Pol Pot's Legacy

The Communist Party of Kampuchea, also known as the Khmer Rouge, took control of Cambodia on April 17, 1975, which lasted until January 1979. For their three-year, eight-month, and twenty-one day rule of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge committed some of the most heinous crimes in current history. The main leader who orchestrated these crimes was a man named Pol Pot. In 1962, Pol Pot had become the coordinator of the Cambodian Communist Party. The Prince of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk, did not approve of the Party and forced Pol Pot to flee to exile in the jungle. There, Pol formed a fortified resistance movement, which became known as the Khmer Rouge, and pursued a guerrilla war against Sihanouk’s government. As Pol Pot began to accumulate power,

Later that same year, Pot and the Khmer Rouge took control over Cambodia. Pot wasted no time in starting his mission to reconstruct Cambodia. He thought that all the educated people needed to be killed (Melicharova). Also he thought that all noncommunist aspects of Cambodia needed to be wiped out. All rights you had were now gone. Religion was banned and if you were any kind of leader among the Buddhist monks, you were killed instantly (Melicharova). All kids were taken away and sent to work in the fields (Melicharova). If anyone was currently working and had a job, they were immediately killed along with their family members. It got so bad that you could be killed for just laughing, crying, and knowing another language. The Khmer Rouge motto was “To spare you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss” (Melicharova). If you were lucky enough to escape death, you were put into the fields working usually from 4am to 10pm unpaid (“Pol”). From lack of food and sleep, people often became very ill which sadly led to death.

The next two decades of Pol Pot’s life are best characterized by his endless political maneuvering within the Cambodian Communist movement. Having struggled to gain independence from French colonialism during the 1940’s, and again during the First Indochina War of the 1950’s, there were already several prominent Communist factions active in Cambodia upon Pol Pot’s return to his country. His initial task as a clandestine operative of the Marxist Circle was to evaluate each of these factions, and to rise to power in the most promising

Cambodian Communist Party leader, Pol Pot (1962), went into hiding from the then Cambodian leader Prince Norodom Sihanouk. While he was avoiding the Prince he created a movement called the Red Cambodians (Khmer Rouge) and tried to wage guerrilla warfare against Sihanouk. When a military coup staged by the U.S. took away Sihanouk’s power, he joined forced with Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. As the U.S. continuously bombed North Vietnam holding locations as far as Cambodia, their population of peasants began to feel the effects as hundreds of thousands were in the midst war games between 1969-1973; as a result the Cambodian peasants went to Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia. The U.S. presence was seen as harmful eventually pulled away from supporting

Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979. From the moment he was in control of Cambodia he set the calendars to year zero. His goal was to recreate Cambodia as a natural society, eliminating any trace of the modern world. Modern materials were seen as impure and dangerous and were quickly disposed of. Any intellectuals, artists, or monks were

In the 1960’s a group named the Khmer Rouge surfaced, but was with few members. They were led by Pol Pot, a man who would soon bring terror to all Cambodians. Their goal was to bring Cambodia into a primal state, where everyone

How did Pol pot's regime affect life in cambodia in the past and the present? Pol Pot's goal was to make Cambodia start at year zero. As soon as he came to power, He tried to eliminate anything that would ruin his idea for the utopia he wanted. The Khmer Rouge believed that to make the country perfect country, they must remove everything from the old way, including the old education way. In the past, Students were taught in Buddhist monasteries called Wats.(Bookbridge) After he took over, his first step was to remove education from Cambodia.

The Cambodian war lasted eight years, from 1967 to 1975, the Cambodian genocide was four years long starting in 1975 until 1979. According to History, “Pol Pot was a political leader whose communist Khmer Rouge government led Cambodia from 1975 to 1979” (Pol Pot). As shown Pol Pot was the leader during this time, whether it was in the background or upfront. He believed in communism and thought it was what was best for Cambodia.

Pol Pot who was born in Cambodia,led the Khmer Rouge from 1963 until 1997 and also served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea.On April 1975,when his forces captured Phnom Penh,he became leader of Cambodia.During that time of his leadership, about 1.5 million Cambodians out of a total population of 7 to 8 million died of starvation, execution, disease or overwork, apparently the death toll was higher.At one point in his life,Pol Pot taught history, geography and French literature at a private school while simultaneously planning a revolution.Sadly, Pol Pot died unexpectedly in his sleep on April 15, 1998, due to heart failure.

