Pol Pot - The Khmer Rouge & the Killing Fields Documentary

The man known to history as Pol Pot was born with the name Saloth Sar, in the village of Prek Sbauv, in north-eastern Cambodia, at some time in the second half of the 1920s, official records place his birthdate as being on the 25th of May 1928, but others have suggested a date of birth over three years earlier, on the 19th of May 1925. Given the age that we know that Saloth began his education, the latter date of 1928 seems more likely. He was known as Saloth Sar for over thirty years and as we will see, the

name Pol Pot was a revolutionary pseudonym which he gradually began using during the 1960s, one of many he later employed, although it was the one by which he was most commonly known. His mother was Sok Nem, a pious Buddhist who had nine children, of which Sar was the eighth and his father was Saloth Phem, a relatively wealthy farmer in the Prek Sbauv region, of mixed Khmer and Chinese ethnicity. Both then, as now, Prek Sbauv was a very small fishing village on the Sen River, and since Saloth Phem owned over 20 acres of rice growing paddies

and a small herd of cattle, he was one of the district’s most affluent individuals, as such, the man who would one day become known as Pol Pot, grew up in an affluent upper middle-class family, an important point to remember when evaluating his later ideologies. Any account, of Pol Pot’s life and career, must be understood against the backdrop of Cambodia’s wider history as Cambodia’s past had been extremely varied by the time that the Roman Empire was collapsing, and the Middle Ages were dawning in Europe. In southeast Asia, Cambodia belonged to a number of regions, including modern

day Thailand which had absorbed elements of Indian culture, but which were rooted in Buddhism, rather than Hinduism. In the ninth century, a strong imperial state began to emerge in Cambodia, the Khmer Empire, so named for the Khmer speaking people of the region, it rose in the centuries that followed, to become the most powerful state in southeast Asia, its capital of Angkor Wat may eventually have been home, to nearly a million people in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but thereafter the Khmer Empire declined and by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Cambodia had become a backwater between

Siam and Vietnam. It is not surprising, that the kingdom was easily absorbed by the French into their growing colony of French Indochina in 1867, although the relatively peaceful transition to colonial rule ensured that the monarchy was kept in place, as a puppet government by the French, thus, the Cambodia which Pol Pot was born into and grew up in, was a French protectorate, though one in which some benefits had accrued from European dominance, owing to slightly improved standards of living and more secure food supplies. For instance, the Cambodian population more than quadrupled in the 80 or

so years after the commencement of French rule, from just under a million people, to well over 4 million, by the middle of the twentieth century. Pol Pot’s family enjoyed extensive connections with the Cambodian government, including the royal family, and it was through these, that the young Sar was able to obtain a position as a novice monk, at the Buddhist monastery of Vat Botum Vaddei, in the capital of Phnom Penh in 1934, here he learned Buddhist teachings and literature, but perhaps the more significant impact of his time here, was his exposure to a system of rigid

discipline, thereafter he was sent to a Roman Catholic primary school in 1935, this was a colonial establishment where Pol Pot was educated, alongside the children of the French colonial community. He was not very academically gifted or inclined, preferring sport instead of his studies, and it was not until 1941, that he graduated from primary school, two years behind schedule, nevertheless, his privilege and familial ties, continued to benefit him and despite his poor performance hitherto as a student, he was admitted in 1942, to a prestigious new boarding school, which was patronised by the Cambodian monarchy, he would

remain there until 1947, again indulging his passion for football and basketball over his studies. Cambodia’s politics were shifting dramatically, while Pol Pot was undertaking his education, French colonial rule in southeast Asia was weakening considerably, as a result of the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe, in the autumn of 1939. Taking advantage of this situation, in October 1940, the neighbouring Kingdom of Thailand invaded Cambodia and Laos and succeeded in taking possession of some border provinces from the French, then in April 1941, King Monivong, the puppet monarch of Cambodia, died, he was replaced by the

French, by King Sihanouk, an eighteen year old, whom the French believed would be more pliable than Prince Monireth, Monivong’s designated successor, but Sihanouk would prove less of a puppet than was foreseen and he would play a major role in the tumultuous politics of Cambodia, over the next seventy years. No sooner was he on the throne, than Cambodia was invaded by the Empire of Japan, as the Second World War spread across eastern Asia and the Pacific, Cambodia would suffer four years of occupation, then, as the end of the war neared in 1945, Sihanouk proclaimed an independent

