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Khmer Rouge is the name that was popularly given to members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), and by extension to Democratic Kampuchea, which ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The name was coined in the 1960s by Norodom Sihanouk to describe his country's heterogeneous, communist-led dissidents, with whom he allied after the 1970 Cambodian coup d'état.
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Text from the Wikipedia article “Khmer Rouge”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Khmer Rouge is the name that was popularly given to members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), and by extension to Democratic Kampuchea, which ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The name was coined in the 1960s by Norodom Sihanouk to describe his country's heterogeneous, communist-led dissidents, with whom he allied after the 1970 Cambodian coup d'état.
The Kampuchea Revolutionary Army was slowly built up in the forests of eastern Cambodia during the late 1960s, supported by the People's Army of Vietnam, the Viet Cong, the Pathet Lao, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Although the Khmer Rouge originally fought against Sihanouk, it changed its position on the CCP's advice and began supporting him after he was overthrown in a 1970 coup d'état by Lon Nol, who established the pro-American Khmer Republic. Despite a massive American bombing campaign (Operation Freedom Deal) against them, the Khmer Rouge won the Cambodian Civil War when they captured the Cambodian capital and overthrew the Khmer Republic in 1975. Following their victory, the Khmer Rouge—who were led by Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, and Khieu Samphan—immediately set about forcibly evacuating the country's major cities. In 1976, they renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea.
The Khmer Rouge regime was highly autocratic, totalitarian, and repressive. Many deaths resulted from the regime's social engineering policies and the "Moha Lout Plaoh", an imitation of China's Great Leap Forward which had caused the Great Chinese Famine. The Khmer Rouge's attempts at agricultural reform through collectivization similarly led to widespread famine, while its insistence on absolute self-sufficiency, including the supply of medicine, led to the death of many thousands from treatable diseases, such as malaria.
The Khmer Rouge regime murdered hundreds of thousands of their perceived political opponents, and their racist emphasis on national purity resulted in the genocide of Cambodian minorities. Its cadres summarily executed and tortured perceived subversive elements, or they killed them during genocidal purges of their own ranks between 1975 and 1979. Ultimately, the Cambodian genocide which took place under the Khmer Rouge regime led to the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people, around 25% of Cambodia's population.
In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge was largely supported and funded by the CCP, receiving approval from CCP Chairman Mao Zedong; it is estimated that at least 90% of the foreign aid which was provided to the Khmer Rouge came from China. The regime was removed from power in 1979 when Vietnam invaded Cambodia and quickly destroyed most of its forces. The Khmer Rouge then fled to Thailand, whose government saw them as a buffer force against the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). 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 Cambodian governments-in-exile (including the Khmer Rouge) held onto Cambodia's United Nations seat (with considerable international support) until 1993, when the monarchy was restored and the name of the Cambodian state was changed to the Kingdom of Cambodia. A year later, thousands of Khmer Rouge guerrillas surrendered themselves in a government amnesty.
In 1996, a new political party called the Democratic National Union Movement was formed by Ieng Sary, who was granted amnesty despite his role as the deputy leader of the Khmer Rouge, in exchange for his defection and his role in persuading other Khmer Rouge fighters to surrender. This move helped to further dissolve the Khmer Rouge and was a calculated political decision to end the ongoing civil war by incorporating former resistance leaders. The Khmer Rouge was largely dissolved by the mid-1990s and finally surrendered completely in 1999. Sary was arrested in 2007 and was charged with crimes against humanity but died of heart failure before the case against him could be brought to a verdict. In 2014, two Khmer Rouge leaders, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, were jailed for life by the United Nations-backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, which found them guilty of crimes against humanity for their roles in the Khmer Rouge's genocidal campaign.
The term Khmers rouges, French for red Khmers, was coined by King Norodom Sihanouk and it was later adopted by English speakers (in the form of the corrupted version Khmer Rouge). It was used to refer to a succession of communist parties in Cambodia which evolved into the Communist Party of Kampuchea and later the Party of Democratic Kampuchea. Its military was known successively as the Kampuchean Revolutionary Army and the National Army of Democratic Kampuchea.
