Cambodia & History : The last days at the French Embassy, Phnom Penh, avril 1975
- Christophe Gargiulo
- 6 days ago
- 8 min read
At the fall of Phnom Penh, on April 17, 1975, the French embassy became an improvised ark for thousands of foreign nationals and Cambodians. For thirteen days, vice‑consul Jean Dyrac had to manage the impossible: protect those under his care without delivering others to the Khmer Rouge killing machine. Between the official narrative, the archives, and the wounded memories of survivors, this is a revisit of a largely forgotten tragedy.
For French diplomats now stationed in the renovated chancery on Monivong Boulevard, it is an image they prefer not to rekindle. Yet in the turbulent history of the post, no episode is as deeply etched into the walls as the failed evacuation of April 1975.
As Khmer Rouge troops complete their takeover of the capital, the diplomatic compound turns into a tiny island of survival in the middle of a collapsing world. This sanctuary, however, will be short‑lived. Under pressure from the victors, Cambodian refugees are sorted and then handed over to a fate from which many will never return. Jean Dyrac, now deceased, later described this ordeal with a single word: “a tearing apart,” a “déchirure.”
The last refuge
By early 1975, the French embassy had ceased its official activities. The last ambassador had left. Nevertheless, the Paris government maintained a presence, entrusted to Vice‑Consul Jean Dyrac, an old Indochina hand. On the morning of April 17, as the suburbs of Phnom Penh burst into flames, panic seizes the city. In his home in Les Sables‑d’Olonne, Jean Dyrac recalled: “Around 1 p.m., Khmer Rouge soldiers arrive in a jeep. They announce that the Americans will bomb everything. It was a maneuver to empty the city of its inhabitants. French citizens, foreigners, and Cambodians then rushed into the grounds of our embassy.”
Within hours, the diplomatic park—a vast area of 4.8 hectares—turns into an improvised camp. There are roughly 600 foreigners and up to 1,000 Cambodians. Soviet diplomats stripped of their status, dignitaries of the former regime, UNICEF staff, and entire families in search of an illusion of protection are all huddled together. According to a dispatch the consul sent to Paris at 12:45 that day, National Assembly president Ung Boun Hor “forced his way in” through the gates, pleading for asylum.
Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak, architect of the 1970 coup against Sihanouk, also phones to request protection. The reply from the Quai d’Orsay arrives one hour and twenty‑four minutes later: “They now need to consider whether it might not be in their interest to seek refuge elsewhere and, in any case, to leave our premises quickly.”
François Bizot, witness and interpreter
Among those living through these hours of confusion, one voice outweighs all others: ethnologist François Bizot. A specialist in Khmer Buddhism, Bizot knows the language and codes of the country after many years of living there. Above all, he has a singular history with the Khmer Rouge: in 1971, while working on field research in Angkor, he was captured by guerrillas and detained for three months before being released through the intervention of one of his jailers, the young Douch, who would later become director of the Tuol Sleng torture center. This experience gave him an intimate understanding of the enemy. During these days of extreme tension, he serves as interpreter and negotiator.
In The Gate (Le Portail), published by Éditions de la Table Ronde in 2000, Bizot recounts these days of April 1975 with clinical precision and unsparing introspection. He describes the embassy as a “vast entrenched camp” where the old order crumbles before the very people who once embodied it. Here are some excerpts from this exceptional testimony.
On the arrival of the first refugees:“The park filled up within a few hours. People came in clusters, laden with suitcases and bundles; some carried children in their arms. They pressed against the fence, then crossed the gate, the very same gate that would soon close behind them. There were trembling old men, hysterical women, officials in still‑elegant suits, soldiers who had thrown away their weapons. Panic had stripped them of all dignity, yet they still clung to the mad hope that the French flag, flying above the entrance, would protect them.”
On the re‑establishment of hierarchy in the camp:“Very quickly, the old distinctions of rank re‑emerged. The dignitaries installed themselves in the offices, demanding mattresses and blankets, while the crowd remained on the lawns, exposed to rain and sun. The privileges of the old world do not vanish in a day. They hide, they disguise themselves, but they survive. I saw Ung Boun Hor demand a private room in the name of his position. He shouted, pushed the gendarmes aside. The consul had to intervene to calm him down. In that mêlée, he was already a dead man, and he did not know it.”
On the encounter with the Khmer Rouge:“They arrived by jeep, faces closed, eyes hard. They wore no uniform, only the famous black krama around their necks, black trousers and black shirts. They looked at the embassy as one looks at an enemy den. I had known them four years earlier, in the forest. They had not changed: the same iron discipline, the same hatred of cities, the same certainty that they embodied absolute justice.”
On the decision to hand over the dignitaries:“There was a meeting. Dyrac, the gendarmes, a few staff members. The question was simple: should we resist, at the risk that the embassy would be overrun and everyone massacred, or should we yield? I did my best to persuade the Khmer Rouge to wait, to negotiate. I knew their language, their rituals. I knew violence was their only alphabet.”
On the departure of the dignitaries:“I accompanied them as far as the gate. They walked slowly, one after the other. Some were crying; others held their heads high, as if in one last challenge. Ung Boun Hor struggled. The gendarmes had to push him. Sirik Matak, meanwhile, walked straight, impassive. He had been a prince; he wanted to die as a prince.”
