François Ponchaud, the French missionary who revealed the reality of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge to the outside world, has died aged 85.
Ponchaud spent 56 years of his life as a missionary in Cambodia, and was the first to provide an authoritative account of the horrors committed by Pol Pot’s genocidal regime which ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979.
The world was willing to hope for the best when the Khmer Rouge took control of Phnom Penh in April 1975. The previous regime of Lon Nol had been corrupt, and the war between Lon Nol’s forces and the insurgents was over. The Khmer Rouge immediately ordered the entire population of Phnom Penh and other cities in Cambodia to leave for the countryside, citing the threat of imminent bombing by the United States.
The claim that the U.S. was about to attack seemed plausible. It had already carried out massive bombing campaigns in Cambodia as an overspill of the war in Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge used the perceived danger for their own ends. The real aim of the Khmer Rouge was the abolition of all private property in an extreme form of agrarian communism which amounted to an end to urban life. The regime systematically slaughtered its own people and allowed others to die of starvation. Estimates of the total number of victims range from 1.5 million to 3 million, or as much as a quarter of the population.
Ponchaud took refuge in the French embassy in April 1975, and in May was one of the last foreigners deported from Cambodia. He published articles in La Croix and Le Monde newspapers alerting the world to the reality of the new regime. His book “Cambodge, année zero” was published in 1977, and is based on 94 interviews with Cambodian refugees on the Thai border in 1975 and 1976.
“There is no justification for so few voices being raised in protest against the assassination of a people,” Ponchaud wrote. “How many of those who approve the Cambodian revolution without reserve would accept a centimeter of the current suffering of the Cambodian people? . . . France has organizations for animal protection. They have factories where they make dog and cat food. Are Cambodians worth less than animals?”
“Black Misery”
Ponchaud was born in November 1939 in Sallanches in the Haute-Savoie, southeastern France, the seventh in a family of 12 children. He joined the Missions Étrangères de Paris (MEP) missionary order in 1957, and was ordained as a priest in France in 1964. The MEP sent Ponchaud to Cambodia, where he arrived by boat in 1965 and set about studying Khmer, a language that he mastered.
Francois Ponchaud inside the French Embassy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Photo by Will Conquer
After leaving Cambodia in 1975, Ponchaud highlighted the plight of Cambodians who had succeeded in fleeing the Khmer Rouge to Thailand, where the conditions in the refugee camps were atrocious, as well as in North America and Europe. The Khmer Rouge regime was ended in early 1979 by a Vietnamese invasion, though conflict between Vietnam and the retreating Khmer Rouge continued through the 1980s, culminating in the signing of the Paris Peace Agreements of 1991. Ponchaud returned to Cambodia in 1993. He established the Cambodian Catholic Cultural Center to teach Khmer to foreign volunteers in Cambodia, and translated the Bible into Khmer.
Ponchaud in 2013 testified to the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), set up by the Cambodian government and the United Nations, to try Khmer Rouge officials. Speaking in Khmer, Ponchaud told the ECCC that the Khmer Rouge revolt had initially seemed to bring hope to the population. An arbitrary land seizure by Sihanouk in 1967 to make way for a sugar factory in Samlaut in western Cambodia triggered a rebellion and contributed to the emergence of the Khmer Rouge. The Lon Nol regime, which came to power in 1970, had led to rampant corruption in government, but not as bad as that which existed in 2013, Ponchaud said.
I heard Ponchaud speak at a MEP fundraising event for Cambodia held in Paris in November 2018. He explained that the work of the MEP in Cambodia had changed over the years, with the modern aim being to improve education for children rather than converting them to Christianity. Children were now left to decide for themselves on religious questions, he said.
Ponchaud strongly criticized Cambodian dictator Hun Sen, a commander in the Khmer Rouge from 1970 to 1977, and his entourage for amassing private fortunes while the rural population lived in “black misery.” He expressed his support for Cambodia’s banned opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party, led by Kem Sokha.
The knowledge gained over the decades led to more published works. “La cathédrale de la rizière : 450 ans d’histoire de l’Église au Cambodge,” published in 1990, is a valuable resource for historians of state colonialism and missionary activity.
Ponchaud returned permanently to France in 2021. He died on 17 January at a missionary retirement home in Lauris. Ponchaud was cremated according to his wishes in solidarity with the Cambodian people.