Taing said he wasn't worried, and that she shouldn't be either. His job, he said, was just another job. He wasn't going to get close enough to anyone to "touch" him or her. Cheam kept talking. Quit reporting, she begged. Come home. Work with me in our rice field. Help raise our daughter. After a while, she looked over and saw that Taing was asleep. The next day, Cheam woke relieved and unburdened. She went to the fields filled with a strange sense of peace.But Taing had not been strictly honest with her. He left the house that morning and drove east toward the Province of Kratie, on the border of what remained of Cambodia's eastern forests. He headed for a place awash in money from the illegal sale of land, gems, and wood, a place where dirty cops and soldiers ran shadowy, heavily armed logging networks. Out there, in the dark, something went wrong. Two days after Taing left home, local peasants found his body facedown in the muck of a logging road, a bullet in the back of his head.In Cambodia and across the remote forests of the world, a rising boom in the illegal sale of wood, land, and minerals has turned the environmental beat into a new sort of conflict journalism.
Taing Try's widow, Cheam Mom, holds her husband's press credential. Taing was murdered on October 12, 2014, while reporting on illegal logging operations in Kratie Province, Cambodia.
Two men ride a motorcycle near Snuol.
Sa Piseth, a journalist who accompanied Taing into the forest on the day he was murdered
Take Cambodia's 2001 logging ban, for example. The same year the Hun Sen government banned logging, it created "economic land concessions," or ELCs, which leased land for rubber, cassava, or palm-oil plantations. ELCs granted leaseholders the right to sell any wood they cleared, which meant that they almost immediately became de facto logging concessions, often in primary forest that had been fraudulently certified as wasteland. When the government finally prohibited ELCs under international pressure, it simultaneously created a loophole that obviated the entire ban. And the loggers themselves, Global Witness found in a 2006 investigation, were the very people whose job it was to protect the forests: the police and the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces. In fact, cutting down valuable trees and moving them across the border was one of the army's main jobs. In 2005, Yash Ghai, then the UN's special rapporteur on Cambodia, looked over the nation's government and delivered a damning verdict: that the country's lawlessness was not a matter of state weakness or accident but intentional policy. "The deliberate rejection of the concept of a state governed by the rule of law has been central to [Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party's] hold on power."Even when it doesn't result in prison time, a reliance on hustling to pay the bills also leads journalists to put themselves in dangerous situations for very little money.
Chea Lyhieng, head of the reporting collective Pride of the Khmer
'Cnhaya Angkor News,' a so-called ghost newspaper, known for its investigative journalism and sporadic publication schedule
On the same road where Taing was killed, a van prepares to haul away a load of illegally logged wood.
Cheam, Taing's widow
Coy Saveuth, a reporter, shows a photo he took of illegal lumber.
Coy points to the location where police found Taing's body. Photo by the author