Kingdom of Kampuchea in March 1945, it proved short lived and French colonial rule was quickly re-imposed on Cambodia, in October 1945, but this brief experiment in independence, foreshadowed the struggle to end colonial rule which was to follow. Pol Pot’s path in the years following the Second World War, though, increasingly pushed him away from Cambodia altogether, having left boarding school without finishing his studies or acquiring his baccalauréat, he enrolled in 1948, in a carpentry course at the technical college in Phnom Penh, given his family background Pol Pot might have been expected to follow a different career

path and setting out on vocational training as a carpenter, would have been viewed as a step down, for the son of a wealthy landowner at the time in Cambodia. Yet it seems that his privilege once again benefited him, in the months ahead, as Pol Pot’s academic shortcomings were ignored and in 1949, he was awarded a prestigious scholarship to attend an advanced engineering school far away in Paris in Europe, the capital of the French colonials. At the time, it was not uncommon for the French to invite the sons of well-connected colonial families, to acquire their education

in France itself, the goal being to inculcate young men like Pol Pot, to the virtues of French society and encourage them to want to maintain French control over countries like Cambodia, rather than seeking independence, thus it was, that Pol Pot set out for Paris in 1949, however, the political climate of Cambodia in the post-war period, was such that Pol Pot would become radicalised against French colonial rule while in Europe, rather than inculcated into becoming a supporter of the French presence in Indochina. Before examining Pol Pot’s time in Europe, we need to look at events in

Cambodia itself in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in the aftermath of the Second World War, King Sihanouk had succeeded in gaining some concessions from the French government, to grant greater autonomy to Cambodia. The country’s first elections to a domestic parliament were held in 1946 and a new, modern constitution for the country came into effect in May 1947. Negotiations continued in the years ahead, for Cambodia to be given a more concerted form of independence, and thereafter this was driven by events elsewhere in Indochina, as since December 1946, the French had been fighting a war in

neighbouring Vietnam, against insurgents who wished to acquire independence from French Indochina, the First Indochina War, would drag on eventually, until 1954 and would extend into neighbouring Laos and Cambodia, it was the beginning of a long period, in which events in Vietnam substantially impacted on developments in Cambodia, and for the meantime, the insurgency in Vietnam made the French government more willing to grant concessions to King Sihanouk and Cambodia, as a means of shoring up support there and avoiding another independence war. Yet the concessions which Sihanouk continued to obtain in the late 1940s, were viewed as not

going far enough, and so as Cambodia entered into the early 1950s, the country was rife with political instability as many parties emerged, calling for independence and an end to French colonial rule, with some also wishing for the abolition of the monarchy, which was tainted by its long associations with the French. This was the situation at home, as Pol Pot arrived in Paris in 1949, the stormy politics of Cambodia, had been transplanted to the French capital, while he lived on the banks of the Seine in the months that followed, Pol Pot became associated with numerous political

groups, that had been organised by his fellow Cambodians in Paris, one of these was the Khmer Student Association, which met regularly and was broadly committed to achieving Cambodian independence from French rule, more extreme and effectively illegal, was the Cercle Marxiste or Marxist Circle, a Marxist-Leninist organisation which met in secret to read Marxist, Leninist and other Communist writings and to discuss Cambodia’s struggle against French oppression. It is important to remember, that the great majority of anti-colonial independence struggles in Africa and Asia in the post-Second World War period, adopted one form of Communism or another as their

ideological base in their independence struggles, not least because the best way to throw off European imperial rule, was by obtaining financial and material aid from Communist Russia or China, but in assessing Pol Pot’s ideology and future career, we can largely dismiss any ardent affection for Marxist thought, which he might have claimed to have had, as in reality, the future dictator did not really understand Marxist thought at all, what little of Karl Marx’s own writings he had read, he later admitted, he had not been really able to comprehend, rather Pol Pot was attracted by the idea

of continuous revolution, without concerns for the violence and humanitarian implications of it, which had become a feature of Marxist-Leninist thought in the post-war period. This unswerving commitment to acquiring independence and carrying out a revolution at all costs, became the central focus of his political leanings later on, not any ideological commitment to Communism. Pol Pot spent three years in Paris, becoming more and more embroiled in politics there, his departure from the French capital would eventually come about, owing to developments back in his homeland, in January 1953, as the political situation in Cambodia lurched from crisis to

crisis, King Sihanouk disbanded the National Assembly and began ruling by decree. Domestic political turmoil increased rapidly thereafter, such that by the spring of 1953, Cambodia was virtually in a state of civil war. Already in late 1952, the Cercle Marxiste in Paris, had determined to send one of their members back to Cambodia, to assess the situation on the ground, in order to determine which of the competing entities, they should be supporting, and so it was, that Pol Pot found himself returning to southeast Asia in December 1952, after three years in France. As a result, he was

back in Cambodia to witness King Sihanouk’s call for independence from France, in the summer of 1953, a request which was granted by the French government in November, when it realised that it lacked the support or the military capacity, to maintain its control over Cambodia, independence had been achieved, but it remained to be seen, exactly what kind of state would emerge in the new Cambodia. The next fifteen years in Cambodia, were a period of almost continual turmoil, which eventually, in 1968, would result in the outbreak of a civil war, which was the result of the unrest

which continued to dominate southeast Asia, in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the Geneva Conference of 1954, succeeded in ending the First Indochina War between the French and pro-independence Vietnamese, conflict in southeast Asia was in no way brought to an end, henceforth the northern parts of Vietnam, became the independent country of North Vietnam which was pro-Communist, while the south of the country also gained independence, as the pro-Western Republic of Vietnam, however, no sooner had the dust settled on the Geneva Conference, than North Vietnam began efforts to unite the country under Communist rule. Thus, in 1955, the

