At the Choeung Ek memorial in Phnom Penh,
Cambodia, you’ll find a stupa – a squat, tower-like structure used as a place of prayer
and meditation by Buddhists. At a distance, this little building might
seem like a good photo opportunity, but if you get closer, you’ll see a truly harrowing
sight: Around 5,000 human skulls are stored inside. While this is horrific in its own right, 5,000
dead are the tip of the iceberg for what lays below in mass graves known as The Killing
Fields. And for this, we have one man to thank: Pol
Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, and orchestrator of the horrific Cambodian Genocide. While he’s rarely mentioned alongside other
vicious dictators of the 20th Century, like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini,
and Chairman Mao, proportionally, Pol Pot is as bad as any of them. Often credited with murdering practically
a quarter of his own country during his four-year reign from 1975 to 1979, Pol Pot has left
a legacy of torture, brutality, fear, and mass killings that’ve left scars on the
Cambodian psyche even today, over forty years after the worst of his terrible violence. The man’s cruelty and ruthlessness in carrying
out his communist, agrarian vision was the stuff of legend, and for many in Cambodia,
even the mere mention of his name is enough to send a chill down their spine. So, for one of arguably the world’s most
murderous dictators – responsible for the senseless slaughter of over a million of his
own citizens – it’s worth asking the following questions: Who was this man, how and why did
he come to power, and what horrors did he unleash on the citizens he should have been
protecting? Well, first of all, Pol Pot wasn’t actually
his real name – Pot was born in 1925 as Saloth Sar in the small Cambodian village
of Prek Sbauv, in the Kampong Thom Province. He was the eighth of nine children. The Cambodia Sar was born into was one still
under French colonial rule, which was naturally a point of contention between the Cambodian
people and the powers that be over in France. Though Sar himself was unlikely to have felt
the ripples of this personally, having been born into a relatively well-off, landowning
farming family. His family owned 50 acres of rice paddy, which
was over ten times the national average at the time, so it was fair to say that he lived
a pretty charmed life early on. So just how did this upper crust 1% end up
murdering a quarter of his own country? Saloth Sar would make for a terrible student,
and his parents worried about his future. While not interested in education in the least,
a young Sar was immediately attracted to the revolutionary attitudes of Cambodian communists-
specially those who sought independence from France. Saloth began using the revolutionary pseudonym
Pol Pot, short for the French phrase “Politique Potentielle” – or Potential Politics. In politics, he’d found what he believed
to be his true calling. So much so, in fact, that he decided to invest
all his time in revolutionary activities rather than his schooling. As a result, he failed his next wave of examinations
and had his scholarship revoked by the government. He returned to Phnom Penh in 1953 with a head
full of dangerous ambitions, though it’d be another few decades before he could put
the most nightmarish of them into practice. The same year Pot returned to his home country,
Cambodia finally gained independence from French colonial rule after the people revolted
against their European oppressors. This left a kind of power vacuum in the country
that numerous political entities – Pol Pot and his Communist allies included – would
later attempt to fill. In the meantime – much like his fellow 20th
Century Asian dictator, Chairman Mao – Pol Pot decided to pursue teaching while he kept
his revolutionary plans on the back burner. He taught at a Phnom Penh private school between
1956 and 1963, specialising in history, geography, and French literature, and marrying his first
wife, Khieu Ponnary, in the interim. If Pol Pot had decided to settle down and
invest himself fully in his teaching career, Cambodia would have been spared a lot of bloodshed
and horror, but that’s sadly not how all this played out. Pot spent time helping to build up Cambodia’s
Communist party on the side, serving as its secretary in 1960, and converting it to his
particular brand of Marxist-Leninism. However, Cambodia’s new monarchical rulers
didn’t take kindly to this kind of subversive activity, and began a crackdown on communist
groups that forced Pol Pot and his allies to flee Phnom Penh and take refuge in the
jungle. There, Pot encamped with a group of Viet Cong,
before beginning his quest to reform his scattered own group into the Khmer Rouge Guerrilla Army
– a revolutionary insurgency movement who intended to pry control of the country out
of royal hands. As Pot grew his forces and began launching
his revolution in 1968, it was clear that what he lacked in academic drive, he made
up for in having an almost preternatural level of charisma and persuasion. One Khmer Rouge defector would later say,
“Pol Pot makes a very powerful impression on those who hear him for the first time. After that, they want to come back... Those who attend his seminars feel enlightened
by his teaching, his explanations and his vision... He's like a father to us.” Much like another one of his contemporaries,
Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, Pot ran his political movement not unlike a cult – a group with
a loose ideology congealed around a charismatic leader. Ultimately, what ushered Pol Pot into power
were the conditions of absolute chaos occurring in the late sixties and early seventies. In 1970, a brutal civil war broke out between
the forces of General Lon Nol and the Khmer Rouge. General Nol undertook a military coup while
