Pol Pot died on April 15, 1998 at the age of 73 — seemingly from heart failure, though rumors of suicide or even murder began to spread in the aftermath.
Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock PhotoPol Pot, the Cambodian revolutionary and dictator, around 1978.
By the time Pol Pot died in 1998, the genocidal dictator had left irreversible scars on Cambodia. Between 1975 and 1979, the country was at the mercy of his ruthless regime, one that sought to exterminate anyone considered an “enemy.” Under the rule of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge movement, an estimated two million people — nearly a quarter of the population — died from starvation, overwork, disease, and mass execution.
Cities were emptied, religion was outlawed, and families were torn apart in the name of building a supposedly utopian agrarian society. Pol Pot was the architect of “Year Zero,” a movement that promised equality but instead delivered genocide. He was a man who projected humility but orchestrated policies that dismantled his nation — and never faced true justice.
The once-quiet student of Marxism in Paris returned home to engineer one of the bloodiest revolutions of the 20th century, but Pol Pot died at age 73 under house arrest in the Cambodian jungle. He left behind a fractured and traumatized country, and a legacy as the man who broke it.
This is the story of his rise — and fall.
The Formative Youth Of Saloth Sar
Pol Pot was born Saloth Sar — “Sar” loosely translating to “white” or “pale,” a reflection of his lighter complexion — on May 19, 1925, in the small farming village of Prek Sbauv in central Cambodia. His family lived modestly but comfortably, with enough land to employ laborers and maintain status within their community. As a child, he grew up studying the fundamental principles of Buddhism, and even spent a year at a Buddhist monastery.
His education soon took him far beyond the rice paddies, however.
In 1949, Sar set off for Paris with a scholarship — and it quickly changed his worldview. In France, he was exposed to a different way of life and was surrounded by centuries of French culture, but radical new ideas were forming in Europe at the time as well. Sar was transfixed.
CPA Media Pte LtdSaloth Sar, later known as Pol Pot, circa 1979.
Alongside his study of radio technologies, Sar spent much of his time immersed in communist theory, absorbing ideas about class struggle and revolutionary transformation. Back in his home country, many others were also newly drawn to ideas about Communism.
In 1951, the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party (KPRP) was founded in Cambodia. Revolution was brewing on multiple fronts, as the Cambodians also fought for the independence from France.
And after Saloth Sar returned to Cambodia in 1953, he soon took advantage of the dramatic changes taking place across his country.
The Rise Of The Khmer Rouge
By November 1953, Cambodia had achieved its independence from France. Meanwhile, Saloth Sar worked as a teacher while simultaneously plotting a communist revolution with the KPRP.
Throughout the next decade, Sar rose through the ranks of the organization, which was renamed Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) and would eventually become known as the Khmer Rouge. Sar also began identifying himself with a nom de guerre, Pol Pot.
CPA Media Pte LtdKhmer Rouge soldiers in 1975.
He became the leader of the CPK in 1963, the same year that the Khmer Rouge set up guerrilla bases deep in the Cambodian countryside. As the decade came to a close, the movement only grew more radical. Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge soldiers — mostly composed of teenage peasant boys — gained the support of peasants living on the fringes of Cambodian society, organizing their revolution around causes that would support the poor at the expense of the wealthier people living in the cities.
Then came the Vietnam War.
Although Cambodia was not directly involved in the conflict, as Vietnam’s neighbor it still suffered from the fighting. The violence drove more and more people out of the cities and into the arms of Pol Pot and his followers.
In 1970, the movement gained an unexpected ally: Prince Norodom Sihanouk. The prince had lost power after General Lon Nol staged a coup — possibly with the support of the United States. Sihanouk, furious, then allied himself with Pol Pot’s guerrillas, lending them legitimacy in the eyes of many peasants. As the U.S. bombing of Cambodian territory continued over the next four years, more rural communities found themselves devastated and looking to the Khmer Rouge for salvation.
Public DomainNorodom Sihanouk eventually shifted his support in favor of the Khmer Rouge.
Then, on April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge captured the capital, Phnom Penh. The civil war was over, and they had won.
Pol Pot promised the people a fresh start. He claimed to envision a classless system, an alternative to the corrupt autocracy that had been in place, and a prosperous future for Cambodia’s people.
Their history would begin anew, with “Year Zero.”
No one foresaw the horror that was to come.
Pol Pot And The Cambodian Genocide
Katherine Gruspier and Michael S. Pollanen/Academic Forensic Pathology InternationalThe skull of a prisoner sent to Tuol Sleng Prison.
