The man known to history as Pol Pot was born
with the name Saloth Sar, in the village of Prek Sbauv, in north-eastern Cambodia, at
some time in the second half of the 1920s, official records place his birthdate as being
on the 25th of May 1928, but others have suggested a date of birth over three years earlier,
on the 19th of May 1925. Given the age that we know that Saloth began
his education, the latter date of 1928 seems more likely. He was known as Saloth Sar for over thirty
years and as we will see, the name Pol Pot was a revolutionary pseudonym which he gradually
began using during the 1960s, one of many he later employed, although it was the one
by which he was most commonly known. His mother was Sok Nem, a pious Buddhist who
had nine children, of which Sar was the eighth and his father was Saloth Phem, a relatively
wealthy farmer in the Prek Sbauv region, of mixed Khmer and Chinese ethnicity. Both then, as now, Prek Sbauv was a very small
fishing village on the Sen River, and since Saloth Phem owned over 20 acres of rice growing
paddies and a small herd of cattle, he was one of the district’s most affluent individuals,
as such, the man who would one day become known as Pol Pot, grew up in an affluent upper
middle-class family, an important point to remember when evaluating his later ideologies. Any account, of Pol Pot’s life and career,
must be understood against the backdrop of Cambodia’s wider history as Cambodia’s
past had been extremely varied by the time that the Roman Empire was collapsing, and
the Middle Ages were dawning in Europe. In southeast Asia, Cambodia belonged to a
number of regions, including modern day Thailand which had absorbed elements of Indian culture,
but which were rooted in Buddhism, rather than Hinduism. In the ninth century, a strong imperial state
began to emerge in Cambodia, the Khmer Empire, so named for the Khmer speaking people of
the region, it rose in the centuries that followed, to become the most powerful state
in southeast Asia, its capital of Angkor Wat may eventually have been home, to nearly a
million people in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but thereafter the Khmer Empire
declined and by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Cambodia had become a backwater
between Siam and Vietnam. It is not surprising, that the kingdom was
easily absorbed by the French into their growing colony of French Indochina in 1867, although
the relatively peaceful transition to colonial rule ensured that the monarchy was kept in
place, as a puppet government by the French, thus, the Cambodia which Pol Pot was born
into and grew up in, was a French protectorate, though one in which some benefits had accrued
from European dominance, owing to slightly improved standards of living and more secure
food supplies. For instance, the Cambodian population more
than quadrupled in the 80 or so years after the commencement of French rule, from just
under a million people, to well over 4 million, by the middle of the twentieth century. Pol Pot’s family enjoyed extensive connections
with the Cambodian government, including the royal family, and it was through these, that
the young Sar was able to obtain a position as a novice monk, at the Buddhist monastery
of Vat Botum Vaddei, in the capital of Phnom Penh in 1934, here he learned Buddhist teachings
and literature, but perhaps the more significant impact of his time here, was his exposure
to a system of rigid discipline, thereafter he was sent to a Roman Catholic primary school
in 1935, this was a colonial establishment where Pol Pot was educated, alongside the
children of the French colonial community. He was not very academically gifted or inclined,
preferring sport instead of his studies, and it was not until 1941, that he graduated from
primary school, two years behind schedule, nevertheless, his privilege and familial ties,
continued to benefit him and despite his poor performance hitherto as a student, he was
admitted in 1942, to a prestigious new boarding school, which was patronised by the Cambodian
monarchy, he would remain there until 1947, again indulging his passion for football and
basketball over his studies. Cambodia’s politics were shifting dramatically,
while Pol Pot was undertaking his education, French colonial rule in southeast Asia was
weakening considerably, as a result of the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe,
in the autumn of 1939. Taking advantage of this situation, in October
1940, the neighbouring Kingdom of Thailand invaded Cambodia and Laos and succeeded in
taking possession of some border provinces from the French, then in April 1941, King
Monivong, the puppet monarch of Cambodia, died, he was replaced by the French, by King
Sihanouk, an eighteen year old, whom the French believed would be more pliable than Prince
Monireth, Monivong’s designated successor, but Sihanouk would prove less of a puppet
than was foreseen and he would play a major role in the tumultuous politics of Cambodia,
over the next seventy years. No sooner was he on the throne, than Cambodia
was invaded by the Empire of Japan, as the Second World War spread across eastern Asia
and the Pacific, Cambodia would suffer four years of occupation, then, as the end of the
war neared in 1945, Sihanouk proclaimed an independent Kingdom of Kampuchea in March
1945, it proved short lived and French colonial rule was quickly re-imposed on Cambodia, in
October 1945, but this brief experiment in independence, foreshadowed the struggle to
end colonial rule which was to follow. Pol Pot’s path in the years following the
Second World War, though, increasingly pushed him away from Cambodia altogether, having
left boarding school without finishing his studies or acquiring his baccalauréat, he
enrolled in 1948, in a carpentry course at the technical college in Phnom Penh, given
his family background Pol Pot might have been expected to follow a different career path
and setting out on vocational training as a carpenter, would have been viewed as a step
down, for the son of a wealthy landowner at the time in Cambodia. Yet it seems that his privilege once again
