Khmer Rouge

The Khmer Rouge (French for "Red Khmers") was the popular name for the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) and its armed wing, which seized power in Cambodia on 17 April 1975 after capturing Phnom Penh. Led by Pol Pot (Saloth Sâr), along with figures such as Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan, and Ta Mok, the movement renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea and pursued a radical agrarian-Maoist transformation.

Within days of taking the capital, the regime forcibly evacuated urban populations to the countryside, abolished money, private property, markets, schools, and organized religion, and sought to create a self-reliant peasant society at "Year Zero." Through forced labor, starvation, disease, torture in sites such as the S-21 (Tuol Sleng) prison, and mass executions at killing fields like Choeung Ek, an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people died — roughly a quarter of Cambodia's population. Ethnic Vietnamese, Cham Muslims, Chinese Cambodians, Buddhist monks, and educated professionals were disproportionately targeted.

The regime's border clashes with Vietnam led to a Vietnamese invasion in late 1978, and Phnom Penh fell on 7 January 1979, replaced by the People's Republic of Kampuchea. The Khmer Rouge retreated to the Thai border and, paradoxically, retained Cambodia's UN seat for years with backing from China, the United States, and ASEAN states opposed to Vietnamese occupation. It continued a guerrilla insurgency through the 1990s before disintegrating; Pol Pot died in 1998.

Accountability came through the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), a hybrid UN-Cambodian tribunal established in 2006. It convicted Kaing Guek Eav ("Duch"), Nuon Chea, and Khieu Samphan; in 2018 the ECCC issued the first judicial finding of genocide against the regime for crimes targeting the Cham and Vietnamese minorities.