When the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh in 1975, they were hailed as liberators.  At long last the bloody Cambodian civil war was over, and the hated Lon Nol government, a regime notorious for its inefficiency, corruption and brutality, had been toppled.  Little was known about Saloth Sar, the soft-spoken former schoolteacher who led the Khmer Rouge under his nom de guerre, Pol Pot.  Indeed, little was known about the Khmer Rouge:  those outside its ranks knew only of a shadowy, omnipotent revolutionary organization (Angkar padevat) which had “as many eyes as a pineapple.”  For those living in the squalid refugee camps which had swelled Phnom Penh’s population to 2 million from its pre-war 600,000, any change had to be a change for the better… or so they thought, until the orders came to evacuate the city.

No one was exempted; even hospitals were emptied.  Patients staggered into the streets, their wounds untreated; doctors performing surgery were ordered at gunpoint to abandon their patients.  Those who resisted, or straggled, were executed on the spot.  Many succumbed to heat and exhaustion, with infants, the old, and the sick the first to die as their relatives were forced to leave the bodies at the roadside.  It is estimated that some 20,000 people died in the evacuation, as the Khmer Rouge declared the “Year Zero” and the establishment of the Democratic People’s Republic of Kampuchea.

Pol Pot’s goal was to remake Cambodia as a self-sufficient agrarian communist state.  The new regime abolished money, newspapers private property and schools. Family life and freedom of movement were restricted, as Cambodians were told “Angkar is your new family”. Religious practices were forbidden, and everyone was made to wear the block cotton pajamas that peasants wore when they were working.  In most areas, “schooling” (more accurately: indoctrination) was available only for very young children; children as young as six were assigned to “weak strength” work groups alongside the elderly. These groups performed such tasks as collecting manure, tending small gardens, or raising chickens. The “full strength” groups did the heavy work like digging canals, building dikes, and logging.  They often worked from sunup to sundown, or well into the night if there was enough moonlight or if they had not met their work quota.  Most areas followed a schedule of ten days of work, then one day of rest.

An ardent admirer of Chairman Mao, Pol Pot developed a “four-year plan” in which Cambodians were expected to produce an average national yield of 3 metric tons of rice per hectare (1.4 tons per acre) – a 300% increase over Cambodia’s pre-Khmer Rouge yields.  To meet these new demands on rice production the Khmer Rouge enforced strict policies where workers labored in the fields for 12 hours a day without adequate rest or food.  Those who were not well enough to work often vanished: after being taken away to a distant field or forest, they would be forced to dig their own graves before Khmer Rouge soldiers would bludgeon them on the back of the head with a shovel or hoe.  In the words of a popular Khmer Rouge saying:  “To preserve you is no gain, to destroy you is no loss.” 

Faced with a starving, demoralized populace, there was no way of meeting these unrealistic quotas.  Still, quotas of rice and other crops set by the center had to be met. As agricultural surpluses were shipped to the capital, food intended for local consumption disappeared.  Thousands of people starved, and when news of their deaths reached the center, hundreds of cadre were arrested for having sabotaging the plan.  Pol Pot was unable to see how his policies were at fault; instead, he launched ever more brutal pogroms against “saboteurs.”  Educated or “bourgeois” Cambodians (those who spoke a foreign language, or who wore eyeglasses) were taken to prison camps, where they were tortured until “confessing” their crimes, then executed:  frequently their families were killed alongside them.  By the time the Khmer Rouge were driven from power by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979, an estimated 1.8 million Cambodians – approximately 25% of the population – had been executed or died of starvation or overwork.