Pol Pot: The Man Behind the Khmer Rouge

Sure! Here’s a sanitized version of the transcript:

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Two things before we get started today. One, there are some unusual pronunciations in this one. I’m looking them up when I can; I have a laptop right here. Sometimes it doesn’t exist, and sometimes there just aren’t the pronunciations available. I’m doing my best, but feel free to let me know in the comments if you want.

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Alright, so for three years and eight months, Pol Pot ruled over Cambodia with an iron fist. The legacy he left is horrific—millions of families were torn apart, hundreds of thousands were tortured, and 1.7 million of his own people were put to death. So how did it end this way? In this week’s biography, we attempt to seek answers as we delve into the life of Pol Pot.

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Pol Pot was born Saloth Sar on January 25, 1925, in the small village of Prax above in Cambodia. He came from a peasant family, and from an early age, he found himself working long hours in the rice fields. The Saloth clan was better off than many, being landowners who worked their own rice fields. Sar’s father, Loth, owned nine hectares and employed local workers at harvest time. His mother, Sock Nem, was a devoutly religious woman who raised her children as Theravada Buddhists. Sar was the second to youngest of nine children; however, three of them died early. According to his brother, Nap, Sar was a considerate, kind, and hardworking child. During the day, he and his brothers would work in the fields and then play in the rivers and on the outskirts of the jungle. In the evening, they would gather around an open fire and sing the teachings and histories of a local religious leader.

For the vast majority of rural Cambodians, life revolved around the rice fields in the village. However, Loth wanted his sons to experience more from life, so when he was six, Sar and his older brother were sent to the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. Loth had a cousin named Meek who was employed as a consort to the king of Cambodia. The boys were sent to live with him, and no longer considered peasants, Sar and his brother were now among the privileged. As such, they were educated by the French colonial rulers in a school where the teaching was done in French. Sar studied French literature and history, filling his head with the events of the 1789 French Revolution and the reign of terror that followed under the orchestration of Maximilien Robespierre.

Sar was a quiet, introspective young man who kept his thoughts to himself. He was an average student at best, apparently being held back two years. Most of his classmates were the children of French officials or Catholic Vietnamese. Cambodia was officially a monarchy, but the king ruled in name only, with real power lying with the French colonial government. At this time, the French were tied up in a bitter struggle to hold on to their power in neighboring Vietnam, where the communist army under Ho Chi Minh was leading the struggle for independence. The Vietnamese revolutionaries had started to train small groups of Cambodians and infused them with the desire for independence from European rule. This was a movement that was spreading throughout all of Indochina at this time.

At the age of 20, Sar traveled with some friends on a pilgrimage to the famous temples at Angkor Wat. This site was a rallying point for Cambodian nationalistic pride. The trip left a lasting impression on the young man. In 1977, he stated, “If our people could build Angkor Wat, they could do anything. We must revive our national soul and pride in order to defend the nation, build the country well, and preserve it forever.” The trip marked the awakening of Sar’s political consciousness and his drive for independence.

In 1947, he passed the exams and gained entrance into the CC Sawara Secondary College in Phnom Penh. The following year, he failed the entry exam into the upper classes and had to leave the school. With his academic career seemingly at a standstill, he began to study carpentry. Then, in 1949, he won a scholarship to study at an elite engineering school in Paris.

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For the first few months, he indulged in the excesses that Parisian social life had to offer, but things changed when he came into contact with some fellow Cambodians who had views that built upon the spark of nationalist pride that had been ignited at Angkor Wat. They began meeting at Sar’s apartment, and discussions soon led to the formation of two groups: one that advocated working peacefully towards independence from the French and the other that favored armed resistance. From the very start, Sar was in the latter camp. He and his like-minded friends pointed to other countries around the world where armed overthrow was working, and they noticed they all had one thing in common: the rebels were all communists.

There was a vibrant communist movement in Paris at the time, and those in Sar’s group who worked for armed rebellion began attending meetings. Sar began studying the teachings of Karl Marx but found them difficult to understand. However, he readily grasped the writings of Joseph Stalin and became a lifelong advocate of Stalinism, with its emphasis on rapid industrialization, totalitarian government, and the cult of personality. In 1951, he joined the Communist Party, and by the time he returned to Cambodia in 1953, he had committed himself to the cause of the Cambodian Revolution.

Once back on Cambodian soil, Sar journeyed north to join Cambodian forces who had attached themselves to the Vietnamese communists in their fight for independence from the French. He now lived in the jungle as a prospective guerrilla fighter, but first, he had to do an apprenticeship. For the first few months, his duties consisted of maintaining the group’s vegetable patch. He later recalled that most everyone there was Vietnamese; there were very few Cambodians. For a long time, there was nothing for him to do. After a while, they let him work in the kitchen, but really, the Cambodians were there in name only.

