The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia



Unfortunately, there are many instances of brutal dictatorships in history that have committed genocides and mass atrocities. While I have never had a debate topic on the Khmer Rouge specifically, an understanding of one of the most brutal communist regimes could improve spec knowledge and work as supporting evidence in a number of debates.


  • After a period of civil war, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), commonly known as the Khmer Rouge, sized control of Cambodia in April of 1975.
  •  Characterized by the mass deaths that occurred underneath its administration, the Khmer Rouge ruled from 17 April 1975 to 7 January 1979. It was not until the establishment of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, nearly two decades later, that Ieng Sary and other leaders of the Khmer Rouge were tried for various crimes on 19 August 1979. 
  •  The Khmer Rouge killed or executed nearly 1.7 million Cambodians in support of their Regime’s policies.
  • The aim of the Khmer Regime was to build an entirely homogeneous society through the abolition of economic, cultural, and social institutions.
  • Cambodians living underneath Khmer rule suffered inhuman living conditions, extrajudicial killings, and the extermination of ethnic and social minorities.
  • The Khmer Rouge forced hundreds of thousands of Cambodians into the countryside from urban centers to work in agriculture and labor sectors.
  • The Regime abolished anything that differentiated individuals including money, property, foreign and traditional clothing, any association with academia, and religious practices.
  • Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister respectively, controlled the Khmer Rouge throughout its reign. Numerous human rights violations occurred underneath Pot and Sary. One of the most significant violations was the targeting of the Vietnamese minority. At a Party Congress in May 1975, a representative remarked, “we cannot allow any Vietnamese minority to live in Cambodia."
  •  Furthermore, the national objective of the CPK was to establish a homogenous society of which the Vietnamese could not be a part.
  • Later in 1976, CPK policies refused Vietnamese the right to leave Cambodia and forced them to remain living and working in the Eastern Sector, an area in Cambodia that housed a large Vietnamese population.
  • As of April 1977, the CPK ordered the arrest of all ethnic Vietnamese or individuals who spoke Vietnamese.
  • The upper-Khmer Rouge leadership arrested Vietnamese residents from a “pre-prepared” list of Vietnamese in the area. From 1977 onward, there were “mass targeted killings of Vietnamese civilians.”
  • The most notorious violations culminated with the Genocide of the Eastern Sector. The Khmer Rouge regime’s most obvious “genocidal plan,” the Eastern Sector Genocide, began on 6 January 1978, when Pot and Sary released their plan to exterminate the Vietnamese living in the Eastern Sector, proclaiming that “each Cambodian” must kill “30 Vietnamese people” regardless of their personal status. By late 1978, cadres working under the policy directives of Pot and Sary massacred the remaining 100,000 Vietnamese in Cambodia.
  •  It was not until the Vietnamese Army invaded Cambodia in 1979, overthrowing the Khmer Regime, that the persecution of the Vietnamese ended. 
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