#saloth sar

[siskosos]

Pol Pot and Norodom Sihanouk be like (original art by @julex93drawings)

[historyhalls]

Find out here about how Pol Pot, one of the twentieth century's worst monsters, was once a beloved professor known as a 'very kind man'

Before He Committed Genocide, Pol Pot Used to Be Known as 'A Very Nice Man'

[indochina1]

Khmer Rouge Fighters. Source: GettyImages/Bettman

In Cambodia in 1963, Sihanouk clamped down on leftist opposition groups, forcing most to flee the capital, Phnom Penh, to avoid arrest and imprisonment. Among these was a small communist group termed the Workers’ Party of Kampuchea (WPK). The WPK could trace its history back to the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party (KPRP), itself a communist faction formed by the Vietnamese Communists for Cambodians following Ho’s dissolution of the Indochinese Communist Party. In February 1963, a young left wing history teacher named Saloth Sar, became leader of the WPK, edging out the pro-Vietnamese Marxist old guard and orientated the party towards nationalist communist agrarian revolution, inspired by the example of Mao Zedong in China.

Sar was on a list of leftists invited by Sihanouk to join the government in mid-1963, a transparent attempt to corral Cambodian communist leaders to enable their arrest. Sar wisely fled into the jungles with a small band of followers where he set up a revolutionary base camp. The WPK made contact with Viet Cong units operating in eastern Cambodia and obtained its first military supplies from them. Sihanouk himself dismissively termed the WPK as “Red Khmers” and it was as the Khmer Rouge, the movement became colloquially known. Sar himself took on the alias Pol Pot (“Original Cambodian”) by which he became known thereafter.

The Khmer Rouge initially had negligible influence on the Second Indochina War, but from 1964 it established itself permanently in north east Cambodia, and began propagandising amongst the Khmer population and arming itself for revolutionary struggle. The DRV continued to maintain the movement, although remained suspicious of its implicit anti-Vietnamese Khmer nationalism.

[schattenlinien]

No. 19 POL POT Saloth Sar (19 May 1925 – 15 April 1998) Cambodian politician and revolutionary who led the Khmer Rouge

[odkryc]

Saloth Sar, or better known as Pol Pot, was a communist leader of Cambodia. May 19, 1925, he was born to a relatively affluent family of farmers in Prek Sbauv. He moved to Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, in 1934 staying in a Buddhist monastery before attending a French Catholic school. He continued his education in Cambodia until he obtained a scholarship to study radio technology in Paris in 1949. While there, he became absorbed in Marxism, causing him to neglect his studies and lose his scholarship in 1953. After having returned to Cambodia, he joined a underground communist movement. 

Pol Pot had become the leader of the Cambodian Communist Party by 1962 and had escaped the wrath of the then Cambodian leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, by fleeing into the jungle. There, he had formed an armed resistance movement that went by Khmer Rouge and waged a war against Prince Sihanouk’s government. But due to a U.S.-backed military coup, Prince Sihanouk was driven out of his position in 1970. Resentful, the Prince retaliated by joining the Khmer Rouge, opposing the new military government. The U.S. invasion caused economic and military destabilisation, resulting in a surge of popular support for Pol Pot. After the U.S. withdrew its troops in 1975, Pol Pot took advantage of Cambodia’s poor state and took control.

Partially inspired by Mao Zedong, Pol Pot began an experiment to create an agrarian utopia. He was going to “purify” Cambodia by extinguishing religion, capitalism, city life, and all foreign influences and replace it with an extreme form of peasant communism. All embassies were closed, any foreign assistance was refused, he banned foreign languages, TV stations and newspapers were shut down, radios and bikes were confiscated, and a restriction was placed on phone usage and mail. Money became taboo, businesses were closed, religion was banned. He halted education and eliminated health care. He completely cut off Cambodia from the outside world.

Citizens were forced to evacuate into the countryside. Around 20,000 were killed by gunfire on the way. They were forced into slave labour in his “killing fields” and were put on a diet of one tin of rice every two days. Soon, they began dying from malnutrition, disease, and being overworked. They had to work 18 hours a day, starting at 4 am and ending at 10 pm under the supervision of Khmer Rouge soldiers that would kill anyone for the slightest infraction.

Pol Pot would sometimes conduct purges,meant to eliminate the remnants of the way society used to be. Anyone who was educated, the religious, the wealthy, police, teachers, doctors, and former government officials were all killed along with anyone who was suspected to be disloyal to Pol Pot.

After Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia on December 25, 1978, Pol Pot retreated to Thailand along with however many of his Khmer Rouge army remained. Over the next 17 years, he launched a guerrila war against the Cambodian government, eventually losing control over the Khmer Rouge after a series of internal power struggles.

