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The Gate

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The Gate

by Francois Bizot (translated by Euan Cameron)

Harvill Press $154

In 1965, when the young French ethnologist Francois Bizot arrived in Cambodia, it was a land 'rich and beautiful; partitioned with paddy fields, dotted with temples, this was a country that had chosen peace and simplicity'.

The Gate is Bizot's account of the end of that idyll. In 1971, he was living with his wife and three-year-old daughter in the northern Angkor region, studying Buddhism and attempting unsuccessfully to ignore the rising tide of war spilling into Cambodia from neighbouring Vietnam. On what was supposed to be a routine visit to a local monastery, Bizot and two Cambodian colleagues were ambushed by Khmer Rouge soldiers.

With their arms tied at the elbows behind their backs, they were frog-marched deep into Khmer Rouge-held territory by gun-toting adolescents. Accused of being a CIA spy, Bizot was detained and interrogated for three months in a torture and holding camp run by a man named Douch, who was to gain infamy as one of the Khmer Rouge's most ruthless and prolific executioners, responsible for thousands of deaths.

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