Pure communism half a sweat. Pol Pot: the bloodiest Marxist in history. Rise of the Khmer Rouge

“You talk about me like that, as if I were some kind of Pol Pot,” the heroine of Lyudmila Gurchenko said offendedly in one popular Russian comedy. 1970s. However, this name in those years thundered all over the world. In a little less than 4 years of his reign, more than 3,370,000 people were exterminated in Cambodia.

Common noun

In just a few years, the leader of the Khmer Rouge movement has become on a par with the bloodiest dictators in human history, earning the title of "Asiatic Hitler".

Little is known about the childhood of the Cambodian dictator, primarily because Pol Pot himself tried not to make this information public. Even the date of his birth is different. According to one version, he was born on May 19, 1925 in the village of Preksbauw, into a peasant family. The eighth child of the peasant Pek Salot and his wife Sok Nem was born Salot Sar.

The Pol Pot family, although they were peasants, did not live in poverty. The cousin of the future dictator served at the royal court and was even the concubine of the crown prince. Pol Pot's older brother served at the royal court, and his sister danced in the royal ballet.

Salot Sarah himself was sent at the age of nine to relatives in Phnom Penh. After a few months spent in a Buddhist monastery as an acolyte, the boy entered a Catholic elementary school, after which he continued his studies at Norodom Sihanouk College, and then at the Phnom Penh Technical School.

To Marxists by royal grant

In 1949, Salot Sar received a government scholarship for higher education in France and went to Paris, where he began to study radio electronics.

The post-war period was marked by the rapid growth in the popularity of left-wing parties and national liberation movements. In Paris, Cambodian students created a Marxist circle, of which Saloth Sar became a member.

In 1952, Saloth Sar, under the pseudonym Khmer Daom, published his first political article, "Monarchy or Democracy?", in a journal of Cambodian students in France. At the same time, the student joined the French Communist Party.

Passion for politics relegated his studies to the background, and in the same year Salot Sarah was expelled from the university, after which he returned to his homeland.

In Cambodia, he settled with his older brother, began to seek connections with representatives of the Communist Party of Indochina, and soon attracted the attention of one of its coordinators in Cambodia, Pham Van Ba. Salot Sarah was recruited for party work.

"The Politics of the Possible"

Pham Van Ba quite clearly described the new comrade-in-arms: "a young man of average ability, but with ambition and a thirst for power." The ambitions and love of power of Salot Sara turned out to be much greater than his comrades in the fight had expected.

Saloth Sar took on a new pseudonym - Pol Pot, which is an abbreviation for the French "politique potentielle" - "the politics of the possible." Under this pseudonym, he was destined to go down in world history.

Cambodia gained independence from France in 1953. The ruler of the kingdom was Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who was very popular and oriented towards China. In the war that broke out in Vietnam, Cambodia formally adhered to neutrality, but the units of North Vietnam and South Vietnamese partisans quite actively used the territory of the kingdom to locate their bases and warehouses. The Cambodian authorities preferred to turn a blind eye to this.

During this period, the Cambodian communists acted quite freely in the country, and by 1963 Salot Sar had gone from a novice to the party's general secretary.

By that time, there was a serious split in the communist movement in Asia, associated with a sharp deterioration in relations between the USSR and China. The Communist Party of Cambodia made a bet on Beijing, focusing on the policy of Comrade Mao Zedong.

Leader of the Khmer Rouge

Prince Norodom Sihanouk saw the growing influence of the Cambodian communists as a threat to his own power and began to change politics, shifting from China to the United States.

In 1967, a peasant uprising broke out in the Cambodian province of Battambang, which was brutally suppressed by government troops and mobilized citizens.

After that, the Cambodian communists launch a guerrilla war against the Sihanouk government. The detachments of the so-called "Khmer Rouge" were formed for the most part from illiterate and illiterate young peasants, whom Pol Pot made his main support.

Very quickly, the ideology of Pol Pot began to move away not only from Marxism-Leninism, but even from Maoism. Himself a native of a peasant family, the leader of the Khmer Rouge formulated a much simpler program for his illiterate supporters - the path to a happy life lies through the rejection of modern Western values, through the destruction of cities that are carriers of a pernicious infection, and "re-education of their inhabitants."

Even Pol Pot's associates had no idea where such a program would lead their leader...

In 1970, the Americans contributed to the strengthening of the positions of the Khmer Rouge. Considering that Prince Sihanouk, who had reoriented himself to the United States, was not a reliable enough ally in the fight against the Vietnamese communists, Washington organized a coup, as a result of which Prime Minister Lon Nol came to power with firm pro-American views.

Lon Nol demanded that North Vietnam curtail all military activities in Cambodia, threatening to use force otherwise. The North Vietnamese in response hit first, so much so that they almost occupied Phnom Penh. To save his protege, US President Richard Nixon sent American units to Cambodia. The Lon Nol regime eventually held out, but an unprecedented wave of anti-Americanism arose in the country, and the ranks of the Khmer Rouge began to grow by leaps and bounds.

The victory of the guerrilla army

The civil war in Cambodia flared up with renewed vigor. The Lon Nol regime was not popular and was kept only on American bayonets, Prince Sihanouk was deprived of real power and was in exile, and Pol Pot continued to gain strength.

By 1973, when the United States, having decided to put an end to the Vietnam War, refused to continue to provide military support to the Lon Nol regime, the Khmer Rouge already controlled most of the country's territory. Pol Pot managed already without comrades-in-arms in the Communist Party, relegated to the background. It was much easier for him not with educated experts on Marxism, but with illiterate fighters who believed only in Pol Pot and the Kalashnikov assault rifle.

In January 1975, the Khmer Rouge launched a decisive offensive against Phnom Penh. The troops loyal to Lon Nol could not withstand the blow of the 70,000-strong partisan army. In early April, US Marines began evacuating US citizens, as well as high-ranking representatives of the pro-American regime, from the country. On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh.

"The city is the abode of vice"

Cambodia was renamed Kampuchea, but this was the most harmless of Pol Pot's reforms. “The city is the abode of vice; You can change people, but not cities. Working hard to uproot the jungle and grow rice, a person will finally understand the true meaning of life, ”such was the main thesis of the Khmer Rouge leader who came to power.

The city of Phnom Penh with a population of two and a half million people was decided to be evicted within three days. All its inhabitants, young and old, were sent to be peasants. No complaints about health, lack of skills, and the like were accepted. Following Phnom Penh, the same fate befell other cities of Kampuchea.

Only about 20 thousand people remained in the capital - the military, the administrative apparatus, as well as representatives of the punitive bodies, who undertook to identify and eliminate the dissatisfied.

It was supposed to re-educate not only the inhabitants of the cities, but also those peasants who had been under the rule of Lon Nol for too long. It was decided to simply get rid of those who served the former regime in the army and other state structures.

Pol Pot launched a policy of isolating the country, and Moscow, Washington, and even Beijing, which was Pol Pot's closest ally, had a very vague idea of what was really happening in it. They simply refused to believe in the leaking information about hundreds of thousands of those who were shot, who died during the resettlement from cities and from excessive forced labor.

