Democratic Kampuchea under Pol Pot

Background and rise to power

Cambodia was a French protectorate from 1863 and became independent in 1953 under Prince Norodom Sihanouk, a status recognised at the 1954 Geneva Conference. A communist movement grew out of the Indochinese Communist Party: the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party was set up in 1951, and its congress of September 1960, which about 20 people attended, made it the Workers' Party and later became the date the CPK gave as its birth. At the second congress in February 1963 Saloth Sar, later known as Pol Pot, became Secretary and Nuon Chea remained Deputy Secretary. After the government published a list of 34 "leftists" in 1963 the leaders went to the countryside. In 1966 the Party quietly took the name Communist Party of Kampuchea and in 1968 it began an armed uprising (ECCC Closing Order, 2010).

On 18 March 1970 General Lon Nol and Prince Sirik Matak overthrew Sihanouk, who allied with the CPK in a National United Front (FUNK) and an exile government in Beijing (GRUNK), in which Khieu Samphan was Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence. A civil war followed against the Khmer Republic, with United States bombing of Cambodia that was heaviest in 1973 and ended by act of Congress on 15 August 1973; the tonnage is itself disputed, from the long-cited Air Force total of about 540,000 tons to a far higher figure in the analysis by Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan. The CPK imposed cooperatives in the areas it held from 20 May 1973. The US embassy left Phnom Penh by helicopter on 12 April 1975 and CPK forces entered the capital on the morning of 17 April.

The Party did not announce its own existence until September 1977. Until then the public met it only as Angkar, "the Organization", a word that could mean the whole Party or its leaders at any level. Residents of Phnom Penh were told to leave at once because the Americans were about to bomb, and that they would be away for a few days. The ECCC Trial Chamber found that about two million people were moved out of the capital, and that the bombing warning and the promise of a short absence were false assurances; other towns were emptied the same way. A constitution adopted at a national congress in December 1975 and issued on 5 January 1976 named the state Democratic Kampuchea, and Sihanouk stepped down as head of state on 2 April 1976 (Chandler; Kiernan).

How power was organized

The CPK was run by a Central Committee and a Standing Committee, the "Centre" in Phnom Penh, which the ECCC describes as the body that held the key decisions. After Pol Pot, the Closing Order's evidence ranks Nuon Chea second and Ta Mok third; other Standing Committee members included Ieng Sary, Vorn Vet, Son Sen and Sao Phim. Below the Centre the country was divided into zones (Southwest, East, North and later Central, Northwest, Northeast, West and a Special Zone), each with a secretary, and then into sectors, districts, subdistricts and cooperatives. The Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea answered to a Military Committee. On 30 March 1976 the Central Committee decided the shape of a government that "must be a proper party organ. It must be our own state". The ministers were announced on 14 April 1976: Pol Pot as Prime Minister, Ieng Sary for foreign affairs, Son Sen for national defence, Vorn Vet for the economy, Nuon Chea as Chairman of the People's Representative Assembly, Khieu Samphan as Chairman of the State Presidium, Hu Nim for propaganda, Yun Yat for education and Ieng Thirith for social affairs. The ECCC found that the Assembly's roles had little practical significance next to the Party's.

Money and markets were abolished and private property ended. People from the towns were classed as "new people" or "17 April people", people from the zones the CPK had held before 1975 as "base people", and in 1976 the Party reclassified them again into "full-rights" people, "candidates" and "depositees", the last mostly new people with the lowest rations (Kiernan). The Four-Year Plan of 1977 to 1980, approved by the Standing Committee in July and August 1976, set a target of three tons of rice per hectare, against yields of about one ton, and planned exports of 800,000 to one million tons of paddy in 1977 (Chandler, Kiernan and Boua). Eating was to be done in common: in his explanation of the plan on 21 August 1976 Pol Pot said "eating will be collectivized". The Trial Chambers in Cases 002/01 and 002/02 found a common purpose among the Party leaders to implement a rapid socialist revolution through a "great leap forward" and to defend the Party against internal and external enemies "by whatever means necessary".

