The Khmer Rouge & Pol Pot's Reign of Terror

Dan Snow (0:00)

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On April 17th, 1975, the city of Phnom Penh awoke to the end of a war, the beginning of something even more cataclysmic. For five years, Cambodia had been consumed by conflict. It had been unable to resist the lunar pull of the extraordinary violence of neighbouring Vietnam, and in Cambodia itself there had been a brutal struggle between the US-backed government of General Lon Nol and the insurgent forces of the Khmer Rouge led by the Communist Revolutionary Pol Pot supported by China. By that spring, 1975, the capital was overflowing with refugees. Its resources were stretched thin, its people exhausted by bombardment and hunger and uncertainty.

The Khmer Rouge forces finally entered the city that morning. They weren't just conquering soldiers, they were the victors in a long and traumatising, destabilising conflict that had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. They had an agenda. At first, though, their arrival seemed to carry the fragile promise of peace. Residents lined the street, some of them cheered, others watched, hoping that the fighting would finally be over. Khmer Rouge fighters, many of them strikingly young, spread out through the city on tanks and trucks and jeeps. And over loud speakers, there were reassuring words. The war had ended, order would be restored, and for that brief moment, it seemed possible the country might be able to rebuild. But within hours, that sense of relief was utterly shattered. Soldiers with bullhorns moved through neighbourhoods issuing a new urgent command. The entire population must leave the city immediately.

It was presented as a temporary evacuation. It was necessary, they claimed, to avoid a possible American bombing. But actually it was quickly clear there was a more sinister logic. Hospitals were emptied, patients pushed into streets, schools, homes, markets abandoned at gunpoint. Families gathered what they could carry, often only minutes ahead of armed men who swept up any stragglers under threat of death. Phnom Penh, a city of roughly 2 million people, was emptied with astonishing speed. Roads clogged with civilians moving in every direction.

Many were unsure where they were being sent or why.

In the chaos, as you can imagine, families were separated, children lost sight of parents, the elderly lagged behind. Witnesses recalled gunfire used to hurry the crowds along. There was constant pressure to keep people moving no matter what the cost. And so along those jammed highways, leading out of the capital thousands collapsed from exhaustion and illness, injury, bodies left behind. Foreign nationals gathered in embassy compounds and they watched what one observer would describe as a death march. There's one harrowing account of families throwing babies over the walls of those compounds, knowing that even that terrible risk was safer than the fate that awaited those children at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. The entire city was in motion, stripped of its homes, institutions, its continuity, within days even these last outside foreign witnesses would be expelled, leaving Cambodia increasingly sealed off from the rest of the world. This was more seismic than a change of government. This was the deliberate first strike of a radical sweeping transformation. It was Pol Pot's so-called Year Zero.

Cambodia's existing society would be completely eradicated. A new communist agrarian utopia would be built from the ashes. What followed, in fact, is now known as the Cambodian Genocide. A period marked by the excess death of one, perhaps two million people. As many as a quarter of Cambodia's population. In this episode of Dan Snow's History Hit, we're going to try and find out how and why this happened. We're going to explore how the Khmer Rouge came to power. We're going to look at the roots of the regime and the turmoil of World War II decolonisation, war, revolution. We're going to dig into the brutal policies of the Khmer Rouge and consider how this dark chapter continues to shape the country, the region to this day. This is a bit of a personal one for me because I convinced my wife, we were for a brief honeymoon and we went to Southeast Asia and we spent some time at my urging looking at some of the sites at which that genocide had taken place, the sites known as Cambodia's killing fields.