benefited him, in the months ahead, as Pol Pot’s academic shortcomings were ignored
and in 1949, he was awarded a prestigious scholarship to attend an advanced engineering
school far away in Paris in Europe, the capital of the French colonials. At the time, it was not uncommon for the French
to invite the sons of well-connected colonial families, to acquire their education in France
itself, the goal being to inculcate young men like Pol Pot, to the virtues of French
society and encourage them to want to maintain French control over countries like Cambodia,
rather than seeking independence, thus it was, that Pol Pot set out for Paris in 1949,
however, the political climate of Cambodia in the post-war period, was such that Pol
Pot would become radicalised against French colonial rule while in Europe, rather than
inculcated into becoming a supporter of the French presence in Indochina. Before examining Pol Pot’s time in Europe,
we need to look at events in Cambodia itself in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in the
aftermath of the Second World War, King Sihanouk had succeeded in gaining some concessions
from the French government, to grant greater autonomy to Cambodia. The country’s first elections to a domestic
parliament were held in 1946 and a new, modern constitution for the country came into effect
in May 1947. Negotiations continued in the years ahead,
for Cambodia to be given a more concerted form of independence, and thereafter this
was driven by events elsewhere in Indochina, as since December 1946, the French had been
fighting a war in neighbouring Vietnam, against insurgents who wished to acquire independence
from French Indochina, the First Indochina War, would drag on eventually, until 1954
and would extend into neighbouring Laos and Cambodia, it was the beginning of a long period,
in which events in Vietnam substantially impacted on developments in Cambodia, and for the meantime,
the insurgency in Vietnam made the French government more willing to grant concessions
to King Sihanouk and Cambodia, as a means of shoring up support there and avoiding another
independence war. Yet the concessions which Sihanouk continued
to obtain in the late 1940s, were viewed as not going far enough, and so as Cambodia entered
into the early 1950s, the country was rife with political instability as many parties
emerged, calling for independence and an end to French colonial rule, with some also wishing
for the abolition of the monarchy, which was tainted by its long associations with the
French. This was the situation at home, as Pol Pot
arrived in Paris in 1949, the stormy politics of Cambodia, had been transplanted to the
French capital, while he lived on the banks of the Seine in the months that followed,
Pol Pot became associated with numerous political groups, that had been organised by his fellow
Cambodians in Paris, one of these was the Khmer Student Association, which met regularly
and was broadly committed to achieving Cambodian independence from French rule, more extreme
and effectively illegal, was the Cercle Marxiste or Marxist Circle, a Marxist-Leninist organisation
which met in secret to read Marxist, Leninist and other Communist writings and to discuss
Cambodia’s struggle against French oppression. It is important to remember, that the great
majority of anti-colonial independence struggles in Africa and Asia in the post-Second World
War period, adopted one form of Communism or another as their ideological base in their
independence struggles, not least because the best way to throw off European imperial
rule, was by obtaining financial and material aid from Communist Russia or China, but in
assessing Pol Pot’s ideology and future career, we can largely dismiss any ardent
affection for Marxist thought, which he might have claimed to have had, as in reality, the
future dictator did not really understand Marxist thought at all, what little of Karl
Marx’s own writings he had read, he later admitted, he had not been really able to comprehend,
rather Pol Pot was attracted by the idea of continuous revolution, without concerns for
the violence and humanitarian implications of it, which had become a feature of Marxist-Leninist
thought in the post-war period. This unswerving commitment to acquiring independence
and carrying out a revolution at all costs, became the central focus of his political
leanings later on, not any ideological commitment to Communism. Pol Pot spent three years in Paris, becoming
more and more embroiled in politics there, his departure from the French capital would
eventually come about, owing to developments back in his homeland, in January 1953, as
the political situation in Cambodia lurched from crisis to crisis, King Sihanouk disbanded
the National Assembly and began ruling by decree. Domestic political turmoil increased rapidly
thereafter, such that by the spring of 1953, Cambodia was virtually in a state of civil
war. Already in late 1952, the Cercle Marxiste
in Paris, had determined to send one of their members back to Cambodia, to assess the situation
on the ground, in order to determine which of the competing entities, they should be
supporting, and so it was, that Pol Pot found himself returning to southeast Asia in December
1952, after three years in France. As a result, he was back in Cambodia to witness
King Sihanouk’s call for independence from France, in the summer of 1953, a request which
was granted by the French government in November, when it realised that it lacked the support
or the military capacity, to maintain its control over Cambodia, independence had been
achieved, but it remained to be seen, exactly what kind of state would emerge in the new
Cambodia. The next fifteen years in Cambodia, were a
period of almost continual turmoil, which eventually, in 1968, would result in the outbreak
of a civil war, which was the result of the unrest which continued to dominate southeast
Asia, in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the Geneva Conference of 1954, succeeded
in ending the First Indochina War between the French and pro-independence Vietnamese,