Since the deterioration in relations between Vietnam and Democratic Kampuchea, the Vietnamese government no longer recognize the legitimacy of the Khmer Rouge, and as a result, they call the Khmer Rouge the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique (Vietnamese: Tập đoàn Pol Pot-Ieng Sary) or the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary reactionary clique (Vietnamese: Tập đoàn phản động Pol Pot-Ieng Sary).
The movement's ideology was shaped by a power struggle during 1976 in which the so-called Party Centre, which was led by Pol Pot, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, defeated other regional elements of its leadership. The Party Centre's ideology combined elements of communism with a strongly xenophobic form of Khmer nationalism. Partly because of its secrecy and partly because of changes in how it presented itself, academic interpretations of its political position vary widely, ranging from interpreting it as the "purest" Marxist–Leninist movement to characterising it as an anti-Marxist "peasant revolution". The first interpretation has been criticized by historian Ben Kiernan, who asserts that it comes from a "convenient anti-communist perspective". Its leaders and theorists, most of whom had been exposed to the heavily Stalinist outlook of the French Communist Party during the 1950s, developed a distinctive and eclectic "post-Leninist" ideology that drew on elements of Stalinism, Maoism and the postcolonial theory of Frantz Fanon. In the early 1970s, the Khmer Rouge looked to the model of Enver Hoxha's Albania, which they believed was the most advanced communist state which was then in existence.
Many of the regime's characteristics—such as its focus on the rural peasantry rather than the urban proletariat as the bulwark of revolution, its emphasis on Great Leap Forward-type initiatives, its desire to abolish personal interest in human behaviour, its promotion of communal living and eating, and its focus on perceived common sense over technical knowledge—appear to have been heavily influenced by Maoist ideology; however, the Khmer Rouge displayed these characteristics in a more extreme form. Additionally, non-Khmers, who constituted a significant part of the supposedly favored segment of the peasantry, were singled out because of their race. According to Ben Kiernan, this was "neither a communist proletarian revolution that privileged the working class, nor a peasant revolution that favored all farmers".
While the CPK described itself as the "number 1 Communist state" once it was in power, some communist regimes, such as Vietnam, saw it as a Maoist deviation from orthodox Marxism. According to author Rebecca Gidley, the Khmer Rouge "almost immediately erred by implementing a Maoist doctrine rather than following the Marxist–Leninist prescriptions." The Maoist and Khmer Rouge belief that human willpower could overcome material and historical conditions was strongly at odds with mainstream Marxism, which emphasised historical materialism and the idea of history as inevitable progression toward communism. In 1981, following the Cambodian–Vietnamese War, in an attempt to get foreign support, the Khmer Rouge officially renounced communism.
One of the regime's main characteristics was its form of Khmer nationalism, which combined an idealisation of the Khmer Empire (802–1431) and the late Middle Period of Cambodian history (1431–1863) with an existential fear for the survival of the Cambodian state, which had historically been liquidated during periods of Vietnamese and Siamese intervention. The spillover of Vietnamese fighters during the Vietnamese–American War intensified anti-Vietnamese sentiments: the Khmer Republic under Lon Nol, overthrown by the Khmer Rouge, had promoted Mon-Khmer nationalism and it was also responsible for several anti-Vietnamese pogroms which occurred during the 1970s. Some historians such as Ben Kiernan have stated that the importance which the regime gave to race overshadowed its conceptions of class.
The Khmer Rouge targeted particular groups of people, among them Buddhist monks, ethnic minorities, and educated elites. Once they were in power, the Khmer Rouge explicitly targeted the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Cham minority and even their partially Khmer offspring. The same attitude extended to the party's own ranks, as senior CPK figures of non-Khmer ethnicity were removed from the leadership despite extensive revolutionary experience and were often killed.
A Vietnamese official called the Khmer Rouge leaders "Hitlerite-fascists", while the General Secretary of the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party, Pen Sovan, referred to the Khmer Rouge as a "draconian, dictatorial and fascist regime".
The goal of Khmer Rouge was to create a communist society through the complete and immediate abolition of money, trade and private property. The new society was to be perfectly egalitarian, which required homogeneity, which Khmer Rouge sought to achieve through the destruction of existing social structures and the uniformisation of the newly emerging socialist society. To this end, the creation of a "new society" that would completely break with the existing traditions and cultural heritage of Cambodia was also considered necessary. One of the Khmer Rouge activists stated: "We must burn the old grass so that new grass can grow." For Khmer Rouge, egalitarianism also included the concept of "levelling down"—Cambodian society was to be brought to the level of the rural poor and develop from there; anything that was inaccessible to the general public was considered bourgeois and a luxury that had to be destroyed.
