The Bloodshed Caused by the Khmer Rouge
Cambodia is such a beautiful country, like all the countries we visited during the whirlwind tour. Like all the countries we visited, it has a tragic history, more so in the past few generations. What makes history heavy and sometimes hard to delve into is when you know what’s spiralling, the mistakes that were made, at least on an intellectual level, and then learning the human cost. Experiencing the places where they happened. Nothing can make up for the suffering, but more people should know so we don’t have to live through it ourselves, or in the future.
*Information provided by our local tour guide, Ney. Edited for clarity and word clarification, but not the sentiment.
How it Started
The future leader, Pol Pot, was born in 1925 in a farming family. In 1940, he moved to the capital to live with his sister. At the time, it brought him to the city where he could have a good education before graduating with good grades and getting a scholarship to study in Paris in 1949. The first country that got him involved in socialism was France. There, he learned about companies affected by countries’ ideologies. After three years in chemistry, he joined the communist group in 1951. He always spent more time with the group than studying and ended up leaving France without graduating. After three more years, in 1954, Pol Pot spent 2 years in Vietnam learning more about communism and in 1955 he returned to Phnom Penh, Cambodia and started working as a teacher. While working as a teacher, he remained a central member of Cambodia's Marxist–Leninist movement and taught the class “while brainwashing the students”, baking communism into the lessons. In 1959, he helped formalise the movement into the Kampuchean Labour Party, which was later renamed the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). As a party leader, many students and some of the teachers from their school got to meet him, but it was still small. Over time, the group grew, and Pol Pot became the leader in 1963.
The only thing that was discussed was how positive the party was. The poorer people would say that they have nothing to lose most important thing, their lives and family. The belief was that work in the party was good, and many people joined the revolution so that hopefully they would also be doing the right thing. The poor families are the main backbone of the party’s power. Until 1967, the group had not grown large enough to be a concern of the government, but then they became known to be the enemies of the state. If the government found out anybody supported and called for ideas, they would have been arrested, so people continued to hide. With help from the United States military in 1970, Pol Pot led the launch of a successful coup to overthrow the royal family’s power. Creating the new nation from the palace to the countryside.
The statue of a king in the city center was to thank him for independence from the French; he was regarded as a hero after 90 years under French colonialism, but what did they do after that? Back 1955, after the French left, Cambodia had a new king and Prime Minister similar to the U.K. The king decided that he didn’t want to be the king anymore because the power was going to be under that of the Prime Minister. Shortly after, the Vietnam War happened to Cambodia as well. They were supposed to be neutral, but Pol Pot helped in North Vietnam by allowing them to pass through Cambodia, going south to attack the southern armies on two fronts. So when Americans learned about it in the late 1960s, the biggest problem with America. They targeted different parts of the VC and PAVN infrastructure, which included the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos and Cambodia. They didn’t just bomb to destroy the whole trail, but also launched Agent Orange, napalm, and “Rainbow Herbicides” to destroy forests and harm anyone who happened to be there, including killing hundreds or thousands of innocent people. About 25,000 people died from American B-52 bombs. The CIA convened and started a coup against the Prime Minister. And that was when the general betrayed him with CIA support, and the new party took over the country in 1970. The new government, called the Kamaya Republic, took complete control.
Over the next five years, the Khmer Rouge gained more and more power internally. While the ideology is primed to be against communists, the problem is that they still did not like the Americas (fair), and now they had a government at least partially controlled by America. So they fought again against the new government because they didn't want American soldiers to control Cambodia. After the war in Vietnam ended and the armies left from 1973 to 1975, America withdrew their soldiers from Cambodia as well. The people in charge depended on the American military to fight communism, and now they were left alone. Without that support, the Khmer Rouge took over the country completely.
S-21
This is when the worst happens. Imagine the actual 1984. The government, of course run by Pol Pot, ruled that "agriculture is key both to nation-building and to national defence" (Short 2004: 288). Shortly after the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh in 1975 they started killing all members of the previous government that didn’t flee, executing between 700 and 800 senior government, military, and police figures (Short 2004: 271). Very soon after, they called an evacuation, claiming that the US was going to bomb the city and claimed everyone could return after three days. That was a lie and while they were in power, no one was allowed back. People were forced to work day in and day out in the agricultural field and many men were forced to work in the mining and quarry industries while children (aged 5-14) were forced to work in the timber industry or the agricultural sector ("2013 Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor -Cambodia-"). They were barely paid for all their work and could be punished for not working hard enough.
Meanwhile, in the emptied city schools, apartment complexes, and other government buildings were converted into political prisons. The one the tour group visited was the infamous S-21, which stands as a museum and memorial for the thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people who were killed in all of the prisons.