Food was also the ground of punishment, and the record on that is uneven, so it is set out by how well it is supported. The Co-Investigating Judges' Closing Order of 2010, which summarises witness statements and documents gathered for the trials and is not a verdict, records that at the Trapeang Thma Dam "no one dared complain about the food rations for fear of being killed" (para. 341) and that at the Srae Ambel salt fields a witness said workers caught stealing food were deprived of food for two days (para. 379). Its sections on security centres list stealing food among the reasons given for arrest or for classing a prisoner as a "light offender" at Sang (para. 479), Koh Kyang (para. 524), Prey Damrei Srot (para. 542) and Wat Tlork (para. 653), and "eating food which was forbidden" at Kok Kduoch (para. 675). At a North Zone security centre, some witnesses saw prisoners who tried to steal food killed by guards, and one witness described the rape and killing of a cook who had stolen food (para. 578). These are witness statements summarised by the investigating judges, not Trial Chamber findings on each incident, but they agree that stealing food was treated as an offence and could lead to detention, beating, loss of rations or death.

Cutting open the body is documented in other settings. The Closing Order records witness statements that at Sang prisoners had their throats slit and their abdomens cut open at execution (para. 486), that at Koh Kyang prisoners were "often disembowelled to serve as a warning to others" and that guards drank gall bladders mixed with wine and cooked livers (para. 531), and that at Au Kanseng two witnesses said a woman accused of "immorality" had her back cut open and her bile bladder removed, which the centre's chairman contested (para. 623). None of these passages ties the cutting to an accusation about food. One account does: Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) and a survivor, has said that his pregnant sister was killed when, in the words of Time (5 September 2018), "a soldier split open her stomach to see if she had stolen rice. She hadn't"; a Stanford Graduate School of Business profile adds that his brother-in-law had been beaten in public for taking leftover cucumbers for her. In his own essay for DC-Cam (17 April 2005) Chhang writes that his sister was "murdered" and that he was jailed and tortured for looking for vegetables for her, without describing how she died. The soldier and the place are not named in the sources found, and no court finding on it was located. It is therefore recorded here as one survivor's account of one killing, not as a rule applied across the country. The sources checked do not attribute it, or any other cutting open over food, to Ta Mok or to any other named leader. What the ECCC says of Ta Mok is in his card above: that he was Southwest Zone Secretary, that the zone's Sector 13 ran the Kraing Ta Chan security centre, and that he took part in the flow of execution reports from it. He was never charged, and the ECCC states that its findings cannot be equated with findings of guilt against him. Popular accounts do call him "the Butcher".

The toll cannot be fixed to one number, because no census was taken and the dead include people killed by shooting and beating, people who died of hunger, disease and overwork, and people whose cause of death was never recorded. The ECCC Trial Chamber in Case 002/02 (judgement of 16 November 2018, para. 297) notes published estimates from 600,000 to three million, says that experts accept 1.5 to 2 million excess deaths as the most probable range, and stresses the uncertainty of the demographic evidence; it also cites DC-Cam's identification, by 2008, of an estimated 1.3 million human remains in 390 mass grave sites. The demographer Patrick Heuveline (Population Studies, 2015) gives a 95 per cent simulation interval of 1.2 to 2.8 million excess deaths, with a median of 1.9 million, about 21 per cent of the population at risk, of which 728,000 to 1.455 million were violent deaths. Ben Kiernan estimates about 1.7 million. Estimates of how many died by execution and how many of hunger and disease differ between studies.

The propaganda apparatus

The message machinery ran through the Ministry of Propaganda, whose first minister was Hu Nim, from April 1975 until his arrest in April 1977; Yun Yat took over, and two witnesses told the ECCC that Nuon Chea held the post from late 1978. On 9 October 1975 the Standing Committee had given Nuon Chea responsibility for party work, propaganda and education, and he attended its meetings on propaganda work on 9 January, 8 March and 1 June 1976 (Closing Order). The ministry's office, K-25, produced the monthly magazines Tung Padevat ("Revolutionary Flag") and Yuvakon Padevat ("Revolutionary Youth"). The Closing Order describes them as the Party's most important propaganda magazines, open only to Party members, studied in sessions by cadres who had to pass the policies on, and the source of the content of radio broadcasts. Revolutionary Flag had been a secret magazine before 1975. Its issues carried the Party line, leaders' speeches and production targets, and it named the Party's "enemies" at each stage.

