Pol Pot

Between 1976 and 1979, Pol Pot served as the Democratic Kampuchea's prime minister and reigned over Cambodia. He was an influential member of Cambodia's communist movement, the Khmer Rouge, and a Marxist-Leninist. He also supported the Khmer nationalist cause. Up to 2 million people were slaughtered in mass executions of alleged opponents of the regime, in addition to starvation and subpar medical care. He is thought to be a dictatorial leader who has committed crimes against humanity. In the face of Vietnamese imperialism, he was viewed as a protector of Cambodian sovereignty by his supporters.
Sar was adopted by his cousin Meak, the consort of King Sisowath Monivong, when he was six years old. He had intercourse with a few of the king's concubines. In 1941, Sihanouk declared his nation's independence from France. This marked the beginning of Cambodia's independence from France. In the northern suburbs of Phnom Penh, in Russey Keo, Sar attended the Ecole Technique to learn carpentry. He traveled to France to study radio electronics after receiving his brevet.
Sar was motivated to create a Marxist-Leninist-run state by the writings of Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. He made either very little or no effort to blend into French culture. Sar grew familiar with French literature, with Jean-Jacques Rousseau as one of his favorite writers. Sar read The Great Revolution by Kropotkin and Mao's On New Democracy. He thought that the foundation of a communist society was egalitarianism.
The Khmer Viet Minh, a guerrilla subgroup composed of both Vietnamese and Cambodians, was seen as a promising resistance organization by Sar. He advanced to the position of secretary and assistant to Tou Samouth, the Eastern Zone secretary. In 1955, Sihanouk abdicated the monarchy out of fear of a Democratic Party administration. In 1956, Sar married Khieu Ponnary, a relative of Sihanouk's wife Thirith. Many of the Marxist-Leninists' clandestine communications were still under his control.
Kampuchean Labour Party: Sar, Tou Samouth, and Nuon Chea were the leaders of this clandestine communist party from 1959 to 1962. Early in the 1960s, Sihanouk's administration wiped out Cambodia's socialist party, Pracheachon. Sar left to join the Viet Cong and set his camp in the bush close to the border with South Vietnam. Khrushchev's vision of Marxism-Leninism was rejected by Cambodian Marxist-Leninists. They aimed to create a distinct, specifically Cambodian version of the idea.
Saloth Sar visited China in 1966 after traveling the Ho Chi Minh Trail to Hanoi in 1965. They intended for the North-West Zone to be the focal point of the war before it expanded to other areas. In an effort to convince the North Vietnamese to offer direct military help, Sar made the long journey to Hanoi in 1969. Sar concurred with Sihanouk that the Vietnamese should aid the Khmer Rouge in overthrowing Lon Nol's government. Sar concurred on Zhou Enlai's advise as well, despite concealing his leadership position inside the CPK.
In 1970, Sar traveled from Vietnam to the south and came to be known as "Pol Pot," a moniker he ultimately abbreviated to Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge ruled most of Cambodia in 1971 and 1972. Vietnamese soldiers or Cambodians acting under their command were responsible for the majority of the combat against Lon Nol. Gambling was outlawed, drinking was frowned upon, and extramarital affairs were prohibited. Members of CPK were required to regularly attend "lifestyle meetings," where they discussed criticism and self-criticism.
These meetings were run at their headquarters by Pol Pot and Nuon Chea. Villages in the area it controlled were collectivized by Pol Pot's edict in May 1973. Many people were angry about the collectivization and killed their animals to keep them from being turned into communal property. Many people who had lived in North Vietnam at one point and were deemed to be too sympathetic to them were interned at Pol Pot's direction.
By 1974, Lon Nol's administration had lost a significant amount of support on a national and international level. The forces defending Phnom Penh started talking about and ultimately executing a surrender in 1975. On April 17, the Khmer Rouge arrived in the city and rapidly seized power. After the Khmer Rouge took control of Phnom Penh, Pol Pot secretly established his government there. Their first focus should be increasing agricultural production, he said.
Even while they saw foreign aid as harmful, they did not completely reject it. When Mao Zedong visited Pol Pot in China, he cautioned him against copying China's or any other nation's socialist policies. Mao: We have no right to be critical of you. Have you made any errors? I'm not sure.
