The Rev. François Ponchaud, a French Catholic priest whose ebook “Cambodia: Yr Zero” alerted the world to the atrocities being dedicated by the communist Khmer Rouge that will ultimately take the lives of practically two million individuals, died on Jan. 17 in Lauris, France. He was 86.
His demise was introduced by the Paris Overseas Missions Society, of which Father Ponchaud was a member. The society mentioned he died at its retirement facility. The trigger was most cancers, a pal, the historian Henri Locard, mentioned.
In 1975, on the finish of the Indochina conflict, solely sketchy accounts of the Khmer Rouge horrors had reached the surface world, they usually have been broadly dismissed by these within the West who wished to place the conflicts in Vietnam and Cambodia behind them.
Father Ponchaud, a priest who had spent a decade in Cambodia and was fluent within the language, was expelled together with different foreigners when the Khmer Rouge took management of the nation and sealed its borders.
The Khmer Rouge evacuated all the capital metropolis of Phnom Penh — a chaotic compelled exodus through which hundreds died — and for the following 4 years turned Cambodia into an enormous labor camp scattered with torture homes and killing fields, the place near one-fourth of the inhabitants have been executed or died of hunger and overwork.
After his expulsion, Father Ponchaud set to work accumulating a whole bunch of written and oral accounts from refugees alongside the border with Thailand and in France, putting them facet by facet with data from the propaganda broadcasts of the brand new authorities.
His revelations started with articles within the French press that have been fiercely attacked by leftists clinging to a romantic view of revolutionaries who had thrown off the yoke of French colonialism.
Father Ponchaud’s ebook — sober, detailed and totally documented, with probably the most horrific scenes instructed within the phrases of the refugees themselves — was revealed in 1977. The catalog of horrors was laborious to disclaim.
“Ponchaud got here as an annoyance to individuals who wished every little thing to be beautiful in Indochina, with the ‘nice new daybreak’ and all that nonsense,” David P. Chandler, a number one historian of Cambodia, mentioned in an interview.
“Everybody within the West was fed up with Indochina and wished to get out of it after 1975, and didn’t wish to take note of what was occurring,” Mr. Chandler mentioned. “It was an excessive amount of to deal with within the late ’70s.”
The phrase “yr zero” caught the creativeness of the general public, though the Khmer Rouge themselves didn’t use it. It was an apt description, nonetheless, of their shutdown of historical past and tradition in an try and restart the nation and create a pure agrarian utopia.
To attain this, the Khmer Rouge started by executing high-ranking authorities and army officers after which moved on to killing educated individuals who introduced the previous together with them — lecturers, legal professionals, Buddhist monks, court docket dancers — in addition to members of ethnic minorities, together with Vietnamese and Chinese language individuals and Cham Muslims.
Father Ponchaud himself witnessed the evacuation of Phnom Penh, through which even hospital sufferers, some wheeled of their beds, have been compelled into the streets.
“I noticed the unspeakable occasion,” he testified at a United Nations-sponsored trial of Khmer Rouge leaders in 2013. “I noticed sick individuals, I noticed the crippled, who have been crawling like worms proper in entrance of my home.”
The purges unfold by the largely rural nation, as low-ranking members of the Khmer Rouge rooted out individuals they thought of tainted by the previous and executed those that disobeyed them. Slaughter — or “self-slaughter,” in Father Ponchaud’s phrases — ultimately grew to become the defining attribute of the regime.
“Endless labor, too little meals, wretched sanitary situations, terror and abstract executions: From these, the hair-raising human value of the Khmer revolution might be imagined with out a lot issue,” he instructed the French information group Agence France-Presse in 2021.
In one of many ebook’s many descriptions of the phobia that permeated the nation, a lady instructed of climbing a tree when she heard the Khmer Rouge approaching, on the threat of getting her legs eaten by pink ants, as “some kids have been being torn aside and a few have been being impaled.”
The ebook quotes a refugee who mentioned he labored in a hospital with 300 beds. “It was a hospital in title solely as a result of sick individuals have been despatched right here in order that their households wouldn’t waste time taking care of them as an alternative of working,” the witness mentioned. “Massive numbers of individuals died day by day. The 20 or 30 individuals operating the hospital each cooked the rice and carried away the corpses to bury them.”
François Ponchaud was born on Feb. 8, 1939, in Sallanches, a small village within the French Alps the place his father, Leon, served as a common councilor.
He labored together with his mother and father on their farm, he mentioned, till he was 20. “We had 12 cows, pigs and chickens; we had a whole lot of fruits and berries — strawberries, apples and pears,” he instructed The Phnom Penh Submit in 2013. “I’ve six brothers and 6 sisters, however I’m the one one who grew to become a priest.”
In 1959, after a yr in a seminary, he was despatched to struggle within the separatist conflict in Algeria, serving for 2 and a half years. He took parachute coaching however mentioned he by no means jumped in fight.
“I didn’t just like the conflict,” he instructed The Submit. “Now I feel I’d somewhat be killed or go to jail than take part in such a conflict, however on the time I didn’t dare go to jail.”
After the conflict, he studied in a seminary and at a Gregorian college in Rome. He was despatched to Cambodia as a missionary in 1965 and served within the Apostolic Prefecture of Kampong Cham, till he was expelled with different foreigners in 1975.
“I got here to Cambodia to not convert individuals however to assist Cambodian individuals perceive the worth of their very own faith,” he instructed a church publication, UCA Information, in 2021.
“The primary goal helps individuals to grasp clearly what Buddha taught and what Jesus mentioned within the Gospels, serving to them to stay collectively and love each other,” he mentioned. “Our life is effective even when we’re poor. We are able to stroll collectively. That is the excellent news we proclaim in Cambodia at the moment.”
He added: “The educating of Buddha, and meditation, allowed me to change into a greater Christian. Buddha helped me to know who God is.”
He taught himself the language and have become so fluent that he selected to testify in Khmer on the 2013 trial somewhat than in his native French.
Amongst different issues, he instructed the judges that Henry Kissinger, the U.S. nationwide safety adviser, ought to be tried for America’s secret bombing of Cambodia in 1969 and 1970, which took hundreds of lives and contributed to the rise of the Khmer Rouge.
The Khmer Rouge have been lastly ousted in January 1979 by a Vietnamese invasion. They retreated to the jungle, the place they fought a civil conflict that introduced continued ache and destruction to Cambodia till the late Nineties, when the final leaders surrendered.
Father Ponchaud returned to Cambodia in 1993, established a cultural middle to show the language and customs of Cambodia to missionary monks and volunteers, and labored on a translation of the Bible into Khmer, earlier than returning to France in December 2021 due to unwell well being.
Survivors embody his 4 siblings, Marie, André, Henri and Bernard.
