

Pol Pot transformed Cambodia into a one-party state called Democratic Kampuchea. Aided by the Việt Cộng militia and North Vietnamese troops, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge forces advanced and controlled all of Cambodia by 1975. After Lon Nol ousted Sihanouk in a 1970 coup, Pol Pot's forces sided with the deposed leader against the new government, which was bolstered by the United States military.

In 1968, he relaunched the war against Sihanouk's government.

To avoid state repression, in 1962 he relocated to a jungle encampment and in 1963 became the CPK's leader. In 1959, he helped formalise the movement into the Kampuchean Labour Party, which was later renamed the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). Following the Khmer Việt Minh's 1954 retreat into Marxist–Leninist controlled North Vietnam, Pol Pot returned to Phnom Penh, working as a teacher while remaining a central member of Cambodia's Marxist–Leninist movement. Returning to Cambodia in 1953, he involved himself in the Marxist–Leninist Khmer Việt Minh organisation and its guerrilla war against King Norodom Sihanouk's newly independent government. While in Paris during the 1940s, he joined the French Communist Party. Under his administration, Cambodia was converted into a one-party communist state in which mass executions, forced labor, physical abuse, malnutrition, and disease culminated in the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people, nearly a quarter of Cambodia's population in 1975.īorn to a prosperous farmer in Prek Sbauv, French Cambodia, Pol Pot was educated at some of Cambodia's most elite schools. Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist and a Khmer nationalist, he was a leading member of Cambodia's communist movement, the Khmer Rouge, from 1963 until 1997 and served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea from 1963 to 1981. Pol Pot (born Saloth Sâr – 15 April 1998) was a Cambodian revolutionary and politician who governed Cambodia as the Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea between 19, during the Cambodian genocide. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Khmer script.