Second Indochina War, or what is more commonly known as the Vietnam War, erupted, it would last for twenty years, with the south backed primarily by the United States of America, as French influence in southeast Asia waned, and the north backed by Soviet Russia and Communist China. Throughout its entire duration, Cambodia was caught up in the conflict, primarily because the North Vietnamese troops, known as the Vietcong, used Cambodia as a staging base, for attacks into South Vietnam, with Vietnamese camps established in the jungles of northern and eastern Cambodia, but as we will see, Cambodia was also

increasingly tied up with the North Vietnamese, because radical Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries within Cambodia, such as Pol Pot, sought North Vietnamese aid to foment their own rebellion in Cambodia. Pol Pot’s path would soon collide with the North Vietnamese, but for now, in the post-independence period in Cambodia during the 1950s, he became involved in efforts to affect change through political participation, the first post-independence elections in the country were held in 1955, it was widely believed that the anti-monarchy, Democratic Party would win these and Pol Pot and his fellow Marxist-Leninist Cambodians, now attempted to infiltrate the Democratic Party, as

a means of exercising influence from within the government, which it was assumed would soon come to power. However, the king had other ideas, with the elections imminent Sihanouk quickly abdicated in favour of his father Norodom and then Sihanouk established his own political party called Sangkum Reastr Niyum, meaning the Community of the Common People, and in the election, through widespread voter intimidation and fraud, Sangkum won over 80% of the vote, effectively establishing a one-party dictatorship with Sihanouk serving as prime minister. As a consequence of the manner in which independence quickly gave way to a conservative dictatorship,

headed by the former king, Pol Pot spent the next few years in a kind of political wilderness, he continued to be active within Marxist-Leninist circles in Cambodia, but these had largely been driven underground by Sihanouk’s seizure of power and for the time being, a concerted armed struggle by either the communists, or the Democratic Party seemed illusive, meanwhile Pol Pot acquired a job teaching history, geography and literature at a private school in Phnom Penh and in 1956 he married Khieu Ponnary. Political oppression continued throughout these years, with senior members of the Democratic Party being subjected to

public humiliation and physical attacks, during a supposedly official ‘debate’ in August 1957, by the end of the decade, resistance to Sihanouk’s dictatorship was greatly diminished, and then things started to change. In 1959, members of the Marxist-Leninist Cambodian movement, established the Kampuchean Labour Party, the forerunner of what would later become the infamous Khmer Rouge. In late September, twenty-one senior members of the party, including Pol Pot, met in a room of a railway station in Phnom Penh, here they agreed to rename the new party as the Worker’s Party of Kampuchea, and party positions were allocated. Tou Samouth

was made general secretary, while his ally Nuon Chea was appointed as his deputy, but Pol Pot was elected to the bureau and was effectively third in command of the new revolutionary party, he would not have to wait long, before he ascended to a position of leadership, when Tou Samouth was killed by the Cambodian government. Less than two years later, Pol Pot would be elected as his successor, and as the second in command, Nuon Chea, decided to step back from the revolutionary struggle, but Samouth’s death was also part of a wider crackdown on the socialist movement

in Cambodia, and even before Pol Pot had officially been appointed as the new head of the Worker’s Party, he was forced to flee with his wife to a Vietcong encampment near the border between Cambodia and South Vietnam, it was the beginning of the drift towards civil war and the horrors that followed in its aftermath in Cambodia. Pol Pot spent the next half a decade, largely living in encampments in the jungles of Cambodia and Vietnam, his personality as a dictator was formed during these years, he was a somewhat enigmatic character, one who displayed a large level

of self-control and was reserved and introspective, nevertheless, despite his taciturn character, and the deplorable nature of his later crimes, many are agreed that he could be charming when a situation necessitated him to be so, while his varied upbringing and middle years had seen him develop an ability to interact with people from many walks of life, yet behind the apparently amiable façade, lay an individual with a great thirst for power, a propensity for savage violence and a personality that was increasingly paranoid, none of this was alleviated in any fashion by his personal circumstances, his wife suffered

from deteriorating mental health in the 1960s, which would descend into chronic schizophrenia in the 1970s. Pol Pot and she, would eventually divorce in 1979 and although he remarried later in life, he never enjoyed much of a family life, having just one child, a daughter who was born in the mid-1980s, when he was in his late fifties, equally he suffered from very poor health throughout his adult life, with insomnia and intestinal ailments, conditions which would have done nothing beneficial to stabilise an already erratic personality, above all, if we are to seek to discover who Pol Pot

