Pol Pot

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1977, Pol Pot told Yugoslav television that he had been born into a "poor, peasant family." By then he was running Democratic Kampuchea, the one-party state that the Khmer Rouge had built across Cambodia. Pol Pot was born Saloth Sâr. He led Cambodia's communist movement from 1963 to 1997, and he served as General Secretary of its party from 1963 to 1981. Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge carried out the Cambodian genocide. An estimated 1.5 to 2 million people died, roughly one quarter of the country's population before it began.

  Pol Pot is widely regarded as one of the most brutal despots in modern world history. Yet the path that led him there raises uncomfortable questions. How did a student who was not academically gifted come to command an entire nation? Where did his ideas come from, and why did many communists say he had strayed from orthodox Marxism-Leninism? Why did powerful governments abroad support his regime? And what happens when a leader sets out to rebuild a society from scratch?

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• 2. Scholarship Boy

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  The village of Prek Sbauv, outside the city of Kampong Thom, is where the future Pol Pot was born. His parents named him Saloth Sâr. The word sâr means white or pale, a reference to his comparatively light skin. Even his birth date is uncertain. French colonial records gave the 25th of May 1928, but the biographer Philip Short argues that he was born in March 1925.

  His family had mixed Chinese and Khmer roots, though they spoke no Chinese and lived as Khmer. His father, Loth, owned 9 hectares of rice land and several draft cattle. Loth's house was one of the largest in the village, and at transplanting and harvest time he hired poorer neighbours to do much of the labour. His mother, Sok Nem, was locally respected as a pious Buddhist. Sâr was the eighth of nine children, and three of them died young.

  When he was six, Sâr and an older brother were sent to Phnom Penh to live with a cousin named Meak. She was a consort of King Sisowath Monivong and later worked as a ballet teacher. Such informal adoptions by wealthier relatives were common at the time. In the capital, Sâr spent 18 months as a novice monk at the Vat Botum Vaddei monastery, where he learned Buddhist teachings and how to read and write Khmer. In summer 1935 he moved in with his brother Suong. Meak paid his tuition at the École Miche, a Roman Catholic primary school whose pupils were mostly the children of French bureaucrats and Catholic Vietnamese.

  He was a modest student. Held back two years, he earned his primary certificate in 1943, at the age of 18. In 1942 he had been chosen as a boarder at the Collège Preah Sihanouk in Kampong Cham, a privileged place in Cambodian society. There he learned the violin, took part in school plays, and spent spare hours on football and basketball. Two of his fellow pupils, Hu Nim and Khieu Samphan, would later serve in his government. In 1945, his college theatre troupe toured the provinces by bus to raise money for a trip to Angkor Wat.

  The setbacks came in 1948. Sâr failed the entry examinations for the upper classes of the Lycée Sisowath, though several friends went on. He enrolled instead to study carpentry at the Ecole Technique in Russey Keo, a drop from academic to vocational schooling that probably came as a shock. His new classmates were not peasants, but they came from a lower class than his old friends. Among them was Ieng Sary, who became a close friend. In summer 1949, Sâr passed his brevet and won one of five scholarships to study at a French engineering school.

  On the 1st of October 1949, he arrived in Paris. He had sailed from Saigon aboard the SS Jamaïque with 21 other selected students, calling at Singapore, Colombo and Djibouti before Marseille. Access to study abroad made them a tiny elite. In January 1950, Sâr enrolled at the École française de radioélectricité to study radio electronics. He lived first in the Indochinese Pavilion of the Cité Universitaire, then on the rue Amyot, and finally in a bedsit on the corner of the rue de Commerce and the rue Letellier.

  Sâr did well in his first year, then failed his end-of-year exams and narrowly passed the retake. In summer 1950, he was one of 18 Cambodian students who joined French counterparts in Yugoslavia, volunteering in a labour battalion that built a motorway near Zagreb. He returned the next year for a camping holiday. He made little attempt to assimilate into French life and was never fully at ease in the language. Still, he came to know French literature well, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a favourite.

