The Khmer Rouge & Pol Pot's Reign of Terror

0:00Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe.

0:32This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall. That cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close. Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2 % daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more. Get a head start on your end of year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay.

1:05Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Terms and More at applecard.com. This ad is sponsored by ZocDoc. Hi, it's Danny Pellegrino from Everything Iconic. Have you been putting off that annual doctor's appointment because you don't want to make the call? Or maybe you've been meaning to find a new dentist, but you have no idea where to start. I find that's especially true when you move. It's hard to find your people. I've been there, which is why I use ZocDoc. Now, as a busy podcaster parent and someone who's always juggling a million things, I love anything that makes life easier.

1:35And ZocDoc lets you search and compare local in-network doctors with over 250 ,000 providers across more than 200 specialties. You can read reviews from real patients, find a provider who feels like the right fit, see actual appointment openings, and book instantly. I recently had a last-minute health issue pop up and I needed to see someone fast. and instead of calling around or sitting on hold, I found a doctor on ZocDoc and booked an appointment in just a few minutes. It made the whole process so much less stressful. Now, taking care of your health just got easier. Download the ZocDoc app today.

2:09That's ZocDoc, Z-O-C-D-O-C, and book that appointment on your to-do list.

2:21on april the 17th 1975 the city of phnom penh awoke to the end of a war the beginning of something even more cataclysmic for five years cambodia had been consumed by conflict it had been unable to resist the lunar pull of the extraordinary violence of neighbouring Vietnam. And in Cambodia itself, there'd been a brutal struggle between the US-backed government of General Lon Nol and the insurgent forces of the Khmer Rouge, led by the communist revolutionary Pol Pot, supported by China. By that spring, 1975, the capital was overflowing with refugees. Its resources were stretched thin, its people exhausted by bombardment and hunger and uncertainty.

3:12Khmer Rouge forces finally entered the city that morning. They weren't just conquering soldiers, they were the victors in a long and traumatising, destabilising conflict that had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. They had an agenda. At first, though, their arrivals seemed to carry the fragile promise of peace. Residents lined the street, some of them cheered, others watched, hoping that the fighting would finally be over. Khmer Rouge fighters, many of them strikingly young, spread out through the city on tanks and trucks and jeeps. And over loudspeakers, there were reassuring words. The war had ended, order would be restored, and for that brief moment, it seemed possible the country might be able to rebuild.

3:56But within hours, that sense of relief was utterly shattered. Soldiers with bullhorns moved through neighbourhoods issuing a new urgent command. The entire population must leave the city immediately. It was presented as a temporary evacuation. It was necessary, they claimed, to avoid possible American bombing. But actually it was quickly clear there was a more sinister logic. Hospitals were emptied, patients pushed into streets, schools, homes, markets abandoned at gunpoint. Families gathered what they could carry, often only minutes ahead of armed men who swept up any stragglers under threat of death.

4:36Phnom Penh, a city of roughly two million people, was emptied with astonishing speed. Roads clogged with civilians moving in every direction. Many were unsure where they were being sent or why. In the chaos, as you can imagine, families were separated, children lost sight of parents, the elderly lagged behind. Witnesses recalled gunfire used to hurry the crowds along. There was constant pressure to keep people moving no matter what the cost. And so along those jammed highways leading out to the capital, thousands collapsed from exhaustion and illness, injury, bodies left behind. Foreign nationals gathered in embassy compounds and they watched what one observer would describe as a death march.

5:20there's one harrowing account of families throwing babies over the walls of those compounds knowing that even that terrible risk was safer than the fate that awaited those children at the hands of the Khmer Rouge the entire city was in motion stripped of its homes institutions its continuity within days even these last outside foreign witnesses would be expelled leaving Cambodia increasingly sealed off from the rest of the world. This was more seismic than a change of government. This was the deliberate first strike of a radical sweeping transformation. It was Pol Pot's so-called year zero. Cambodia's existing society would be completely eradicated.

6:08A new communist agrarian utopia would be built from the ashes. What followed, in fact, is now known as the Cambodian Genocide, a period marked by the excess death of one, perhaps two million people, as many as a quarter of Cambodia's population. In this episode of Dan Snow's History, we're going to try and find out how and why this happened. We're going to explore how the Khmer Rouge came to power. We're going to look at the roots of the regime and the turmoil of World War II, decolonization, war, revolution. We're going to dig into the brutal policies of the Khmer Rouge and consider how this dark chapter continues to shape the country, the region to this day.

6:53This is a bit of a personal one for me because I convinced my wife we were for a brief honeymoon and we went to Southeast Asia and we spent some time at my looking at some of the sites at which that genocide had taken place, the sites known as Cambodia's Killing Fields. And the descriptions of the violence, of the barbarity, the brutality to men, women, and infants was deeply harrowing. For this episode of the podcast, we are joined by Ben Kiernan, the Whitney Griswold Professor Emeritus of History at Yale, and the founding director of the Cambodian Genocide Programme and the Genocide Studies Programme.

7:30He's the author of lots and lots of acclaimed books, How Pol Pot Came to Power, Blood and Soil, A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. He really is one of the most foremost experts on this topic. We're very lucky to have him today with us. Now, let's get into it.

7:56Ben, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. Tell me just briefly, in the era of mighty European empires, Cambodia, what we now know as Cambodia, is part of the, roughly speaking, French Indochina, is it? What's the nature of that colonial rule? Yes, that's right. Cambodia was integrated into French Indochina colonial possession in the late 19th century and only became independent after the Geneva Conference in 1954. So when Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia obtained their independence. Had there been fighting in Cambodia as there had been in Vietnam next door? Yes, there had been.

