Cambodian Papers Wage War of Words : Media: Once the target of barbs in the local Cambodian newspaper, a community leader has responded with his own publication.

For four years Than Pok suffered the barbs published in Serey Pheap, one of America’s most widely read Cambodian-language newspapers.

There were articles accusing him of not doing much for the Cambodian community. And editorials implying that he and other Cambodian leaders were abusing the public trust. Then there was an editorial referring to him derisively as “the Lord Than Pok,” implying that he was interested only in his own self-aggrandizement and questioning his personal morals.

Finally Pok, executive director of United Cambodian Community, the country’s largest Cambodian social service agency, got mad. “The paper is too negative,” he said during a recent interview in which he adamantly denied all of the accusations. “We need much more positive reporting about the (Cambodian) community.”

Pok didn’t just write a letter to the editor. He started his own twice-monthly newspaper called Jati Khmer, which in English means “Cambodian Nation.” Just out with its third edition, the paper is being touted by its publisher as an upbeat alternative to the weekly Serey Pheap, which translates as “Freedom.” And despite the claims of both principals that they are not competing, the situation has all the earmarks of a Cambodian newspaper war.

“We are responding to a need,” said Pok, 48. “I don’t agree with the way they approach journalism.”

Narin Kem, the chain-smoking engineering student who publishes Serey Pheap, said: “I have no competition. People are smart enough to understand which paper they should read.”

In a sense, the battle is a classic confrontation between the forces of the establishment and those who would question its authority. Pok, a well-educated former Cambodian government official, has emerged since his 1973 arrival in the United States as a highly visible and often-quoted spokesman for the Cambodian community in Long Beach and beyond. Occasionally he travels to Washington to speak on Cambodian issues. And as head of the country’s largest Cambodian social service agency with an annual budget of $2.5 million, he is in a position to command money, power, influence and respect.

Kem, 37, lives in a different world. A part-time student of engineering and industrial technology at Cal State Long Beach, he worked briefly as a journalist before leaving Cambodia in the mid-1970s. Arriving in the United States in 1981 after living in Vietnam, he favors leather jackets and tends to share the decidedly anti-establishment sentiments of his countrymen who personally suffered under the brutal dictatorship of Pol Pot.

Kem started his paper on a shoestring in 1985 in order, he says, to provide an “independent and free” voice for the thousands of Cambodian refugees who had settled in Southern California. An estimated 40,000 of them live in Long Beach, giving the city the largest Cambodian population outside of Cambodia.

Beginning with 24 pages and 3,000 copies, Kem’s paper soon grew to a hefty 64 pages, achieved a national circulation of about 10,000, and, according to one recent survey, is seen by about 43% of the Cambodians living in Long Beach.

With the help of an eight-member staff, many of them idealistic volunteers, Kem publishes the paper from the cluttered office he shares with a Vietnamese tax accountant on Anaheim Street in the heart of the city’s Cambodian district. “We kept silent too long,” he said. “Even if the truth hurts, we have to say it.”

Part of the truth, according to Kem, is that much of the Cambodian leadership, both in Southern California and in Cambodia, is ineffectual. “They call themselves leaders,” he said, “but who voted for them? I’m a cynical person. (People) want me to take sides, but no leaders have my respect.”

Kem publishes a paper that is usually irreverent, often confrontational, sometimes sexually explicit, and generally reminiscent of the so-called “underground” weeklies that flourished in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Recent editions, for instance, have featured critical depictions, not only of the current Cambodian government, but of major elements of the guerrilla coalition attempting to overthrow it. In addition, there was a graphically illustrated love story by a local refugee, stories about atrocities in refugee camps, bits of homespun witticisms on life in America and satirical bits poking fun at journalists and politicians.

One recent cover even featured a cartoon caricature of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, leader of one of Cambodia’s insurgent factions, standing with a bottle of French Champagne in his pocket and holding a copy of Playboy magazine featuring a graphic depiction of a male sex organ.

Pok’s publication, by contrast, is cautious.

Its Dec. 15 inaugural edition led off with a front-page editorial by Pok promising to work toward the “healing, rebuilding and development” of the Cambodian community through love rather than hatred and patience rather than anger.

“There is so much negative reporting in the current Cambodian newspaper sowing mistrust and hatred among people,” Pok wrote in an English translation published two weeks later. “We propose to report positive achievement, promoting trust and friendship among people, working together for the betterment and progress of our community.”

The initial edition went on to feature essays on Cambodian literature and culture, analytical pieces on events in Cambodia, a staff-written poem in which a father advises his son on how to live in America while preserving his Cambodian roots, photographs of disabled children playing table tennis in a Cambodian refugee camp and a page containing pictures of glamorous-looking young women from Russia, Singapore and the Philippines.

Although the paper is published out of the Atlantic Avenue headquarters of the United Cambodian Community, Pok said, it is not affiliated with that organization nor with any political party or special interest. Instead, he said, it is owned by a private corporation under his leadership which puts out the 44-page publication with a skeleton staff and a desktop computer at a cost of about $3,000 per edition.

Some of that money comes from advertisements, Pok said. But most of it, he said, has come from the sale of $100 “shares” to Cambodians interested in supporting the paper which, so far, has a circulation of about 3,000.

“We try to be objective,” Pok said. “We try not to take sides.”

In keeping with that philosophy, Pok says, he will refrain from printing responses to any future barbs by Kem. Kem, on the other hand, seemed intent on escalating his attacks when, three days after the premier appearance of Jati Khmer, his newspaper devoted its entire cover to derisive caricatures of several local Cambodian leaders, including Pok, under an ambiguous headline that he translated as “Ambition, Ambition, Ambition, Ambition.”

“I think the so-called leaders are stupid,” Kem explained. “I stand for no one.”

Countered Pok: “I’m concerned about the community in general. We don’t need this kind of press.”