At the pinnacle of power

During this period, an extremely confused political situation developed in Southeast Asia. The United States, having ended the Vietnam War, set out to improve relations with China, taking advantage of the extremely strained relations between Beijing and Moscow. China, which supported the communists of North and South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, became extremely hostile towards them, because they were guided by Moscow. Pol Pot, who was guided by China, took up arms against Vietnam, despite the fact that until recently the Khmer Rouge considered the Vietnamese as allies in a common struggle.

Pol Pot, abandoning internationalism, relied on nationalism, which was widespread among the Cambodian peasantry. The brutal persecution of ethnic minorities, primarily the Vietnamese, resulted in an armed conflict with a neighboring country.

In 1977, the Khmer Rouge began to penetrate into the adjacent regions of Vietnam, carrying out massacres against the local population. In April 1978, the Khmer Rouge occupied the Vietnamese village of Batyuk, destroying all its inhabitants, young and old. 3,000 people became victims of the massacre.

Pol Pot sold out in earnest. Feeling the support of Beijing behind his back, he not only threatened to defeat Vietnam, but also threatened the entire Warsaw Pact, that is, the Warsaw Treaty Organization headed by the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, his policy forced former comrades-in-arms and previously loyal military units to rebel, considering what was happening in no way justified by bloody madness. The rebellions were crushed ruthlessly, the rebels were executed in the most cruel ways, but their number continued to grow.

Three million victims in less than four years

In December 1978, Vietnam decided that it had had enough. Parts of the Vietnamese army invaded Kampuchea with the aim of overthrowing the Pol Pot regime. The offensive developed rapidly, and already on January 7, 1979, Phnom Penh fell. Power was transferred to the United Front for the National Salvation of Kampuchea, created in December 1978.

China tried to save its ally by invading Vietnam in February 1979. A fierce but short-lived war ended in March with a tactical victory for Vietnam - the Chinese failed to return Pol Pot to power.

The Khmer Rouge, who suffered a serious defeat, retreated to the west of the country, to the Cambodian-Thai border. They were saved from complete defeat by the support of China, Thailand and the United States. Each of these countries pursued its own interests - the Americans, for example, tried to prevent the strengthening of positions in the region of pro-Soviet Vietnam, for the sake of which they preferred to turn a blind eye to the results of the activities of the Pol Pot regime.

And the results were truly impressive. For 3 years 8 months and 20 days, the Khmer Rouge plunged the country into a medieval state. The protocol of the Commission for the Investigation of the Crimes of the Pol Pot Regime of July 25, 1983 stated that between 1975 and 1978, 2,746,105 people died, of which 1,927,061 peasants, 305,417 workers, employees and representatives of other professions, 48,359 representatives national minorities, 25,168 monks, about 100 writers and journalists, and a few foreigners. Another 568,663 people are missing and either died in the jungle or buried in mass graves. The total number of victims is estimated at 3,374,768 people.

In July 1979, the People's Revolutionary Tribunal was organized in Phnom Penh, which tried Khmer Rouge leaders in absentia. On August 19, 1979, the tribunal found Pol Pot and his closest associate Ieng Sari guilty of genocide and sentenced them in absentia to death with confiscation of all property.

The Leader's Last Secrets

For Pol Pot himself, however, this sentence meant nothing. He continued his guerrilla war against the new Kampuchean government by hiding in the jungle. Little was known about the leader of the Khmer Rouge, and many believed that the man whose name had become a household name had long since died.

When processes of national reconciliation began in Kampuchea-Cambodia aimed at ending years of civil war, a new generation of Khmer Rouge leaders tried to push their odious "guru" into the background. There was a split in the movement, and Pol Pot, trying to maintain leadership, again decided to use terror to suppress disloyal elements.

In July 1997, on the orders of Pol Pot, his longtime ally, the former Minister of Defense of Kampuchea Son Sen, was killed. Together with him, 13 members of his family were killed, including young children.

However, this time Pol Pot overestimated his influence. Companions declared him a traitor and held his own trial, sentencing him to life in prison.

The trial of the Khmer Rouge over their own leader caused the last surge of interest in Pol Pot. In 1998, prominent leaders of the movement agreed to lay down their arms and surrender to the new Cambodian authorities.

But Pol Pot was not among them. He died on April 15, 1998. Representatives of the Khmer Rouge said that the former leader's heart failed. There is, however, a version that he was poisoned.

The Cambodian authorities sought the release of the body from the Khmer Rouge in order to make sure that Pol Pot was really dead and to establish all the circumstances of his death, but the corpse was hastily cremated.

The leader of the Khmer Rouge took his last secrets with him ...

The terrible dictatorship of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, which lasted from 1975 to 1979, cost the lives of millions of the country's inhabitants. Until now, the number of victims of the bloody dictator Pol Pot and his revolutionary gangs has not been accurately calculated: according to rough estimates, it ranged from 2 to 3 million people. And today the crimes of the Khmer Rouge horrify humanity.

Having come to power in 1975, Pol Pot declared a "zero year" in the country - the year of the beginning of a new era. The new history had to start from scratch - the rejection of education and the comforts of modern civilization. Cambodians were allowed only one type of labor - work in the fields. All townspeople were expelled from the cities (more than 2 million people were expelled from Phnom Penh in one day) and sent to work in the villages. Those who refused were killed, and even more people died on the way from hunger and disease.

Today, the Tuol Sleng school, which housed the terrible torture prison S-21 during the years of Pol Pot's dictatorship, has become one of the most popular and creepy museums in Phnom Penh. Over the years of its existence, tens of thousands of people have passed through the prison, and only a few survived. People were tortured, seeking confessions to crimes against the state, and when they broke down, they signed the code, they were killed right there, at school, or at nearby training grounds - “killing fields”. There were also children among the prisoners: relatives of the “enemies of the people” received the same punishment as their relatives.

DDT is known as an insecticide that is poisonous to humans. This, the last property, was actively used by the Khmer Rouge during mass executions. Pol Pot's fighters rarely shot "enemies of the people": cartridges were in short supply. People were simply beaten to death with sticks, shovels, hoes. Such executions were carried out en masse, the corpses were dumped into a pit, which, stuffed to the top, was generously filled with DDT - so that the mass graves did not emit poisonous odors, and also to be sure that the unfinished people would still die from poison.

As already mentioned, in order to save cartridges, the Khmer Rouge practiced the most cruel and sadistic types of executions. This also applies to the murders of very young children from families of "traitors", who were killed on an equal basis with adults. The soldiers simply took the child by the legs and smashed his head against a tree. Parents were forced to watch their children die before being executed. This tree on one of the "killing fields" became the place of death of many kids. Today it is a place of memory and mourning.