Correct yourself, then. Under the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia was a "slave state," with its citizens being effectively coerced into slavery through unpaid labor. The "base" and "new" populations continued to be divided fundamentally in society. After receiving permission to do so, Sihanouk spoke before the UN General Assembly and began an international tour. From 1975 until 1979, the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia.
Most regions of the nation were able to avoid hunger in the first year of Khmer administration. A cabinet meeting was conducted in 1976 to adopt a new constitution that renamed the nation "Democratic Kampuchea." The illusion that the Khmer Rouge administration was a unified front was destroyed with Sihanouk's ouster. Pol Pot characterized the new state as having a revolutionary spirit and being "a magnificent model for humanity." In practice, it was more despotic because Pol Pot's judgments were carried out.
In 1977, the Khmer Rouge rejected communism. Instead of "Khmer," the Cambodian population was referred to as "Kampuchean" in official documents. Additionally, communal kitchens were developed so that all residents of a commune may eat together rather than separately in their own dwellings. The Khmer Rouge categorised people based on their racial and religious backgrounds and established a state atheism policy. Buddhist monks were classified as a "special class" and considered societal parasites.
Despite their iconoclasm, the Khmer Rouge did not destroy many historical sites. During the Khmer Rouge era, between 15,000 and 20,000 individuals would perish at S-21. Many cadres tore unborn children from their mothers and consumed the livers of their victims ripped use as kun krak talismans. More and more Cambodians tried to elude capture by entering Thailand and Vietnam. Following the Khmer Rouge's coup in 1975, China emerged as Cambodia's principal trading partner.
The Pol Pot regime was viewed by the Chinese as a stronghold against Vietnamese influence throughout Indochina. Mutual distrust harmed the two nations' relations, although China had little impact on domestic policies. Out of a population of 7.8 million in 1975, a study estimated that there were somewhat fewer than 2 million unnatural deaths in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime. According to a source from 2013, execution may have made up as much as 60% of the total. Between 1979 and 1980, an estimated 300,000 Cambodians perished from starvation.
Vietnam's expansionist intentions, in the eyes of Khmer Rouge commander Pol Pot, were a threat to Cambodia's independence. Plans for a personality cult centered on Pol Pot were created using North Korean and Chinese models. In the end, the cult was never put into practice. To strengthen its position against Vietnam, Pol Pot's regime started attempting to normalize relations with a number of foreign nations, including Thailand. More and more soldiers from the Eastern Zone rebelled against the Khmer Rouge regime.
To subdue the rebels, Pol Pot dispatched extra troops to the Eastern Zone. In December 1978, the Khmer National United Front for National Salvation (KNUFNS) was formally established. Heng Samrin served as the initial leader of KNUFNS. The Black Paper is an anti-Vietnamese polemic written by Pol Pot. The CPK had its Fifth Congress in November 1978.
The Vietnamese attack of Stung Treng and Kratie was not halted by Cambodia's forward defenses. Sihanouk and his family were deported to Thailand on Pol Pot's directive. China became the Khmer Rouge's main source of resistance to the invasion. Khieu Samphan succeeded Pol Pot as Democratic Kampuchea's prime minister in 1979. With the help of the fresh Chinese supplies, the Khmer Rouge reconstituted its armed forces.
The group members ceased using the same black uniforms, and Pol Pot himself switched to jungle-green fatigues, which were later replaced with safari suits. The Khmer Rouge asserted to have 40,000 troops on the ground in Cambodia by the middle of 1980. The Communist Party of Kampuchea was disbanded by Pol Pot and Nuon Chea in December 1981. Both the restriction on private property and the termination of communal meals reflect the ideological shift. The Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea was established in 1982, according to the Khmer Rouge and Sihanoukist groups.
When Pol Pot visited Bangkok in 1983 for a medical examination, his Hodgkin's disease was discovered. Office 131 was relocated to a new base in 1984, close to the O'Suosadey river, further inside Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge escalated hostilities and strengthened its influence throughout western Cambodia. The Vietnamese settlers who had just lately moved into the area were massacred by it. UN peacekeepers failed to successfully stop the bloodshed.
