Cambodia: Report From a Stricken Land

by Henry Kamm

Offers observations of Cambodia that explain the nation's tragedy and complexity

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Asia, Politics, Audiobook, War, American

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Henry Kamm, born June 3, 1925, in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), was a correspondent for The New York Times. He reported for the Times from Southeast Asia (based in Bangkok), Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
In 1969, Kamm won the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting.
Kamm won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1978 for his coverage of the plight of refugees from Indochina.

Reviews

[Yigal Zur · Rating 4 out of 5]

what a report of Cambodia long tragedy. i read while i was writing Passport to Death and my heart was bleeding. and i know Cambodia but not with such deep insight

[Cav · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Since 1970, when it was plunged into the Indochina War, which had begun with the Vietnamese rising against French colonial rule and lasted until the Communist victories in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in 1975, Cambodia has suffered the worst that this callous century has devised..."

Despite Cambodia fielding some important historical material, I did not enjoy the overall presentation. More below.

Author Henry Kamm was a German-born American correspondent for The New York Times. He reported for the Times from Southeast Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Henry Kamm:



The book opens with a preface that was a bit flat and slow. This proved to be a harbinger of the writing to follow. I am very particular about how readable my books are, and this one missed the mark for me here.

The quote from the start of this review continues:

"...It struggled through five years of bloody civil conflict with the destructive intervention of bellicose foreign powers, four years of a genocidal revolutionary regime, then liberation through invasion and a decade of military occupation by Vietnam, a hated and feared big neighbor, and throughout these years unceasing internecine warfare on its soil, continuing to this day."

The author lays out the scope of the book in this quote:

"What follows is an attempt to retrace the events of nearly three decades as seen by a reporter who was granted the privilege of being taken into the confidence of many Cambodians, men and women whom I admired and whose hopes for their country I shared, as well as others. I recall with infinite sadness those among them who paid with their lives for staying when they could have fled, before total darkness enveloped Cambodia for four years that have known no equal in history."

In one of the worst genocidal regimes in modern history, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge killed 1.5 to 2 million people from 1975 to 1979; some ~20-25% of Cambodia's population at the time. The country and its Socialist revolution became another addition to a long list of failed Communist shit holes, and another terrifying case study of how to fuck up your society in the worst way possible. That so many of its citizens took place in the rampant and widespread persecution, arrests, and even murders of their fellow countrymen is a sobering look into the depths of the human condition...

Unfortunately, and further to what I wrote above, the telling of this terrible story was just not up to snuff. I did not like much of the author's writing style here. I found large parts of the book long-winded and dry. I found my finicky attention wandering numerous times. If the book were any longer, I would have put it down. A shame, as the writing here is no doubt of important historical record...


******************

I did not particularly enjoy Cambodia. The writing was just too lackluster to hold my attention.
2 stars.

[Sequoyah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a good journalistic history of Cambodia from the 60’s to the late 90’s. Kamm was one of those journalists who were in the right place at the right time to cover what turned out to be one of, if not the, biggest tragedy of the 20th century. He arrived in Cambodia right before the first dominoes were tipped over, and was in a place to cover—as much as he could—the highest and lowest levels of each phase of the Cambodian tragedy.

I found out here that this tragedy did not just consist of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge’s genocide of one quarter of their own people, but of multiple phases of self-destructive incompetency at every level of society. Kamm, along with the rest of the world (besides the CCP which has almost totally bankrolled every Cambodian death), were unable to get inside Cambodia after its fall to the Khmer Rouge until the Vietnamese Army took control of Phnom Penh, but he was there before and after, covering the farce that is the Cambodian state.

When I say that this was the worst tragedy in the 20th century, more so than other genocides of the century, it is because both the perpetrators and the victims were all Khmer peoples and no other loss of life is comparable except for the Belarusian Soviet Republic during WW2 (also 1/4 of the population)—only that was a result of war. This was the result of purges from vindictive peasants who wanted to wipe out any semblance of knowledge except for that of prehistoric agriculture. The cherry on top of the millions of dead is that almost no one was punished. The Khmer Rouge leaders were integrated back into the (inept) government. A government that for decades after the fall of the Khmer Rouge continued to suck the life out of their people for greed and power. They may have stopped mass murdering their own people, but they allowed—through political conflicts and racial hatred of the Vietnamese—famine and economic corruption to further destroy the Cambodian people. There is absolutely no one to blame but those Cambodians in power throughout these phases.

You could drop a bomb on Phnom Penh and you still wouldn’t hit a person who was both competent and had integrity.

