One of the 20th century’s most brutal and radical dictators, Cambodia’s Marxist leader Pol Pot tried to take Cambodia back to the Middle Ages and forced millions of people from the cities to work on communal farms in the countryside. His regime, known as the Khmer Rouge, lasted four years from 1975 to 1979 and by some estimates, took the lives of over two million people.
Pol Pot conducted a rule of terror, his smiling face and quiet mannerisms belying his brutal nature. He and his inner circle of revolutionaries adopted an extreme form of communism based on Maoism and Stalinism. They tore apart Cambodia in an attempt to “purify” the country’s agrarian society and turn its people into revolutionary worker-peasants. His brutality left a scar on the country and, even today, the people of Cambodia are still healing.
TRAVEL BACK TO THE Beginning
SALOTH Sar, better known by his alias Pol Pot, was born in 1925, in the small village of Prek Sbauv, located about 160 kilometres north of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. His family was rather affluent and owned some 20 hectares of rice paddy, which was about 10 times the national average. His family was a mix of Chinese and ethnic Khmer heritage, but they did not speak Chinese and lived as though they were fully Khmer.
At that time, Cambodia was a monarchy, but the French colonial regime was in political control of the country. At the age of five or six, Pol Pot was sent to live with an elder brother in the capital, where he studied under a French curriculum. All throughout his education, Pol Pot was not academically gifted and was even held back for two years, only receiving his Certificat d’Études Primaires Complémentaires (a diploma awarded at the end of elementary primary education that certified that a student had acquired the basic skills in writing, reading, mathematics, history, geography, and applied sciences), in 1941 at the age of 16.
During World War II (WWII), Nazi Germany invaded France and in 1945, the Japanese ousted the French from Cambodia. After the war ended with Germany’s and Japan’s defeat, France reasserted its control over Cambodia but allowed for the creation of a new constitution and the establishment of various political parties. The most successful of these was the Democratic Party, which went on to win the 1946 general elections.
Inthe summer of 1949, Pol Pot passed his brevet, the French National Diploma, and secured one of five scholarships that allowed him to travel to Paris to study at one of its engineering schools. Whilst in Paris, Pol Pot became friends with leng Sary and together with two others, they established the Cercle Marxiste (“Marxist Circle”), which was a Marxist–Leninist organisation that met often to read Marxist texts and hold selfcriticism sessions. Several months after that formation, Pol Pot and Sary joined the French Communist Party (PCF).
Access to further education abroad made Pol Pot part of a tiny elite in Cambodia and whilst he was in school in France, he often spent more time on revolutionary activities than his studies. Back in his home country in 1952, there was growing internal strife which resulted in King Sihanouk dismissing the government entirely and declaring himself as the prime minister. As a result, the Cercle decided to send someone to Cambodia to assess the situation and determine which rebel group they should support.
Pol Pot volunteered himself for the task. Many scholars believe that this decision may also have had something to do with him failing his second-year exams two years in a