  His closest friendships were with Ieng Sary, who had followed him to France, as well as Thiounn Mumm and Keng Vannsak. He joined Vannsak's discussion circle, whose ideologically mixed members debated how to win Cambodian independence. Meanwhile, Ieng Sary and two others founded the Cercle Marxiste, a clandestine group arranged in cells. The cells read Marxist texts and held self-criticism sessions. Sâr's cell met on the rue Lacepède, and his comrades there included Hou Yuon, Sien Ary and Sok Knaol. He helped duplicate the Cercle's newspaper, Reaksmei, which means "The Spark."

  In October 1951, Hou Yuon was elected head of the Khmer Student Association. That tied the association to the leftist Union Nationale des Étudiants de France, and the Cercle Marxiste manipulated the association and its successors for the next 19 years. A few months after the Cercle formed, Sâr and Sary joined the French Communist Party. To many young people, communism seemed to be the future. The Chinese Communist Party had just won its civil war, and the French party drew the votes of around 25% of the French electorate.

  Sâr struggled with Karl Marx. He later said he "didn't really understand" the denser texts. He grew familiar instead with Joseph Stalin's history of the Soviet party and with Mao's On New Democracy, which outlined a revolution for colonial and semi-feudal societies. He also read the anarchist Peter Kropotkin's book on the French Revolution, The Great Revolution. From Kropotkin he took three convictions. Intellectuals and peasants must ally. A revolution must be pushed to its conclusion without compromise. Egalitarianism is the foundation of a communist society.

  When King Sihanouk dismissed the government and made himself prime minister, Sâr wrote an article called "Monarchy or Democracy?" It appeared in the student magazine Khmer Nisut under the pseudonym "Khmer daom," meaning "Original Khmer." It spoke warmly of Buddhism and cast monks as an anti-monarchist ally of the peasantry. The Cercle then decided to send someone home to judge which rebel group to back, and Sâr volunteered. Failing his second-year exams two years running, and so losing his scholarship, may have helped his decision. That December he boarded the SS Jamaïque again, this time heading home without a degree.

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• 3. Cassava and Secret Congresses

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  On the 13th of January 1953, Sâr arrived in Saigon, the same day Sihanouk disbanded the Democrat-controlled National Assembly, began ruling by decree and jailed Democratic members of parliament without trial. Cambodia was in a civil war, with atrocities against civilians committed by all sides. Sâr spent several months at the headquarters of Prince Norodom Chantaraingsey, a faction leader, in Trapeng Kroloeung. He then moved to Phnom Penh to meet his fellow Cercle member Ping Say.

  He judged the Khmer Việt Minh the most promising resistance group, because its link to the Việt Minh tied it to the international movement. His comrades in Paris accepted the recommendation. In August 1953, Sâr and Rath Samoeun travelled to Krabao, headquarters of the Việt Minh Eastern Zone, and about 12 other Cercle members followed over the next nine months. The reality was humbling. Vietnamese guerrillas ran the group and filled its ranks, while Khmer recruits got menial work. Sâr was assigned to grow cassava and work in the canteen. He picked up basic Vietnamese and rose to become secretary and aide to Tou Samouth, the Eastern Zone's Secretary.

  Independence arrived without his help. After France refused his requests, Sihanouk called for public resistance in June 1953. Khmer troops deserted the French army in large numbers, and in November Sihanouk declared independence. The last Khmer Việt Minh units left for North Vietnam in October 1954. Sâr stayed behind, trekked through South Vietnam to Prey Veng, and made his way to Phnom Penh. He and other revolutionaries decided to pursue power through elections.

  That hope did not survive 1955. The communists formed a front party, Pracheachon, to contest the vote. Sihanouk feared a Democratic Party government. In March, he abdicated in favour of his father so that he could legally launch his own party, the Sangkum Reastr Niyum. In September, amid widespread intimidation and fraud, the Sangkum won all 91 seats. North Vietnam still urged the Cambodian communists not to restart armed struggle. Hanoi was focused on undermining South Vietnam and was glad that Sihanouk kept his country unaligned.

  Sâr rented a house in Phnom Penh's Boeng Keng Kang area and found work at a private school, the Chamraon Vichea, whose name means "Progressive Knowledge." He taught history, geography, French literature and morals. His pupils, among them the later novelist Soth Polin, called him a good teacher. On the 14th of July 1956, he married Khieu Ponnary, sister of Ieng Sary's wife Thirith, in a Buddhist ceremony. Short says he chose the date to coincide with Bastille Day.

