Beyond the Horizon: Five Years With the Khmer Rouge

A former revolutionary gives the only Western account of the Cambodian regime of Pol Pot, one of the most brutal dictators in all history, and tells how her family was torn apart and her daughters indoctrinated Pol Pot's murderous henchmen

A Westerner who suffered under the genocidal regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia between 1975 and 1980, Picq offers terrifying testimony on the ability of a small group of fanatics to enslave and dehumanize an entire society. The French author, formerly married to a Cambodian, writes that she was resented as a member of a former colonial ruling presence and despised elite. After four years of working as a recruit in Khmer Rouge offices and in a camp in deserted Phnom Penh, the pregnant Picq and her two daughters were subjected to a 23-day forced march to the Thai border, described in exhaustive, grim detail, during which she suffered the birth and death of a son. The ordeal ended when the author and her daughters were given refuge in the Cambodian embassy in Peking. After the breakup of her marriage, Picq returned, with her children, to France.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This is a unique perspective on the murderous Khmer Rouge regime, written by a naive and idealistic young Frenchwoman who lived in Kampuchea from 1975 to 1980. Married to a fanatic Communist official, Picq did propaganda work for the foreign ministry in Pnomh Penh. She depicts that city as a monastic barracks of poverty ruled by fear and suspicion, with food used as a weapon of control. This is a rather slight account that tells next to nothing about the broader picture, particularly in the countryside. Only the description of the brutal forced march evacuation of Pnomh Penh in early 1979 grips one's attention. Picq's narrative is disjointed, and her style alternates between the elegiac and the prosaic, yet her book is worth reading for the light it sheds on a particularly gruesome page of contemporary history.
- Steven I. Levine, Duke Univ., Durham, N.C.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.