History

Khmer Rouge

ខ្មែរក្រហម

The Khmer Rouge (ខ្មែរក្រហម) was a communist movement that ruled Cambodia from April 1975 to January 1979.[1][2] The state it created was called Democratic Kampuchea.[3]

In under four years its rule emptied the cities, did away with money, schools and religion, and left a large share of the people dead.[3][4] After its fall, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians fled the country, and many settled abroad.[5][6]

Name and rise to power

In the 1960s King Norodom Sihanouk coined "Khmer Rouge" for the communists who opposed him. The party's own name was the Communist Party of Kampuchea.[3] It did not make its existence public until 1977, and its leaders called themselves "Angkar Padevat".[3]

The movement fought a civil war from 1970 and slowly took more of the countryside. Its forces captured Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975.[1][7] Its military leader, Pol Pot, became prime minister.[1][4]

Democratic Kampuchea (1975 to 1979)

Within days of taking Phnom Penh, the new rulers sent the people of the capital and other towns into the countryside to farm. About two million people were moved in this first phase.[3][8] Thousands died on these marches, from exhaustion, illness and hunger, or were shot by soldiers.[7][8]

The regime declared a "Year Zero" and set out to build a rural society with no classes.[7][3] It abolished money, markets, private property and ordinary schooling. Schools, pagodas, mosques and churches were closed or put to other uses, among them prisons.[3][4]

People died of execution, starvation, disease and overwork.[3][9] Many educated and skilled Cambodians were killed.[1][9]

One of the regime's prisons was S-21, at Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh. Figures for the number held there differ. The tribunal's appeals court found that at least 12,272 people died at S-21.[10] The Documentation Center of Cambodia gives perhaps 14,000 prisoners, and Britannica about 20,000. Both say that about 12 came out alive.[3][7]

The Documentation Center of Cambodia has mapped the regime's sites across the country. Its count is 19,733 mass grave pits, 196 prisons and 81 memorials built by survivors.[11]

The death toll

Estimates of the number who died under Khmer Rouge rule differ.[12] Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program puts it at about 1.7 million, 21 percent of the population.[13][14] The Documentation Center of Cambodia gives nearly two million.[3] Britannica's range runs from 1.5 million to three million deaths, between a fifth and a quarter of all Cambodians.[7] A 2015 study by the demographer Patrick Heuveline found between 1.2 million and 2.8 million excess deaths, with a median of 1.9 million.[12]

Loss to Khmer culture

The regime outlawed Buddhism and all other religion.[7][15] The tribunal's indictment states that pagodas were destroyed and that almost all monks and nuns were made to leave the order.[15] Tricycle, a Buddhist magazine, writes that two thirds of the country's Wats were destroyed and that others became pigsties or prisons.[16] How many monks were killed is hard to count.[17] The historian Ian Harris, in a study published by the Documentation Center of Cambodia, found no policy to kill monks as a group.[18]

Artists were hit hard. Cambodian Living Arts, which was set up to pass on the skills of surviving masters, says that 90 percent of the country's artists did not survive the regime.[19] The scholar Sam-Ang Sam gives the same share for performers and records that of nine master musicians at the Faculty of Choreographic Arts before 1975, three survived.[20]

Fall and the refugee years

Vietnamese forces took Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979, and ended the regime.[3][1] The Khmer Rouge leaders withdrew to bases near and across the Thai border and fought on as guerrillas.[3][1] The movement lasted until 1999, by which time all its leaders had gone over to the government, been arrested or died.[3] Pol Pot died on April 15, 1998.[4][21]

Large numbers of Cambodians crossed into Thailand.[7][6] A Library of Congress study counts about 630,000 who left the country between 1979 and 1981. By late 1987 about 208,000 had resettled in other countries, among them 136,000 in the United States, 32,000 in France and 13,000 each in Australia and Canada.[5] The Public Broadcasting Service gives almost 150,000 Cambodian arrivals in the United States between 1979 and 1989.[6]