Radio Phnom Penh, the successor to the Party's mobile radio unit and to the "Voice of the FUNK" that Ieng Thirith ran from Hanoi until May 1975, became the only broadcast station in the country. The leadership saw radio as the main way to spread the revolutionary idea. Its news praised the cooperatives and the achievements of the regime, and it carried no news critical of Democratic Kampuchea; it also broadcast in English and Vietnamese. Film crews were told to shoot the success of the farming communities, and photography was limited to ceremonies and foreign guests. Outside radio and print, the Party spoke through mass meetings (on 15 April 1977, the second anniversary of the victory, Khieu Samphan praised child workers who were "helping to build dams and embankments"), through study sessions and, in the army, through criticism and self-criticism sessions in which troops were expected to criticise their mistakes and implicate comrades. The Party's existence was announced in a speech by Pol Pot on the 17th anniversary, in late September 1977, which was the first time the public heard that the Party had a name and a Secretary.

The language of the regime did much of the work. "Angkar" spoke as a collective with no face. Cadres used set sayings that survivors later collected, among them "To keep you is no gain, to lose you is no loss" (Locard). Being "taken to study" or "rebuilt" was understood to mean arrest or death, and at S-21 the working word for killing was kamtech, "smash". Duch told the ECCC that to smash "means to arrest secretly" and to interrogate under torture and then execute in secret, and that the word covered more than killing. Internal reports spoke of "microbes": the Party Center's report of 20 December 1976 said "we search for the microbes within the Party without success. They are buried" and, later in the same text, "Many microbes emerged. Many networks came into view". A failure or a shortage was read as the work of traitors inside the ranks. The Standing Committee's own 1976 explanation for hurry was that "enemies attack and torment us".

The evacuation of the cities was the first and largest act of communication by order: a spoken warning of an American bombing that was not coming, delivered to hundreds of thousands at once. S-21 gave the Party a second channel, a paper one. Prisoners were photographed and made to write confessions naming networks of the CIA, the Soviet KGB and Vietnamese agents, and each confession supplied the next arrests. The ECCC found that at least 12,272 people were executed there. Confessions of captured Vietnamese were recorded and broadcast on the radio in early 1978; Duch told the ECCC that this was decided by Nuon Chea and that "the purpose of the propaganda was determined from the upper echelon". Hu Nim's confession shows the genre: the interrogator's note to Duch says "We whipped him four or five times to break his stand", Kiernan judges that the confession gives no convincing evidence for the CIA charge, and the regime never announced his arrest. When the American journalist Richard Dudman visited in December 1978 he was told Hu Nim was "still active in the government".

From 1977 the Party turned its message on Vietnam. The Closing Order says the CPK "escalated its use of propaganda against the Vietnamese", casting them as expansionist, "territory-swallowing annexationists", and that the Revolutionary Flag of December 1977 to January 1978 congratulated the country on purging "Vietnamese agents" from its ranks. Radio Phnom Penh told listeners in May 1978 that if each Cambodian killed 30 Vietnamese, two million soldiers would be enough to eliminate Vietnam's 50 million people (Kiernan, from the BBC Summary of World Broadcasts). The Foreign Ministry's Black Paper of September 1978 described Vietnam as an "aggressor, annexationist and swallower of territories". The ECCC Trial Chamber in Case 002/02 convicted Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan of genocide of the Vietnamese.

Foreign audiences got a managed view. Romanian president Nicolae Ceaușescu made a state visit on 28 to 30 May 1978, a Swedish friendship delegation led by Gunnar Bergström toured for about two weeks in August 1978 and later called the trip a "propaganda tour", and in December 1978 the journalists Elizabeth Becker and Richard Dudman and the scholar Malcolm Caldwell were given a structured tour; Caldwell was shot dead in their guesthouse on 22 to 23 December. The archive's own write-up of the language and the confession pipeline is Angkar: language control in Democratic Kampuchea, 1975-1979.

