Growing up in Darwin, a small city in far northern Australia, through the 1970s I have distinct memories of Dad telling me about Pol Pot being the worst murderer in history. I didn’t know any more details except that Pol Pot was a name which became firmly imprinted in my memory.
Travelling in Cambodia in 1996, the legacy of the Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot’s leadership, was clearly visible. Pol Pot was still alive and leader of the Khmer Rouge however reduced to a small and weakening amount of power and impact. The people on the street were heavily skewed to be younger, people over 40 years tended to be women and there were many amputees. Outside of the areas declared safe and protected for tourism by the government, there were still tens of thousands of unexploded and uncleared land mines as well as bandits and kidnappers.
The Cambodian genocide under the Khmer Rouge was one of the most devastating and extreme atrocities in modern history. Between 1975 to 1979 they killed roughly 1.7 to 2 million Cambodians, being about 25% of the nation’s total population. This makes it proportionally the largest percentage of a country’s population killed by a regime in the 20th century.
Sadly, the more you learn about the timeline that led to the Khmer Rouge regime, their influence and position of power, their philosophies and actions, it is obvious how complicit the big players on the world stage – China and the United States – are in influencing and enabling the horrific events that took place.
The Khmer Rouge originated from anti-colonial and leftist movements in French Indochina during the 1940s and 1950s. Cambodian communism manifested within regional networks fighting against French colonial control. Key founders, including Saloth Sar (Pol Pot), studied in Paris during the 1950s, adopting radical Marxist-Leninist and Maoist ideologies. The early groups during this period also had ties to Vietnamese communist movements, specifically the Viet Minh.
The underground Communist Party of Kampuchea was officially formed in 1960 by leaders like Pol Pot and Nuon Chea. Leaders retreated to remote jungles and mountains to build a base among rural peasants. They made slow progress at first because Cambodia’s ruling leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, remained popular with rural peasants. It was during this time that Sihanouk coined the term “Khmer Rouge” (Red Khmers) to describe his domestic communist political opponents. Pol Pot became the leader of Cambodia’s communist movement in February 1963, when he was elected general secretary of the party (then known as the Workers’ Party of Kampuchea, later the Communist Party of Kampuchea) following the disappearance of predecessor Tou Samouth (likely assassination by the government).
The Khmer Rouge revolution under Pol Pot was heavily inspired and shaped by Chinese communist ideology, namely Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward. Pol Pot visited Beijing in the mid-1960s during the early phase of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, where he met high-ranking Chinese officials and observed their methods for class struggle and political purging. The Khmer Rouge borrowed the concept of total societal restructuring centred around a pure peasant class, attempting an extreme rural-based utopia that mirrored elements of Chinese mass mobilization. The disastrous push for absolute self-sufficiency and extreme agricultural collectivization (Moha Lout Plaoh) was directly modelled after China’s catastrophic Great Leap Forward, which had previously caused widespread famine.
With this context, it is understandable how the Khmer Rouge came to espouse a radical agrarian ideology based on strict one-party rule, rejection of urban and Western ideas, and abolition of private property. Increasing food production through collective farming, they believed, would ensure economic security for Cambodia’s overwhelmingly poor village population.
They also stressed self-reliance and intense nationalism—Cambodia was said to be in danger of extinction at the hands of its historical enemies Vietnam and Thailand (formerly Siam) and their Cold War allies. Under the Khmer Rouge, the group’s leaders believed, the Cambodian people would regain the international heft and stature they had created for themselves during the Khmer Empire.
The period from the mid-1960s to 1970 in Cambodia was a time of rising political tension and war. Prince Norodom Sihanouk tried to keep Cambodia neutral as the Vietnam War grew around them, alienating both right-wing and left-wing factions. Prince Sihanouk broke ties with the United States in 1965 as part of his approach. Although, a tactical mistake was to allow the North Vietnamese forces to use eastern Cambodia as a supply route. Cambodia’s economy was rapidly suffering due to corruption and lost trade.
