Pol Pot

Questions on this topic? Just ask!

(1925–1998), leader of Khmer Rouge guerrillas of Cambodia. Saloth Sar, as Pol Pot was originally named, lived comfortably as a child with his father (a prosperous landowner), along with his brother, sister, and female cousin, under the protection of King Sisowath and King Monivong of Cambodia. For a time Saloth Sar lived in the royal palace, where he witnessed the feudalistic practices, including his sister and cousin's becoming royal consorts, experiences that might have affected his later political thinking.

Because of his family's status, Saloth Sar attended several French-language schools (a privilege afforded few Cambodians) but failed to earn a high school diploma. He subsequently lived in a Buddhist monastery as a novice monk for a few months.

In 1949 Saloth Sar's fluency in French and his family's political connections earned him a scholarship to study in France, but there he neglected academics to study left-wing politics. As a result, he was forced to return to Cambodia when he failed his exams, shortly after joining the French Communist Party in 1952. Before returning, however, he spent time in Yugoslavia working in a labor battalion.

After Cambodia's independence Saloth Sar led a double life, teaching in a private school in Phnom Penh (1954–1963) and commanding the country's Communist Party. In 1965 he visited China and was inspired by the Cultural Revolution, which he saw as a meaningful revolutionary model. Supported by Chinese officials, he returned to Cambodia and spent thenext four years refining the radically utopian ideology he was to practice as Pol Pot.

After Cambodia's ruler Prince Norodom Sihanouk was overthrown in a pro-American coup in 1970, the Khmer Rouge (Cambodian Reds, or Communists)— a term the prince derisively applied to Pol Pot's rebels—waged guerrilla warfare against the Cambodian army. Intensive U.S. bombing of the Cambodian countryside no doubt increased the popularity of the Khmer Rouge. Eventually occupying the capital of Phnom Penh in April 1975, the guerrillas forced the city's 2 million residents—and those of other towns— into the countryside within two days to work in agricultural communes. During the next four years, nearly 2 million people were murdered or died horribly from overwork, disease, or starvation, as Pol Pot brutally took Cambodia back to "Year Zero," in the process destroying the country's economy and society.

In 1979 the Vietnamese entered Cambodia and drove the Khmer Rouge from power, but for nearly two decades Pol Pot and his army hid in the jungles of Thailand and northern Cambodia and terrorized the Vietnamese-dominated Cambodian government and the local population. Soldiers led by Ta Mok, his former comrade, arrested Pol Pot in 1997 after he had ordered some subordinates killed. On 15 April 1998, while listening to the Voice of America, Pol Pot learned that Ta Mok intended to deliver him to an international tribunal for trial. Before midnight he was dead, allegedly from heart failure, though some suspect suicide or even murder.

Becker, Elizabeth. (1998) When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution. Washington, DC: Public Affairs.

Chandler, David. (1999) Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot. 2d ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Chandler, David, Ben Kiernan, and Chanthou Boua, eds. (1988) Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976–1977. New Haven, CT: Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies.

Heder, Stephen R. (1991) Pol Pot and Khieu Samphan. Clayton, Victoria, Australia: Monash University, Centre of Southeast Asia Studies.

Kiernan, Ben. (1985) How Pol Pot Came to Power: A History of Communism in Kampuchea, 1930–1975. London: Verso.

——. (1998) The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

This is the complete article, containing 629 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).