This Week in History

CWA # 1278
This Week in History
17 April 1975: Khmer Rouge captures Phnom Penh in Cambodia, establishing the Pol Pot regime

Vaneeta
19 April 2024

Photo Source: BBC/Getty Images

On 17 April 1978, under the leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge, captured Phnom Penh inCambodia, ending years of insurgency and guerilla warfare inserting, but establishing the Khmer Rouge to power. It resulted  in a reign of terror that would haunt Cambodia for years to come.

A brief note on Cambodia and Khmer Rouge in the 1970s
Khmer Rouge was the armed wing of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. It operated mostly in remote jungles and mountain areas in the country's northeast, along its border with Vietnam, which was at the time immersed in its civil war. after the then monarch of Cambodia, Prince Norodom Sihanouk was overthrown in 1970 in a military coup by Marshal Lon Nol, a Cambodian politician who had previously served as prime minister. As the monarch became popular among Cambodians, the Khmer Rouge gained traction. For the next five years, a civil war between the right-leaning military of pro-American government, and those supporting the alliance of Prince Norodom and the Khmer Rouge raged in Cambodia.

The rise of Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge
Pol Pot spent time in France and became a member of the French Communist Party. He returned to Cambodia in 1953, and joined the communist movement, beginning his journey to power as one of the world's most despised dictators. The Khmer Rouge, aided by the North Vietnamese, began to fight Lon Nol's army on the battlefield. But by the end of 1972, the Vietnamese had left Cambodia and handed over most of the war's tasks to the CPK. In 1973 the Khmer Republic government with the US help dropped half a million tons of bombs on Cambodia, almost killing 300,000 people and pushing them to join the Khmer Rouge to fight the government. 

Eventually, the Khmer Rouge seized the advantage, after gaining control of 85 per cent of territory in the countryside. On 17 April 1975, it captured Phnom Penh. However, The Khmer Rouge chose not to restore authority to Prince Norodom, instead handing control to the Khmer Rouge's commander, Pol Pot.

Pol Pot isolated Cambodia from the rest. Inspired by the tribal way of self-sufficient living, he forcefully moved around two million people from cities to rural areas to undertake agriculture work. Thousands of them died during the evacuations.

They believed that Cambodia should be returned to an alleged ‘golden age’ when the land was cultivated by peasants and the country would be ruled for and by the poorest in society. They wanted all members of society to be rural agricultural workers rather than educated city dwellers, whom the Khmer Rouge considered not pure and corrupted by Western ideas. Everyone’s political and civil rights were taken away. Moreover, Factories, hospitals, schools, and universities were shut down. Beginning of January 1977, all children under the age of eight were removed from their parents and placed in labour camps, where they were trained that the state was their 'real' parents. Children were crucial to the Khmer Rouge's revolution because they felt they could be easily moulded, conditioned, and brainwashed. They may be trained to follow orders, become troops, and kill opponents. Children were taught that everyone who did not follow Khmer laws was a corrupt enemy. Those labelled intellectuals or potential leaders of a revolutionary movement were also executed. According to legend, some people were murdered simply for looking to be intellectuals, such as wearing glasses or speaking a foreign language. An estimated 1.7 to 2.2 million Cambodians died under Pol Pot’s regime.

The end of Pol Pot
The Vietnamese government, alarmed by the Khmer Rouge's aggressive actions along the border and its persecution of ethnic Vietnamese within Cambodia, launched a full-scale military campaign to overthrow the regime. By the end of 1977, clashes between Cambodia and Vietnam broke, leading to a new Vietnam-friendly government, the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) in Phenom Pen. The Khmer Rouge leaders and their followers sought refuge in Thailand and continued fighting the Vietnam-backed PRK. Concurrent with the Vietnamese invasion, various Cambodian resistance groups, including former Khmer Rouge defectors as well as non-communist factions, joined forces with the Vietnamese to oppose the Khmer Rouge regime. This coalition, known as the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation (KUFNS), played a crucial role in the downfall of the Khmer Rouge.

The fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979 marked the end of a dark chapter in Cambodian history but also heralded a new era of uncertainty and instability. 

About the author

Ms Vaneeta is a postgraduate student at the UMISARC Centre for South Asian Studies, Pondicherry University.

In the series:
16 April 1917: Lenin issues “April Theses”
04 April 1968: Martin Luther King Jr assassinated
18 March 2014: Russia annexes Crimea
14 March 1879: Albert Einstein born in Germany
14 March 1849: The Sikh Army surrenders to the British
12 March 1918: Lenin shifts the capital to Moscow
11 March 1985: Mikhail Gorbachev becomes the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

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