conflict in southeast Asia was in no way brought to an end, henceforth the northern parts of
Vietnam, became the independent country of North Vietnam which was pro-Communist, while
the south of the country also gained independence, as the pro-Western Republic of Vietnam, however,
no sooner had the dust settled on the Geneva Conference, than North Vietnam began efforts
to unite the country under Communist rule. Thus, in 1955, the Second Indochina War, or
what is more commonly known as the Vietnam War, erupted, it would last for twenty years,
with the south backed primarily by the United States of America, as French influence in
southeast Asia waned, and the north backed by Soviet Russia and Communist China. Throughout its entire duration, Cambodia was
caught up in the conflict, primarily because the North Vietnamese troops, known as the
Vietcong, used Cambodia as a staging base, for attacks into South Vietnam, with Vietnamese
camps established in the jungles of northern and eastern Cambodia, but as we will see,
Cambodia was also increasingly tied up with the North Vietnamese, because radical Marxist-Leninist
revolutionaries within Cambodia, such as Pol Pot, sought North Vietnamese aid to foment
their own rebellion in Cambodia. Pol Pot’s path would soon collide with the
North Vietnamese, but for now, in the post-independence period in Cambodia during the 1950s, he became
involved in efforts to affect change through political participation, the first post-independence
elections in the country were held in 1955, it was widely believed that the anti-monarchy,
Democratic Party would win these and Pol Pot and his fellow Marxist-Leninist Cambodians,
now attempted to infiltrate the Democratic Party, as a means of exercising influence
from within the government, which it was assumed would soon come to power. However, the king had other ideas, with the
elections imminent Sihanouk quickly abdicated in favour of his father Norodom and then Sihanouk
established his own political party called Sangkum Reastr Niyum, meaning the Community
of the Common People, and in the election, through widespread voter intimidation and
fraud, Sangkum won over 80% of the vote, effectively establishing a one-party dictatorship with
Sihanouk serving as prime minister. As a consequence of the manner in which independence
quickly gave way to a conservative dictatorship, headed by the former king, Pol Pot spent the
next few years in a kind of political wilderness, he continued to be active within Marxist-Leninist
circles in Cambodia, but these had largely been driven underground by Sihanouk’s seizure
of power and for the time being, a concerted armed struggle by either the communists, or
the Democratic Party seemed illusive, meanwhile Pol Pot acquired a job teaching history, geography
and literature at a private school in Phnom Penh and in 1956 he married Khieu Ponnary. Political oppression continued throughout
these years, with senior members of the Democratic Party being subjected to public humiliation
and physical attacks, during a supposedly official ‘debate’ in August 1957, by the
end of the decade, resistance to Sihanouk’s dictatorship was greatly diminished, and then
things started to change. In 1959, members of the Marxist-Leninist Cambodian
movement, established the Kampuchean Labour Party, the forerunner of what would later
become the infamous Khmer Rouge. In late September, twenty-one senior members
of the party, including Pol Pot, met in a room of a railway station in Phnom Penh, here
they agreed to rename the new party as the Worker’s Party of Kampuchea, and party positions
were allocated. Tou Samouth was made general secretary, while
his ally Nuon Chea was appointed as his deputy, but Pol Pot was elected to the bureau and
was effectively third in command of the new revolutionary party, he would not have to
wait long, before he ascended to a position of leadership, when Tou Samouth was killed
by the Cambodian government. Less than two years later, Pol Pot would be
elected as his successor, and as the second in command, Nuon Chea, decided to step back
from the revolutionary struggle, but Samouth’s death was also part of a wider crackdown on
the socialist movement in Cambodia, and even before Pol Pot had officially been appointed
as the new head of the Worker’s Party, he was forced to flee with his wife to a Vietcong
encampment near the border between Cambodia and South Vietnam, it was the beginning of
the drift towards civil war and the horrors that followed in its aftermath in Cambodia. Pol Pot spent the next half a decade, largely
living in encampments in the jungles of Cambodia and Vietnam, his personality as a dictator
was formed during these years, he was a somewhat enigmatic character, one who displayed a large
level of self-control and was reserved and introspective, nevertheless, despite his taciturn
character, and the deplorable nature of his later crimes, many are agreed that he could
be charming when a situation necessitated him to be so, while his varied upbringing
and middle years had seen him develop an ability to interact with people from many walks of
life, yet behind the apparently amiable façade, lay an individual with a great thirst for
power, a propensity for savage violence and a personality that was increasingly paranoid,
none of this was alleviated in any fashion by his personal circumstances, his wife suffered
from deteriorating mental health in the 1960s, which would descend into chronic schizophrenia
in the 1970s. Pol Pot and she, would eventually divorce
in 1979 and although he remarried later in life, he never enjoyed much of a family life,
having just one child, a daughter who was born in the mid-1980s, when he was in his
late fifties, equally he suffered from very poor health throughout his adult life, with
insomnia and intestinal ailments, conditions which would have done nothing beneficial to
stabilise an already erratic personality, above all, if we are to seek to discover who
Pol Pot was, and what motivated him, we must remember that he was an ardent Cambodian nationalist,
