Pol Pot

Just before the Khmer Rouge was about to turn him over to an international tribunal, he died on April 15, 1998. Though he was suffering from facial cancer and a paralytic stroke, there were suspicions of suicide and murder.

‘The Killing Fields’, a film about the Khmer Rouge based on the true experiences of two journalists, directed by Roland Joffe, is one of the best portrayals of the regime’s cruelty.

Pol Pot was born on May 19, 1925, to Pen Saloth, a moderately wealthy rice farmer and Sok Nem, in Prek Sbauv, Kampong Thom Province. Named Saloth Sar at birth, he was eighth of nine children.

In 1935, he left his village to attend Ecole Miche, a Catholic school in Phnom Penh and stayed with his cousin, Meak. Not very bright as a student, he switched to technical study.

In 1949, Pol Pot got a scholarship to study radio electronics in Paris. There, he joined the ‘Cercle Marxiste’, consisting of the Khmer students in Paris, and the French Communist Party.

He failed thrice in his exams and headed back to Cambodia in 1953. He advised the Cercle members who returned home, to join the Communist revolutionary organization, ‘Khmer Viet Minh’.

In August 1953, he secretly left home for Krabao where the Viet Minh’s Eastern Zone Headquarters was situated. Here, he was appalled to find that Cambodians were considered inferior to Vietnamese.

With the Cambodian independence following the 1954 Geneva Accord, the Khmer Viet Minh were forced to break up and he returned to Phnom Penh. He joined the Democratic Party and hoped to influence its policies.

He and his friends decided that a revolution was required when Khmer Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, who had abdicated the power, rigged the 1955 elections that were held as part of the Accord.

Following Cambodia’s independence, he became a member of the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party, KPRP. After a power struggle within the KPRP in the early 1960s, he took control of the party.

The KPRP, renamed as the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) in 1966, was more commonly known as the Khmer Rouge. Khmer King Norodom Sihanouk had embarked on repressing his dissidents and so the Pol Pot took refuge in the jungles.

After capturing Phnom Penh in 1975, Pol Pot began to implement the Year Zero concept which ordained drastic de-industrialization and initiated a new revolutionary culture within the society.