Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge

After changing his name from Saloth Sar to his nom de guerre Pol Pot—the 48-year-old led a civil war with his Khmer Rouge guerrilla forces, which by 1973 had taken control of three-quarters of Cambodia.

Fleeing repressive treatment by Khmer Rouge forces, hundreds of thousands of refugees had poured into Phnom Penh, and when Khmer Rouge forces closed in on the Cambodian capital, they began a campaign of relentless and indiscriminate shelling of the city.

The Cambodian Genocide

By the time the Khmer Rouge took control of Phnom Penh on April 17th, 1975, some half a million Cambodians had died during the civil war years. Yet, over the next three years of Pot’s brutal regime, of the nation’s seven and a half million people, some one and a half to two million would perish during what would become known as the Cambodian Genocide.

After renaming the country Democratic Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge cleared the city of its residents and refugees, stripping the wealthy of their possessions before sending them out into the countryside to work as farmers under Pot’s Marxist–Leninist brand of communism, which saw the removal of three million people from Phnom Penh in less than 72 hours.

Brutal Dictatorship

Within weeks the state controlled all aspects of a person’s life, including private property, sexual relations, vocabulary and fashion, leading to waves of mass genocide against anyone deemed unwilling to conform.

Pol Pot also commissioned detention centers like the infamous S-21, where thousands of lives were lost to unspeakable torture and death, while his countrywide genocide campaigns would later become known by the outside world in movies such as The Killing Fields.

As border skirmishes intensified between Cambodia and Vietnam, in December of 1978—less than three-and-a-half years after the Fall of Saigon—the Vietnamese sent more than 60,000 troops into Cambodia, forcing Pol Pot to flee back into the jungle when Vietnamese forces captured Phnom Penh on January 7th, 1979.

Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces would resume their guerrilla warfare tactics over the decade-long Vietnamese occupation, until a 1991 ceasefire agreement ended the groups’s brutal legacy of torture and death. Captured and placed under house arrest in 1997, Pol Pot died in his sleep from heart failure on April 15th, 1998, ending the life of one of the most brutal dictators in human history.