Pol Pot lived a long time... and without remorse

Pol Pot became one of the sadistic dictators who managed to escape justice. After Vietnamese troops captured Kampuchea in 1979 and overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime, Pol Pot fled the country by helicopter. He showed up in Thailand, where he lived for many years, continuing to be the leader of the Khmer Rouge movement, who transferred their activities abroad. He died only in 1998, at the age of 73. According to the official version, the cause of death was a heart attack, however, according to rumors, Pol Pot was killed by the Khmer Rouge themselves, tired of his many years of dictatorship.

After the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, more than 200 "killing fields" were found - places of mass executions. They found more than 20 thousand mass graves, in which more than a million people were buried. Cambodia is a small country with an area of about 100,000 square kilometers. Thus, there is practically no exaggeration in the statement that under Pol Pot Cambodia turned into one mass grave.

The Khmer Rouge were acknowledged masters of torture. Special torture beds were installed in the S-21 prison - people were chained to them and beaten to a pulp, and sometimes even burned alive. “Vivisections” were also popular, when executioners cut open a living person and removed his internal organs without anesthesia. Slow drowning, electric shocks were considered "ordinary" torture. And those who aroused the hatred of the prison administration were flayed alive by the executioners. In a word, it is impossible to imagine more cruelty than the executioners of Pol Pot demonstrated.

After the overthrow of the dictatorship of Pol Pot, only five of his henchmen were sentenced to criminal punishment. Three of them, including Pol Pot's closest henchmen Nuon Chea and Kiehu Samphan, received life sentences. Tens of thousands of murderers who killed people with hoes were not punished at all.

Bones are a common find.

The 20,000 mass graves in the killing fields were not enough to bury all the victims of the Khmer Rouge regime. According to guides working in museums opened on the site of the former "killing fields", and now, 38 years later, after every rain in the vicinity of the places of mass executions, human bones and the remains of clothes of those whose bodies the executioners did not even manage to rake up appear on the surface of the earth. to a mass grave.

It's hard to imagine, but today's children of Cambodia know nothing about the terrible times of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship! By tacit public agreement, this topic is not taught at school, it is not talked about in families and companies. Thus, children, each of whom has relatives who died in those odes, know nothing about the wave of death and violence that swept their country almost four decades ago.

We have already mentioned that cartridges in the Khmer Rouge army were considered a scarce resource, and they were not supposed to be spent on some enemies of the people. Defenseless civilians were most often slaughtered with hoes: the Khmer Rouge army consisted for the most part of the peasants, and they preferred the familiar tools of agricultural labor. Clubs, sticks, cut pipes - everything was suitable as a murder weapon, and sometimes groups of people were wrapped in barbed wire and let current through them - this saved not only cartridges, but also time.

Before you is Kaing Guek Eav, director of the terrible prison S-21. He personally took part in the torture and murder of 16,000 people. However, after the Khmer Rouge dictatorship was overthrown, he enjoyed life in freedom for about 30 years and was convicted only in 2009, at the age of 68, becoming the fifth henchman of Pol Pot, convicted for his atrocities. Kaing Guek Eak received a life sentence.

Why did Pol Pot stage a terrible genocide of his own people? No, he was not a sick maniac, striving for big blood. Things were even worse: he was an ideological maniac. He was sure that in order to build an ideal society, people must return to their roots, to the beginning of their history, forgetting about all the achievements of civilization and acquired knowledge. And for this good, civilization should simply be destroyed, along with their carriers - scientists, engineers, teachers, as well as ordinary citizens who are accustomed to modern amenities and do not want to give them up.

John Duhurst, Kerry Hamill and Stuart Glass were British, New Zealand and Canadian citizens respectively. They were sailing on a yacht past the coast of Cambodia towards Singapore when they were boarded by a Khmer Rouge ship. Stuart Glass was killed on the spot, while Dewarst and Hamill were sent to prison S-21, where, after much torture, Duhurst confessed to being a CIA spy sent to Cambodia for sabotage. Both Western tourists were executed on one of the "killing fields". In the photo - the brother of Kerry Hamill, after the overthrow of the dictatorship of Pol Pot, visited the terrible prison where his brother died.

Some political analysts argue that little Cambodia has become just part of a larger geopolitical game. Pol Pot called Vietnam his main enemy (and after coming to power, he executed all the Vietnamese who ended up in Cambodia). The United States, just before Pol Pot came to power, left Vietnam and was ready to support any enemy of its former enemies. In turn, the sympathies of the USSR turned out to be on the Vietnamese side - in defiance of America. If not for the enmity between the US and Vietnam, it is quite possible that with the support of the world's political heavyweights, the Khmer Rouge regime would have been overthrown much earlier or would not have reigned in Cambodia at all.

“You talk about me like that, as if I were some kind of Pol Pot,” the heroine said offendedly. Ludmila Gurchenko in one popular Russian comedy.

"Pol Potovshchina", "Pol Potov regime" - these expressions firmly entered the lexicon of Soviet international journalists in the second half of the 1970s. However, this name in those years thundered all over the world.

In just a few years, the leader of the Khmer Rouge movement has become on a par with the bloodiest dictators in human history, earning the title of "Asiatic Hitler".

Little is known about the childhood of the Cambodian dictator, primarily because Pol Pot himself tried not to make this information public. Even the date of his birth is different. According to one version, he was born on May 19, 1925 in the village of Preksbauw, into a peasant family. Eighth child peasant Peck Salot and his wife Juice Nem given a name at birth Saloth Sar.

Village of Prexbauw. Birthplace of Pol Pot. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Albeiro Rodas

To Marxists by royal grant

In 1949, Salot Sar received a government scholarship for higher education in France and went to Paris, where he began to study radio electronics.

Paul Pot. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

Passion for politics relegated his studies to the background, and in the same year Salot Sarah was expelled from the university, after which he returned to his homeland.

In Cambodia, he settled with his older brother, began to look for connections with representatives of the Communist Party of Indochina and soon attracted the attention of one of its coordinators in Cambodia - Pham Wan Ba. Salot Sarah was recruited for party work.

"The Politics of the Possible"

Norodom Sihanouk. Photo: commons.wikimedia.org

Cambodia gained independence from France in 1953. The ruler of the kingdom was Prince Norodom Sihanouk, which was very popular and focused on China. In the war that broke out in Vietnam, Cambodia formally adhered to neutrality, but the units of North Vietnam and South Vietnamese partisans quite actively used the territory of the kingdom to locate their bases and warehouses. The Cambodian authorities preferred to turn a blind eye to this.

During this period, the Cambodian communists acted quite freely in the country, and by 1963 Salot Sar had gone from a novice to the party's general secretary.

By that time, there was a serious split in the communist movement in Asia, associated with a sharp deterioration in relations between the USSR and China. The Communist Party of Cambodia has staked on Beijing, focusing on politics Comrade Mao Zedong.

Leader of the Khmer Rouge

Prince Norodom Sihanouk saw the growing influence of the Cambodian communists as a threat to his own power and began to change politics, shifting from China to the United States.

In 1967, a peasant uprising broke out in the Cambodian province of Battambang, which was brutally suppressed by government troops and mobilized citizens.

Even Pol Pot's associates had no idea where such a program would lead their leader...

