My Week In A Warzone: Covering The Conflict Between Thailand and Cambodia

I was aware when I headed to the Cambodian border to cover the conflict which had just flared up that there was an outside chance I might get shot at but it had never occurred to me that I would almost be arrested on suspicion of being a Cambodian spy.

I was sitting at home in front of my laptop in Bangkok when Thailand and Cambodia first started lobbing shells at each other. Being a bored freelance journalist whose most recent assignment had been on the slightly uninspiring subject of corporate social responsibility I felt the opportunity to actually go out and do some real reporting was too good to turn down.

It was 3pm on a Friday afternoon, the fighting had only just begun and there was a plane to Ubon Ratchatani leaving that evening so I swiftly packed my bag and took a taxi bound for the airport.

My girfriend was convinced I was going to get killed and burst into tears and begged me not to go, which I thought added quite a poetic touch to proceedings and made me feel a little bit like a proper war reporter. Of course in return for risking their necks proper war reporters generally get quite a competitive salary whereas I was basically funding the trip out of my own pocket on the off chance I could sell a story but it still beat another 10 hour shift in front of the laptop.

I had quickly consulted a map and knew that I needed to head to Kantharalak, a place which google assured me had at least a couple of hotels. I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to get there so I was delighted when a taxi agreed to take me straight from Ubon airport to Kantharalak for a price which seemed extremely competitive at the time but was probably double the going rate.

Floor space was at a premium at the refugee camp in Kantharalak ©James Goyder

My hotel was just a couple of hundred metres up the road from the place where all the refugees who had fled from the fighting were camped out. They were packed in to two buildings and floor space was at an absolute premium. Volunteers were on hand to serve up food but this was clearly not a satisfactory long term arrangement.

It quickly became apparent that there was very little prospect of finding anyone in the area who spoke any English. My Thai is very much rudimentary, good enough to ask questions but not necessarily good enough to understand the answers and I still have a 20 minute interview with a refugee on my dictaphone. One day I intend to find out what she actually said.

I woke up at the crack of dawn the following morning, rented a scooter and set off for the border. In the absence of a detailed map of the area my strategy was to head in the opposite direction from which the refugees had come. This decision was vindicated when I started seeing signs telling me I was heading towards Preah Vihear, the disputed temple which ultimately all the fuss was actually about.

There was no missing the house which had suffered the direct hit, even if there hadn’t been a TV van parked opposite. It had been absolutely obliterated and the cinders were still smoking. I hopped off my bike and took some shots. My biggest fear was that all of the relevant areas would be restricted but here I was standing in the remnants of a building which had been hit by a shell less than 24 hours ago.

The smouldering remains of a house in Ban Phum Saron after a direct hit by a Cambodian shell ©James Goyder

On the other side of the road there was some evidence of fire damage but I wasn’t sure exactly what had caused it. Fortunately I bumped into a touring party of locals who had either elected not to join the evacuation or had simply headed back into the danger zone in order to sate their curiosity and they took me on a guided tour of shell holes. One of them contained a jagged lump of flesh lying in a pool of blood which had once belonged to a 50 year old man, the only civilian to have been killed on the Thai side of the border. He must have been heading back from the fields when the shells struck.

There was no discernible reason why the Cambodian army should have targeted this particular area, which consisted  of a handful of houses on either side of the road. Given that more than ten shells had all landed within close proximity of each other they must have felt that something there was worth hitting although the longer I spent looking at these craters the less I believed that the Cambodians had any idea what, if anything, they were actually aiming for.

Just up the road was a school which had also taken a direct hit and had a gaping hole in the roof. Some classrooms behind the main building had been destroyed and I would become increasingly familiar with these images as the media gradually began to arrive on the scene and relay them around the world.

I set out to explore a bit further afield and eventually discovered a tiny track leading into some woods which seemed to have a surprisingly steady flow of military traffic heading in and out of it. A large people carrier pulled out and the soldiers made gestures to indicate that taking this particular turning was not a good idea.

I nodded to show my understanding, waved back and then waited until they were well out of sight to take the turning. I didn’t get very far because there were two more vehicles full of extremely apprehensive looking soldiers who also gestured for me to go away, an experience I would become increasingly accustomed to over the course of the next few days.