The FUNCINPEC party under Norodom Ranariddh gained 58 seats in the National Assembly in the 1993 elections. The Khmer Rouge had almost completely lost control of the interior of Cambodia by 1996. Pol Pot's health was deteriorating and he was no longer able to receive cancer follow-up care. He began to spend more time with his family, particularly his daughter. On April 15, 1998, Khmer Rouge commander Pol Pot of Cambodia passed away in his sleep due to heart failure.
Pol Pot identified himself a communist, even if his "Marxist-Leninist outlook" had been modified to fit Cambodian circumstances. He supported an agrarian socialist society that was completely self-sufficient. Pol Pot was "critically shaped" by Joseph Stalin's work. The "monastic reliance on discipline" and "the methodical destruction of the individual" that were "hallmarks" of the Khmer Rouge ideology set it apart from previous strains of Marxism. Totalitarianism and dictatorship have both been used to define Pol Pot's rule.
The "unruly" nature of decision-making in Pol Pot's Cambodia set it apart from other Marxist-Leninist nations. Short asserted that Pol Pot had served as "an real advocate" for the aspirations of the Khmer people to be great. He showed self-control, self-reflection, and introspection. He was extremely secretive, preoccupied with secrecy, and terrified of the possibility of being killed. Pouk, Hay, Pol, 87, Grand-Uncle, Elder Brother, First Brother, and in later years 99 and Phem were just a few of the many aliases Pol Pot employed.
Pol Pot, the dictator of Cambodia, was well-known for his gentle voice and striking smile. He had a nationalistic outlook and showed little curiosity about things happening outside of Cambodia. He viewed violence as a tool to achieve his goals and bloodshed as "cause for exultation." Pol Pot desired that his adherents acquire a "revolutionary consciousness" that would enable them to act independently of him. He meticulously oversaw events, checking details like meals for state receptions.
Some of his admirers desired the establishment of a personality cult in Cambodia. While Pol Pot's regime was accountable for crimes against humanity, according to Short, it was inaccurate to charge them with genocide. While "Cambodia's revolution" under Pol Pot caused "millions of casualties," Chandler recognized that it also had some winners. Around Pol Pot's grave, a multitude of cultic practices and activities have been noted. On particular holy days, such as the Festival of the Dead and the Cambodian New Year, people from Anlong Veng as well as from other regions of Cambodia visit his cemetery to leave food offerings.
Pol Pot was a patron of the common farmer and a defender of Cambodia, according to Cambodians who have visited his grave. An elderly woman claims that in her dream, Pol Pot appeared to her.
== Criticism ==
Democratic Kampuchea, Pol Pot's one-party state in Cambodia, was created. Pol Pot's administration forcibly sent the urban people to the countryside to work on collective farms in an effort to establish an agrarian socialist society that he believed would eventually transform into a communist state. More than one million people are thought to have perished between 1975 and 1979 as a result of the government's drastic social and agricultural reforms, which included forced labor, malnutrition, sickness, torture, and execution. Therefore, these two adversaries—the Chinese and Vietnamese—were the targets of the early conflict. The Khmer Rouge, however, held two additional beliefs that contributed to its ruthless nature. The first was the idea that foreign ideas and beliefs—especially those from the West—had to be eradicated for Cambodia to once again be great. The Khmer Rouge adopted policies that led to the deaths of around one-quarter of Cambodia's population during their nearly four years in power. They desired to replace the current anti-Vietnam government with a pro-Vietnam government. And in doing so, they succeeded in overthrowing the Khmer Rouge regime. After a series of bloody skirmishes on the border between the two nations, the Vietnamese Army entered Cambodia in 1979 and overthrew Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. When Vietnam was finally united, Pol Pot tried to expand his power there, but his forces were soon turned back.
=== Khmer Political Leader ===
The Khmer political leader Pol Pot, also known by his birth name Saloth Sar, was born on May 19, 1925, in the Cambodian province of Kompong Thom. He passed away on April 15, 1998, close to Anlong Veng, on the Cambodian side of the Cambodia-Thailand border. Millions of people were slaughtered or forced to flee their homes under his cruel communist rule, which also left a brutal and impoverished legacy.