8:35Sporadically in the late 1940s and more intensively in the early 50s, a communist movement was founded in 1951 in Cambodia, and it fought mostly alongside the Vietnamese communists against the French until 1954. There were also other nationalist movements fighting against the French and some Cambodians on the French side as well. And what was the condition then of Cambodia when it achieves independence? It sounds to me like there's going to be a scramble in that vacuum left by French power. Who's best placed to try and get control of the country? Well, it wasn't exactly a vacuum. Cambodia had been a kingdom for many centuries.

9:18It goes back to the Angkor period of the medieval times. It had been quite a powerful kingdom. But then it had been suffering intrusions from both Thailand in the west and Vietnam in the east and had lost a lot of its original territory. But it was a discrete kingdom at the time it was taken over by the French in the 19th century. And the king of Cambodia at the time of the French withdrawal in 1954 was Noradong Sihanouk. And he then stood down from the monarchy and became the chief of state instead. But it was still a kingdom. His father briefly, until his death served as king. And Noradam Sihanouk was now a prince, but chief of state of Cambodia in the late 50s and early 60s, and until his overthrow in 1970.

10:11Now, Cambodia was independent in the late 50s and early 60s, and it was a neutral kingdom. It was fairly small, about five to six million people by the mid-60s. It was an agricultural kingdom, not industrial in many ways at all, but most peasants owned some land. And by the mid-60s, it was doing quite well agriculturally and economically and growing a lot of rice by the mid-60s and exporting quite a lot of rice. And the Cambodian government got most of its income from taxing rice exports. And what was the first sign of trouble then in the mid-60s? Well, there were some countervailing factors, both negative and positive, I guess, that were influencing Cambodia.

11:02The first, I think, would be the fact that it was a one-party state. Prince Sihanouk's kingdom slowly banned opposition parties and kept a close watch on opposition press. But at the same time, it was doing very well economically. And Cambodian peasants, being mostly landowners, were not susceptible to a communist revolution. The Communist Party, as I mentioned, had been founded as the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party. It changed its name to the Workers' Party after independence. And it was not very effective. And indeed, it supported Cambodia's neutrality in the Vietnam War and supported Sihanouk's neutrality.

11:48And other leftists were also in support of the neutral aspect of Cambodia's foreign policy under Prince Sihanouk. And so there was some unity in Cambodia. There was some success economically. On the other hand, there was the divisive insurgency and trouble, the war that was building up in Vietnam, particularly the United States intervention, which built up strongly from 65 onwards. which had a countervailing effect on Cambodia's economic prosperity. The way this happened was that the destruction that both sides in the war in Vietnam caused to the rice-growing productivity of the Vietnamese farmland meant that rice productivity fell enormously in Vietnam, and both armies needed rice.

12:42And so a lot of the Cambodian rice, which was very productively produced, was smuggled across the border into Vietnam to feed both armies, and the Saigon Army and the Viet Cong, the Vietnamese Communist Army. And what happened was the Cambodian government was now, because of the smuggling, which was out of its control, Cambodian government was no longer able to tax rice exports, which was the main source of the Cambodian government's income. It had lost control and it plunged towards bankruptcy in the mid to late 60s. Even though it sounds like it's boom times for rice farmers. Exactly. Well, it was, but a lot of the profits were being taken by smugglers.

13:27Both the government and the peasants were finding conditions quite difficult. And the effect on the Cambodian economy and then on the Cambodian politics, which although it was already a one-party state, it was not particularly oppressive. But by 1966, Sihanouk appointed the general of the army, Lon Nol, as prime minister and cracked down on the left and the leading left-wing parliamentarians who were elected in the 66 elections, one of them with 78 % of the vote, but they felt they were in danger and they had to flee. In 67, all three of them disappeared and became known as the Three Ghosts. And then a small rebellion began in 1967, which slowly built up, but not on a large scale, by 1969-70.

14:21Now, this rebellion was begun not by those three formerly elected parliamentarians of Cambodia, who were Marxists, but it was begun by a group of formerly Paris-trained intellectuals led by Pol Pot. Now, Pol Pot himself was not a peasant activist. He had grown up in the royal palace himself. His sister was a concubine of the king of earlier days. And Pol Pot himself was not really acquainted with peasant conditions, but he saw his future in the communist movement and he took it over when his predecessor as leader of what was then the Workers' Party of Campechea, was killed mysteriously, I suspect, by Pol Pot's actions.

15:10He was handed over to the police of Long Nol and was killed in 1962. Pol Pot immediately seized leadership of the communist movement and took to the forest and began preparations for the uprising that started in 1967. And so this uprising, is it being supported now by the Vietnamese Communist Party? Obviously, they're adept in those what it's doing by this point. They're fighting the world's great superpower in just this way. Is there support coming from China? Is Pol Pot sensing here which way the wind is blowing? No, because the Vietnamese supported Sien Hoek's neutrality in the Vietnam War.

15:51And the Khmer Communists or the Khmer Rouge is Sien Hoek dubbed them, led by Pol Pot. were very suspicious of the Vietnamese for supporting Sihanouk's neutrality. Pol Pot was starting a rebellion against Sihanouk. So a split began, which was probably dateable much earlier, because although Pol Pot had been in the French Communist Party, he was not particularly Marxist. I think he admired Lenin and Mao for their close control of the Communist parties they led. but he also was very anti-Vietnamese. He told Nguyen Chia, his number two, that he hated Vietnamese youths from the time he was young. He didn't have a very strong working class identification because he was brought up in the palace.

