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Pol Pot

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Saloth Sar
"Pol Pot"



Pol Pot in 1977 at the height of his power

General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea
In office
1963 – 1979
Preceded by Tou Samouth
Succeeded by None (party dissolved)

Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia)
In office
May 13, 1976 – January 7, 1979
Preceded by Khieu Samphan
Succeeded by Pen Sovan

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Born May 19, 1928(1928-05-19)[1][2][3][4][5]
Kampong Thom Province, Cambodia
Died April 15, 1998 (aged 69)
Cambodia
Political party Khmer Rouge红色高棉
Spouse Khieu Ponnary (deceased)
Mea Son
Religion Atheist
Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page. (March 2009)

Saloth Sar (May 19, 1928[6][2][3][4][7] – April 15, 199, widely known as Pol Pot, was the leader of the Cambodian communist movement known as the Khmer Rouge[8] and was Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea from 1976–1979.

Pol Pot became the de facto leader of Cambodia in mid-1975.[citation needed] During his time in power, Pol Pot imposed a version of agrarian collectivization, forcing city dwellers to relocate to the countryside to work in collective farms and forced labour projects, toward a goal of "restarting civilization" in "Year Zero". The combined effects of slave labour, malnutrition, poor medical care, and executions resulted in the deaths of an estimated 750,000 to 1.7 million people, approximately 26% of the Cambodian population.[9]

In 1979, after the invasion of Cambodia by neighboring Vietnam in the Cambodian–Vietnamese War, Pol Pot fled into the jungles of southwest Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge government collapsed.[10] From 1979 – 1997 he and a remnant of the old Khmer Rouge operated from the border region of Cambodia and Thailand, where they clung to power and United Nations recognition as the rightful government of Cambodia.

Pol Pot died in 1998 while held under house arrest by the Ta Mok faction of the Khmer Rouge. Since his death, rumours that he was poisoned have persisted.[11]

Contents [hide]
1 Biography
1.1 Early life (1928-1961)
1.2 The path to rebellion (1962-196
1.3 The path to power (1969-1975)
2 Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979)
2.1 Conflict with Vietnam
3 Aftermath (1979-199
3.1 Death
4 See also
5 References
6 Further reading
7 External links



[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life (1928-1961)
Saloth Sar was born in Prek Sbauv in Kampong Thom Province in 1928 to a moderately wealthy family of Chinese-Khmer descent.[12][13] In 1935, he left Prek Sbauv to attend the École Miche, a Catholic school in Phnom Penh. As his sister Roeung was a concubine of King Sisowath Monivong, he often visited the royal palace. In 1947, he gained admission to the exclusive Lycée Sisowath but was unsuccessful in his studies. His future first wife, Khieu Ponnary, her sister, (née Khieu Thirith) Ieng Thirith and Khieu's future husband, Ieng Sary also attended the Lycée.[citation needed]


Prek Sbauv, birthplace of Pol PotAfter switching to a technical school at Russey Keo, north of Phnom Penh, he qualified for a scholarship that allowed for technical study in France. He studied radio electricity at the EFR in Paris from 1949 to 1953. He also participated in an international labour brigade building roads in Yugoslavia in 1950. After the Soviet Union recognized the Viet Minh as the government of Vietnam in 1950, French Communists (PCF) took up the cause of Vietnam's independence. The PCF's anti-colonialism attracted many young Cambodians, including Saloth. In 1951, he joined a communist cell in a secret organization known as the Cercle Marxiste which had taken control of the Khmer Student's Association (AER) that same year. Within a few months, Saloth also joined the PCF. Historian Philip Short has said that Saloth's poor academic record was a considerable advantage within the anti-intellectual PCF, who saw uneducated peasants as the true proletariat and helped him to quickly establish a leadership role for himself among the Cercle Marxiste.[citation needed]

As a result of failing his exams in three successive years, he was forced to return to Cambodia in January 1954. He was the first member of the group to return to Cambodia and was given the task of evaluating the various groups rebelling against the government. He recommended the Khmer Viet Minh, and in August 1954, Saloth, along with Rath Samoeun, travelled to the Viet Minh Eastern Zone headquarters in the village of Krabao in the Kompong Cham/Prey Veng border area of Cambodia.

Saloth and the others learned that the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP) was little more than a Vietnamese front organization. In 1954, the Cambodians at the Eastern Zone Headquarters split into two groups. Due to the Geneva peace accord of 1954 expelling all Viet Minh forces and insurgents, one group followed the Vietnamese back to Vietnam as cadres to be used by Vietnam in a future war to liberate Cambodia. The other group, including Saloth, returned to Cambodia.

After Cambodian independence following the 1954 Geneva Conference, right and left wing parties struggled against each other for power in the new government. King Norodom Sihanouk played the parties against each other while using the police and army to suppress extreme political groups. Corrupt elections in 1955 led many leftists in Cambodia to abandon hope of taking power by legal means. The communist movement, while ideologically committed to armed struggle in these circumstances, did not launch a rebellion because of the weakness of the party.