  Behind the classroom, he was becoming the link between the open and secret wings of the movement. All correspondence between the Democratic Party and Pracheachon passed through him, as did most contact with underground elements. Sihanouk's crackdown had halved the movement's membership since the civil war ended. Ties with the North Vietnamese communists faded, and Sâr later called that a good thing because it let the Cambodians develop independently. With Tou Samouth and Nuon Chea, he drafted a programme and statutes for a party allied with the Vietnamese but not subordinate to them.

  The Kampuchean Labour Party was founded at a 1959 conference, and its existence was kept secret from non-members. At a clandestine conference in Phnom Penh in September and October 1960, Samouth became party secretary and Nuon Chea his deputy. Sâr took the third post and Ieng Sary the fourth. Then the state closed in. In January 1962, Sihanouk's security services jailed Pracheachon's leaders and left the party almost lifeless. In July, Samouth was arrested, tortured and killed, which opened a path for Sâr.

  In February 1962, student protests turned into riots. Sihanouk produced a list of 34 left-leaning Cambodians and demanded that they meet him. Sâr was on it and refused. He and Ieng Sary slipped out of Phnom Penh to a Viet Cong encampment near Thboung Khmum, in the jungle along the border with South Vietnam. The historian David Chandler wrote that "from this point on he was a full-time revolutionary." In February 1963, at a party conference held in a central Phnom Penh apartment, Sâr was elected party secretary.

  In early 1964, he set up his own camp, Office 100, on the South Vietnamese side of the border. The party resolved to stress its independence from Vietnamese control and to endorse armed struggle against Sihanouk. In January 1965, the Central Committee denounced Nikita Khrushchev's "peaceful transition" to socialism and called him a revisionist. Sâr and his comrades wanted an explicitly Cambodian variant of the ideology. They gave the revolutionary role to the rural peasantry rather than the urban proletariat. By 1965, they were refusing membership to the small working class, which they saw as full of "enemy agents." Membership reached 2000.

  In April 1965, Sâr walked the Ho Chi Minh trail to Hanoi, where he met figures including Ho Chi Minh and Lê Duẩn. The North Vietnamese did not want him destabilizing Sihanouk, whose anti-American stance made him a useful ally. In the archives of the Workers' Party of Vietnam, Sâr concluded that the Vietnamese communists were committed to an Indochinese Federation, which in his view clashed with Cambodia's interests. In November 1965 he flew to Beijing. His official host was Deng Xiaoping, but most meetings were with Peng Zhen.

  Chinese officials, including Chen Boda, Zhang Chunqiao and Kang Sheng, shared his low opinion of Khrushchev amid the Sino-Soviet split. They trained him in the dictatorship of the proletariat, class struggle and political purges. He also saw the Cultural Revolution unfolding, which shaped his later policies. He left Beijing in February 1966 and spent four months walking back along the Ho Chi Minh trail to a new Cambodian base at Loc Ninh.

  In October 1966, the leaders renamed the organisation the Communist Party of Kampuchea, a change initially kept secret. Sihanouk began calling its members the "Khmer Rouge," or Red Cambodians, though they never adopted the term. They agreed to move their headquarters to Ratanakiri Province and to prepare every zone for armed struggle. North Vietnam refused their request for weapons. In November 1967, Sâr caught malaria on the way to a new base called Office 102, and he recovered in a Viet Cong medical base near Mount Ngork. By December, the plan was set. War would begin in the North-West Zone and spread, and each zone would often have to operate alone because communication was slow.

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• 4. Rebellion and Evacuation

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  The war began in January 1968 with an attack on the Bay Damran army post, south of Battambang. Further raids targeted police and soldiers and seized weapons. The government responded with scorched-earth policies and aerial bombardment of areas where rebels were active. The army's brutality aided the insurgents, and more than 100,000 villagers joined them as the uprising spread.

  In summer 1968, Sâr moved his base 48 km north to the mountainous area called Naga's Tail, to avoid encroaching government troops. This base, K-5, gave him his own camp, staff and guards, and no outsider could meet him without an escort. He also took over from Sary as Secretary of the North East Zone. In November 1969, he trekked to Hanoi to ask for direct military help and was refused. In January 1970, he flew to Beijing, where his wife began showing the first signs of the chronic paranoid schizophrenia later diagnosed.