and one whose tendencies in this regard, were heightened in the 1960s, as he built up opposition
to Sihanouk’s regime in the wayward north and east of the country, and if there is any
consistency to his actions, it is surely found, in his zealous desire for Cambodian independence
from French rule and the monarchy epitomised by Sihanouk. As well as being formative in his personal
development these years in the jungle were a time of growth for the Cambodian Communist
movement, as Sihanouk’s repressive regime gained more and more enemies, more revolutionaries
fled from civil society into the jungles to plot revolution. Here they found a new umbrella organisation
for their resentment, the Worker’s Party renamed itself in 1966, as the Communist Party
of Kampuchea, but to the southwest in Phnom Penh Sihanouk had begun referring to the party’s
members as the Khmer Rouge, meaning Red Cambodians, and although Pol Pot and his followers initially
rejected the term themselves, it quickly gained traction and is the name most typically used
for the Communist Party of Kampuchea today, a byword for the terror which would occur
years later, when Pol Pot came to power. But beyond this name change, the party was
also evolving in new ways, during the mid-1960s, first and foremost it was developing its own
independent streak, wishing to break away from the North Vietnamese, secondly, it had
set out on a new ideological course, one which appreciated that the vast majority of Cambodians,
were actually farmers, as a result any Marxist-Leninist revolution in Cambodia, would not be driven
by an urban proletariat such as Marx had envisaged a hundred years earlier and which had occurred
to some extent in Russia in 1917, rather the undeveloped state of the Cambodian economy
dictated, that this would be a revolution of the rural peasantry in Cambodia, so much
of which, had been impoverished by French colonial rule and that of the collaborationist
monarchy, the continuation of which, was epitomised in the form of the former king and current
dictator Sihanouk. Finally, the major factor at play in these
years, was the growth of the party and its military capabilities, by 1967 it had several
thousand members who were armed in the jungles of northern and eastern Cambodia, waiting
to take action against Sihanouk’s one-party state, they struck in the first days of 1968,
it was the start of a long and bloody eight-year civil war. The Cambodian Civil War was initiated in January
1968, when Pol Pot’s insurgents attacked an army base at Bay Damran south of Battambang,
the regional capital of northwest Cambodia, Sihanouk’s initial reaction to this limited
insurrection backfired, he ordered a violent crackdown, with widespread bombing of the
north and east of the country, indiscriminate attacks, which were designed to hit at Communist
encampments, but which largely just succeeded in alienating hundreds of thousands of rural
Cambodians, whose livelihoods were damaged by the scorched earth tactics favoured by
the government in Phnom Penh, consequently support for the revolt, of which Pol Pot was
increasingly the undisputed leader, swelled in the late 1960s, he was now also increasingly
referring to himself as Pol Pot, rather than Sar, and it is from this time, that the Cambodian
Communist leader became primarily known by his pseudonym. In 1970, the Civil War took a dramatic turn,
owing to Cambodia’s ongoing role in the Vietnam War to the east. In the spring of 1969, the President of the
United States, Richard Nixon, ordered a series of bombing raids into Cambodia, to try to
interrupt the Vietcong supply lines into South Vietnam and hit at Vietcong camps and bases
in the jungles of northeast Cambodia, this was followed in March 1970, by the overthrow
of Sihanouk’s government in Phnom Penh by a pro-American coup d’état. The Khmer Republic was now established, with
Prime Minister Lon Nol as its head. Sihanouk fled the country, but it was certainly
not the end of his role in Cambodian politics, Nol honoured his commitments to Washington,
and the Khmer Republic ordered the Vietcong to leave Cambodian territory, but it was unable
to effect this and in the months that followed, the Vietcong, with Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge
as their allies, effectively established control over as much as one-third of Cambodia, constituting
the bulk of the north and east of the country. In the process, the Cambodian Civil War shifted,
from one which had been initiated to overthrow Sihanouk and his regime, to one which sought
to capture Cambodia for the Khmer Rouge from Lon Nol and his pro-American, pro-Western
government in Phnom Penh. Five years of bloody conflict would follow,
between Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge and Lon Nol’s Khmer Republic, with one backed by the Vietcong
and the Chinese and the other aided by the US. Pol Pot’s cause also benefited in the early
1970s, from a bizarre reconciliation between his Communist Party and Sihanouk, who had
fled to China following the coup of 1970, this brought the disparate rebel groups within
Cambodia, who were opposed to Nol’s government in Phnom Penh, into alliance with each other. Then, as the war intensified in the early
1970s, many thousands of pro-monarchy rebels joined the ranks of the Khmer Rouge, in the
jungles of northern and eastern Cambodia, few of them having any real affinity with
Communist thought, but willing to support Pol Pot’s struggle, if they felt it aided
the Cambodian monarchy. The ranks of the rebels soared to nearly 50,000
armed Cambodians by 1972, simultaneously, the Communist Party began to develop a more
sophisticated party bureaucracy and the rudimentary basics of a revolutionary government, where
responsibilities were delegated according to who would fill what ministerial brief,
if and when, the party was able to seize power in Phnom Penh in the years ahead. As with so much of Cambodia’s history since
the end of the Second World War, the Civil War’s outcome was broadly determined by
events in wider southeast Asia, from the late 1960s, the US had adopted a policy of exiting
