Khmer Rouge

The political events of the last 5 years had prepared the ground for the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975: the excessive corruption and incompetence of Lon Nol's government, the intermitent USA bombing in Cambodia during 1969-73 that killed around 150,000 peasants, the American and South Vietnamese invasion of Southeastern Cambodia that drove the North Vietnamese troops deeper into the country and the support showed by Sihanouk to the Khmer Rouge led many Cambodian's to believe that they would be better off under the Pol Pot led party.

At the beginning the Khmer Rouge had been dependant of their Vietnamese allies, but as they grew stronger and gained support in the countryside, they became more independent and their ideological line took a different approach: they pursued an indigenous communism based in the agrarian Chinese Cultural Revolution (as opposed to the more Soviet style communism followed by the Vietnamese), supported by strong nationalist feelings. Despite their earlier collaboration cambodian communism was embedded in strong antivietnamese feelings.

Agrarian Utopia

In 1975, after a long civil war against Lon Nol's army, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh and were greeted by effusive crowds that believed the end of the war and harship would finally be over. Nothing further from reality, the new regime (Democratic Kampuchea) would be the most brutal in Cambodian history. Next day the Khmer Rouge started evacuating all the cities and relocating all their citizens to the country side. Cambodia was reinvented into a radical agrarian utopia: all foreign influences, capitalism, western culture, religion and modern life were abolished. Embassies were closed, foreigns expelled, newspapers, radio and television stations were closed, health care and education eliminated, money and markets banned. Children were removed from their parental guard and put in communal camps. Cambodia was taken back to "year zero".