16:39And I think he was rather racist towards Vietnamese. And so that split began in the late 60s when the Vietnamese were hoping to support Si Anouk's neutrality and Pol Pot was hoping to overthrow it. So there's a rural insurgency that begins. What is leading people to join this? Is there ideology here? Is there coercion? Is it cash? And how quickly does it spread? It didn't spread very quickly. It was probably in the numbers of 3 ,000 to 4 ,000 to 5 ,000 by 1969-70. Pol Pot and his small group of, I would say, extremist leaders who began this revolt in 1967 had been joined by the three, if you like, exiled parliamentarians, but those three didn't get much power in the movement.

17:33As far as peasant support, some of the peasants were driven into support for an insurgency by the army, which went around rounding up rice harvests and trying to take control of the rice harvest. That did happen in the northwest of the country. And so there was some support, but it wasn't very significant and it was not likely to overthrow the Si 'anuk regime. What made the big difference was the war next door in Vietnam, not only economically, as I've mentioned, but also militarily. By 1965, a number of Vietnamese communists had taken refuge from the Vietnam War inside the Cambodian border, setting up what the Americans called sanctuaries where they could escape the attacks of the Americans by hiding in Cambodia.

18:25the Americans began bombing with fighter bombers, those sanctuaries, and also sending in special forces units to attack the Vietnamese communists. So the war was now spreading to Cambodia from as early as 65 and 66. And the Cambodian peasants in the countryside were slowly becoming affected quite strongly militarily by the war that was spreading to their country. And becoming sort of radicalized? I mean, are they sympathizing with the Vietnamese communists? Is the American bombing enraging the Cambodians? I think it did. Another prince in the Sienaub government said that hundreds of our people have already been killed by U.S.

19:09bombs as early as 1966. I think he made that complaint to the Americans. But of course, not many peasants joined. I think it was in the small numbers of thousands by 1969. But in 1969 itself, in March of 1969, the US began a much more serious bombing campaign of B-52s, high-flying heavy bombers, which started bombing Cambodian areas from, in fact, the last year of the Sihanouk regime for a full year. It was called Operation Menu, and the various targets were called snack, lunch, breakfast, dinner, and so on. And these did take a number of lives of Cambodian peasants in the countryside, although they were targeted at the Vietnamese communist sanctuaries along the border.

20:04And then Lon Nol, who was the general who'd become prime minister in 66, overthrew Si Anuk while he was on a visit to Europe and Moscow. And Si Anuk's neutrality was ended by the new Lon Nol regime. A new name for the country, the Khmer Republic, was established. Si Anouk took up exile in China, and he then put his full support behind the communist rebellion, the insurgency that Pol Pot had begun. And this led a lot of peasants who were loyal to the prince, just ideologically and traditionally, to join the communists. That is an unholy alliance. Crikey. Yes, it was part of a traditional loyalty of peasants to the prince, but also the bombing spread now.

20:53With Long Nol in power, the United States spread its B-52 bombing across Cambodia in 1970. The coup was in March 18th, 1970, exactly a year since the start of the B-52 bombing, which was secret. But now it became public and much more extensive across the breadth of Cambodia. With the acquiescence of this new leader, yeah. Long Nol felt that this bombing would help him. and the South Vietnamese government as well as the Vietnamese communists both invaded Cambodia. All sides in the Vietnam War spread to Cambodia to fight their war there as well as in South Vietnam. And so Cambodia was in chaos and war spread on the ground and in the air and effect on Cambodian peasants was enormous, terrifying, and there was recruitment for the Khmer Rouge insurgency, which began to really spread.

21:50And by 1973, the bombing had doubled just in the year 1973. In fact, only from January to August, the US dropped 250 ,000 tons of B-52 bombs on Cambodia. That doubled the total tonnage that had previously been dropped on Cambodia in the four years since 1969. And that was across the width of Cambodia nearly except for the northwest of the country. And so huge numbers of peasants were killed. Many more joined the Khmer Rouge insurgency because their families were killed or their homes were bombed and destroyed. The villages were wiped out, and the Khmer Rouge found it much more easy to recruit supporters.

22:38And their numbers increased from a few thousand in 69 to more than 200 ,000 by the end of 1973. And so they were in a position to really challenge the Long Nile government by the time the U.S. bombing reached its height and ended in August of 1973. So 1973, interesting year because then the Americans are disengaging from Vietnam at that point. They're pulling out troops. They're obviously still supplying the South Vietnamese and there's air support. But so having exacerbated this problem, the Americans now slightly exiting stage right. But the Khmer Rouge and the communists generally are on the march in Cambodia.

23:21That's right. They refused to take part in the Paris negotiations that led to what was supposed to be a ceasefire in Vietnam that led to the American withdrawal from South Vietnam. The U.S. bombing stopped in August 15, 1973. But the insurgency in Cambodia continued. The South Vietnamese troops pulled out of Cambodia. The Vietnamese communist troops pulled back pretty much to the border. And so it was a fight between the Long Knoll government, which was depleted in its forces, and the rising Khmer Rouge forces. And if Long Knoll turns to the US for support, the US is like, we're trying to get out of Southeast Asia, presumably, right?

