Pol Pot was born May
19, 1925 (as Saloth Sar) into a farming family in central Cambodia,
which was then part of French Indochina. In 1949, at age 20, he
traveled to Paris on a scholarship to study radio electronics but
became absorbed in Marxism and neglected his studies. He lost his
scholarship and returned to Cambodia in 1953 and joined the
underground Communist movement. The following year, Cambodia
achieved full independence from France and was then ruled by a
royal monarchy.
By 1962, Pol Pot had
become leader of the Cambodian Communist Party and was forced to
flee into the jungle to escape the wrath of Prince Norodom
Sihanouk, leader of Cambodia. In the jungle, Pol Pot formed an
armed resistance movement that became known as the Khmer Rouge (Red
Cambodians) and waged a guerrilla war against Sihanouk's
government.
In 1970, Prince
Sihanouk was ousted, not by Pol Pot, but due to a U.S.-backed
right-wing military coup. An embittered Sihanouk retaliated by
joining with Pol Pot, his former enemy, in opposing Cambodia's new
military government. That same year, the U.S. invaded Cambodia to
expel the North Vietnamese from their border encampments, but
instead drove them deeper into Cambodia where they allied
themselves with the Khmer Rouge.
From 1969 until
1973, the U.S. intermittently bombed North Vietnamese sanctuaries
in eastern Cambodia, killing up to 150,000 Cambodian peasants. As a
result, peasants fled the countryside by the hundreds of thousands
and settled in Cambodia's capital city, Phnom Penh.
All of these events
resulted in economic and military destabilization in Cambodia and a
surge of popular support for Pol Pot.
By 1975, the U.S.
had withdrawn its troops from Vietnam. Cambodia's government,
plagued by corruption and incompetence, also lost its American
military support. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Pol Pot's
Khmer Rouge army, consisting of teenage peasant guerrillas, marched
into Phnom Penh and on April 17 effectively seized control of
Cambodia.
Once in power, Pol
Pot began a radical experiment to create an agrarian utopia
inspired in part by Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution which he had
witnessed first-hand during a visit to Communist China.
Mao's "Great Leap
Forward" economic program included forced evacuations of Chinese
cities and the purging of "class enemies." Pol Pot would now
attempt his own "Super Great Leap Forward" in Cambodia, which he
renamed the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea.
He began by
declaring, "This is Year Zero," and that society was about to be
"purified." Capitalism, Western culture, city life,
religion, and all foreign influences were to be extinguished in
favor of an extreme form of peasant Communism.
All foreigners were
thus expelled, embassies closed, and any foreign economic or
medical assistance was refused. The use of foreign languages was
banned. Newspapers and television stations were shut down, radios
and bicycles confiscated, and mail and telephone usage curtailed.
Money was forbidden. All businesses were shuttered, religion
banned, education halted, health care eliminated, and parental
authority revoked. Thus Cambodia was sealed off from the outside
world.
All of Cambodia's
cities were then forcibly evacuated. At Phnom Penh, two million
inhabitants were evacuated on foot into the countryside at
gunpoint. As many as 20,000 died along the way.
Millions of
Cambodians accustomed to city life were now forced into slave labor
in Pol Pot's "killing fields" where they soon began dying from
overwork, malnutrition and disease, on a diet of one tin of rice
(180 grams) per person every two days.
Workdays in the
fields began around 4 a.m. and lasted until 10 p.m., with only two
rest periods allowed during the 18 hour day, all under the armed
supervision of young Khmer Rouge soldiers eager to kill anyone for
the slightest infraction. Starving people were forbidden to eat the
fruits and rice they were harvesting. After the rice crop was
harvested, Khmer Rouge trucks would arrive and confiscate the
entire crop.
Ten to fifteen
families lived together with a chairman at the head of each group.
All work decisions were made by the armed supervisors with no
participation from the workers who were told, "Whether you live or
die is not of great significance." Every tenth day was a day of
rest. There were also three days off during the Khmer New Year
festival.
Throughout Cambodia,
deadly purges were conducted to eliminate remnants of the "old
society" - the educated, the wealthy, Buddhist monks, police,
doctors, lawyers, teachers, and former government officials.
Ex-soldiers were killed along with their wives and children. Anyone
suspected of disloyalty to Pol Pot, including eventually many Khmer
Rouge leaders, was shot or bludgeoned with an ax. "What is rotten
must be removed," a Khmer Rouge slogan proclaimed.
In the villages,
unsupervised gatherings of more than two persons were forbidden.
Young people were taken from their parents and placed in communals.
They were later married in collective ceremonies involving hundreds
of often-unwilling couples.
Up to 20,000 persons
were tortured into giving false confessions at Tuol Sleng, a school
in Phnom Penh which had been converted into a jail. Elsewhere,
suspects were often shot on the spot before any
questioning. Ethnic groups were attacked including the
three largest minorities; the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cham
Muslims, along with twenty other smaller groups. Fifty percent of
the estimate 425,000 Chinese living in Cambodia in 1975 perished.
Khmer Rouge also forced Muslims to eat pork and shot those who
refused.
On December 25,
1978, Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia seeking to
end Khmer Rouge border attacks. On January 7, 1979, Phnom
Penh fell and Pol Pot was deposed. The Vietnamese then installed a
puppet government consisting of Khmer Rouge defectors.
Pol Pot retreated
into Thailand with the remnants of his Khmer Rouge army and began a
guerrilla war against a succession of Cambodian governments lasting
over the next 17 years. After a series of internal power struggles
in the 1990s, he finally lost control of the Khmer Rouge.
April 15, 1998, 73-year-old Pol Pot died of an apparent heart
attack following his arrest, before he could be brought to trial by
an international tribunal for the events of
1975-79.