One of the buildings was for housing the bigger names in government, people with more power. They had full classrooms (in their previous functions) for each prisoner with a single metal bed frame with restraining chains and a single bucket for their excrement. In other buildings, the classrooms were sectioned off with brick blocks into barely closet-sized “rooms” with claims and the quintessential bucket for normal people. Torture happened every day to collect information; if nothing was forthcoming, they would be starved and beaten until they died. If any names were provided, not only would those people be rounded up and thrown in prison as well, but also their entire family. Even small children were not spared, although generally they wouldn’t torture the children for information they would just murder them, either where they found them or in any one of dozens (or hundreds of killing fields - they still haven’t found them all, but people, even scholars have just stopped looking). When the Khmer army would come for people, it wasn’t always violent or even covert. Many times, people were told that they were being taken to see the leader and didn’t realise what was actually happening to them until they were locked in a brick cell after the entrance photo was taken. That’s why some of the people are smiling in their ‘mugshots’.
Walking through the rooms, you could almost smell the remnants of decay and death. Upon losing the final overthrow in 1998, the remaining prisoners were all brutally murdered. Still chained to the bed frames, their heads were bashed in, the brown bloodstains are still stained the floors, and the rooms now have large photographs which were taken when the opposing military took down the Khmer Rouge (with the most disturbing parts mostly obscured by opaque paper/plastic).
**Photos below are of the rooms and cells, photos of the people who were killed, and many of their skulls. It may be upsetting for readers, so viewer discretion is advised. I sure felt it while I was walking through the buildings. All photos were taken by me (Whitehouse February 2025).
The Killing Fields
As mentioned, there were dozens, if not at least a hundred killing fields across the countryside. Hundreds of thousands or even millions of innocent people were sent to these fields. So often, even people who ended up giving in to torture and giving names of others were probably told that they’d be freed and taken home, but were just taken to the fields. The soldiers who worked there generally would have taken a sick pleasure in the abuse they got to inflict, because there are mountains of evidence in the bone forensics that prove the extended brutal treatment of the victims. Women and their children were taken there together; they would be ripped apart from each other, the child would be murdered in front of their mothers, and then the mothers would be murdered. But the specifics were monstrous. There is a specific tree (Figure 31) where babies and toddlers were killed by holding their feet and bashing their heads against the tree for longer than would have killed them before being dumped in a pit. The bodies of mothers and women in general were found without clothes, implying that they were forced to strip and what that further implies before being murdered.
There are also many male bodies, they killed anyone they could. Basically, everywhere archaeologists have excavated at this site, they have found thousands of bones. Like the killing fields in general, they have slowed down on active excavations at the site. Far too many bodies to keep track of.
In 1976, the now North-controlled Vietnam was under scrutiny from Pol Pot because he believed that Vietnam would try to expand and try to take over Cambodia. The “Democratic Kampuchea” army had multiple border clashes with Vietnam, and in 1977, they invaded multiple villages in Vietnam, killing several hundred (Chandler 1992, 141; Short 2004, 372 & 375). Of course, Vietnam retaliated, and it was an all-out war. Vietnam sent in 50,000 troops that reached 12. miles into Cambodia before having to retreat, and general fighting continued. As this was right during and just after the US lost to the North Vietnamese, they sided with the Khmer Rouge, especially because they were non-Marxist and called themselves “Democratic”. China was also called upon for help, and they launched an invasion of North Vietnam to draw troops away from Cambodia, but it didn’t work, and the Vietnamese army took over Phnom Penh in 1978-1979. For a while, people were happy with the Khmer Rouge leaders evacuating further and further away, soon making it into Thailand. In late 1979, the United Nations General Assembly decided to send aid to the Khmer Rouge and its army, which made Pol Pot lax several of the restrictions on personal freedoms that the Khmer Rouge put in place in the 1980s (Short 2004, 418). Luckily, in the 1990s, the UN finally decided that the Khmer Rouge’s government was no longer recognised as a legitimate governing body within the General Assembly (Short 2004, 426). After a forced ceasefire with Vietnam (which wasn’t really followed), an election that was ignored by the loser, and with a lot more internal fighting with the anti-Khmer Rouge Cambodian army, the government was finally overturned in 1998. There were a ton more events and more nuance in the events that took place over the decades, but luckily the reign of the mass murderers was over… (?)
3 million deaths. It is so crazy. The population before this happened was around 7.8 million; that is almost half the entire population! These are the most insane things that the leaders did to their people. Pol Pot was like Stalin in how controlling and deplorable he was.
But they aren’t gone. These people are still in charge, only under a different name. The leaders that sold out their comrads were allowed to stay free and were allowed to run for office, and won. They lie to their people while keeping them out of world conflicts. According to Ney, that’s what keeps them in power. Even though the “average wage” is so incredibly low that most people don’t make enough to do much but eat but there is peace, and that’s much better than the deaths that were happening until 1998. That’s also relayed from our main tour guide, who works nonstop all season, so his family can save for the wet season months when there is no work. The only people who can save/spend money are the incredibly wealthy people at the top of the government, the old Khmer Rouge/ “Democratic” Party. And because that party is still in charge, I (perhaps paranoidly) am purposely leaving out the actual names of the guides who are talking about them this way. Especially because Ney had told us that people are still taken away late at night when everyone is asleep.
Additional Work Cited
Chandler, David P. (1992). Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot. Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford: Westview Press. ISBN 0-8133-0927-1.
Short, Philip (2004). Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare. London: John Murray. ISBN 978-0719565694.
