https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0469-7074
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Syrus Solo Jin, Remembering the Fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge: A Cambodian Gallery, The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 169–174, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae663
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“We will only execute seven people.”
Prince Norodom Sihanouk, former Cambodian head of state, sought to calm fears as the Khmer Rouge closed in on the capital city of Phnom Penh in 1975. Deposed in a coup five years prior, Sihanouk in turn threw his support behind the Khmer Rouge and over the radio issued the group’s death list of seven high-ranking leaders of the US-supported Cambodian government.1 The Khmer Rouge captured the Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, in a collapse quickly overshadowed in the United States by the fall of Saigon two weeks later.
Fifty years later, the following collection of images explores how violence in Southeast Asia extended in time and scope beyond American involvement in Vietnam. One photograph was taken by Samuel Jackson, the director of an English Language Center in Phnom Penh. International governments and organizations carried out evacuations throughout the spring of 1975. In the previously unpublished image (Fig. 6), Jackson captured the end of the American evacuation. He had spent the morning of April 12 arranging for the incineration of identifying student records before evacuating on the last US helicopter out of the city. His photograph shows John Gunther Dean, the US ambassador to Cambodia, as US officials flew out to the USS Okinawa waiting in the Gulf of Thailand. In two weeks’ time, the Okinawa would then go on to host evacuees from Vietnam.
