It may sound absurd at this point, but during the time of the Khmer Rouge regime many Western scholars discounted the reports of human rights atrocities in Cambodia. French priest Fr François Ponchaud knew better, though. A missionary in Cambodia, he was among the last Westerners to leave following the Khmer Rouge takeover. And he wrote a book, Cambodia: Year Zero, about the nightmare underway.
On 17 January 2025, Fr Ponchaud died in France at age 85. He has been described as ‘the first to draw world attention’ to Khmer Rouge atrocities.
Ponchaud was one of twelve children born to a family of modest means in a village in the French Alps. As a young man, he served the French military as a paratrooper for three years during the Algerian War. He then joined the MEP (Missions Etrangères de Paris) Catholic missionary organisation. Ordained a priest in 1964, he went to Cambodia the following year.
It was peaceful then. Ponchaud spent his first several years studying the Khmer language and the Buddhist religion amid bucolic surroundings. By 1970, though, the effects of the Vietnam War had reached Cambodia, where the Vietcong established outposts and where the US followed with massive bombing missions.
Cambodian villages were collateral damage. In short time, the population of the nation's capital city, Phnom Penh, began to overflow due to the influx of refugees from bombed-out rural locations. Meanwhile, a pro-American puppet government in Phnom Penh showed little interest in anything aside from its own outlandish corruption.
Other refugees from decimated villages went not to the capital city but instead retreated into the jungle, joining a secretive movement that called itself the Khmer Rouge.
On 17 April 1975, almost exactly 50 years ago, the Khmer Rouge, having gradually gained momentum and territory in Cambodia, invaded Phnom Penh. After taking control of the city, they ordered all Cambodians to evacuate.
There were no exceptions, not even hospital patients. Ponchaud described the scene, ‘Some were lying on beds pushed by their families with their plasma and IV bumping alongside. I shall never forget one cripple who had neither hands nor feet, writhing along the ground like a severed worm’.
The Khmer Rouge told them they would be able to return to their homes in a few days. But they had to leave the city now, because the Americans were about to unleash a savage bombing campaign on the capital. And so the forcible evacuation was for their own good.
‘We cannot make use of the deaths of millions of Khmers to defend our own theories or projects for society’.
Ponchaud knew there was a more sinister reason. He could see that this mass evacuation of 2.5 million people would, ‘certainly mean hundreds of thousands of deaths. The ailing and aged, the children, and the large numbers of refugees who had been seriously undernourished for several months could hardly be expected to survive the miles of forced marches’.
Having spent a few tense weeks at the French embassy with all the remaining Westerners in Phnom Penh, Ponchaud departed Cambodia on 8 May 1975, obtaining a seat on the last evacuation convoy headed to neighbouring Thailand.
‘On April 17, 1975, a society collapsed’, Ponchaud would write. ‘Another is now being born from the fierce drive of a revolution which is incontestably the most radical ever to take place in so short a time’.
For several years before taking over Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge had made a practice of burning down homes of locations they invaded. This way the inhabitants would have nothing to return to. They weren't just seeking to kick people out of towns and cities. They were seeking to eradicate the very concept of towns and cities.
The curious thing was that Western journalists and university professors were rooting for the Khmer Rouge. This viewpoint was so popular that it would come to be known as the Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia.
Some of these intellectuals loved the idea of peasant revolutions, which seemed exciting and romantic, as long as the actual carnage was far away. Also, there was concern that reports of widespread revolutionary atrocities would serve to validate US military endeavours in the region — endeavours which many intellectuals had come to revile.
In such a climate, anyone who wrote about Khmer Rouge atrocities was dismissed as a pro-American propagandist. This was especially silly in the case of Ponchaud, who was opposed to many US military endeavours and eventually called for war crimes trials against former US President Richard Nixon and former national security advisor Henry Kissinger.
Dissatisfied with the media coverage of Cambodia (then officially known as ‘Democratic Kampuchea’), Ponchaud reached out to France's main newspaper, Le Monde, sending a letter he composed along with refugee accounts. By February 1976, he was writing articles for Le Monde about human rights violations under the Khmer Rouge.
The year 1977 saw the publication of Ponchaud's Cambodia: Year Zero, which was heavily based on his interviews with refugees. The book would receive widespread readership and see translation into eight languages. There were critics who contended that Ponchaud's account was inaccurate, even an embellishment. But history would vindicate him. But no book was, by itself, going to change things in Cambodia. For such change, you needed a powerful country to take interest.
A demoralised US was unlikely to get involved. The Americans had just pulled out of Vietnam, and there was scant chance their military would return to Southeast Asia anytime soon.
As for any other nation, why would they care? Cambodia was just a small, impoverished country without much geopolitical significance. What's more, leading intellectuals said things were going quite well there anyway. Why disrupt a good revolution?
The Khmer Rouge had its own hellish utopia fully unchaperoned. The autogenocide might have persisted for much longer, but the Khmer Rouge's paranoia and hostility to their Vietnamese neighbours brought about their undoing. After a series of murderously ill-conceived aggressions on Vietnamese soil, Hanoi's government had had enough.
At the end of 1978, the superior Vietnamese military crossed into Cambodian soil and soon seized control of Phnom Penh.
High-ranking Khmer Rouge officers fled to the mountainous areas of western Cambodia. They didn't have enough time to destroy evidence of how they had indulged themselves the previous four years. And so the ensuing period unveiled the very horror that Western scholars had spent years denying.
As it turned out, Cambodia had become every bit as bad as the refugee accounts, and in some places — from which no one escaped — it was far worse yet.
More than 20 per cent of Cambodia's population would perish under the Khmer Rouge. Many succumbed to exhaustion and disease, while others expired in secret interrogation centres or at outdoor settings of mass slaughter.
During the Khmer Rouge regime, Ponchaud had remained busy visiting Cambodian refugees on three different continents.
Fluent in the Khmer language, he would also produce translations of the Bible, along with many texts and materials specific to the Catholic Church. He authored an ensuing book, The Cathedral of the Rice Paddy, which explored the history of the Church in Cambodia.
Upon his return to Cambodia, Ponchaud established the Cambodian Catholic Cultural Center, which taught Khmer language and customs to missionaries and other volunteers. He also helped renovate irrigation systems so as to boost the ever-crucial rice crop.
From 2016 to 2021, he had resided at a rural Cambodian parish, until health issues compelled him to return to his homeland. His recent death brings an opportunity to honour the moral courage he showed in drawing attention to the sufferings of a people on whom the outside world had turned its back.
Among Ponchaud's most memorable warnings was that, ‘We cannot make use of the deaths of millions of Khmers to defend our own theories or projects for society’.
Ray Cavanaugh is a freelance writer from Massachusetts, USA, who has written for such publications as The Guardian, TIME and The New York Times.
Main image: A demonstration outside the UN headquarters in New York City against the genocide in Cambodia perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, circa 1975. (Photo by FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)