When French photojournalist Roland Neveu arrived in Phnom Penh in the summer of 1973, he had little inkling of the atrocities he would witness, or the scale of the suffering that would soon engulf the country and claim the lives of one in four Cambodians through murder, starvation or neglect.
But over a two-year period, Neveu would experience a brutal civil war, and its grim climax as a victorious Khmer Rouge evicted the entire population of the Cambodian capital in pursuit of a deluded plan to reinvent the country as an agrarian utopia.
“Those memories are forever etched on my mind,” he said, reflecting ahead of the 50th anniversary of Phnom Penh’s fall to the Khmer Rouge on Thursday. “I just need to close my eyes and I am taken back to those terrible events.”
“I flew to Bangkok and took the daily connecting flight to Phnom Penh as a tourist,” he said. “Then I went to the Ministry of Information and got a press pass as a freelance photographer. It was that easy.”
