Cambodia Year Zero Remembered

The Mirror remembers the Killing Fields of Cambodia and the efforts of one reporter to get the story out to the world.

Thirty years ago, the Daily Mirror's John Pilger revealed to the world the horrors of Cambodia.

Two million people had died in Pol Pot's killing fields and hundreds of thousands were starving. Pilger's awardwinning reports warned there was just six months "to save three million people". Mirror readers raised enough money for a plane load of aid, and the reports kickstarted a global humanitarian response. Here he recalls his horrifying trip into a country that had been closed to the outside world for four years.

The aircraft flew low, following the Mekong THE aircraft flew low, following the Mekong River west from Vietnam. Once over Cambodia, what we saw silenced all of us on board. There appeared to be nobody, no movement, not even an animal, as if the great population of Asia had stopped at the border.

Whole villages were empty. Chairs and beds, pots and mats lay in the street, a car on its side, a bent bicycle. Behind fallen power lines lay or sat a single human shadow; it did not move.

From the paddies, tall, wild grass followed straight lines. Fertilised by the remains of thousands upon thousands of men, women and children, these marked common graves in a nation where as many as two million people - or more than a quarter of the population - were "missing".

At the liberation of the Nazi death camp in Belsen in 1945, The Times correspondent wrote: "It is my duty to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind." That was how I felt in 1979 when I entered Cambodia, a country sealed from the outside world for almost four years since "Year Zero".

Year Zero had begun shortly after sunrise on April 17, 1975, when Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge guerrillas entered the capital, Phnom Penh. They wore black and marched in single file along the wide boulevards. At 1pm, they ordered the city be abandoned.

The sick and wounded were forced at gunpoint from their hospital beds; families were separated; the old and disabled fell beside the road. "Don't take anything with you," the men in black ordered. "You will be coming back tomorrow."

Tomorrow never came. An age of owned cars and such "luxuries", anybody who lived in a city or town or had a modern skill, anybody who knew or worked with foreigners, was in grave danger; some were already under sentence of death. Of the Royal Cambodian Ballet company of 500 dancers, perhaps 30 survived. Doctors, nurses, engineers and teachers were starved, or worked to death, or murdered. For me, entering the silent, grey humidity of Phnom Penh was like walking into a city the size of Manchester in the wake of a nuclear cataclysm which had spared only the buildings. There was no power, no drinking water, no shops and no services.

At the railway station trains stood empty. Personal belongings and pieces of clothing fluttered on the platforms, as they fluttered on the mass graves beyond.