was, and what motivated him, we must remember that he was an ardent Cambodian nationalist, and one whose tendencies in this regard, were heightened in the 1960s, as he built up opposition to Sihanouk’s regime in the wayward north and east of the country, and if there is any consistency to his actions, it is surely found, in his zealous desire for Cambodian independence from French rule and the monarchy epitomised by Sihanouk. As well as being formative in his personal development these years in the jungle were a time of growth for the Cambodian Communist movement, as Sihanouk’s repressive

regime gained more and more enemies, more revolutionaries fled from civil society into the jungles to plot revolution. Here they found a new umbrella organisation for their resentment, the Worker’s Party renamed itself in 1966, as the Communist Party of Kampuchea, but to the southwest in Phnom Penh Sihanouk had begun referring to the party’s members as the Khmer Rouge, meaning Red Cambodians, and although Pol Pot and his followers initially rejected the term themselves, it quickly gained traction and is the name most typically used for the Communist Party of Kampuchea today, a byword for the terror which would

occur years later, when Pol Pot came to power. But beyond this name change, the party was also evolving in new ways, during the mid-1960s, first and foremost it was developing its own independent streak, wishing to break away from the North Vietnamese, secondly, it had set out on a new ideological course, one which appreciated that the vast majority of Cambodians, were actually farmers, as a result any Marxist-Leninist revolution in Cambodia, would not be driven by an urban proletariat such as Marx had envisaged a hundred years earlier and which had occurred to some extent in Russia in

1917, rather the undeveloped state of the Cambodian economy dictated, that this would be a revolution of the rural peasantry in Cambodia, so much of which, had been impoverished by French colonial rule and that of the collaborationist monarchy, the continuation of which, was epitomised in the form of the former king and current dictator Sihanouk. Finally, the major factor at play in these years, was the growth of the party and its military capabilities, by 1967 it had several thousand members who were armed in the jungles of northern and eastern Cambodia, waiting to take action against Sihanouk’s one-party

state, they struck in the first days of 1968, it was the start of a long and bloody eight-year civil war. The Cambodian Civil War was initiated in January 1968, when Pol Pot’s insurgents attacked an army base at Bay Damran south of Battambang, the regional capital of northwest Cambodia, Sihanouk’s initial reaction to this limited insurrection backfired, he ordered a violent crackdown, with widespread bombing of the north and east of the country, indiscriminate attacks, which were designed to hit at Communist encampments, but which largely just succeeded in alienating hundreds of thousands of rural Cambodians, whose livelihoods were

damaged by the scorched earth tactics favoured by the government in Phnom Penh, consequently support for the revolt, of which Pol Pot was increasingly the undisputed leader, swelled in the late 1960s, he was now also increasingly referring to himself as Pol Pot, rather than Sar, and it is from this time, that the Cambodian Communist leader became primarily known by his pseudonym. In 1970, the Civil War took a dramatic turn, owing to Cambodia’s ongoing role in the Vietnam War to the east. In the spring of 1969, the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, ordered a series

of bombing raids into Cambodia, to try to interrupt the Vietcong supply lines into South Vietnam and hit at Vietcong camps and bases in the jungles of northeast Cambodia, this was followed in March 1970, by the overthrow of Sihanouk’s government in Phnom Penh by a pro-American coup d’état. The Khmer Republic was now established, with Prime Minister Lon Nol as its head. Sihanouk fled the country, but it was certainly not the end of his role in Cambodian politics, Nol honoured his commitments to Washington, and the Khmer Republic ordered the Vietcong to leave Cambodian territory, but it was

unable to effect this and in the months that followed, the Vietcong, with Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge as their allies, effectively established control over as much as one-third of Cambodia, constituting the bulk of the north and east of the country. In the process, the Cambodian Civil War shifted, from one which had been initiated to overthrow Sihanouk and his regime, to one which sought to capture Cambodia for the Khmer Rouge from Lon Nol and his pro-American, pro-Western government in Phnom Penh. Five years of bloody conflict would follow, between Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge and Lon Nol’s

Khmer Republic, with one backed by the Vietcong and the Chinese and the other aided by the US. Pol Pot’s cause also benefited in the early 1970s, from a bizarre reconciliation between his Communist Party and Sihanouk, who had fled to China following the coup of 1970, this brought the disparate rebel groups within Cambodia, who were opposed to Nol’s government in Phnom Penh, into alliance with each other. Then, as the war intensified in the early 1970s, many thousands of pro-monarchy rebels joined the ranks of the Khmer Rouge, in the jungles of northern and eastern Cambodia, few of

them having any real affinity with Communist thought, but willing to support Pol Pot’s struggle, if they felt it aided the Cambodian monarchy. The ranks of the rebels soared to nearly 50,000 armed Cambodians by 1972, simultaneously, the Communist Party began to develop a more sophisticated party bureaucracy and the rudimentary basics of a revolutionary government, where responsibilities were delegated according to who would fill what ministerial brief, if and when, the party was able to seize power in Phnom Penh in the years ahead. As with so much of Cambodia’s history since the end of the Second World War,

