Khmer Rouge Seize Phnom Penh
The Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975 and emptied it within days. Cambodia had been drawn into the Vietnam War against its will. American bombing of North Vietnamese supply routes ran from 1969 and dropped something over 500,000 tonnes on a neutral country; the coup that removed Prince Sihanouk in 1970 brought a pro-American government and a civil war; and the bombing radicalised a peasantry that had previously ignored a small communist movement. Sihanouk, in exile, told his followers to join it, which gave it legitimacy it could not have earned. The evacuation of the capital was the first act of the new government. Two million people were marched out at gunpoint, including hospital patients pushed in their beds, on the stated grounds that the Americans were about to bomb it. They were not going home. The cities were abolished, money was abolished, markets, schools, religion, private property and the postal system were abolished, and the population was put to agricultural labour in cooperatives on rations of watery rice. Year Zero meant that the past was to be discarded entirely. Anyone educated, urban, Vietnamese, Cham, Chinese, a monk, or wearing glasses was suspect. Torture centres such as S-21 processed some 15,000 people, of whom a handful survived. Between 1.5 and 2 million people died in three years and eight months, out of a population of about eight million. Vietnam invaded in December 1978 and took Phnom Penh in two weeks. The West kept recognising the Khmer Rouge at the UN for another decade.
- Year: 1975 CE
- Category: Military