[goldpeninsula]

Vietnamese troops faced little resistance when they entered Cambodia's capital on January 7th, 1979.

A powerful force of 150,000 Vietnamese troops and 15,000 Cambodian exiles, with tanks and air support, crossed the border into Cambodia on Christmas Day in 1978, swept all opposition aside and took the capital, Phnom Penh, two weeks later. The once thriving city had been almost emptied of its population by the Khmer Rouge regime, which disliked cities and whose leaders now fled, along with most of the senior military officers. There were perhaps 40,000 people in Phnom Penh who had been left to fend for themselves. There were no cars and no traffic and only the buzzing of flies and mosquitoes broke the eerie silence of what has been compared to a movie set without actors. Bits of paper and old money were blowing about in the gutters. The Khmer Rouge had done away with money, which it also disapproved of. There was a repulsive stench from the drains because the city’s water supply was not working.

Hostilities with the Vietnamese had been going on ever since the communist Khmer Rouge had seized control of what they rechristened Democratic Kampuchea in 1975. Under ‘Brother Number One’ – one of history’s most vicious tyrants, the plump, charming, ever-beaming Pol Pot as he called himself – in four years they killed anything up to two million Cambodians or perhaps one in four of the population, who were executed or starved or worked to death to create a new ‘nation of workers and peasants’, closed off against the outside world.

Convinced that the tide of history was with them, the Khmer Rouge was bent on destroying capitalism and modern culture. Educated people were practically wiped out and the few doctors who survived were only allowed to prescribe herbs and roots. Anyone known to speak French was executed and so was anyone who wore spectacles. Thousands of city-dwellers were driven on forced marches out into the countryside to create collective farms. Buddhist temples and Christian churches were destroyed, cars and medical equipment and other products of foreign technology were smashed.

Pol Pot and the other Khmer Rouge leaders believed that once the Vietnamese tried to occupy the rest of the country, they would be an easy target for guerrilla warfare and would soon have to withdraw. ‘Once they are all within our borders,’ Pol Pot said, ‘we will cut them up into little pieces.’ He was wrong. The Vietnamese set up a puppet government in Phnom Penh and their army did not leave Cambodia until 1989. The Khmer Rouge kept up a guerrilla campaign from a base on the Thai border. Pol Pot was eventually deposed by his colleagues in 1997 and held under house arrest until his death the following year. There were suspicions that he had been poisoned.

[mitsunari]

The Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. As the leader of the Communist Party, Saloth Sar was the designated leader of the new regime. He took the name "brother number one" and declared his nom de guerre Pol Pot. This has generally supposed to derive from Politique potentielle, the French equivalent of a phrase supposedly coined for him by the Chinese leadership. An alternative version of the origin of Pol Pot's name is from Philip Short, who states that Saloth Sar announced that he was adopting the name in July 1970 and suspects that it is derived from pol: “the Pols were royal slaves, an aboriginal people,” and that “Pot” was simply a “euphonic monosyllable” that he liked.

A new constitution was adopted on January 5, 1976, officially altering the country's name to "Democratic Kampuchea." The newly established Representative Assembly held its first plenary meeting on April 11 – 13, electing a new government with Pol Pot as prime minister. His predecessor, Khieu Samphan was instead given the position of head of state as President of the State Presidium. Prince Sihanouk was given no role in the government and was placed under detention.

Immediately after the fall of Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge began to implement their concept of Year Zero and ordered the complete evacuation of Phnom Penh and all other recently captured major towns and cities. Those leaving were told that the evacuation was due to the threat of severe American bombing and it would last for no more than a few days.

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge had been evacuating captured urban areas for many years, but the evacuation of Phnom Penh was unique in scale. The first operations to evacuate urban areas occurred in 1968 in the Ratanakiri area and were aimed at moving people deeper into Khmer Rouge territory to better control them. From 1971–1973, the motivation changed. Pol Pot and the other senior leaders were frustrated that urban Cambodians were retaining old habits of trade and business. When all other methods had failed, evacuation to the countryside was adopted to solve the problem.

In 1976, people were reclassified as full-rights (base) people, candidates and depositees – so called because they included most of the new people who had been deposited from the cities into the communes. Depositees were marked for destruction. Their rations were reduced to two bowls of rice soup, or "p'baw" per day. This led to widespread starvation. "New people" were allegedly given no place in the elections taking place on March 20, 1976, despite the fact the constitution was said to have established universal suffrage for all Cambodians over age 18.

[okolivertrask]