POL POTPol Pot (1925-1998) and his communist Khmer Rouge movement led Cambodia

from 1975 to 1979. During that time, about 1.5 million Cambodians out of a total

population of 7 to 8 million died of starvation, execution, disease or overwork.

Some estimates place the death toll even higher. One detention center, S-21, was

so notorious that only seven of the roughly 20,000 people imprisoned there are

known to have survived. The Khmer Rouge, in their attempt to socially engineer a

classless peasant society, took particular aim at intellectuals, city residents, ethnic

Vietnamese, civil servants and religious leaders. An invading Vietnamese army

deposed the Khmer Rouge in 1979, and, despite years of guerilla warfare, they

never took power again. Pol Pot died in 1998 without ever being brought to justice.

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POL POT: THE EARLY YEARS

Saloth Sar, better known by his nom de guerre Pol Pot, was born in 1925 in

the small village of Prek Sbauv, located about 100 miles north of the

Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. His family was relatively affluent and

owned 50 acres of rice paddy, or roughly 10 times the national average. In

1934 Pol Pot moved to Phnom Penh, where he spent a year at a Buddhist

monastery before attending a French Catholic primary school. His

Cambodian education continued until 1949, when he went to Paris on a

scholarship. While there, he studied radio technology and became active in

communist circles.

Did You Know?

An estimated 1.5 million people living in Cambodia were killed during the brutal regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Their bodies were buried in

mass graves that became known as “killing fields.”

When Pol Pot returned to Cambodia in January 1953, the whole region was

revolting against French colonial rule. Cambodia officially gained its

independence later that year. Pol Pot, meanwhile, joined the proto-

communist Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party (KPRP), which had been

set up in 1951 under the auspices of the North Vietnamese. From 1956 to

1963, Pol Pot taught history, geography and French literature at a private

school while simultaneously plotting a revolution.

In 1960 Pol Pot helped to reorganize the KPRP into a party that specifically

espoused Marxism-Leninism. Three years later, following a clampdown on

communist activity, he and other party leaders moved deep into the

countryside, encamping at first with a group of Viet Cong. Pol Pot, who had

begun to emerge as Cambodian party chief, and the newly formed Khmer

Rouge guerilla army launched a national uprising in 1968. Their revolution

started off slowly, though they were able to gain a foothold in the sparsely

populated northeast.

THE KHMER ROUGE SEIZES CONTROL

In March 1970, General Lon Nol initiated a coup while Cambodia’s

hereditary leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was out of the country. A civil

war then broke out in which Sihanouk allied himself with the Khmer Rouge

and Lon Nol received the backing of the United States. Both the Khmer

Rouge and Lon Nol’s troops purportedly committed mass atrocities. At the

same time, about 70,000 U.S. and South Vietnamese soldiers stormed

across the border to fight North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops who had

taken sanctuary there. U.S. President Richard Nixon also ordered a secret

bombing campaign as part of the Vietnam War. Over the span of four

years, U.S. planes dropped 500,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia, more

than three times the amount dropped on Japan during World War II.

By the time the U.S. bombing campaign ended in August 1973, the number

of Khmer Rouge troops had increased exponentially, and they now

controlled approximately three-quarters of Cambodia’s territory. Soon after,

they began shelling Phnom Penh with rockets and artillery. A final assault

of the refugee-filled capital started in January 1975, with the Khmer Rouge

bombarding the airport and blockading river crossings. A U.S. airlift of

supplies failed to prevent thousands of children from starving. Finally, on

April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered the city and ended the fighting.

About half a million Cambodians had died during the civil war, yet the worst

was still to come.

LIFE UNDER THE KHMER ROUGE

Almost immediately after taking power, the Khmer Rouge evacuated

Phnom Penh’s 2.5 million residents. Former civil servants, doctors,

teachers and other professionals were stripped of their possessions and

forced to toil in the fields as part of a reeducation process. Those that

complained about the work, concealed their rations or broke rules were

usually tortured in a detention center, such as the infamous S-21, and then

killed. The bones of people who died from malnutrition or inadequate

healthcare also filled up mass graves across the country.

Under Pol Pot, the state controlled all aspects of a person’s life. Money,

private property, jewelry, gambling, most reading material and religion were

outlawed; agriculture was collectivized; children were taken from their

homes and forced into the military; and strict rules governing sexual

relations, vocabulary and clothing were laid down. The Khmer Rouge,

which renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea, even insisted on

realigning rice fields in order to create the symmetrical checkerboard

pictured on their coat of arms.

At first, Pol Pot largely governed from behind the scenes. He became prime

minister in 1976 after Sihanouk resigned. By that time, border skirmishes

were occurring regularly between the Cambodians and the Vietnamese.

The fighting intensified in 1977, and in December 1978 the Vietnamese

sent more than 60,000 troops, along with air and artillery units, across the

border. On January 7, 1979, they captured Phnom Penh and forced Pol Pot

to flee back into the jungle, where he resumed guerilla operations.

