By MATT MCCANN More pictures at New York Times.
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.
Mathieu Young Chut Wutty in February.
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.”
Mathieu Young Mr. Chut Wutty.
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