POL POT

Pol 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 protocommunist Khmer Peoples 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 Cambodias
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 Nols 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 Cambodias 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 Penhs 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 persons 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 POTS 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 Rouges 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.

Map & Photos

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 197579.
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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/1G23404705193.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 Kampucha (DK) from 1976 to 1979. He
directed the mass killing of intellectuals, professional people, city dwellersperhaps onefifth 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 officialsand, on at least one occasion, even by King Monivong himselfto
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 Kampucha (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 studentssome 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 Sampanrallied 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 experienceall 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 livesnearly 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

Cambodia
Pol 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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Profile Of Pol Pot

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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 militarystyle 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