Cambodian genocide

The Cambodian genocide was carried out against Cambodia's own people by the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot, between its capture of Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975 and its overthrow on 7 January 1979. Through executions, forced labour, starvation and disease, an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people died, roughly a fifth to a quarter of the country's population of about 7.8 million. Former officials, educated people, religious communities and ethnic minorities were particular targets.

The Khmer Rouge, Cambodia's communist movement, launched an insurgency in 1968. In 1970 the head of state, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was deposed by his prime minister Lon Nol, who set up the pro-American Khmer Republic. From exile in Beijing, Sihanouk allied with the Khmer Rouge, and his support helped their forces grow rapidly. North Vietnamese troops also drove government forces from much of eastern Cambodia. The civil war was accompanied by heavy American bombing of the countryside, part of the wider Vietnam War; historians disagree on how far the bombing helped the Khmer Rouge recruit. On 17 April 1975 Khmer Rouge forces captured Phnom Penh and ended the civil war.

The new regime, which in 1976 renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea, set out to create a self-sufficient agrarian communist society, cut off from foreign influence and shaped by radical Maoist ideas. China was its principal foreign backer, supplying the great majority of its foreign aid. The cities were emptied and their inhabitants marched into the countryside. Almost the entire population was organised into mobile work teams and labour camps, land was collectivised, and all religions were banned. In the camps, forced labour, abuse, starvation and disease were widespread, and many died of hunger, exhaustion and illness.

The regime executed people it saw as enemies: officials and soldiers of the old government, professionals, intellectuals, Buddhist monks and anyone suspected of foreign connections. Ethnic minorities suffered heavily. Estimates suggest that 200,000 to 300,000 ethnic Chinese died, along with around 20,000 Vietnamese, while estimates for the mostly Muslim Cham range widely, from about 90,000 to 500,000. Up to 50,000 Buddhist monks are estimated to have been killed. The regime also turned on its own members in repeated purges, the most serious being the massacres in the Eastern Zone in 1978. Some 20,000 people passed through the security prison known as S-21, at Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh, and only a handful survived. Researchers have since mapped more than 23,000 mass graves, and executions are thought to account for a large share, perhaps up to 60 per cent, of all deaths.

In late 1978 the Vietnamese army invaded, and by 7 January 1979 it had overthrown the regime and installed a new government. In 1979 that government tried Pol Pot and Ieng Sary in absentia and convicted them of genocide. The Khmer Rouge fought on as an insurgency against the Vietnamese occupation until 1989, and to include it in the Paris peace agreements of 1991 the major powers avoided using the word genocide. Many refugees fled to Thailand. Pol Pot died in April 1998, never having been brought before an international court.

In 2003 the Cambodian government and the United Nations agreed to set up a special tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, which began trials in 2009. It convicted Kang Kek Iew, known as Duch, the head of S-21, of crimes against humanity, and later convicted the senior leaders Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan; it later also found them guilty of genocide against the Vietnamese, and Nuon Chea of genocide against the Cham. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment. Cambodia marks a National Day of Remembrance each year on 20 May, and S-21 is now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.

Our 1985 map shows Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, under the Vietnamese-backed government; the 1960 map shows the country before the civil war.