Pol Pot - Cambodia's Brother Number One

by Read Listen Learn

Pol Pot was the head of the Communist Party, called Khmer Rouge, in Cambodia and, from 1976 to 1979, the leader of his country. In those three years, he killed about three million people - nearly half of the population - even young children. (Cambodia only had a population of eight million at that time.) When the Vietnamese army attacked Cambodia in early 1979, he escaped to the jungle near Thailand. However, he did not die until 1998.

Pol Pot’s real name was Saloth Sar and he was born in a village in 1925. His father was quite a rich rice farmer. Saloth Sar was not a very hard-working student at school or when he studied radio electronics in Paris for three years. At that time, Cambodia was a French colony and there was money for some Cambodians to study in France. However, he failed his exams every year in France and returned to Cambodia in 1953 with no diploma, when he was already twenty-eight.

The year after Saloth Sar got back to his country, Cambodia became independent. King Silhanouk used soldiers to stop extremist political groups but Khmer Rouge did not die. In 1963, Saloth Sar became its head and it slowly grew. Most people who liked it were students and middle class farmers, but Saloth Sar was not interested in them. He wanted poor farmers. The group became more popular and, in 1976, Saloth Sar became the leader of the country.

Saloth Sar changed his name to Pol Pot and called himself ‘Brother Number One’. He wanted people to live a natural life and made everyone in the cities move to the countryside. He did not tell them that they were not going to come back. Instead, he said that the Americans were going to bomb the cities and so it was dangerous to stay. Everyone left. The capital, Phnom Penh, was empty in three days. The problem was that these people had no work to do in the villages and so he only gave them two bowls of rice soup to eat every day. Many died.

Pol Pot also killed educated people, like engineers, doctors, dentists, middle class farmers, business managers and university teachers. His soldiers put them in the ground while they were alive because Pol Pot told them not to use expensive bullets. If someone needed the dentist, they went to a man or woman with only six weeks training because all the good dentists were dead. Sometimes the new ‘dentist’ could not read or write. Pol Pot had other strange ideas: he killed people wearing glasses, for example.

Quickly problems started. There was no food because there were no managers to organise transport. People became very hungry and, later, very sick. But there were no doctors. And Pol Pot continued to kill: people who believed in religion; people who were not Khmer but from other Cambodian tribes; people who had family in Thailand or Vietnam; people who read books or newspapers; and many, many more. He taught children to kill by putting plastic bags on people’s heads until they died.

Pol Pot had many serious problems at home in these years but he decided to attack Vietnam. Nobody understood why. Vietnam’s war, first with France in 1955 and then with America, finished in 1975. The Vietnamese Army had a lot of weapons and very experienced soldiers. Cambodia did not. But Pol Pot attacked. At first, Vietnam thought he was not serious and did nothing, but, finally, in 1979, they attacked Cambodia.

Pol Pot ran away to the border with Thailand and lived in the jungle there for the rest of his life. In 1997, the Khmer Rouge said they would send him to answer questions in the capital about killing so many people. A few nights before he was going to Phnom Penh, he died. Maybe it was a heart attack or, maybe, he was killed. The Cambodian government asked to look at his body, but the Khmer Rouge burnt him instead. We don’t know why.

That was how Pol Pot lived and died. If you go to Cambodia, you can visit a museum with thousands of photos of people he killed – many were little boys and girls. Their skulls still make a mountain outside the capital.

Pol Pot said: “I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country.”