the Civil War’s outcome was broadly determined by events in wider southeast Asia, from the late 1960s, the US had adopted a policy of exiting the Vietnam War, in such a way that would preserve the independence of South Vietnam from its northern Communist neighbour, or ‘Peace with Honour’ as President Nixon termed it. As the US began its long withdrawal from Vietnam in the early 1970s, its support for Lon Nol’s regime in Phnom Penh diminished, in particular, the bombing raids on the Vietcong. The actions of the Khmer Rouge in northern and eastern Cambodia were temporarily ended by

late 1972, and then in January 1973, Lon Nol declared a ceasefire in the hopes that the Civil War could be ended amicably, but it was not to be, Pol Pot and his militants continued their push westwards towards Phnom Penh, and it was clear by the spring of 1973, that they were in the ascendant. Lon Nol had to introduce conscription, in order to have enough troops to defend the capital, but even so, the Khmer Rouge reached the outskirts of the city by April, they were prevented from seizing the seat of power at this time, only through

the intervention of the US, Nixon ordering a huge bombing campaign which drove Pol Pot’s insurgents back into the jungle, it was however only a limited reprieve. As the months rolled by and US aid dried up, Nol’s government found itself increasingly unpopular and confined to a city, the population of which, had swelled to nearly two million people, nearly three-quarters of them refugees. By March 1975, the Khmer Rouge and the Vietcong had surrounded Phnom Penh with nearly 400,000 troops, and it was no surprise to anyone, when the city finally surrendered to Pol Pot and his insurgents on

the 17th of April 1975. The Cambodian Civil War was over, the capital of South Vietnam, Saigon, fell to the Vietcong just thirteen days later on the 30th of April 1975, as western efforts to stop the spread of socialist regimes in southeast Asia, ended in dismal failure in the spring of 1975. The Cambodian Civil War was over, approximately a quarter of a million Cambodians had been killed, in nearly eight years of conflict, but few knew what the future now held in store for the country. Despite being the main rebel organisation during the civil war, the Khmer

Rouge was something of an unknown quantity, in international circles Pol Pot and his party were viewed as something of an ancillary to the Vietcong presence in Cambodia, few though knew, what they would do once in power, nor could they have predicted the scale of the brutality, which would now be unleashed throughout the country. Even Pol Pot himself, was a relatively shadowy figure, of whom the world knew little in 1975, but that would all change, in the years that followed. Having seized power, the Khmer Rouge unleashed a savage assault on Cambodian society itself, the horrors of

which, have been eclipsed by few regimes in human history. At the heart of the nightmare which unfolded, in the months and years after the end of the Civil War, was the ideological platform, the Communist Worker’s Party of Kampuchea with Pol Pot as its leader, it had grown and developed in the ten years or so, since they first began building up their strength, in the jungles of northeast Cambodia in the mid-1960s. The party was wedded to the idea of building an agrarian revolution, one in which rural peasants would form the basis of their Communist state, as

we saw earlier, Pol Pot had little understanding of Communist thought himself, and this ideology, that the Khmer Rouge developed, had little to do with the writings of Karl Marx, indeed they were directly antithetical. Marx had envisaged a revolution, driven by the urban proletariat of oppressed factory workers, conversely, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge viewed urban workers as dangerous subversives and wanted to encourage Cambodians to return to the countryside from the cities, in order to create an almost exclusively agrarian society, this utopian dream of theirs, would soon become a nightmare for the Cambodian people. As soon

as Phnom Penh had been seized in April 1975, Pol Pot quickly made his way to the city, he entered the capital on the 20th of April and by May, had established his government at the Silver Pagoda, an opulent nineteenth-century royal palace, which had once been home to the monarchy. It was not at once clear, that Pol Pot and the Communist Party would be the primary power in the new Cambodia, not least because a number of regional military leaders, commanded their own power bases throughout the country, there was even an effort made to unseat Pol Pot

in the autumn of 1976, but ultimately the party prevailed and solidified its power. Then, the name of the country was officially changed to Democratic Kampuchea, in January 1976 and it was governed by a standing committee of the Khmer Rouge’s leading figures, who were named as ‘Brothers’, Pol Pot was ‘Brother number 1’ and served as prime minister, for a time the former king, Sihanouk, was even brought into the government, in an effort to prevent him becoming a focus of opposition to the new regime, but he resigned from his position in the spring of 1976 and was

subsequently kept under house arrest by the regime, which is how the Khmer Rouge kept their control of the country in the first twelve months after the end of the civil war. The policies pursued by Pol Pot and the Khmer regime, in the second half of the 1970s have become infamous, as we have seen, the regime constructed itself around the idea of creating an agrarian revolution, with a kind of rural proletariat, Pot and his allies were inspired by the Great Leap Forward, which Chairman Mao had attempted in China, twenty years earlier, whereby he had attempted to