Pol Pot’s stated goal was to make Cambodia into a self-sufficient agrarian utopia free from class divisions, foreign influence, and urban corruption. But the methods Pol Pot used to achieve this were tenuous at best — and outright cruel at worst.
Immediately upon assuming power, he ordered included the evacuation of all cities and towns, forcing millions into the countryside to work in the fields. The Khmer Rouge also ordered the abolition of money, markets, schools, and religion, and the establishment of agricultural communes where people labored under brutal conditions.
Anyone considered an “enemy of the revolution” was imprisoned, tortured, or executed. This included intellectuals, merchants, government officials, soldiers, ethnic minorities (especially Cham Muslims, Vietnamese, and Chinese Cambodians), Buddhist monks, and even suspected dissenters within the party. Many of these people were sent to the notorious prison Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh. According to the Association for Asian Studies, the prison became known as a place where people “entered but never returned.”
Wikimedia CommonsPhotos of victims of the genocide taken by Khmer Rouge soldiers.
Millions died of famine, forced labor, and mass killings.
A 2017 study by Katherine Gruspier and Michael S. Pollanen entitled “Forensic Legacy of the Khmer Rouge: The Cambodian Genocide,” found that over the course of just four years between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot’s regime resulted in the deaths of between 1.67 and 2.18 million people — roughly a quarter of the population.
Then, in 1979, Vietnam invaded Cambodia. The Vietnamese toppled the Khmer Rouge and installed a new government, once again forcing Pol Pot and his followers to retreat into the jungles along the Thai border and wage a low-level guerrilla war.
The Death Of Pol Pot Following His Fall From Power
SJOBERG/AFP/Getty ImagesKhmer Rouge guerilla soldiers in Phnom Penh.
Despite his ousting, Pol Pot retained influence in exile. Throughout the 1980s, the Khmer Rouge continued to receive indirect international support, as Cold War politics made both China and the United States wary of backing the Vietnam-installed regime. As such, things remained turbulent in Cambodia.
By the 1990s, though, the Khmer Rouge’s power had begun to decline. Then, in 1997, Pol Pot was arrested by Khmer Rouge defectors. He was placed under house arrest as international prosecutors geared up to put him on trial for genocide, a difficult crime to prove. There was evidence, though.
Since the Vietnamese invasion, the horrors of the Cambodian genocide had become abundantly clear to the rest of the world. Slowly but surely, the international community found an abundance of evidence that a significant percentage of the population had been killed, that Tuol Sleng had been a prison of mass torture, and that many of the people imprisoned at Tuol Sleng had been executed at a nearby “killing field” known as Choeung Ek.
In fact, similar sites littered the country.
Katherine Gruspier and Michael S. Pollanen/Academic Forensic Pathology InternationalSkulls taken from a mass grave at Ampe Phnom.
But before the dictator could face justice, Pol Pot died suddenly from heart failure on April 15, 1998, at the age of 73. However, not everyone believed this official explanation of Pol Pot’s cause of death.
How Did Pol Pot Die? Inside The Lingering Questions Of His Death
In January 1999, the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review reported Pol Pot’s death was not from natural causes, but that the dictator had actually committed suicide upon learning that he might be extradited to the United States to stand trial. (Though it was likewise reported that the U.S. declined to take Pol Pot because it was not prepared to try him.)
Khmer Rouge officials had made the initial claim that Pol Pot died in his sleep, but, according to reporting from The New York Times, they also refused demands from the United States and the Cambodian government to conduct an official autopsy.
Then Pol Pot’s body was hastily cremated. No autopsy was conducted, though Thai officials reportedly took samples of his hair and skin.
Alasdair McLeod/Alamy Stock PhotoThe site of Pol Pot’s cremation.
The cremation — so soon after Pol Pot’s death — sparked immediate suspicion and fueled rumors that the exiled despot may have taken poison to avoid facing trial, or even that his followers had hastened his death to prevent him from revealing their crimes. Far Eastern Economic Review, however, reported that Pol Pot died after taking a “lethal dose of a combination of Valium and chloroquine.”
Though Pol Pot claimed that “my conscience is clear” in the months before his death, he is considered one of the most homicidal dictators in human history. His attempt at radical societal restructuring resulted in nothing but mass suffering and decades-long devastation in Cambodia.
And while he never faced trial, the Khmer Rouge tribunal later convicted several surviving leaders of crimes against humanity, only further confirming the atrocious legacy of their former leader.
After learning about Pol Pot’s crimes and death, read about the horrifying history of the Rwandan genocide. Then, read about the Armenian genocide and the sad truth of why it is often forgotten.
