Cambodian Genocide: The Killing Fields
The Khmer Rouge killed somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians in three years, eight months and twenty days. They entered Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975 and emptied it within seventy-two hours, telling two million people that the Americans were about to bomb the city and that they would be back in three days. The hospitals were emptied too, patients pushed out in their beds. The regime declared Year Zero. Money was abolished and the central bank blown up, markets closed, schools and pagodas shut, the post and telephones ended, foreign languages banned, and the entire population set to agricultural labour in cooperatives on twelve-hour days and a ration of watery rice. Anyone associated with the old order was a target: officials, soldiers, teachers, monks, doctors, the Vietnamese and Cham minorities, and city people generally, who were classed as new people and given less food than the peasants. Wearing glasses or speaking French was evidence. Perhaps half the deaths were executions and half starvation and disease, in a country of about eight million. The security prison S-21 at Tuol Sleng, a former school, processed some 15,000 people and produced photographs and forced confessions of almost all of them; twelve are known to have survived. Pol Pot's leadership then turned inward, purging its own cadres in waves, and attacked Vietnam. Vietnam invaded in December 1978 and took Phnom Penh in two weeks. The Khmer Rouge kept Cambodia's United Nations seat until 1990. Pol Pot died under house arrest in 1998 without being tried. A hybrid United Nations and Cambodian tribunal took sixteen years and some 300 million dollars to convict three men, and closed in 2022.
- Year: 1975 CE
- Category: Atrocity