Lon Nol. Photo: commons.wikimedia.org

In 1970, the Americans contributed to the strengthening of the positions of the Khmer Rouge. Considering that Prince Sihanouk, who had reoriented himself to the United States, was not a reliable enough ally in the fight against the Vietnamese communists, Washington organized a coup, as a result of which Prime Minister Lon Nol with strong pro-American views.

Lon Nol demanded that North Vietnam curtail all military activities in Cambodia, threatening to use force otherwise. The North Vietnamese in response hit first, so much so that they almost occupied Phnom Penh. To save your henchman, US President Richard Nixon sent American units to Cambodia. The Lon Nol regime eventually held out, but an unprecedented wave of anti-Americanism arose in the country, and the ranks of the Khmer Rouge began to grow by leaps and bounds.

The victory of the guerrilla army

"The city is the abode of vice"

2nd General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea Pol Pot. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

Only about 20 thousand people remained in the capital - the military, the administrative apparatus, as well as representatives of the punitive authorities, who undertook to identify and eliminate the dissatisfied.

At the pinnacle of power

Pol Pot on a Laos postage stamp. 1977 Photo: commons.wikimedia.org

Three million victims in less than four years

China tried to save its ally by invading Vietnam in February 1979. A fierce but short-lived war ended in March with a tactical victory for Vietnam - the Chinese failed to return Pol Pot to power.

Democratic Republic of Kampuchea (Cambodia). Official visit of the party and government delegation of China (November 5-9, 1978). Meeting of Pol Pot and Wang Dongxing. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

In July 1979, the People's Revolutionary Tribunal was organized in Phnom Penh, which tried Khmer Rouge leaders in absentia. On August 19, 1979, the tribunal recognized Pol Pot and his closest associate of Ieng Sari guilty of genocide and sentenced them in absentia to death with confiscation of all property.

Passport of Ieng Sari, one of the most influential figures in the Khmer Rouge regime. During the years of Pol Pot's dictatorship (1975-1979), he served as Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Democratic Kampuchea. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

The Leader's Last Secrets

However, this time Pol Pot overestimated his influence. Companions declared him a traitor and held his own trial, sentencing him to life in prison.

Pol Pot's grave. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

But Pol Pot was not among them. He died on April 15, 1998. Representatives of the Khmer Rouge said that the former leader's heart failed. There is, however, a version that he was poisoned.

The leader of the Khmer Rouge took his last secrets with him ...

In the history of any nation there are periods that I want to cross out, burn out of memory - they brought so much grief and suffering to people, threw back the country in economic and evolutionary development for decades. Such a period can rightly be called the reign of Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.

Childhood and youth Saloth Sarah

Biography Salot Sarah, that's what Pol Pot was actually called, still hides many secrets and unknown moments. However, no matter how the dictator tried to hide his past, some facts from his life became public knowledge.

The future dictator was born on May 19, 1925 in the tiny fishing village of Prexbauw, located on the shores of Lake Tonle Sap in northeastern Cambodia. He was the eighth of nine children in a wealthy ethnic Khmer peasant family.

In childhood, little Sarah, not without the help of rather influential relatives who served at the royal court, was able to get an education in various educational institutions of the country, and later, using a state scholarship, went to continue her studies in France.

In Paris, having become close to other students from the young man, he first became imbued with communist ideology. Together with like-minded people, he created a Marxist circle and joined the French Communist Party.

The beginning of the revolutionary path

However, Salot Sara enters the real struggle for the “bright” ideals of communism after returning from France to Cambodia. Staying in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, the young man soon joins the ranks of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, and ten years later becomes its general secretary.

By this time, the active phase of the struggle between partisans and government troops begins in the country. Salor Sara, together with a group of associates, creates a communist agrarian movement - the Khmer Rouge. The most fanatical supporters of Saloth Sara become the core of the new movement. The combat units consisted mainly of 12-15-year-old ethnic Khmers, representatives of the poorest sections of society.

As a rule, these are orphans who fiercely hate intellectuals and ordinary residents of cities, whom they considered traitors and accomplices of the capitalists.

New Reality - Democratic Kampuchea

In the spring of turbulent 1975, under the roar of a parade of sovereignties taking place around the world, the fact that the Communist Party, headed by Pol Pot, came to power in Cambodia, almost went unnoticed in the press. It is during these April days, according to legend, Salor Sara allegedly dies in battle.

And already in mid-April, after fierce fighting, to the capital Cambodia Pol Pot introduces Khmer Rouge units . The inhabitants of the city joyfully greeted the winners, not yet realizing that from that day on, the life of most of them would turn into a pitch hell.

From the first days after the seizure of power, the communists began to implement their terrible plans. Since the new communist state of Kampuchea, proclaimed by Pol Pot, is an agrarian country, accordingly, the entire population turns into a peasant one.

Within a few days, all the inhabitants of Phnom Penh and other large cities, regardless of age and gender, were forcibly gathered in columns and, under the escort of armed Khmer Rouge detachments, were sent to distant provinces. After the forced evacuation, the population of Phnom Penh decreased from 2.5 million to 20 thousand inhabitants.

In labor concentration camps, according to the plan of Pol Pot, the inhabitants of the cities were to be re-educated by creative labor for the benefit of Communist Kampuchea. However, in essence, millions of people were doomed to a painful death from disease, hunger and cold in labor camps.

Literally from the first days Pol Pot's reign in Cambodia established a brutal dictatorship. He had grandiose plans to turn the once beautiful prosperous country into an agrarian communist paradise, so the new government was not going to stop at the forced eviction of the townspeople.

The Pol Potites methodically destroyed everything that could somehow connect the country with human civilization. By decrees of the party medicine, education, science, commerce, and trade were abolished overnight. Hundreds of hospitals, schools, institutes and laboratories were closed or destroyed across the country.

In a special way, the Pol Potites solved the issue of religion. It was simply declared malicious and cancelled. Temples and mosques began to be used as slaughterhouses and warehouses. The clergy were either executed on the spot or sent to labor camps.

The situation with ethnic minorities was not the best either. The Khmer hegemony was proclaimed in the country, which left no chance for representatives of other peoples to survive. All citizens of non-Khmer nationality were ordered to change their first and last name to Khmer, and in case of refusal, they were expected to suffer a painful death. In a short time, tens of thousands of representatives of various nationalities were executed in the country.

One of the necessary elements for building a successful communist state, according to the dictator, was the total destruction of the intelligentsia.

Intoxicated with impunity, juvenile thugs from the Khmer Rouge detachments organized raids and, without trial or investigation, tortured and executed representatives of the clergy, doctors, engineers, and teachers. Even wearing glasses doomed a person to death, as it was a sign of intelligence.

The new government severed diplomatic ties with all countries, banned telephone and telegraph communications, tightly closed the borders. The country is completely fenced off from the outside world.

Throughout the history of human civilization, there have been many dictatorial regimes. However, it is very difficult to find an analogue of the terrible experiment organized by Pol Pot on his own people in Kampuchea.