the Vietnam War, in such a way that would preserve the independence of South Vietnam
from its northern Communist neighbour, or ‘Peace with Honour’ as President Nixon
termed it. As the US began its long withdrawal from Vietnam
in the early 1970s, its support for Lon Nol’s regime in Phnom Penh diminished, in particular,
the bombing raids on the Vietcong. The actions of the Khmer Rouge in northern
and eastern Cambodia were temporarily ended by late 1972, and then in January 1973, Lon
Nol declared a ceasefire in the hopes that the Civil War could be ended amicably, but
it was not to be, Pol Pot and his militants continued their push westwards towards Phnom
Penh, and it was clear by the spring of 1973, that they were in the ascendant. Lon Nol had to introduce conscription, in
order to have enough troops to defend the capital, but even so, the Khmer Rouge reached
the outskirts of the city by April, they were prevented from seizing the seat of power at
this time, only through the intervention of the US, Nixon ordering a huge bombing campaign
which drove Pol Pot’s insurgents back into the jungle, it was however only a limited
reprieve. As the months rolled by and US aid dried up,
Nol’s government found itself increasingly unpopular and confined to a city, the population
of which, had swelled to nearly two million people, nearly three-quarters of them refugees. By March 1975, the Khmer Rouge and the Vietcong
had surrounded Phnom Penh with nearly 400,000 troops, and it was no surprise to anyone,
when the city finally surrendered to Pol Pot and his insurgents on the 17th of April 1975. The Cambodian Civil War was over, the capital
of South Vietnam, Saigon, fell to the Vietcong just thirteen days later on the 30th of April
1975, as western efforts to stop the spread of socialist regimes in southeast Asia, ended
in dismal failure in the spring of 1975. The Cambodian Civil War was over, approximately
a quarter of a million Cambodians had been killed, in nearly eight years of conflict,
but few knew what the future now held in store for the country. Despite being the main rebel organisation
during the civil war, the Khmer Rouge was something of an unknown quantity, in international
circles Pol Pot and his party were viewed as something of an ancillary to the Vietcong
presence in Cambodia, few though knew, what they would do once in power, nor could they
have predicted the scale of the brutality, which would now be unleashed throughout the
country. Even Pol Pot himself, was a relatively shadowy
figure, of whom the world knew little in 1975, but that would all change, in the years that
followed. Having seized power, the Khmer Rouge unleashed
a savage assault on Cambodian society itself, the horrors of which, have been eclipsed by
few regimes in human history. At the heart of the nightmare which unfolded,
in the months and years after the end of the Civil War, was the ideological platform, the
Communist Worker’s Party of Kampuchea with Pol Pot as its leader, it had grown and developed
in the ten years or so, since they first began building up their strength, in the jungles
of northeast Cambodia in the mid-1960s. The party was wedded to the idea of building
an agrarian revolution, one in which rural peasants would form the basis of their Communist
state, as we saw earlier, Pol Pot had little understanding of Communist thought himself,
and this ideology, that the Khmer Rouge developed, had little to do with the writings of Karl
Marx, indeed they were directly antithetical. Marx had envisaged a revolution, driven by
the urban proletariat of oppressed factory workers, conversely, Pol Pot and the Khmer
Rouge viewed urban workers as dangerous subversives and wanted to encourage Cambodians to return
to the countryside from the cities, in order to create an almost exclusively agrarian society,
this utopian dream of theirs, would soon become a nightmare for the Cambodian people. As soon as Phnom Penh had been seized in April
1975, Pol Pot quickly made his way to the city, he entered the capital on the 20th of
April and by May, had established his government at the Silver Pagoda, an opulent nineteenth-century
royal palace, which had once been home to the monarchy. It was not at once clear, that Pol Pot and
the Communist Party would be the primary power in the new Cambodia, not least because a number
of regional military leaders, commanded their own power bases throughout the country, there
was even an effort made to unseat Pol Pot in the autumn of 1976, but ultimately the
party prevailed and solidified its power. Then, the name of the country was officially
changed to Democratic Kampuchea, in January 1976 and it was governed by a standing committee
of the Khmer Rouge’s leading figures, who were named as ‘Brothers’, Pol Pot was
‘Brother number 1’ and served as prime minister, for a time the former king, Sihanouk,
was even brought into the government, in an effort to prevent him becoming a focus of
opposition to the new regime, but he resigned from his position in the spring of 1976 and
was subsequently kept under house arrest by the regime, which is how the Khmer Rouge kept
their control of the country in the first twelve months after the end of the civil war. The policies pursued by Pol Pot and the Khmer
regime, in the second half of the 1970s have become infamous, as we have seen, the regime
constructed itself around the idea of creating an agrarian revolution, with a kind of rural
proletariat, Pot and his allies were inspired by the Great Leap Forward, which Chairman
Mao had attempted in China, twenty years earlier, whereby he had attempted to drastically increase
China’s food production and industrial output, in just a few short years. The Great Leap Forward failed spectacularly
and is now understood to have resulted in the deaths, of as many as fifty million Chinese
people, in the space of five or six years, but, undeterred by this appalling record,
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge now sought to use similar methods, to exponentially increase
Cambodia’s agricultural and manufacturing capacities. The ultimate goal was to make Cambodia self-sufficient
