Pol Pot

Pol Pot, born Saloth Sar, was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian communist movement that ruled the country as Democratic Kampuchea from 1975 to 1979. In less than four years his regime emptied the cities, abolished money, religion and private property, and drove the population into forced labour on collective farms. Through executions, starvation, overwork and untreated disease, an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people died, roughly a quarter of the population, in what is known as the Cambodian genocide.

Saloth Sar was born in the village of Prek Sbauv, near Kampong Thom in central Cambodia, then part of French Indochina. His birth date is uncertain: French colonial records give 1928, while his biographer Philip Short argues for 1925, the year most often cited. His family were prosperous rice farmers of mixed Khmer and Chinese descent, with connections at the royal court, where a cousin was a consort of the king. As a boy he was sent to Phnom Penh, spent some months as a novice in a Buddhist monastery and attended a French Catholic school. He was an unremarkable student, but in 1949 he won a government scholarship to study radio electronics in Paris.

In France he joined a circle of Cambodian students who read Marxist texts, and in the early 1950s he became a member of the French Communist Party. Among his friends were Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan, later leading figures in his government. He neglected his studies, lost his scholarship and returned home in 1953, the year Cambodia gained independence from France under King Norodom Sihanouk.

Back in Cambodia, Saloth Sar joined the communist-led resistance, then dominated by Vietnamese communists of the movement founded by Ho Chi Minh, and came to resent its subordination to Vietnam. For most of the 1950s he worked as a teacher of history and French in Phnom Penh while organising in secret. In 1960 the small Cambodian communist party was reorganised, and he joined its leadership; he became its secretary in 1963, after the previous leader disappeared, probably killed by the police. That year, facing arrest, he fled to the jungle along the Vietnamese border.

He visited North Vietnam and China in 1965 to 1966. The China of the early Cultural Revolution impressed him deeply, and the ideas of Mao Zedong about peasant revolution shaped his own. In 1968 his party, which Sihanouk had named the Khmer Rouge, the "Red Khmers", began an armed uprising.

Cambodia was drawn into the Vietnam War as North Vietnamese forces used its eastern border regions for supply routes and bases. From 1969 the United States bombed these areas heavily. In March 1970 Sihanouk was overthrown by his prime minister, General Lon Nol, who allied with the Americans. Sihanouk, in exile in Beijing, joined forces with the Khmer Rouge, giving them a popular figurehead and a flood of recruits from the countryside. American bombing, which killed many civilians, also helped recruitment. With North Vietnamese help at first, the Khmer Rouge grew into a disciplined army and imposed harsh collective farming in the areas it controlled. On 17 April 1975 it captured Phnom Penh.

Within days the new rulers forced the entire population of Phnom Penh and other towns, more than two million people, including the sick and the elderly, to march into the countryside. Many died on the way. Money, markets, schools, private property, religious practice and family life outside the party's control were abolished. Pol Pot, who took that name publicly in 1976 and became prime minister, wanted to create a purely agrarian communist society from scratch and to make Cambodia self-sufficient through gigantic rice and irrigation projects. The leadership called itself simply Angkar, "the Organisation", and Pol Pot was known inside the party as Brother Number One.

The population was divided into "base people", peasants from areas held during the war, and "new people" from the cities, who were treated as suspects with fewer rights and rations. People were worked from dawn to night on starvation rations, families were separated, and children were taken away to be indoctrinated. Doctors, teachers, officials, former soldiers and anyone thought to be educated or connected with the old regime were hunted out, along with their families, and killed. Buddhist monks were defrocked and monasteries destroyed. Ethnic Vietnamese were expelled or murdered, and the Cham Muslim minority and ethnic Chinese suffered especially heavily.

As the economy failed, Pol Pot blamed traitors and enemy agents. The party turned on itself in waves of purges from 1976. At the secret prison S-21, in a former school in Phnom Penh's Tuol Sleng district, between about 15,000 and 20,000 prisoners, many of them party members and their families, were photographed, tortured into confessing to imaginary conspiracies and then killed; only a handful survived. Across the country, victims were executed and buried in mass graves, the "killing fields". In 1978 the regime launched a massacre in the Eastern Zone, where it suspected the population of sympathy for Vietnam. Estimates of the total dead range from about 1.5 to 2 million out of a population of around 8 million; a large share, by some estimates around half, were executed, and most of the rest died of hunger, exhaustion and disease.

Pol Pot's regime, allied with China, was fiercely hostile to Vietnam, and from 1977 its troops raided across the border and massacred Vietnamese villagers. On 25 December 1978 Vietnam invaded with a large army. Phnom Penh fell on 7 January 1979, and a pro-Vietnamese government was installed. The Khmer Rouge leadership fled to the forests along the Thai border.

In the politics of the Cold War, China, Thailand and the United States opposed the Vietnamese occupation, and the Khmer Rouge kept Cambodia's seat at the United Nations as part of a coalition with non-communist factions. Pol Pot remained the movement's real leader through the 1980s, though he formally gave up his posts. After the Vietnamese withdrew in 1989 and the 1991 Paris peace agreement, the Khmer Rouge boycotted the UN-run elections of 1993 and kept fighting, but defections steadily weakened it.

In June 1997 Pol Pot ordered the killing of his long-time defence chief, Son Sen, who was murdered with members of his family. The military commander Ta Mok then turned against him, and in July 1997 Pol Pot was put on show trial by his own movement in the jungle at Anlong Veng and sentenced to life under house arrest. In an interview with the journalist Nate Thayer he denied responsibility for mass killing and said his conscience was clear. He died on 15 April 1998, officially of heart failure, though some suspected suicide, and his body was burned on a pyre of tyres and rubbish. The Khmer Rouge collapsed within a year.

He never faced a court. A UN-backed tribunal in Phnom Penh, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, later convicted the S-21 commandant Kang Kek Iew of crimes against humanity, and in 2018 found Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan guilty of genocide against the Vietnamese and Cham minorities, in addition to crimes against humanity. Tuol Sleng is now a genocide museum, and the killing field at Choeung Ek a memorial. The longer story is told in the History of Cambodia.