Pol Pot

Dictator of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979)

• Born: May 19, 1925
• Birthplace: Prek Sbauv, Kompong Thom Province, Cambodia
• Died: April 15, 1998
• Place of death: Dangrek Mountains, near Choam Ksant, Cambodia

As the leader of the communist Khmer Rouge, which seized control of Cambodia only a few weeks before South Vietnam fell to the Communists in April, 1975, Pol Pot attempted to create a pure agrarian society. His policies led to the deaths of more than 1.5 million citizens by execution, starvation, forced evacuations, and overwork.

Early Life

Pol Pot (pawl pawt) was born Saloth Sar in Prek Sbauv, Cambodia. At the time of his birth, Cambodia was part of French Indochina. In 1935, he enrolled at École Miche, a Roman Catholic school in Phnom Penh. Although he gained admission to the Lycée Sisowath in 1947, he foundered academically. He transferred to the Russey Keo Technical School, and in 1949 won a scholarship to study radio electronics in France.

While in Paris, Pol Pot became involved in communist organizations, including one affiliated with the Khmer Student Association and another that supported independence for Vietnam. Because he failed exams in three successive years, he lost his scholarship. He returned to Cambodia in January, 1953, and within a year helped to establish the Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party, an anti-French underground communist party. After the French withdrawal from Vietnam in 1954 and Cambodian independence that same year, Pol Pot served as a liaison between leftist parties and the communist movement, taught history and French literature, and worked as a journalist.

By 1960, Pol Pot had worked his way up the ladder of the Cambodian Communist Party and was elected to its central committee that year. After the killing of the party’s leader by the Cambodian government in 1962, Pol Pot became the acting leader. A year later, he was elected as secretary of the central committee, the top position in the party. Rather than join forces with Prince Norodom Sihanouk, he organized the Khmer Rouge , a communist guerrilla military, and spent the next decade fighting Sihanouk’s government. It was during this time that Pol Pot changed his name from Saloth Sar in 1969, the name “Pol Pot” coming from the French words politique potentielle (potential politic).

In March, 1970, General Lon Nol took control of Cambodia with the assistance of the United States, which considered him an ally against the North Vietnamese. Deposed leader Sihanouk joined forces with the Khmer Rouge to oppose the government. Aided financially by China, the Khmer Rouge fought Lon Nol’s military, the U.S. troops who invaded Cambodia in 1970, South Vietnamese forces, and even fellow communists loyal to Sihanouk and North Vietnam.

Pol Pot would build a huge military loyal to Lon Nol, but he also would soon solidify his own political power and organize a takeover of Cambodia. The combination of a withdrawal by the U.S. military from Southeast Asia in 1973 and the so-called Winter Offensive of 1975 by communists in Vietnam and Cambodia, led to the fall of Lon Nol’s regime on April 17, 1975.

Life’s Work

Once in power, Pol Pot gave Cambodia a new name: Democratic Kampuchea. He sought to remake the country by adopting an extreme form of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the Chinese movement he witnessed during a visit there. Designating the immediate period after the takeover as Year Zero, he demanded a purification of society through the elimination of all foreign influences. This meant the expulsion of all foreigners, closing embassies, banning the use of foreign languages, and refusing foreign economic and medical assistance. Most egregiously, the indigenous who remained in Cambodia were slaughtered.

Pol Pot then decreed that all citizens relocate to the rural countryside and begin collective farming. To do this, all cities were emptied and residents forced to march to the country on foot. No fewer than twenty thousand persons died during the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh alone. All domestic businesses were closed and money was forbidden. Once in the fields, people were required to work eighteen-hour days with little rest and even less food for themselves. The only sustained period of rest came every tenth day and during the three-day Khmer New Year celebration. Hundreds of thousands of citizens died in what became known as the Killing Fields.

To prevent dissent and disloyalty to the regime, the Khmer Rouge targeted those who were perceived as threats, including the educated, the wealthy, teachers, lawyers, police officers, former government officials, former soldiers, and Buddhist monks, among many others. To prevent future opposition, the regime banned all religion and formal education, replacing the latter with rigid indoctrination. Interrogation centers were set up in several areas of the country. A high school at Tuol Sleng was converted into a security prison, famously known as S-21.

