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Lecture - War and Remembrance

Lecture - War and Remembrance

The only Westerner to survive Khmer Rouge imprisonment -- noted Buddhist Studies scholar François Bizot presents his memoir.

Friday, April 04, 2003
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
UCLA
243 Royce Hall
Los Angeles, CA 90095

--  THIS LECTURE HAS BEEN POSTPONED  --

 

For information on re-scheduled date and time, please e-mail asia@international.ucla.edu.

 

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In 1971, on a routine outing through the Cambodian countryside, the young French scholar François Bizot was captured by the Khmer Rouge.  Accused of being an agent of "American imperialism," he was chained and imprisoned. His captor Douch, later responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, interviewed him at length.  After three months of torturous deliberation, during which his every word was weighed and his life hung in the balance, he was released.  Four years later, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh.  François Bizot became the official intermediary between the ruthless conqueror and the terrified refugees behind the gate of the French embassy, a ringside seat to one of history's most appalling genocides. Bizot is thought to be the only Westerner to survive Khmer Rouge imprisonment during their genocidal control of Cambodia in the 1970s.

 

Le Portail (The Gate) is Bizot's memoir of his three-month detention by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and has just been published in the United States by Knopf.  

 

"The Gate is a thrilling, exquisitely observed and terrifying account of the world trapped in the moral cul de sac of absolute revolution. It reads like a novel and it sears both the conscience and the heart. If you only ever read one book on Cambodia, make sure it is this one." --William Shawcross, The Sunday Telegraph (London)

  

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François Bizot is an ethnologist who has spent the greater part of his career studying Buddhism. He is the Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and holds a chair in Southeast Asian Buddhism at the Sorbonne.

 

---  Part of the Center for Buddhist Studies' Spring 2003 lecture series   ---

Cost: Free

For more information please contact

Jonathan Silk Tel: (310) 206-8235
silk@humnet.ucla.edu

Sponsor(s): Center for Buddhist Studies, Center for Southeast Asian Studies