Starting from the jungles in the 1960s, Pol Pot’s radical communist guerrilla
group also known as Khmer Rouge, ruled and exploited Cambodia for four years between 1975
and 1979. Turning schools and hospitals into prisons and punishment centers,
Pol Pot forced his ideologies on an entire nation. Anybody who didn’t agree or fit into his
vision for Cambodia was procedurally eliminated resulting in the deaths of a million people,
nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s population. Welcome to Nutty History, and today let’s
look back at the brutal things that Pol Pot committed during his rule over Cambodia.
The most notorious of Pol Pot’s torment centers was the S-21 jail in Phnom Penh, Tuol Sleng.
Once a secondary school, S-21 was converted into a prison and site of interrogation by the Khmer
Rouge where as many as thirteen to thirty thousand men, women, and children were imprisoned during
the regime's four years in power. Like Stalinist Russia’s Gulag and Nazi Germany’s Concentration
camp, once an individual was transported to S-21, he or she was fundamentally condemned to
an agonizing end. Only seven out of thousands of S-21 prisoners are believed to survive the ordeal.
Not because they were innocent or somebody took mercy on them, but because they possessed a valued
talent or skill, like mechanical repair or the ability to paint portraits. Prisoners who were
deemed of any importance were shackled on their backs in individual cells with feet chained in
a crude device. While for others it was worse as hundreds of them were chained together by
their feet with shameful minimum clothing. They would be crammed together in orderly rows and
had to remain in this position for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Prisoners were
forbidden from speaking and on occasion fed a few spoons of gruel. A gulp of water was distributed
by request in regulation, and excretion was performed into a bucket or shelled coconut.
These prisoners were showered with fire hoses sporadically without freeing them from their
bonds. Another similar prison, Kraing Ta Chan which could hold more than 400 prisoners at once,
faced similar treatment as S-21 prisoners. But they were also subjected to malnutrition because
of a lack of regular food distribution. Many prisoners ended up resorting to eating live rats
and other such rodents and insects. S-21 and other prisons weren’t hell only for prisoners but
the guards as well. Most of the prison staff was made up of sixteen to nineteen-year-old teenagers,
living in constant fear for their lives. A single mistake could turn the tables on them
and have them arrested, turning their status from a guard to a prisoner. Pol Pot’s terror
and paranoia had his own followers living at the edge every single moment. These guards
would often witness senior officials of Pol Pot’s regime arriving as prisoners to S-21
for various reasons ranging from disobedience, failing to meet impossible quotas and suspicious
activities. These young guards of S-21 and other prisons also had a short expectancy of life. Pol
Pot would have them routinely purged over fears of knowing too much or for failing to follow orders.
As thousands never made it alive out of S-21 prison,
the prison staff required a place to execute and bury the prisoners.
When space in prison ran out, the prison officials decided to carry out exterminations in Choeung Ek,
located about 10 miles outside the city. The main purpose of prisons was to extract confessions.
Once a person was accused of a crime against Pol Pot’s regime, their fate was sealed and the
prison’s objective was to make their prisoners deliver written confessions of what they
were accused of. When confessions weren't made forthwith, interrogators applied so-called hot
or cold methods of persuasion. Cold methods of interrogation involved psychological approaches
like verbal disapproval, shaming, guilt-tripping, or waiting for the inevitability of confession.
Hot methods of interrogation were beatings with rattan whips, lashings with split electrical
cords, removal of fingernails, H2O boarding, electric shock, and blunt force trauma.
However, prison guards weren’t allowed to deal fatal blows while interrogating prisoners as doing
so would render confession meaningless. Only after the confession was extracted, Brother Duch would
officially order an individual’s demise. His exact words would be along the lines of sending the
condemned for a “smashing.” Prisoners would arrive at Choeung Ek loaded in trucks and were summoned
by name one by one to a pit. At the edge of the pit, victims would face death by crude objects
to save ammunition. At least ten thousand people were eliminated at Choeung Ek. Today, the killing
field is a national monument with a Buddhist shrine containing the remains of some victims.
