Pol Pot
Saloth Sar took the name Pol Pot, ruled Cambodia for three years and eight months, and killed between a fifth and a quarter of its people. He was born about 1925 into a prosperous farming family with connections at the royal court — a cousin was a royal concubine and he spent time in the palace as a boy. He was educated at a Catholic school, failed the examinations repeatedly, and won a scholarship to Paris in 1949 to study radio electronics, where he spent three years failing that too and joining a circle of Cambodian students who were members of the French Communist Party. He came home in 1953, taught school, and worked in the underground for fifteen years. The party he took over was small, and what made it large was the war next door: American bombing of the border areas from 1969 dropped some 500,000 tonnes on a neutral country, and Lon Nol's coup in 1970 removed the monarchy that peasants respected, and the Khmer Rouge went from a few thousand to an army. They took Phnom Penh in April 1975 and emptied it in three days. The regime abolished money, markets, schools, religion, the post and private life, and killed anyone associated with the old order. He was never a public figure — the country was ruled by an entity called Angkar, the organisation, and most Cambodians did not know who he was. He died in 1998 under house arrest, untried. He gave an interview in 1997 saying that his conscience was clear and that he had come to make a struggle, not to kill people. The regime's own photographs and records at Tuol Sleng were preserved because a bureaucracy that intends to be permanent keeps files.
- Lived: 1925 CE – 1998 CE
- Nationality: Cambodian
- Roles: dictator, revolutionary_leader, head_of_state
