The launching of a new newspaper isn't especially remarkable, unless it's being launched in Cambodia. The Cambodia Daily, started last August by Bernard Krisher, a former Newsweek Tokyo bureau chief, is the country's first independent daily.

Given Cambodia's history, it's not surprising that getting one took so long. Decades of instability, exacerbated by the Vietnam War, evolved into the vicious Khmer Rouge regime of 1975-1979. Under the Khmer Rouge, information was issued by the central government. The Vietnamese invasion government that followed wasn't exactly a free press bastion either.

After the Vietnamese left and Cambodia's civil war gave way to a nascent peace, midwifed by the UN, a frail truce was declared in the fight for people's thoughts. Two years ago, Krisher, an American who has lived in Japan for more than thirty years (and is famous there for getting the world's only exclusive interview with the late Emperor Hirohito), decided that the time had come to "do something, to get involved a little." He got on the phone, called in a lifetime's worth of favors, and founded Japan Relief for Cambodia, a nonprofit organization.

It started with a modest four-point plan to help Cambodia recover: a medical team was sent from Japan to Phnom Penh's Municipal Hospital; a shop was opened, employing amputees to sell goods donated by major Japanese firms; more than 2,000 bicycles were collected in Japan, to be distributed to Cambodia's rural population; and, finally, in the summer of 1993, The Cambodia Daily was launched.

Krisher's phone calls to Japanese corporate friends netted him computers, paper, an old offset printing press, a land cruiser, some start-up money, and various other essentials. Several Western news services, including Dow Jones, The New York Times, and The Washington Post-Los Angeles Times news services, agreed to provide copy free of charge. Krisher enlisted Tokyo-based journalists to act as back-ups in case the political situation deteriorated in Cambodia and the paper had to be written from outside.

He then went to the West, recruited an editorial staff of journalism school graduates, and set them up in Phnom Penh. Krisher himself stayed in Japan to continue organizing for his nonprofit organization, while, in Phnom Penh, his young staff teamed up with untrained Cambodian journalists.

Krisher's goal is nothing less than to "create a foundation for a free press, to set a standard for international reporting, and to train local reporters to make us obsolete." The Daily covers international and local news in three languages -- English, Japanese, and Khmer. It looks like a campus newsletter, but is being read by Cambodians from the highest levels of government to the workers in the rice fields. Distributed in Phnom Penh at 5:30 A.M. by a fleet of newsboys, the Daily's entire run, often determined by limits on paper, disappears by mid-day. Issues are tacked up to city bulletin boards and attract quite a crowd.

The Daily is unique in that it is genuinely open to all factions in Cambodia, not to mention the rest of the world. Its scope is demonstrated by its opinion page, which, in a recent edition, featured a piece by Bob Herbert of The New York Times, another by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and a third by Kim Myong Chol, former editor of a Tokyo-based pro-North Korea paper. The staff also does its best to write about domestic issues, covering everything from local festivals to final skirmishes of the civil war.

Recurrent problems include electricity black-outs and ants in the printing press, but so far no one has told The Cambodian Daily what to print.

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