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Victory was achieved by Vietnamese communists in 1953 following the French disaster at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. The French pulled out of not only Vietnam but Cambodia as well. However, the new nationalist Cambodian government was headed not by a communist but by King Norodom Sihanouk. Still, the top third of Cambodia was under the control of the Viet Minh. Sar’s other local communists urged the Viet Minh to continue pushing south until the entire country was communist, but the leadership of the Viet Minh resisted their urgings. A truce was arranged with the king.

Sar returned to Phnom Penh, where he continued to work for the political underground. His day job was as a school teacher, where he taught history. By night, however, he worked to establish contacts with every strata of society, from intellectuals to peasants, in order to garner support for the coming communist revolution. Around this time, Sar met the man who would become his closest political associate and second-in-command, Nuan Chia. Chia later recalled that Sar had an innate ability to charm people and bring them into the party, having the ability to explain things in a way that simple people could understand. Sar also met up with revolutionary students he had worked with in Paris, named King Van Sack. Together, they worked on plans for the country’s first free and open political elections.

Sar went to Van Sack’s house for breakfast every morning to work on their party’s manifesto. However, their work did not come to fruition. King Sihanouk renounced his throne and formed his own political party, the Sangkum. He threw his hat into the 1955 general election and won, becoming Cambodia’s new prime minister. Sihanouk had achieved this victory by throwing his political rivals into prison. For Sar, the sham election marked the end of any hopes he may have had for democratic means to bring about change in his country. He confirmed his commitment to violent overthrow and threw himself toward working toward that goal.

In July of 1956, Sar married a fellow communist party member named Kou Pen Re. Like Sar, she had been educated in France and was equally committed to the revolutionary cause. They soon became the power couple of the underground communist movement. Life was increasingly dangerous for the communists under the rule of Sihanouk, who had outlawed the Communist Party and given them a new name: the Khmer Rouge. The pace of imprisonments, killings, and general terror was stepped up as the prime minister sought to stamp out any and all opposition to his rule. The Communist Party secretary, a close friend of Sar, was taken to the outskirts of Phnom Penh and killed.

It was during this climate of fear that Sar accepted the leadership of the Khmer Rouge. He was constantly followed by the police, who knew who he was but not his position in the party. By 1963, things had gotten too hot for Sar in the capital city, and he left to dwell in the jungle in the north. Here, he was taken in by the Viet Minh, who had set up camps on the Vietnam-Cambodia border. They were now focused on a new enemy within their country: the United States. From their Cambodian bases, they would regularly travel into Vietnam to make lightning strikes before retreating back over the border. In response, the Americans dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs in North Cambodia in an attempt to kill the Viet Minh. In the process, they killed nearly 150,000 Cambodians over the course of the war.

The American bombing had the effect of drawing more and more people to the Khmer Rouge, and soon Sar no longer had to rely only on the Viet Minh. He now had his own guerrilla camps stretched out along the border. He had transformed himself in the mold of his hero, Joseph Stalin. He was the unquestioned party leader and now went by the name Pol Pot. He lived apart from the rank-and-file of his army and only allowed a select few the privilege of having an audience with him. Pol believed that the lifeblood of his revolutionary forces would come from the peasantry, but he also believed that they needed to be molded so their sole allegiance was to the party. New recruits would undergo an intense period of initiation, where they would be locked in a cell until they were proven to be obedient. Pol instead used a rigid disciplinary structure, which included group meetings where members had to confess their weaknesses and seek forgiveness.

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In 1970, Prime Minister Sihanouk was overthrown by a military dictatorship. He escaped to the north and sought to establish an alliance with his former enemy, the Khmer Rouge. Bolstered by the supporters of Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge numbers rose to 64,000 by the spring of 1964. Many of them were now armed with Chinese-supplied rifles. Pol Pot’s army had gradually filtered down from the border area and now controlled two-thirds of Cambodia. By December of 1974, Pol felt strong enough to make an assault on the capital. The Khmer Rouge encircled Phnom Penh and began to close in. Those who could fled the city as the streets became war zones. Within five days, the military government was overpowered, and the revolution was over. April 17, 1975, was Day Zero in the life of a new Cambodia. Cambodia was now called Kampuchea and was under the control of its Stalinist leader, Pol Pot.

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Now, let’s get back to the story of Pol Pot.