The U.S. military began secret bombing raids on North Vietnamese bases inside Cambodia in 1969. Rural Cambodians suffered from the violence and displacement caused by the conflict spreading through their country. This resulted in the Khmer Rouge gaining in popularity and influence across Cambodian rural provinces.
The U.S. supported a military coup in March 1970 that removed Sihanouk and installed the pro-Western General Lon Nol. The new Lon Nol government demanded that North Vietnamese troops leave Cambodia. This pulled the Cambodia into the full Vietnam War and plunged Cambodia into a civil war between the Khmer Rouge and the ruling Cambodian government.
From 1969 to 1974, the Cambodian Civil War raged, including the U.S. military dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs on the Cambodian countryside to target North Vietnamese supply lines. This bombing killed tens of thousands of civilians, ruined the rural economy, and drove the local population into the arms of the radical Khmer Rouge. The U.S. government viewed Pol Pot’s communists as an enemy and tried to defeat them during the civil war.
The U.S. did not intentionally support the Khmer Rouge’s rise to power; in fact, the U.S. fought against them and heavily backed the opposing Cambodian government. However, historians widely agree that U.S. military interventions in the early 1970s, including a massive, secret bombing campaign, destabilized Cambodia and fuelled the peasant anger that the Khmer Rouge used to recruit followers and seize power.
The war caused a refugee crisis in Cambodia with two million people, more than 25% of the population, displaced from rural areas into the cities. Phnom Penh’s population grew from 600,000 in 1970 to nearly 2 million by 1975. The Cambodian government estimated that more than 20% of the property in the country had been destroyed during the war. Whilst an estimated 275,000 to 310,000 people were killed as a result of the war, including 30,000 to 150,000 killed in U.S. bombing campaigns.
Throughout 1974, the Khmer Rouge steadily squeezed government held towns by cutting off vital waterways and roadways leading into Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge launched a massive dry-season offensive, blocking the Mekong River supply line and trapping the capital’s final lifeline to Pochentong Airport. Diminishing financial and military support from the U.S. left Khmer Republic government forces exhausted, demoralized, and critically short of ammunition.
On 12 April 1975, the U.S. evacuated its embassy and personnel in Operation Eagle Pull as defeat became certain. On 17 April 1975, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge marched into an exhausted and defenceless Phnom Penh. Citizens initially felt relief in the belief that the brutal civil war had concluded. Within hours of victory, the new regime betrayed those expectations by ordering the forced, brutal evacuation of the entire capital of two million people into the rural countryside under the guise of an imminent American bombing threat, initiating “Year Zero”. Their singular focus was to build a pure, classless farming utopia.
The Khmer Rouge’s core beliefs were:
* Absolute state loyalty: they demanded that devotion to the organization supersede traditional family and religious bonds their actions 1975 – 1979.
* Agrarian utopianism: they believed that true communist purity existed only in manual agricultural labour.
* Anti-urban and anti-Western: they viewed cities, money, private property, and formal education as corrupt and capitalist.
* Radical purification: they sought to cleanse society of “parasitic” elements, class enemies, and foreign influences.
Following 17 April 1975 seizure of total control, the Khmer Rouge put the following key actions in place:
* Forced city evacuations: they emptied Phnom Penh and other cities on foot immediately in April 1975, marching two million people into rural zones.
* Abolition of money and property: they banned currency, closed markets, and destroyed the national bank.
* Targeted executions: they murdered former government officials, intellectuals, doctors, teachers, monks, and anyone with a formal education or foreign ties.
* Social and family breakdown: they banned religion, music, and books, split families apart. They forced children into labor brigades.
* Forced labour and starvation: they worked the population to exhaustion on collective farms, leading to mass death from malnutrition and untreated illness.
* Persecution of minorities: they systematically slaughtered ethnic minorities, including the Cham Muslims, Chinese, and Vietnamese.
Human lives counted for little. The experiment failed on a massive scale in all facets across the population, economy, national infrastructure, cultural pride, intellectual know-how and global standing.