In 1975, the armed wing of the Communist Party of Kampuchea marched into the capital of Cambodia,
Phnom Penh, after winning a grueling five-year civil war. The populace of not just Phnom Penh but
the entire Cambodia knew the change was coming, whether they like it or not. Yet they hadn’t
expected what happened next in their wildest dream. Pol Pot, the head of the Khmer Rouge,
a shorter name for the armed wing of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, was a massive fanboy of other
communist tyrants such as Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. His own ambitions for Cambodia,
which was then renamed Kampuchea, were no lesser than his idols’ ghastly achievements in their
respective countries. In fact, he wanted to outdo them with his dream of creating an egalitarian,
agrarian communist-Marxist society. In theory, that sounds like a wonderful idea,
but in reality, it was just Pol Pot’s deception to gain control over the lives of every single
Cambodian. Pol Pot isolated his people from the rest of the world, money was abolished, private
property was abolished, religion was abolished, education was abolished, modern clothing was
abolished, and even Khmer’s entire culture was abolished. The Khmer Rouge began an immediate,
radical program to transform Cambodia. In this real-life version of George Orwell’s 1984,
Pol Pot said Cambodia is restarting itself from Year Zero. There was no more contact with foreign
governments; schools, hospitals, and banks were closed down; and entertainment became a mere tool
of propaganda where only art supporting Pol Pot’s “revolution” was allowed. People were
pulled from their own homes which they did not own anymore. The entire three million population of
Phnom Penh was uprooted. The urban population of Cambodia was pushed to relocate to the countryside
to set up rural collectives. Those who refused to relocate saw their homes burned down by Angkar.
Pol Pot justified this new approach to governance by stating, "We will burn the old grass and the
new will grow." Moreover, families were separated by the means of deportations, executions, and
collectivization of work and living arrangements and that doesn’t include those who lost their
family during relocation. Those who survived the long and harsh on-foot journey from their
comfortable homes in cities to confinement within a large collective farm were challenged with
even harsher labor terms. Personal relationships were minimized and emotion or affection was
considered a sign of punishable weakness. Food was scarce, medical care didn’t exist, and living
conditions didn’t even meet the bare minimum of comfort. These people weren’t farmers and
were given no training either. Instead of a hike in food production, Pol Pot’s Cambodia witnessed
a collapse in agriculture and widespread famine. As predicted, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians
succumbed to starvation. Pol Pot once said it himself, “Hunger is the most effective disease.”
Pol Pot's "utopia" had no place for the rising middle class. Professionals such as journalists,
doctors, engineers, architects, and basically anyone who could be classified as educated,
wealthy, or used to live in the city only, were considered unproductive
and a parasite to the system. Workers joining the collective were told to forget their families
and think only about the "revolution". The top brass of the Khmer Rouge was a committee of
high-ranking officials known as Angkar who were responsible for governing the entire country.
Loosely translated as The Community or The Organization,
Angkar would address its members with their code names. Pol Pot was designated Brother Number One,
his underlings were referred to as Brother Number Two, Brother Number Three, etc. based
on their political prominence. “Angkar wills it” became the umbrella statement for justifying
all sorts of brutalities, atrocities, and crimes against humanity. May it be a governmental policy,
individual torment, and execution, or any act performed in any official capacity at even
the most remote levels of authority. Anyone in opposition to the system, or suspected to be so,
was picked out and eliminated at execution fields after being tormented into signing
confessions for crimes they did not know of, and often for being agents of the CBI or KGB.
The Choeung Ek Execution field was just one among the 2,000 dotting such execution grounds
across Cambodia. Men, women, infants, no one was spared. The Khmer Rouge had a brutal philosophy,
"it is better to eliminate an innocent person than to leave an enemy alive."
Interestingly, the anti-elite, anti-urban, Pol Pot himself was born in one of the most elite class
families of colonized Cambodia. He was studying radio electronics in France in 1950 when he became
friends with Ieng Sary and established a Marxist Circle with him and later joined the French
Communist Party. Pol Pot never fully understood the writings of Karl Marx but was fascinated with
Stalin’s rework of Marxism called Stalinism. Around the same time, the Chinese Communist
Party got hold of power in China and later their tyrannical rule had Pol Pot impressed by the idea
of The Great Leap Forward, the annihilation of the majority of China’s population included. During
his time in the remote north-east, Pol Pot had been influenced by the surrounding hill tribes,
who were self-sufficient in their communal living, had no use for money, and were unaffected by
Buddhism. All of this added up to the inspiration of this Marxist agrarian utopia Pol Pot had for
Cambodia. After Pol Pot acquired control over Cambodia, his regime quickly began to identify
those suspected of being enemies of Angkar. Khmer Rouge’s disgust for urbanization was based on the
idea of urban cities being infected with Western influence. The much-loathed educated and/or
wealthy classes, urban residents were branded as ‘New People’ who were not truly Kampuchean and
thus, deemed subordinate to peasants and rural Cambodians, who were termed as Base People. In
reality, whether one was New People or Base People, they all were under surveillance.