Saloth Sar, the son of a landowner farmer, was moved at the age of five or six to live with an older brother in Phnom Penh where he received a French education. He was an average student who failed the high school entrance exams and spent a year learning carpentry at a technical institute in Phnom Penh. On a scholarship, he traveled to Paris in 1949 to study radio electronics. There, he joined a group of young, left-leaning Cambodian nationalists and joined the French Communist Party. These individuals later rose to become his fellow Khmer Rouge leaders. He diverted more of his time from his studies in France than he did from them. After failing his exams, his scholarship was terminated, and in 1953 he returned to Phnom Penh.
From 1956 until 1963, Pol Pot worked as a private school teacher in Phnom Penh. However, the police began to accuse him of having communist affiliations, so he had to leave the city. By 1963, he had chosen Pol Pot as his revolutionary alias. The Communist Party had been established in Cambodia in 1960, and he spent the following 12 years strengthening it while acting as its secretary.
He led the Khmer Rouge guerilla troops in their overthrow of Gen. Lon Nol's military government in 1975 as an opponent of both the Norodom Sihanouk and Lon Nol military governments. From 1976 until the Vietnamese invaders toppled the new Khmer Rouge regime in January 1979, Pol Pot served as its prime minister. More than one million people are thought to have perished between 1975 and 1979 as a result of the government's drastic social and agricultural reforms, which included forced labor, malnutrition, sickness, torture, and execution.
Pol Pot moved to bases in Thailand after the Vietnamese invaded his nation to lead the Khmer Rouge forces against the newly installed Hanoi-backed government in Phnom Penh, which resisted engaging in peace talks as long as he remained in power. He was allegedly ousted from the Khmer Rouge's military and political leadership in 1985, but he continued to serve as a driving force within the group, which carried on with its guerilla struggle into the 1990s, albeit with waning vigor. The Khmer Rouge were in serious decline by 1997, with factionalism and defection rampant within their ranks. Pol Pot was forcibly removed from the organization's leadership in June of that year, put under house arrest by his associates, and found guilty of treason in July. Heart failure was listed as the official cause of death when he passed away in 1998, yet there were rumors that he had committed suicide. But there was never an autopsy, and there was never a medical confirmation of the cause of death.
=== Baby Killing ===
The group's top jailer said on Monday that Khmer Rouge guards killed infants by slamming them against trees as part of an official strategy to prevent the children of the victims of the horrific Cambodian regime from exacting revenge for their parents' murders.
When Kaing Guek Eav, often known as Duch, oversaw the notorious S-21 jail in Phnom Penh for the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, he claimed responsibility for the cruel execution of newborns. It is estimated that up to 16,000 men, women, and children were tortured there before being sent to their deaths.
Duch, 66, told a tribunal with U.N. support, "I am criminally guilty for killing babies, young children, and teenagers." He made no mention of whether he had personally committed such murders. "I do not blame them because this was under my authority; it was done by my subordinates."
The genocide tribunal is putting Duch on trial for war crimes, torture, murder, and crimes against humanity. Under the communist Khmer Rouge dictatorship in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, an estimated 1.7 million people perished as a result of forced labor, malnutrition, poor healthcare, and executions.
Duch was shown drawings depicting Khmer Rouge officers dangling infants by their legs and banging their heads against tree trunks when the tribunal led him to S-21, which is now a museum, and the location of prisoner executions last year.
I initially failed to recognize the horrifying pictures of the infants being slammed against the trees, said Duch. However, he acknowledged that he remembered that such things had occurred after seeing photographs of children who had been confined at the facility.
Duch claimed that in accordance with official Khmer Rouge doctrine, the jailed children of S-21, also known as Tuol Sleng, inmates had to be killed in order to stop retaliation.
Duch recited the strategy that he claimed to have acquired from the former defense minister of the regime, Son Sen: "There is no gain to keep them, and they might take revenge on you."
How many young children perished at S-21 is unknown. Adult convicts were meticulously documented by photographers, but infants and younger captives weren't frequently photographed.
One of the gruesome accusations made by the prosecutor in the indictment—that S-21 detainees' children were kidnapped from their parents and dropped from third-floor windows to break their necks—was refuted by Duch. Duch said before the tribunal that tossing kids out of windows would have alarmed other inmates, which would have been against his orders. According to him, it is proper to keep prisoners unaware of their impending execution.
