III.

Khmer Rouge Takes Power

On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge armies defeated the Lon Nol regime and took the capital, Phnom Penh, immediately dispersing almost all of its more than 2 million inhabitants to a life of hard agricultural labor in the countryside. Other cities and towns were also evacuated. The Khmer Rouge renamed the country Democratic Kâmpŭchéa (DK), and for the next four years the regime, headed by Pol Pot as prime minister and other members of the Standing Committee of the CPK Central Committee, terrorized the population.

Almost 1.7 million Cambodians were killed in the takeover, including members of minority and religious groups, people suspected of disagreeing with the party, intellectuals, merchants, and bureaucrats. Millions of other Cambodians were forcibly relocated, deprived of food, tortured, or sent into forced labor.

Of about 425,000 Chinese Cambodians, only about half survived the Khmer Rouge regime. While most of about 450,000 Vietnamese Cambodians had been expelled by the Lon Nol regime, more were driven out by the Khmer Rouge; the rest were tracked down and murdered. Of about 250,000 Muslim Chams (an ethnic group inhabiting the rural areas of Cambodia) in 1975, 90,000 were massacred, and the survivors were dispersed.

By 1979, 15 percent of the rural Khmer population and 25 percent of the urban Khmer population had perished. The most horrific slaughter took place during the second half of 1978 in a purge of the Eastern Zone on the Vietnam border, where resistance to the Khmer Rouge was strong. At least 250,000 people were killed in the worst single massacre of the Khmer Rouge period.

Religion in Cambodia was also affected by the Khmer Rouge regime. Buddhism was completely suppressed from 1975 to 1979; many monks were defrocked and sent into forced labor, while others were killed. The Khmer Rouge also attacked the neighboring countries of Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos in an attempt to reclaim territories lost by Cambodia many centuries before.