Early history The history of the communist movement in Cambodia can be divided into six phases, namely the emergence before
World War II of the
Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), whose members were almost exclusively Vietnamese; the 10-year struggle for independence from the French, when a separate Cambodian communist party, the
Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP), was established under Vietnamese auspices; the period following the Second Party Congress of the KPRP in 1960, when Saloth Sar gained control of its apparatus; the revolutionary struggle from the initiation of the Khmer Rouge insurgency in 1967–1968 to the fall of the Lon Nol government in April 1975; the Democratic Kampuchea regime from April 1975 to January 1979; and the period following the Third Party Congress of the KPRP in January 1979, when
Hanoi effectively assumed control over Cambodia's government and communist party. In 1930,
Ho Chi Minh founded the Communist Party of Vietnam by unifying three smaller communist movements that had emerged in northern, central and southern Vietnam during the late 1920s. The party was renamed the Indochinese Communist Party, ostensibly so it could include revolutionaries from Cambodia and Laos. Almost without exception, all of the earliest party members were Vietnamese. By the end of World War II, a handful of Cambodians had joined its ranks, but their influence on the Indochinese communist movement as well as their influence on developments within Cambodia was negligible.
Viet Minh units occasionally made forays into Cambodian bases during their war against the French and in conjunction with the leftist government that ruled Thailand until 1947. The Viet Minh encouraged the formation of armed, left-wing
Khmer Issarak bands. On 17 April 1950, the first nationwide congress of the Khmer Issarak groups convened, and the
United Issarak Front was established. Its leader was
Son Ngoc Minh, and a third of its leadership consisted of members of the ICP. According to the historian David P. Chandler, the leftist Issarak groups aided by the Viet Minh occupied a sixth of Cambodia's territory by 1952, and on the eve of the
Geneva Conference in 1954, they controlled as much as one half of the country. Members of the Pracheachon were subject to harassment and arrests because the party remained outside Sihanouk's political organization,
Sangkum. Government attacks prevented it from participating in the
1962 election and drove it underground. Sihanouk habitually labelled local leftists the Khmer Rouge, a term that later came to signify the party and the state headed by Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan and their associates. Advocates of this line hoped that the prince could be persuaded to distance himself from the right-wing and to adopt leftist policies. The other line, supported for the most part by rural cadres who were familiar with the harsh realities of the countryside, advocated an immediate struggle to overthrow the "
feudalist" Sihanouk.
Paris student group During the 1950s, Khmer students in
Paris organized their own communist movement which had little, if any, connection to the hard-pressed party in their homeland. From their ranks came the men and women who returned home and took command of the party apparatus during the 1960s, led an effective insurgency against Lon Nol from 1968 until 1975 and established the regime of Democratic Kampuchea. Pol Pot, who rose to the leadership of the communist movement in the 1960s, attended a technical high school in the capital and then went to Paris in 1949 to study radio electronics (other sources say he attended a school for fax machines and also studied civil engineering). Described by one source as a "determined, rather plodding organizer", Pol Pot failed to obtain a degree, but according to
Jesuit priest Father François Ponchaud he acquired a taste for the classics of
French literature as well as an interest in the writings of Karl Marx. Another member of the Paris student group was Ieng Sary, a Chinese-Khmer from South Vietnam. He attended the elite
Lycée Sisowath in
Phnom Penh before beginning courses in commerce and politics at the Paris Institute of Political Science (more widely known as
Sciences Po) in France. Khieu Samphan specialized in economics and politics during his time in Paris.