The only senior Khmer Rouge member to take responsibility for his deeds is Duch, who is also the first of them to go on trial. Khieu Samphan, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, and Ieng Sary's wife, Ieng Thirith, are all arrested senior officials who will likely stand trial within the next two years.
=== Violence and Oppression ===
In a nutshell, the term "revolutionary nationalism" in Third World countries refers to a broad range of anti-colonial feeling that typically borrows socialist terminology in order to appeal to international anti-colonial forces that might provide them with help, typically the USSR or China. One such movement was the Khmer Rouge, and much of its socialist rhetoric can be seen in this light. What I'm trying to convey is that the Khmer Rouge matches the definition of a Nationalist and Socialist dictatorship precisely.
They were deeply, profoundly, and brazenly nationalist, and this is what drove them to use violence. Unmistakably palingenetic, Angkor's ideology was preoccupied with the restoration of a country that had been humiliated by colonial rulers and its neighbors due to territorial loss. More than anything else, they abhorred being foreign. It also explains other peculiarities of their movement that you wouldn't consider usually communist, such their alliance with and support of the Khmer monarchy that had been overthrown by the US-backed Lon Nol. This defined the early years of the dictatorship.
Take into consideration Pol Pot's remarks from the day they seized Phnom Penh:
Sons and daughters of our workers and peasants who were fighting alongside their brothers and sisters in the revolutionary army were horrified by the overpowering, indescribable sight of long-haired men and children dressed in strange attire that made them look like the fair sex. U.S. imperialism and its goons completely destroyed our traditional mindset, mores, traditions, literature, arts, culture, and tradition. The old, morally upright qualities and essence of our people were totally lost, and were replaced with fanatical, imperialist, pornographic, shameless qualities.
The Chinese, the Vietnamese, and the Westerners were Pol Pot's top three targets for eradicating from Khmer mentality. The eviction of the first two, who were visibly present on Khmer territory, was violent. In a speech he gave in 1978, Pol Pot expressed his satisfaction that "not one seed of Vietnamese survived in Kampuchea." We may understand how this anti-Vietnamese mentality was manifested by reading witness statements:
As you are well aware, the Chinese parasitized our country during the Lon Nol administration. Each village's population will be split into sections made up of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cambodian people. Stand up and leave the group, some of you are not Cambodian. Keep in mind that Cambodians appear radically different from Chinese and Vietnamese. About ten individuals got to their feet and moved to the spot set out for them, asking, "Are there any more? "When nobody rose, the four guards were instructed to pass through the crowd. Anyone whose face appeared unfamiliar was hauled outside.
The book At the Edge of the Forest: Essays on Cambodia, History, and Narrative in Honor of David Chandler is a useful resource for these witness statements and speeches.
Therefore, these two adversaries—the Chinese and Vietnamese—were the targets of the early conflict. The Khmer Rouge, however, held two additional beliefs that contributed to its ruthless nature.
The first was the idea that foreign ideas and beliefs—especially those from the West—had to be eradicated for Cambodia to once again be great. The Angkor believed that urban dwellers were corrupted by the Western "bourgeoisie mentality" and specifically targeted academics, business owners, people who had an excessive amount of contact with the old colonial government, and foreigners.
There was also the notion that re-education was no longer possible at a certain age and for particular kinds of individuals. This is one of the factors contributing to the Khmer Rouge's heavy reliance on youth cadres (their minds were still pure). When reeducation was not an option, murdering was considered as a method to conserve resources and maintain control over populations, particularly urban groups. This group was known as the "New People" by the Khmer Rouge, and even when they weren't actually killed, the reeducation process was so brutal (they were denied the right to own land, forced to work ten to twelve hours a day, and were given very meager rations) that many of them still perished from disease or starvation. The somewhat famous KR motto "To maintain you is no gain. To destroy you is no loss." is directed at individuals like this.
The second was the idea of Year 0, which referred to the year before to the French Revolution, when the French had not yet colonized the area. The KR believed that because Cambodia at the time was an agricultural nation, the communist state should be as well. Deindustrialization and city evacuation were necessary for this. For the same reasons stated earlier, many people also perished during this process. The Khmer economy suffered greatly as a result of the deindustrialization program, and Pol Pot's extreme anxiety of a Vietnamese invasion rendered resources even more limited as more and more was allocated to the military. More deaths resulted from a shortage of resources, which finally increased peasant discontent with the dictatorship. Of course, when violence has been completely adopted as a means of achieving goals, what is the simplest way to deal with peasants who are beginning to rebel against your rule? Increased violence directed at these new "anti-revolutionaries."
