50 years since Khmer Rouge conquered Cambodia, photographer recalls descent into madness

Frenchman Roland Neveu witnessed the victorious Khmer Rouge enter Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, heralding a savage era for Cambodians

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Khmer Rouge troops gather surrendered weapons at an intersection in Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. Photo: Roland Neveu

Published: 12:39pm, 17 Apr 2025Updated: 12:56pm, 17 Apr 2025

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.”

In 1973, the conflict in neighbouring Vietnam had spilled across the border and was stoking a vicious civil war between the US-backed Lon Nol government and the Chinese- and North Vietnamese-backed Khmer Rouge.

For the then 23-year-old aspiring combat photographer, Cambodia was the perfect war. Access for journalists was unrestricted, and his arrival came at the peak of international outrage at a long-secret US bombing campaign ostensibly targeting communist sanctuaries inside Cambodia.

Roland Neveu in Phnom Penh in 1975. Photo: Roland Neveu

“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.”