Hou Yuon studied economics and law, Son Sen studied education and literature, and
Hu Nim studied law. Two members of the group, Khieu Samphan and Hou Yuon, earned doctorates from the
University of Paris while Hu Nim obtained his degree from the
University of Phnom Penh in 1965. Most came from landowner or civil servant families. Pol Pot and Hou Yuon may have been related to the royal family as an older sister of Pol Pot had been a concubine at the court of King
Monivong. Pol Pot and Ieng Sary married
Khieu Ponnary and Khieu Thirith, also known as
Ieng Thirith, purportedly relatives of Khieu Samphan. These two well-educated women also played a central role in the regime of Democratic Kampuchea. At some time between 1949 and 1951, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary joined the French Communist Party. In 1951, the two men went to
East Berlin to participate in a youth festival. This experience is considered to have been a turning point in their ideological development. Meeting with Khmers who were fighting with the Viet Minh (but subsequently judged them to be too subservient to the Vietnamese), they became convinced that only a tightly disciplined party organization and a readiness for armed struggle could achieve revolution. They transformed the Khmer Students Association (KSA), to which most of the 200 or so Khmer students in Paris belonged, into an organization for nationalist and leftist ideas. Inside the KSA and its successor organizations, there was a secret organization known as the
Cercle Marxiste (Marxist circle). The organization was composed of cells of three to six members with most members knowing nothing about the overall structure of the organization. In 1952, Pol Pot, Hou Yuon, Ieng Sary and other leftists gained notoriety by sending an open letter to Sihanouk calling him the "strangler of infant democracy". A year later, the French authorities closed down the KSA, but Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphan helped to establish in 1956 a new group, the Khmer Students Union. Inside, the group was still run by the
Cercle Marxiste. His comrades Ieng Sary and Hou Yuon became teachers at a new private high school, the Lycée Kambuboth, which Hou Yuon helped to establish. Khieu Samphan returned from Paris in 1959, taught as a member of the law faculty of the University of Phnom Penh, and started a left-wing French-language publication, ''L'Observateur''. The paper soon acquired a reputation in Phnom Penh's small academic circle. The following year, the government closed the paper, and Sihanouk's police publicly humiliated Samphan by beating, undressing and photographing him in public; as Shawcross notes, "not the sort of humiliation that men forgive or forget". Yet the experience did not prevent Samphan from advocating cooperation with Sihanouk in order to promote a united front against United States activities in South Vietnam. Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim were forced to "work through the system" by joining the Sangkum and by accepting posts in the prince's government. From November 1965 to February 1966, Pol Pot received training from high-ranking CCP officials such as
Chen Boda and
Zhang Chunqiao, on topics such as the
communist revolution in China,
class conflicts, and
Communist International. Pol Pot was particularly impressed by the lecture on political purge by
Kang Sheng. In September 1966, the WPK changed its name to the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). Although thoroughly aware of the weakness of Lon Nol's forces and loath to commit American military force to the new conflict in any form other than air power, the
Nixon administration supported the newly proclaimed Khmer Republic. On 29 March 1970, the North Vietnamese launched an offensive against the Cambodian army. Documents uncovered from the Soviet Union archives revealed that the invasion was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge following negotiations with Nuon Chea. A force of North Vietnamese quickly overran large parts of eastern Cambodia reaching to within of Phnom Penh before being pushed back. By June, three months after the removal of Sihanouk, they had swept government forces from the entire northeastern third of the country. After defeating those forces, the North Vietnamese turned the newly won territories over to the local insurgents. The Khmer Rouge also established "liberated" areas in the south and the southwestern parts of the country, where they operated independently of the North Vietnamese. After Sihanouk showed his support for the Khmer Rouge by visiting them in the field, their ranks swelled from 6,000 to 50,000 fighters. Many of the new recruits for the Khmer Rouge were apolitical peasants who fought in support of the king, not for communism, of which they had little understanding. Sihanouk's popular support in rural Cambodia allowed the Khmer Rouge to extend its power and influence to the point that by 1973 it exercised
de facto control over the majority of Cambodian territory, although only a minority of its population. By 1975, with the Lon Nol government running out of ammunition, it was clear that it was only a matter of time before the government would collapse. On 17 April 1975, there was the
Fall of Phnom Penh, as the Khmer Rouge captured the capital. During the civil war, unparalleled atrocities were executed on both sides.
Foreign involvement Before 1975 The relationship between the massive
carpet bombing of Cambodia by the United States and the growth of the Khmer Rouge, in terms of recruitment and popular support, has been a matter of interest to historians. Some scholars, including
Michael Ignatieff,
Adam Jones and
Greg Grandin, have cited the United States intervention and bombing campaign (spanning 1965–1973) as a significant factor which led to increased support for the Khmer Rouge among the Cambodian peasantry. According to Ben Kiernan, the Khmer Rouge "would not have won power without U.S. economic and military destabilization of Cambodia.... It used the bombing's devastation and massacre of civilians as recruitment
propaganda and as an excuse for its brutal, radical policies and its purge of moderate communists and Sihanoukists."
Peter Rodman and
Michael Lind claim that the United States intervention saved the Lon Nol regime from collapse in 1970 and 1973. Craig Etcheson acknowledged that U.S. intervention increased recruitment for the Khmer Rouge but disputed that it was a primary cause of the Khmer Rouge victory.
William Shawcross writes that the United States bombing and ground incursion plunged Cambodia into the chaos that Sihanouk had worked for years to avoid. In 1970 alone, the Chinese reportedly gave 400 tons of military aid to the
National United Front of Kampuchea formed by Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge. It is estimated that at least 90% of the foreign aid to Khmer Rouge came from China, with 1975 alone seeing
US$1 billion in interest-free economic and military aid and US$20 million gift, which was "the biggest aid ever given to any one country by China". Democratic Kampuchea was overthrown by the
Vietnamese army in January 1979, and the Khmer Rouge fled to
Thailand. However, to counter the power of the Soviet Union and Vietnam, a group of countries—including China, the United States, Thailand, and some other Western nations—supported the Khmer Rouge–dominated
Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea in retaining Cambodia's seat in the United Nations, which it held until 1993, after the
Cold War had ended.