and reliant on no other state, for the goods which it needed, in particular Pol Pot wished
to avoid having the country fall under the influence, of its more powerful neighbour
to the east in Vietnam. Cambodian self-sufficiency was to be achieved
through collectivisation, whereby farms throughout the country, were brought under state ownership
and then run collectively or communally by farmers, the goal was to have the country’s
agricultural output increased substantially, by forcing Cambodians to work as hard as possible,
to this end Pot and the Khmer Rouge, immediately began forcing the population to leave Cambodia’s
cities and relocate to labour camps in the countryside, to work on collective farms,
conditions in these were brutal, often amounting to little more than slave labour, workers
were beaten and tortured if they did not work sufficiently hard enough, they were fed poorly,
often so that camp overseers could report on higher production yields, and malnutrition
was soon rife, giving way eventually to death through starvation. As conditions in Kampuchea’s work camps
deteriorated, during the course of 1976 and 1977, disease became rife in them also, exacerbating
the level of mortality, workers who refused to work hard enough or resisted directives,
were executed. The barbaric conditions of the labour camps
in the countryside, were not the sole theatre in Pot’s Cambodia, where mass murder was
occurring, the Khmer Rouge established itself as a highly autocratic, xenophobic, classist
and totalitarian regime, people from the middle and upper class were murdered in large numbers,
simply for having the most tenuous links to the ruling elites of past years or being seen
as ‘bourgeois’ subversives, all this, despite Pol Pot’s own, upper middle class
family background. Foreigners were targeted also, for instance,
a quarter of a million Cambodians of Chinese ethnicity were killed, between 1975 and 1979,
with perhaps as many as 100,000 Muslims also murdered. The state also established itself as an Atheistic
regime and Buddhism was savagely repressed, anyone who was seen to resist the government,
became the victim of arrest and execution and over 150 torture and execution centres
were established throughout the country, the most notorious being S-21, a converted secondary
school, through which as many as 20,000 prisoners passed, between 1976 and 1979. As the months went by, paranoia came to dominate
every aspect of Cambodian society, children were indoctrinated into the regime’s atrocities
and forced to engage in killings, in other instances, the children of political dissenters
or ethnic minorities who were killed, were also murdered, the rationale of Pol Pot and
the regime being that, they wanted to avoid these children growing up and seeking to avenge
their parents. All of this took place in the Killing Fields,
sites throughout Cambodia where mass executions were carried out, in the years following Pol
Pot’s ascent to power. At these sites, individuals were sometimes
killed using sharpened bamboo, scythes and pickaxes, to save bullets. Some victims were forced to dig their own
graves, before being executed, often poor farmers and peasants were forced to carry
out these executions, in order to avoid punishment themselves by the regime. Such was the barbarity of the Khmer Rouge
and the unmitigated terror and destruction of life which it unleashed, that by the end
of the 1970s, somewhere between 1.7 and 2.2 million of Cambodia’s population of approximately
8 million people, had been killed, the Cambodian genocide overseen by Pol Pot and orchestrated
by the Khmer Rouge was one of the most heinous and vicious genocides ever undertaken. It is hard to look beyond the genocide to
try to find any coherent policies which might have been implemented by Pol Pot’s regime,
and it is perhaps unsurprising to find, that these were in any event, dictated by the ideological
brutality and totalitarianism of the Khmer Rouge as well, for instance, the party’s
approach to education was mired in a highly repressive and paranoid approach to learning
and the role of teachers in society. Upon the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, several
thousand educators were executed across the city, a new curriculum was devised, which
sought to teach little more than basic mathematics and literacy, and thereafter was focused on
instilling the regime’s political ideology into the minds of students, consequently,
some children were fashioned into enthusiastic contributors to the state’s atrocities. The health system also effectively collapsed
under Pol Pot’s reign of terror, with many physicians executed on class grounds. On the economic front, currency was abolished,
and a barter system was introduced, along with state run distribution of goods, as a
result Cambodians were soon trading their few personal possessions, in order to acquire
basic goods. Foreign trade almost completely dried up,
but most strikingly, the goal of drastically improving agricultural output, was a catastrophic
failure, the reverse, famine, was endemic as the months and years passed by. On the foreign policy front, Pol Pot’s approach
mirrored his desire to make Cambodia self-sufficient, isolationism was favoured, consequently Pot
and the Khmer Rouge spurned the western powers, including the US, with which the previous
administration in Phnom Penh had been so closely associated. Those states which Pol Pot established good
relations with, were usually headed by fellow autocrats, such as Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania. The Soviet Union was rejected as a source
of support, despite being the ostensible head of the Communist bloc, in favour of aligning
Kampuchea with China, chairman Mao committed over $1 billion dollars of Beijing’s money
in aid, to help rebuild and develop Cambodia, in the aftermath of the civil war, and many
civil and military advisors were sent to southeast Asia, to provide advice on how to develop
the Cambodian economy, although the relationship cooled considerably from 1976 onwards, with