The archive's definitions fit most clearly: euphemism ("evacuation" for three days, "study", "smash"), name-calling ("new people", "microbes", "Yuon"), scapegoating (hunger and failure read as the work of hidden traitors and of Vietnam), fear-appeal (the false bombing warning), identity-fusion (Angkar as a faceless "we", and "Khmer bodies with Vietnamese minds" in 1978) and card-stacking (S-21 files that could only confirm the conspiracy already named). Rwanda's radio in 1994 is a later case of a station naming a group as an enemy within (RTLM and Kangura), and the Soviet trials of 1936 to 1938 produced confessions in open court (Moscow show trials); the mechanisms are alike, and the settings differ.

Timeline

• 1951: the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party is formed; 9 November 1953, Cambodia becomes independent.
• 30 September 1960: the Workers' Party congress, later counted as the CPK's founding; February 1963, Saloth Sar becomes Secretary.
• 18 March 1970: Lon Nol overthrows Sihanouk, who joins the CPK in the FUNK and GRUNK; 5 May 1970, GRUNK is announced.
• 20 May 1973: cooperatives are imposed in CPK-held areas; 15 August 1973, US bombing ends by act of Congress.
• 12 April 1975: the US embassy is evacuated; 17 April, CPK forces take Phnom Penh and empty it.
• 12 to 15 May 1975: Cambodian forces seize the US ship Mayaguez; the US responds at Koh Tang island and the crew is released on 15 May.
• 9 October 1975: the Standing Committee assigns portfolios, among them party work, propaganda and education to Nuon Chea and the General Staff to Son Sen.
• 5 January 1976: the constitution of Democratic Kampuchea is issued; 20 March, the Assembly election; 2 April, Sihanouk steps down; 14 April, the government is announced with Pol Pot as Prime Minister.
• 21 to 23 August 1976: Pol Pot explains the Four-Year Plan to the Party Center; 27 September, Nuon Chea is named Acting Prime Minister while Pol Pot is said to be on leave.
• 20 December 1976: the Party Center's report on "microbes" inside the Party.
• 10 April 1977: Hu Nim is arrested; he is executed on 6 July.
• Late September 1977: Pol Pot announces the existence of the CPK (sources give 27 to 29 September for the speech).
• 31 December 1977: Democratic Kampuchea breaks relations with Vietnam amid border fighting.
• March to June 1978: the purge of the East Zone; Sao Phim kills himself in June.
• 28 to 30 May 1978: Ceaușescu visits; August, the Swedish delegation; September, the Black Paper; November, Vorn Vet is arrested; December, the Becker, Dudman and Caldwell visit.
• 25 December 1978: Vietnamese forces begin a full invasion; 7 January 1979, Phnom Penh falls and the People's Republic of Kampuchea is set up.
• 15 to 19 August 1979: the People's Revolutionary Tribunal tries Pol Pot and Ieng Sary in absentia; September 1979, the UN Credentials Committee seats Democratic Kampuchea's delegation.

How it ended

Vietnamese forces and the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation took Phnom Penh on 7 January 1979 and set up the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK). The Khmer Rouge leadership withdrew to the Thai border and fought on for nearly two decades. China, the United States, ASEAN and most Western governments declined to recognise a government installed by a foreign army and backed the Democratic Kampuchea delegation, and from 1982 the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, at the UN; Vietnam, the Soviet Union and their allies backed the PRK. The PRK held its own tribunal in August 1979 and opened the Tuol Sleng museum in 1980; several PRK leaders, among them Heng Samrin and Hun Sen, had served as Khmer Rouge cadres before defecting in 1977 and 1978. Pol Pot died on 15 April 1998; see How Pol Pot died. Son Sen and Yun Yat had been killed on his orders in June 1997, and Ta Mok was captured in March 1999 and died in 2006 without a trial.

The UN-backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) tried five people. Case 001: Duch was convicted of crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions for S-21, given 35 years on 26 July 2010 and life on appeal on 3 February 2012, and died in 2020. Case 002/01 (7 August 2014): Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan were convicted of crimes against humanity, including the forced transfer of the population of Phnom Penh, and given life sentences, upheld on 23 November 2016. Case 002/02 (16 November 2018): both were convicted of further crimes against humanity and of genocide of the Vietnamese, and Nuon Chea also of genocide of the Cham; Nuon Chea died on 4 August 2019, and on 22 September 2022 the Supreme Court Chamber upheld Khieu Samphan's convictions and life sentence. The Chambers did not classify the killing of the Khmer majority as genocide in law. Ieng Sary died on 14 March 2013 before judgement, and Ieng Thirith was found unfit to stand trial in 2012 and died in 2015. Cases 003 and 004, against lower-ranking suspects, ended without a trial: the national and international co-investigating judges issued opposing closing orders, and the proceedings were terminated "in the absence of a definite and enforceable indictment".

