34 Facts About Khmer Rouge

Khmer Rouge army was slowly built up in the jungles of eastern Cambodia during the late 1960s, supported by the North Vietnamese army, the Viet Cong, the Pathet Lao, and the Chinese Communist Party .

The Khmer Rouge regime murdered hundreds of thousands of their perceived political opponents, and its racist emphasis on national purity resulted in the genocide of Cambodian minorities.

The Khmer Rouge then fled to Thailand, whose government saw them as a buffer force against the Communist Vietnamese.

The Khmer Rouge continued to fight against the Vietnamese and the government of the new People's Republic of Kampuchea until the end of the war in 1989.

The spillover of Vietnamese fighters from the Vietnamese–American War further aggravated anti-Vietnamese sentiments: the Khmer Republic under Lon Nol, overthrown by the Khmer Rouge, had promoted Mon-Khmer nationalism and was responsible for several anti-Vietnamese programs during the 1970s.

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Once in power, the Khmer Rouge explicitly targeted the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Cham minority and even their partially Khmer offspring.

Khmer Rouge was reportedly impressed with the self-sufficient manner in which the mountain tribes of Cambodia lived, which the party believed was a form of primitive communism.

Khmer Rouge theory developed the concept that the nation should take "agriculture as the basic factor and use the fruits of agriculture to build industry".

The opposition of the peasantry and the urban population in Khmer Rouge ideology was heightened by the structure of the Cambodian rural economy, where small farmers and peasants had historically suffered from indebtedness to urban money-lenders rather than suffering from indebtedness to landlords.

Mat Ly, a Cham who served as the deputy minister of agriculture under the People's Republic of Kampuchea, stated that Khmer Rouge troops had perpetrated a number of massacres in Cham villages in the Central and Eastern zones where the residents had refused to give up Islamic customs.

The Khmer Rouge was an intellectual group with a middle-class background and a romanticised sympathy for rural poor people but with little to no awareness that their radical policies would lead to such violence; according to this view, the applicability of genocide is rejected and the violence was an unintentional consequence that was beyond the Khmer Rouge's control.

Khmer Rouge attended the elite Lycee Sisowath in Phnom Penh before beginning courses in commerce and politics at the Paris Institute of Political Science in France.

In 1968, the Khmer Rouge was officially formed, and its forces launched a national insurgency across Cambodia.

Political appeal of the Khmer Rouge was increased as a result of the situation created by the removal of Sihanouk as head of state in 1970.

The Khmer Rouge established "liberated" areas in the south and the southwestern parts of the country, where they operated independently of the North Vietnamese.

Many of the new recruits for the Khmer Rouge were apolitical peasants who fought in support of the king, not for communism, of which they had little understanding.

Sihanouk's popular support in rural Cambodia allowed the Khmer Rouge to extend its power and influence to the point that by 1973 it exercised de facto control over the majority of Cambodian territory, although only a minority of its population.

Craig Etcheson acknowledged that U S intervention increased recruitment for the Khmer Rouge but disputed that it was a primary cause of the Khmer Rouge victory.

In June 1975, Pol Pot and other officials of Khmer Rouge met with Mao Zedong in Beijing, receiving Mao's approval and advice; in addition, Mao taught Pot his "Theory of Continuing Revolution under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat" .

However, to counter the power of the Soviet Union and Vietnam, a group of countries including China, the United States, Thailand as well as some Western countries supported the Khmer Rouge-dominated Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea to continue holding Cambodia's seat in the United Nations, which was held until 1993, after the Cold War had ended.

Khmer Rouge carried out a radical program that included isolating the country from all foreign influences, closing schools, hospitals and some factories, abolishing banking, finance and currency, and collectivising agriculture.

In Phnom Penh and other cities, the Khmer Rouge told residents that they would be moved only about "two or three kilometers" away from the city and would return in "two or three days".

The Khmer Rouge followed a morality based on an idealised conception of the attitudes of prewar rural Cambodia.

Marriage required permission from the authorities, and the Khmer Rouge were strict, giving permission to marry only to people of the same class and level of education.

The Khmer Rouge wanted to "eliminate all traces of Cambodia's imperialist past", and its previous culture was one of them.

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The Khmer Rouge did not want the Cambodian people to be completely ignorant, and primary education was provided to them.

The Khmer Rouge's goal was to gain full control of all of the information that the Cambodian people received, and spread revolutionary culture among the masses.

Khmer Rouge language has a complex system of usages to define speakers' rank and social status.

The Khmer Rouge originally reported that he had been killed in the final battles for Phnom Penh, but he was apparently executed in late 1975 or early 1976.

On 25 December 1978, the Vietnamese armed forces along with the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation, an organization founded by Heng Samrin that included many dissatisfied former Khmer Rouge members, invaded Cambodia and captured Phnom Penh on 7 January 1979.

The Khmer Rouge, still led by Pol Pot, was the strongest of the three rebel groups in the Coalition Government, which received extensive military aid from China, Britain and the United States and intelligence from the Thai military.

In 1981, the Khmer Rouge went so far as to officially renounce communism and somewhat moved their ideological emphasis to nationalism and anti-Vietnamese rhetoric instead.

However, the Khmer Rouge resumed fighting in 1992, boycotted the election and in the following year rejected its results.

The book is unique in that instead of focusing on the victims as most books do, it collects the stories of former Khmer Rouge, giving insights into the functioning of the regime and approaching the question of how such a regime could take place.