the death of Mao that year and the Cambodian regime’s increasingly hostile approach to
ethnic Chinese Cambodians, but the most consequential relationship of the Khmer regime, was with
its neighbour to the east, with whom its recent history had been so entangled. Following the end of the civil war, relations
between Cambodia and a united Vietnam, quickly deteriorated and in the summer of 1976, negotiations
to resolve some border disputes between the two countries failed, thereafter relations
thawed considerably, little could Cambodians have known at that time, but the Communist
regime in Vietnam, would soon provide a kind of salvation for the people of Pol Pot’s
Cambodia. Relations between Cambodia and Vietnam were
in terminal decline by 1978, the previous December the Vietnamese had sent tens of thousands
of troops over the border to contested regions and broke off relations with Phnom Penh, although
it soon withdrew in the first weeks of 1978. Pol Pot responded by ordering raids along
the border region, war was not officially entered into at this point, but the unrest
was the spark to see resistance to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge begin to emerge within
Cambodia. Such was the anarchy and brutality that prevailed
throughout the country, that several regional military commanders were now moving through
the country to distance themselves from the regime. In a desperate bid to bolster his support,
Pol Pot courted Sihanouk, who was still under house arrest, to throw his support behind
the regime, a sign of his increasing desperation, and then in December 1978, the inevitable
war broke out. The Vietnamese-Cambodian War began on Christmas
Day 1978, when the Vietnamese launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia. Over 150,000 Vietnamese troops, many of them
hardened veterans from the long Vietnam War and led by seasoned military commanders, streamed
over the border, the invaders quickly overran the country, northeast Cambodia had been captured
by the end of 1978, and then on New Year’s Day, the main Vietnamese forces began their
approach to Phnom Penh. As the Cambodian army’s resistance melted
away in the opening days of 1979, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime, began evacuating
the capital. Many senior members fled to Thailand, while
Pot himself headed for the city of Battambang, the regional capital of the northwest, Phnom
Penh fell on the 7th of January 1979, to the Vietnamese, who now established a new People’s
Republic of Kampuchea, headed by Cambodian exiles who had fled to Vietnam in recent times,
to avoid the purges of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The war seemed to have been won in a matter
of days and Pol Pot and his regime utterly defeated, but then foreign powers yet again
intervened in Cambodia’s affairs. Following the initial flush of victories,
the Vietnamese and their Cambodian allies were stopped in their advances, when China
invaded northern Vietnam in mid-February 1979, although the Sino-Vietnamese War which ensued,
lasted less than a month and a ceasefire had been agreed by mid-March, the attack was sufficient
to give the Khmer Rouge and many other militant groups in Cambodia time to regroup and organise
their resistance to the Vietnamese-backed government in Phnom Penh. During this period, Pol Pot and his Khmer
Rouge allies took advantage of the distraction offered by China’s intervention, to establish
control over parts of the northwest of the country, along the border with Thailand. Armed with financial and military aid from
China and the United States, Pot was trying, in the summer of 1979, to reinvent the Khmer
Rouge, efforts were made to disavow the party’s former socialist past and actions, while Pot
tried to position himself as the leader of a new Patriotic Democratic Front, an alliance
of disparate political and military groups which opposed the Vietnamese-backed regime
in Phnom Penh. The leader of the Khmer Rouge, even attempted
to reinvent himself by dropping his pseudonym Pol Pot and adopting the name Phem, after
his father, incredibly, these actions won him some credibility on the international
stage and in November 1979, the United Nations chose to recognise the Khmer Rouge as the
government of Cambodia over the administration in Phnom Penh despite the appalling crimes
of the regime in recent years, the full extent of which was admittedly still unknown to the
world in 1979. Thus, by the end of the first year of the
Cambodian-Vietnamese War, the stage was set for an extended showdown, between the Vietnamese
and their puppet regime in Phnom Penh and the many militant groups which controlled
much of the country and of which the Khmer Rouge was just one, this was effectively a
new civil war in Cambodia, it would last as long as that which had first brought Pol Pot
and the Khmer Rouge to power in 1975. The Cambodian-Vietnamese War lasted for another
ten years, the Khmer Rouge was just one of the militant groups fighting against the People’s
Republic of Kampuchea and Vietnam in these years, foremost amongst these other groups
was the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia,
or FUNCINPEC, which was formed in 1981, by the stalwart of Cambodian politics, the former
king Sihanouk. Then in an effort to win over more support
for the Khmer in response to the formation of Sihanouk’s FUNCINPEC, Pol Pot officially
dissolved the Communist Party in 1981 and proposed a new Nationalist movement, an indication
of his ongoing ideological flexibility, then as the fighting wore on, in an interminable
series of guerrilla attacks in the jungles and foothills of Cambodia in the mid-1980s,
Pol Pot began moving away from the forefront of the movement, and in September 1985 he
resigned as the military commander of the Khmer Rouge, in part owing to reverses the
previous year, when the Vietnamese had pushed the Khmer forces into Thailand from Cambodia,
and in part owing to his own declining health. In 1983, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s
Lymphoma, a relatively severe type of cancer, which required him to spend extensive periods
