Contributor Profiles

There is a 2,000-year-old Taoist tale known as the Parable of the Chinese Farmer whose upshot is that you never know when something happening to you will turn out to be good or bad in the long run.

So it is through the dual filters of uncertainty and adventure that one should view the distinguished journalism career of Robert Karniol, who found himself drawn to media after graduating from McGill University during the turbulent Vietnam War years.

“I found it interesting to explore areas where the powerful prefer to remain in the shadows,” he once confided to a colleague. “It (journalism) also brought a life of some adventure which, in retrospect, was my main ambition from early youth.”

An impartial observer might have wondered whether Robert – with no business background – was lucky to have landed a job in the 1970s as the magazine editor at Montreal Business Report. In fact he nailed the opportunity, winning a National Business Writing Award in his first year and staying on as editor of the publication between 1979 and 1981.

But then he was seduced by the allure of adventure in the Far East, responding to an ad for an editing job with a banking magazine in Hong Kong. He didn’t get the job, but that didn’t turn out to be so bad after all because he still made the gutsy decision to move to Hong Kong, which he termed “vibrant and loaded with opportunity”.

He freelanced for a few months in Hong Kong before snagging a job as Managing Editor of Asia Travel Trade. He loved the travel that came with his new position, but grew bored after a couple of years and resigned with no new job in hand.

Bad move? Not really!

Bad move, you might think. But no, Robert landed on his feet working as a stringer for London-based Jane’s Defence Weekly (JDW) for two years, by which time he had become so proficient at breaking stories about regional military and security issues that JDW offered him their first and only staff job as the Asia/Pacific bureau chief  based in Bangkok. He covered a vast region stretching from Central Asia to Hawaii.

For 20 years with JDW, Robert reported on conflicts in Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Laos, Pakistan, Nepal – on one occasion requiring rescue by the Khmer Rouge from Vietnamese Army pursuit. He wrote about security issues, industry and intelligence while sometimes lecturing at institutions such as Australia’s Joint Services Staff College, the U.S. Joint Intelligence Centre Pacific, and the French Air Force Academy.

After JDW, he spent five years as defence columnist for the Straits Times newspaper in Singapore. This allowed for some coverage of a more esoteric nature that included war art, space archaeology, and the physics of fire.

Robert, an avid rugby player in his youth, moved back to his native Montreal with his wife and son in 2009, where a recent highlight was reclaiming for himself and his son, Kim, the Czech citizenship that his parents had revoked in 1948 by Czechoslovakia’s newly installed Communist government.