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François Ponchaud, Who Alerted World to Cambodian Atrocities, Dies at 86

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.

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