Given that the soldiers looked distinctly nervous I wasn’t particularly inclined to ignore their advice and decided to beat a dignified retreat. When I got back  to Kantharalak I did something which in four years as a freelance journalist I am happy to say I had never done before, I followed an ambulance. This decision actually paid dividends because the ambulance was only travelling a few hundred metres and was carrying the body of a young man who had lost his life just that morning, one of only two Thai soldiers to be killed in the conflict.

I sympathised for the soldiers carrying the body, it was clearly not an easy job and dropping a corpse in front of a large crowd of military top brass is not a move likely to enhance your chances of promotion. I felt even sorrier for the dead soldier, particularly when they presented his picture. He looked painfully young, only 20 as it turned out.

The body of a 20 year old Thai soldier is brought in from the battlefield ©James Goyder

The atmosphere at the temple was very convivial, the photographers were making no effort to switch off their phones and the high ranking officers and dignitaries were greeting each other like long lost friends. I imagined it would be a very different scene back in his hometown when the parents received the unwelcome news that their 20 year old son wasn’t coming home.

He had been hit by shrapnel at Por Makhua in the early hours of Saturday morning and by the time his body was being laid out in the temple that afternoon a ceasefire had already been announced. Everyone went to bed that night under the impression that the fighting was over but I still wanted to have another look at the place in the woods I had been turned away from which I would later discover was the track to Por Makhua.

It was another perfect day and it was very difficult to conjure up any sort of a sense of danger as I drove through the woods, even when I went through a couple of abandoned army checkpoints.

The border between Thailand and Cambodia is actually one of the more beautiful areas of the world when the two sides aren’t exchanging ordnance. A ceasefire was already in place and in the unlikely event that I inadvertently ended up between the lines I couldn’t see anybody mistaking a sunburnt white man on a scooter for an invading army.

There was plenty of evidence of military activity but no actual military and it was a little eerie, I managed to drive for about 15 minutes without seeing a soul. Then I saw something which got my attention, a column of smoke not too far ahead. I continued driving but I was now extremely alert and aware that this was almost certainly not somewhere that I was supposed to be.

I did finally encounter some signs of life, a manned checkpoint adjacent to a base with several vehicles. The soldier on duty confirmed that the smoke had been caused by a Cambodian shell and suggested, very politely, that I might like to go away.

Back in my hotel room I made plans to do just that and booked a flight back to Bangkok. Later that evening I decided to grab a bite to eat from a roadside stall and couldn’t help noticing that the previously quiet road now resembled a motorway at rush hour.

‘What’s going on, are all the refugees returning home because the fighting has stopped?’ I asked but no-one understood me. It took several similar conversations for me to work out that far from heading home these people were in fact fleeing. The Cambodians had attacked!

With the adrenaline coursing through my veins I hopped on my bike and headed at break neck speed towards the border, or this is what I would have done if I hadn’t got hopelessly lost. I had never attempted to leave Kantharalak after dark and ended up doing several frustratingly unnecessary laps of the town, totally losing my bearings before finally ending up on the road to Preah Vihear.

I drove until I came to a scrum of media who had gathered by a cross roads. A glance skywards confirmed what the fuss was all about. The Cambodians might have attacked but the Thais were retaliating with what looked like everything that they had got. Shell after shell sailed over our heads, some from closer to Kantharalak and others from the general direction of the destroyed buildings in Ban Phum Saron, which could go some way towards explaining why the Cambodians had targetted that particular area in the first place.

A shed near a temple in Ban Phum Saron suffers a direct hit from a Cambodian shell ©James Goyder

It was an awe inspiring sight although having seen first hand what happened when these things landed I couldn’t help but wonder what sort of devastation was being wrought on the other side of the border. Every now and again a vehicle full of civilians fleeing from the fighting would head towards us and be mobbed by the Thai media. After a while a truck with a prone soldier lying on his back passed through at high speed, then another.

I decided that, unless there was more fighting, I would head back the day after next. I had done a couple of live interviews for the BBC World Service but with all eyes on Egypt global interest in events anywhere else was almost non existent.