POL POT’S FINAL YEARS

Throughout the 1980s, the Khmer Rouge received arms from China and

political support from the United States, which opposed the decade-long

Vietnamese occupation. But the Khmer Rouge’s influence began to

decrease following a 1991 ceasefire agreement, and the movement

completely collapsed by the end of the decade. In 1997 a Khmer Rouge

splinter group captured Pol Pot and placed him under house arrest. He

died in his sleep on April 15, 1998, due to heart failure. To date, a United

Nations-backed tribunal has convicted only a handful of Khmer Rouge

leaders of crimes against humanity.

http://www.history.com/topics/pol-pot

An attempt by Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot to form a Communist peasant farming society resulted in the deaths of 25 percent of the country's population from starvation, overwork and executions.

Pol Pot was born in 1925 (as Saloth Sar) into a farming family in central Cambodia, which was then part of French Indochina. In 1949, at age 20, he traveled to Paris on a scholarship to study radio electronics but became absorbed in Marxism and neglected his studies. He lost his scholarship and returned to Cambodia in 1953 and joined the underground Communist movement. The following year, Cambodia achieved full independence from France and was then ruled by a royal monarchy.

By 1962, Pol Pot had become leader of the Cambodian Communist Party and was forced to flee into the jungle to escape the wrath of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, leader of Cambodia. In the jungle, Pol Pot formed an armed resistance movement that became known as the Khmer Rouge (Red Cambodians) and waged a guerrilla war against Sihanouk's government.

In 1970, Prince Sihanouk was ousted, not by Pol Pot, but due to a U.S.-backed right-wing military coup. An embittered Sihanouk retaliated by joining with Pol Pot, his former enemy, in opposing Cambodia's new military government. That same year, the U.S. invaded Cambodia to expel the North Vietnamese from their border encampments, but instead drove them deeper into Cambodia where they allied themselves with the Khmer Rouge.

From 1969 until 1973, the U.S. intermittently bombed North Vietnamese sanctuaries in eastern Cambodia, killing up to 150,000 Cambodian peasants. As a result, peasants fled the countryside by the hundreds of thousands and settled in Cambodia's capital city, Phnom Penh.

All of these events resulted in economic and military destabilization in Cambodia and a surge of popular support for Pol Pot.

By 1975, the U.S. had withdrawn its troops from Vietnam. Cambodia's government, plagued by corruption and incompetence, also lost its American military support. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army, consisting of teenage peasant guerrillas, marched into Phnom Penh and on April 17 effectively seized control of Cambodia.

Once in power, Pol Pot began a radical experiment to create an agrarian utopia inspired in part by Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution which he had witnessed first-hand during a visit to Communist China.

Mao's "Great Leap Forward" economic program included forced evacuations of Chinese cities and the purging of "class enemies." Pol Pot would now attempt his own "Super Great Leap Forward" in Cambodia, which he renamed the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea.

He began by declaring, "This is Year Zero," and that society was about to be "purified." Capitalism, Western culture, city life, religion, and all foreign influences were to be extinguished in favor of an extreme form of peasant Communism.

All foreigners were thus expelled, embassies closed, and any foreign economic or medical assistance was refused. The use of foreign languages was banned. Newspapers and television stations were shut down, radios and bicycles confiscated, and mail and telephone usage curtailed. Money was forbidden. All businesses were shuttered, religion banned, education halted, health care

Map & Photos

Cambodia and surrounding area.

Pol Pot addresses a closed meeting in Phnom Penh after the 1975 Khmer Rouge victory.

Young Khmer Rouge soldiers in 1975.

Tuol Sleng Prison, the nerve center of the Khmer Rouge secret police. Today it's the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide.

The Killing Fields at Choeung Ek. This mass grave, discovered in 1980, was one of the first proofs to the outside world of what had occurred during Pol Pot's regime.

eliminated, and parental authority revoked. Thus Cambodia was sealed off from the outside world.

All of Cambodia's cities were then forcibly evacuated. At Phnom Penh, two million inhabitants were evacuated on foot into the countryside at gunpoint. As many as 20,000 died along the way.

Millions of Cambodians accustomed to city life were now forced into slave labor in Pol Pot's "killing fields" where they soon began dying from overwork, malnutrition and disease, on a diet of one tin of rice (180 grams) per person every two days.

Workdays in the fields began around 4 a.m. and lasted until 10 p.m., with only two rest periods allowed during the 18 hour day, all under the armed supervision of young Khmer Rouge soldiers eager to kill anyone for the slightest infraction. Starving people were forbidden to eat the fruits and rice they were harvesting. After the rice crop was harvested, Khmer Rouge trucks would arrive and confiscate the entire crop.

Ten to fifteen families lived together with a chairman at the head of each group. All work decisions were made by the armed supervisors with no participation from the workers who were told, "Whether you live or die is not of great significance." Every tenth day was a day of rest. There were also three days off during the Khmer New Year festival.