In the very last part of the book, where Kamm is trying to come up with a solution to the self-perpetuating tragedy, he mentions something I was thinking the entire time: Cambodia needs to become the ward of the international community. I know this is the late 90’s that he wrote this, but even in Sebastian Strangio’s In the Dragon’s Shadow, Cambodia in the late 2010’s is barely a functioning state that could be called an Asian Somalia, and where there is a functioning government it is only held together inside the left-breast pocket of China. Honestly, Cambodia is one of the prime examples of why national self-determination should be a privilege and not a right under the United Nation’s Charter. Even if Cambodia was to become an exclave territory of China, the Cambodian’s would suffer less than under their own incompetent statesmen—a direct consequence of multiple generations of uneducated and the purging of the once educated.

This was a good, thought provoking book. This story can make one highly pessimistic for the possibilities of Man: it only took a few months to destroy all human progress in Cambodia. It reminded me how lucky Americans have been to have had a government created by a group of the most prudent and intelligent statesmen of their time; nearly a miracle when comparing the founding fathers to the political leaders in the developing world where corruption not only exists (like it does in all states(man and his vices are invariably intertwined with governance)) but is the state itself.

[Liv Townsend · Rating 3 out of 5]

Super comprehensive and a great overview of recent Cambodian history - can see why Kamm's journalism was pretty groundbreaking at the time. But, there's a slightly patronising distance in the way he talks about Cambodian people, and it feels very detached from their lived experiences.

[Jacqueline Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was expecting a book dominated by Pol Pot not so, and the before and after is just as complex to grasp. A country failed by so many internal and external "leaders" but still has something special about it.

[Bobby Daugherty · Rating 2 out of 5]

Depressing run down of how a small impoverished country is used as a lowly pawn by a series of more powerful governments.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the book. I thought that the information in the book was solid. The author was fair in his discussion of the participants. It was a subject that I had a general understanding of but did not know many of the details. The interviews between the author and the key players and the author's firsthand observations were critical in making the book a good one. The thing that I did not like is some of the jumping back and forth that occurred in the book. This made it seem a bit muddled.

Despite the shortcomings of the book, I recommend it to anyone interested in Cambodia and Vietnam after the departure of American ground troops in the mid 1970s.

[Jonah Breslow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kamm documents a bleak history of the Cambodian people from their unfortunate position between the ancient warring nations directly to their west and east (Siam and Vietnam) to their brief apathetic interlude with the UN. You get to read the rich history of Cambodia’s position during the Vietnam war with Sihanouk as the king, the genocide of the ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia, the coup that brought the weak American apologist government of Lon Nol into existence, Pol Pot’s genocidal communism, UNTAC’s utter failure to achieve any peace in the region, and the hopeless aftermath of nearly 50 years of violence. Cambodia is a socio-political theatre that proves to be a poignant warning of the importance of trustworthy and ethic political institutions, of the care we must take in considering any politician who speaks of “revolution,” and the unending need to take care of ourselves because relying on others is a fast-track to failure.

I visited Cambodia a few years back to see the awe-inspiring temples of Angkor. Unfortunately, I knew almost nothing of the recent history of Cambodians. It is indeed quite surreal to see all these smiling southeast Asian faces knowing that they have little if anything at all to smile about.

[Ian Humphries · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a child Cambodia featured on the news a lot. I never really understood what was going on other than people were dying and the man to blame was Pol Pot. A popular children's TV programme at the time called Blue Peter had fund raising campaigns to help the starving people, so this far off place really stuck in my mind. But as time goes on the news cycle moves on and for years I heard nothing about Cambodia. So when I saw this book in a charity shop I was intrigued and it doesn't disappoint. Kamm gives a broad overview of recent Cambodian history, obviously the book written in 1998 is now out of date, but crucially it covered from my point of interest the rise and fall of Pol Pot. It's a competent journal of events without going into too much detail which is a shame as I have questions. Kamm's affection for Cambodia comes through along with his despair at its leaders, understandable for such a neglected country. A solid overview of events.

[solo · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5★ rounded down. written by a journalist, rather than a historian, which proved to be a drawback. fairly broad in terms of scope: from before the Khmer Rouge until the late '90s, but relatively shallow - and it's a slim volume. largely based on author's own coverage and interviews, though, AFAICT, he's fluent in French, not Khmer. given the dearth of non-fiction, non-memoir-of-survivor books on the subj accessible to me (and in general, actually) this had to do, but this was clearly not enough. got to find a way to grab Becker, or something...

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very enlightening analysis by a professional reporter who personally witnessed the history that he's covering in the book. The book covers roughly the 1970s-1990s. Most of the Cambodian history books I've read focus on the Khmer Rouge years or the present time (2010 to the present). I enjoyed learning more about the 1980s-1990s.

When the book was published in 1998, Cambodia was still realing from the affects of the Khmer Rouge genocide and the 1997 coup. The future looked a bit bleak. Right about that time, however, the country began a remarkable 20+ years of growth, averaging around 7% GDP growth per year. It's interesting to see how far the country has come.

[Nat Kidder · Rating 4 out of 5]

More a series of personal vignettes than a straightforward historical narrative, Mr. Kamm covers Cambodia's tortured history from Sihanouk's growing problems in the late 1960's to Hun Sen imposing a one-party state in the late 1990's.