  In March 1970, while Sâr was in Beijing, parliamentarians led by Lon Nol deposed Sihanouk, who was abroad. Sihanouk also flew to Beijing. There the Chinese and North Vietnamese Communist Parties urged him to ally with the Khmer Rouge. On the advice of Zhou Enlai, Sâr agreed to the alliance as well, though his dominant role in the party was hidden from the prince. Sihanouk formed a government-in-exile and launched the National United Front of Kampuchea. His backing greatly helped recruitment, and many of the new fighters were apolitical peasants who fought for the king, not for communism.

  The war also drew in foreign armies. North Vietnamese troops, working with the Viet Cong, invaded Cambodia to attack Lon Nol's forces, and South Vietnam and the United States sent troops to bolster his government. The United States dropped three times as many bombs on Cambodia as it had on Japan during the Second World War. The targets were Viet Cong and Khmer Rouge camps, but the bombing mostly harmed civilians. It fed recruitment. The Khmer Rouge had an estimated 12,000 regular soldiers at the end of 1970 and four times as many by 1972.

  In July 1970, Sâr started calling himself "Pol," a name he later lengthened to "Pol Pot." In September, a Standing Committee meeting issued a resolution on "independence-mastery," the principle that Cambodia must be self-reliant and free of other countries. Through 1971 and 1972, most fighting against Lon Nol was still carried out by Vietnamese or by Cambodians under Vietnamese control. Pol Pot used the time to build a regular Khmer Rouge army and administration. Membership narrowed to "poor peasants." Students and "middle peasants" were excluded. At the Third Congress, with around 60 delegates, he was confirmed as Secretary of the Central Committee and Chairman of its Military Commission.

  In early 1972, Pol Pot made his first tour of the "liberated zones." There, corruption was stamped out, gambling was banned, and alcohol and extramarital affairs were discouraged. By the end of 1972, every family in these areas held an equal amount of land. From May 1972, people under Khmer Rouge control were ordered to dress like poor peasants, in black clothes, red-and-white krama scarves and sandals cut from car tyres. The rule fell first on the Cham minority. Pol Pot dressed this way too. Party members attended frequent "lifestyle meetings" of criticism and self-criticism, which created constant suspicion. Pol Pot and Nuon Chea ran such sessions but were exempt from criticism themselves.

  In May 1973, Pol Pot ordered the collectivisation of villages in Khmer Rouge territory. The aim was both ideological and practical, since it gave the group control over the food supply. Many villagers killed their livestock rather than hand it over. About 60,000 people fled Khmer Rouge areas over the next six months. In July, after the North Vietnamese briefly cut the flow of arms, the Central Committee decided to treat them as "a friend with a conflict." Pol Pot had many Khmer Rouge who had spent time in North Vietnam interned, and most were later executed.

  In summer 1973, the Khmer Rouge made its first major assault on Phnom Penh and was driven back with heavy losses. It later began shelling the city. In September 1974, a Central Committee meeting at Meakk, in Prek Kok commune, decided to expel the population of every Cambodian city to the villages. The leaders thought this was needed to dismantle capitalism, which they linked with urban culture.

  The troops defending Phnom Penh began discussing surrender in 1975, and the Khmer Rouge entered the city on the 17th of April. Soldiers executed between 700 and 800 senior government, military and police figures. Lon Nol had fled into exile in the United States. The Khmer Rouge announced that the population must leave to escape an imminent American bombing raid, and falsely promised that people could return in three days. More than 2.5 million people were pushed out with little preparation, including 15,000 to 20,000 taken from hospitals. Checkpoints along the roads stripped marchers of their belongings. The march fell in the hottest month of the year, and an estimated 20,000 people died along the route.

  The Khmer Rouge declared that April 17 marked "Year Zero," after which everything before had to be purged. For its leaders, emptying the capital demolished capitalism, Sihanouk's power base and the CIA's spy network all at once. It also drove the urban population toward farm work. Pol Pot slipped into the empty city only three days later.

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• 5. A Country Without Wages

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  On the 20th of April 1975, Pol Pot secretly entered the abandoned capital and based himself with other leaders in the railway station, which was easy to defend. In early May they moved to the former Finance Ministry. At a meeting in the Silver Pagoda, they agreed that raising farm output came first. Pol Pot declared that "agriculture is key both to nation-building and to national defence." He feared that without swift development, Cambodia would again fall under Vietnamese domination. The targets were 70 to 80% farm mechanisation in five to ten years and a modern industrial base in fifteen to twenty.