Throughout Cambodia, deadly purges were conducted to eliminate remnants of the "old society" - the educated, the wealthy, Buddhist monks, police, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and former government officials. Ex-soldiers were killed along with their wives and children. Anyone suspected of disloyalty to Pol Pot, including eventually many Khmer Rouge leaders, was shot or bludgeoned with an ax. "What is rotten must be removed," a Khmer Rouge slogan proclaimed.

In the villages, unsupervised gatherings of more than two persons were forbidden. Young people were taken from their parents and placed in communals. They were later married in collective ceremonies involving hundreds of often-unwilling couples.

Up to 20,000 persons were tortured into giving false confessions at Tuol Sleng, a school in Phnom Penh which had been converted into a jail. Elsewhere, suspects were often shot on the spot before any questioning.

Ethnic groups were attacked including the three largest minorities; the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cham Muslims, along with twenty other smaller groups. Fifty percent of the estimated 425,000 Chinese living in Cambodia in 1975 perished. Khmer Rouge also forced Muslims to eat pork and shot those who refused.

On December 25, 1978, Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia seeking to end Khmer Rouge border attacks. On January 7, 1979, Phnom Penh fell and Pol Pot was deposed. The Vietnamese then installed a puppet government consisting of Khmer Rouge defectors.

Pol Pot retreated into Thailand with the remnants of his Khmer Rouge army and began a guerrilla war against a succession of Cambodian governments lasting over the next 17 years. After a series of internal power struggles in the 1990s, he finally lost control of the Khmer Rouge. In April 1998, 73-year-old Pol Pot died of an apparent heart attack following his

arrest, before he could be brought to trial by an international tribunal for the events of 1975-79.

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History

Pol Pot, near the end of his life  ©Pol Pot was leader of the Khmer

Rouge, a communist regime that ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, and caused

the deaths of more than one million people.

Pol Pot was born Saloth Sar on 19 May 1925 in Kompong Thong province in central

Cambodia. The country was then a French protectorate and Pol Pot, whose family were

relatively prosperous, was educated in a series of French-speaking schools. In 1949, he

won a scholarship to study in Paris where he became involved in communist politics.

He returned to Cambodia in 1953 and became one of the leaders of an underground

communist movement, the 'Khmer Rouge'. In 1963, the Khmer Rouge set up guerrilla

bases in remote regions of the country to fight the government of Prince Sihanouk. In

1970, Sihanouk was overthrown by General Lon Nol. Civil war broke out between Lon

Nol's army and the Khmer Rouge.

In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge captured the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. Led by Pol

Pot, they reset the calendar to 'Year Zero' and attempted to transform Cambodia into

their vision of a communist, rural society. All inhabitants of Cambodian cities and towns

were expelled to work in agricultural communes. Money, private property and religion

were abolished. Thousands were murdered in special detention centres and thousands

more died from starvation and overwork.

After raids by the Khmer Rouge across their border, the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia

and in 1979 overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime. Pol Pot fled to the border region with

Thailand from where he fought against the Vietnamese-backed government in Phnom

Penh. The Khmer Rouge continued to receive support from abroad because of their

opposition to the communist regime in Vietnam.

In 1997, after a power struggle within the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot was arrested by former

colleagues and sentenced to life under house arrest. He died on 15 April 1998

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/pot_pol.shtml

"Pol Pot." Encyclopedia of World Biography. 2004. Retrieved November 11, 2015 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3404705193.html

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Pol Pot

Pol Pot (born 1928) was a key figure in the Cambodian Communist movement, becoming

premier of the government of Democratic Kampuchéa (DK) from 1976 to 1979. He directed

the mass killing of intellectuals, professional people, city dwellers—perhaps one-fifth of his

own people.

Pol Pot was born Saloth Sar on May 19, 1928. He was the second son of a conservative,

prosperous, and influential small landowner. Pol Pot's father had social and political

connections at the royal court at the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, some 70 miles south

from Prek Sbau, the small hamlet in Kompong Thom, the province where Pol Pot was born.

Visits by court officials—and, on at least one occasion, even by King Monivong himself—to

Pol Pot's father's home appear to have been common. Pol Pot consistently denied that he was

Saloth Sar, probably because his family and educational background clashed with Communist

proletarian perceptions and because his tactical and organizational skills seemed to have

flourished best in an atmosphere of extreme secrecy. Even after he had become premier of the

victorious Communist Democratic Kampuchéa (DK) regime in Phnom Penh on April 5,

1976, there was widespread uncertainty about who he was.

The Education of a Radical

Pol Pot's intellectual development showed a sharp break from traditional toward radical

values. He was educated in a Buddhist monastery and a private Catholic institution in Phnom

Penh and then enrolled at a technical school in the provincial quiet and security of the town

of Kompong Cham to learn carpentry. Despite his later claims, there is no evidence that as

early as his mid-teens he joined Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh resistance for a while. He seemed

at first destined for a trade in carpentry. However, the program of French colonial

policymakers to accelerate development of a more diversified "polytechnic" elite in the

overseas territories enabled Pol Pot in 1949 to obtain a government scholarship to study radio

and electrical technology in Paris.