Memory and justice

A long three-story concrete building with open walkways and shuttered windows, seen across a lawn with young trees and palms under a grey sky.
A building of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, 2018. Photo: Christophe95, CC BY-SA 4.0

Yale's Cambodian Genocide Program set up the Documentation Center of Cambodia in Phnom Penh in 1995. Two years later it had become an independent research institute.[14] In 2025 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization added three sites of the period to its World Heritage List as the Cambodian Memorial Sites. They are the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in the former S-21 prison, the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center at S-21's execution site, and the former M-13 prison.[22]

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia were set up under an agreement between the Cambodian government and the United Nations, signed on June 6, 2003.[23][24] The court heard crimes committed between April 17, 1975, and January 6, 1979, and its investigations and trials ran from 2006 to 2022.[24]

Its first case was against Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, who ran S-21. The trial chamber gave him 35 years on July 26, 2010, and on February 3, 2012, the appeals court raised the sentence to life.[10][24] He died in 2020 while serving it.[25]

Nuon Chea had been the party's deputy secretary, and Khieu Samphan the president of Democratic Kampuchea's State Presidium.[26] On August 7, 2014, the court sentenced both to life in prison for crimes against humanity.[8][27] On November 16, 2018, it convicted both of genocide of the Vietnamese, and Nuon Chea also of genocide of the Cham.[25][9] Nuon Chea died in 2019.[26][21] On September 22, 2022, in the court's final judgment, the appeals court upheld Khieu Samphan's conviction and life sentence.[25][21]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Khmer Rouge (undated)
  2. ↑ Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, Case 002/02 (undated; in Khmer)
  3. ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 3.11 3.12 Documentation Center of Cambodia, Khamboly Dy, A History of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979) (2007)
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Pol Pot (undated)
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Library of Congress, Federal Research Division, Cambodia: Migration and Refugees (data as of December 1987)
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 PBS FRONTLINE/WORLD, Cambodia: Pol Pot's Shadow, Chronicle of Survival, 1980-1991 (undated)
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Cambodian genocide (undated)
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 UN News, UN-backed tribunal sentences Khmer Rouge leaders to life in prison (August 7, 2014)
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Smithsonian Magazine, Brigit Katz, Two Former Leaders of the Khmer Rouge Found Guilty of Genocide (November 16, 2018)
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 UN News, UN-backed court sentences key Khmer Rouge figure to life in prison on appeal (February 3, 2012)
  11. ↑ Documentation Center of Cambodia, Mapping Project (undated)
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Patrick Heuveline, The Boundaries of Genocide: Quantifying the Uncertainty of the Death Toll During the Pol Pot Regime in Cambodia, Population Studies 69(2) (2015)
  13. ↑ Yale University, Genocide Studies Program, Case Studies: Cambodia (undated)
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Yale News, Bearing Witness: Cambodian Genocide Program Releases Key Data (January 27, 1997)
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Phnom Penh Post, Buddhist monks disrobed to 'survive' Khmer Rouge (undated)
  16. ↑ Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Silence in the Pagoda (undated)
  17. ↑ Carleton College, Religions in Minnesota, Theravada Buddhism in Cambodia: Conflict and Change in the 20th Century (undated)
  18. ↑ Documentation Center of Cambodia, Buddhism under Pol Pot (Ian Harris, 2007)
  19. ↑ Cambodian Living Arts, Arn Chorn-Pond (undated)
  20. ↑ Cultural Survival Quarterly, Sam-Ang Sam, Preserving a Cultural Tradition: Ten Years After the Khmer Rouge (undated)
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 21.2 UN News, Cambodia: UN-backed tribunal ends with conviction upheld for last living Khmer Rouge leader (September 22, 2022)
  22. ↑ UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Cambodian Memorial Sites (inscribed 2025)
  23. ↑ Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, About the ECCC (undated)
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 24.2 Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, Case 001 (undated)
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 25.2 Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, Court Report 2018-2022 (2022)
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, Case 002/02 (undated)
  27. ↑ Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, Case 002/01 (undated)


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This page was last edited on 9 October 2026, at 10:10.