In 1940s, because of supporting by the Vietnamese, the Cambodian communist movement was created to fight against France colonization. In 1962, Pol Pot had become the leader of CPK was flee into the jungle to escape from King Norodom Sihanouk, because

On December 25, 1978, Vietnam launched a land invasion of Cambodia in the hopes of ending the Khmer border attacks. On January 7, 1979, Pol Pot was disposed of and the capitol fell to Vietnam control. A temporary government was established and consisted of Khmer defectors. Pot retreated to Thailand with the remainder of the Khmer and fought a series of guerrilla wars against the new Cambodian government for 17 years. Pot lost power and later died of a heart attack just shortly after being arrested in April 1998. He did not live long enough to be tried in international court.

After that, he began to go to a French Catholic primary school. He continued his learning until 1949, where he went to Paris, France. He studied radio technology and was an avid communist. After his arrival back to Cambodia, he had found that its people were rebelling against French rule, a year later they got their independence. From 1956, Pot had taught history, geography and French literature, all while he had joined a secret communist party and plotting a revolution. In the 60s, he made the party exclusively focusing on Marxism-Leninism. The group moved deep in the countryside and in 1968 they began a national uprising that led to his total command of the country. In 1970, while the Prince of Cambodia was out of the country, the group started a civil war. The Prince had been kicked out of power and turned to the Khmer Rouge movement. He supported Pol Pot in the uprising. By 1975, the Khmer Rouge took control of the capital. As its leader, Pol Pot became the leader of the country. Life under the Rouge was deadly. Everyone was stripped of their belongings and worked in the fields as part of a re-education program. Anyone that refused would be taken to detention centers,

After Year Zero and the purge of his own people, he lost a large amount of public support. Many believed that he was a traitor “whose hands are stained with blood” because “Cambodians don’t kill Cambodians” (Thayer). He claimed to have committed those crimes to ensure better lives for his people, but he only made them hate him by killing their fellow Cambodians. To make matters even worse, Pol Pot refused to repent or even talk about the thousands of executions or the million deaths that he caused, he only continued to blame the Vietnamese for his actions (Becker). He believed that there were countless Vietnamese agents in Cambodia who “didn’t give rice to the population”, causing widespread starvation (Thayer). He took no personal responsibility for the over one million deaths that he caused and believed that his “conscious is clear”. Somehow Pol Pot thought that he could deny that the mass genocide, that occurred during his own rule, was his fault. Even his old allies turned against him and were the ones to capture him in the end (“Khmer Rouge”). Pol Pot turned on every possible person that could have helped him, and when he was captured he had no one left. But, even with Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge’s known terror, the Vietnamese government that was installed after the Khmer Rouge was led by Khmer Rouge leaders and Khmer Rouge trained communists (Rainsy) . As

A consecutive three years (1975-1978) history remarked how Kingdom of Cambodia doing today. As international world put concerns just after genocide stopped rather than taking any factual actions toward Pol Pot’s regime which exhausted people of Kingdom of Cambodia for that consecutive three years, every international dissents are not an absolute true voices to determine what was exactly happen during that three years. With a blink of an eye, alliances formed during those dramatic years – Vietnam which driven by aid from Soviet rejected People’s Republic of China offers to aid them and Cambodia which has a closer knot to People’s Republic of China had alike vision on transforming Cambodia community into agrarian society in Pol Pot’s regime.

On April 17th, 1975, the Khmer Rouge army began marching into Phnom Penh, the capitol of Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge army consisted mostly of uneducated teenage boys or young peasants, and Pol Pot was their leader. Pol Pot was born in March 1925, and was born with the name of Saloth Sar. He earned a scholarship from the government of France to attend the Ecole Francaise d’Electronique et d’Informatique in Paris, and study electronics. While in Paris, Sar joined the Khmer Students’ Association and the French Communist Party. These groups fought for the liberation of the uneducated peasantry, which opposed to the original factory workers, who were supported by Marxist policies. However, Sar was forced to return to Cambodia in 1952 after 3 years of failing exams.