In France Pol Pot joined a small circle of leftist Cambodian students—some of whom later

became prominent Marxist and/or Communist Party leaders (such as Ieng Sary, the future DK

foreign minister, and Hou Yuon, an independent Marxist radical who repeatedly served in

Prince Norodom Sihanouk's cabinets until his death in 1975 in the Pol Pot holocaust). Pol Pot

soon became an anti-colonialist, Marxist radical. Among the European countries he visited

during this period was Yugoslavia, whose determination to chart its own national Communist

course of thoroughgoing reform reportedly particularly impressed him.

Upon his return to Cambodia in 1953, Pol Pot first drifted into the Viet Minh "United Khmer

Issarak (Freedom) Front" of underground Cambodian Communists and radical nationalists.

After 1954 the Issarak's principal above-ground organizational mainstay became the Krom

Pracheachon ("Citizens Association"). The Front, along with other Cambodian political

groups, opposed both the remnant of French colonial power in Cambodia and the government

of Sihanouk. The latter was perceived by many Cambodians to be a French puppet. Pol Pot

served for several months with Viet Minh and Issarak units, some of whom had joined in the

loose leftist radical resistance groups supervised by the Krom Pracheachon. But Cambodia's

1954 achievement of independence from the French also found him increasingly involved in

the organization of the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP), the first Cambodian

Communist party, founded in 1951.

In the post-independence era Pol Pot appears to have resented as much the continued heavy

Communist Vietnamese influence in the KPRP and its armed units as the hothouse

atmosphere of partisan political intrigues in the capital deftly manipulated by the wily

Sihanouk. Pol Pot's contempt for intellectuals and politicians jockeying for favor and power

was greatly increased and helped shape his own ruthless radical reforms once he assumed

power. Pol Pot's mentor in these years was Tou Samouth, the onetime Unified Issarak Front's

president and later the KPRP's secretary general. Like Pol Pot, Samouth was primarily

interested in building the KPRP into a genuinely Cambodian, broad-based organization

capable of rallying all opposition elements among peasants, urban workers, and intellectuals

against the Sihanouk regime. This effort led to tensions with the Vietnamese, who continued

to try to dominate the left and anti-Sihanouk Cambodian resistance.

Building a Revolutionary Party

On September 28, 1960, Pol Pot, Tou Samouth, Ieng Sary, and a handful of followers

reportedly met in secret in a room of the Phnom Penh railroad station to found the "Workers

Party of Kampuchea" (WPK). Samouth was named secretary general and Pol Pot became one

of three Politburo members. But on February 20, 1963, at the WPK's second congress, Pol

Pot succeeded Samouth as party secretary. The latter had disappeared on July 20, 1963, under

mysterious circumstances and subsequently was reported to have been assassinated. Whether

Pol Pot was involved in Samouth's murder remains uncertain.

For the next 13 years, as the WPK increasingly seemed to distance itself from Hanoi, Pol Pot

and other top WPK cadres virtually disappeared from public notice. They set up their main

party encampments in a remote forest area of Ratanakiri province. During this period Pol Pot

appears not only to have been consolidating his own leadership position in the WPK, but he

also gradually and successfully contested pro-Hanoi elements in the anti-Sihanouk resistance

generally. However, Pol Pot at this time carefully avoided an open breach with the

Vietnamese Communists, who were consolidating their hold on the Ho Chi Minh trail and

adjacent pockets of Cambodian territory. Nevertheless, a 1965 visit by Pol Pot to Hanoi

designed to win acceptance as top party leader was shrouded in mutual mistrust. More

successful was Pol Pot's journey and extended stay in Beijing in the same year. He remained

in China for some seven months, during which time he likely received ideological and

organizational schooling. Pol Pot's pro-Chinese orientation became more pronounced upon

his return to Cambodia in September 1966. The WPK soon changed its name to Communist

Party of Kampuchea (CPK).

CPK-instigated demonstrations against the Sihanouk regime now steadily mounted. The

prince's blanket denunciation and execution of scores of what his government termed

theKhmer Rouge ("Red Khmers") solidified the CPK-led opposition. At the same time, it

made that opposition appear more formidable than it actually was. In December 1969 and

January 1970 Pol Pot and other CPK leaders again visited Hanoi and Beijing, evidently in

preparation for a final drive against the Sihanouk regime. But the drive was preempted as on

March 18, 1970, a right-wing coup in Phnom Penh overthrew Sihanouk, bringing Lon Nol to

the Cambodian presidency.