But fortunately in 1979, over the country tormented by the bloody dictator, a timid ray of dawn began to dawn. Emboldened by his impunity within the country, Pol Pot began to increasingly remind of the legendary past of Kampuchea, of the Great Angkor Empire, which was located where Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam are now located. He called for the start of a struggle for the revival of the empire "within its former borders."

After numerous border conflicts with Vietnam, the confrontation turned into a full-scale war. The Vietnamese troops, having utterly defeated the Pol Pot detachments, entered Phnom Penh. The bloody regime of the Khmer Rouge fell, and Pol Pot himself fled.

Died 73-year-old Pol Pot in Cambodia never having built his terrible an empire on the bones. But even his death is shrouded in mystery and it is still unclear whether Pol Pot died himself or was poisoned.

Terrible results of the communist experiment

Management results Cambodia Paul Sweat and Reds Khmers are terrifying.

In less than four years, the bloody regime destroyed, according to various sources, from 1.5 to 3 million of its citizens. Hundreds of thousands of children were left orphans.

The once prosperous state has turned into a medieval wasteland. The entire national economy had to be raised from scratch. And irreparable losses among the intelligentsia are felt in the country to this day.

What was the phenomenon of this man? How could he lead millions of fellow citizens, blessing them to commit terrible crimes in the name of a utopian idea? Perhaps due to his fanatical belief in building an ideal communist state, as well as rare asceticism, which was a model for many.

Whatever it was, but it was an ominous period of horror and hopelessness.

Prince of Cambodia.
The tragedy of Cambodia is a consequence of the Vietnam War, which first broke out on the ruins of French colonialism, and then escalated into a conflict with the Americans. Fifty-three thousand Cambodians died on the battlefields.
Prince Norodom Sihanouk, ruler of Cambodia and heir to its religious and cultural traditions, renounced his royal title ten years before the start of the Vietnam War, but remained head of state. He tried to lead the country along the path of neutrality, balancing between warring countries and conflicting ideologies. Sihanouk became king of Cambodia, a French protectorate, back in 1941, but abdicated in 1955. However, then, after free elections, he returned to the leadership of the country as head of state.
During the escalation of the Vietnam War from 1966 to 1969, Sihanouk fell out of favor with Washington's political leadership for not taking decisive action against arms smuggling and the establishment of Vietnamese guerrilla camps in the jungles of Cambodia. However, he was also quite soft in his criticism of the US-led punitive air raids.
On March 18, 1970, while Sihanouk was in Moscow, his prime minister, General Lon Nol, with the support of the White House, staged a coup d'état, returning Cambodia to its ancient name Khmer. The United States recognized the Khmer Republic, but a month later they invaded it. Sihanouk found himself in exile in Beijing. And here the ex-king made a choice, entering into an alliance with the devil himself.

Entry into power.
Pol Pot's real name is Saloth Sar (also known as Tol South and Pol Porth). He was born in the rebellious province of Kampong Thom. Pol Pot, who grew up in a peasant family in the Cambodian province of Kampong Thom and received his primary education in a Buddhist monastery, was a monk for two years, allegedly receiving the science of tolerance and humility there. However, what was actually taught and taught in Buddhist monasteries is well known. These are the techniques of various schools of oriental martial arts, meditation, occultism, etc. Therefore, it is not difficult to guess who instructed the future Pol Pot on the "true path".
Even during the Second World War, Salot Sar joined the Communist Party of Indochina. In the fifties he studied electronics in Paris and, like many students of that time, became involved in the left movement. Here Pol Pot heard - it is still not known whether they met - about another student, Khieu Samphan, whose controversial but imaginative plans for an "agrarian revolution" fueled Pol Pot's great-power ambitions. In Paris, he joined the ranks of the French Communist Party and became close to other Cambodian students who preached Marxism in the interpretation of Maurice Teresa. Returning to his homeland in late 1953 or 1954, Saloth Sar began teaching at a prestigious private lyceum in Phnom Penh. At the turn of the sixties, the communist movement in Cambodia was split into three almost unrelated factions operating in different parts of the country. The smallest, but the most active, was the third faction, which rallied on the basis of hatred for Vietnam. In 1962, Tu Samut, secretary of the Cambodian Communist Party, died under mysterious circumstances. In 1963, Salot Sar was approved as the new party secretary. He became the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the communist guerrillas of Cambodia. Salot Sar left his job at the Lyceum and went into hiding. By the beginning of the 1970s, the Salot Sarah group had seized a number of posts in the highest party apparatus. He destroyed his opponents physically. For these purposes, a secret security department was created in the party, which was personally subordinate to Saloth Sar.
In 1975, the Lon Nol government, despite the support of the Americans, fell under the blows of the Khmer Rouge. American B-52 bombers carpet bombed this tiny country with as many tons of explosives as were dropped on Germany during the last two years of World War II. Vietnamese fighters - the Viet Cong - used the impenetrable jungle of a neighboring country to set up military camps and bases for operations against the Americans. These strongholds were bombed by American planes. The Khmer Rouge not only survived, but also captured Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, on April 23, 1975. By this time, the Salot Sarah group occupied strong, but not sole positions in the leadership of the party. This forced her to move. With his characteristic caution, the head of the Khmer Rouge stepped into the shadows and began to prepare the ground for the final seizure of power. To do this, he resorted to a number of hoaxes. Since April 1975, his name has disappeared from official communications. Many thought he was dead.
On April 14, 1976, the appointment of a new prime minister was announced. His name was Pol Pot. The unknown name caused surprise at home and abroad. It did not occur to anyone, except for a narrow circle of initiates, that Pol Pot was the disappeared Saloth Sar. The difficult situation in which the Pol Pat faction found itself by the autumn of 1976 was exacerbated by the death of Mao Zedong. On September 27, Pol Pot was removed from the post of prime minister, as announced, "for health reasons." Two weeks later, Pol Pot became prime minister again. New Chinese leaders helped him. The dictator and his henchmen set out to destroy everyone they considered potentially dangerous, and indeed destroyed almost all the officers, soldiers and civil servants of the old regime. Little is known about Pol Pot. This is a man with the appearance of a handsome old man and the heart of a bloody tyrant. It was with this monster that Sihanouk teamed up. Together with the leader of the Khmer Rouge, they vowed to merge their forces together for a common goal - the defeat of American troops.
The dictator outlined an audacious plan to build a new society and declared that it would take only a few days to implement it. Pol Pot announced the evacuation of all cities under the leadership of the newly minted regional and zonal leaders, ordered the closure of all markets, the destruction of churches and the dispersal of all religious communities. Having been educated abroad, he harbored a hatred for educated people and ordered the execution of all teachers, professors and even kindergarten teachers.

