Khmer Rouge: the Marc Filloux mystery resurfaces, fifty years after his disappearance

He vanished in 1974 in northern Cambodia while trying to interview the Khmer Rouge. Marc Filloux, a young AFP reporter, was only 29. Fifty years later, Jean-François Bouvet retraces his fate in an investigative book, "L'homme qui voulait rencontrer les Khmers rouges" ("The Man Who Wanted to Meet the Khmer Rouge"), published by Éditions L'Harmattan.

On the cover, a tall man in jeans and a rugged shirt, a camera around his neck, baci cotton bracelets on his wrists in the Laotian tradition. Beside him, a young Southeast Asian woman holds his arm. He is Marc Filloux, a correspondent for Agence France-Presse based in Laos. She is Manivanh, a Laotian interpreter of Vietnamese descent who spoke Khmer. The photo was taken just months before their disappearance, and has since become an unintended symbol of an entire generation of journalists swept up in the Indochina war.

A scoop that would cost him his life

In April 1974, as Cambodia's civil war raged on, Marc Filloux secretly crossed the Laotian border into a zone already under Khmer Rouge control. His goal: to land the interview no Western journalist had yet managed to secure, having already succeeded in approaching the Pathet Lao, the Laotian communist movement ideologically aligned with the Cambodian guerrilla. But Marc and Manivanh never returned. Their disappearance remains one of the most striking tragedies suffered by the foreign press during the Indochina war — a year before the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, opening one of the darkest chapters of the twentieth century.

An investigation carried out on the ground, decades later

The author, Jean-François Bouvet, is no stranger to wartime Cambodia: a columnist for Le Point, he had already published Havre de guerre — Phnom Penh, Cambodge, 1970-1975 (Fayard, 2018), a collective portrait of war correspondents of the era. It was while working on that book that he met Jean-Jacques Cazaux, who ran AFP's Laos bureau in 1974 and was Filloux's direct superior — a man who remained deeply marked by his young colleague's disappearance.

In November 2018, Bouvet set off with Cazaux and the celebrated British correspondent Jon Swain (who also covered the fall of Phnom Penh) to retrace Filloux and Manivanh's steps in a remote village in northern Cambodia near the Laotian border. There, they finally got confirmation: the two young people had been taken prisoner by the Khmer Rouge right after crossing the border, and executed in 1974. Another lead, reported by Libération journalist James Burnet, even points to a public trial followed by a beheading in Stung Treng — a gray area the book explores without reaching a definitive conclusion.

A portrait of a generation drawn to Asia

Beyond Marc Filloux's individual fate, Jean-François Bouvet paints the portrait of an entire generation: young French men and women of the '68 era, fascinated by Southeast Asia, who crossed the barricades of May 1968 before finding themselves caught up in the chaos of Indochina. The investigation also brings in a range of figures, from CIA agents to Air America pilots and fellow war correspondents — sketching out the climate of uncertainty and secrecy that surrounded any contact with the Khmer Rouge at the time. As the author puts it:

"Marc Filloux's story is that of a generation fascinated by Asia and caught in the contradictions of a time marked by the Cold War."

Where to buy the book

L'homme qui voulait rencontrer les Khmers rouges, Jean-François Bouvet, Éditions L'Harmattan, "Là-bas" collection.

Available in paperback (€22) and digital PDF (€16.99) directly from the Éditions L'Harmattan website, as well as in paperback from Fnac.fr.