Although some CPK members and other Communist Pracheachon resistance leaders—

including Pol Pot's colleague the future DK President Khieu Sampan—rallied to Sihanouk's

call for a united front against Lon Nol, Pol Pot himself remained aloof. After Sihanouk's fall,

Hanoi had begun infiltrating some 1, 000 Vietnamese-trained Cambodian Communists into

Cambodia. But on orders of Pol Pot most of these were identified and quickly killed. Despite

this action and clashes with Pol Pot's followers in Kompong Chom province, Hanoi avoided

rupture in the interest of winning first a decisive Communist victory throughout Indochina.

In mid-September 1971 a new CPK congress re-elected Pol Pot as secretary general and as

commander of its "Revolutionary Army." Tensions between Hanoi and Pol Pot increased further

when the CPK refused a Vietnamese request to negotiate with the Lon Nol regime and the United

States as Vietnamese-U.S. discussions took place in Paris. In keeping with the Paris Accords, the

Vietnamese in the early months of 1973 left some of their Cambodian encampments. But CPK

"Revolutionary Army" units quickly took their place as Pol Pot further strengthened his power

base. Clashes between Lon Nol's forces and Pol Pot's guerrillas, as well as new "Revolutionary

Army" raids on pro-Hanoi Cambodian resistance units and on followers of Sihanouk's coalition

exile government continued, however. Yet throughout 1974, in letters to Hanoi and Vietnamese

party leaders and in public messages, Pol Pot affirmed his friendship and gratitude.

A Holocaust on His Own People

On April 17, 1975, Phnom Penh fell to several Communist Cambodian and Sihanoukist

factions. The CPK and Pol Pot slowly managed to establish hegemony over the capital.

Fighting continued between Pol Pot's "Revolutionary Army" and Vietnamese troops in

disputed border territories and on islands in the Gulf of Thailand. At a meeting with

Vietnamese representatives along the border in early June 1975, Pol Pot reportedly

apologized for his troops' "faulty map reading." Tensions between Pol Pot and his associates

and the Vietnamese did not abate, however, despite another Pol Pot visit to Hanoi in order to

suggest a friendship treaty.

For nearly a year Pol Pot and other Cambodian Communists, as well as the embattled

Norodom Sihanouk, struggled for power in the newly proclaimed state of "Democratic

Kampuchea." Another CPK party congress in January 1976 reaffirmed Pol Pot's position as

secretary general but also revealed emergent leadership rifts between Pol Pot and some

outlying zone organizations of the party. Relations with Hanoi continued to worsen. On April

14, 1976, after CPK-controlled elections for a new "People's Representative Assembly" and

the resignation as head of state of Sihanouk, a new DK government was proclaimed. Pol Pot,

who officially had been elected to the assembly as a delegate of a "rubber workers

organization, " now became premier.

However, his authority still was being contested both by Hanoi-influenced party cadres and

rival party zone leaders. Beginning in November 1976 Pol Pot accelerated extensive purges

of rivals, including cabinet ministers and other top party leaders. This provoked repeated

explosions of unrest in Kompong Thom and Oddar Meanchey.

Meanwhile, the fury of Pol Pot's social and economic reform policies carried out by the

mystery-shrouded Angka, or "inner" party organization, eventually was to make Pol Pot's

name synonymous with one of the modern world's worst holocausts. Forced evacuation,

through extended death marches, of the inhabitants of major cities and resettlement and

harshly exploitive labor of tens of thousands in agricultural work projects; deliberate

withholding of adequate food and medical care; systematic mass killings of all "old

dandruff"—i.e., suspected subversives, especially those who had white collar or intellectual

occupations or political experience—all these reflected Pol Pot's brand of ideology in which

Rousseauist purism and Stalinist terrorism were uniquely blended. Great emphasis was

placed in Pol Pot's policies on the training of the young and on the creation of a "New Man"

in Cambodia. Even after Pol Pot was driven from power, young teenagers remained among

his dedicated followers in the DK's "Revolutionary Army." But the killings and deliberate

neglect by the Pol Pot regime cost some 1.6 million Cambodians their lives—nearly 20

percent of the country's total population.

Regime policies prompted mounting opposition among divisional commanders and party

cadres. Pol Pot's visit to China and North Korea in September and October 1977 solidified his

standing among other Asian Communist leaders, even as fighting with Vietnamese border

forces intensified. On December 31, 1977, all diplomatic relations with Hanoi were severed,

Pol Pot charging that the Vietnamese were seeking to impose their hegemony on both Laos

and Cambodia through an "Indochinese Federation."

The Fall of a Dictator

On May 26, 1978, Eastern Zone party leaders and their followers rose up in revolt against Pol

Pot. But the rising failed, and thousands of cadres either were killed or, like Heng Samrin

(who would succeed Pol Pot as premier), made good their escape to Vietnam. Some Eastern

Zone leaders charged Pol Pot with selling Cambodia to the Chinese. Vietnamese attacks on

and military penetration of DK territory became more severe and extensive during the second

half of 1978. Pol Pot's premiership also became more precarious and his overtures toward the

Chinese to deter Vietnamese intervention found little response. In the wake of a final

Vietnamese military drive, Pol Pot and other DK leaders were forces to flee Phnom Penh on

January 7, 1979. They eventually regrouped their forces and established an underground

government in Western Cambodia and in the Cardamom mountain range.