Of the approximately sixteen thousand people confined and tortured at S-21, only five survived. Pol Pot’s radical nationalism soon led to conflict with neighboring Vietnam. In 1977, after refusing a Vietnamese offer for return of its nation’s refugees, the Khmer Rouge conducted a raid into Vietnam that resulted in the destruction of several villages. This was followed by larger-scale military raids into Vietnam. In response, Vietnam sent fifty thousand troops into Democratic Kampuchea for a short military strike, and it signed a treaty of friendship with Laos. Vietnam likewise tried to get China to convince Democratic Kampuchea to forgo its aggression toward Vietnam.

After Khmer raids continued and China refused to intercede, Vietnam prepared for a full-scale invasion of Democratic Kampuchea, which came in December, 1978. Within a month, Khmer Rouge forces were defeated and Pol Pot fled to Thailand. Vietnam renamed the country the People’s Republic of Kampuchea in January, 1979, and retained control there for the next decade.

During the ensuing twenty years, Pol Pot, even in exile, would remain a player in the affairs of his native country. Although the Communist Party of Kampuchea dissolved itself in 1981, Pol Pot continued as the leader of Khmer Rouge forces. Though it suffered a major setback at the hands of Vietnam in 1984, the Khmer Rouge regrouped after Vietnam left Cambodia in 1989. Refusing to cooperate with the new coalition government, the Khmer Rouge returned en masse from Thailand and fought government forces for the next several years.

However, things began to fall apart for the Khmer Rouge by 1995. The confluence of defections and desertions, a Cambodian policy of making peace with Khmer Rouge individuals if not the organization as a whole, and infighting between leaders severely weakened the Khmer Rouge’s position.

In 1997, Pol Pot was put on trial by Khmer Rouge leadership for ordering the murder of former ally Son Sen and his family in June of that year. Found guilty, he was sentenced to life under house arrest. He died under suspicious circumstances one year later and was cremated before an autopsy could be performed.

Significance

At the time of his death, Pol Pot was a wanted man. The Khmer Rouge had agreed to turn him over to an international tribunal for war crimes. Knowing this, some suspect that Pol Pot committed suicide. Others theorize that he was killed by Khmer Rouge forces who feared what an international trial could uncover about their own culpability in the actions that occurred between 1975 and 1979. Whether or not those actions constitute genocide, it is clear that Pol Pot led a government that killed at least one-fifth of the country’s population. As such, he ranks as one of the most despised and notorious figures of the twentieth century.

As easy as it may be to lay blame solely with Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge followers, others likewise bear responsibility for the nightmare that befell Democratic Kampuchea during the late 1970’s. First, the brutal policies of the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution became a model for Pol Pot’s own deviant variation of an agrarian utopia. Second, the policies of both the North Vietnamese and the United States during the Vietnam War destabilized Cambodia, leading to the downfall of two governments that preceded the seizure of power by the Khmer Rouge. Finally, the global community ignored reports of the violence perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, which was evident years before the 1975 takeover by the communists and Pol Pot.

Bibliography

Chandler, David. A History of Cambodia. 3d ed. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000. A well-researched and broad history of Cambodia. The author does a good job of placing the conflict in the context of Cambodian history and development.

Hinton, Alexander Laban, and Robert Jay Lifton. Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. A well-researched study on the cultural and ideological origins of the Cambodian genocide.

Power, Samantha. A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. New York: HarperPerennial, 2002. This Pulitzer Prize-winning book examines U.S. foreign policy toward those countries where genocide or mass murder has occurred, including Cambodia.

Shawcross, William. Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia. New York: Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, 1979. This text offers a devastating indictment of U.S. policy during the Vietnam War and how it adversely affected the sovereignty of Cambodia.

Short, Philip. Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare. New York: Henry Holt, 2004. The authoritative biography of the Khmer Rouge leader, which furnishes a comprehensive review and analysis of Pol Pot’s life and legacy.

Tucker, Spencer C., ed. The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Offers entries on Pol Pot, Norodom Sihanouk, and other Cambodian leaders.