24:04So they're not about to try and prop up another government in Southeast Asia. Yeah, they continued to supply weapons, but no longer troops to the Long Knoll government. and it was eventually defeated by the Khmer Rouge who surrounded Phnom Penh in 74 and early 75 and eventually took over the capital city. Long Nol fled to America and some of his bravest ministers stayed behind and they were murdered. Interesting timing. People will be familiar with the fall of Saigon, the photographs of the helicopters on the embassy and things. That was a month or two later in 1975. That's two weeks later. Two weeks later.

24:43Okay, wow. Tell me about the entry of the Khmer Rouge. It's the subject of so many astonishing history books and novels. But as the Khmer Rouge enter the city, did they enter like an invading army? Would you have been able to tell immediately that everything had changed? And what was their intent when they entered the city, the capital? Well, most of the Khmer Rouge units that entered came from different regions or zones, as the Khmer Rouge called them. They had armies that were made up of different zone forces. And most of them were under orders to immediately evacuate the entire population of Phnom Penh.

25:22And so that's what happened. They came into the city and they told everybody to leave, all two million. And why is that? Is that ideologically driven or military? What's going on with that? Well, what they told the people was that the Americans were going to bomb the city and that they'd better get out and they'd be safer in the countryside. But of course, that was a clear lie. The Americans were no longer engaged in Southeast Asia and were not going to bomb the city. But they wanted to destroy urban life. They wanted to turn the country into an agrarian, what they call the classless society. But although they talked about equality and abolishing classes, what they actually did was divide the country into the people who had lived in Khmer Rouge zones until victory, whom they called the base people, the people of the Khmer Rouge bases.

26:13and the new people, two and a half million people from the cities and the northwest where the Khmer Rouge had not been able to take over until the very end. And so these populations were basically new classes created by the Khmer Rouge of the base people and the new people. They later applied Leninist categories for party members, full rights party members and candidate party members in the communist ideology of describing ranks within the party. They applied those categories to the whole population of Cambodia. So they talked about full rights people and candidate people rather than the base people and the new people.

26:59So they did establish classes in the society of Cambodia. They talked about equality, but they established inequality in Cambodia. What was Pol Pot on? He was not a rural person, and yet he's developed this fantasy of a communal rural community with no troublesome journalists, lawyers, civil servants. Where does this come from? I think it comes from a very top-down view of the society, having grown up in the palace, He was born in a village, but as I mentioned, his sister was a princess or a concubine of the palace. His cousin was actually a princess, and he grew up as a young boy in the palace, brought up by his brother who lived there and served as director of protocol in the palace.

27:47He then went to Paris to study, and he failed his radio electricity course two years in a row, so he was sent back to Cambodia. He didn't participate in the war against the French in any significant way. He was only there for the last six or eight months of the war. He came back in 1953 from Paris. And his main interest was taking control of what was then called the People's Revolutionary Party or later called the Workers' Party. And he rose within that after his predecessor leader, Toussaint Mout, was mysteriously killed. In my view, he handed him over to the police through his own methods, because he did have police who were on his side or sympathetic police.

28:31And so he used his position, I think, to rise within the communist movement. He pretty much excluded the three intellectual former parliamentarians that I mentioned before from real power. and he was very suspicious of the 1 ,000 or so Cambodian communists who had fought the French and then went to North Vietnam for further training after independence. When they came back after victory in 1975, they were called to meetings one by one and assassinated, nearly all 1 ,000 of them. So Pol Pot was very quiet, secretive, and brutal in his methods of controlling the communist movement. And he did the same with the population in general.

29:20So within hours of taking the capital city, he's enacting, I mean, it's one of the few places where he looked at the cultural revolution, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the late 60s and thought, yeah, let's have a bit of that. So he's trying to do a version of that kind of radical de-urbanization, sending people out to work on collective farms for re-education and sort of restructuring society itself. I think there's something of that too, but there's more of the great leap forward in China from 1958 to 60 when nearly 35 or 40 million people died of the huge economic catastrophe that Mao had caused by establishing what he called the great leap forward.

30:02The Pol Pot regime established what they called a super great leap forward. They were going to outdo Mao. They talked about excelling Lenin and outstripping Mao in another quote from their documents. I think the word is extremist, but it's also they didn't believe in an equal communist international movement. They were very extremist in the sense that they didn't believe in communist equality on the international level. And as I've explained, they didn't really believe in it within their country in the national level as well. They thought they could do better than China. They thought they could do better than the Soviet Union, whom they regarded as an enemy, by the way.

30:46many people within the communist movement Hal Phuot's group of himself and Nguyen Chia and Yang Seri they called them KGB CIA Yuen Yuen meaning a dyslogistic insult for Vietnamese they called them all sometimes alleged that they were working for all three of those enemy groups You listened to Dan Snow's History Don't go anywhere, there's more to come

31:19This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery. A detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialised. Now I wonder what all baffle historians about us. Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different.

31:52Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com slash discovermore.

32:13You need to find a new dentist, but you have no idea where to start. I find that's especially true when you move. It's hard to find your people. I've been there, which is why I use ZocDoc. Now, as a busy podcaster, parent, and someone who's always juggling a million things, I love anything that makes life easier. And ZocDoc lets you search and compare local in-network doctors with over 250 ,000 providers across more than 200 specialties. You can read reviews from real patients, find a provider who feels like the right fit, see actual appointment openings, and book instantly. I recently had a last-minute health issue pop up and needed to see someone fast.

32:47Instead of calling around or sitting on hold, I found a doctor on ZocDoc and booked an appointment in just a few minutes. It made the whole process so much less stressful. Now, taking care of your health just got easier. Download the ZocDoc app today. That's ZocDoc, Z-O-C-D-O-C, and book that appointment on your to-do list. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall. That cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close.