On July 20, 1979, Pol Pot was condemned to death in absentia, on grounds of having

committed genocide. The verdict was issued by a "People's Tribunal" of the new government

of the "People's Republic of Kampuchea, " installed with the aid of Vietnamese forces. As

growing world attention focussed on the plight of wartorn Cambodia and on the bloody

violence of the Pol Pot era, Pol Pot himself increasingly became a liability to his Chinese

backers and the underground DK leaders. At a CPK congress on December 17, 1979, Pol Pot

stepped down as DK prime minister, and the post was taken over by DK President Khieu

Sampan. However, he remained as party secretary general and as head of the CPK's military

commission, making him in effect the overall commander of the DK's 30, 000-man guerrilla

force battling the Vietnamese in Cambodia. (But throughout most of the 1980s the

Vietnamese army controlled Cambodia (Kampuchea) under the presidency of Heng Samrin.)

After leaving his premiership little was known of Pol Pot's whereabouts or activities.

Reportedly he repeatedly sought medical attention for a cardio-vascular condition in Beijing

in the course of 1981-1983. On September 1, 1985, the DK's clandestine radio announced

that Pol Pot had retired as commander of the DK's "National Army" and had been appointed

to be "Director of the Higher Institute for National Defense."

Pol Pot was married to Khieu Ponnary, a former fellow student activist of his Paris days and

later the CPK women's movement leader in Phnom Penh.

Captured at Last

After several years of living underground, Pol Pot was finally captured on June 18, 1997 by a

rival faction of his own comrades. The Khmer Rouge had suffered from internal factionalism

in recent years, and finally splintered into opposing forces, the largest of which, in the

northern zone, joined with the government of Cambodia under Sihanouk and hunted down

their former leader. Upon capturing him, the guerrillas sentenced Pol Pot, leader of the

modern day reign of terror, to life in prison.

Further Reading

Pol Pot kept out of the limelight even during his premiership, and no comprehensive full

length biography of him as yet exists. Various stages of his life and career are dealt with in

Ben Kiernan and Stephen Heder, "Why Pol Pot? Roots of the Cambodian Tragedy,

" Indochina Issues (Center for International Policy, Washington, D.C.), 52 (December 1984);

Serge Thion, "Chronology of Khmer Communism, 1940-1982, " in David P. Chandler and

Ben Kiernan, editors, Revolution and Its Aftermath in Kampuchea (Yale University Southeast

Asia Studies, Monograph Series, no. 25, 1983); Ben Kiernan and Chanthou Boua,

editors, Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea, 1942-1981(1982); Michael

Vickery, Cambodia, 1975-1982 (1984); and David P. Chandler, A History of

Cambodia (1983). For the PRK view of Pol Pot see Say Phouthong, "Fidelity to the Chosen

Path, "World Marxist Review (February 1985). The horror of the Pol Pot holocaust was

reported by Elizabeth Becker in When the War Was Over: The voices of Cambodia's

revolution and its people (1986). 

1

Pol Pot, Butcher of Cambodia

Pol Pot, Butcher of CambodiaPol Pot, former Khmer Rouge leader of Cambodia responsible for the Killing Fields, shortly before his

death in 1998.  Getty Images

Kallie Szczepanski

Asian History Expert 

 

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Pol Pot. The name is synonymous with horror.

Even in the blood-drenched annals of twentieth-century history, Pol Pot's Khmer

Rouge regime in Cambodia stands out for the sheer scale and senselessness of its

atrocities. In the name of creating an agrarian communist revolution, Pol Pot and his

underlings killed at least 1.5 million of their own people in the infamous Killing Fields.

They wiped out between 1/4 and 1/5 of the country's entire population.

Who would do this to their own nation? What kind of monster kills millions in the name of

erasing a century of "modernization"? Who wasPol Pot?

Early Life:

A child named Saloth Sar was born in March of 1925, in the little fishing village of Prek

Sbav, French Indochina. His family was ethnically mixed, Chinese and Khmer, and

comfortably middle-class. They owned fifty acres of rice-paddies, which was ten times as

much as most of their neighbors, and a large house that stood on stilts in case the river

flooded. Saloth Sar was the eighth of their nine children.

Saloth Sar's family had connections with the Cambodian royal family.

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His aunt had a post in the future King Norodom's household, and his first cousin Meak

as well as his sister Roeung served as royal concubines. Saloth Sar's elder brother

Suong was also an officer at the palace.

When Saloth Sar was ten years old, his family sent him 100 mile south to the capital city

of Phnom Penh to attend the Ecole Miche, a French Catholic school. He was not a good

student. Later, the boy transferred to a technical school in Kompong Cham, where he

studied carpentry.

