Magazine
April 17, 1975 – the day Phnom Penh fell – can perhaps never be fully reappropriated because of the strong sense of shame and pain that surrounds it.
Cambodian students from Royal University of Fine Arts reenact torture and execution by the Khmer Rouge during their reign of terror in the 1970s in an event hosted by the ruling Cambodian People’s Party to mark the annual National Day of Remembrance at Choeung Ek Genocide Center, outside Phnom Penh, Cambodia, May 21, 2019.
Credit: VOA
Each year, as April 17 draws close, a letter from Prince Sirik Matak to then-U.S. Ambassador John Gunther Dean is habitually shared by Cambodians on social media.
Drafted five days before the fall of Phnom Penh to Khmer Rouge forces, the former prime minister of the doomed Khmer Republic declined the ambassador’s offer of political asylum in the United States. His words have since become famous:
“As for you and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection and we can do nothing about it. You leave us and it is my wish that you and your country will find happiness under the sky. But mark it well that, if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is too bad because we are all born and must die one day. I have only committed the mistake of believing in you, the Americans.”
The letter continues to resonate on multiple levels. Perhaps because it takes the Khmer Rouge period out of the almost unintelligible national frame of “Khmers killed Khmers” and places it in its true Cold War context. Perhaps also because it hints at the possibility of another scenario, still imaginable merely days before the Khmer Rouge takeover was a fact.
“We’d accepted responsibility for Cambodia and then walked out without fulfilling our promise,” Dean said in a 2015 interview to mark the 40th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh. “That’s the worst thing a country can do. And I cried because I knew what was going to happen.”
Sirik Matak was executed by the Khmer Rouge, likely on April 21.
This year, on the 50th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge victory, his letter has a particular resonance. Many Cambodians see a parallel betrayal unfolding in the U.S. backstabbing of Ukraine – it was widely shared following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s February 28 exchange with U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office.
There are few conversations in Cambodia that do not at some point turn to the three years, eight months, and 20 days under Khmer Rouge rule that began on April 17, 1975.