33:24Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2 % daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more. Get a head start on your end of year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, terms and more at AppleCard.com.

34:09and just how amazing our distant ancestors were. That's the Ancients from History Hit.

34:28Okay, so it is not the correct word, but it's a deeply eccentric use of a twisting of communist, nationalist, conspiracy sort of thinking. Fascinating. So did they empty the city? Where are people being sent to? Are they being sent to these collective farms? Two million people that lived in Phnom Penh were sent in all directions, to the eastern zone, to the southwest zone, to the northern zone, and into what became the western zone. But then there were two more major relocations of hundreds of thousands of people. This was the first one of April 1975, immediately on capturing Phnom Penh. But later in the year, September, October, November, a lot of those people who had been expelled from Phnom Penh were regathered again, rounded up in all those zones that they'd been sent to, and sent to the northwest zone, which the Pol Pot regime regarded as the most fertile and underpopulated zone on the Thai border.

35:29And so 800 ,000 people of those original expellees from the cities were rounded up and sent again for a second time to the northwest zone. And that was causing, it was way too many people. They were sent after the planting zone, but before the harvest, so that they were not able to contribute to the productivity of the northwest zone. They weren't there in time to plant more rice for themselves. they had to then rely on the northwest zone's smaller planting season when it was harvested it wasn't enough to feed them and so there was huge starvation in the northwest zone in 1976 after the harvest came in late in the year 1975 and that was because there were 800 ,000 extra people to feed in that zone who were not native to that zone and then there was a third major deportation of people in 1978, when the regime was at the height of its brutality, it turned on the eastern zone, which was in many ways the most moderate zone and had been targeted as the most dissident zone of the Khmer Rouge regime.

36:44On the Vietnamese border in the eastern zone, they tried to empty out the entire eastern zone and they evacuated about 250 ,000 people in 1978 after trying to wipe out the entire official class, the Communist Party, in the Eastern Zone and evacuate all of those population that lived in the Eastern Zone to the Northwest again. And then they killed them once they got there. And there are huge mass graves left in the Northwest and Western Zone of people wearing blue scarves because they were marked on their way through Phnom Penh from the eastern zone to the northwest with blue scarves which were a sign that they were supposedly Khmer bodies with Vietnamese minds.

37:34It was the slogan used to criticize them and once they got to the northwest then they were rounded up and killed en masse and that was the third of the major population deportations, which ended in mass murder in 1978 as the regime was disintegrating. So we've got, what other reforms were there as well as people being moved, the capital city being emptied, money and private property eliminated? Yes, that's right. They thought that money and property were contradictory to their goals. They wanted people to have no personal property at all. And so they abolished money. They abolished private ownership of land and even private family meals.

38:19By 1977, after two years, they were introducing on a national scale communal eating where people would eat in mess halls and not in family meals. And of course, that meant that they got rations. They had no other access to food. And the rations were dealt out according to the officialdom who ruled over them. And that was, again, another deep attack on personal liberties. The religion banned? Yes. Religion was considered to be another anti-communist and anti-Khmer Rouge activity. And so most of the population, 80 % of the population were Buddhist. And Buddhist monks were disrobed, forcibly disrobed, and forced to become ordinary civilians.

39:12But many of them were killed of the entire abbot group of monks who were leading abbots. Nearly all of those were murdered. And many Buddhist monks were killed, even though they weren't leading abbots. And in fact, it's been very difficult to track down the numbers. But people who survived, who were monks, know how many others didn't survive from their monastery. And it's astonishing just how large the proportion of Buddhist monks who were killed is. Is it an urban myth, but there's the old story that even wearing spectacles was regarded as a sort of unacceptably bourgeois thing to do, and that could get you targeted?

39:56That's right. People with education that was considered Western education, and therefore they looked like they'd had such an education if they wore spectacles. It wasn't always true, I think, in some parts of the country under some leaderships, such as in the Eastern Zone and in other places. Wearing spectacles wasn't a sign of future execution, but it did happen a lot. People were killed because they were doctors, because they had a medical education. The attack on professionals, on the educated class, was quite severe. I wouldn't say all-encompassing, but it was quite severe in the sense that people who had an education that the Khmer Rouge leadership at Pol Pot's level and their trusted zone chiefs, particularly Mok, the chief of the southwest zone, and Polk of the northern zone.

40:57Those two were particularly active in purging other zones, including the east, and destroying the Khmer Rouge officialdom who didn't carry out those extreme orders. They went after people with spectacles and so on. So we've got massive starvation from people being moved around the country in unrealistic sort of agricultural quotas and planting and harvesting. We've got brutality, people being killed, executed, persecuted. If doctors are being targeted, healthcare collapses. Yes. And there was very little that the regime did. Hospitals were barely operating. Many of the hospitals in Phnom Penh were just closed down.

41:43Certainly the people who'd been expelled to the countryside, didn't have access to those hospitals that might still be functioning in Phnom Penh. There was some form of international aid coming from China and North Korea, but virtually that's all. And it focused on agriculture rather than on spreading medical aid to the countryside where it was most needed. And so there was a great deal of neglect. Sometimes it could be called deliberate neglect of the healthcare needs of the population. What are your best estimates of casualties in these terrible years? Well, there are different kinds of casualties, of course.

42:28There's people who are directly murdered, killed on the spot, or taken to prison and then killed, or taken to mass graves or to places that became mass graves by the institution of mass killings in the individual locations, as well as individual murders, people just being called away from work sites and quietly murdered. It's been stated by the people who were investigating for the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, which was supported by the UN and sponsored by the UN, that around a million people were directly killed. I think it may be that high, it may be slightly less high, but it's in that range of many hundreds of thousands of people were directly killed.

