The Rev. François Ponchaud, a French Catholic priest whose book “Cambodia: Year Zero” alerted the world to the atrocities being committed by the communist Khmer Rouge that would eventually take the lives of nearly two million people, died on Jan. 17 in Lauris, France. He was 86.
His death was announced by the Paris Foreign Missions Society, of which Father Ponchaud was a member. The society said he died at its retirement facility. The cause was cancer, a friend, the historian Henri Locard, said.
In 1975, at the end of the Indochina war, only sketchy accounts of the Khmer Rouge horrors had reached the outside world, and they were widely dismissed by those in the West who wanted to put the conflicts in Vietnam and Cambodia behind them.
Father Ponchaud, a priest who had spent a decade in Cambodia and was fluent in the language, was expelled along with other foreigners when the Khmer Rouge took control of the country and sealed its borders.
The Khmer Rouge evacuated the entire capital city of Phnom Penh — a chaotic forced exodus in which thousands died — and for the next four years turned Cambodia into a vast labor camp scattered with torture houses and killing fields, where close to one-fourth of the population were executed or died of starvation and overwork.
After his expulsion, Father Ponchaud set to work collecting hundreds of written and oral accounts from refugees along the border with Thailand and in France, placing them side by side with information from the propaganda broadcasts of the new government.
His revelations began with articles in the French press that were fiercely attacked by leftists clinging to a romantic view of revolutionaries who had thrown off the yoke of French colonialism.
Father Ponchaud’s book — sober, detailed and thoroughly documented, with the most horrific scenes told in the words of the refugees themselves — was published in 1977. The catalog of horrors was hard to deny.
“Ponchaud came as an annoyance to people who wanted everything to be lovely in Indochina, with the ‘great new dawn’ and all that nonsense,” David P. Chandler, a leading historian of Cambodia, said in an interview.
“Everyone in the West was fed up with Indochina and wanted to get out of it after 1975, and didn’t want to pay attention to what was happening,” Mr. Chandler said. “It was too much to handle in the late ’70s.”
The phrase “year zero” caught the imagination of the public, although the Khmer Rouge themselves did not use it. It was an apt description, however, of their shutdown of history and culture in an attempt to restart the country and create a pure agrarian utopia.
To achieve this, the Khmer Rouge began by executing high-ranking government and military officials and then moved on to killing educated people who brought the past along with them — teachers, lawyers, Buddhist monks, court dancers — as well as members of ethnic minorities, including Vietnamese and Chinese people and Cham Muslims.
Father Ponchaud himself witnessed the evacuation of Phnom Penh, in which even hospital patients, some wheeled in their beds, were forced into the streets.
“I saw the unspeakable event,” he testified at a United Nations-sponsored trial of Khmer Rouge leaders in 2013. “I saw sick people, I saw the crippled, who were crawling like worms right in front of my house.”
The purges spread through the mostly rural nation, as low-ranking members of the Khmer Rouge rooted out people they considered tainted by the past and executed those who disobeyed them. Slaughter — or “self-slaughter,” in Father Ponchaud’s words — eventually became the defining characteristic of the regime.
“Unending labor, too little food, wretched sanitary conditions, terror and summary executions: From these, the hair-raising human cost of the Khmer revolution can be imagined without much difficulty,” he told the French news organization Agence France-Presse in 2021.
In one of the book’s many descriptions of the terror that permeated the country, a woman told of climbing a tree when she heard the Khmer Rouge approaching, at the risk of having her legs eaten by red ants, as “some children were being torn apart and some were being impaled.”
The book quotes a refugee who said he worked in a hospital with 300 beds. “It was a hospital in name only because sick people were sent here so that their families wouldn’t waste time looking after them instead of working,” the witness said. “Large numbers of people died every day. The 20 or 30 people running the hospital both cooked the rice and carried away the corpses to bury them.”
François Ponchaud was born on Feb. 8, 1939, in Sallanches, a small village in the French Alps where his father, Leon, served as a general councilor.
He worked with his parents on their farm, he said, until he was 20. “We had 12 cows, pigs and chickens; we had a lot of fruits and berries — strawberries, apples and pears,” he told The Phnom Penh Post in 2013. “I have six brothers and six sisters, but I’m the only one who became a priest.”
In 1959, after a year in a seminary, he was sent to fight in the separatist war in Algeria, serving for two and a half years. He took parachute training but said he never jumped in combat.
“I didn’t like the war,” he told The Post. “Now I think I’d rather be killed or go to prison than participate in such a war, but at the time I didn’t dare go to prison.”
After the war, he studied in a seminary and at a Gregorian university in Rome. He was sent to Cambodia as a missionary in 1965 and served in the Apostolic Prefecture of Kampong Cham, until he was expelled with other foreigners in 1975.
“I came to Cambodia not to convert people but to help Cambodian people understand the value of their own religion,” he told a church publication, UCA News, in 2021.
“The main aim is helping people to understand clearly what Buddha taught and what Jesus said in the Gospels, helping them to live together and love one another,” he said. “Our life is valuable even if we are poor. We can walk together. This is the good news we proclaim in Cambodia today.”
He added: “The teaching of Buddha, and meditation, allowed me to become a better Christian. Buddha helped me to know who God is.”
He taught himself the language and became so fluent that he chose to testify in Khmer at the 2013 trial rather than in his native French.
Among other things, he told the judges that Henry Kissinger, the U.S. national security adviser, should be tried for America’s secret bombing of Cambodia in 1969 and 1970, which took thousands of lives and contributed to the rise of the Khmer Rouge.
The Khmer Rouge were finally ousted in January 1979 by a Vietnamese invasion. They retreated to the jungle, where they fought a civil war that brought continued pain and destruction to Cambodia until the late 1990s, when the last leaders surrendered.
Father Ponchaud returned to Cambodia in 1993, established a cultural center to teach the language and customs of Cambodia to missionary priests and volunteers, and worked on a translation of the Bible into Khmer, before returning to France in December 2021 because of ill health.
Survivors include his four siblings, Marie, André, Henri and Bernard.