On the final evacuation:“The last convoy left on May 1. We had left the embassy at dawn, packed into military trucks. The city was deserted, silent, as if struck dead. Houses were wide open; people’s belongings were left abandoned on the pavements.”
The case of Dith Pran: a story in question
Among the refugees are several international journalists. Sydney Schanberg of The New York Times and his assistant and Cambodian interpreter Dith Pran belong to the small group of holdouts who disobeyed evacuation orders. This story is what Schanberg later takes to the global media stage, first in a long feature in the New York Times Magazine in January 1980, then in the screenplay for the film The Killing Fields, directed by Roland Joffé in 1984.
However, behind the acclaim—three Oscars, worldwide recognition—lies a murkier reality. According to several analysts, the cinematic version shifts the focus significantly: Schanberg’s article was titled “The Death and Life of Dith Pran”; the film, in contrast, places the American journalist at center stage, relegating Pran to a secondary role. Above all, the film erases the rough edges of a relationship that Schanberg himself had described more honestly in his original text. He recounted how Pran, a proud man, sometimes refused to give a full translation: “I can’t tell you the whole truth, I can only give you 80%. The remaining 20%, I keep for myself,” he once replied. When they met again after four years apart, Schanberg asked whether he could now have the full 100%. The answer was “yes.” That detail, emblematic of a bond that was not one‑sided, disappears from the adaptation.
Jon Swain, the British journalist from The Sunday Times who experienced those same days, offers a less heroic version of this friendship in his memoir River of Time. He suggests that the solidarity between the two men owed as much to professional necessity as to disinterested brotherhood.
Other voices, especially within the Cambodian diaspora, go further: they claim Schanberg used Pran’s trauma to construct his own redemption. A former war correspondent in Phnom Penh, speaking anonymously, confided:
“When Pran was left stranded at the embassy, Schanberg did what everyone did: he thought of himself first. Only afterward, when he realized the narrative power of that story, did he make it the heart of his legend.”
Dith Pran, until his death in 2008, always refused to publicly condemn the man he still called “my brother Sydney.” Yet in an interview with PBS in 1996, he hinted at a more nuanced truth:“When I arrived in America, I was very angry. Angry with everyone. With the Khmer Rouge, with the Americans, with Sydney. But I had to let that anger go, otherwise I would have gone mad. Sydney and I, we have a history. It’s complicated. But it’s ours.”
The choice of the impossible
The Khmer Rouge tolerate this sanctuary only for so long. By April 21, pressure intensifies. The authorities demand that the “unprotected” Cambodians leave the compound. An ultimatum is issued: if the Cambodians will not leave on their own, soldiers will enter by force. Jean Dyrac must make a wrenching choice. François Bizot, who knows the language and codes of the Khmer Rouge, plays a key role in the negotiations. On several occasions, he manages to calm the enraged guards, irritated by radio messages sent from the embassy by American agents. Yet on the fate of the Cambodian dignitaries, the margin for maneuver is nonexistent.
One of the gendarmes present, Pierre Gouillon, later testified:
“To be honest, he did not want to go. He must have known what was in store for him. He struggled. We pushed him. In any case, the Khmer Rouge would have loaded him in by force.”
The judicial inquiry opened by Ung Boun Hor’s widow ended in “no case to answer” in 2010, with the judges concluding that no proof of “forced handover” could be established.
The crossing
On May 1, 1975, the last convoy of about 550 foreigners leaves the embassy. François Bizot and Jean Dyrac are among them. The journey takes three days over deserted roads, crossing a country emptied of its inhabitants and strewn with objects abandoned by fleeing villagers. Dith Pran, however, is not on this convoy. Forced out of the embassy, he is taken with thousands of other Cambodians into the countryside.
An impossible memory
For nearly fifteen years, the embassy lies abandoned. From 1986 to 1991, the premises even house an orphanage. Today, the carefully tended gardens of the chancery reveal nothing of the camp of despair that existed there in April 1975. Only one door—the threshold through which hope and despair passed—has been restored and preserved. In May 2025, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh, a ceremony brought together diplomats and survivors. Phoeurng Sackona, Cambodia’s Minister of Culture, testified:
“The Khmer Rouge regime respected neither the beauty of culture, nor human dignity, nor anything at all. Those of us who lived through that period, like me, knew only fear and hunger.”
Sydney Schanberg died in July 2016. Until his final days, he defended the image of an unbreakable brotherhood. Yet, in the now‑peaceful gardens of the embassy, only those who know how to look can still hear the echo of those days when fear, selfishness, heroism, and betrayal mingled in the same mud—the mud of History as it was being written.
Sources : Archives diplomatiques, fonds de l’ambassade de France à Phnom Penh ; télégrammes diplomatiques français publiés par Le Monde ; The New York Times Magazine (20 janvier 1980) ; The Cambodia Daily (19 avril 2007) ; Ouest-France (23 septembre 2000) ; Jon Swain, River of Time (Heinemann, 1995) ; décision judiciaire du tribunal de grande instance de Paris (2010).
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