drastically increase China’s food production and industrial output, in just a few short years. The Great Leap Forward failed spectacularly and is now understood to have resulted in the deaths, of as many as fifty million Chinese people, in the space of five or six years, but, undeterred by this appalling record, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge now sought to use similar methods, to exponentially increase Cambodia’s agricultural and manufacturing capacities. The ultimate goal was to make Cambodia self-sufficient and reliant on no other state, for the goods which it needed, in particular Pol Pot wished to avoid having

the country fall under the influence, of its more powerful neighbour to the east in Vietnam. Cambodian self-sufficiency was to be achieved through collectivisation, whereby farms throughout the country, were brought under state ownership and then run collectively or communally by farmers, the goal was to have the country’s agricultural output increased substantially, by forcing Cambodians to work as hard as possible, to this end Pot and the Khmer Rouge, immediately began forcing the population to leave Cambodia’s cities and relocate to labour camps in the countryside, to work on collective farms, conditions in these were brutal, often amounting to

little more than slave labour, workers were beaten and tortured if they did not work sufficiently hard enough, they were fed poorly, often so that camp overseers could report on higher production yields, and malnutrition was soon rife, giving way eventually to death through starvation. As conditions in Kampuchea’s work camps deteriorated, during the course of 1976 and 1977, disease became rife in them also, exacerbating the level of mortality, workers who refused to work hard enough or resisted directives, were executed. The barbaric conditions of the labour camps in the countryside, were not the sole theatre in Pot’s Cambodia,

where mass murder was occurring, the Khmer Rouge established itself as a highly autocratic, xenophobic, classist and totalitarian regime, people from the middle and upper class were murdered in large numbers, simply for having the most tenuous links to the ruling elites of past years or being seen as ‘bourgeois’ subversives, all this, despite Pol Pot’s own, upper middle class family background. Foreigners were targeted also, for instance, a quarter of a million Cambodians of Chinese ethnicity were killed, between 1975 and 1979, with perhaps as many as 100,000 Muslims also murdered. The state also established itself as an Atheistic

regime and Buddhism was savagely repressed, anyone who was seen to resist the government, became the victim of arrest and execution and over 150 torture and execution centres were established throughout the country, the most notorious being S-21, a converted secondary school, through which as many as 20,000 prisoners passed, between 1976 and 1979. As the months went by, paranoia came to dominate every aspect of Cambodian society, children were indoctrinated into the regime’s atrocities and forced to engage in killings, in other instances, the children of political dissenters or ethnic minorities who were killed, were also murdered, the rationale

of Pol Pot and the regime being that, they wanted to avoid these children growing up and seeking to avenge their parents. All of this took place in the Killing Fields, sites throughout Cambodia where mass executions were carried out, in the years following Pol Pot’s ascent to power. At these sites, individuals were sometimes killed using sharpened bamboo, scythes and pickaxes, to save bullets. Some victims were forced to dig their own graves, before being executed, often poor farmers and peasants were forced to carry out these executions, in order to avoid punishment themselves by the regime. Such was

the barbarity of the Khmer Rouge and the unmitigated terror and destruction of life which it unleashed, that by the end of the 1970s, somewhere between 1.7 and 2.2 million of Cambodia’s population of approximately 8 million people, had been killed, the Cambodian genocide overseen by Pol Pot and orchestrated by the Khmer Rouge was one of the most heinous and vicious genocides ever undertaken. It is hard to look beyond the genocide to try to find any coherent policies which might have been implemented by Pol Pot’s regime, and it is perhaps unsurprising to find, that these were in

any event, dictated by the ideological brutality and totalitarianism of the Khmer Rouge as well, for instance, the party’s approach to education was mired in a highly repressive and paranoid approach to learning and the role of teachers in society. Upon the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, several thousand educators were executed across the city, a new curriculum was devised, which sought to teach little more than basic mathematics and literacy, and thereafter was focused on instilling the regime’s political ideology into the minds of students, consequently, some children were fashioned into enthusiastic contributors to the state’s atrocities. The

health system also effectively collapsed under Pol Pot’s reign of terror, with many physicians executed on class grounds. On the economic front, currency was abolished, and a barter system was introduced, along with state run distribution of goods, as a result Cambodians were soon trading their few personal possessions, in order to acquire basic goods. Foreign trade almost completely dried up, but most strikingly, the goal of drastically improving agricultural output, was a catastrophic failure, the reverse, famine, was endemic as the months and years passed by. On the foreign policy front, Pol Pot’s approach mirrored his desire to make

