Khmer Rouge Seize Phnom Penh: Cambodia's Dark Era Begins

Khmer Rouge soldiers marched into Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, and immediately began emptying the city. At gunpoint, they ordered the entire urban population of roughly two million people to leave their homes and walk into the countryside. Hospital patients were pushed into the streets in their beds. Families were separated. Anyone who resisted or moved too slowly was shot. Within days, Phnom Penh, a city of French colonial boulevards and Buddhist temples, was a ghost town. The Khmer Rouge, led by the French-educated Communist Pol Pot, had spent five years fighting a guerrilla war from the Cambodian jungle before their final victory. The movement's ideology was an extreme agrarian communism that rejected cities, money, private property, religion, and formal education as corruptions of an idealized peasant past. "Year Zero" began the moment they took the capital. The entire population was to be reorganized into agricultural communes, and Cambodia's history before the revolution was to be erased. The evacuation of Phnom Penh was the first act of a genocide that killed an estimated 1.7 to 2.5 million Cambodians over the next four years, roughly a quarter of the country's population. Executions accounted for a large share of the deaths, but many more died from forced labor, starvation, and disease in the rural work camps. The Khmer Rouge targeted anyone with education, professional skills, or connections to the former government. Wearing glasses was considered evidence of intellectual status and could be a death sentence. The regime collapsed when Vietnam invaded in December 1978, capturing Phnom Penh in January 1979 and driving the Khmer Rouge back into the jungle. The Vietnamese found a country in ruins, with schools and hospitals closed, currency abolished, and entire families wiped out. Pol Pot retreated to the Thai border and continued fighting as a guerrilla for two more decades. He died in 1998 without facing trial. The Khmer Rouge tribunal, established in 2006, convicted only three senior leaders before concluding its work, leaving most of the regime's crimes officially unpunished.