{"id":225647,"date":"2025-01-27T22:58:13","date_gmt":"2025-01-27T22:58:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/27\/francois-ponchaud-who-alerted-world-to-cambodian-atrocities-dies-at-86\/"},"modified":"2025-01-27T22:58:13","modified_gmt":"2025-01-27T22:58:13","slug":"francois-ponchaud-who-alerted-world-to-cambodian-atrocities-dies-at-86","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/27\/francois-ponchaud-who-alerted-world-to-cambodian-atrocities-dies-at-86\/","title":{"rendered":"Fran\u00e7ois Ponchaud, Who Alerted World to Cambodian Atrocities, Dies at 86"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Fran\u00e7ois<\/div>


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The Rev. Fran\u00e7ois Ponchaud, a French Catholic priest whose book \u201cCambodia: Year Zero\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n