Wheel of death.
On April 17, 1975, Pol Pot ordered the forced assimilation of 13 national minorities living in Democratic Kampuchea. They were ordered to speak Khmer, and those who could not speak Khmer were killed. On May 25, 1975, Pol Pot's soldiers carried out a massacre of Thais in the province of Kah Kong in the southwest of the country. 20,000 Thais lived there, and after the massacre, only 8,000 remained.
Inspired by the ideas of Mao Zedong about communes, Pol Pot launched the slogan "Back to the village!". In pursuance of it, the population of large and small cities was evicted to rural and mountainous areas. On April 17, 1975, using violence combined with deceit, the Pol Potites forced more than 2 million residents of the newly liberated Phnom Penh to leave the city. All indiscriminately - the sick, the old, the pregnant, the crippled, the newborn, the dying - were sent to the countryside and assigned to communes of 10,000 people each. Residents were forced to overwork, regardless of age and health status. With primitive tools or by hand, people worked 12-16 hours a day, and sometimes longer. According to the few who managed to survive, in many areas their daily food was only one bowl of rice for 10 people. The leaders of the Pol Pot regime created a network of spies and encouraged mutual denunciations in order to paralyze the will of the people to resist. The Pol Potites tried to abolish Buddhism, a religion practiced by 85 percent of the population. Buddhist monks were forced to give up their traditional dress and forced to work in "communes". Many of them were killed. Pol Pot sought to exterminate the intelligentsia and, in general, all those who had some kind of education, technical connections and experience. Of the 643 doctors and pharmacists, only 69 survived. Pol Potov's people eliminated the education system at all levels. Schools were turned into prisons, places of torture, and manure stores. All books and documents stored in libraries, schools, universities, research centers were burned or looted.

His "killing fields" were strewn with the corpses of those who did not fit into the framework of the new world formed by him and his bloodthirsty minions. During the reign of Pol Pot in Cambodia, about three million people died - the same number of unfortunate victims perished in the gas chambers of the Nazi death factory Auschwitz during World War II. Life under Pol Pot was unbearable, and as a result of the tragedy that broke out on the land of this ancient country in Southeast Asia, its long-suffering population came up with a new eerie name for Cambodia - the Land of the Walking Dead.
According to Samphan's theory, Cambodia, in order to achieve progress, had to turn back, renounce capitalist exploitation, fattening leaders fed by the French colonial rulers, abandon devalued bourgeois values and ideals. Samphan's perverted theory was that people should live in the fields, and all the temptations of modern life should be destroyed. If Pol Pot, say, had been run over by a car at that time, this theory would probably have died out in coffee houses and bars without stepping over the boundaries of Parisian boulevards. However, she was destined to become a monstrous reality.
Pol Pot's twisted dream of turning back time and forcing his people to live in a Marxist agrarian society was helped by his deputy, Ieng Sari. In his policy of destruction, Pol Pot used the term "get out of sight". "Cleaned" - destroyed thousands and thousands of women and men, old people and babies.
Buddhist temples were desecrated or turned into soldiers' brothels, or even just slaughterhouses. As a result of the terror, out of sixty thousand monks, only three thousand returned to the destroyed temples and holy cloisters.
In the “commune” of Psot, reprisals usually took place in the following way: a person was buried up to his neck in the ground and beaten with hoes on the head. They didn’t shoot - they took care of the bullets. “Those who had reached the age of fourteen or fifteen were forcibly sent to the so-called “mobile brigades” or to the army ... Pol Potov’s men prepared killers by recruiting 14-17 year old teenagers who were told that if they did not agree to kill, then after painful torture they would be killed themselves. In addition, the selected teenagers were deliberately corrupted, accustomed to murder, drunk with a mixture of palm moonshine with human blood. They were told that they were “capable of anything”, that they became “special people” because they drank human blood.” In this cannibalism we also see traces of the ancient religion of Cambodia. The entire population of the country was divided into three categories. The first included residents of remote mountainous and forest regions of the state. The second consisted of residents of those areas that were controlled by the overthrown pro-American regime of Lon Nol. The third group consisted of former military personnel, the old administration, their families and the entire (!) population of Phnom Penh. The third category was subject to complete destruction, and the second partial.
Such was the course of the faithful Marxist Pol Pot, who well mastered the principles of the class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat. On April 16, 1975, over two million people were evicted from Phnom Penh, and they were not allowed to take anything with them. “In accordance with the order, all residents were obliged to leave the city. It was forbidden to take food and things. Those who refused to obey the order or hesitated were killed and shot. Neither the elderly, nor the disabled, nor pregnant women, nor the sick who were in hospitals escaped this fate. People had to walk, despite the rain or the scorching sun ... During the journey they were not given any food or medicine ... Only on the banks of the Mekong, when the Phnom Penh people were transported to remote areas of the country, about five hundred thousand people died. According to another plan by Pol Pot, the villages were to be destroyed. The massacre inflicted on them defies description: “The population of the village of Sreseam was almost completely destroyed ... the soldiers drove the children, tied them in a chain, pushed them into funnels filled with water and buried them alive ... , and pushed down. When there were too many people to be eliminated, they were gathered in groups of several dozen people, entangled with steel wire, passed current from a generator installed on a bulldozer, and then they pushed the unconscious people into a pit and covered them with earth. Even his own wounded soldiers, Pol Pot ordered to be killed so as not to spend money on medicines.