Pol Pot’s economic policies under the Khmer Rouge (1975–1979) were characterized by an extreme form of agrarian socialism that sought to eliminate markets, money, and private property. The regime aimed to transform Cambodia into a self-sufficient, classless society based entirely on collective agriculture. Urban populations were forcibly relocated to rural communes, where the state controlled production and distribution. This system rejected industrialization, diverging from other communist models that incorporated industrial development. The abolition of money and markets disrupted traditional economic coordination, leading to inefficiencies, shortages, and declining agricultural output. Collective land policies further reduced individual incentives and contributed to mismanagement of resources. Long-term effects included significant demographic and economic consequences, including reduced human capital and persistent institutional challenges. These policies are widely regarded as a major factor in Cambodia’s economic collapse during this period.
The leading economic theorist of Khmer Rouge, Hou Yuon, distinguished two types of economic systems: "natural" (natural economy) and "commodity" (trade-based); in the agricultural conditions of Cambodia, the "commodity" economy was considered a parasite on the "natural" economy—according to Youn's calculations, rice producers received only 26% of the profits. This formed the basis of Khmer Rouge's hostility towards cities, as urban areas were seen as playing a parasitic role in the pre-industrial society of Cambodia, and even the urban working class was considered a relatively privileged group. Khmer Rouge instead postulated socialism built on agrarianism—the poorest peasants, organized into production cooperatives, were considered the main and in fact the only force of the revolution; one of the Khmer Rouge's slogans was "agriculture is the basis for further industrial expansion"—the economy was to be based on agriculture, with the development of industry postponed for the future. The Cambodian economy was also supposed to be self-sufficient along the principle of "reliance on one's own strength", which Khmer Rouge considered necessary to ensure the independence of the Cambodian revolution from imperialism and neo-colonialism, even if this entailed technological regression.
The Khmer Rouge's economic policy, which was largely based on the plans of Khieu Samphan, focused on the achievement of national self-reliance through an initial phase of agricultural collectivism. This would then be used as a route to achieve rapid social transformation and industrial and technological development without assistance from foreign powers, a process which the party characterised as a "Super Great Leap Forward".
The party's General Secretary Pol Pot strongly influenced the propagation of the policy of autarky. He 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". In 1975, Khmer Rouge representatives to China said that Pol Pot's belief was that the collectivisation of agriculture was capable of "[creating] a complete communist society without wasting time on the intermediate steps". Society was accordingly classified into peasant "base people" (ប្រជាជនមូលដ្ឋាន prâchéachôn mulôdthan), who would be the bulwark of the transformation; and urban "new people" (ប្រជាជនថ្មី prâchéachôn thmei), who were to be reeducated or liquidated. The focus of the Khmer Rouge leadership on the peasantry as the base of the revolution was according to Michael Vickery a product of their status as "petty-bourgeois radicals who had been overcome by peasantist romanticism". 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. The policy of evacuating major towns, as well as providing a reserve of easily exploitable agricultural labour, was likely viewed positively by the Khmer Rouge's peasant supporters as removing the source of their debts.
Democratic Kampuchea was an atheist state, although its constitution stated that everyone had freedom of religion, or freedom not to practice a religion. However, it specified that what it termed "reactionary religion" would not be permitted. While in practice religious activity was not tolerated, the relationship of the CPK to the majority Cambodian Theravada Buddhism was complex; several key figures in its history, such as Tou Samouth and Ta Mok, were former monks, along with many lower level cadres, who often proved to be some of the strictest disciplinarians. While there was extreme harassment of Buddhist institutions, the CPK regime had a tendency to internalise and reconfigure the symbolism and language of Cambodian Buddhism so that many revolutionary slogans mimicked the formulae which were learned by young monks during their training. Some cadres who had previously been monks interpreted their change of vocation as a simple movement from a lower to a higher religion, mirroring attitudes around the growth of Cao Dai in the 1920s.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Khmer Rouge”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.