Cambodia self-sufficient, isolationism was favoured, consequently Pot and the Khmer Rouge spurned the western powers, including the US, with which the previous administration in Phnom Penh had been so closely associated. Those states which Pol Pot established good relations with, were usually headed by fellow autocrats, such as Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania. The Soviet Union was rejected as a source of support, despite being the ostensible head of the Communist bloc, in favour of aligning Kampuchea with China, chairman Mao committed over $1 billion dollars of Beijing’s money in aid, to help rebuild and develop Cambodia, in the aftermath of

the civil war, and many civil and military advisors were sent to southeast Asia, to provide advice on how to develop the Cambodian economy, although the relationship cooled considerably from 1976 onwards, with the death of Mao that year and the Cambodian regime’s increasingly hostile approach to ethnic Chinese Cambodians, but the most consequential relationship of the Khmer regime, was with its neighbour to the east, with whom its recent history had been so entangled. Following the end of the civil war, relations between Cambodia and a united Vietnam, quickly deteriorated and in the summer of 1976, negotiations to resolve

some border disputes between the two countries failed, thereafter relations thawed considerably, little could Cambodians have known at that time, but the Communist regime in Vietnam, would soon provide a kind of salvation for the people of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Relations between Cambodia and Vietnam were in terminal decline by 1978, the previous December the Vietnamese had sent tens of thousands of troops over the border to contested regions and broke off relations with Phnom Penh, although it soon withdrew in the first weeks of 1978. Pol Pot responded by ordering raids along the border region, war was not officially

entered into at this point, but the unrest was the spark to see resistance to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge begin to emerge within Cambodia. Such was the anarchy and brutality that prevailed throughout the country, that several regional military commanders were now moving through the country to distance themselves from the regime. In a desperate bid to bolster his support, Pol Pot courted Sihanouk, who was still under house arrest, to throw his support behind the regime, a sign of his increasing desperation, and then in December 1978, the inevitable war broke out. The Vietnamese-Cambodian War began on

Christmas Day 1978, when the Vietnamese launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia. Over 150,000 Vietnamese troops, many of them hardened veterans from the long Vietnam War and led by seasoned military commanders, streamed over the border, the invaders quickly overran the country, northeast Cambodia had been captured by the end of 1978, and then on New Year’s Day, the main Vietnamese forces began their approach to Phnom Penh. As the Cambodian army’s resistance melted away in the opening days of 1979, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime, began evacuating the capital. Many senior members fled to Thailand, while Pot

himself headed for the city of Battambang, the regional capital of the northwest, Phnom Penh fell on the 7th of January 1979, to the Vietnamese, who now established a new People’s Republic of Kampuchea, headed by Cambodian exiles who had fled to Vietnam in recent times, to avoid the purges of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The war seemed to have been won in a matter of days and Pol Pot and his regime utterly defeated, but then foreign powers yet again intervened in Cambodia’s affairs. Following the initial flush of victories, the Vietnamese and their Cambodian allies were

stopped in their advances, when China invaded northern Vietnam in mid-February 1979, although the Sino-Vietnamese War which ensued, lasted less than a month and a ceasefire had been agreed by mid-March, the attack was sufficient to give the Khmer Rouge and many other militant groups in Cambodia time to regroup and organise their resistance to the Vietnamese-backed government in Phnom Penh. During this period, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge allies took advantage of the distraction offered by China’s intervention, to establish control over parts of the northwest of the country, along the border with Thailand. Armed with financial and

military aid from China and the United States, Pot was trying, in the summer of 1979, to reinvent the Khmer Rouge, efforts were made to disavow the party’s former socialist past and actions, while Pot tried to position himself as the leader of a new Patriotic Democratic Front, an alliance of disparate political and military groups which opposed the Vietnamese-backed regime in Phnom Penh. The leader of the Khmer Rouge, even attempted to reinvent himself by dropping his pseudonym Pol Pot and adopting the name Phem, after his father, incredibly, these actions won him some credibility on the international stage

and in November 1979, the United Nations chose to recognise the Khmer Rouge as the government of Cambodia over the administration in Phnom Penh despite the appalling crimes of the regime in recent years, the full extent of which was admittedly still unknown to the world in 1979. Thus, by the end of the first year of the Cambodian-Vietnamese War, the stage was set for an extended showdown, between the Vietnamese and their puppet regime in Phnom Penh and the many militant groups which controlled much of the country and of which the Khmer Rouge was just one, this was

effectively a new civil war in Cambodia, it would last as long as that which had first brought Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to power in 1975. The Cambodian-Vietnamese War lasted for another ten years, the Khmer Rouge was just one of the militant groups fighting against the People’s Republic of Kampuchea and Vietnam in these years, foremost amongst these other groups was the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia, or FUNCINPEC, which was formed in 1981, by the stalwart of Cambodian politics, the former king Sihanouk. Then in an effort to win over

more support for the Khmer in response to the formation of Sihanouk’s FUNCINPEC, Pol Pot officially dissolved the Communist Party in 1981 and proposed a new Nationalist movement, an indication of his ongoing ideological flexibility, then as the fighting wore on, in an interminable series of guerrilla attacks in the jungles and foothills of Cambodia in the mid-1980s, Pol Pot began moving away from the forefront of the movement, and in September 1985 he resigned as the military commander of the Khmer Rouge, in part owing to reverses the previous year, when the Vietnamese had pushed the Khmer forces into

