Who Killed Haing Ngor?
Welcome to Who Killed Haing Ngor?
Welcome. This is the first episode of an experiment I’m trying in journalism – a real-time and hopefully crowdsourced - investigation into the murder of Haing Ngor.
Haing Ngor was a doctor, a political activist and an actor. He won an Oscar for his role in “The Killing Fields” – the movie released in 1985. He played the part of Dith Pran, the Cambodian reporter for “The New York Times.” Dith Pran worked alongside correspondent Sydney Schanberg covering the takeover of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge guerrilla group ten years prior to the film , in 1975.
The “Killing Fields” in part tells the story of the press and a few thousand Cambodians holed up in the French embassy, as the Khmer Rouge began their forced evacuation of Phnom Penh. After several days of extraordinarily intense negotiations, foreigners were allowed by the Khmer Rouge to leave, overland in truck convoys, to Thailand. Dith Pran was among the thousands forced to stay.
One reason Haing Ngor – who had never acted before - performed so well in the movie is that Ngor also escaped the Khmer Rouge, eventually settling in the US as a refugee, in Los Angeles, specifically. He told his own heartbreaking story of losing his wife and unborn child in the Khmer Rouge period in his memoir, “A Cambodian Odyssey.”
So Who Are the Khmer Rouge?
In the 1970’s – Communism was trending. By April 1975, next door in Vietnam, the fall of Saigon was fast approaching to Communist North Vietnam, and their fighters, the Viet Cong.
The international press in Vietnam famously dubbed Cambodia the “sideshow” to the main news story of the day: the American folly in Vietnam. Cambodia endured its own share of American folly – unfortunately with absolutely catastrophic results.
So this is a depressingly familiar set of moves that people will recognize from other places that the US and the CIA have dabbled. But first, the US orchestrated a coup d’état in 1970 to install in Cambodia a “friendly” government. President Nixon then sidestepped Congress and illegally invaded Cambodia from Vietnam. The goal was to look for Vietcong bases over the border. As Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger spearheaded a mission to carpet-bomb Cambodia. The goal was to destroy supply lines used by North Vietnam to supply the fighters further south. Those supply lines - known as the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” - criss-crossed in and out of Cambodia.
Not surprisingly, Cambodia turned away from the US and everything it stood for. Many joined forces with the Khmer Rouge, headed by its rarely seen leader, Pol Pot. (Want to see how many locations in Cambodia were bombed? Click here .)
ISIS OF THEIR DAY
In a very broad sense, you can think of the Khmer Rouge as the “ISIS” of their day. ISIS took territory across Syria and Iraq and tried to create what they called a “pure Islamic” state.
In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge tried to create a “pure” Communist state. Their inspiration was Mao Tse Tung’s Cultural Revolution in China, and the idea was a “classless” society, based on agriculture. But there’s no such thing as political purity. So just like ISIS, and Mao’s Red Guards, the Khmer Rouge were breathtakingly violent.
They forced every single Cambodian out of the cities and into the countryside to farm. Former officials, the wealthy, educated people, people who wore glasses, people whose hands were too soft - revealing they weren’t actually a “noble” peasant farmer – all got executed.
The results were absolutely catastrophic. The most conservative estimates put the number of dead at 1.7 million, from disease, forced labor, starvation, torture and execution. Other estimates go as high as 5 million. The Khmer Rouge were eventually forced from power in 1979.
But Pol Pot is up there with Mao, Stalin and Hitler as one of the worst war criminals of the 20th century.
The New York Times article on the murder; February 27, 1996
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1996/02/27/issue.html
LOS ANGELES
Let’s turn to Los Angeles, in 1996. Haing Ngor was murdered in what looked like a gang-robbery gone wrong. His Rolex was stolen. But he reportedly refused to give up a locket he wore, on a gold chain, containing a photo of his late wife. Three members of the LA gang the Oriental Lazy Boyz went to prison for killing him.
The FBI said there was no political connection to Ngor’s murder. But there are a lot of unanswered questions. Why didn’t the Lazy Boyz take Ngor’s wallet, which was filled with cash? The gang was known for car-jacking, so why didn’t they take Ngor’s Mercedes?
At this point, in 1996, Oscar-winning Ngor was activist and he was well known. He was pushing for an international war-crimes human rights tribunal to hold the Khmer Rouge accountable for the millions they killed.
It’s important to realize: the Khmer Rouge were still active in 1996. They were removed from power in 1979 – but that just started a civil war.
By 1996, the Khmer Rouge were isolated, and fraction of the force they were in the 1970’s. But they still had pockets of territory – and they punched above their weight in terms of propaganda.
Back in the 70’s, 80’s and into the 1990’s, short-wave radio was absolutely huge. I used to work for Voice of America, where it was said, “CNN is heard in the board-rooms. VOA is heard in the rice paddies.” In the developing world, before the internet and cellphones, when most people were far too poor to have television sets, short-wave radio was the absolute king.
Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge’s mysterious leader, had not been seen by outsiders since 1978. But KR Radio haunted Cambodia’s airwaves with propaganda broadcasts.The Khmer Rouge were constantly denouncing their enemies and pushing the narrative that they’d soon return to power.
That’s why some believe Haing Ngor’s murder was a political assassination, ordered by Pol Pot.
But there are other possibilities: perhaps he was murdered by someone else who would be threatened by both a Khmer Rouge tribunal and Ngor’s growing popularity, amongst the Cambodian ex-patriate community in Long Beach, a suburb of LA. Maybe it really was just a robbery.
My name is M.P. Nunan. I’m a journalist and former foreign correspondent. I got my start in Cambodia in the early 1990’s. And since then I have worked for VOA, NPR, CBC, the BBC and numerous other news outlets, and I often use “Patricia Nunan” as my byline.
I am still connected to many friends and colleagues I met when starting out in journalism in Cambodia, so I’ll be reaching out to them -- and anyone else -- who might be able to shed light on the murkiness surrounding Haing Ngor’s murder, and other unanswered questions.
This is a crowdsourced podcast, so if you have any information or details you think may be relevant, please reach out. If anyone knew Haing Ngor personally would like to contribute, please reach out. The best email is whokilledhaingngor@gmail.com
Thanks for listening.