  The Khmer Rouge wanted a self-sufficient agricultural state and regarded foreign aid as pernicious. Even so, China supplied substantial food aid that was never publicly acknowledged, and Ieng Sary negotiated 13,300 tons of Chinese weaponry in Beijing. The Khmer Rouge also announced that it would allow no foreign military bases on Cambodian soil. That threatened Vietnam, which still had 20,000 troops in the country. After clashes over Wai Island, Pol Pot, Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary travelled secretly to Hanoi in May and proposed a Friendship Treaty, which eased tensions in the short term.

  Pol Pot then went on to Beijing, again in secret, and met Mao and Deng. Mao warned the younger man against copying China or any other country and advised him to avoid repeating the drastic measures the Khmer Rouge had imposed earlier. In China, Pol Pot also received treatment for malaria and stomach ailments. He then visited Kim Il Sung in North Korea and returned in mid-July. His wife's schizophrenia had worsened, and she was sent to live in a house in Boeung Keng Kâng. Pol Pot took her old family home on the rue Docteur Hahn as a residence, and later a villa in the south of the city.

  To look legitimate, Pol Pot organised a parliamentary election with only one candidate in every constituency except Phnom Penh. The parliament met for just three hours. In April 1975, a special National Congress made Sihanouk nominal head of state, and in September he was allowed home. He addressed the United Nations General Assembly in October. Sihanouk grew uneasy, and in March 1976 he resigned. Pol Pot repeatedly tried to change his mind, but without success. Sihanouk asked to travel to China for medical treatment and was refused. He was kept in a palace stocked well enough for a luxurious life through the Khmer Rouge years.

  In January 1976, a new constitution renamed the country "Democratic Kampuchea." It asserted state ownership of the means of production, declared men and women equal and made work a duty. Pol Pot, who became prime minister, took the public name "Pol Pot." Since nobody in the country knew who this was, a fictitious biography was supplied. Nuon Chea became President of the Standing Committee of the National Assembly, and Khieu Samphan became head of state. The parliament elected the year before never met again after 1976. Pol Pot called the new state "a precious model for humanity."

  The state itself stayed hidden. In September 1976, he revealed that the secretive "Angkar," or "Organization," that held supreme power was a Marxist-Leninist body. A year later, at a rally in the Olympic Stadium, he revealed that Angkar was a pseudonym for the party. That September 1976, he was also announced as having stepped down as prime minister in favour of Nuon Chea, but he remained in charge and returned to the post in October. The move may have distracted Vietnam while he purged people suspected of Vietnamese sympathies. In 1977, Ieng Sary said, "We are not communists... we are revolutionaries."

  A new currency had been printed in China during the civil war, but the Khmer Rouge decided not to use it. Money, they agreed in September 1975, would breed corruption. So Democratic Kampuchea had no wages. People worked at the party's command without pay, and refusal brought punishment, sometimes execution. Short called Pol Pot's Cambodia a "slave state." Farmers were told to deliver three tons of unmilled rice per hectare, more than the previous average yield.

  Cambodians in rural co-operatives, the vast majority of the population, were sorted into full-rights members, candidates and depositees. In practice the key divide ran between "base" people and "new" people, and the new people were usually treated harshly. Pol Pot did not intend to exterminate them. He wanted the population to double or triple, reaching 15 to 20 million within a decade. Militia in the villages nonetheless killed those they called "bad elements," saying "to keep you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss." The bodies were often buried in the fields as fertiliser.

  Daily life was regimented. A ten-day week with one day off was modelled on the one used after the French Revolution. Loudspeakers and radios broadcast set phrases about hard work and loving Cambodia. People were encouraged to say "we" instead of "I." Sport was prohibited, and the only permitted reading was government material such as the newspaper Padevat, meaning "Revolution." Travel required local permission. Villages were grouped into co-operatives of 500 to 1000 families, with communal kitchens, and foraging or hunting for extra food was banned as individualistic. From the summer of 1976, children over seven lived with Khmer Rouge instructors instead of their parents.

