Pol Pot

Pol Pot, born Saloth Sâr in 1925 in Prek Sbauv, Cambodia, was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) and the principal architect of the Khmer Rouge regime. After studying in Paris in the early 1950s, where he was exposed to Marxist-Leninist thought, he returned to Cambodia and rose through clandestine communist networks, eventually leading an insurgency against the U.S.-backed Lon Nol government during the Cambodian Civil War.

On 17 April 1975, Khmer Rouge forces captured Phnom Penh and established Democratic Kampuchea. Pol Pot became Prime Minister in 1976. His government pursued a radical agrarian-Maoist transformation: cities were forcibly evacuated, money and private property were abolished, religion was suppressed, and the population was organized into rural collectives. Real and perceived enemies — intellectuals, ethnic Vietnamese, Cham Muslims, Buddhist monks, and eventually party cadres themselves — were executed or worked to death. The interrogation center S-21 (Tuol Sleng) and the Choeung Ek killing field became emblems of the regime. Estimates of deaths from execution, starvation, and disease range from about 1.5 to 2 million, roughly a quarter of Cambodia's population.

The regime fell in January 1979 when Vietnamese forces invaded and installed the People's Republic of Kampuchea. Pol Pot retreated to the Thai border, where the Khmer Rouge continued a guerrilla insurgency and — controversially — retained Cambodia's UN seat into the early 1990s with support from China, the United States, and ASEAN states opposed to the Vietnamese occupation. He was placed under house arrest by his own former comrades in 1997 and died on 15 April 1998, never tried by an international court. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), established in 2006, later convicted several of his senior associates, including Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, of genocide and crimes against humanity.