A Cause — and Questions — in Cambodia

Chut Wutty in February. (Photo: Mathieu Young)

Mr. Chut Wutty. (Photo: Mathieu Young)

Chut Wutty burned wood felled by illegal loggers (Photo: Mathieu Young)

A rubber plantation owned by the Vietnamese company PNT, taken from a motorcycle pursued by the military police and private security (Photo: Mathieu Young)

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May 5, 2012
By MATT MCCANN
The New York Times

“The government would say this is a protected land, and he’d say ‘Yeah, the chain saws are louder than the law,’ ” Mr. Young said. “He was dangerous to the ruling elite, and to the international companies — he was the most capable and the most organized.”

A little more than a week ago, the Cambodian forest activist Chut Wutty died under circumstances for which officials have already provided three different accounts.

He was with two journalists in the Cardamom Mountains in Cambodia, taking photos and collecting evidence of illegal logging when he was stopped by the military police. There was an altercation, and somebody opened fire. Mr. Chut Wutty, who carried a pistol with him because of frequent harassment and death threats, was shot, and a military police officer was killed as well. The two journalists with Mr. Chut Wutty, according to reports, dived for cover and were unable to witness the actual shooting.

Mathieu Young, 30, a Los Angeles-based photographer, spent several days in February with Mr. Chut Wutty, who showed him several sites of illegal logging, places he had been taking snapshots, recording data, confiscating chain saws and burning ill-gotten timber. Mr. Young was traveling with the Cambodian journalist Vannarin Neou, a fixer and translator, and Allie Hoffman of the Pari Project. Of particular interest this trip was Prey Lang, claimed to be one of the last vast old-growth forests of Southeast Asia, home to large numbers of indigenous people and a trove of biodiversity.

Mr. Chut Wutty, head of the Natural Resource Protection Group, had impressed on Mr. Young how vulnerable — and enticing for well-financed interests — the forests are, and how various private companies worked in concert with — and often with direct assistance from — the government to install huge illicit logging operations.

“All these foreign companies that are just strings of letters,” Mr. Young said, “To the locals, they’re all called ‘the company, the company, the company.’”

They arrive, he said, set up, and exploit the resources and individuals in reach: not only clearing and mining the land, but also employing locals to collect resin or cut trees. Mr. Young explained that though the government would say it was protecting land — for the sake of its natural resources, for the sake of the indigenous people in those protected areas — secretly, sometimes brazenly, it allowed lucrative concessions to be taken by a monolithic front of powerful, mysterious companies.

“You can hear chain saws going everywhere,” Mr. Young said. “It’s pretty devastating to see the scale of the deforestation. It’s happening all over the country.”

His photographs show Mr. Chut Wutty amassing evidence to bring a large lawsuit to the government. Some of them were taken while riding motorbikes that Mr. Young, his interpreters, guides and other activists would take from site to site, sometimes being chased by military police or company security.

Even before the shooting, Mr. Young had an impression of Mr. Chut Wutty as a charismatic, though almost militant, leader.

“He was a fearless individual,” he said. “He had no fear of these people.”

Mr. Young said that Mr. Chut Wutty’s appeal was not merely his passion, but that “he had this eloquent way of speaking about it.”

“The government would say this is a protected land, and he’d say ‘Yeah, the chain saws are louder than the law,’ ” Mr. Young said. “He was dangerous to the ruling elite, and to the international companies — he was the most capable and the most organized.”

He added: “The more that comes out about his death, the more murky it gets.”

On Tuesday, the United Nations human rights office called for an investigation, citing the “lack of clarity about what exactly happened,” and noting that there had been many recent cases of violence and threats to activists in Cambodia.

As the investigation proceeds, the future of Prey Lang and its people is also murky. Acknowledging the seemingly inevitable encroachment of these companies, the people of Prey Lang have ratcheted down their demands.

“These people are afraid for their culture, afraid for their livelihood,” Mr. Young said. “They ask, ‘When will these companies come to my home?’ At this point, all they’re asking for is an opportunity to co-manage the space.”

It is a despairing set of challenges — fighting well-supplied and well-financed companies that are backed by the muscle and unofficial imprimatur of the government — challenges that would give a leader of sturdiest determination pause. But Mr. Chut Wutty never saw the cause as unwinnable.

“This was a fight he was willing to A) die for, and B) and more importantly, this was what he was going to live for,” Mr. Young said. “Now there seems to be a rallying cry around his death, not to let his death go in vain and to get his work carried out.”

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