Images of a Lost Generation
The first rays of the day’s sun fall on the streets of Phnom Penh as the morning’s silence is torn apart by the ever-louder rumbling of heavy engines. Tank tracks clatter over the asphalt, their metal claws digging into the ground. Soldiers in black uniforms march through the streets. Their faces are expressionless, their weapons tightly gripped.
It’s April 17, 1975. For weeks, the people of Phnom Penh had been waiting with tension for this day. The communist guerilla fighters of the Khmer Rouge, supported by China and North Korea, had taken the capital, and the Lon Nol government had been overthrown. But anyone who might have believed that the country would now be at peace was terribly mistaken. Dramatically mistaken.
Just a few hours after the invasion, the city is brutally evacuated. Allegedly, an attack by U.S. air forces is imminent. Allegedly. In truth, this is just the devious plan to drive the city’s roughly two million inhabitants out into the countryside, where they could be better controlled.
The goal: To transform Cambodia into an agrarian communist society without cities, money, or private property. A utopia that, in the barely more than four years of the Pol Pot regime, would claim the lives of over 1.7 million people.
It was questions like these that drove Hannes to interview some of the few truly elderly people that lived in the area surrounding the Smiling Gecko campus at the time of the Khmer Rouge and also to photograph them.
What resulted were truly striking portraits of a lost generation, to which Hannes assigned some of the most brutal statements he had heard about the terror regime.
We would like to share some of these images here in the Campus Magazine. All of these images will soon be displayed at our cultural center, “The Gong.” We can’t imagine a better place to allow the predominantly young people of the region a glimpse into the past.
«Your survival is not a gain,
your death is not a loss.»
«Of course, you wonder: Why me? Why was I allowed to live when everyone else died?»
