The Cambodian Genocide was the murder of between 1,500,000 and 3,000,000 Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge (the popular name for the Communist Party of Kampuchea [CPK]), between 1975 and 1979.
The Khmer Rouge came to power following a period of civil war and unrest in Cambodia and in the midst of Cold War tensions between America, the Soviet Union and Communist China. The Khmer Rouge were led by Pol Pot and held radical totalitarian beliefs. They wanted to create a classless, rural, agricultural society where personal property, currency, religion and individuality did not exist.
The Khmer Rouge began to implement this vision immediately after taking power on 17 April 1975. Within hours, the new regime had expelled the capital city’s, Phnom Penh, two million residents to the countryside at gunpoint to begin agricultural labour.
People associated in any significant way with the previous government, religion, or education, as well as members of ethnic cleansing , were targeted for persecution, imprisonment, torture and murder. The Khmer Rouge created 189 prisons, which were de facto execution centres. The most notorious of these prisons/execution centres was named ‘S-21’, and of the approximately 14,000-17,000 prisoners held there by the Khmer Rouge, just 12 are known to have survived.
Outside of the prisons, many hundreds of thousands of people were also executed on the ‘Killing Fields’ – areas of farmland where people were killed by a blow to the back of the head before being dumped into mass graves.
Some Cambodians were also exploited as forced labourers by the regime and died as a result of over-work and malnutrition.
Despite the Khmer Rouge’s focus on production through mass forced labour, they were ineffective rulers and their economic mismanagement caused significant shortages of food and medicine. This mismanagement, combined with the regime’s murder of many of its doctors and medical staff, meant that hundreds of thousands of Cambodians began to die from hunger caused by the famine and treatable diseases such as malaria .
Later, as the economic situation worsened and paranoia increased, the Khmer Rouge also began to execute members of its own party for failing to achieve the unrealistic agricultural aims or for being supposed foreign spies.
After almost four years in power, in December 1978, in response to the Khmer Rouge’s invasions of the previous year, Vietnam successfully invaded Cambodia and, on 7 January 1979, overthrew the Khmer Rouge by entering the largely deserted capital of Phnom Penh.