Regime Leadership The governing structure of Democratic Kampuchea was split between the state presidium headed by Khieu Samphan, the cabinet headed by Pol Pot (who was also Democratic Kampuchea's
prime minister) and the party's own Politburo and Central Committee. All were complicated by a number of political factions which existed in 1975. The leadership of the Party Centre, the faction which was headed by Pol Pot, remained largely unchanged from the early 1960s to the mid-1990s. Its leaders were mostly from middle-class families and had been educated at French universities. The second significant faction was made up of men who had been active in the pre-1960 party and had stronger links to Vietnam as a result; government documents show that there were several major shifts in power between factions during the period in which the regime was in control. A reorganisation that occurred in September 1976, during which Pol Pot was demoted in the state presidium, was later presented as an attempted pro-Vietnamese coup by the Party Centre.
Life under Khmer Rouge rule The Khmer Rouge carried out a radical program that included isolating the country from all foreign influences, closing schools, hospitals and some factories, abolishing banking, finance and currency, and collectivising agriculture. Khmer Rouge theorists, who developed the ideas of Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphan, believed that an initial period of self-imposed economic isolation and national self-sufficiency would stimulate the rebirth of the crafts as well as the rebirth of the country's latent industrial capability. Military officers and those occupying elite professional roles were usually sent for reeducation, which in practice meant immediate execution or confinement in a labour camp. Due to the widespread and constant nature of state violence, the regime's autarkic and economically disruptive industrial policies, and especially after the outbreak of
war with Vietnam in 1978, even
bullets would fall into scarcity. As a result, executions were often carried out using crude implements such as a
hoes,
machetes, and
pickaxes. Unwilling to import Western medicines, the regime turned to traditional medicine instead and placed medical care in the hands of cadres who were only given rudimentary training. The famine, forced labour and lack of access to appropriate services led to a high number of deaths. After 1976, the regime reinstated discussion of export in the period after the disastrous effects of its planning began to become apparent.
Family relations contain thousands of photos taken by the Khmer Rouge of their victims. The regulations made by the Angkar (អង្គការ, The Organisation, which was the ruling body) also had effects on the traditional Cambodian family unit. The regime was primarily interested in increasing the young population and one of the strictest regulations prohibited
sex outside marriage which was punishable by execution. As well as reflecting the Khmer Rouge obsession with production and reproduction, such marriages were designed to increase people's dependency on the regime by undermining existing family and other loyalties. Education came to a "virtual standstill" in Democratic Kampuchea. while Chinese and Vietnamese–language borrowings were discouraged. People were told to "forge" (លត់ដំ;
lot dam) a new revolutionary character, that they were the "instruments" (ឧបករណ៍;
opokar) of the ruling body known as Angkar (អង្គការ, The Organisation) and that nostalgia for pre-revolutionary times (ឈឺសតិអារម្មណ៍;
chheu satek arom, or "memory sickness") could result in execution.
Crimes against humanity Acting through the
Santebal, the Khmer Rouge arrested, tortured and eventually executed anyone who was suspected of belonging to several categories of supposed enemies: According to Ben Kiernan, "all but seven of the twenty thousand Tuol Sleng prisoners" were executed. On 7 August 2014, when sentencing two former Khmer Rouge leaders to life imprisonment, Cambodian judge Nil Nonn said there was evidence of "a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Cambodia". He said the leaders, Nuon Chea, the regime's chief ideologue and former deputy to late leader Pol Pot and Khieu Samphan, the former head of state, together in a "
joint criminal enterprise" were involved in murder, extermination, political persecution and other inhumane acts related to the mass eviction of city-dwellers, and executions of enemy soldiers. In November 2018, the trial convicted Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan of crimes against humanity and genocide against the Vietnamese, while Nuon Chea was also found guilty of genocide relating to the Chams.