The only thing remaining for me to try and do was get some photos of Por Makhua where the most intense fighting was reported to have taken place. I knew roughly where it was although my inability to pronounce the name of the place was proving an impediment. There were pockets of people hanging around the evacuated areas and I stopped to ask one such group to point me in the right direction.

Someone immediately got on the phone to his friend who was a soldier and told me to wait. Ten minutes later two soldiers turned up on a motorbike. I told them that I was a journalist and wanted to reach Por Makhua and one of them got on the phone and made one phone call, and then another phone call, and then another. I couldn’t make out much except the word ‘nak khao’ (journalist) but I was becoming increasingly concerned about the number of official sounding conversations which were taking place on my account.

Another two trucks arrived, one containing slightly higher ranking soldiers and the other police. Everyone was being extremely friendly but there was now a crowd of about 15 people and the questions intensified. One of the men who I assume was a policeman looked inside my motorbike, checked the photos on my camera, phoned the woman I had rented the bike from and inspected my journalist’s card which was a little bit on the out of date side.

Eventually I was told to hand over the keys to my scooter and bundled unceremoniously into the back of a truck. I still had no idea where we were going but it soon emerged that we were on our way to Kantharalak police station which was not a development I felt particularly enthusiasic about.

At the police station the memory card from my camera was confiscated and a police officer proceeded to copy every single file from it including pictures of me and my girlfriend in Bangkok as well as the actual photos I had taken in the last couple of days.

I was then cross examined although once again the language barrier made this a laborious process. Eventually one of the soldiers, who had been friendly throughout, put his hand on my shoulder and told me it was OK and I had nothing  to worry about, or words to that effect.

I had not been particularly worried in the first place although his demeanour made me think that perhaps I should have been. During a discussion with some Thai reporters later that night it emerged that I had in fact been suspected of being a Cambodian spy and someone from Al Jazeera also told me that the army had been looking for a journalist who was suspected of passing information to the Cambodian army.

In hindsight I could suddenly see how my activities could clearly have been construed as consistent with espionage. I had been driving round some extremely remote areas taking photos of the places where the shells had actually landed and the military targets where presumably they were supposed to have landed.

Courts tend to take quite a dim view of acts of acts of espionage and even though I had been investigated and exonerated I didn’t want to push my luck any further and decided to head back to Bangkok at the earliest available opportunity. There was still the small matter of retrieving the scooter, I had absolutely no idea where it was but fortunately I had a photo of the policeman who I had handed the keys to.

Before I was whisked away to Kantharalak police station everyone, including the soldiers, had insisted that I pose for photos with them. Whether this was in the interests of national security or their own scrap books I don’t know but I had also got them to take a photo with my camera. Enquiries as to the exact whereabouts of the bike at Ban Phum Saron police station at first proved fruitless, there was no sign of it, but once I was able to show people the photo they realized straightaway that it was at Ban Don Ao police station.

Me with some soldiers and policemen shortly before being taken to the police station ©James Goyder

Despite the fact that I had now been issued with an official press pass the police at Ban Don Ao were still extremely suspicious of me and were highly reluctant to return the scooter. They finally handed over the keys but not before photographing and photocopying every imagineable item of evidence.

By this stage my appetite for further investigation was rapidly diminishing and I returned the bike and got the first bus back to Ubon.

I enjoyed my first foray into war reporting and was happy to have had the opportunity to work with the BBC but the whole trip had very nearly gone horribly wrong. I had envisaged I might encounter some problems as a foreign journalist covering a conflict but being accused of espionage was certainly not one of them.

The smouldering remains of a house in Ban Phum Saron after a direct hit by a Cambodian shell ©James Goyder

Recent Posts on The Foreign Desk - International dispatches from Independent correspondents -

• India’s parliament loses its sense of humour
• Refugees and scarce resources: A humanitarian crisis in West Africa
• Hilary Clinton clashes with Indian government trouble-maker
• Is there a plan to bring the last Mughal Emperor back to India?
• Khalil Dale - His life was one of love, not hatred.