Anybody disobeying Khmer Rouge directives were deemed an enemy of the state. The organization
will determine if the offender was more suited for "re-education" or extermination. In their zeal to
root out unworthy New People, Khmer Rouge targeted several demographics in Cambodian society.
Any member of the defeated Cambodian army, doctors, teachers, clergymen, reporters,
attorneys, and government workers were treated with the highest suspicion and frequently targeted
for immediate extermination. The revulsion for anybody who could be associated with urbanization
ran so deep that people wearing eyeglasses, in possession of a wristwatch, or who could speak
a foreign language faced their demise. Those attributes are stereotypically associated with
intellectualism, education, and academia; the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot wanted to exterminate
anybody who would promote such ideas. Many such professionals were put down
along with their entire extended families. As the regime's control on the society stiffened,
radios and music were banned. People were not allowed to be in a group of more than three,
and hoarders of food and valuables were hunted by the Khmer Rouge like wild dogs. If by any
chance such convicts were allowed to live, they were forced to work endless hours at no wage.
Any citizen denounced by another citizen or member of the Khmer Rouge, under the slightest pretext,
could be arrested and detained. Such a system allowed people to make false accusations about
others to have them and their families tortured or executed merely because of a personal grudge. As
one infamous Khmer Rouge saying went, "To spare you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss."
For ethnic and religious communities, the situation was worse. Buddhism was the most
prominent religion in Cambodia when Pol Pot seized power and therefore it became the
primary target of the radical communists. Pol Pot had more than twenty-five thousand Buddhist
monks eliminated and defrocked. He forced the rest of nearly forty thousand into labor camps.
Monks were also publicly humiliated and compelled to consume alcohol and other substances forbidden
by their beliefs. He also destroyed about two thousand Buddhist temples and monasteries and
repurposed the rest into prisons and other establishments that Khmer Rouge could use
for their nefarious deeds. Although official persecution ended with the end of the Khmer Rouge,
Buddhism wasn't re-established as Cambodia's official religion until 1989. Despite the fact
that Pol Pot was half Chinese, the Khmer Rouge unconditionally exterminated ethnic Chinese,
Cambodian Christians, and the Cham, a sect of Cambodian Muslims. Most of the Western people
residing in Cambodia were able to flee the nation before Khmer Rouge took control of Phnom Penh but
the rest didn’t have the same luck on their side and were taken captive by Pol Pot’s communists.
Most of these unfortunate souls disappeared without their loved ones ever finding out what
happened to them. The fate of these victims remained a mystery for years until Brother
Duch was charged with crimes he committed during the Khmer Rouge regime. Duch testified that any
westerner they found was eliminated, smashed to bits, and then burned to ashes. Spectacles
were made of the decimation of Briton John Dewhirst, American Chris Delance, Michael Deeds,
and many other such poor victims. However, of all foreigners, Pol Pot was deeply consumed with
paranoia concerning his perpetual enemy, Vietnam. North Vietnam greatly aided the Khmer Rouge during
its attempt to seize power, but, eventually, Cambodia's irrational distrust and xenophobia
resulted in the persecution of the Vietnamese. They would also not shy away from crossing the
border and attacking Vietnamese civilians. One of these incursions, the Ba Chuc Unfortunate event,
occurred four miles from the Cambodia-Vietnam border, on April 18, 1978. Khmer Rouge troops
crossed the border and decimated more than 3,000 civilians before retreating to their base.
This proved to be the final straw for the Vietnamese government which never even considered
Cambodia a threat given they were on a high after the USA retreated from the Vietnam Conflict.
By January 7, 1979, Vietnamese troops captured Phnom Penh, toppled Pol Pot,
and sent him and his fanatic followers into the safety of the jungles. Despite the upset,
the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot remained part of the Cambodian political scene well into the nineties.
Worse, only a few Khmer Rouge officials were ever tried and convicted of their crimes.
Pol Pot himself was never tried for his crimes and largely lived a politically active life for
years after being dethroned by Vietnamese forces. Even though the Communist Party of Kampuchea was
dissolved at the end of 1981, the Khmer Rouge remained active in Cambodia for years. However,
after Pol Pot had his old ally Son Sen eliminated in 1997 because of suspecting him of betrayal,
the leader of the Khmer Rouge was put under House Arrest. In April 1998, Pol Pot passed
away from a heart failure in his sleep. According to American journalist Nate Thayer, however,
Pol Pot had taken his own life fearing that the new leader of the Khmer Rouge,
Ma Tok was planning to hand Pol Pot to American authorities. Tell us in the comments,
did Pol Pot escape justice for his crimes against humanity? Who should we cover next under this
series? And as always, thanks for watching Nutty History, do not forget to like and subscribe!