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By November 1978, when Vietnam invaded and put an end to the Khmer Rouge’s excesses, at least 1.25 million and as many as 3 million Cambodians had died as a result of Khmer Rouge action; Cambodia’s population had been 7.5 million.
By January 1979, 1.5 to 2 million people had died due to the Khmer Rouge's policies, including 200,000–300,000 Chinese Cambodians, 90,000–500,000 Cambodian Cham (who are mostly Muslim), and 20,000 Vietnamese Cambodians.
- Pol Pot
- Kampuchea
- Cambodian Genocide
- The End of Pol Pot
- Sources
Although Pol Potand the Khmer Rouge didn’t come to power until the mid-1970s, the roots of their takeover can be traced to the 1960s, when a communist insurgency first became active in Cambodia, which was then ruled by a monarch. Throughout the 1960s, the Khmer Rouge operated as the armed wing of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, the name the party...
As a leader of the Khmer Rouge during its days as an insurgent movement, Pol Pot came to admire the tribes in Cambodia’s rural northeast. These tribes were self-sufficient and lived on the goods they produced through subsistence farming. The tribes, he felt, were like communes in that they worked together, shared in the spoils of their labor and we...
Workers on the farm collectives established by Pol Pot soon began suffering from the effects of overwork and lack of food. Hundreds of thousands died from disease, starvation or damage to their bodies sustained during back-breaking work or abuse from the ruthless Khmer Rouge guards overseeing the camps. Pol Pot’s regime also executed thousands of p...
The Vietnamese Army invaded Cambodia in 1979 and removed Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge from power, after a series of violent battles on the border between the two countries. Pol Pot had sought to extend his influence into the newly unified Vietnam, but his forces were quickly rebuffed. After the invasion, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge fighters quickly ...
Cambodia’s brutal Khmer Rouge regime. BBC News. The Cambodian Genocide. United to End Genocide. Cambodian Genocide. World Without Genocide. The Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot’s Regime. Mount Holyoke College. Cambodia: The World Factbook. CIA.
Estimates of total deaths resulting from Khmer Rouge policies, including from disease and starvation, range from 1.7 to 2.2 million, out of a 1975 population of roughly 8 million. Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to the subsequent Vietnamese invasion.
In total, over 200,000 people were murdered, and approximately 2.5 million were displaced. Since 2003, the Janjaweed, supported by the government, have continued to target black Africans in the Darfur region, and this persecution continues today, with approximately 2.7 million people in the area having been displaced.
Nearly two million people died under the rule of the fanatical Communist movement, which imposed a ruthless agenda of forced labor, thought control, and mass execution on Cambodia. The purported goal was to transform the Southeast Asian country into a classless agrarian utopia.
Lasting for four years (between 1975 and 1979), the Cambodian Genocide was an explosion of mass violence that saw between 1.5 and 3 million people killed at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, a communist political group. The Khmer Rouge had taken power in the country following the Cambodian Civil War.