of time in Bangkok and Beijing receiving medical treatment. As the war dragged on interminably into the
late 1980s, Pol Pot began to make it known to political elements within Cambodia and
abroad, that he would not seek to return to power should the war end, rather his sole
wish was to see the Vietnamese removed from Cambodia, or at least that is what he claimed. As ever, this statement came about largely
owing to wider geo-political circumstances, by the end of the decade the Communist bloc
worldwide was in decline and the Cold War was drawing to an end, as it did, Vietnam,
which had been largely ostracised from the global community since the 1970s, determined
to bring its role in Cambodia to an end also. In 1988, it began withdrawing the nearly 100,000
troops which it had in Cambodia and instituted a series of political and economic reforms,
designed to prop up the People’s Republic of Kampuchea and to fully disentangled itself
from the country, and by September 1989, it had withdrawn the last of its troops from
the country. Once a ceasefire was proclaimed in 1990, peace
negotiations began between the various groupings within Cambodia, to find a workable way forward
in stabilising the country, despite its crimes while in power between 1975 and 1979, the
Khmer Rouge with Pol Pot as its leader, would play a part in these negotiations. In the talks which followed, Pol Pot remained
in an obscure location near the border between Thailand and Cambodia and instead dispatched
his close associate in the Khmer Rouge, Khieu Samphan, to Phnom Penh to represent the party,
here negotiations largely centred around Samphan, Sihanouk and the head of the pro-Vietnamese
faction, Hun Sen. Samphan struck an antagonistic pose in the capital, declaring that the Khmer
Rouge refused to disarm its troops in western Cambodia, in response Sen and Sihanouk proved
similarly recalcitrant, as a result sporadic fighting continued throughout the early 1990s,
even as negotiations continued in Phnom Penh, eventually it was agreed that national elections
would be held in the early summer of 1993, the results were a sharp rebuttal of Pol Pot
and his Khmer Rouge, with Sen and Sihanouk’s parties cumulatively winning nearly 80% of
the vote. It was the beginning of the end for the Khmer
Rouge and for Pol Pot too, Sihanouk now negotiated a coalition with Sen and the new combined
government launched an offensive against the Khmer Rouge in western Cambodia. While the initial gains made by the government
were pushed back by a counter-offensive launched by Pot, in the course of 1994, the party was
nevertheless witnessing increasing desertion of its forces in Cambodia, in the months that
followed. On its last legs, from this point onwards,
it had little more than a few thousand troops occupying a small segment of the border region
with Thailand, but despite its weakness, it would take until 1999, for the Cambodian government
to fully defeat the party which had so terrorised its own country in the 1970s, however, Pol
Pot would not live to see the final defeat of the Khmer Rouge. The man who had been born as Saloth Sar in
the 1920s, and who had created such immense human suffering in his homeland, eventually
met his end in 1998, but his downfall had come shortly before that. With the Khmer’s fortunes at their lowest
ebb ever, the husk of a party which remained, turned against its leader in 1997, paranoia
and internal disputes plagued the leadership in the wilds of western Cambodia by this time
and in a party coup in the summer of 1997, Pol Pot and his family were placed under house
arrest by a rival faction led by one Ta Mok. By that time, Pol Pot did not have long to
live in any event, he suffered from a heart condition and a stroke had left him partially
paralysed and needing regular oxygen, moreover, his cancer remained and without access to
effective medical care, he was deteriorating rapidly. Such was the wreckage of a man, whom the Khmer
Rouge put on trial in July 1997, in a remarkably hypocritical act. He was sentenced to life in prison by the
party which he had himself led for over thirty years, but that life would end shortly thereafter. On the 15th of April 1998, Pol Pot died in
his sleep as his heart gave out, though suspicions have since arisen that he committed suicide
to avoid being handed over to the United States for trial. On the 21st of April 1998, six days after
his death, he was cremated in a Buddhist ceremony, thus died one of the twentieth century’s
most brutal dictators, he left behind a country which today is littered with land mines, a
scarred history and a largely authoritarian state. There is no doubting that Pol Pot was one
of the true monsters of the twentieth century, a century in which such figures abounded throughout
the world, but what perhaps marks Pol Pot out is the enormous brutality with which,
he and the Khmer Rouge carried out the Cambodian genocide, between 1975 and 1979. During these years, the regime turned against
everyone within its own borders, foreigners and political dissenters were targeted above
others, as is usually the case with totalitarian societies, but Pot and his followers even
turned entirely against their own people, murdering hundreds of thousands of Cambodians
in mass labour camps, in a crazed pursuit of agricultural productivity, which only succeeded
in creating a famine. As a result, Pol Pot’s regime murdered and
killed nearly one out of every four Cambodian citizens, in less than half a decade during
the late 1970s. It is hardly any surprise, that as a result,
the United Nations and the Red Cross were already declaring by 1979, that Pol Pot and
his regime were bringing about, “the near destruction of Cambodian society,” only
the intervention of the Vietnamese that year, stopped the crazed, horrific killing, that
is Pol Pot’s legacy, there is nothing approaching any rationalisations which can be made for
it. What do you think of Pol Pot? Was he perhaps the most tyrannical dictator
of the entire twentieth century? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
