Under Pol Pot, the state controlled all aspects of a person’s life. During the Cambodian genocide, the bones of millions of people who died from malnutrition, overwork or inadequate health care also filled up mass graves across the country. 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. Former civil servants, doctors, teachers and other professionals were stripped of their possessions and forced to toil in the fields as part of a re-education process. About half a million Cambodians had died during the civil war, yet the worst was still to come.Īlmost immediately after taking power, the Khmer Rouge evacuated Phnom Penh’s 2.5 million residents. airlift of supplies failed to prevent thousands of children from starving.įinally, on April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered the city, winning the civil war and ending the fighting. Soon after, they began shelling Phnom Penh with rockets and artillery.Ī final assault of the refugee-filled capital started in January 1975, with the Khmer Rouge bombarding the airport and blockading river crossings. 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. planes dropped 500,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia, more than three times the amount dropped on Japan during World War II.īy the time the U.S. Nixon also ordered a secret bombing campaign as part of the Vietnam War. and South Vietnamese soldiers stormed across the Vietnam-Cambodian border to fight North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops who had taken sanctuary in Cambodia. A civil war then broke out in which Prince Norodom allied himself with the Khmer Rouge, and Lon Nol received the backing of the United States.īoth the Khmer Rouge and Lon Nol’s troops purportedly committed mass atrocities. In March 1970, General Lon Nol initiated a military coup while Cambodia’s hereditary leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was out of the country. Their revolution started off slowly, though they were able to gain a foothold in the sparsely populated northeast.Ĭlick Here The Khmer Rouge Seizes Control 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. Three years later, following a clampdown on communist activity, he and other party leaders moved deep into the countryside of northern Cambodia, encamping at first with a group of Viet Cong. In 1960 Pol Pot helped to reorganize the KPRP into a party that specifically espoused Marxism-Leninism. From 1956 to 1963, Pol Pot taught history, geography and French literature at a private school while simultaneously plotting a revolution. 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. Cambodia officially gained its independence from France later that year. When Pol Pot returned to Cambodia in January 1953, the whole region was revolting against French colonial rule. Their bodies were buried in mass graves that became known as “killing fields.” The phrase later became the title of a movie about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge era, The Killing Fields. While there, he studied radio technology and became active in communist circles.ĭid you know? Millions of people living in Cambodia were killed during the brutal regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. His Cambodian education continued until 1949, when he went to Paris on a scholarship. 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 family was relatively affluent and owned some 50 acres of rice paddy, or roughly 10 times the national average. 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.
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