John Pilger, crusader journalist and documentary maker, dies at 84

Johannes Pilger, a sleazy foreign correspondent and documentary filmmaker who based his often righteous anger on injustices around the world, such as the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia and human rights abuses in East Timor, died on December 30 in London. He was 84.

His son, Sam, said the cause of death at a hospital was pulmonary fibrosis.

A tireless critic of Western imperialism and a voice for the voiceless, Mr. Pilger was comfortable with his role as a journalistic provocateur. He once derided impartiality as “a euphemism for the consensual view of established authority.”

But he was sometimes criticized for tailoring his reporting to fit his left-wing worldview — that United States foreign policy had often helped create misery around the world.

Mr. Pilger (pronounced PILL-jer), with blond surfer looks, was one of the first journalists to enter Cambodia after Vietnam ousted Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in 1979, ending his nearly four-year reign of terror, during which about two million people died. .

His reporting from there filled almost an entire issue of The Daily Mirror, the British newspaper for which he had worked since 1963, and it formed the basis of his best-known documentary, 'Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia', directed by David Munro.

In that film, Mr. Pilger takes viewers along in a poignant way 52 minute guided tour of what he called the “human hemorrhage,” depicted in scenes showing the many unburied skulls and bones lying in killing fields; genocide survivors who remembered in detail how they had been tortured; former Khmer Rouge soldiers admit to killing hundreds of fellow Cambodians; and children and adults dying of malnutrition and anthrax poisoning due to lack of medicine.

Mr. Pilger left little doubt about whom he blamed for Cambodia's vulnerability to the ruthless Khmer Rouge: President Richard M. Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, architects of the secret bombing of Cambodia in 1969 and, a year later, the invasion of the country by the United States and South Vietnam.

“The bombing was their personal decision, illegal and secret,” Mr. Pilger said calmly at the beginning of the film. “They bombed Cambodia, a neutral country, back to the Stone Age.”

“Year Zero” was one of dozens of documentaries he made while also writing for The Daily Mirror and other publications, including The Guardian.

His honors include a Peabody Award in 1989 “Cambodia: Year Ten,” a documentary about conditions in the country ten years after the departure of the Khmer Rouge; an International Emmy in 1991 for “Cambodia: The Betrayal” (1990), who exposed deteriorating conditions in the country and tracked arms shipments to the Khmer Rouge; and the Sydney Peace Prize in 2009, for holding governments to account for human rights abuses.

But the praise was tempered by criticism of his style – that he subordinated journalism to advocacy, leading to some notable errors and questionable claims.

Mr. Pilger lost a libel suit over his claim in “The Betrayal” that British agents trained the Khmer Rouge. A story about a young Thai girl who was forced into slavery until Mr. Pilger rescued her turned out to be untrue.

“Pilger's reporting, especially on television, has sharply divided the journalistic world,” wrote British journalist Jon Snow in a review in The Observer of “In the Name of Justice” (2001), a book by Anthony Hayward about the documentaries of the Mr Pilger . “There was a loyal minority who shouted, 'Thank God for Pilger,' and the vocal majority who condemned his partisan politics and campaign style as 'too much' and 'just not done.'”

John Richard Pilger was born on October 9, 1939 in Bondi, New South Wales, Australia, the son of Claude and Elsie (Marheine) Pilger. His mother was a teacher, his father a carpenter and trade unionist. John started a student newspaper with a friend at the age of 12.

After a four-year journalism apprenticeship with Australian Consolidated Press, a newspaper company, Mr Pilger became a reporter for The Daily and Sunday Telegraph in Sydney in 1958. He later freelanced in Italy and worked for Reuters in London until he was hired by The Mirror in 1963, where he stayed until 1986.

He began his parallel career making documentaries in 1970 with “Vietnam: The Quiet Mutiny,” about the disintegrating morale of American troops in Vietnam.

His other documentaries include Thalidomide: The Ninety-Eight We Forgot (1974), about uncompensated victims of the drug that caused birth defects; “The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back” (1985), the story of the mistreatment of Aboriginal people in his homeland; and “Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy” (1994), about the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, in which witnesses described mass murders.

The Timor film was praised by columnist Anthony Lewis in The New York Times for offering “much new material on the role of Britain, Australia and the United States in aiding Indonesia and whitewashing the invasion.”

But Mr. Pilger occasionally got into trouble. In 1982, he wrote in The Mirror that he had purchased an 8-year-old slave girl, Sunee, in Bangkok, insisting that she was one of many children in Thailand forced into forced labor in sweatshops, as domestic servants or into prostitution. .

The illegal deal he got – for £85, stated on a receipt – was to keep the girl for a year without paying wages. He didn't keep her and gave her back to her mother.

The story received enormous attention, but it was untrue: another journalist discovered that Sunee was a schoolgirl living with her family, that she had been found by a taxi driver hired by Mr. Pilger to find a young slave, and that the driver bribed the girl and her mother to play. Mr. Pilger said he was the victim of a hoax.

When conservative British journalist Auberon Waugh questioned the story in The Spectator, Mr. Pilger filed a lawsuit (how it was resolved remains unclear). Mr Waugh then coined the verb 'to pilger': 'to present information in a sensational way to arrive at a foregone conclusion', and 'to use emotive language to make a false political point'.

In 1991, Mr. Pilger lost a libel judgment against Christopher Geidt, a former British military intelligence officer, and another former army officer, after accusing Mr. Geidt in “Cambodia: The Betrayal” of training the Khmer Rouge to destroy landmines. lay. . Mr. Pilger apologized and the broadcaster, Central Independent Television, paid a financial settlement.

In addition to his son, Sam, from his first marriage to Scarth Flett, which ended in divorce, Mr. Pilger is survived by a daughter, Zoe Pilger, from a relationship with Yvonne Roberts; his partner, Jane Hill; and two grandchildren.

In recent years, Mr. Pilger has been a vocal supporter of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who faces extradition from Britain to the United States under the Espionage Act for obtaining and publishing secret government documents.

“Remember, Julian's pursuit is a measure of his performance,” Mr. Pilger said the Socialist World Website in 2022. “He informed millions of the government deceptions that too many people relied on; he respected their right to know. It was a remarkable public service.”