43:12The total number of deaths in the Pol Pot regime, four years or slightly less, three years and eight months from April 75 to January 79, I estimate at 1.7 million. And that is, you know, about half murdered and approximately half died of starvation, disease or overwork. That would be my estimate. And what's the total population before? Well, the population was nearly 8 million after population growth in the 60s and 70, early part of the 70s. In 1975, I estimate the population was about 8 million or 7.8 or 9 million. By the time the regime was overthrown in January of 79, it was, I'm not sure of the exact number, but I think it's 5.7 million.

44:05I can't give you the exact number in my memory, but I believe that 1.7 million died. That's approaching 20 % of the population. It's about 20%, 21%, something like that, yeah. You've mentioned the mass killings. We can't skate over the story without mentioning the killing fields. People will be familiar with that expression. Tell me about those sites. Those are places of deliberate murder, even genocide, are they? Yes, and it's just surprising, even to me now, just how many cases there are of hundreds of people or a hundred or more people being killed in one space, in one place at a time. There were many, many individual killings where people, like I mentioned, the 1 ,000 or so returnees from North Vietnam, they all went to different places and they were selectively called aside and murdered.

44:58Only a small number of them survived. They saw what was happening to the others and they fled, but it's in the dozens who survived. But there are also huge numbers of cases where a village population was actually taken to what you would now call a killing field and just slaughtered en masse. There are numbers and numbers of these cases where this happened, particularly if they were associated with dissident cadre or officials or people who the regime distrusted. And entire local populations were just murdered in the hundreds. And examples of sexual assault and brutality as well. And this is without mentioning the ethnic mass killings that took place.

45:50There were minorities in the Cambodian population, about 20 % were non-Khmer, Khmer being the Cambodian majority. There were Muslims who were known as CHAMs, as the CHAM ethnic group, and there were ethnic Vietnamese, and there were a number of other minorities, Thai, ethnic Chinese. There were about half a million ethnic Chinese in Cambodia. Half of those died in the Khmer Rouge less than four years. And the Cham population, their numbers about 40 % or slightly under 40 % died. That's about double the population who died of the Khmer majority or of the national population of 21%. Twice as many charms proportionally died or were killed.

46:44And that's because they were singled out as minorities, as non-Khmer ethnicities. The same for the ethnic Vietnamese. They suffered genocide like the charms did because they were singled out. They were people who were ethnic Vietnamese were killed down to the last couple of dozen or even fewer than that. I think people have finally found examples, or they did finally found examples. I was unable in my research in the 80s to find a single ethnic Vietnamese who had survived. And Michael Vickery, who worked on the border amongst refugees in Thailand from Cambodia, he was unable to find a single ethnic Vietnamese.

47:25But since then, about six, I believe, have been found who survived the Khmer Rouge. And that's of about 20 ,000 or at least 10 to 20 ,000 who were not expelled, but tracked down and killed by the Khmer Rouge during 1977 and 78. You listen to Dan Snow's History. Don't go anywhere. There's more to come.

47:57This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Awful. That cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close. Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2 % daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more. Get a head start on your end of year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay.

48:29Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch, terms and more at AppleCard.com. This episode is sponsored by ZocDoc. Have you been putting off a doctor's appointment or need a dentist and you don't know where to start? We've definitely been there and that's why we use ZocDoc. Actually, over the holidays, Michael had a dental emergency and seemingly every office was closed. but we hopped onto ZocDoc, found an in-network dentist, had great reviews, saw real-time appointments available, which was key. It was on New Year's Day and booked an appointment in just minutes.

49:05It took so much of the stress out of the already stressful situation. ZocDoc makes it easy to search and compare over 250 ,000 local in-network providers across more than 200 specialties. So you can find the right doctor or dentist and book instantly. Taking care of your health just got easier. Download the ZocDoc app today and book that appointment on your to-do list. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C. ZocDoc.

49:44you mentioned a lot of the killing was around internal sort of power struggles or purges and paranoid purges is that something that gets worse as those years go on does the khmer regime start to destroy itself with a vast amount of attendant violence? It depends on what level you're looking at. At what was called the party centre, the Communist Party of Campuchia was ruled by what was called the centre or the Machim. That was headed by Pol Pot, of course, and his number two was Nguyen Chia, number three was Yang Sari. That was Pol Pot's brother-in-law. There was about eight of them in the party centre.

50:26and that pretty much survived intact until the last month of the Pol Pot regime when Vaughan Veit, who was the Deputy Prime Minister for the Economy, one of three Deputy Prime Ministers, he was purged and killed in December of 78. But he's the only one, and it's only in the last month before the regime fell, that any one of the party's centre, those eight top people, was suspected or purged or killed. But of the party central committee, a much larger group, and party members more generally, huge numbers were purged and killed. And the process was accelerating as the regime went on. So that in 75 and 76, the two of the three intellectuals who'd been parliamentarians in the Sienuk regime.

51:20They were both assassinated. And then in 77, a number of other more moderate communists were rounded up and killed. But by 77 and 78, the purges got much more widespread. And for instance, the leader of the Eastern Zone found his subordinates being rounded up and killed. And finally, the attention came to him and he was surrounded and about to be murdered when he killed himself. That was in May of 1978, just before the regime took over his zone then and, as I mentioned, expelled and killed 250 ,000 or so of the population of the eastern zone. And so the purges did accelerate over time. They started, I would say, in the 60s when the party was very small and Pol Pot was installing himself as leader and exerting control over the party bodies.