After his return to Phnom Penh, Saloth became the liaison between the above-ground parties of the left (Democrats and Pracheachon) and the underground communist movement. He married Ponnary on July 14, 1956. She returned to Lycee Sisowath but now as a teacher, while he taught French literature and history at Chamraon Vichea, a new private college.[14]


[edit] The path to rebellion (1962-196
In January 1962, the government of Cambodia rounded up most of the leadership of the far-left Pracheachon party ahead of parliamentary elections due in June. The newspapers and other publications of the party were also closed. This event effectively ended any above-ground political role for the communist movement in Cambodia. In July 1962, the underground communist party secretary Tou Samouth was arrested and later killed while in custody. The arrests created a situation where Saloth could become the de facto deputy leader of the party. When Ton Samouth was murdered, Saloth became the acting leader of the communist party. At a party meeting attended by at most eighteen people in 1963, he was elected Secretary of the central committee of the party. In March 1963, Saloth went into hiding after his name was published in a list of leftist suspects put together by the police for Norodom Sihanouk. He fled to the Vietnamese border region and made contact with Vietnamese units fighting against South Vietnam.

In early 1964, Saloth convinced the Vietnamese to help the Cambodian Communists set up their own base camp. The central committee of the party met later that year and issued a declaration calling for armed struggle. The declaration also emphasized the idea of "self-reliance" in the sense of extreme Cambodian nationalism. In the border camps, the ideology of the Khmer Rouge was gradually developed. The party, breaking with Marxism, declared rural peasant farmers to be the true working class proletarian and the lifeblood of the revolution. This is in some sense explained by the fact that none of the central committee were in any sense "working class". All of them had grown up in a feudal peasant society. The party adapted elements of Theravada Buddhism to justify their non-standard communism.[citation needed]

After another wave of repression by Sihanouk in 1965, the Khmer Rouge movement under Saloth rapidly grew. Many teachers and students left the cities for the countryside to join the movement.

In April 1965, Saloth went to North Vietnam to gain approval for an uprising in Cambodia against the government. North Vietnam refused to support any uprising because of agreements being negotiated with the Cambodian government. Sihanouk promised to allow the Vietnamese to use Cambodian territory and Cambodian ports in their war against South Vietnam.

After returning to Cambodia in 1966, Saloth organized a party meeting where a number of important decisions were made. The party was officially but secretly renamed the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). Lower ranks of the party were not informed of the decision. It was also decided to establish command zones and prepare each region for an uprising against the government.

In early 1966 fighting broke out in the countryside between peasants and the government over the price paid for rice. Saloth's Khmer Rouge was caught by surprise by the uprisings and was unable to take any real advantage of them. But the government's refusal to find a peaceful solution to the problem created rural unrest that played into the hands of the Communist movement.

It wasn't until early 1967 that Saloth decided to launch a national uprising, even after North Vietnam refused to assist it in any real way. The uprising was launched on January 18, 1968 with a raid on an army base south of Battambang. The Battambang area had already seen two years of great peasant unrest. The attack was driven off by the army, but the Khmer Rouge had captured a number of weapons, which were then used to drive police forces out of Cambodian villages.

By the summer of 1968, Saloth began the transition from a party leader working with a collective leadership into the absolutist leader of the Khmer Rouge movement. Where before he had shared communal quarters with other leaders, he now had his own compound with a personal staff and a troop of guards. Outsiders were no longer allowed to approach him. Rather, people were summoned into his presence by his staff.


[edit] The path to power (1969-1975)
The movement was estimated to consist of no more than 1500 regulars, but the core of the movement was supported by a number of villagers many times that size. While weapons were in short supply, the insurgency was still able to operate in twelve of nineteen districts of Cambodia. In the middle of the year Saloth called a party conference and decided on a change in propaganda strategy. Up to 1969, the Khmer Rouge had been very anti-Sihanouk. Opposition to Sihanouk was at the center of their propaganda. But it was decided at the conference to shift the party's propaganda to be against the right-wing parties of Cambodia and their supposed pro-American attitudes. The party ceased to be anti-Sihanouk in public statements, but in private the party had not changed its view of him.

The road to power for Saloth and the Khmer Rouge was opened by the events of January 1970 in Cambodia. Sihanouk, while out of the country, ordered the government to stage anti-Vietnamese protests in the capital. The protesters quickly went out of control and wrecked the embassies of both North and South Vietnam. Sihanouk, who had ordered the protests, then denounced them from Paris and blamed unnamed individuals in Cambodia for them. These actions, along with intrigues by Sihanouk's followers in Cambodia, convinced the government that he should be removed as head of state. The National Assembly voted to remove Sihanouk from office. Afterward, the government closed Cambodia's ports to Vietnamese weapons traffic and demanded that the Vietnamese leave Cambodia.

The North Vietnamese reacted to the political changes in Cambodia by sending Premier Phạm Văn Ä