His academic struggles during his youth would actually stand him in good stead in

decades to come, given the Khmer Rouge's anti-intellectual policies.

French Technical College:

Probably because of his connections rather than his scholastic record, the government

gave him a scholarship to travel to Paris, and pursue higher education in the field of

electronics and radio technology at the Ecole Francaise d'Electronique et d'Informatique

(EFRIE). Saloth Sar was in France from 1949 to 1953; he spent most of his time learning

about Communism rather than electronics.

Inspired by Ho Chi Minh's declaration of Vietnamese independence from France, Saloth

joined the Marxist Circle, which dominated the Khmer Students' Association in Paris.

He also joined the French Communist Party (PCF), which lionized the uneducated rural

peasantry as the true proletariat, in opposition to Karl Marx's designation of the urban

factory-workers as the proletariat.

Return to Cambodia:

Saloth Sar flunked out of college in 1953. Upon his return to Cambodia, he scouted out

the various anti-government rebel groups for the PCF, and reported that the Khmer Viet

Minh was the most effective.

Cambodia became independent in 1954 along with Vietnam and Laos, as part of the

Geneva Agreement which France used to extract itself from the Vietnam War. Prince

Sihanouk played the different political parties in Cambodia off against one another and

fixed elections; nonetheless, the leftist opposition was too weak to seriously challenge

him either at the ballot box or through guerrilla war. Saloth Sar became a go-between for

the officially recognized left-wing parties and the communist underground.

On July 14, 1956, Saloth Sar married teacher Khieu Ponnary. Somewhat incredibly, he

got work as a lecturer in French history and literature at a college called Chamraon

Vichea. By all reports, his students loved the soft-spoken and friendly teacher. He would

soon move up within the communist sphere, as well.

Pol Pot Assumes Control of Communists:

Throughout 1962, the Cambodian government cracked down on communist and other

left-wing parties. It arrested party members, shut down their newspapers, and even killed

important communist leaders while they were in custody. As a result, Saloth Sar moved

up the ranks of surviving party members.

In early 1963, a small group of survivors elected Saloth as Secretary of the Communist

Central Committee of Cambodia. By March, he had to go into hiding when his name

appeared on a list of people wanted for questioning in connection with leftist activities.

Saloth Sar escaped to North Vietnam, where he made contact with a Viet Minh unit.

With support and cooperation from the much better-organized Vietnamese Communists,

Saloth Sar arranged for a Cambodian Central Committee meeting early in 1964. The

Central Committee called for armed struggle against the Cambodian government, (rather

ironically) for self-reliance in the sense of independence from the Vietnamese

Communists, and for a revolution based on the agrarian proletariat, or peasantry, rather

than the "working class" as Marx envisioned it.

When Prince Sihanouk unleashed another crack-down against leftists in 1965, a number

of elites such as teachers and college students fled the cities and joined the nascent

Communist guerrilla movement taking shape in the countryside. In order to become

revolutionaries, however, they had to give up their books and drop out. They would

become the first members of the Khmer Rouge.

Khmer Rouge Take-Over of Cambodia:

In 1966, Saloth Sar returned to Cambodia and renamed the party the CPK - Communist

Party of Kampuchea. The party began to plan for a revolution, but was caught off-guard

when peasants across the country rose up in anger over the high price of food in 1966;

the CPK was left standing.

It wasn't until January 18, 1968 that the CPK started its uprising, with an attack on an

army base near Battambang. Although the Khmer Rouge did not overrun the base

entirely, they were able to seize a weapons cache which they turned against the police

in villages across Cambodia.

As violence escalated, Prince Sihanouk went to Paris, then ordered protesters to picket

the Vietnamese embassies in Phnom Penh. When the protests got out of hand, between

March 8 and 11, he then denounced the protesters for destroying the embassies as well

as ethnic Vietnamese churches and homes. The National Assembly learned of this

capricious chain of events, and voted Sihanouk out of power on March 18, 1970.

Although the Khmer Rouge had consistently railed against Sihanouk in its propaganda,

the Chinese and Vietnamese communist leaders convinced him to support the Khmer

Rouge. Sihanouk went on the radio and called for the Cambodian people to take up

arms against the government, and fight for the Khmer Rouge. Meanwhile, the North

Vietnamese army also was invading Cambodia, pressing the Cambodian army back to

less than 25 kilometers from Phnom Penh.

Killing Fields - Cambodian Genocide:

In the name of agrarian communism, the Khmer Rouge decided to completely and

immediately remake Cambodian society as a utopian farming nation, free of all foreign

influence and the trappings of modernity. They immediately abolished all private

property, and seized all products of field or factory. The people who lived in cities and

towns - some 3.3 million - were driven out to work in the countryside. They were labeled

"depositees," and were given very short rations with the intention of starving them to

death. When party leader Hou Youn objected to the emptying of Phnom Penh, Pol Pot

labeled him a traitor; Hou Youn disappeared.