Rising military tensions and bloody border attacks by Pol Pot’s forces against Vietnam triggered a full-scale counter-offensive. Vietnam launched a massive invasion in late December 1978, quickly overwhelming the exhausted and isolated Khmer Rouge army. Discontented Cambodian communists and military commanders, including future leader Hun Sen, fled to Vietnam and helped form a united resistance force. The Khmer Rouge regime collapsed on 7 January 1979, when invading Vietnamese troops and Cambodian rebel fighters captured the capital city of Phnom Penh. This military victory ended four years of brutal rule.
Vietnam installed a friendly government called the People’s Republic of Kampuchea. Vietnam controlled and occupied Cambodia for approximately 10 years following its invasion in January 1979, completing its final military withdrawal in September 1989. The defeated Khmer Rouge retreated to remote jungles near the Thai border. Backed by China and supported with a fragile coalition, the group waged a long guerrilla war against the new government through the 1980s until peace accords were signed in 1991. The eventual collapse of the Khmer Rouge and the end of the Cambodian Civil War was in December 1998.
Cambodia’s dictator Pol Pot died on 15 April 15 1998, at age 72, in a remote area of Cambodia, near the Thai border. He died from apparent heart failure while under house arrest by his own former faction, the Khmer Rouge, avoiding an international tribunal for genocide. Speculation is that he died of a deliberate drug overdose and his body was quickly cremated to avoid an autopsy.
Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot caused the deaths of an estimated 1.5 to 3 million people in Cambodia. This total was nearly one-quarter of the country’s total population of about 7.8 million. Hundreds of thousands were executed in mass killings at sites known as the “Killing Fields”. The most famous killing field in Cambodia was Choeung Ek, located 17 kilometres south of Phnom Penh. Operating under the Khmer Rouge from 1977 to 1979, it served as the primary execution site and mass grave for prisoners from the notorious S-21 (Tuol Sleng) prison.
Slaves in rural work camps died from exhaustion, overwork, and severe malnutrition. Widespread economic failure, lack of medicine, and forced urban evacuations caused massive outbreaks of fatal disease and famine. Nearly 50% of the Muslim Cham minority population was killed, along with large percentages of ethnic Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, and Laotian residents. Doctors, teachers, monks, lawyers, and former government officials were systematically hunted and murdered to eliminate opposition to the agrarian “Year Zero” social reset. Even thousands of the regime’s own soldiers and leaders were executed as suspected traitors or spies.
The table below is of the Cambodian population demographic profile in 2020. A picture says a thousand words! Firstly, the gap for the age group between 41 – 51 years is significantly diminished as a direct result of the Khmer Rouge genocide. The initiation of the civil war followed by the Khmer Rouge genocide occurred when this group were 0 – 10 years. Secondly, as a result of this significantly reduced age cohort the number of children born 20 – 30 years after they were born is also naturally significantly diminished, hence the gap between 12 – 26 years. Thirdly, the female surplus for older Cambodians in 2020 is a result of the Khmer Rouge killing more adult men during their 1975 – 1979 period of control. Finally, the male surplus for 0 – 15 years shows the compensating desire amongst Cambodians, especially in rural areas, to have more male than female children.
China served as the primary economic, military, and diplomatic ally to the Khmer Rouge, both during their rise to power and throughout their brutal rule from 1975 to 1979. China supplied the vast majority, estimated at up to 90%, of the foreign economic and military assistance received by the Khmer Rouge, including weapons, ammunition, tanks, artillery and training. Beijing viewed the regime as a strategic counterweight against Soviet and U.S. backed Vietnamese influence in Southeast Asia, overlooking or quietly condoning the internal atrocities of Democratic Kampuchea.
Today, the Chinese government largely avoids officially discussing or acknowledging its historical complicity in the Cambodian genocide. Instead of using the term “genocide” or addressing the mass killings, official state discourse treats the era with diplomatic silence, preferring the stance that past regional conflicts belong to history and emphasizing current friendly relations with Cambodia.