the country’s ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was away on business, and the prince sided
with the Khmer Rouge. And like almost all terrible events that occurred
in the 1970s, then US President Richard Nixon was involved. While a coalition of 70,000 US and South Vietnamese
troops marched into Cambodia to root out the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong presence, Nixon
was busy dropping 500,000 tons of bombs on the country over the next four years. It was a complete humanitarian nightmare for
all parties involved. In the meantime, the violence committed by
General Nol, the South Vietnamese, and the United States was radicalising more locals
into the Khmer Rouge cause, swelling their armies massively. By the time the US was finished brutalising
Cambodia with their bombing campaign, Pol Pot controlled three quarters of what was
left. And after a sustained shelling and forced
starvation campaign over Phnom Penh left the capital defenceless, the Khmer forces stormed
in and took absolute control. On April 17th, 1975, Pol Pot became the de
facto leader of Cambodia. Many thought the end of the Cambodian Civil
War would usher in a period of stability for the country, little did they know that the
worst was yet to come. Pol Pot had been planning for decades, and
at long last, he had the power to actualise those plans. Like many infamous totalitarian dictators,
he wasn’t after power for its own sake – He had a vision for his perfect country, and
anyone who didn’t fit into that vision was destined to meet a grisly end. Pol Pot wanted to take Cambodia back to its
roots as a proud nation of grass roots farmers and labourers. Under the rule of Pol Pot, the “decadent”
ranks of the educated, professional, and the urban were public enemy number one. It was these academics who would meet the
worst fates. One of Pol Pot’s first insane actions was
evacuating Cambodia’s urban areas, including Phnom Penh, displacing and ruining the lives
of millions. Professionals like doctors, lawyers, and civil
servants were forced into re-education camps, stripped of their possessions, and made to
work themselves to the bone in Cambodia’s fields and rice paddies. If you dared to complain about the back-breaking
work, then you’d likely find yourself in one of the Khmer Rouge’s infamous detention
centres, being tortured until you either complied or died. One particular detention centre, the S-21,
a former high school turned into a dystopian torture chamber, had only 23 survivors out
of its 18,000 known prisoners. The brutality in these institutions under
Pol Pot was so great that they had official torture manuals dictating methods of interrogation,
with choice excerpts like, “Our experience in the past has been that our interrogators
for the most part tended to fall on the torture side.... However, we must nevertheless strive to do
politics to get them always and absolutely to confess to us. Only once we have pressured them politically,
only when we have put them in a corner politically and have gotten them to confess will torture
become productive.” Pol Pot’s minions often found that torture
was extremely productive. Pot instituted a level of totalitarian control
that made the dystopian world of George Orwell’s 1984 look like a day care in comparison. Among the things outlawed by Pol’s Khmer
Rouge regime were: Private property, jewellery, money, religion, gambling, and most reading
material. If you defied these laws, you’d once again
either be tortured, shot, or both. And even if you weren’t personally executed
by the Khmer forces, that didn’t mean you were out of the woods. The horrific mismanagement of resources under
Pol Pot lead to widespread famine, leading countless Cambodian citizens to die from malnutrition. Their bodies were dumped into mass graves
in the same so-called “Killing Fields”, with the body count ratcheting up to astronomical
numbers. Pol Pot’s supervillain-level dictatorship
antics didn’t end with all the horrific mass murder, torture, and starvation. He committed many acts that were as petty
as they were strange and sadistic. The country was renamed Democratic Kampuchea,
despite democracy playing no real role in the government. There were strict rules imposed on sexual
relations, the clothing you could wear, and even the words you could use, in what feels
like almost a direct tribute to Orwell’s dystopian masterwork. In one particularly insane act, the country’s
rice fields were forcibly realigned in order to resemble the Khmer Rouge’s checkerboard-patterned
coat of arms. In spite of these cartoonishly weird decisions,
you have to remember that Pol Pot was a truly horrific monster. Under his command, children would be ripped
from their homes and forced into mandatory military service by the Khmer Rouge, creating
an army of obedient soldiers who carried out the will of their murderous dictator on pain
of death. Men, women, and children were all horrifically
victimised under one man’s vision of a classless utopia gone awry, with anyone daring to speak
out meeting a brutal end. In 1979, a large detachment of Vietnamese
troops stormed Cambodia and captured Phnom Penh, forcing the power-mad dictator back
into the jungle with his Khmer Rouge guerrilla army. There, with political support from the US
and China, Pol Pot continued military operations for the next ten years. The movement would finally totally collapse
in the late 1990s, following a ceasefire in 1991. In 1997, a Khmer Rouge splinter cell would
capture Pol Pot and place him under house arrest, until he died of natural causes at
age 72. Ready for more on some of the most terrifying
despots? Check out “Terrifying Story of Joseph Stalin’s
Rise to Power” and “Why Mao Zedong Was The Most Brutal Tyrant.”