  The country was also renamed in language. The people were to be called "Kampuchean," not "Khmer," to avoid ethnic specificity. Kampuchean was the only legal language, the Sino-Khmer minority was banned from speaking Chinese, and the Cham were pressed to assimilate. Large irrigation projects were launched, including a huge dam in the Eastern Zone, but many failed because the workers lacked technical skill. Meanwhile, party members ate better, and Central Committee members could receive medical treatment in China. Fearing criticism, cadres falsely claimed they had met food quotas. By the end of 1976, Pol Pot admitted shortages in three quarters of the country.

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• 6. Purges and S-21

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  Buddhist monks were treated as social parasites and designated a "special class" under the Khmer Rouge's policy of state atheism. Within a year of the victory, the monks were set to manual labour in the co-operatives and on irrigation projects. The regime was iconoclastic, yet many historical monuments were left undamaged. Like earlier governments, it treated the historic state of Angkor as a key point of reference.

  Opposition appeared in scattered forms. The Western Zone chief Koh Kong and his followers launched small attacks along the Thai border, and there were several village rebellions among the Cham. In February 1976, explosions at Siem Reap destroyed a munitions depot. Pol Pot suspected senior military figures and had several officers arrested, though he could not prove who was responsible. In September 1976, party members were arrested and accused of conspiring with Vietnam. The arrests grew over the following months.

  The government invented stories of assassination attempts to justify turning on its own party. Accused members were labelled spies for the CIA, the Soviet KGB or the Vietnamese. They were pressed to confess, often after torture or its threat, and the confessions were read at party meetings. Trusted cadres were sent into the zones to start further purges. The scale grew quickly, as did the machinery for it.

  The Khmer Rouge turned a disused secondary school in Phnom Penh's Tuol Sleng district into a security prison known as S-21. It was placed under the defence minister, Son Sen. About 400 people were sent there in the first half of 1976 and nearer to 1,000 in the second half. By spring 1977, 1,000 arrived each month. Between 15,000 and 20,000 people were killed at S-21 over the Khmer Rouge years, about a dozen of them Westerners. Pol Pot never visited the prison.

  From late 1976, and especially in mid-1977, violence rose across the country, most sharply in villages. Most rural killings were carried out by young cadres who believed they were enforcing the government's will. Peasant cadres tortured and killed neighbours they disliked. The Central Command knew of such practices and did nothing to stop them. The brutality and poor food bred disillusionment even among the Khmer Rouge's core supporters, and growing numbers tried to flee to Thailand and Vietnam.

  In autumn 1977, Pol Pot declared the purges at an end. By the party's own figures, between 4,000 and 5,000 party members had been liquidated as "enemy agents" or "bad elements" by August 1977. The pause was short. In 1978, a second purge struck, and tens of thousands of Cambodians were accused of being Vietnamese sympathisers and killed. The remaining party members who had spent time in Hanoi were killed, along with their children. In January 1978, Pol Pot gave his colleagues a slogan: "Purify the Party! Purify the army! Purify the cadres!"

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• 7. Allies and Enemies

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  When Vietnam was unified in July 1976, Cambodia's government sent a message of congratulations. In private, relations were souring. On the first anniversary of the Khmer Rouge victory, Khieu Samphan called the Vietnamese imperialists. In May 1976, talks to draw a formal border between the two countries failed. Having turned away from both the Western states and the Soviet Union, the Khmer Rouge made China its main partner. As Vietnam leaned toward Moscow, China saw Pol Pot's government as a bulwark against Vietnamese influence in Indochina.

  Mao pledged $1 billion in military and economic aid, including an immediate $20 million grant. Many thousands of Chinese advisors and technicians arrived to work on projects such as the Kampong Chhnang military airport. Still, the partnership was marked by mutual suspicion, and China had little influence on domestic policy. It had more on foreign policy, pushing Cambodia toward rapprochement with Thailand and contact with the United States to counter Vietnam. The historian Peter Maguire writes that the United States "gave $85 million to the Khmer Rouge between 1980 and 1986." The U.S. government denies this.

  Mao died in September 1976, and Cambodia declared an official period of mourning. In November, Pol Pot travelled secretly to Beijing to keep the alliance alive after the arrest of the Gang of Four, and he was taken on a tour of sites linked to Mao. Inside Phnom Penh, only China was allowed to keep its old embassy. All other diplomats were confined to quarters on the Boulevard Monivong, a barricaded street where they could not leave without escorts. Their food came through the only shop left open in the country.

