Saloth Sar (May 19, 1925 – April 15, 1998) who was later known as Pol Pot was the leader of the Communist movement in Cambodia, known as the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot was the Prime Minister of Cambodia from 1976 to 1979. During his time in power, Pol Pot relocated many of the urban citizens of Cambodia into the countryside to work in collective farms and forced labor projects with the goal of restarting civilization. An attempt by Pol Pot to form a Communist peasant farming society resulted in the deaths of approximately 25 percent of the country’s population from starvation, overwork and executions (The History Place).

Saloth Sar was born into a farming family in central Cambodia which was then part of the French Indochina. Saloth Sar was intelligent in that he traveled to Paris to study electronics but became absorbed in the study of Marxism and eventually took up his new study and neglected his previous obligations. While Pol Pot studied in Paris learning a lot about Marxism, he believed that the more he knew about it, the better the chances of circumventing a marxist revolution and ultimately he would be able to stick with his ideals of a classless society. After losing his scholarship, he returned to Cambodia where he took part in the underground Communist movement that was arousing behind the back of the French who were in control of most of the country. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, leader of Cambodia, set out a resistance against the uprising of the Communist party, and Pol Pot was forced to flee into the jungle. While in hiding, Pol Pot formed the Khmer Rouge Party whose initiative was to set out guerrilla operations that were aimed at Sihanouk’s government. U.S. launched air strikes that bombarded roads travelling into Cambodia that allowed for the Vietnamese to retreat into the countryside. After the United States’ attempt to overthrow Sihanouk’s reign, Sihanouk attempted to side with Pol Pot; however, The Khmer Rouge party launched an armed rebellion against Sihanouk’s independent regime and labeled him as a “U.S. Puppet”. All of the mayhem that took place in Cambodia at the time was derived from France’s persuasion on Cambodians that caused them to believe that they are essentially in debt of lost territory from Vietnam. It was believed that expanded a portion of their country into Cochinchina, and this caused much dismay. France’s persuasion on Cambodians formed a sense of nationalism for the Khmer Rouge party to cleanse the country of those who were not of Cambodian decent. The Vietnam war left Cambodia vulnerable as the war was heating up. The U.S. bombardment of most of Cambodia’s major cities and much of the countryside killed over 100,000 people forcing survivors into the ranks of the Khmer Rouge. On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh, deported its 2 million residents using brute force, and established the DK (Democratic of Kampuchea). Pol Pot viewed this as being a genocide of particular ethnicities such as Chinese, Laotian, and Vietnamese however many scholars did not agree with this perspective. China and Cambodia had close relations and when Vietnam invaded Cambodia, China invaded Vietnam. By the end of the Pol Pot regime, there was an approximated 2 million deaths.


Reap, Siem and McCarthy Terry. Monday, April 27, 1998. “The Butcher of Cambodia.” Times Magazine. Retrieved May 15, 2008.

“[W]ho can ever fathom the evil that men do. We stand disbelieving before genocide, when women’s throats are slit with sharp palm leaves, when children’s heads are smashed against tree trunks, when men are slaughtered with the crack of a hoe. These things happened every day in Cambodia for 3 ½ terrible years, and when the world learned of it, people could only respond with dumb horror” (Reap and McCarthy). This gruesome image of the horror that those who were captured faced cannot measure up to the actuality of the effect of genocide. All that Pol Pot believed in was that he was creating a pure communist society and whatever he did was done for his country. The Khmer Rouge revolution created hell on earth for outsiders that did not conform to them and many of the innocent citizens that resided in the country of Cambodia.

2000. “The Legacy of Pol Pol – A photographic record of mass murder.” Times Magazine. Retrieved May 15, 2008.

The pictures of innocent children that were displayed brought about a sense of melancholy because of the thought of the different kinds of torture that children went through. A “Killing Field” was uncovered in 1980 with a hill of human bones that were evidently buried to discard of the uncountable amount of humans that were sent to an early death. The Khmer Rouge secret police turned Phnom Penh high school into its headquarters which was later named S-21. Thousands of captives were tortured and executed in the former classrooms that were turned into jail cells. S-21 has now been refashioned into the Tuol Sleng Museum of genocide where thousands of pictures of Khmer Rouge victims hang on its walls. The name of Khmer Rouge, which means “Red Khmers,” was given to a leftwing Cambodian faction in the 1950’s. Led by Pol Pot, the party gained control of Cambodia in 1975. “Intellectuals and anyone else seen as standing in the way of the new social order were mercilessly killed, while many of those who escaped execution died from overwork and starvation” (The Legacy of Pol Pol – A photographic record of mass murder).

The History Place – Genocide in the 20th
Century. 1999. “Pol Pot in Cambodia 1975-1979.” Retrieved May 15, 2008.

