Post reporter Elizabeth Becker were summoned to meet him.

Becker was first. Pol Pot refused questions, instead delivering a rambling two-hour lecture on how Cambodia-Vietnam friction would result in a superpower struggle in Asia, with NATO victorious alongside him.

Caldwell’s private session followed. He returned exhilarated to the hotel, but had perhaps asked one question too many. They shot him dead hours later – a Marxist manner of dealing with inconvenience.

It was a brave reporter who volunteered to confront Pol Pot. Thayer – whose father had been ambassador to Singapore – had been working across Myanmar and Thailand since 1994, mainly in areas of guerrilla conflict, reporting for Soldier of Fortune magazine and Associated Press before settling in Cambodia to write for the Far Eastern Economic Review. He once narrowly escaped death on a mined road, but the men ­either side of him were killed. He was twice deported, his dispatches about rampant corruption annoying the country’s dictator, Hun Sen.

In between, Thayer would ­return to the US from time to time for other jobs, but no employer could tame him, in much the same way he was expelled from several schools as a child. Still, he made it to the University of Massachusetts, but it did not work out.

At one point he led a mission to find a kouprey, the wild forest ox last seen in Cambodia in 1970. It failed; they are probably­ ­extinct.

By 1997 is was widely believed Pol Pot had died, but doubters were none too keen to look for him. Thayer negotiated with Khmer Rouge guerrillas who said they could take him to their leader. He travelled that July to silently witness the curious people’s tribunal trial of one of the century’s biggest mass murderers. A nonplussed Pol Pot sat against a tree, rocking back and forth, disinterested in the proceedings and ­refusing to speak.

Thayer returned to the jungle soon after and this time Pol Pot wanted to defend himself and his strain of communism. The melancholy but unrepentant leader grasped Thayer’s arm for support before sitting in a clearing. He accepted the Khmer Rouge “made mistakes”, but he couldn’t understand the fuss: “I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people. Even now, and you can look at me, am I a savage person? My conscience is clear.”

On ordering the murder months earlier of former senior comrade Son Sen, during which Son Sen’s wife, children, grandchildren and other family members, 13 people in all, were murdered and their bodies crushed by a truck, Pol Pot said: “You know for the other people, the babies, the young ones, I did not order them to be killed. For Son Sen and his family, yes, I feel sorry for that.”

Pol Pot died after becoming aware of a Thayer report that he was to be handed over to the US. The reporter insisted he had poisoned himself. Thayer wrote a never-published book of all this, Sympathy for the Devil, and ­reportedly always carried of copy of the manuscript with him.