Following the example of his teachers Stalin and Mao Zedong, Pol Pot also fought against the intelligentsia. “The intelligentsia was completely destroyed: doctors, teachers, engineers, artists, scientists, students were declared mortal enemies of the regime. At the same time, anyone who wore glasses, read books, knew a foreign language, wore decent clothes, in particular European cut, was considered an intellectual. How can one not remember the 20-30s in the USSR, when people were also fired and killed for wearing a tie, ironed clothes? When everyone was forced to walk in blouses and wrinkled trousers. “Schools were either destroyed or turned into prisons, places of torture, warehouses for grain and fertilizers. Books from libraries, institutes, research centers, museum property were destroyed, and the most valuable objects of ancient art were stolen.” And again the analogy with the USSR, where the most valuable works of art were sold abroad, while others were destroyed. “The bloody experiment of Pol Pot led to the destruction of all Cambodian cities with their industry and developed infrastructure, to the physical elimination of millions of people, especially educated and specialists, to the transformation of the country into a huge concentration camp, where the Khmer Rouge ruled with impunity.
For the Pol Potites, oriented towards the values of Marxist socialism, a person's life was worth nothing: in order not to waste bullets, people were killed with shovels and other improvised means, starved, not to mention sophisticated bullying. It is worth noting in this connection that the attempts of communists in a number of countries, primarily Soviet ones, to dissociate themselves from these crimes and not to see in them repressions akin to all communist dictatorships are unconvincing. Of course, the Khmer Red Terror can be perceived as a caricature, but if you look closely and compare it with what has become known about our Red Terror in recent years of open publications and revelations, then there will be no doubt about the relationship. The source of the Khmer Rouge's convictions, as well as their arrogance and disrespect for people's lives, is still the same - the Marxist theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the idea of \u200b\u200bdestroying hostile classes and, in general, all enemies of the revolution, which, as you know, can include anyone who does not kill with a shovel (and, on occasion, himself, too).
Pol Pot's decree effectively eradicated ethnic minorities. The use of Vietnamese, Thai and Chinese was punishable by death. A purely Khmer society was proclaimed. The forcible eradication of ethnic groups had a particularly hard effect on the Chan people. Their ancestors - people from today's Vietnam - inhabited the ancient Kingdom of Champa. The Chans migrated to Cambodia in the 18th century and were engaged in fishing along the banks of Cambodian rivers and lakes. They professed Islam and were the most significant ethnic group in modern Cambodia, preserving the purity of their language, national cuisine, clothing, hairstyles, religious and ritual traditions.
Young Khmer Rouge fanatics attacked the vats like locusts. Their settlements were burned, the inhabitants were expelled into the swamps, teeming with mosquitoes. People were forcibly forced to eat pork, which was strictly forbidden by their religion, the clergy were ruthlessly destroyed. At the slightest resistance, entire communities were exterminated, and the corpses were thrown into huge pits and covered with lime. Of the 200,000 vats, less than half survived. Those who survived the beginning of the campaign of terror later realized that instant death was better than hellish torment under the new regime.
According to Pol Pot, the older generation was corrupted by feudal and bourgeois views, infected with "sympathy" for Western democracies, which he declared alien to the national way of life. The urban population was driven from their habitable places to labor camps, where hundreds of thousands of people were tortured to death by overwork.
People were killed even for trying to speak French - the biggest crime in the eyes of the Khmer Rouge, as it was considered a manifestation of nostalgia for the country's colonial past.
In huge camps with no amenities other than a straw mat as a bed for sleeping and a bowl of rice at the end of the working day, in conditions that even prisoners of Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War would not envy, merchants, teachers, entrepreneurs, only survivors because they managed to hide their professions, as well as thousands of other townspeople. These camps were organized in such a way as to get rid of the elderly and the sick, pregnant women and young children through "natural selection".
People died in hundreds and thousands from disease, hunger and exhaustion, under the clubs of cruel overseers. Without medical assistance, except for traditional herbal treatments, the life expectancy of the prisoners of these camps was frustratingly short. Stalin and Hitler are resting.

At dawn, people were sent in formation to the malaria swamps, where they cleared the jungle for 12 hours a day in an unsuccessful attempt to win new cropland from them. At sunset, again in formation, urged on by the bayonets of the guards, people returned to the camp to their bowl of rice, liquid gruel and a piece of dried fish. Then, despite the terrible fatigue, they still had to go through political classes on Marxist ideology, in which incorrigible "bourgeois elements" were identified and punished, while the rest, like parrots, kept repeating phrases about the joys of life in the new state. Every ten working days, a long-awaited day off was due, for which twelve hours of ideological studies were planned. The wives lived separately from the husbands. Their children began to work from the age of seven or were placed at the disposal of childless party functionaries, who brought them up fanatical "fighters of the revolution."
From time to time, huge bonfires made of books were made in the city squares. Crowds of unfortunate tortured people were driven to these fires, who were forced to chant memorized phrases in chorus, while the flames devoured the masterpieces of world civilization. "Lessons of hatred" were organized, when people were whipped in front of portraits of the leaders of the old regime. It was an ominous world of horror and hopelessness. In the "commune" it was strictly forbidden to read ... If they found a magazine or a book, they dealt with the whole family ...
Pol Potovtsy broke off diplomatic relations in all countries, postal and telephone communications did not work, entry into and exit from the country were prohibited. The Cambodian people found themselves isolated from the whole world.
To strengthen the fight against real and imaginary enemies, Pol Pot organized a sophisticated system of torture and executions in his prison camps. As in the days of the Spanish Inquisition, the dictator and his henchmen proceeded from the premise that those who fell into these damned places were guilty and they had only to admit their guilt. In order to convince its followers of the need for brutal measures to achieve the goals of "national revival", the regime gave torture a special political significance.
Documents seized after the overthrow of Pol Pot show that Khmer security officers, trained by Chinese instructors, were guided by cruel ideological principles in their activities. Interrogation Manual S-21, one of the documents later handed over to the UN, stated: "The purpose of torture is to get an adequate response from the interrogated. Torture is not used for entertainment. Pain must be inflicted in such a way as to cause a quick reaction "Another goal is the psychological breakdown and loss of will of the interrogated. During torture, one should not proceed from one's own anger or self-satisfaction. Beating the bearer should be done in such a way as to intimidate him, and not beat him to death. Before proceeding to torture, it is necessary to examine the state of health of the interrogated and examine instruments of torture.You should not try to kill the person being interrogated without fail.During interrogation, political considerations are the main thing, inflicting pain is secondary.Therefore, you should not forget that you are engaged in political work.Even during interrogations, you should constantly conduct agitation and propaganda work.At the same time, you must avoid indecision and hesitation during torture, when possible receive answers from the enemy to our questions. It must be remembered that indecision can slow down our work. In other words, in propaganda and educational work of this kind, it is necessary to show determination, perseverance, and categoricalness. We must proceed to torture without first explaining the reasons or motives. Only then will the enemy be defeated."
Among the many sophisticated torture methods used by Khmer Rouge executioners, the most favorite were the notorious Chinese water torture, crucifixion, and strangulation with a plastic bag. Site S-21, which gave the document its title, was the most infamous camp in all of Cambodia. It was located in the northeast of the country. At least thirty thousand victims of the regime were martyred here. Only seven survived, and even then only because the administrative skills of the prisoners were needed by their masters to manage this terrible institution.
But torture was not the only tool to intimidate the already frightened population of the country. There are many cases when the guards in the camps caught the prisoners, driven to despair by hunger, eating their dead comrades in misfortune. The punishment for this was a terrible death. The guilty were buried up to their necks in the ground and left to a slow death from hunger and thirst, and their still living flesh was tormented by ants and other living creatures. Then the heads of the victims were cut off and put on stakes around the settlement. A sign was hung around the neck: "I am a traitor to the revolution!"
Dit Pran, Cambodian translator for American journalist Sydney Schoenberg, lived through all the horrors of Pol Pot's rule. The inhuman ordeals he had to go through are documented in the film "Field of Death", in which the suffering of the Cambodian people appeared for the first time in front of the whole world with stunning nakedness. The heartbreaking narration of Prana's journey from civilized childhood to the death camp horrified viewers. “In my prayers,” Pran said, “I asked the Almighty to save me from the unbearable torment that I had to endure. But some of my loved ones managed to flee the country and take refuge in America. For their sake, I continued to live, but it was not life but a nightmare."
The foreign policy of the Pol Pot regime was characterized by aggressiveness and disguised fear of powerful powers. After the final approval in power, Pol Pot decided to isolate himself from the outside world. In response to Japan's proposal to establish diplomatic relations, the Pol Potites said that Cambodia "would not be interested in them for another 200 years." Exceptions to the general rule were only a few countries for which Pol Pot, for one reason or another, had personal sympathy. In January 1977, after almost a year of silence, shots were fired on the Cambodian-Vietnamese border. Detachments of the Khmer Rouge, having crossed the Vietnamese border, killed the inhabitants of the border villages with clubs. In 1978, Vietnam signed a pact with China, Kampuchea's only ally, and launched a full-scale invasion. Dec. 1978 Vietnamese troops, who had been in conflict with the Khmer Rouge for many years over disputed border areas, entered Cambodia with the help of several motorized infantry divisions, supported by tanks. The country fell into such decline that, due to the lack of telephone communications, it was necessary to deliver combat reports on bicycles. The Chinese did not come to the aid of Pol Pot, and in January 1979 his regime fell under the onslaught of the Vietnamese troops. The fall was so rapid that the tyrant had to flee from Phnom Penh in a white Mercedes two hours before the triumphant appearance in the capital of the army of Hanoi. However, Pol Pot was not going to give up. He fortified himself in a secret base with a handful of his loyal followers and formed the National Liberation Front of the Khmer People. The Khmer Rouge retreated in an organized manner into the jungle on the border with Thailand.
In early 1979, the Vietnamese occupied Phnom Penh. A few hours earlier, Pol Pot left the deserted capital in a white armored Mercedes. The bloody dictator hurried to his Chinese masters, who provided him with shelter, but did not support him in the fight against the heavily armed Viet Cong.

