Beyond the Horizon: Five Years with the Khmer Rouge

She married a Party activist (who is a self-centered, insensitive scum bag) and found herself in the middle of the genocidal madness with two young daughters. She's slow to shake off her enthusiasm for the Communist cause but eventually reality catches up with her. The State aimed to do away with everything (including family relationships) to make everyone in society equal. If everybody has nothing, then a classless society has been born. She had to go as far as making her own spoon for a meager bowl of rice gruel. Of course the only way to make the population go along with this is by brutal force. Hence the Killing Fields....

A French citizen marries a Khmer Rouge cadre in France, then follows him through China back to Cambodia after Pol Pot came to power. The only story like this to have yet been told, the author provides insight into the daily routine of fear and insecurity within the world of the Khmer Rouge. One scene describes Ieng Sary giving a speech during which he waved his copies of the "confessions" forced from the regime's "internal enemies" at an interrogation center later known to the world as S-21. Readers who want to know more about S-21 from the perspective one of the few surviving prisoners should read Vann Nath's "Cambodian Prison Portrait". David Chandler's "Voices from S-21" is the definitive work on S-21, the site where thousands of Khmer Rouge cadre were toruted and killed. "Beyond the Horizon" has been published in French, Khmer, and English, and thereby also serves as a great language learning tool for students of things Cambodian. Laurence Picq is indeed fortunate to have escaped both S-21 and the grasp of her twisted and paranoid husband, who also survives. An upcoming book by Richard Linnett, "The Eagle Mutiny", will tell the story of two Americans who died in their bizarre efforts to be accepted as members of the Cambodian revolution. "Beyond the Horizon" is simply remarkable, truth far stranger than any fiction.

It is a year since I read this book and it sticks in the mind. In the original French it is gripping and all the stronger for not being written in purple prose - the writer saves her emotion for the the concluding chapters where she realises the extent of the cruelty of the Khmers Rouges and of the deceptions played on her. (She loses her child to malaria - a disease the KR claimed was all but eradicated.) The gradual loss of her illusions is perhaps the real subject of the book. Given that it is the only account we are likely to have from a Westerner of life at the heart of the KR apparat we are as well served as we could hope to be.I note that the only other person who seems to have read this book describes the writer as a "bourgeois Marxist". I am not sure if this is either accurate or fair: If I recall correctly Ms Picq came from a blue collar background; and any connexion between the KR and the 19th century thinker called Marx is pretty tenuous.