== Khmer Rouge ==
The hardline communist movement known as the Khmer Rouge, or "Red Khmer," sometimes known as the Khmers Rouges, controlled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 after seizing control through a guerilla war. It was allegedly founded in 1967 to serve as the Communist Party of Kampuchea's armed branch.
The Khmer People's Revolutionary Party, which was established in 1951 with the support of the Viet Minh of Vietnam, is where the communist movement in Cambodia has its roots. The party was eventually renamed the Communist Party of Kampuchea by its mostly French-educated Marxist leaders. Due in part to Prince Norodom Sihanouk's popularity among the peasants the communists sought to incite to rebellion, the party's members began engaging in covert operations against Sihanouk's government in the late 1950s. However, for many years they made little progress against Sihanouk from their bases in isolated jungle and mountain regions.
However, after Sihanouk was overthrown by a right-wing military coup in 1970, the Khmer Rouge formed a political alliance with him and started to gain more support in rural Cambodia. This development was hastened by the damaging U.S. bombing raids over Cambodia in the early 1970s. By this time, North Vietnam had resumed providing aid to the Khmer Rouge after refusing to do so for the whole of Sihanouk's rule.
The Khmer Rouge rapidly increased the sections of the Cambodian countryside under their control during a civil conflict that lasted for nearly five years starting in 1970. In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge forces finally launched a successful assault on Phnom Penh, the nation's capital, and established a national government to control Cambodia. Pol Pot, the military supremo of the Khmer Rouge, was appointed prime minister of the new government. The following four years of the Khmer Rouge's rule were marked by some of the worst excesses of any Marxist government in the 20th century, during which an estimated 1.5 million (and possibly as many as 2 million) Cambodians perished and a sizable portion of the country's professional and technical class was wiped out.
Vietnamese troops that invaded Cambodia in 1979 overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime and erected a puppet regime supported by Vietnamese assistance and know-how. The Khmer Rouge withdrew to isolated areas and resumed guerrilla combat, this time from strongholds close to the Thai border and with support from China. In order to fight the Vietnamese-backed central government, they created a flimsy coalition in 1982 with two noncommunist Khmer organizations (under the nominal direction of Sihanouk). This coalition, which engaged in guerilla warfare until 1991, was led by the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge opposed the 1991 peace accord sponsored by the UN and the 1993 multiparty elections, and they continued their guerilla struggle against the noncommunist coalition government that was established as a result of those elections.
The Khmer Rouge experienced a string of military setbacks and weakened year after year due to their isolation in the country's remote western districts and growing reliance on gem smuggling for income. Many of their cadres agreed to the Cambodian government's offer of amnesty in 1995, and one of their top leaders, Ieng Sary, defected in 1996 along with thousands of insurgents under his command and signed a peace accord with the government. When other Khmer Rouge officials detained Pol Pot and gave him a life sentence in 1997, the chaos inside the group worsened. After Pol Pot's death in 1998, the Khmer Rouge's senior commanders either defected or were put in prison.
Almost immediately after the Khmer Rouge's demise, discussions aimed at putting the movement's remaining leaders on trial started. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (commonly known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal) was founded in 2006 as a collaborative venture between the United Nations and the government of Cambodia after years of controversy and delay. The initial charges were brought against Kaing Guek Eav (also known as Duch), the former head of an infamous Khmer Rouge jail, in 2007, and the first trial against him began in 2009. Duch was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity in 2010 and received a prison term. Ieng Sary, who had also been charged with a crime against humanity in 2007, passed away in custody in 2013. The movement's top diplomat and ideologist, respectively, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, were found guilty of crimes against humanity in 2014 and given life sentences. In the tribunal's final trial against leaders of the Khmer Rouge, both were also found guilty in 2018 of genocide-related offenses.
