He arrived by boat in Cambodia in October 1965. From then on, the Khmer kingdom had never left François Ponchaud’s mind and a certain reason for being. Even since his return to France, in 2021 to Lauris, where he retired to the Foreign Missions retirement home in Paris. He died there this Friday January 17 at the age of 85. This priest with azure eyes, firm words and tenacious energy will have worked for more than fifty years with the Cambodians, who have not forgotten everything they owe him.
Big lie and big silence
Father Ponchaud was one of the first to reveal to the world the scale of the massacres perpetrated between April 17, 1975 and January 7, 1979 by the Khmer Rouge, which left at least 1.7 million dead. He spoke Khmer, having studied it for three years, before translating the Bible and religious texts. He officiated in the Kampong Cham region (north-east of Phnom Penh) in the years 1969-1975 when he witnessed the fratricidal civil war and the rise in power of the forest revolutionaries, nourished by the ideals of the French Revolution, of Marxism-Leninism and Maoism. They intend to wipe away the past and promise a new Cambodia free of imperialists, feudal society and colonizers.
When the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, he was blocked at the French embassy which became p
Swiss