By 1975, the U.S. had withdrawn troops from Vietnam which called for and end of the Vietnam Conflict. Cambodia’s system of government was plagued with corruption due to the loss of U.S. stabilization through military support. This was a perfect time for Pol Pot to take advantage of the instability in office and to move the Khmer Rouge closer to power. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge army consisted of teenage peasants whose new role was guerrilla warfare, set out to Phnom Penh where they would take control of the major city on April 17th and eventually effectively seized control of Cambodia (The History Place).

Essortment. 2002. Pol Pot biography – A brief biology of Pol Pot and the devastation he brought to Cambodia.” Retrieved May 14, 2008.

Throughout 1976 and 1977, battles with Vietnam continued as well as reinforcement from China to the advantage of Cambodia. Vietnam resistance created roads that travelled into Cambodia so Vietnam could hopefully take control of the country. By January 1979 the Vietnamese forces had reached Phnom Penh which was the headquarters for the Khmer Rouge or DK, which force the Kampuchean government to flee by train while Pol Pot was taken by airplane to Thailand. Before going into exile for the next 19 years, Pol Pot was last seen in December of 1979 (Essortment).

Cambodian Communities out of crisis. 2008. “Cambodia’s Holocaust.” Retrieved May 14, 2008.

“On the pretext that they were expecting the USA to bomb Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge forced the whole population to evacuate the city on foot. Those who refused were shot, as were hospital patients who were unable to walk. The roads out of the city were clogged with bewildered people, clutching a few belongings. Children were separated from their parents; the old and infirm who could not keep up were left to die at the roadside(Cambodian Communities out of crisis). As Pol Pot was achieving his dream of “Year Zero,” the return of Cambodia to traditional peasant economy was in the making; however there would be no class divisions, no money, no education, and no hospitality. Certain religions were also banned after Pol Pot had taken control (Cambodian Communities out of crisis).

Kiernan, Ben. 1996. The Pol Pot Regime. New Haven and London. Yale University Press.

"The Pol Pot Regime" is Ben Kiernan's long awaited sequel to "Pol Pot's Rise to Power." Kiernan's explanation of Pol Pot's Regime throughout the novel is addressed with a lot of imagery that allows the reader to visualize what it was like to physically be in Cambodia at the time: "Dressed in khaki uniforms and U.S. Army boots, white seat bands on their wrists, they dripped with grenades and firearms. Some carried U.S.-made M-16 rifles, others M-79 grenade launchers and packs of rice rations" (Kiernan).

At first glance, mid-twentieth-century Cambodia seems a society resistant to transformation. Compared to neighboring Thailand and Vietnam, it was geographically compact, demographically dispersed, linguistically unified, ethnically homogenous, socially undifferentiated, culturally uniform, administratively unitary, politically undeveloped, economically undiversified, and educationally deprived (Kiernan). Cambodia was ethnically quite homogenous, as were Thailand and Vietnam. But unlike its two neighbors, Cambodia had had much less exposure to external cultural influence, which, when it came, was potentially destabilizing ( Kiernan). Cambodia at this time was empowered by the French colonization for over ninety years, and remained to suppress Cambodia's independence. With French colonial policy in Indochina allowing the population of Vietnamese, Chinese, Lao and Thais to dominate the cities, the majority of the Khmer people had to resort to the rural landscape for necessities. The shadowy leaders of this closed country gave few clues to their personal lives for fear that the French would discover their underground political operations. Under The Norodom Sihanouk reign, the number of high schools rose from 8 in 1953 to two hundred in 1967. Another eleven thousand students attended the nine new universities that were available. At this point nearly all Khmer's were able to achieve an education which allowed for the educated Pol Pot to take advantage of the opportunity of educating his people about Communism (Kiernan). Pol Pot joined the Cambodian and Vietnamese communists and in his first contact, Vietnamese communists began teaching him, as one of them later put it, how to "work with the masses at the base, to build up the independence committees at the village level, member by member." In 1945, Cambodia transformed itself into the Democratic Kampuchea. Under Japanese control for many years, the French eventually reimposed their control in 1945 however their absence built up a sense of nationalism for Cambodians. "Out of this nationalist struggle for independence, the first precondition for Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea had been realized: a viable communist party had emerged on the Cambodian political scene" (Kiernan). With the eventual exiling of many of the leaders of the KPRP, Pol Pot was able to take over the leadership of the communist party in 1963. These leaders immediately went underground, forestalling any serious party debate while preparing a rebellion against Sihanouk. This meant that the party must break off will all previous communist connections such as the Vietnamese as well as the policy of accommodation to the prince's neutralism that they had signed (Kiernan). By 1970 the Khmer Rouge party's leadership was now urban, French-educated, radical, and anti-Vietnamese. A major factor in this change was the rivalry between Chinese and Vietnamese communists for influence in this part of Southeast Asia. Cambodia sided with China mainly because they supported the new communist movement that distanced themselves from Hanoi (Kiernan). Pol Pot's revolution would not have won power without U.S. economic and military destabilization Cambodia. Leaving the country in ruins, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge party were now able to come out of the woodwork and teach the remaining followers communist ideals as well as ethnically cleanse Cambodia.