Beehive Radio founder Mam Sonando is furious. He barks across his dim office to his secretary.
“I asked you to put the outgoing letters back in the file!”
It’s a letter to Prime Minister Hun Sen that’s gone missing. The letter asked the premier to investigate alleged land grabbing along the Vietnamese border.
The letters are an effort to get the government’s side of the story. Mam Sonando needs Hun Sen’s response to balance the interviews he’s done with villagers who live near the border. He wants to be fair.
“Some ignorant people, they say I’m not neutral, that I’ve interviewed only the people who are the victims of this, but never the top government officials,” he says.
It’s a principled stand typical of the renegade radio DJ. Although he once led the Beehive party, Mam Sonando says his partisan days are behind him. All he wants to do now, he says, is build an independent media.
“For the sake of an independent media, I won’t participate in the 2003 national elections,” he said.
Beehive runs on Mam Sonando’s private money and has teetered on the verge of bankruptcy for most of its existence. A great way to increase audience share and revenue, he says, was to carry the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia broadcasts.
“VOA and RFA want to broadcast through my station because they know many people listen to it, they know my station is independent and only broadcasts the truth,” he says.
Last month, Minister of Information Lu Laysreng sent Mam Sonando a letter demanding he dump the broadcasts from the US or face having his station shut down. The government says VOA and RFA don’t have licenses to broadcast in the country.
Mam Sonando is no stranger to controversy and sometimes, it seems, he goes out of his way to create it.
The 60-year-old is one of the few French-educated Cambodians of the pre-war era to have survived the Pol Pot regime—because he was abroad. He’s one of fewer still to have returned to his native land.
His experiences in France made all the difference, Mam Sonando says. The French government forbade foreign students from working, which forced many—including, in 1969, the young photography and cinema student—into a life underground.
“I struggled for 10 years to work to pay for my studies,” he said. “Sometimes, I ate bread from the garbage.”
After graduation, he worked for an advertising company, which sent him around the world on photo shoots. From there, he went from one post to another in Europe, working as the president of the Paris Restaurant and Bar Association, and later as an insurance company executive.
In 1994, after 30 years away, Mam Sonando returned to Cambodia, where he won permission to set up his radio station.
Beehive began as a way to teach Cambodians, long locked into fratricidal isolation, about the world at large. The station carried foreign songs, with a sprinkling of traditional Khmer works and open requests.
“My only thought was to bring other traditional music of other countries to teach young Cambodians, because at the time, there were not many people going abroad to study,” he says.
Mam Sonando’s long, on-again, off-again battles with the government didn’t begin until the July 1997 fighting. That year, soldiers loyal to then-Second Prime Minister Hun Sen broke into Beehive’s studio, making off with $60,000 in equipment. Mam Sonando is still bitter about the theft.
“Hun Sen promised to refund the money, but I still haven’t received it. The prime minister doesn’t keep his promises,” he says.
After the fighting, Mam Sonando changed the radio’s content from general cultural fare to politics. Soon after, he formed the Beehive Democratic Society Party.
“When I realized that the nation’s leaders used politics to serve their own interest, that they didn’t serve the people, that the country doesn’t have enough freedom for itself, I decided to form a political party,” he says.
Though he is declining to run for national office next year, Mam Sonando says nothing is different in Cambodia to change his mind about its politics.
“The Kingdom cannot control itself,” he says.
With the Beehive party’s collapse in the 1998 general elections, Mam Sonando says he remains solely focused on making his station the voice of the people. Carrying the American outlets, he claims, was a way to meet that goal.
The issue—although it has diffused in recent weeks—hasn’t gone away; nor is it likely to.
Experts and observers say access to the media will be one of the most critical issues of next year’s general elections. Almost all of the electronic media is controlled by the
government, and critics have long maintained that their broadcasts are little more than propaganda.
For Mam Sonando, the importance of a free media stretches far beyond the elections. VOA and RFA, he says, are two of the only truly independent broadcast outlets in Cambodia.
“The two stations are very important for the people. Most Cambodian people don’t have the money to buy newspapers and some are illiterate,” he says. “Now in this country, all the other radio stations broadcast only what the government wants, contrary to what the people want to listen to.”
The station, Mam Sonando says, is only his small way of giving back to the country. It is a way, he says, of dealing with a long-lost dream.
“I am a Cambodian,” he said. “I thought about Cambodia for more than 30 years.”
