Nothing had prepared Francois Ponchaud for his first glimpse of the nature of the Khmer Rouge's new order imposed on Phnom Penh in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Cambodian capital on April 17, 1975.
In spite of the horrors borne from a decade of watching Cambodian society descend rapidly into a vicious downward spiral of violent civil conflict, the bizarre events unfolding in the street in front of the Jesuit missionary's residence appeared to defy all belief.
"Around one in the afternoon ... a hallucinatory spectacle began. Thousands of the sick and wounded were abandoning the city. The strongest dragged pitifully along, others were carried by friends, and some were lying on beds pushed by their families, with their plasma and IV bumping alongside. That s how the first evacuees left, about twenty thousand of them."
The depopulating of Phnom Penh, which was to be followed in the days that followed by the forced evacuation of Cambodia's other urban centers, was the first indication that the worst was far from over for Cambodia and its people.
The stark images of Phnom Penh's 2.5 million residents being led out of the city at gunpoint by unsmiling, black-clad Khmer Rouge fighters who killed any and all who dared question their intentions dealt a decisive blow to the hopes shared by Ponchaud and other foreign residents and observers of Cambodia who had anticipated a Khmer Rouge victory as a deliverance from the corrupt brutality of Lon Nol's Khmer Republic.
"The evacuation was a stupidity ... a useless suffering for many, many people," Ponchaud recalled in an interview with the Taipei Times last week. "When the Khmer Rouge forced old people out [of Phnom Penh], I couldn't support it."
The evacuations -- the first step in the Khmer Rouge's attempt to transform Cambodia into a "hyper-Maoist" agrarian utopia that would eventually kill more than 1.5 million people -- came as a shock to Ponchaud, who had assumed that the desperate conditions endured by Cambodians under the Lon Nol regime could only improve under the KR.
"The Lon Nol regime [1970-1975] was very, very corrupt and there was no hope for the people ... the only hope was the coming of the Khmer Rouge," Ponchaud said. "We'd known since 1970 that when the Khmer Rouge [captured] a village, the killed the village chief, redistributed the land and took people to the forest, but we thought it was an effect of the war and when [the Khmer Rouge] had victory [their methods] would change."
Expelled from Cambodia after a harrowing three weeks of confinement to the grounds of Phnom Penh's French Embassy, Ponchaud did not have to wait long before accounts of the murderous reality of Democratic Kampuchea reached him through refugees who'd fled over the border.
"When in France I heard accounts of atrocities [by the Khmer Rouge], at first I didn't believe them," he said. "But later there were so many, and so similar in the details that I had to believe."
Ponchaud was moved to compile the stories of widespread murder and starvation in Democratic Kampuchea in a marathon three month writing session that produced Cambodia Year Zero.
Published in 1977 , Year Zero
was the first and most influential expose of the horror that everyday life in Cambodia had become under the Khmer Rouge.
"The book was written as an expression of solidarity with the Cambodian people who were suffering, but I had no hope that [the book] would change anything," he said. "The stories the refugees told me [in camps along
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