Henry Kamm, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times who covered Cold War diplomacy in Europe and the Soviet Union, famine in Africa, and wars and genocide in Southeast Asia, died on Sunday in Paris. He was 98.
Mr. Kamm’s son Thomas confirmed the death, at St. Joseph’s Hospital.
From the continent he had fled at 15 to escape Nazi persecution during World War II, to the battlefields and killing fields of what was then known as Indochina, Mr. Kamm was the consummate star of The Times’s foreign staff: a fast, accurate, stylish writer, fluent in five languages, with global contacts and reportorial instincts that found human dramas and historical perspectives in the day’s news.
His early displacement deeply influenced his 47-year career with The Times, Thomas Kamm, a former Wall Street Journal correspondent, said in an email in 2017. It “explains the interest he always showed throughout his journalistic career for refugees, dissidents, those without a voice and the downtrodden,” he said.
Henry Kamm won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for articles on the plight of refugees from Southeast Asia who fled their war-torn homelands in 1977 and braved the South China Sea. Many sailed for months in small, unsafe fishing boats, suffering horrendous privations, only to find themselves unwanted on any shore.
In interviews with hundreds of the refugees — “boat people,” as they were called, who had sought safety in the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and Japan — Mr. Kamm wrote of the despair of men, women and children whose escape from probable death had led to ordeals of near starvation, terrors of drowning on the high seas and crushing rejection as the world turned them away.
“In the sad picture of the wanderings on land and sea of tens of thousands of refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia since the end of the Indochinese war two years ago,” Mr. Kamm wrote from Singapore, “nothing exemplifies so fully all the ironies and pain of people who thought they were choosing freedom and wound up in a limbo of hostility or indifference from those from whom they expected help.”
A decrepit freighter riding at anchor out in Singapore Harbor, he wrote, was laden with 249 Southeast Asian refugees who had boarded the ship in Thailand and had lived on its open deck, through pitching storms and merciless days of baking sun, for four months, finding no haven in port after port.
“At first they waited to go to a country that would give them a home,” Mr. Kamm wrote. “Then they lowered their hopes to finding a country that would recognize their existence and let them ashore at least temporarily until one government or another decided to let them come to stay.”
Because of Mr. Kamm’s reports, the Pulitzer judges noted, the United States and several other nations eventually opened their doors to the Southeast Asian refugees.
Mr. Kamm later wrote two books about Asia. In “Dragon…
2023-07-09 13:36:32
Source from www.nytimes.com
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