John Pilger's Cambodian film
Return to Year Zero, award-winning journalist John Pilger's new documentary on Cambodia, has been screened in Britain. But it will apparently not be seen in Australia in the immediate future. According to a report by Greg Sheridan in the April 21 Australian, the ABC has decided not to screen the film.
The report quoted an ABC spokesperson as saying that the documentary "covered ground the ABC was already planning to cover itself. The ABC was devoting substantial resources to Cambodia in the run-up to the election and did not need to import a British film on the subject."
It is good to hear that ABC television plans to improve its sparse and superficial coverage of Cambodia. We will eagerly await the change. But planned, future, reporting is hardly a substitute for a documentary available now.
Moreover, the treatment of the issue in the Australian indicates that something more than a purely commercial decision is involved, at least in some minds. Sheridan (the Australian's foreign editor) openly editorialises in the front-page article that the ABC has made the right decision. The headline on the article is not something like "ABC decides not to show Pilger film" but "Pilger's Cambodia film deeply flawed".
Evidently feeling that this is insufficient, Sheridan takes another 84 column centimetres to attack a film that his readers, if he has his way, will never be able to see. Stripped of the unsubstantiated abuse that typifies a Murdoch hatchet job ("rubbish", "slippery", "tendentious", "falsehoods", "idiocy", "discreditable"), the piece reveals that Sheridan disagrees with Pilger's sharp criticism of the "peace plan" developed by the United Nations and Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans, and his condemnation of the role the United Nations has played in Cambodia since 1979.
Sheridan is of course entitled to his opinions, though his arguments are not likely to convince many, relying as they do on an appeal to "best intelligence estimates" by unnamed estimators as evidence for his central contention (that the peace plan was the best hope of preventing a return of the Khmer Rouge to power).
The point, however, is that even Gareth Evans now acknowledges that the peace plan is in trouble. The stakes for Cambodians are extremely high, and Australia, for good or ill, has already influenced and will probably continue to influence the outcome. People in this country ought to be able to see the film, read the criticisms of Sheridan or others, and decide for themselves. The hysterical tone and attempted overkill of the Australian coverage suggest that someone is afraid that the ABC will change its mind, or that another network will decide to screen Return to Year Zero. We hope that they do.