"The stories the refugees told me [in camps along "The book was written as an expression of solidarity with the Cambodian people who were suffering, but I had no hope that would change anything," he said. Was the first and most influential expose of the horror that everyday life in Cambodia had become under the Khmer Rouge.
Ponchaud was moved to compile the stories of widespread murder and starvation in Democratic Kampuchea in a marathon three month writing session that produced Cambodia Year Zero. "But later there were so many, and so similar in the details that I had to believe." "When in France I heard accounts of atrocities, at first I didn't believe them," he said.
"We'd known since 1970 that when the Khmer Rouge a village, the killed the village chief, redistributed the land and took people to the forest, but we thought it was an effect of the war and when had victory would change."Įxpelled from Cambodia after a harrowing three weeks of confinement to the grounds of Phnom Penh's French Embassy, Ponchaud did not have to wait long before accounts of the murderous reality of Democratic Kampuchea reached him through refugees who'd fled over the border. the only hope was the coming of the Khmer Rouge," Ponchaud said. "The Lon Nol regime was very, very corrupt and there was no hope for the people. The evacuations - the first step in the Khmer Rouge's attempt to transform Cambodia into a "hyper-Maoist" agrarian utopia that would eventually kill more than 1.5 million people - came as a shock to Ponchaud, who had assumed that the desperate conditions endured by Cambodians under the Lon Nol regime could only improve under the KR.
"When the Khmer Rouge forced old people out, I couldn't support it." a useless suffering for many, many people," Ponchaud recalled in an interview with the Taipei Times last week.
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