The Paris Foreign Missions Society said Father Ponchaud, a member of the group, died at its retirement facility, where he had lived since returning to France in late 2021. He had battled cancer, French media reported.
The accounts from Cambodian refugees collected by Father Ponchaud in his 1977 book offered some of the first detailed evidence of the bloodshed and repression under the Khmer Rouge, which had expelled foreigners — including Father Ponchaud — and sealed the borders after seizing the capital, Phnom Penh, in 1975.
Almost immediately, the deadly purges began. The victims numbered anyone perceived as challenging the visions of Khmer Rouge strongman Pol Pot to remold Cambodia into an agrarian autocracy. Teachers, writers, bureaucrats, ethnic minorities, military members, Buddhist monks and others were rounded up and killed or sent to labor camps to die from starvation, torture or exhaustion.
With the country effectively closed off, only fragmented reports of the massacres leaked out at first. Meanwhile, much of the focus in Southeast Asia at the time was on the closing dramas of the Vietnam War after the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in 1975 and the surge of refugees that followed.
Father Ponchaud followed another migrant trail — searching out Cambodians who fled the Khmer Rouge to reach Thailand. He was fluent in the Cambodian language, Khmer, which he learned after arriving in the country in 1965. He began to compile stories from the Khmer Rouge killing fields.
He added his own outrage, too. “There is no justification for so few voices being raised in protest against the assassination of a people,” he wrote in “Cambodia: Year Zero.” “France has organizations for animal protection. … Are Cambodians worth less than animals?”
The book’s dozens of firsthand accounts from Cambodians shook readers around the world and, in France, helped shatter the image of the Khmer Rouge as a leftist movement seeking to wipe away the legacies of French colonial rule in Indochina.
A Cambodian teacher described how he was in a group sentenced to death in January 1976 for traveling without Khmer Rouge permission. The teacher and 11 others managed to untie themselves while in the back of a truck, presumably heading to an execution site. They dived into a river and escaped, leaving behind eight prisoners. “The other eight were killed on the spot,” the teacher told Father Ponchaud.
A woman said she climbed a tree to hide from Khmer Rouge gunmen and watched as “some children were being torn apart and some were being impaled.” A doctor recounted how he and others — including students, architects and medical professionals — were forced by the Khmer Rouge to give presentations on their views for the country’s future.
“They called out the names of 20 young people who had been most outspoken in their criticism, tied their hands behind their backs the way you tie a parrot’s wings,” the doctor was quoted as saying. He said the 20 were taken to prison, where chances for survival were bleak.
In one of the main detention and torture compounds — a former high school in Phnom Penh — only 12 of the estimated 20,000 prisoners sent there survived, according to the United Nations.
The full extent of the savagery began to emerge in 1979 after invading Vietnamese forces toppled the Khmer Rouge. Loyalists moved into the jungles to begin a guerrilla insurgency until the late 1990s. (Pol Pot died in April 1998 after he was ousted by the remaining Khmer Rouge commanders.)
An estimated 1.7 million Cambodians perished from “execution, torture, starvation and neglect” under the Khmer Rouge, the United Nations said, but some observers place the death toll higher. More than 19,000 mass graves were found around the country.
Father Ponchaud was among those who testified before a U.N.-backed tribunal that brought former Khmer Rouge leaders to justice with convictions including the regime’s torture chief, Kaing Khek Iev, known as “Brother Duch.”
Father Ponchaud described how he and hundreds of others, including Cambodians from the military and the toppled government, took refuge in the French Embassy as the Khmer Rouge fighters overran Phnom Penh. Eventually, many of the Cambodians ended up in Khmer Rouge hands, he testified, and those with military ties were executed.
Father Ponchaud was airlifted out of the country as one of the last foreigners to leave. He told the tribunal about seeing hospital patients forced on the streets.
“I saw the unspeakable,” he testified in 2013. “I saw sick people, I saw the crippled, who were crawling like worms right in front of my house.”
He also used the court to denounce the American bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War as part of U.S. attempts to disrupt North Vietnamese supply lines. He told the magistrates that the bombings and the use of the defoliant Agent Orange killed thousands of Cambodians and helped bring the rise of the Khmer Rouge.
Father Ponchaud said that Henry Kissinger, one of the architects of the covert attacks as national security adviser, should be brought to trial. Father Ponchaud waved his hand in disgust when he mentioned the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize shared by Kissinger, then secretary of state, and North Vietnamese envoy Le Duc Tho for secret negotiations to end U.S. military participation in the Vietnam War.
“This is truly shameful,” he said.
François Ponchaud was born in Sallanches, a village in the French Alps, on Feb. 8, 1939. His parents had a fruit and livestock farm, where François worked until he was nearly 20.
He spent a year in seminary studies before beginning military duty in 1959. He spent three years with a paratrooper unit in Algeria, where a war against French rule led to independence in 1962.
“Now I think I’d rather be killed or go to prison than participate in such a war, but at the time I didn’t dare go to prison,” he told the Phnom Penh Post in 2013.
After leaving miliary service, he resumed seminary studies and was ordained in 1964. He was sent to Cambodia by the Paris Foreign Missions Society. In 1993, Father Ponchaud returned to Cambodia, where he led a center to teach the Cambodian language and culture to missionary priests and others.
His other books include “La cathédrale de la rizière: 450 ans d’histoire de l'église au Cambodge” (“The Rice Field Cathedral: 450 years of Church History in Cambodia”) in 1990, and “Buddha e Cristo” (“Buddha and Christ”) in 2005.
Survivors include a sister and three brothers.
Over the decades, Father Ponchaud deepened his studies of Buddhism and said he hoped some of his work helped Cambodian Buddhists more deeply understand their faith.
“Our life is valuable even if we are poor,” he told UCA News, a church publication, in 2021. “We can walk together.”