Wilhelm ('Willi') Germund, 25 November 1954 - 26 September 2023, RIP

‍‍‍The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand expresses its deepest condolences to the family, colleagues and many friends of Willi Germund, the veteran German journalist and author who has died of heart complications while on holiday in Riga, Latvia, with his wife Kanya.

Willi started out as a foreign correspondent in 1980 at the age of 26 when he traveled to Nicaragua to cover one of the major proxy battlegrounds in the Cold War. He went on to become a much-respected correspondent for a stable of German newspapers. He was an FCCT stalwart from 2001 after he shifted his coverage of South and Southeast Asia to Bangkok. He had been based in New Delhi, India, since 1995 and before that spent several years in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Given his extensive travels and reporting on three continents – South America, Africa and Asia, Willi was a great source of information on places far and wide, and was always generous with his knowledge and connections.

Although something of a “besserwisser” (know-it-all), Willi was humorous and sometimes self-effacing. “I remember an FCCT event on climate change,” recalled Peter Janssen, a former Deutsche Presse-Agentur correspondent in Bangkok. “It was time for questions, and Willi asked me to ask one for him. I said, ‘Why not ask it yourself?’ and he responded, ‘Because I am scared.’ I laughed and asked his question for him.”

In Bangkok, Willi fearlessly covered the lengthy and increasingly violent street protests that shook the capital between 2005 and 2014, sometimes risking his life to provide his outlets with on-the-scene reporting.

“Willi was often cynical and unsparing of others, but also of himself,” Nirmal Ghosh, a former FCCT president and Straits Times correspondent, recalled. “But he was also kind and compassionate.”

“We were on the street in 2010 with a young Italian colleague during the violent Red Shirt protests. Bullets were flying just around the corner where we were crouched, our hearts racing. Our Italian friend was visibly afraid -- and she had good reason to be.”

After a hasty lunch, Ghosh suggested they go back see if the situation had evolved. Willi shot him a stern look. “Are you addicted?” he asked. “She is upset.” He was right, and the idea was dropped.Ian Mackinon knew Willi from the times they shared as foreign correspondents covering the US invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001. “Most of us, including Willi, were in Islamabad listening to the BBC World Service as the invasion began,” Mackinon, who was filing for Newsweek among others, recalled.

Willi decided he would drive to Kabul, and made it to the newly liberated Afghan capital. “The point about this story is that somewhere on the road just behind him a car with four journalists had been stopped by the Taliban, and they were taken out into a field and murdered,” said Mackinon. “He held it up as another reason to travel fast and light, and preferably alone. He always followed his own instincts.”

Willi was not shy about expressing his opinions, and sometimes steeped himself in controversy. In 2015, he fell sick with an ailment that incapacitated both kidneys. He found an organ donor in Africa and had a transplant done in Mexico -- illegally. Instead of concealing the procedure, Willi wrote a book about it to show how easily such operations could be accomplished.

Although the transplant worked, Willi suffered numerous ailments thereafter and had pretty much retired from active journalism by January 2018 after his marriage to his ever-patient companion, Kanya. They moved from Bangkok to a beachside house in Chumphon, southern Thailand, and were on a three-month holiday in Europe when Willi fell sick.

Willi had deep compassion for the downtrodden and victimized in his reporting, and a profound sense of right and wrong, and he was always generous in sharing contact details with journalist friends from his impressive array of sources.

“Willi introduced me to his German contacts working on Myanmar-related issues during the junta years and after,” Marwaan Macan-Markar, a former FCCT president who was then working for Inter Press Service, recalled.“That helped with my reporting to understand the context of unfolding stories. The most prized in this list for Willi were those from German think tanks and NGOs. He will be missed.”