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The people of Phnom Penh enthusiastically welcomed the Khmer Rouge, but their smiles turned to alarm at the ruthlessness of Pol’s men. They shot any military forces on sight. Then Pol ordered a mass evacuation of the capital. The reason given was that the Americans were about to bomb Phnom Penh. Khmer Rouge soldiers went into the city, forcing people out of hospitals and their homes. Many died in the streets in the melee that followed. The reality was that there was no threat of an American air raid. Pol Pot simply wanted to get the people out of the way so that he could concentrate on rebuilding his new society. He told his aides that they must use extreme violence in order to build a socialist system from the ground up.

The two million people who were forced out of Phnom Penh had to pass through Khmer Rouge checkpoints on the outskirts of the city. There, they were assigned to districts for re-education as field laborers. The policy of equality was strictly enforced, with any possessions that set city folk apart from the peasantry being taken from them. Khmer Rouge soldiers went through the now-deserted capital and destroyed any of the trappings of modern civilization that they could find. Any people who were found to be hiding were taken into the street and shot. Under Pol Pot’s regime, communist equality meant that everyone was to be a peasant. As a result, all of the modern advances of the last 100 years were rejected. Even though former city dwellers and peasants were now working in the fields side by side, their Khmer Rouge overseers held a special hatred for the former urbanites, who were considered capitalists. They were given only half of the food rations of the peasants.

The equality policy included children, who had to live with Khmer Rouge teachers from the age of seven onwards. Private thoughts and feelings were considered evil, with uniformity being the only acceptable way of life. The state would choose which people got married, and anyone who was suspected of falling in love outside these arrangements was beaten to death in public. The Khmer Rouge regime outlawed any form of entertainment, including sports, with former sports fields and basketball courts being planted as rice fields. The feeling of terror that had been generated reached into the ranks of power, with members of Pol’s government eager to prove that they too were peasants and worked in the fields. As a result, there was no real government.

Pol instituted a rice harvesting quota on the people, which was three tons of unhusked rice per hectare, but less than a third of this was actually being produced. Meanwhile, the people were suffering physically; disease was rife, and millions suffered from malnutrition. Hundreds of people were dying every single day. Pol blamed the lack of success of his great vision on infiltrators and enemies of the party. He devised a great purge to weed out those non-conformists. A state secret interrogation center was set up to imprison and torture those suspected of being traitors. The families of those arrested would also be taken to the prison and tortured. If a child was too young to be interrogated, they would be taken away and simply killed immediately. Any adults who survived their torture were taken out to the killing fields and beaten to death. Of the 14,000 prisoners who passed through the gates of the main interrogation center in Phnom Penh, only seven survived. Many of those killed were loyal Khmer Rouge supporters who were falsely accused of treason.

Pol Pot succeeded in imposing his ruthless iron-fisted control within the borders of Cambodia, but there was a new threat to his regime just over the border: the Vietnamese. Having seen off the Americans, they now turned their attention to Cambodia. A border dispute threatened to bring these two countries to war. As tensions were rising, Pol carried out his latest purge right on the border zone. He suspected his defensive forces in that area of colluding with the Vietnamese. After being viciously interrogated, more than a hundred thousand soldiers and party officials, along with their wives and children, were executed. As a result of this wholesale massacre of his own defense forces, Pol left his eastern border with Vietnam open to invasion, and that invasion came on Christmas Day 1978, taking just 13 days for the capital of Phnom Penh to fall. Pol Pot managed to slip away and escape into the jungle, but at least his three-and-a-half-year reign of terror was over. In total, it had cost the lives of nearly two million people.

The Khmer Rouge may have been over, but the party persisted for nearly twenty years. A remnant continued to wage guerrilla warfare from its jungle bases. Pol Pot set up a base near the Thai border and rebuilt his military force with the aid of the Chinese and Thai governments. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese had installed a new government made up of Khmer Rouge supporters who had escaped Pol’s purges. From his base in the northern part of the country, Pol gave occasional interviews to reporters in which he would invariably accuse those who opposed him of being traitors.

In 1985, it was announced that he was retiring from the leadership of the Khmer Rouge. Shortly thereafter, the Vietnamese clamped down on the Khmer Rouge, moving into their stronghold and decimating their bases. Pol managed to escape into Thailand, where he remained for the next few years. In 1988, he went to China to undergo treatment for cancer. The Vietnamese withdrew from Cambodia in 1988, prompting Pol to return from Thailand. For the next eight years, the Khmer Rouge ran guerrilla operations against government forces. In 1996, the government began engaging in peace negotiations with individual Khmer Rouge leaders, leading many of them to defect away from