The fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge 50 years ago: An evening with Roland Neveu and Jon Swain, eyewitnesses to history

Link to the program recording here.[Embed YT VDO]Accredited to Gamma, one of France’s legendary photo agencies, Roland Neveu was just 25 and one of 22 foreign journalists listed by the French embassy in Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975. Another was Jon Swain, a British journalist working for the Sunday Times in London. Swain was one of the four journalists featured in the Oscar-winning blockbuster 'The Killing Fields'.That day, the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge finally entered the riverside Cambodian capital after weeks of shelling and heavy fighting that just days before had cost future Prime Minister Hun Sen an eye. The city was bloated with people in search of food and security who hoped the Vietnam War would finally end and give Cambodians a chance to recover their normal lives and common humanity.[Image 2] Jon Swain, London Sunday Times correspondent and author of 'River of Time: A memoir of Vietnam.Within days, the entire city was emptied on the spurious pretext that U.S. bombing, which had already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, would resume. The sick, elderly, pregnant women and infants were marched off into the war-ravaged countryside.US Ambassador John Gunther Dean and other Americans had mostly been evacuated five days earlier by marine helicopters in Operation Eagle Pull -- an abandonment that haunted the veteran diplomat to his dying day.[Image 3] French photographer Roland Neveu in Phnom Penh in April 1975, shortly before the city fell to communist forces.Prince Sirik Matak, who would die a slow, painful death on 21 April, famously declined a ticket out. “I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly manner,” he wrote to Ambassador Dean. “As for you, and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people, which has chosen liberty.”The harrowing scenes at the French embassy, where many were turned away to hopeless futures or death, have been recorded in the books of French anthropologist Francois Bizot (‘The Gate’) and Jon Swain (‘River of Time: A Memoir of Vietnam’), as well as the Oscar-winning film ‘The Killing Fields’.[Image 4]Prince Sirik Matak, left, Cambodia's acting prime minister, sits in the Oval Office with President Richard Nixon in 1971. The prince was brutally murdered by the Khmer Rouge in 1975 after rebuking the U.S. for its perfidy in abandoning Cambodia. (Photo credit: Library of Congress)It was Year Zero, Cambodia was about to endure a three-and-a-half-year holocaust under the Democratic Kampuchea regime of Pol Pot, and over 1.8 million Cambodians would die by execution, overwork, starvation or medical neglect. One of the darkest experiments in political history anywhere was about to begin.Moderator: Dominic Faulder, FCCT vice president and Nikkei Asia associate editor.An exhibition of Roland Neveu's historic photographs from 1975 will be on display in the club from April 28.