Between 1975 and 1979, Cambodia was governed by the Khmer Rouge. The moniker was given to CPK members by Norodom Sihanouk, who was the head of state at the time. They received Mao Zedong's blessing and received the majority of their funding and assistance from the Chinese Communist Party. From 1975 until the end of the Cambodian War in 1989, the Khmer Rouge dominated the country. The ideology of the movement was influenced by Pol Pot's 1976 power battle.
The Kampuchean Revolutionary Army and National Army of Democratic Kampuchea were the names of its armed forces, respectively. It was greatly influenced by Maoist doctrine, especially in how it emphasized Khmer nationalism and the rural peasantry. Once in control, the Khmer Rouge specifically targeted the Chinese, Vietnamese, Cham minority, and even their half Khmer children. The promotion of the autarky policy was significantly influenced by the party's general secretary, Pol Pot. Peasant "base people" and urban "new people" in society were to be reeducated or eliminated.
Through the Cambodian Civil War, which was largely directed against communist Vietnamese forces, the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975. Along with other places of worship, the Phnom Penh Cathedral was destroyed. Although some Cham Muslims appear to have been told they could continue their observances in private, Islamic religious leaders were put to death. There are two ways to interpret the Khmer Rouge's control in Cambodia. One explanation is a left-wing, bottom-up peasant revolution in which the peasants themselves were the revolutionaries.
The other is that violence was an unintended side effect of their principal motivation, which was toppling the old system. There are six distinct periods in the communist movement's history in Cambodia. Prior to World War II, the Indochinese Communist Party, whose members were nearly entirely Vietnamese, was founded. Viet Minh units entered Cambodia during their conflict with the French and in cooperation with communist regimes until 1947. The majority of KPRP commanders and members appear to have been ethnic Khmer Krom or Vietnamese. The Pracheachon Party was established by those who remained in Cambodia as a legitimate political party.
Students from Cambodia in Paris established their own communist movement in the 1950s. After graduating from a Phnom Penh technical high school, Pol Pot moved to Paris in 1949 to pursue a career in radio electronics. During his stay in Paris, Khieu Samphan focused on politics and economics. Son Sen studied education and literature, Hu Nim studied law, and Hou Yuon studied economics and law. The Cercle Marxiste was a covert group operating within the KSA.
The PhD dissertations of Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphan would subsequently serve as the tenets of Democratic Kampuchea's policies. They suggested that Cambodia ought to stop depending on the industrialized world for its economic needs and start becoming independent. Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon, and Hu Nim were coerced into joining the Sangkum and taking positions in the prince's administration in order to "work through the system." The Workers' Party of Kampuchea, the new name of the KPRP, elected Tou Samouth as general secretary. In 1962, Tou Samouth was replaced as the party's general secretary by Pol Pot.
In order to build an insurgent base in Ratanakiri Province, he and the majority of the central committee fled Phnom Penh. Pol Pot visited China and North Vietnam for many months in 1965.
The Khmer Rouge took the name of the Communist Party of Kampuchea in 1966. The party leadership supported the armed uprising against Sihanouk's administration at the time. Despite not being notified of the choice, North Vietnam still gave the rebels sanctuary and supplies. Chinese military assistance to the United Front is said to have totaled 400 tons in 1970 alone. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge ousted the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia and seized control of the nation's capital, Phnom Penh.
After Sihanouk visited them in the field to show his support for them, their numbers increased from 6,000 to 50,000 fighters. Historians have been interested in the connection between American carpet bombing of Cambodia and the rise in public support. The U.S. bombing of Cambodia served as both recruitment propaganda and justification for the Khmer Rouge's terrible tactics. The majority of the foreign help given to the Cambodian Rouge was provided by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including a US$1 billion gift and US$20 million in interest-free economic and military aid. The state presidium led by Khieu Samphan, the cabinet led by Pol Pot, and the party's own Politburo and Central Committee made up Democratic Kampuchea's government.
From the early 1960s to the middle of the 1990s, the Party Centre's leadership mostly remained the same. In Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge destroyed the Khmer Party and took over the nation's governmental and economic institutions. They were led by Pol Pot, who served as the movement's de facto leader from 1963 until his passing in 1998. Those with technical know-how were dispatched back to the cities to resume production in the factories that the takeover had stopped. Together with the "base people" or "old people" of the peasantry, the remaining urban residents who had been displaced were housed in agricultural communes.
