Day of Infamy

IT’S BEEN 40 years since one of the great dramas in modern Southeast Asian history – the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge.
April 17, 1975 is a day carved into the minds of millions of Cambodians who endured three and half years of horror and suffering under the brutal communist regime.
Photographer Roland Neveu – a long-time resident of Bangkok – was one of the few photographers to witness and record that tragic day when the Khmer Rouge took over and wound the clock back to “Year Zero”.
Neveu captured a swag of historic images after the fall of the city, before taking refuge in the French Embassy and being trucked out of the country with the last Westerners, scenes immortalised in movie “The Killing Fields”.
“There was no reason to think the country would be the scene of such a crime – we didn’t know what would happen next. We had no reason to believe this was a revolution that would go wrong,” he said recently in a panel discussion at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand (FCCT).
In just a matter of hours, Khmer Rouge troops were ordering all residents to leave the city, a move that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands through disease and starvation.
“It is amazing that they could ask everyone to go,” Neveu said. The Khmer Rouge spread “the lie that Phnom Penh would be destroyed by the loser – that the US would bomb the city… I still can’t understand that it was possible.
“Then it turned into a nightmare.”
Many of Neveu’s pictures – which have featured recently in exhibitions in Phnom Penh, the Soy Sauce Factory in Yaowarat, and now at Alliance Francaise in Bangkok – record the “happy face” of the end of the war, prior to the long march out of Phnom Penh.
Aside from the exhibitions, Neveu has released a second edition of his book ‘The Fall of Phnom Penh’ – a superb pictorial record of that pivotal event.
He has also been involved in publishing “When Clouds Fell From the Sky”, a non-fiction book by Robert Carmichael about a family’s search for a Cambodian father who disappeared during the Khmer Rouge era.
Carmichael, who hails from Cape Town, is a well-known correspondent based in Cambodia who worked previously as managing editor of the Phnom Penh Post.
He revealed the genesis of his book at the FCCT last month, saying he had returned to Cambodia several years ago to cover the trial of Duch, head of the notorious Tuol Sleng prison.
He met two French women – “got talking to them by accident over breakfast”. One of the women was the widow of a young Cambodian diplomat who had chosen to leave his wife and two young children in Paris, believing there was no risk in returning to his homeland while the Khmer Rouge were in power in 1977.
Carmichael said it took the family years to learn what happened. The murder of Ouk Ket was a tale that foreigners could relate to, he thought, “a bridge to a Western audience to understand what happened”.
“A lot of people in the West don’t understand why this – the death of one in four of the [Cambodian] population – happened.
“It is one of the most under-appreciated crimes of the 20th century.”
Academic and rights activist Dr Lao Mong Hay spoke at the same event, and described in detail how “Cambodian society was completely uprooted by the Khmer Rouge and cut off from all life outside”.
“Even when they sat together they could not talk together – there were spies all around. Then there was a second wave of displacement when the Vietnamese came,” he said.
“There was no settled life, no subtle society. All common values were destroyed.”
What saddens him is the restrictions put on the United Nations-backed tribunal that is prosecuting leaders of the Khmer Rouge.
 WORDS AND IMAGES
- “40 Years Later: Commemoration of the Fall of Phnom Penh” is showing at the Alliance Francaise Bangkok through Tuesday.
- “The Fall of Phnom Penh” (Bt1,275) and ”When Clouds Fell From The Sky” (Bt540), both published by Asia Horizon Books, are available at Asia Books and other bookstores and direct from [email protected].
- For more details, see www.RNBK.info, www.TheFallofPhnomPenh.pictures and www.WhenCloudsFell.com.