  Pol Pot also saw the Khmer Rouge as a model for other revolutionaries. He courted Marxist leaders from Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, and let Thai Marxists build bases along the Thai border. In November 1977, Burma's Ne Win became the first foreign head of government to visit, followed soon after by Romania's Nicolae Ceaușescu.

  At home, the war with Vietnam was approaching. In December 1976, the Central Committee told the country to ready itself for conflict, since Pol Pot believed Vietnam was bent on expansion. On the 30th of April 1977, Cambodian units backed by artillery entered Vietnam and attacked villages, killing several hundred civilians. Vietnam sent its air force against border positions. In September, two Eastern Zone divisions raided the Tay Ninh area and slaughtered villagers. Pol Pot flew to Beijing and then North Korea, where Kim Il Sung spoke against Vietnam.

  In December 1977, Vietnam sent 50,000 troops across a 100-mile stretch of border, pushing 12 miles into Cambodia. Cambodia broke off diplomatic relations. The invaders were back in Vietnam by the 6th of January 1978, and Pol Pot ordered the army to strike first in future. Raids on Vietnamese villages followed in January and February. The Vietnamese Politburo concluded that it must remove Pol Pot before the Cambodian military grew stronger, and it opened training camps for Cambodian refugees in southern Vietnam.

  Plans were drawn up for a personality cult around Pol Pot, based on Chinese and North Korean models, to unify the population in wartime. Large photographs began to appear in communal dining halls, and oil paintings and busts were produced. The cult was never fully carried out. The Eastern Zone's failure to repel the Vietnamese made him suspicious of its loyalty. He ordered a purge, and over 400 cadres from the area were sent to S-21. Troops there began to rebel, knowing what awaited them.

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• 8. Aftermath and Arithmetic

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  In December 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia. Within two weeks its forces held most of the country, and a new Cambodian government replaced the Khmer Rouge, which was pushed back to the rural west. By January 1979, Pol Pot and his movement were toppled. Surviving members retreated to jungles near the Thai border, from where they kept fighting and raiding. Vietnamese soldiers hunted the weakened group until their withdrawal in 1989.

  How many died under his rule is a matter of careful, contested estimation. The historian Ben Kiernan estimates that 1.671 million to 1.871 million Cambodians died because of Khmer Rouge policy, between 21% and 24% of the 1975 population. The French demographer Marek Sliwinski calculated slightly under 2 million unnatural deaths from a population of 7.8 million. His figures showed that 33.5% of Cambodian men died under the Khmer Rouge, compared with 15.7% of women.

  A 2001 academic source says the most widely accepted estimates of excess deaths run from 1.5 million to 2 million, though figures as low as 1 million and as high as 3 million have been cited. Conventional estimates of deaths by execution ranged from 500,000 to 1 million. A 2013 source, citing research from 2009, suggests executions may account for as much as 60% of the total. That research counted 23,745 mass graves holding approximately 1.3 million suspected victims of execution. Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia called estimates over a million "plausible," noting that its methods are more likely to undercount bodies than overcount them.

  The demographer Patrick Heuveline estimated that between 1.17 million and 3.42 million Cambodians died unnatural deaths from 1970 to 1979. Between 150,000 and 300,000 of those occurred during the civil war. His central estimate is 2.52 million excess deaths, of which 1.4 million were the direct result of violence. The successor regime, the People's Republic of Kampuchea, promoted a figure of 3.3 million. This is generally considered an exaggeration, partly because its authorities added the victims found in partly exhumed mass graves to the survey results, double-counting some. An estimated 300,000 Cambodians starved to death between 1979 and 1980, largely from the after-effects of Khmer Rouge policies.

  The world's response had been divided. Pol Pot rose at the high point of the communist movement's strength and proved divisive within it. Many claimed he deviated from orthodox Marxism-Leninism, yet China and the United States supported his government as a bulwark against Soviet influence in Southeast Asia during the Sino-Soviet split. Internationally, he has since been widely denounced as a totalitarian dictator guilty of crimes against humanity.

  In his last years, his health declined and he stepped back from many roles in the movement. In 1998, the Khmer Rouge commander Ta Mok placed him under house arrest. Pol Pot died shortly afterward, on the 15th of April 1998.

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