Number of deaths According to a 2001 academic source, the most widely accepted estimates of excess deaths under the Khmer Rouge range from 1.5 million to 2 million, although figures as low as 1 million and as high as 3 million have been cited; conventionally accepted estimates of executions range from 500,000 to 1 million, "a third to one half of excess mortality during the period". A 2013 academic source (citing research from 2009) indicates that execution may have accounted for as much as 60% of the total, with 23,745 mass graves containing approximately 1.3 million suspected victims of execution. Historian Ben Kiernan estimates that 1.671 million to 1.871 million Cambodians died as a result of Khmer Rouge policy, or between 21% and 24% of Cambodia's 1975 population. A study by Polish demographer Marek Sliwinski calculated nearly 2 million unnatural deaths under the Khmer Rouge out of a 1975 Cambodian population of 7.8 million; 33.5% of Cambodian men died under the Khmer Rouge compared to 15.7% of Cambodian women. Researcher Craig Etcheson of the
Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) suggests that the death toll was between 2 million and 2.5 million, with a "most likely" figure of 2.2 million. After five years of researching mass grave sites, he estimated that they contained 1.38 million suspected victims of execution. Although considerably higher than earlier and more widely accepted estimates of Khmer Rouge executions, Etcheson argues that these numbers are plausible, given the nature of the mass grave and DC-Cam's methods, which are more likely to produce an under-count of bodies rather than an over-estimate.
Internal power struggles and purges Hou Yuon was one of the first senior leaders to be purged. The Khmer Rouge originally reported that he had been killed in the final battles for Phnom Penh, but he was apparently executed in late 1975 or early 1976.
only two survived the massacre. These Khmer Rouge forces were repelled by the Vietnamese. After several years of border conflict and after a flood of refugees fled from Kampuchea, relations between Kampuchea and Vietnam collapsed by December 1978. On 25 December 1978, the Vietnamese armed forces along with the
Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation, an organization founded by Heng Samrin that included many dissatisfied former Khmer Rouge members, These included
Phnom Malai, the mountainous areas near
Pailin in the
Cardamom Mountains and
Anlong Veng in the
Dângrêk Mountains.
Place in the United Nations Despite its deposal, the Khmer Rouge retained its United Nations seat, which was occupied by
Thiounn Prasith, an old companion of Pol Pot and
Ieng Sary from their student days in Paris and one of the 21 attendees at the 1960 KPRP Second Congress. The seat was retained under the name Democratic Kampuchea until 1982 and then it was retained under the name Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea. Western governments voted in favor of the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea retaining Cambodia's seat in the organization over the newly installed Vietnamese-backed People's Republic of Kampuchea, even though it included the Khmer Rouge. In 1988,
Margaret Thatcher stated: "So, you'll find that the more reasonable ones of the Khmer Rouge will have to play some part in the future government, but only a minority part. I share your utter horror that these terrible things went on in Kampuchea". On the contrary,
Sweden changed its vote in the
United Nations and it withdrew its support for the Khmer Rouge after many Swedish citizens wrote letters to their elected representatives in which they demanded a policy change towards Pol Pot's regime. The origin of the international
proxy war between the US and the
Soviet Union dates back to the origin of the Cambodian Civil War. The
Kingdom of Cambodia was supported by the United States, the Khmer Republic (that eventually took over after the removal of
Prince Sihanouk) and South Vietnam. The other side, the National United Front of Kampuchea, was supported by the Khmer Rouge, North Vietnam, China and the Soviet Union. Cambodia became an instrument for the superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The measures that the US employed in Cambodia were seen as preventative acts which were supposed to stop the communists. These preventative acts included the deployment of military troops and the establishment of other institutions like the
UNTAC.
Insurgency and surrender Vietnam's victory was supported by the Soviet Union and had significant ramifications for the region. The People's Republic of China launched a
punitive invasion of northern Vietnam but then retreated, with both sides claiming victory. China, the United States and the
ASEAN countries sponsored the creation and the military operations of a Cambodian
government in exile, known as the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, which included the Khmer Rouge, the republican
Khmer People's National Liberation Front and the royalist
Funcinpec Party. In an attempt to broaden its support base, the Khmer Rouge formed the
Patriotic and Democratic Front of the Great National Union of Kampuchea in 1979. In 1981, the Khmer Rouge went so far as to officially renounce communism Pol Pot relinquished the Khmer Rouge leadership to Khieu Samphan in 1985; however, he continued to be the driving force behind the Khmer Rouge insurgency, giving speeches to his followers. Journalist
Nate Thayer, who spent some time with the Khmer Rouge during that period, commented that despite the international community's near-universal condemnation of the Khmer Rouge's brutal rule, a considerable number of Cambodians in Khmer Rouge–controlled areas seemed genuinely to support Pol Pot. This resulted in bloody factional fighting among the Khmer Rouge leaders, ultimately leading to Pol Pot's trial and imprisonment by the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot died in April 1998. On 29 December 1998, leaders of the Khmer Rouge apologised for the 1970s genocide. By 1998, the Khmer Rouge was almost wiped out and it dissolved its government. Its last guerrillas surrendered to the Cambodian government on 9 February 1999, ending the remnants of communism in Cambodia. As a result, the government incorporated the last remnants of the Khmer Rouge into Cambodian army on 12 February. == Legacy ==