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.
In full: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/27/world/europe/francois-ponchaud-dead.html