Thailand from Cambodia, and in part owing to his own declining health. In 1983, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a relatively severe type of cancer, which required him to spend extensive periods of time in Bangkok and Beijing receiving medical treatment. As the war dragged on interminably into the late 1980s, Pol Pot began to make it known to political elements within Cambodia and abroad, that he would not seek to return to power should the war end, rather his sole wish was to see the Vietnamese removed from Cambodia, or at least that is what he claimed. As

ever, this statement came about largely owing to wider geo-political circumstances, by the end of the decade the Communist bloc worldwide was in decline and the Cold War was drawing to an end, as it did, Vietnam, which had been largely ostracised from the global community since the 1970s, determined to bring its role in Cambodia to an end also. In 1988, it began withdrawing the nearly 100,000 troops which it had in Cambodia and instituted a series of political and economic reforms, designed to prop up the People’s Republic of Kampuchea and to fully disentangled itself from the country,

and by September 1989, it had withdrawn the last of its troops from the country. Once a ceasefire was proclaimed in 1990, peace negotiations began between the various groupings within Cambodia, to find a workable way forward in stabilising the country, despite its crimes while in power between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge with Pol Pot as its leader, would play a part in these negotiations. In the talks which followed, Pol Pot remained in an obscure location near the border between Thailand and Cambodia and instead dispatched his close associate in the Khmer Rouge, Khieu Samphan, to Phnom

Penh to represent the party, here negotiations largely centred around Samphan, Sihanouk and the head of the pro-Vietnamese faction, Hun Sen. Samphan struck an antagonistic pose in the capital, declaring that the Khmer Rouge refused to disarm its troops in western Cambodia, in response Sen and Sihanouk proved similarly recalcitrant, as a result sporadic fighting continued throughout the early 1990s, even as negotiations continued in Phnom Penh, eventually it was agreed that national elections would be held in the early summer of 1993, the results were a sharp rebuttal of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, with Sen and Sihanouk’s

parties cumulatively winning nearly 80% of the vote. It was the beginning of the end for the Khmer Rouge and for Pol Pot too, Sihanouk now negotiated a coalition with Sen and the new combined government launched an offensive against the Khmer Rouge in western Cambodia. While the initial gains made by the government were pushed back by a counter-offensive launched by Pot, in the course of 1994, the party was nevertheless witnessing increasing desertion of its forces in Cambodia, in the months that followed. On its last legs, from this point onwards, it had little more than a few

thousand troops occupying a small segment of the border region with Thailand, but despite its weakness, it would take until 1999, for the Cambodian government to fully defeat the party which had so terrorised its own country in the 1970s, however, Pol Pot would not live to see the final defeat of the Khmer Rouge. The man who had been born as Saloth Sar in the 1920s, and who had created such immense human suffering in his homeland, eventually met his end in 1998, but his downfall had come shortly before that. With the Khmer’s fortunes at their lowest ebb

ever, the husk of a party which remained, turned against its leader in 1997, paranoia and internal disputes plagued the leadership in the wilds of western Cambodia by this time and in a party coup in the summer of 1997, Pol Pot and his family were placed under house arrest by a rival faction led by one Ta Mok. By that time, Pol Pot did not have long to live in any event, he suffered from a heart condition and a stroke had left him partially paralysed and needing regular oxygen, moreover, his cancer remained and without access to effective

medical care, he was deteriorating rapidly. Such was the wreckage of a man, whom the Khmer Rouge put on trial in July 1997, in a remarkably hypocritical act. He was sentenced to life in prison by the party which he had himself led for over thirty years, but that life would end shortly thereafter. On the 15th of April 1998, Pol Pot died in his sleep as his heart gave out, though suspicions have since arisen that he committed suicide to avoid being handed over to the United States for trial. On the 21st of April 1998, six days after

his death, he was cremated in a Buddhist ceremony, thus died one of the twentieth century’s most brutal dictators, he left behind a country which today is littered with land mines, a scarred history and a largely authoritarian state. There is no doubting that Pol Pot was one of the true monsters of the twentieth century, a century in which such figures abounded throughout the world, but what perhaps marks Pol Pot out is the enormous brutality with which, he and the Khmer Rouge carried out the Cambodian genocide, between 1975 and 1979. During these years, the regime turned against

everyone within its own borders, foreigners and political dissenters were targeted above others, as is usually the case with totalitarian societies, but Pot and his followers even turned entirely against their own people, murdering hundreds of thousands of Cambodians in mass labour camps, in a crazed pursuit of agricultural productivity, which only succeeded in creating a famine. As a result, Pol Pot’s regime murdered and killed nearly one out of every four Cambodian citizens, in less than half a decade during the late 1970s. It is hardly any surprise, that as a result, the United Nations and the Red Cross

were already declaring by 1979, that Pol Pot and his regime were bringing about, “the near destruction of Cambodian society,” only the intervention of the Vietnamese that year, stopped the crazed, horrific killing, that is Pol Pot’s legacy, there is nothing approaching any rationalisations which can be made for it. What do you think of Pol Pot? Was he perhaps the most tyrannical dictator of the entire twentieth century? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.