Not smoothly written, but the personal testimonies, particularly of the Khmer Rouge survivors, are compelling. Particularly insightful was the incompetence and apathy shown by Lon Nol and his associates during the first civil war, traits on display even as their government's plight grew ever more desperate.

[David Cuatt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well written account covering decades of turbulence in Cambodia. Covers the time period before and after the Vietnam war, with an emphasis on Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot. A tragic yet fascinating time period with militarily and economically weak Cambodia facing foreign invaders and internal conflicts. A very good read for anyone wishing to get a good overview of this complex period written by someone with extensive firsthand knowledge.

[Nathan Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

While a bit anectdotal in nature, it nonetheless, is a powerful firsthand account of many of the politics of Cambodia. The 1970-1975 period of the Lon Nol government was particularly rich. The book covers politics in detail from the 1960s until 1990s. While the Khmer Rouge are discussed, it is not the primary focus of the book, so a different angle from many books on the "stricken" past of Cambodia.

[Evelien · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have read many books about the subject, but most of them were perspectives of survivors (first they killed my father, stay alive my son,...) so this was a completely different format to me, and while I found it interesting, it didn't move me.
However I have learned a lot more from this book than from many others, so there is that.

[John Cramer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A concise and readable look at Cambodia. The book briefly touches on the broad history of this troubled country, and from there, covers the author's time in Cambodia during the turbulent 70s forward. Worthy and enjoyable throughout.

[Court · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kamm’s book is now 20+ years out of date, and some of his predictions about Cambodia’s economic growth in the Hun Sen era have not panned out, but this remains one of the the best analyses of the Lon Nol era that cleared the way for Pol Pot’s regime. L

[Megan Alford · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to the audiobook, and it was difficult to track who was who for some of the book. It is an incredibly sad story told by a journalist who was on the ground before the genocide and again after. This was written in the late 90’s, and even at that time, there was no happy ending.

[Bud Chapman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book on the history and current events in Cambodia

[Петр Федичев · Rating 4 out of 5]

it's all complicated (c)

[Ian Hefele · Rating 4 out of 5]

Got dry at times, but felt like a good overview of what happened in this beautiful country.

[Robert Costin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book, over 20 years old now but still riveting. I’m travelling through Cambodia at the moment and it’s been a great help in understanding this wonderful but stricken country.

[Chris Schaffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent!

[Ryker Peene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Top tier piece of Journalism

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative reporting

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

I knew virtually nothing about Cambodia, now I know a little. So much human suffering and many of the usual culprits: colonialism, imperialism, corruption, incompetence and communism.

[Pavel Lipski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book was hard, as I've lived in Cambodia for the past 7 years.

But it gave me the necessary context to understand the present situation.

[pierre bovington · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written by a journalist, often the best writers of history, given they were watching things unfold.
Kamm was a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, enlisted with the US Army, in
1943, and became an interpreter at the War Trials.
Picked up the New York Times, armed with 3 languages, he became a Foreign correspondent in SE Asia and Russia.
This is one of the 2 books he wrote of his experiences.
It is necessary to take note of a book's title before reading nonfiction, reporters report, they don't tell stories.
Pol Pot is mentioned of course. What I found interesting is many of Kamm's predictions came true. Hun Sen survived as a Khmer Rouge member and went on to be Prime Minister.
One of the best books on this largely ignored part of history.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book's greatest virtue is its concision: Kamm knows how to pack about 60 years of Cambodian history (1940-1998) into a compact and readable volume. This is impressive given the politically complex insanity which slowly unraveled the country in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Its weakness is how superficially it explores the working of the Khmer Rouge regime. But then, it is more concerned with how Cambodia has been victimized by outside powers that by itself. And Kamm never visited Cambodia during the KR years and doesn't have the research to back up a deep look at them.

Still, this has to be one of the best short looks at modern Cambodia. Its conclusion, written in 1998, is extremely depressing: Kamm says that an internationally-created government (i.e., the UN) must rule Cambodia for a generation to begin to heal the country and demonstrate how democratic institutions operate. Tough love, but necessary, he says.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the work of a lifetime, by Henry Kamm. His depth of experience and knowledge of the central players, over a course of more than 40 years, makes this a rivetting read.

This is great, in-depth journalism, which provides a sweeping overview of the tragic fall of Cambodia from the 1950s until the late 1990s. While it is an intensely sad book, and provides little reason for hope at the end (in the 2011 afterword), it is a must read in order to have a basic understanding of the country.

I have immense respect for Henry Kamm after reading this book. One of the things that makes it so poignant, in light of the Khmer Rouge atrocities,is his own early childhood history of being raised as a Jew in Germany.

Warning: The book ends in 1998 and while it has a second publishing date of 2011, it has not been updated in 2011--just the inclusion of a 5-6 page Afterword.