Pol Pot

Biography

Pol Pot was born Saloth Sâr in 1925 in Prek Sbauv, Kampong Thom province, the son of a prosperous farmer. He was schooled in Phnom Penh, where he also spent time as a novice monk, but after failing to continue at the Lycée Sisowath he moved to a technical school. In 1949 a scholarship took him to Paris to study radio electronics; he left without a degree but joined the French Communist Party in 1951.

Back in Cambodia from 1953, he worked with the Khmer Viet Minh and then taught at a private school in Phnom Penh while helping to build the clandestine Marxist movement that became the Communist Party of Kampuchea. He became its leader in 1963 and moved to jungle camps near the Vietnamese border. In 1968 the party took up arms against Sihanouk's government, and after Lon Nol's coup of 1970 it fought on the deposed prince's side against the US-backed republic.

The Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh in April 1975. As leader of Democratic Kampuchea, and prime minister from 1976, Pol Pot set out to build an agrarian communist society: the cities were emptied, money, religion and private property were abolished, and the population was driven into collective farms. Executions, forced labour, starvation and disease killed an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people. Vietnam invaded in December 1978 and drove his government from the capital in January 1979.

From bases near the Thai border Pol Pot led a continuing guerrilla war, giving up the post of commander-in-chief in 1985 while keeping much of his influence. In his last years the Khmer Rouge commander Ta Mok turned against him and held him under house arrest, and he died in April 1998.