François Ponchaud, the French missionary who revealed the reality of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge to the outside world, has died aged 85.

Ponchaud spent 56 years of his life as a missionary in Cambodia, and was the first to provide an authoritative account of the horrors committed by Pol Pot’s genocidal regime which ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979.

The world was willing to hope for the best when the Khmer Rouge took control of Phnom Penh in April 1975. The previous regime of Lon Nol had been corrupt, and the war between Lon Nol’s forces and the insurgents was over. The Khmer Rouge immediately ordered the entire population of Phnom Penh and other cities in Cambodia to leave for the countryside, citing the threat of imminent bombing by the United States.

The claim that the U.S. was about to attack seemed plausible. It had already carried out massive bombing campaigns in Cambodia as an overspill of the war in Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge used the perceived danger for their own ends. The real aim of the Khmer Rouge was the abolition of all private property in an extreme form of agrarian communism which amounted to an end to urban life. The regime systematically slaughtered its own people and allowed others to die of starvation. Estimates of the total number of victims range........

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