There was a surreal quality to the day The Cambodia Daily published its final edition.

For years the pint-sized A4 paper only circulated 4000-5000 copies per day, but last week people were scrambling from newsstand to newsstand across the capital, Phnom Penh, attempting to track down the last edition, which packed one final punch.

It sold out so fast that vendors were taking copies to photocopy shops to print more.

The newspaper was shuttered after being given just month to pay a dubious $6.3 million in back taxes to the tax department.

Publisher Deborah Krisher-Steele noted in a press release that for years the paper had been running at a loss and the campaign against it had been “unprofessional and unlawful”.

“The power to tax is the power to destroy. And after 24 years and 15 days, the Cambodian government has destroyed The Cambodia Daily,” the statement said.

“The Daily has been targeted with an astronomical tax assessment, leaks and false statements by the tax department and public vilification by the head of government before an audit.”   

Her father, Bernard Krisher, who founded the paper, has said he will travel to Cambodia to take on her tax liabilities.

The Daily’s closure followed a months-long crackdown by Prime Minister Hun Sen and his ruling Cambodian People’s Party against critical media outlets, NGOs and the main opposition party in a blatant attempt to silence dissent ahead of next year’s critical national elections.

The non-partisan, US-backed National Democracy Institute had been ordered closed a week before, while some 19 radio stations were ordered to halt broadcasting critical programming from news outlets Radio Free Asia, Voice of America and Voice of Democracy, which many in the rural provinces relied on.

“Millions have been deprived of their daily news, in what appears to be a disproportionate violation of people’s right to information,” Sopheap Chak, executive director of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, said via email.

To top it all off, less than 12 hours before the final issue of the Daily going to print, government forces swooped in, arresting the opposition party president Kem Sokha for “treason” in a midnight raid on his home.

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The Cambodia Daily’s last haymaker headline confirmed fears Cambodia had finally taken its “Descent into Outright Dictatorship”.

For senior editor Michael Dickison, the last night of the Daily was a night like any other, filled with long hours, stress, but an overall sense of pride and satisfaction knowing they were holding those in power to account one last time.

“I think you can tell it had a clear mission: to do good journalism, to hold people in power to account. There was nothing fancy about it, it didn’t try to do anything more than it did. I think that’s rare, around the world,” he said.

The response to the Daily’s closing was one of sadness and despair as hundreds of people mourned the loss on social media while political analysts and human rights defenders slammed the government’s unprecedented actions since Cambodia became a democracy after decades of civil war.

“The government’s targeting of the highly regarded Cambodia Daily is one of the gravest threats to freedom of the press in Cambodia since the 1991 Paris Peace Accords,” Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch, said in the lead-up to its closure.

“With the shuttering of the Daily, the Kingdom lost a significant aspect of its media diversity,” the board of the Overseas Press Club of Cambodia said in a statement.

The Daily’s editor-in-chief Jodie Dejonge said the community’s support was a testament to what the newspaper stood for.

“The support we’ve seen has lifted us up in these saddest hours, but it only reinforces how important the Daily was to the Cambodian people and how much it was needed,” she said.

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Launched by journalist and philanthropist Bernard Krisher in 1993, the Daily soon gained a reputation as being one of the most critical and impartial in a country where most media outlets are owned by oligarchs with family connections to the ruling party.

Journalists who trained at the Daily have gone on to write for wire services and publications such as The New York Times, AFP and The Washington Post, while former Daily editor Robin McDowell received a Pulitzer Prize last year.

For Sophal Ear, policy analyst and associate professor of diplomacy and world affairs at Occidental College, reading the Daily was a morning ritual that he looks back fondly on after returning to Cambodia in 1996 after 20 years away as a refugee.

“It was like a breath of fresh air, an institution dedicated to fighting injustice in Cambodia,” he said.

“Its stories shaped the discourse of what works, what doesn’t, and why, in Cambodia. It was hard-hitting, not fluff, and its editorial standards were — I dare say — on par with my other favourite newspaper, The New York Times.”

The paper’s readership over the years include some of the Cambodia’s most influential figures, including Prime Minister Hun Sen and the late King Father Norodom Sihanouk.

Its stories covered blatant corruption, illegal logging practices and human rights abuses, but now it seems the government has had enough of having a mirror held up to itself.

“There could be another time at which democracy will be back in Cambodia, but it will not be with the current powers that be,” Ear said.

That time now seems a long way off, with Prime Minister Hun Sen now claiming he wants to stay on as leader for another decade for the sake of “stability”, while a powerless opposition can do nothing in protest out of fear of further crackdowns.

Meanwhile, rubbing salt in the wound, the government has charged the publishers of the Daily with tax evasion and defamation and have barred them from leaving the country.

Dejonge said: “The closure of the Daily is a cautionary tale. Protect press freedom at every step. Find your allies and fight.”

You can download a PDF of the final edition of The Cambodia Daily here