This picture shows three young male soldiers looking at a poster that represents a soldier of the Kampuchea United Front for National Salvation (KUFNS, also known as FUNSK) [Front or Renakse] aiming his rifle with bayonet at the enemies, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. The drawing next to Pol Pot’s head is a reproduction of a photograph of killings by Khmer Rouge guards that were published between April 1976 and January 1978 in the mainstream Western media. Different stories circulated about the origin of those pictures. Some said they had been smuggled out of Cambodia by a relative of the photographer, who himself had died while trying to escape, or by a Cambodian refugee in Paris who refused to reveal his identity. According to Sygma Photo News (the agency which had distributed the original pictures), the images came from Khmer Rouge defectors. In fact, the photos had first appeared in a Thai newspaper in April 1976 and were reprinted in the Bangkok Post under the headline “True or false?” a few days later. The newspaper explained that they had first refused to buy the images from the Thai trader who tried to sell them because they had doubted their authenticity. Even American intelligence services thought the pictures were fake. The photographs, it turned out, were part of an operation by the Thai intelligence services. They had been staged and taken in Thailand.

This photograph is part of the collection held by the Agence Khmère de Presse (AKP) and Cambodia’s Ministry of Information. This collection, which documents the early years of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea as photographed by the Vietnamese and a small team of Cambodian photographers, has not yet been classified or indexed.