The prior culture of Cambodia was one of the things that the Khmer Rouge sought to "eradicate." The administration intended to replace the traditional extended family structure in Cambodia with compact nuclear families made up of parents and kids. It encouraged arranged marriages, especially those involving party officials. Democratic Kampuchea was effectively without education under the Khmer Rouge's control. The dictatorship eliminated all advanced literary education in favor of a literacy-only curriculum.
People were urged to use the term "friend" instead of more formal salutations such bowing or folding the hands. People were pushed by the Khmer Rouge to embrace a new revolutionary persona, that of "instruments" of the Angkar regime. Numerous artists, including writers, musicians, and filmmakers, were put to death. The Phnom Penh Roman Catholic cathedral was destroyed. Between 21% and 24% of Cambodia's population in 1975 perished as a result of Khmer Rouge policies, or between 671 million and 1.8 million people. Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan were found guilty of crimes against humanity and the genocide of the Vietnamese in November 2018 following the trial.
From a population of 7.8 million in 1975, a study by French demographer Marek Sliwinski estimated that roughly 2 million unnatural deaths occurred during the Khmer Rouge regime. Between 1979 and 1980, 300,000 more Cambodians perished from starvation, largely as a result of post-Khmer Rouge policy. Genocide, according to historian David P. Chandler, was imperfect and occasionally politicized. There have been some misguided and flawed attempts to label the majority of the killings as genocide. The party central ordered a purge of the northwest zone as a result of the zone's weak rice yields.
The following year, troops murdered a minimum of 40 senior cadre members and a large number of lower level commanders. Many peasants were able to flee the area and seek safety in Thailand as a result of the disruption this cleansing generated. In order to inform his closest subordinates that those who had been expelled were not traitors, Phim summoned a private gathering of them. So Phim went into hiding and made an effort to make radio contact with Pol Pot because he couldn't believe he was being purified. A meeting was scheduled, but a squad of troops from the center showed up instead of Pol Pot, and So Pham ended his life.
One of the incidents that led to the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea in 1978 was the Ba Chc massacre. Vorn Vet was Duch's immediate supervisor and had previously served as the Phnom Penh region's secretary. He also founded the Santebal. The US and the Soviet Union have been engaged in a global proxy war since the American Civil War. Western nations chose to support Cambodia's membership in the UN over the recently erected People's Republic of Kampuchea, which was backed by Vietnam. After numerous Swedish individuals addressed petitions to their political representatives requesting a change in policy, Sweden withdrew its support for the Khmer Rouge.
The most powerful of the three insurgent groups was the Khmer Rouge, which was still governed by Pol Pot. China, Britain, and the United States all provided it with significant military assistance. The pro-Vietnamese Cambodian government and the rebel coalition reached a deal in 1991 after ten years of fruitless fighting. Cambodia has steadily recovered from the Khmer Rouge in terms of its population and economy, but many Cambodian families and émigré groups are still affected by its psychological effects. Beginning in 2009, the Ministry of Education of Cambodia began instructing history in high schools.
Public trial hearings, research tours, video screenings, school lectures, and video archives are just a few of the outreach initiatives that the ECCC has undertaken to reach both domestic and foreign audiences. Head of a torture facility Kaing Guek Eav shocked the court during his trial by pleading for his release. The initial plea for his client's release from the case was made by his attorney Kar Savuth. Duch's sentence was upgraded to life in prison in February 2012. All citizens of Cambodia over the age of 18 are welcome to attend public trial hearings in Phnom Penh.
For them to visit the court and meet with court personnel, the court offers free transportation. The Choeung Ek Killing Fields and the genocide museum are also accessible to visitors. Democratic Kampuchea: A History. The first history textbook in the country on the Khmer Rouge is 1975–1979 In 2007, the government accepted the 74-page textbook as an additional text.
Behind the Darkness:Taking Responsibility or Acting Under Orders? is a book written by Youth for Peace. in 2011. Since 2007, the International Center for Conciliation (ICfC) has operated in Cambodia. The effort strives to foster empathy and understanding between victims and former Khmer Rouge members. The public can speak with court officials during the ECCC's weekly radio program on RNK.