Pol Pot's regime targeted intellectuals - including anyone with an education, or with

foreign contacts - as well as anyone from the middle or upper classes. Such people were

tortured horrifically, including by electrocution, pulling out of finger and toenails, and

being skinned alive, before they were killed. All of the doctors, the teachers, the Buddhist

monks and nuns, and the engineers died. All of the national army's officers were

executed.

Love, sex and romance were outlawed, and the state had to approve marriages. Anyone

caught being in love or having sex without official permission was executed. Children

were not allowed to go to school or to play - they were expected to work, and would be

summarily killed if they balked.

Incredibly, the people of Cambodia did not really know who was doing this to them.

Saloth Sar, now known to his associates as Pol Pot, never revealed his identity or that of

his party to the ordinary people. Intensely paranoid, Pol Pot reportedly refused to sleep

in the same bed two nights in a row for fear of assassination.

The Angka included only 14,000 members, but through secrecy and terror tactics, they

ruled a country of 8 million citizens absolutely. Those people who were not killed

immediately worked in the fields from sun-up to sun-down, seven days a week. They

were separated from their families, ate in communal dining messes, and slept in military-

style barracks.

The government confiscated all consumer goods, piling vehicles, refrigerators, radios

and air conditioners up in the streets and burning them. Among the activities utterly

banned were music-making, prayer, using money and reading. Anyone who disobeyed

these restrictions ended up in an extermination center, or got a swift axe-blow to the

head in one of the Killing Fields.

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge sought nothing less than the reversal of hundreds of

years of progress. They were willing and able to erase not only the symbols of

modernization, but also the people associated with it. Initially the elites bore the brunt of

Khmer Rouge excesses, but by 1977 even peasants ("base people") were being

massacred for offenses such as "using happy words."

Nobody knows exactly how many Cambodians were murdered during Pol Pot's reign of

terror, but the lower estimates tend to cluster around 1.5 million, while others estimate 3

million, out of a total population of just over 8 million.

Vietnam Invades:

Throughout Pol Pot's reign, border skirmishes flared from time to time with the

Vietnamese. A May 1978 uprising by non-Khmer Rouge communists in eastern

Cambodia prompted Pol Pot to call for the extermination of all Vietnamese (50 million

people), as well as of the 1.5 million Cambodians in the eastern sector. He made a start

on this plan, massacring more than 100,000 of the eastern Cambodians by the end of

the year.

However, Pol Pot's rhetoric and actions gave the Vietnamese government a reasonable

pretext for war.Vietnam launched an all-out invasion of Cambodia, and overthrew Pol

Pot. He fled to the Thai borderlands, while the Vietnamese installed a new, more

moderate communist government in Phnom Penh.

Continued Revolutionary Activity:

Pol Pot was put on trial in absentia in 1980, and sentenced to death. Nonetheless, from

his hideout in the Malai district of Banteay Meanchey Province, near the

Cambodia/Thailand border, he continued to directKhmer Rouge actions against the

Vietnamese-controlled government for years. He announced his "retirement" in 1985,

supposedly due to problems with asthma, but continued to direct the Khmer Rouge

behind the scenes. Frustrated, the Vietnamese attacked the western provinces and

drove the Khmerguerrillas into Thailand; Pol Pot would live in Trat, Thailand for several

years.

In 1989, the Vietnamese withdrew their troops from Cambodia. Pol Pot had been living

in China, where he underwent treatment for facial cancer. He soon returned to western

Cambodia, but refused to take part in negotiations for a coalition government. A hard

core of Khmer Rouge loyalists continued to terrorize the western regions of the country,

and waged guerrilla war on the government.

In June of 1997, Pol Pot was arrested and put on trial only for the murder of his friend

Son Sen. He was sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life.

Pol Pot's Death and Legacy:

On April 15, 1998, Pol Pot heard the news on a Voice of America radio program that he

was going to be turned over to an international tribunal for trial. He died that night; the

official cause of death was heart failure, but his hasty cremation raised suspicions that it

might have been suicide.

In the end, it is difficult to assess Pol Pot's legacy. Certainly, he was one of the bloodiest

tyrants in history. His delusional plan for reforming Cambodia did set the country back,

but it hardly created an agrarian utopia. Indeed, it is only after four decades that

Cambodia's wounds are beginning to heal, and some sort of normalcy is returning to this

utterly ravaged nation. But a visitor does not even have to scratch the surface to find the

scars of Cambodia's Orwellian nightmare under the rule of Pol Pot.

Sources:

Becker, Elizabeth. When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge

Revolution, Public Affairs, 1998.

Kiernan, Ben. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the

Khmer Rouge, Hartford: Yale University Press, 2008.

"Pol Pot," Biography.com.

Short, Philip. Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, New York: MacMillan, 2006.http://asianhistory.about.com/od/cambodia/p/Pol-Pot-Biography.htm