Same-standard note

This page uses the same structure and definitions as every other regime page: a technique is listed only where the archive's working definition and a documented example fit, offices and dates are stated without judging the people who held them, and the findings of a court are reported as findings and kept apart from witness statements and from popular accounts. Where the record is uneven, as with punishments for food offences and with the toll, the page says which parts are supported and which are not. This was a one-party state that ruled for three years, eight months and three weeks and in which, on the ECCC experts' range, about one in five people died; its leaders spoke of enemies, hidden agents and "microbes" in the same register that appears on other regime pages, but the scale, the speed and the source of the documentation (the Party's own magazines, telegrams and prison files, tested in a court) are specific to this case, and a shared method is not an equivalence. Other regime pages record other systems, each with its own scale, intent and context.

Sources

• ECCC, Co-Investigating Judges, Closing Order (Indictment) in Case 002, D427, 15 September 2010, especially paras 18 to 63, 99 to 111, 143 to 145, 194 to 201, 253, 296, 341, 379, 479, 486, 523 to 531, 542, 578, 591, 623, 653, 675, 819 to 821, 881 to 890, 950, 985, 989, 1053 to 1054, 1157 to 1167 and 1267: eccc.gov.kh.
• ECCC Trial Chamber, Judgement in Case 001 (Kaing Guek Eav alias Duch), E188, 26 July 2010, paras 99 to 100, 182, 340 and 597: eccc.gov.kh; Supreme Court Chamber, Case 001 appeal judgement, 3 February 2012.
• ECCC Trial Chamber, Case 002/01 Judgement E313, 7 August 2014; Case 002/02 Judgement E465, 16 November 2018 (para. 297 on the toll, as quoted in the Supreme Court Chamber's Case 002/02 appeal judgement F76, eccc.gov.kh); Supreme Court Chamber, 22 September 2022 (ABC News).
• ECCC profile of Ta Mok (Chhit Choeun); Just Security, "The ECCC Begins Winding Down", 2022.
• David P. Chandler, Ben Kiernan and Chanthou Boua (eds), Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976-1977 (Yale Southeast Asia Studies, 1988), including Document 4 (Pol Pot, 21 August 1976), Document 6 (20 December 1976) and Document 8 (Hu Nim's confessions): archive.org.
• Pol Pot, speech on the 17th anniversary of the CPK, September 1977: archive.org.
• Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 (Yale University Press, 1996); David Chandler, Voices from S-21 (University of California Press, 1999) and A History of Cambodia; Henri Locard, Pol Pot's Little Red Book: The Sayings of Angkar (Silkworm Books, 2004).
• Patrick Heuveline, "The Boundaries of Genocide: Quantifying the Uncertainty of the Death Toll During the Pol Pot Regime in Cambodia (1975-79)", Population Studies, 2015; Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, "Bombs over Cambodia", The Walrus, October 2006.
• Youk Chhang, "How Did I Survive the Khmer Rouge?", DC-Cam, 17 April 2005; Eli Meixler, "Youk Chhang: Why We Must Fight for Justice After Genocide", Time, 5 September 2018; Stanford Graduate School of Business, "Youk Chhang: Picking up the Pieces in Cambodia".
• Fototeca online a comunismului românesc (National Archives of Romania), record 45014X1X4, Ceaușescu's visit to Democratic Kampuchea, 28 to 30 May 1978: fototeca.iiccmer.ro; Gerald R. Ford Library, National Security Council meeting minutes, 13 to 15 May 1975 (Mayaguez).
• The archive's case study: Angkar: language control in Democratic Kampuchea, 1975-1979, which carries the full source list on the BBC broadcasts, the Swedish and American visits, the 1979 tribunal and the UN seat.

In the archive

Case studies

• Angkar: language control in Democratic Kampuchea, 1975-1979, and the contests over its record

Learn and Write

• Group identity
• Emotion and fear