The Year Zero
Many forces were at play for Pol Pot to seize the city of Phnom Penh. There were the political and internal factors and the technical and physical maneuvers of the outside forces that helped Pol Pot to capture the city and later turn Cambodia into a killing field. The different political figures mentioned here are partially responsible for the destruction of the country. The act of genocide caused by the Khmer Rouge was not a genocide against two different ethnic backgrounds. It was the elimination of one group by another group of the same ethnic background. This is called auto-genocide, or self-genocide. It is virtually unique in history.
Pol Pot
The destruction began with Lon Nol, who was the minister of defense and Prime Minister under Prince Sihanouk before 1970. In March 1970, he overthrew the Prince Sihanouk in a military coup. He then later became Prime Minister, Commander in Chief, and Head of State of the Khmer Republic. Prince Sihanouk was exiled to Paris where he campaigned for the people of Cambodia to revolt against Lon Nol. In the meantime, Vietnamese forces moved into Cambodia and when Lon Nol ordered the Vietnamese Communist forces to leave, he was ignored. In May 1970, a joint United States-South Vietnamese invasion of East Cambodia drove the North Vietnamese to the west. After a stroke in 1971, Lon Nol rapidly lost his power. Cambodia became a republic in October 1970 mostly due to United States military assistance. Meanwhile, officers under Lon Nol were selling military equipment to the Communists encircling the capital and also falsifying the number of soldiers under their command. Towards the end of 1970, the government under Lon Nol was controlled only Phnom Penh, Battambang, and a few capitals in the provinces. The east of the country was rapidly falling under Communist control.
In 1975, the Communists blocked all approaches to Phnom Penh, which resulted in the United States being unable to deliver aid and the city falling on April 17, 1975. The Khmer Rouge was basically the Communist party. The Khmer Rouge and the Democratic Kampuchea are basically the same meaning. It was called the Khmer Rouge because the French gave them that name since they wore red scarves. Many of the troops that entered the capital were less than fifteen-years-old, dressed in peasant clothes, and extremely quiet and cold. Lon Nol had already fled the country with a million dollars in March. A new Communist regime controlled Cambodia, which claimed that, "Over two thousand years of Cambodian history was finished." This regime abolished money, markets, education, religion, books, private property, diverse clothing styles and most importantly of all, the regime abolished freedom. Under Pol Pot and his colleagues, the Communist Party of Kampuchea hid its existence from foreigners and ordered everyone out from cities and towns to grow rice for security reasons and in order to avert food shortages. Food shortages were always the issue, as many starve to death and were malnourished.
The brain behind the Communist Party of Kampuchea (sometimes referred to as Democratic Kampuchea) was Pol Pot. Pol Pot, formally known as Solath Sar, was the leader the of the Communist Party of Kampuchea in 1963 and also was the Prime Minister of the Democratic Kampuchea. He is referred to as the Brother Number One because in the social order of the communist party, he is the top leader. The leaders below him would also be called brothers, declining in number with the social order. For example, the leader second in importance to Pol Pot would be called Brother Number two. This is similar to how we refer to the leader of the United States as the President and the man below him as the Vice-president.
Educated in France along with other students who later became the leaders of the Cambodian Communist Party, Pol Pot was driven to create a society similar to what China went through during China's Cultural Revolution led by general Mao Zedong. Pol Pot did not gain his control over Cambodia until 1975 when he decided to take over the capital city of Phnom Penh. A factor that contributed to the communist regime to take over the capital city was help from his Vietnamese allies. Other factors were that the country was going through a war with the Communist Vietnamese and that the United States bombing the country was helping to weaken the country. The absences Prince Sihanouk and Lon Nol, the two political figures in Cambodia, also contributed to an easy entry for Pol Pot and his troops. All of these events created a window of opportunity for Pol Pot to exercise his demise on the scarred country. It was on April 17, 1975 that marked the beginning of the end of Cambodia's past. Pol Pot declared that day to be the beginning of the Year Zero. He turned Cambodia's fields into a killing field; the country itself was a mass grave.
The Khmer Rouge soldiers were all different in ages; they range from 10 to 20 years of age. They were the new generation of killers. The Khmer Rouge trained children who were illiterate, poor, uneducated because they were easily influenced. The young cadres were trained to become cold-blooded killers. They were taught to abandon their past, to murder their family and to hate. They also trained to be the next leaders who would transform Cambodia into a socialist state.
Pol Pot abolished any religion so people could not practice any religious
doctrines. He wanted the set back to the time of he Ankgorean period
where there was one ruler king who had slaves to work the land. Everything
that the Khmer Rouge did was done for the Ankgar, which is the organization
(the whole hierarchy Democratic Party). The Khmer Rouge separated the
people into two categories. They were categorized as the "new people"
and the "old people". The new people were the city dwellers;
they had not done any agricultural work or other hard labors. The opposite
was true for the old people; they were the peasants, lower class farmers.
The "new people" were the hope for a "new Khmer state",
anxious to reconstruct a country that had been at war for many years.
They worked the new people harder than the old people because the new
people were those driven from the cities. Those city people or the new
people were not traditionally laborers, so the Khmer Rouge forced them
to work for long hours and in harsh conditions that they were not accustomed
to. The other reason that the new people were forced to work under extreme
conditions is because they were considered "socially unredeemable",
so losing their lives would be no loss. This is the Khmer Rouge Slogan.
As a result of working under harsh conditions and inadequate amounts
of food, an estimate of 2 million people died in the hands of the Khmer
Rouge.