52:19But once they took power, then when Hu Yun, for instance, one of the three former parliamentarians, spoke out and said, you shouldn't have evacuated cities, you can't do that, you shouldn't abolish money, you shouldn't abolish religion. Now, he was a candidate member of the Central Committee, but soon after that he was shot dead and his body thrown in the Mekong in August of 1975 and then the purges just accelerated from there. There's a temptation isn't there with Hitler and Stalin to sort of talk about it's easier perhaps to some people like to just reach for sort of mental derangement the sort of paranoia the madness can you get inside Pol Pot's head can you understand what he is trying to do?

53:04Is this just a product of power corrupting someone so completely? Or is there any sort of method here? What's happening? Well, I think it's a mixture of dictatorial instincts. Although the fact that he did not begin to purge the rest of the party centre, the other seven members of the party centre, until the very end of the regime, although he didn't expect it to be the very end of the regime. But I think that they were a quite tightly knit group of Pol Pot, Nguyen Chia, Yangsiri, Sun Sen, and others, Kew Zempon. Many of them survived. Nguyen Chia and Kew Zempon survived to be brought to trial by the UN-sponsored tribunal in the 2000s.

53:53and both of them were found guilty of extermination as a crime against humanity and of genocide against the Chams and the Vietnamese. So I think they were well part of the, not just Pol Pot was dictating the policies, they were part of it, but I think a lot of the initiative came from Pol Pot and I think he was probably the most racist of all of them and was responsible for initiating the genocidal campaigns. He was probably the most distant from ordinary Cambodians' lives and values, and I think that's because he grew up in the palace. I think that his extreme distance from Cambodians generally, as well as his policy, as he wrote at the time in documents that survive, of keeping secrecy as the basis of the operations.

54:52And so everything that he did, he tried to keep secret. And so many, even of his colleagues, I think, probably people even in the party centre, didn't always know what orders he might have sent out to the countryside. It's just a terrifying case study in megalomaniacal fundamental breakdown and ever spiraling tyrannical urges that result from that kind of power, I guess, being concentrated. What happens to end this regime? Well, I think in a way, the regime's extreme policies brought about their own destruction, as well as the destruction of 2 million or 1.7 million Cambodians. But also, they attacked not only their own people, but all three of their neighbours.

55:40In 1977, as the regime became much more radical and started purging their own party much more, and as well as that intensifying the demands on the population of Cambodia, they also attacked Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos in early 1977, attacking all three of Cambodia's neighbors with military force. Now, they didn't attack Thailand and Laos with the same degree of extreme military force that they did against Vietnam, but they did start round about the same time, January 1977, a big incursion into Thailand, slaughtering villagers across the border in Thailand. They also sent from December 76 a number of military units against Laos, But from about March or April 1977, they sent troops across the border into South Vietnam's Mekong Delta and slaughtered civilians there on a very large scale.

56:46And they continued to do that, even though the Vietnamese asked them for, they had already asked them in 1976 for negotiations in June. and the Cambodians, Pol Pot himself said, no, we have this, the transcript of a Cambodian Communist Party meeting where he said, no, we're not going to have negotiations with the Vietnamese in June of 76. The Vietnamese then asked again after the attacks began, negotiations in June of 77, and the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot refused. And then again, when the Vietnamese responded at the end of 77 with an incursion of their own into Cambodia and then asked for negotiations in February 78.

57:33The Khmer Rouge regime even refused to accept the proposal for negotiations in February 78. And so eventually the Vietnamese government decided that there was nothing that would stop these attacks into Vietnam, which slaughtered many thousands of ethnic Vietnamese citizens of Vietnam, except an invasion that would come and overthrow the Pol Pot regime, which they did in December, January 1978-79. It's terrifying to think what would have happened if the Vietnamese had not done that, because presumably that regime might have survived and gone on killing its own people in enormous numbers. And I think that was the goal of the Chinese, who immediately invaded North Vietnam, to try to get the pressure off the Pol Pot regime.

58:25And the Chinese sent 200 ,000 troops across the border from China into North Vietnam. And the Vietnamese had to fight that invasion off as well as take over from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia on their southern border. So the Vietnamese could easily have been defeated in either of those theatres, but they were not. And that meant that the Khmer Rouge were driven into Thailand. The Chinese retreated from North Vietnam, and the new regime was set up in Cambodia, mostly of Eastern Zone rebels who had, after So Pim's suicide, the head of the Eastern Zone, other members of his Eastern Zone forces fled to Vietnam, and they started a rebellion.

59:13On the coattails, yeah. Yeah, well, they actually started a rebellion in May 78, and after several months, they were driven into Vietnam. And then they came back again with the Vietnamese army in December of 78. So it wasn't the only rebellion, by the way. There were two others inside Cambodia against the Pol Pot regime that the regime put down. But this was the most serious and significant one in the eastern zone. I mean, the Vietnamese, you don't want to mess with the Vietnamese in the late 70s. I mean, those guys are match fit. They've been fighting on and off since the 1940s. I imagine the Vietnamese knew what they were about.

59:55I'm not surprised they beat the Chinese off in the north and at the same time captured Cambodia. That's the interesting thing. So the new government of Cambodia, actually, they are complicit. They were complicit in many of the crimes of the previous regime. And that has been, when you go to Cambodia today, a lot of people speak quietly about the rage that they feel that despite some truth, reconciliation, justice, actually so many people responsible for monstrous crimes walk free and indeed have thrived since. Well, it's certainly true that many of the leaders of the new regime were former Khmer Rouge, but most of them were, I think, rebels against the Khmer Rouge or had been refugees.

