Book review: When Clouds Fell From the Sky - Cambodia's terror dissected

When Clouds Fell From the Sky
by Robert Carmichael
Asia Horizons Books

Estimates of the number of people who died during the Khmer Rouge's murderous rule in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 range from 1.7 million to 2.2 million, around a quarter of the population at the time.

Almost every family lost members - and in , South African journalist Robert Carmichael's goal is to bring one family into sharp focus. Taking his title from a local saying about the Khmer Rouge's time in power, Carmichael, who has been based in Cambodia on and off since 2001, sets out to tell the story of Ouk Ket, his French wife and their two children.

A 30-year-old diplomat, Ket returned to Cambodia voluntarily in 1977 at the height of the madness, leaving his family behind in France. Ket and hundreds of his fellow diplomats, and other educated Cambodians living abroad, had received letters ominously stating: "The government requests you to come to Cambodia to get educated to better fulfil your responsibilities."

The letters were a ruse to bring Ket and the others home so they could be exterminated. In the Khmer Rouge's twisted vision, only peasants could be fully trusted, and even then not all of them. As the Paris-educated son of a member of the late King Sihanouk's household, Ket was one of the primary targets. He was sent to S-21, a former school in the capital, Phnom Penh, that had been turned into a prison and torture centre. Six months later, Ket was dead, another body tossed into a mass grave.

In January 1980, his wife, Martine, learned Ket had been killed. In 1991, she and her children made the first of many visits to Cambodia in an effort to discover what they could about Ket's last days. Those trips culminated in Martine and her daughter, Neary, appearing at the 2009 trial of Comrade Duch, the man who ran S-21 and the one senior Khmer Rouge cadre to be jailed for his role in the regime.