When the whole world became aware of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime and the devastation that reigned in the country, aid rushed to Cambodia in a powerful stream. The Khmer Rouge, like the Nazis in their time, were very pedantic in recording their crimes. The investigation uncovered journals in which daily executions and torture were recorded in the most detailed way, hundreds of albums with photographs of those sentenced to death, including the wives and children of intellectuals liquidated in the initial stages of terror, detailed documentation of the notorious "killing fields". These fields, conceived as the basis of a labor utopia, a country without money and needs, in fact turned out to be mass graves of the day of burial of people crushed under the yoke of cruel tyranny. “After three years of the existence of the Pol Pot regime, Kampuchea was called nothing more than a “huge concentration camp”, a “giant prison”, a “state of barracks socialism”, where blood flows like a river and a policy of genocide against its own nation is ruthlessly and systematically carried out.” Of the country's 8 million people, 5 million survived.

After the overthrow.
On August 15-19, 1979, the People's Revolutionary Tribunal of Kampuchea tried the case on charges of genocide by the Pol Pot-Ieng Sari clique. Pol Pot and Ieng Sari were found guilty and sentenced to death in absentia. The Pol Potites left Kampuchea in a very difficult state. Despite all this, representatives of the Khmer Rouge, led by Khieu Samphan, remained in Phnom Penh for some time. The parties have been looking for ways to mutual reconciliation for a long time. The support of the United States helped the Pol Potites to feel confident. At the insistence of the superpower, the Pol Potites retained their place in the UN. But in 1993, following the Khmer Rouge's boycott of the country's first UN-monitored parliamentary elections, the movement hid entirely in the jungle. Every year contradictions grew among the leaders of the Khmer Rouge. In 1996, Ieng Sari, who was deputy prime minister in the Pol Pot government, went over to the side of the government with 10,000 fighters. In response, Pol Pot traditionally resorted to terror. He ordered the execution of Defense Minister Son Sen, his wife and nine children. The tyrant's frightened associates organized a conspiracy led by Khieu Samphan, Ta Mok, the commander of the troops, and Nuon Chea, the most influential person in the Khmer Rouge leadership at present. In June 1997, Pol Pot was placed under house arrest. He was left with his second wife, Mia Som, and daughter, Seth Seth. The dictator's family was guarded by one of Pol Pot's commanders, Nuon Nu.
In early April 1998, the United States suddenly began to demand the transfer of Pol Pot to the international tribunal, pointing out the need for "just retribution." Washington's position, difficult to explain in the light of his past policy of supporting the dictator, caused a lot of controversy among the leadership of Angka. In the end, it was decided to trade Pol Pot for their own safety. The search for contacts with international organizations began, but the death of the bloody tyrant on the night of April 14-15, 1998 immediately solved all problems. According to the official version, Pol Pot died of a heart attack. His body was cremated, and the skull and bones left after the burning were handed over to his wife and daughter.
Pran was lucky enough to survive this bloody Asian nightmare and reunite with his family in San Francisco in 1979. But in the remote corners of a devastated country that survived a terrible tragedy, there are still mass graves of nameless victims, over which mounds of human skulls rise with mute reproach. It is unlikely that Pol Pot knew the work of the artist Vereshchagin, but he seems to have decided to recreate his painting "The Apotheosis of War" in real life.
In the end, thanks to military might, and not morality and law, it was possible to stop the bloody slaughter and restore at least a semblance of common sense to the tormented land. Britain should be given credit for speaking out in 1978 against human rights violations after reports of rampant terror in Cambodia through intermediaries in Thailand, but this protest went unheeded. Britain issued a statement to the UN Commission on Human Rights, but a Khmer Rouge spokesman hysterically retorted: "The British imperialists have no right to talk about human rights. The whole world is well aware of their barbaric nature. Britain's leaders are drowning in luxury, while the proletariat has the right only unemployment, sickness and prostitution."
Pol Pot, who seemed to have gone into oblivion, has recently reappeared on the political horizon as a force claiming power in this long-suffering country. Like all tyrants, he claims that his subordinates made mistakes, that he faced resistance on all fronts, and that those who died were "enemies of the state." Returning to Cambodia in 1981, in a secret meeting among his old friends near the Thai border, he declared that he was too gullible: "My policy was correct. Overzealous regional commanders and leaders on the ground perverted my orders. Accusations of massacres are vile a lie. If we really destroyed people in such numbers, the people would have ceased to exist long ago."
"Misunderstanding" at the cost of three million lives, almost a third of the country's population, is too innocent a word to describe what was done in the name of Pol Pot and on his orders. But, following the famous Nazi principle - the more monstrous the lie, the more people are able to believe in it - Pol Pot still rushed to power and hoped to gather forces in rural areas, which, in his opinion, were still loyal to him. He again became a major political figure and was waiting for an opportunity to reappear in the country as an angel of death, seeking revenge and completing the work he had previously begun - his "great agrarian revolution."
By the way, the United States then ensured that the Pol Potites retained a place in the UN. This is another example of American "democracy". In 1982, Pol Pot regains power, holding it until 1985, when he suddenly announces his resignation. Soon civil war breaks out again in the country, and the aged dictator returns to political life again, leading the pro-communist Khmer Rouge group. Now he is already ordering the execution of his own ministers, fearing treason on their part. The composure shown by him in the murder of his closest supporters inspires horror in his entourage. And it decides, in order to save its own life, to remove Pol Pot from power, which they managed to do in June 1997. For the next year, the dictator lived under house arrest until he died in 1998. According to beliefs, Pol Pot's body was burned at a ritual fire. By the way, before putting the body in the coffin, the nostrils of the dead man were plugged with cotton so that the spirit of the dead man would not escape the fire. Such was the people's fear of a man who is "rightly called the most terrible villain of the outgoing century."

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