1:00:33Hun Sen, for instance, is now the head of state and his son is the prime minister. Hun Sen fled from the eastern zone in 1977, long before the rebellion. Chia Sim and Hang Seng Nguyen were leaders of the rebellion against the Khmer Rouge. it's not been clear whether they participated in any atrocities and as I mentioned the eastern zone was was certainly the most moderate of the zones under Salpim and it was the one that that had the most according to refugees from that zone it was the most moderate living standards were better than in other zones so that it's possible that they committed crimes but I don't think it's been proven beyond a doubt.

1:01:18But certainly there is much suspicion of them because they were Khmer Rouge. On the other hand, there is relief that the Khmer Rouge regime was overthrown, both by the Vietnamese and by the rebels who joined the Vietnamese and or rebelled against them first. And on the other hand, they've established pretty much a one-party state. Cambodia is pretty much back to what it was under Sihanouk in the mid-60s. There has been a lot of economic growth, as there was under Sihanouk in the mid-60s. But there's been a lot of repression of freedom and human rights and freedom of speech that many people complain about.

1:01:58And in terms of that justice process, you've mentioned that there was a UN-supported process. Have people got to prison? Is it more like South Africa, where there's been a mechanism for airing and to a certain extent, sort of a certain amount of restorative justice, what's actually taken place in terms of accounting for those monstrous crimes? Well, I think the major problem has been that it took so long that it wasn't until 2007, I think, that the UN-sponsored tribunal got going. And that's 30 years nearly after the Khmer Rouge were in power and 28 years after they were overthrown. I think the reason for that is, surprisingly, given the UN's history, is that when they were overthrown and from, is it 15 years after they were overthrown, they retained Cambodia's UN seat in the United Nations General Assembly.

1:02:59And so the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, were still on the Thai border with their army threatening to return to power with the support of Thailand and China and in the United Nations with the support of the United States of America. That's how the Khmer Rouge managed to prevent a tribunal from being established until the 2000s. It was only when Pol Pot died in 1998 and the UN held elections in Cambodia in 1993, which were jointly won by the Sihanoukists and Hun Sen's State of Cambodia Party. Sihanoukists actually won slightly more votes, but Hun Sen eventually took over from them and remains in power today.

1:03:49But the UN did establish a tribunal in conjunction with the Cambodian government of Hun Sen. It got going around about 2009 and it brought to trial, Pol Pot had died, but it brought to trial the surviving top leaders of the Khmer Rouge government, which had been overthrown 30 years before. They included Nguyen Chia, Pol Pot's number two, Kyi Sengpon, the head of state of the democratic Camphagia regime headed by Pol Pot, Mok, the military commander who had probably killed more people than all of them, had died just before. He'd been in jail in Cambodia under Hun Sen, waiting trial. He'd been captured by the Hun Sen government, but he died before the tribunal was up and running.

1:04:41So he was never put on trial. Pol Pot was never put on trial. But Nguyen Chia and Kyu Sampong, Yang Sari, the number three of the Pol Pot regime, he was put on trial, but he died during his trial. His wife, Yang Tirit, who was Pol Pot's sister-in-law, she was found unfit, mentally unfit to face trial. So she was not put on trial. But Nguyen Chia and Kieu Sampoan, Pol Pot's number two and the head of state of Pol Pot's regime, were both found guilty in 2014 of crimes against humanity, including extermination. And then in 2018 and 19, they were both found guilty of genocide against the charm population, the minority charm Muslim group and the ethnic Vietnamese.

1:05:33So in some sense, justice was done, but not to Pol Pot or mock the military commander of the Pol Pot regime. And Yang Tsuri managed to avoid a judgment by dying during his trial. However, there were many second-rank Khmer Rouge whom the Hun Sen government refused to allow to be put on trial. And there was some injustice about that, I think. people who had not been at the top level of the Khmer Rouge regime, but who had committed major crimes, but they were never brought to trial. Must be just an extraordinary legacy for those living in Cambodia at the moment. Tell everyone what your book is called.

1:06:18Well, I wrote a series of two books, one called How Pol Pot Came to Power, and a sequel called The Pol Pot Regime. Well, Ben Kinnan, thank you very much for coming on the podcast and talking all about it. Thanks for having me.

1:06:35Well, that's it, folks. Thank you very much for listening. I certainly learnt a lot in that podcast. I guess I'd underappreciate the extent to which the wider regional picture is so important. Khmer Rouge didn't happen in isolation. It's a culmination of years of global, regional civil war. Profound social and economic dislocation in Cambodia. Amazing. The scale of that devastation was mind-blowing. It's just a terrible example of a mindset, of a system that treats human life as expendable in the service of radical ideological transformation. Terrifying what unyielding ideological absolutism can do when it's combined with unchecked authority, unchecked power in a society like that.

1:07:17Thank you very much to Nathan Rothery for suggesting that we cover this. Really important bit of history. I'm very grateful. If there are any other topics I'd like us to cover, remember to please reach out in the email. it's all in the show notes. Our vulture-ine producers spend their time scavenging that for good ideas. Fun word. Who knows, maybe your ideas will make it onto the podcast. Until then folks, till next time.

1:07:55pretty holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close. Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2 % daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more. Get a head start on your end of year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch, terms and more at applecard.com. Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history?

1:08:27Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe