A brief but instructive history of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge

“You talk about me like I’m some kind of Pol Pot,” the heroine of Lyudmila Gurchenko said offendedly in one popular Russian comedy. “Pol Potism”, “Pol Pot regime” - these expressions firmly entered the vocabulary of Soviet international journalists in the second half 1970s. However, this name thundered throughout the world in those years. In just under 4 years of his reign, more than 3,370,000 people were exterminated in Cambodia.

Common noun

In just a few years, the leader of the Khmer Rouge movement became one of the bloodiest dictators in human history, earning the title of “Asian Hitler.”

Little is known about the childhood of the Cambodian dictator, primarily because Pol Pot himself tried not to make this information public. Even about the date of his birth there is different information. According to one version, he was born on May 19, 1925 in the village of Prexbauw, into a peasant family. The eighth child of the peasant Pek Salot and his wife Sok Nem was given the name Salot Sar at birth.

Although Pol Pot’s family was a peasant family, it was not poor. The future dictator's cousin served in the royal court and was even the crown prince's concubine. Pol Pot's elder brother served at the royal court, and his sister danced in the royal ballet.

Salot Sara himself, at the age of nine, was sent to live with relatives in Phnom Penh. After several months spent in a Buddhist monastery as an altar boy, the boy entered a Catholic primary school, after which he continued his studies at Norodom Sihanouk College and then at Phnom Penh Technical School.

The Marxists by royal grant

In 1949, Salot Sar received a government scholarship to study higher education in France and went to Paris, where he began to study radio electronics.

The post-war period was marked by a rapid growth in the popularity of left-wing parties and national liberation movements. In Paris, Cambodian students created a Marxist circle, of which Saloth Sar became a member.

In 1952, Saloth Sar, under the pseudonym Khmer Daom, published his first political article, “Monarchy or Democracy?” in a Cambodian student magazine in France. At the same time, the student joined the French Communist Party.

His passion for politics pushed his studies into the background, and in the same year Salot Sara was expelled from the university, after which he returned to his homeland.

In Cambodia, he settled with his older brother, began to look for connections with representatives of the Communist Party of Indochina and soon attracted the attention of one of its coordinators in Cambodia, Pham Van Ba. Salot Sara was recruited to party work.

"The Politics of the Possible"

Pham Van Ba ​​quite clearly described his new ally: “a young man of average abilities, but with ambitions and a thirst for power.” Salot Sara's ambitions and lust for power turned out to be much greater than his fellow fighters expected.

Salot Sar took a new pseudonym - Pol Pot, which is short for the French "politique potentielle" - "politics of the possible." Under this pseudonym he was destined to go down in world history.

In 1953, Cambodia gained independence from France. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who was very popular and oriented toward China, became the ruler of the kingdom. In the war that followed in Vietnam, Cambodia formally adhered to neutrality, but units of North Vietnam and South Vietnamese partisans quite actively used the territory of the kingdom to locate their bases and warehouses. The Cambodian authorities preferred to turn a blind eye to this.

During this period, Cambodian communists operated quite freely in the country, and by 1963 Saloth Sar had risen from novice to party general secretary.

By that time, a serious split had emerged in the Asian communist movement due to sharp deterioration relations between the USSR and China. The Cambodian Communist Party relied on Beijing, focusing on the policies of Comrade Mao Zedong.

Leader of the Khmer Rouge

Prince Norodom Sihanouk saw the growing influence of the Cambodian communists as a threat to his own power and began to change policy, reorienting from China to the United States.

In 1967, a peasant uprising broke out in the Cambodian province of Battambang, which was brutally suppressed by government troops and mobilized citizens.

After this, the Cambodian communists launched a guerrilla war against the Sihanouk government. The detachments of the so-called “Khmer Rouge” were formed for the most part from illiterate and illiterate young peasants, whom Pol Pot made his main support.

Very quickly, Pol Pot’s ideology began to move away not only from Marxism-Leninism, but even from Maoism. Coming from a peasant family himself, the leader of the Khmer Rouge formulated a much simpler program for his illiterate supporters - the path to happy life lies through the rejection of modern Western values, through the destruction of cities that are carriers of a pernicious infection, and the “re-education of their inhabitants.”

Even Pol Pot’s comrades had no idea where such a program would lead their leader...

In 1970, the Americans contributed to strengthening the position of the Khmer Rouge. Considering that Prince Sihanouk, who had reoriented towards the United States, was not a reliable enough ally in the fight against the Vietnamese communists, Washington organized a coup, as a result of which Prime Minister Lon Nol came to power with strong pro-American views.

Lon Nol demanded that North Vietnam cease all military activities in Cambodia, threatening to use force otherwise. The North Vietnamese responded by striking first, so much so that they almost occupied Phnom Penh. To save his protege, US President Richard Nixon sent American units to Cambodia. The Lon Nol regime ultimately survived, but an unprecedented wave of anti-Americanism arose in the country, and the ranks of the Khmer Rouge began to grow by leaps and bounds.

Victory of the partisan army

The civil war in Cambodia flared up with renewed vigor. The Lon Nol regime was not popular and was supported only by American bayonets, Prince Sihanouk was deprived of real power and was in exile, and Pol Pot continued to gain strength.

By 1973, when the United States, having decided to end the Vietnam War, refused to provide further military support to the Lon Nol regime, the Khmer Rouge already controlled most of the country. Pol Pot already managed without his comrades in the Communist Party, which was relegated to the background. It was much easier for him not with educated experts in Marxism, but with illiterate fighters who believed only in Pol Pot and the Kalashnikov assault rifle.

In January 1975, the Khmer Rouge launched a decisive offensive against Phnom Penh. The troops loyal to Lon Nol could not withstand the blow of the 70,000-strong partisan army. In early April, American Marines began evacuating US citizens from the country, as well as high-ranking representatives of the pro-American regime. On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh.

"The city is the abode of vice"

Cambodia was renamed Kampuchea, but this was the most harmless of Pol Pot's reforms. “The city is an abode of vice; You can change people, but not cities. Working hard to uproot the jungle and grow rice, a person will finally understand the true meaning of life,” this was the main thesis of the Khmer Rouge leader who came to power.

It was decided to evict the city of Phnom Penh with a population of two and a half million people within three days. All its inhabitants, young and old, were sent to become peasants. No complaints about health conditions, lack of skills, etc. were accepted. Following Phnom Penh, other cities in Kampuchea suffered the same fate.

Only about 20 thousand people remained in the capital - the military, the administrative apparatus, as well as representatives of the punitive authorities who took up the task of identifying and eliminating the dissatisfied.

It was supposed to re-educate not only the inhabitants of the cities, but also those peasants who had been under the rule of Lon Nol for too long. It was decided to simply get rid of those who served the previous regime in the army and other government agencies.

Pol Pot launched a policy of isolating the country, and Moscow, Washington, and even Beijing, which was Pol Pot’s closest ally, had a very vague idea of ​​what was actually happening in it. They simply refused to believe the information leaking out about hundreds of thousands of people who were executed, who died during relocation from cities and from backbreaking forced labor.

At the pinnacle of power

During this period, an extremely complicated political situation developed in Southeast Asia. The United States, having ended the Vietnam War, set a course for improving relations with China, taking advantage of the extremely strained relations between Beijing and Moscow. China, which supported the communists of North and South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, began to treat them extremely hostilely, because they were oriented towards Moscow. Pol Pot, who was focused on China, took up arms against Vietnam, despite the fact that until recently the Khmer Rouge viewed the Vietnamese as allies in a common struggle.

Pol Pot, abandoning internationalism, relied on nationalism, which was widespread among the Cambodian peasantry. Brutal persecution of ethnic minorities, primarily the Vietnamese, resulted in an armed conflict with a neighboring country.

In 1977, the Khmer Rouge began to penetrate into neighboring areas of Vietnam, carrying out bloody massacres against the local population. In April 1978, the Khmer Rouge occupied the Vietnamese village of Batyuk, destroying all its inhabitants, young and old. The massacre killed 3,000 people.

Pol Pot went wild. Feeling the support of Beijing behind him, he not only threatened to defeat Vietnam, but also threatened the entire “Warsaw Pact,” that is, the Warsaw Pact Organization led by the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, his policy forced former comrades and previously loyal military units to rebel, considering what was happening to be unjustified bloody madness. The riots were suppressed ruthlessly, the rebels were executed in the most brutal ways, but their numbers continued to grow.

Three million victims in less than four years

In December 1978, Vietnam decided it had had enough. Units of the Vietnamese army invaded Kampuchea with the aim of overthrowing the Pol Pot regime. The offensive developed rapidly, and already on January 7, 1979, Phnom Penh fell. Power was transferred to the United Front for the National Salvation of Kampuchea, created in December 1978.

China tried to save its ally by invading Vietnam in February 1979. The fierce but short war ended in March with a tactical victory for Vietnam - the Chinese failed to return Pol Pot to power.

The Khmer Rouge, having suffered a serious defeat, retreated to the west of the country, to the Kampuchean-Thai border. They were saved from complete defeat by the support of China, Thailand and the United States. Each of these countries pursued its own interests - the Americans, for example, tried to prevent the strengthening of pro-Soviet Vietnam's position in the region, for the sake of this they preferred to turn a blind eye to the results of the activities of the Pol Pot regime.

And the results were truly impressive. In 3 years, 8 months and 20 days, the Khmer Rouge plunged the country into a medieval state. The protocol of the Commission for the Investigation of Crimes of the Pol Pot regime dated July 25, 1983 stated that between 1975 and 1978, 2,746,105 people died, of which 1,927,061 were peasants, 305,417 workers, employees and representatives of other professions, 48,359 representatives national minorities, 25,168 monks, about 100 writers and journalists, as well as several foreigners. Another 568,663 people were missing and either died in the jungle or were buried in mass graves. Total number casualties are estimated at 3,374,768.

In July 1979, the People's Revolutionary Tribunal was organized in Phnom Penh, which tried the leaders of the Khmer Rouge in absentia. On August 19, 1979, the tribunal found Pol Pot and his closest associate Ieng Sary guilty of genocide and sentenced them to death in absentia with confiscation of all property.

The Leader's Last Secrets

For Pol Pot himself, this verdict, however, meant nothing. He continued his guerrilla war against the new government of Kampuchea, hiding in the jungle. Little was known about the leader of the Khmer Rouge, and many believed that the man whose name had become a household name had long since died.

When processes of national reconciliation began in Kampuchea-Cambodia aimed at ending the long-term civil war, a new generation of Khmer Rouge leaders tried to relegate their odious “guru” to the background. There was a split in the movement, and Pol Pot, trying to maintain leadership, again decided to use terror to suppress disloyal elements.

In July 1997, on the orders of Pol Pot, his long-time ally, former Minister of Defense of Kampuchea Son Sen, was killed. Along with him, 13 members of his family, including young children, were killed.

However, this time Pol Pot overestimated his influence. His comrades declared him a traitor and held his own trial, sentencing him to life imprisonment.

The Khmer Rouge's trial of its own leader sparked a final surge of interest in Pol Pot. In 1998, prominent leaders of the movement agreed to lay down their arms and surrender to the new Cambodian authorities.

But Pol Pot was not among them. He died on April 15, 1998. Representatives of the Khmer Rouge said that the former leader's heart failed him. There is, however, a version that he was poisoned.

The Cambodian authorities sought from the Khmer Rouge to hand over the body in order to make sure that Pol Pot was really dead and to establish all the circumstances of his death, but the corpse was hastily cremated.

The leader of the Khmer Rouge took his last secrets with him...

Prince of Cambodia.

The tragedy of Cambodia is a consequence of the Vietnam War, which first broke out in the ruins of French colonialism and then escalated into conflict with the Americans. Fifty-three thousand Cambodians died on the battlefields.

Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia's ruler and heir to its religious and cultural traditions, renounced his royal title ten years before the outbreak of the Vietnam War but remained head of state. He tried to lead the country along the path of neutrality, balancing between warring countries and conflicting ideologies. Sihanouk became king of Cambodia, a French protectorate, back in 1941, but abdicated the throne in 1955. However, then, after free elections, he returned to lead the country as head of state.

During the escalation of the Vietnam War from 1966 to 1969, Sihanouk fell out of favor with the political leadership in Washington for not taking decisive action against arms smuggling and the establishment of Vietnamese guerrilla camps in the Cambodian jungle. However, he was also quite mild in his criticism of punitive air raids carried out by the United States.

On March 18, 1970, while Sihanouk was in Moscow, his prime minister, General Lon Nol, with the support of the White House, carried out a coup d'état, returning Cambodia to its ancient name Khmer. The United States recognized the Khmer Republic, but within a month it invaded it. Sihanouk found himself in exile in Beijing. And here the ex-king made a choice, entering into an alliance with the devil himself.

Entering into power.

Pol Pot's real name is Salot Sar (also known as Tol Saut and Pol Porth). He was born in the rebel province of Kampong Thom. Pol Pot, who grew up in a peasant family in the Cambodian province of Kampong Thom and received his primary education in a Buddhist monastery, spent two years as a monk, receiving the supposed science of tolerance and humility. However, what was actually taught and taught in Buddhist monasteries is well known. These are techniques from various schools of oriental martial arts, meditation, occultism, etc. Therefore, it is not difficult to guess who set the future Pol Pot on the “true path.”

During World War II, Salot Sar joined the Indochina Communist Party. In the fifties he studied electronics in Paris and, like many students of that time, became involved in the leftist movement. Here Pol Pot heard - it is still not known whether they met - about another student, Khieu Samphan, whose controversial but exciting plans for an "agrarian revolution" fueled Pol Pot's great power ambitions. In Paris, he joined the ranks of the French Communist Party and became close with other Cambodian students who preached Marxism as interpreted by Maurice Therese. Returning to his homeland in late 1953 or 1954, Salot Sar began teaching at a prestigious private lyceum in Phnom Penh. At the turn of the sixties, the communist movement in Cambodia was split into three almost unrelated factions operating in different parts of the country. The smallest, but most active was the third faction, united on the basis of hatred of Vietnam. In 1962, the secretary of the Cambodian Communist Party, Tu Samut, died under mysterious circumstances. In 1963, Salot Sar was approved as the new party secretary. He became the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the communist guerrillas of Cambodia. Salot Sar left his job at the lyceum and went underground. By the beginning of the 70s, the Salot Sara group captured a number of posts in the highest party apparatus. He physically destroyed his opponents. For these purposes, a secret security department was created in the party, reporting personally to Salot Sar.

In 1975, the Lon Nol government, despite American support, fell to the Khmer Rouge. American B-52 bombers, using carpet bombing, dropped as many tons of explosives on this tiny country as were dropped on Germany during the last two years of the Second World War. Vietnamese fighters - the Viet Cong - used the impenetrable jungles of the neighboring country to set up military camps and bases during operations against the Americans. American planes bombed these strong points. The Khmer Rouge not only survived, but also captured Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, on April 23, 1975. By this time, the Salot Sara group occupied strong, but not sole, positions in the leadership of the party. This forced her to maneuver. With his characteristic caution, the head of the Khmer Rouge retreated into the shadows and began to prepare the ground for the final seizure of power. To do this, he resorted to a number of hoaxes. Since April 1975, his name has disappeared from official communications. Many thought he was dead.

On April 14, 1976, the appointment of a new prime minister was announced. His name was Pol Pot. The unknown name raised eyebrows at home and abroad. It did not occur to anyone, except a narrow circle of initiates, that Pol Pot was the disappeared Saloth Sar. A difficult situation, in which the Pol Pata faction found itself by the fall of 1976, was aggravated by the death of Mao Zedong. On September 27, Pol Pot was removed from the post of prime minister, as announced, “for health reasons.” Two weeks later, Pol Pot became prime minister again. The new Chinese leaders helped him. The dictator and his henchmen set out to destroy everyone they considered potentially dangerous, and indeed they destroyed almost all the officers, soldiers and civil servants of the old regime. Little is known about Pol Pot. This is a man with the appearance of a handsome old man and the heart of a bloody tyrant. It was with this monster that Sihanouk teamed up. Together with the leader of the Khmer Rouge, they vowed to merge their forces together for the common goal of defeating American troops.

The dictator outlined a bold plan for building a new society and said that its implementation would take only a few days. Pol Pot announced the evacuation of all cities under the leadership of newly appointed regional and zonal leaders, ordered the closure of all markets, the destruction of churches and the dispersal of all religious communities. Having been educated abroad, he hated educated people and ordered the execution of all teachers, professors and even kindergarten teachers.

Wheel of Death.

On April 17, 1975, Pol Pot ordered the forced assimilation of 13 national minorities living in Democratic Kampuchea. They were ordered to speak Khmer, and those who could not speak Khmer were killed. On May 25, 1975, Pol Pot's soldiers carried out a massacre of Thais in Koh Kong province in the southwest of the country. 20,000 Thais lived there, but after the massacre only 8,000 remained.

Inspired by Mao Zedong's ideas on communes, Pol Pot launched the slogan "Back to the Village!" To implement it, the population of large and small cities was evicted to rural and mountainous areas. On April 17, 1975, using violence combined with deception, the Pol Pot forces forced more than 2 million residents of newly liberated Phnom Penh to leave the city. Everyone indiscriminately - the sick, the old, the pregnant, the crippled, the newborn, the dying - was sent to the countryside and distributed among communes, 10,000 people in each. Residents were forced to do backbreaking work, regardless of age or health. With primitive tools or by hand, people worked 12-16 hours a day, and sometimes longer. As those few who managed to survive said, in many areas their daily food was only one bowl of rice for 10 people. The leaders of the Pol Pot regime created a network of spies and encouraged mutual denunciations in order to paralyze the people's will to resist. The Polpotites tried to abolish Buddhism, a religion professed by 85 percent of the population. Buddhist monks were forced to give up their traditional clothing and were forced to work in "comunes." Many of them were killed. Pol Pot sought to exterminate the intelligentsia and, in general, all those who had any education, technical connections and experience. Of the 643 doctors and pharmacists, only 69 remained alive. The Polpotites liquidated the education system at all levels. Schools were turned into prisons, places of torture, and dumps of manure. All books and documents stored in libraries, schools, universities, and research centers were burned or looted.

His “killing fields” were littered with the corpses of those who did not fit into the framework of the new world formed by him and his bloodthirsty minions. During the rule of Pol Pot's regime, about three million people died in Cambodia - the same number as the unfortunate victims who perished in the gas chambers of the Nazi death factory Auschwitz during the Second World War. Life under Sex Pot was unbearable, and as a result of the tragedy that took place on the soil of this ancient country in Southeast Asia, its long-suffering population came up with a new eerie name for Cambodia - Country Walking Dead.

According to Samphan's theory, Cambodia, in order to achieve progress, had to turn back, renounce capitalist exploitation, the fattening leaders fed by the French colonial rulers, and abandon devalued bourgeois values ​​and ideals. Samphan's perverted theory stated that people should live in the fields, and all temptations of modern life should be destroyed. If Pol Pot had, say, been hit by a car at that time, this theory would probably have died out in coffee shops and bars without crossing the boundaries of the Parisian boulevards. However, she was destined to become a monstrous reality.

Pol Pot's perverted dream of turning back time and forcing his people to live in a Marxist agrarian society was helped by his deputy Ieng Sari. In his policy of destruction, Pol Pot used the term "getting out of sight." “They removed” - they destroyed thousands and thousands of women and men, old people and babies.

Buddhist temples were desecrated or turned into soldiers' brothels, or even simply slaughterhouses. As a result of the terror, out of sixty thousand monks, only three thousand returned to the destroyed temples and holy monasteries.

In the “commune” of Psot, the reprisal usually took place as follows: a person was buried up to his neck in the ground and beaten on the head with hoes. They didn’t shoot - they saved the bullets.” “Those who reached the age of fourteen or fifteen were forcibly sent to the so-called “mobile brigades” or to the army... Polpot members trained killers, recruiting 14-17 year old teenagers, who were inspired that if they did not agree to kill, then after painful torture they would be killed themselves. In addition, selected teenagers were deliberately molested, taught to kill, and drunk with a mixture of palm moonshine and human blood. They were told that they were “capable of anything”, that they became “special people” because they drank human blood" In this cannibalism we also see traces of the ancient religion of Cambodia. The entire population of the country was divided into three categories. The first group included residents of remote mountain and forest areas of the state. The second consisted of residents of those areas that were controlled by the overthrown pro-American regime of Lon Nol. The third group consisted of former military personnel, the old administration, their families and the entire (!) population of Phnom Penh. The third category was subject to complete destruction, and the second partial.

This was the course of the faithful Marxist Pol Pot, who had well mastered the principles of class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat. On April 16, 1975, over two million people were evicted from Phnom Penh, and they were not allowed to take anything with them. “In accordance with the order, all residents were required to leave the city. It was forbidden to take food or belongings. Those who refused to obey orders or hesitated were killed and shot. Neither the elderly, nor the disabled, nor pregnant women, nor the sick in hospitals escaped this fate. People had to walk, despite the rain or the scorching sun... During the journey, they were not given any food or medicine... On the banks of the Mekong alone, when Phnom Penh residents were transported to remote areas of the country, about five hundred thousand people died.” According to another Pol Pot plan, villages were to be destroyed. The massacre carried out in them defies description: “The population of the village of Sreseam was almost completely destroyed... the soldiers rounded up children, tied them in a chain, pushed them into craters filled with water and buried them alive... People were driven to the edge of the trench, struck in the back of the head with a shovel or hoe , and pushed down. When too many people were to be eliminated, they were gathered into groups of several dozen people, entangled with steel wire, passed a current from a generator mounted on a bulldozer, and then the unconscious people were pushed into a hole and covered with earth.” Pol Pot even ordered his own wounded soldiers to be killed so as not to spend money on medicine.

Following the example of his teachers Stalin and Mao Zedong, Pol Pot also fought with the intelligentsia. “The intelligentsia was completely destroyed: doctors, teachers, engineers, artists, scientists, students were declared mortal enemies of the regime. At the same time, anyone who wore glasses, read books, knew a foreign language, and wore decent clothes, in particular European cut, was considered an intellectual.” How can one not remember the 20-30s in the USSR, when people were fired and killed for wearing a tie and ironed clothes? When everyone was forced to wear shirts and wrinkled trousers. “Schools were either destroyed or turned into prisons, places of torture, grain and fertilizer warehouses. Books from libraries, institutes, research centers, museum property were destroyed, and the most valuable items ancient art were kidnapped." And again, the analogy is with the USSR, where the most valuable works of art were sold abroad, while others were destroyed. “The bloody experiment of Pol Pot led to the destruction of all Cambodian cities with their industry and developed infrastructure, to the physical liquidation of millions of people, especially educated and specialists, to the transformation of the country into a huge concentration camp, where the Khmer Rouge ruled with impunity.

For the Pol Potites, oriented towards the values ​​of Marxist socialism, a person’s life was worth nothing: in order not to waste bullets, people were killed with shovels and other improvised means, starved, not to mention sophisticated bullying. It is worth noting in this regard that the attempts of communists in a number of countries, primarily Soviet ones, to dissociate themselves from these crimes and not see in them repressions akin to all communist dictatorships, are unconvincing. Of course, the Khmer Red Terror may be perceived as a caricature, but if you look closely and compare it with what has become known about our Red Terror in recent years of open publications and revelations, there will be no doubt about the relationship. The source of the beliefs of the Khmer Rouge, as well as their unceremoniousness and disrespect for people’s lives, is still the same - the Marxist theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe destruction of hostile classes and in general all enemies of the revolution, which, as you know, can include anyone who does not kill with a shovel (and on occasion, himself too).”

Pol Pot's decree effectively eradicated ethnic minorities. Using Vietnamese, Thai and Chinese was punishable by death. A purely Khmer society was proclaimed. The forced eradication of ethnic groups was especially hard on the Chan people. Their ancestors - people from what is now Vietnam - inhabited the ancient Kingdom of Champa. The Chans migrated to Cambodia in the 18th century and fished along the banks of Cambodian rivers and lakes. They professed Islam and were the most significant ethnic group in modern Cambodia, preserving the purity of their language, national cuisine, clothing, hairstyles, religious and ritual traditions.

Young fanatics from the Khmer Rouge attacked the vats like locusts. Their settlements were burned, the inhabitants were driven into swamps infested with mosquitoes. People were forcibly forced to eat pork, which was strictly prohibited by their religion, and the clergy were mercilessly destroyed. If the slightest resistance was shown, entire communities were exterminated, and the corpses were thrown into huge pits and covered with lime. Of the two hundred thousand Chans, less than half remained alive. Those who survived the beginning of the campaign of terror later realized that instant death was better than hellish torment under the new regime.

According to Pol Pot, the older generation was spoiled by feudal and bourgeois views, infected with “sympathies” for Western democracies, which he declared alien to the national way of life. Urban population were driven from their habitable places to labor camps, where hundreds of thousands of people were tortured to death by backbreaking labor.

People were killed for even trying to speak French - the biggest crime in the eyes of the Khmer Rouge, as this was considered a manifestation of nostalgia for the country's colonial past.

In huge camps with no amenities other than a straw mat for sleeping and a bowl of rice at the end of the working day, in conditions that even prisoners of Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War would not have envied, traders, teachers, entrepreneurs worked, the only survivors because they managed to hide their professions, as well as thousands of other citizens. These camps were organized in such a way as to, through “natural selection,” get rid of the old and sick, pregnant women and young children.

People died in hundreds and thousands from disease, hunger and exhaustion, under the batons of cruel overseers. Without medical care, with the exception of traditional methods herbal treatments, the life expectancy of prisoners in these camps was depressingly short. Stalin and Hitler are resting.

At dawn, people were sent in formation into the malarial swamps, where they cleared the jungle for 12 hours a day in unsuccessful attempts to reclaim new cropland from them. At sunset, again in formation, urged on by the bayonets of the guards, people returned to the camp to their cup of rice, gruel and a piece of dried fish. Then, despite terrible fatigue, they still had to go through political classes on Marxist ideology, during which incorrigible “bourgeois elements” were identified and punished, and the rest, like parrots, kept repeating phrases about the joys of life in the new state. Every ten working days there was a long-awaited day off, for which twelve hours of ideological classes were planned. Wives lived separately from their husbands. Their children began working at the age of seven or were placed at the disposal of childless party functionaries, who raised them to be fanatical “fighters of the revolution.”

From time to time, huge bonfires made of books were made in city squares. Crowds of unfortunate tortured people were driven to these bonfires, who were forced to chant memorized phrases in chorus, while the flames devoured the masterpieces of world civilization. “Lessons of hatred” were organized when people were flogged in front of portraits of the leaders of the old regime. It was an ominous world of horror and hopelessness. In the “commune” it was strictly forbidden to read... If they found a magazine or a book, they dealt with the whole family...

The Polpotites severed diplomatic relations in all countries, postal and telephone communications did not work, entry into and exit from the country was prohibited. The Cambodian people found themselves isolated from the rest of the world.

To intensify the fight against real and imaginary enemies, Pol Pot organized a sophisticated system of torture and execution in his prison camps. As during the Spanish Inquisition, the dictator and his minions proceeded from the premise that those who ended up in these damned places were guilty and all they had to do was admit their guilt. To convince its followers of the need for brutal measures to achieve the goals of “national revival,” the regime attached special political significance to torture.

Documents seized after the overthrow of Pol Pot show that Khmer security officers trained by Chinese instructors were guided by brutal, ideological principles in their activities. The Interrogation Guidelines S-21, one of the documents later submitted to the UN, stated: “The purpose of torture is to obtain an adequate response to it from the interrogated. Torture is not used for entertainment. Pain must be inflicted in such a way as to cause a quick reaction. Another goal is psychological breakdown and loss of the will of the interrogated. When torture, one should not proceed from one’s own anger or self-satisfaction. You should beat the person being tortured in such a way as to intimidate him, and not beat him to death. Before starting the torture, it is necessary to examine the health of the interrogated person. instruments of torture. You should not necessarily try to kill the interrogated. During interrogation, political considerations are the main thing, causing pain is secondary. Therefore, you must not forget that even during interrogations you should constantly conduct propaganda work. indecision and hesitation during torture, when there is an opportunity to get answers to our questions from the enemy. We must remember that indecisiveness can slow down our work. In other words, in propaganda and educational work of this kind it is necessary to show determination, persistence, and categoricalness. We must engage in torture without first explaining the reasons or motives. Only then will the enemy be broken."

Among the numerous sophisticated methods of torture that the Khmer Rouge executioners resorted to, the most favorite were the notorious Chinese torture water, crucifixion, suffocation with a plastic bag. Site S-21, which gave the document its name, was the most notorious camp in all of Cambodia. It was located in the northeast of the country. At least thirty thousand victims of the regime were tortured here. Only seven survived, and only because the administrative skills of the prisoners were needed by their owners to manage this terrible institution.

But torture was not the only weapon of intimidation of the already frightened population of the country. There are many known cases when guards in camps caught prisoners, driven to despair by hunger, eating their dead comrades in misfortune. The punishment for this was terrible death. The culprits were buried up to their necks in the ground and left to slowly die from hunger and thirst, while their still living flesh was tormented by ants and other living creatures. The victims' heads were then cut off and displayed on stakes around the settlement. They hung a sign around their necks: “I am a traitor to the revolution!”

Dith Pran, a Cambodian translator for American journalist Sidney Schoenberg, lived through all the horrors of Pol Pot's rule. The inhumane ordeal he had to endure was documented in the film The Killing Fields, in which the suffering of the Cambodian people was revealed to the world for the first time in stunning nakedness. The heartbreaking tale of Pran's journey from a civilized childhood to a death camp left viewers horrified. “In my prayers,” Pran said, “I asked the Almighty to save me from the unbearable torment that I was forced to endure. But some of my loved ones managed to flee the country and take refuge in America. For their sake I continued to live, but it was not life , but a nightmare."

The foreign policy of the Pol Pot regime was characterized by aggressiveness and a disguised fear of strong powers. After his final assertion in power, Pol Pot decided to isolate himself from the outside world. In response to Japan's proposal to establish diplomatic relations, the Pol Potians stated that Cambodia "will not be interested in them for another 200 years." Exceptions to the general rule were only a few countries for which Pol Pot, for one reason or another, had personal sympathy. In January 1977, after almost a year of silence, shots were heard on the Cambodian-Vietnamese border. Detachments of the Khmer Rouge, having crossed the Vietnamese border, killed residents of border villages with batons. In 1978, Vietnam signed a pact with Kampuchea's only ally China and launched a full-scale invasion. On Dec. 1978 Vietnamese troops, who had been in conflict with the Khmer Rouge for many years over disputed border areas, entered Cambodian territory with the help of several motorized infantry divisions supported by tanks. The country fell into such disrepair that, due to the lack of telephone communications, it was necessary to deliver combat reports on bicycles. The Chinese did not come to Pol Pot's aid, and in January 1979 his regime fell to the onslaught of Vietnamese troops. The fall happened so quickly that the tyrant had to flee Phnom Penh in a white Mercedes two hours before his triumphant appearance in the capital of the army of Hanoi. However, Pol Pot was not going to give up. He established himself in a secret base with a handful of his loyal followers and created the National Liberation Front of the Khmer People. The Khmer Rouge retreated into the jungle on the border with Thailand in an orderly manner.

In early 1979, the Vietnamese occupied Phnom Penh. A few hours earlier, Pol Pot left the deserted capital in a white armored Mercedes. Bloody dictator hurried to his Chinese masters, who provided him refuge, but did not support him in the fight against the heavily armed Viet Cong.

When the whole world became aware of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime and the devastation that reigned in the country, help rushed to Cambodia in a powerful stream. The Khmer Rouge, like the Nazis in their time, were very pedantic in recording their crimes. The investigation discovered logs in which daily in detail executions and torture were recorded, hundreds of albums with photographs of those sentenced to execution, including the wives and children of intellectuals liquidated in initial stages terror, detailed documentation of the notorious "killing fields". These fields, conceived as the basis of a labor utopia, a country without money and needs, in fact turned out to be mass graves of the day of burial of people crushed by the yoke of cruel tyranny. “After three years of the existence of the Pol Pot regime, Kampuchea was called nothing more than a “huge concentration camp”, a “giant prison”, “a state of barracks socialism”, where blood flows like a river and a policy of genocide is mercilessly and systematically carried out against its own nation.” Of the country's eight million population, 5 million survived.

After the overthrow.

On August 15-19, 1979, the People's Revolutionary Tribunal of Kampuchea examined the case on charges of genocide against the Pol Pot-Ieng Sari clique. Pol Pot and Ieng Sary were found guilty and sentenced to death in absentia. Polpot's troops left Kampuchea in a very difficult condition. Despite all this, representatives of the Khmer Rouge, led by Khieu Samphan, remained in Phnom Penh for some time. The parties have been looking for ways to mutual reconciliation for a long time. The support of the United States helped the Polpot residents feel confident. At the insistence of the superpower, the Pol Potites retained their place in the UN. But in 1993, after the Khmer Rouge boycotted the country's first parliamentary elections held under UN supervision, the movement completely hid in the jungle. Every year, contradictions among the leaders of the Khmer Rouge grew. In 1996, Ieng Sari, who was deputy prime minister in the Pol Pot government, went over to the side of the government with 10,000 fighters. In response, Pol Pot traditionally resorted to terror. He ordered the execution of Defense Minister Song Sen, his wife and nine children. The tyrant's frightened associates organized a conspiracy led by Khieu Samphan, Ta Mok, the commander of the troops, and Nuon Chea, the currently most influential person in the leadership of the Khmer Rouge. In June 1997, Pol Pot was placed under house arrest. He left with him his second wife Mia Som and daughter Seth Seth. The dictator's family was guarded by one of Pol Pot's commanders, Nuon Nu.

In early April 1998, the United States suddenly began to demand the transfer of Pol Pot to an international tribunal, pointing out the need for “just retribution.” Washington's position, difficult to explain in light of its past policy of supporting the dictator, caused a lot of controversy among the Angka leadership. In the end, it was decided to exchange Pol Pot for his own safety. The search for contacts with international organizations began, but the death of the bloody tyrant on the night of April 14-15, 1998 immediately solved all the problems. According to the official version, Pol Pot died of a heart attack. His body was cremated, and the skull and bones remaining after the burning were given to his wife and daughter.

Pran was lucky enough to survive this bloody Asian nightmare and reunite with his family in San Francisco in 1979. But in the remote corners of a devastated country that has experienced a terrible tragedy, mass graves of nameless victims still remain, above which mounds of human skulls rise in silent reproach. It is unlikely that Pol Pot knew the work of the artist Vereshchagin, but he apparently decided to recreate his painting “The Apotheosis of War” in real life.

In the end, thanks to military power, and not morality and law, it was possible to stop the bloody massacre and restore at least a semblance of common sense. To its credit, the UK protested against human rights abuses in 1978 following reports of rampant terror in Cambodia through intermediaries in Thailand, but this protest fell on deaf ears. Britain made a statement to the UN Commission on Human Rights, but a representative of the Khmer Rouge hysterically retorted: “The British imperialists have no right to talk about human rights. The whole world knows their barbaric essence. The leaders of Britain are drowning in luxury, while the proletariat has the right only for unemployment, illness and prostitution."

Pol Pot, who seemed to have faded into oblivion, has recently re-emerged on the political horizon as a force vying for power in this long-suffering country. Like all tyrants, he claims that his subordinates made mistakes, that he faced resistance on all fronts, and that those killed were “enemies of the state.” Returning to Cambodia in 1981, at a secret meeting among his old friends near the Thai border, he declared that he had been too trusting: “My policy was correct. Overzealous regional commanders and local leaders perverted my orders. Accusations of massacres are vile lie. If we really destroyed people in such numbers, the people would have ceased to exist long ago."

A "misunderstanding" at the cost of three million lives, almost a third of the country's population, is too innocent a word to describe what was done in the name of Pol Pot and on his orders. But, following the well-known Nazi principle - the more monstrous the lie, the more more people able to believe in her, - Pol Pot was still eager for power and hoped to gather forces in the rural areas, which, in his opinion, were still loyal to him. He again became a major political figure and was waiting for an opportunity to reappear in the country as an angel of death, seeking revenge and completion of the work he had previously begun - his “great agrarian revolution.”

By the way, the United States then ensured that the Pol Potites retained their place in the UN. This is another example of American “democracy”. In 1982, Pol Pot regained power, holding it until 1985, when he suddenly announced his resignation. Soon the country will flare up again Civil War, and the elderly dictator returns to political life again, heading the pro-communist group “Khmer Rouge”. Now he is already ordering the execution of his own ministers, fearing treason on their part. The cold blood he showed in killing his closest supporters inspires horror in those around him. And it decides, in order to save its life, to remove Pol Pot from power, which they managed to do in June 1997. Over the next year, the dictator lived under house arrest until he died in 1998. According to beliefs, Pol Pot's body was burned in a ritual fire. By the way, before placing the body in the coffin, the nostrils of the dead man were plugged with cotton so that the spirit of the deceased would not escape the fire. Such was the fear of people before the man who “is rightly called the most terrible villain of the outgoing century.”

(born 1928 – died 1998)

Head of the left-wing extremist Khmer Rouge regime in Kampuchea. The organizer of the genocide of his own people.

“At about 9:30 a.m. the first column of winners appeared on Monivong Avenue [in Phnom Penh]. The population poured out into the street greeted them with joyful applause and cheers. But what is it? The woman, who rushed to hug the liberating soldier in a motherly manner, was thrown away with a blow from the butt. The girls, who ran up to hand over flowers, came across the cold steel of bayonets... People were brought out of their stupor by orders that rang out from loudspeakers installed on military jeeps: “Everyone - get out of the city! Quickly leave your home and get out of town! Forever! There will be no return!" Panic began among the townspeople. People were driven like cattle. If the family hesitated, they often threw a grenade into the yard or rushed them with a burst from a machine gun fired at the glass windows. In the chaos, confusion and haste that arose, wives lost their husbands, parents lost their children. Even patients who were dragged from their beds were subject to violent mass theft..."

This is how Soviet journalist V. Seregin described the first appearance in the capital, Phnom Penh, of the Khmer Rouge - the “liberators” of Cambodians from the oppression of the anti-people pro-American regime. To understand the situation, you need to go back five years.

In the first half of the 70s. power in Cambodia belonged to the so-called Phnom Penh group, which carried out a coup d'etat in March 1970 with the support of the United States. For five years, Cambodians fought against usurpers and American invaders. Finally, on April 17, 1975, the capital of the state was liberated from the troops of the American protege, General Long Nol. However, the people's aspirations for a happy, quiet life did not come true. The Phnom Penh group was replaced by the power of the Khmer Rouge, which became one of the bloodiest nightmares of the past century, the debut of which was reflected by Seregin. And at the head of this power was a man known as Pol Pot, whose ruthlessness suggests mental pathology.

Quite little is known about the life of Salot Sarah (this is the real name of the dictator). Even the exact date of his birth is unknown. They call it 1927, or more often 1928. The parents of the future tyrant - Piem Lot and Dok Niem - had Chinese roots and were peasants. In official biographies of the Pol Pot period, they were called poor people. Actually Pyem Lot. According to local standards, he was a wealthy man. He owned about forty buffaloes and was able to hire farm laborers. The children - and there were many of them: seven sons and two daughters - received a good education. Salot Sar learned to read at the age of five, successfully graduated from a local school, and at the age of 15 he went to Phnom Penh, where he entered a technical college. Growing up in the rebellious province of Kampong Thom, the young man could not help but be interested in politics. While still very young, during the Second World War, he became a member of the Indochina Communist Party. Then his father’s money and family connections allowed the young man to go abroad to study.

In 1949, Salot Sar arrived in Paris. Here he joined the French Communist Party, became close to Cambodian students who professed Stalinist Marxism, and together with them in 1950 created a circle to study the Stalinist theory of class struggle, the tactics of totalitarian organizational control and the Stalinist approach to solving national problems. At the same time, the young man was interested in French poetry and in between times wrote pamphlets directed against the Cambodian royal family.

In Paris, Saloth Sar met with Cambodian Khieu Polnary. They got married in Cambodia, where the future dictator returned in 1953 or 1954. The marriage, however, did not work out. There is information that the unfortunate woman went crazy, unable to bear it life together with a monster husband.

At home, Salot Sar, armed with Stalinist ideas, began teaching at a prestigious private lyceum in Phnom Penh. On this basis, many years later he began to call himself “professor of history and geography.” However, apparently, the main thing in his activity during this period was not teaching at all. Salot Sar did not advertise his political leanings, but gradually propagated Marxist ideas among students. Moreover, over time, Stalin’s theses were supplemented with a fair share of the “great teachings of Mao.”

Soon, the young propagandist joined one of the factions of the Cambodian Communist Party, which professed the idea of ​​​​creating a strong Cambodia through a “super-great leap forward” with an emphasis on its own strength. Already in the early 60s. Saloth Sar became one of the leaders of the faction, and after the death of the Secretary of the Communist Party of Cambodia Tu Samut, who died under unclear circumstances, he became his successor. It was rumored that the new leader was involved in the death of his predecessor, but no one began to look into this.

In 1963, Salot Sar left the lyceum and went into hiding. In his new role, he relied on establishing relationships with like-minded people abroad. To do this, he visited Vietnam in 1965, and not finding common language with the Vietnamese communists, went to Beijing, where he received full support from Mao.

Gradually, like-minded people of Salot Sara took a commanding position in the party. To eliminate rivals, systematic purges were used, and especially dangerous ones were simply physically eliminated. To strengthen the position of the leader, a special security service was created, which was personally subordinate to Salot Sar. Later it grew to the size of an entire army. Its fighters became known as the “Khmer Rouge” and went down in history as an example of incredible cruelty and arbitrariness.

At the beginning of 1975, the name Salot Sarah disappeared from the pages of newspapers. And about a year later, on April 14, 1976, the world learned of the appointment of a new Prime Minister of Cambodia, the unknown Pol Pot. However, it soon became clear that Salot Sar had simply changed his name and position. He did not come to power as a result of a coup: a compromise was reached between several political factions in the government; Apparently, there was also support from China.

The “Great Leap Forward” that Pol Pot sought involved “development” exclusively Agriculture. It was supposed to build “community-village socialism.” For this purpose, the forced relocation of townspeople to countryside, where “agricultural communes” were created. Each had approximately 10 thousand people.

The cities were depopulated, and many thousands of their former inhabitants died before reaching their destination from hunger, disease and cruel treatment. Massive deaths were also observed in the communes. In “public canteens” people were fed from hand to mouth with stale food. There was one bowl of rice per 10 people. To survive, people were forced to eat the bark of banana trees. The weak and dissatisfied were killed.

In the communes, all Cambodians, starting from the age of seven, were forced to work 12–16 hours. They worked for 9 days, and the tenth day was intended for political studies. People had no right not only to personal property, but also to personal belongings. Each was given a mattress and, once a year, black work clothes. According to the leader of the country and his minions, everything else was only a consequence of bourgeois depravity.

Industrial enterprises were reoriented to the production of hoes and shovels, and all Cambodians, young and old, were required to grow rice and build irrigation structures. However, at the first spill, all the dams and dams were washed away. They were built without the participation of specialists, who simply were not left in the country. The technical intelligentsia, doctors, and teachers were subject to physical destruction as “infected with bourgeois ideology and the old culture.”

To avoid wasting ammunition, numerous victims of the regime had their skulls broken with bricks or hoes. People were killed with sticks, iron rods, knives and even sugar palm leaves, which have extremely hard and sharp edges. Those who did not please had their throats cut and their stomachs ripped open. The extracted liver was often eaten, and gallbladders went to make medicine. People were thrown to be eaten by crocodiles, crushed by bulldozers, burned, buried alive, buried in the ground up to their necks. Children were thrown into the air, and then impaled on bayonets, their heads smashed against trees, and limbs torn off. The unprecedented repressions, directed virtually against the entire people of the country, could not but cause protest. Already in 1975, an uprising broke out against the Pol Pot regime, which was brutally suppressed. All participants and sympathizers up to the third generation were executed so that grandchildren could not avenge their fathers and grandfathers. Pol Pot was convinced that popular discontent undermined power, and therefore all those who were dissatisfied were destroyed.

But in mid-1976, the prime minister's policies began to cause protests from other members of the government. And since Pol Pot’s position was greatly weakened due to the death of Mao Zedong, he was dismissed under the pretext of deteriorating health. If we take the statements of Foreign Minister Ieng Sary on faith, former second a person in the state, the authorities of Vietnam and the KGB had a hand in this. However, the new Chinese government helped Pol Pot return to power: within two weeks he again became prime minister.

The head of the executive branch continued his previous policy, but expanded it by increasing ideological influence. Under the slogan “For the political education of personnel”, the political organization “Angka” was created from among the Khmer Rouge. Its goal was the destruction of thousands of people who did not show sufficient zeal in political education. People of the older generation understand that behind this “crime” lies insufficiently zealous note-taking and a reluctance to speak out during political classes in the spirit of devotion to the existing regime.

The entire population was divided into three categories: “old residents” - those who, before the Khmer Rouge came to power, lived in territories that resisted the Long Nol regime; “new residents” - inhabitants of areas under the control of Long Nol; persons who collaborated with the previous regime. First of all, the latter were subject to destruction. Then the second and first categories were purged. First of all, officers, soldiers and officials were destroyed along with their families, including even young children, who, according to Pol Pot, “could become dangerous later.”

National minorities were ordered to speak the Khmer language. Those who did not own it were also destroyed. For example, on May 25, 1975, 12 out of 20 thousand Thais living in Kah Kong province were exterminated.

The left-wing extremist government of Pol Pot, whose actions brought Marxist ideas to a bloody absurdity, of course, could not leave the religious views of the Cambodians alone. Buddhism and Islam, the main religions practiced by Cambodians, were banned. The clergy were sent to “comunes” or killed. Temples were turned into grain warehouses, pigsties and prisons.

Along the way, imitating Mao, Pol Pot carried out the “cultural revolution.” The performance of folk dances and songs was prohibited. Schools were turned into prisons and manure warehouses, museums into pigsties. All books, including textbooks and technical publications, were burned at the stake as “reactionary in nature.” Monuments of architecture and art of the ancient and unique Khmer culture were destroyed. Not a single one of the 2,800 pagodas that graced the country before Pol Pot and his clique came to power remains.

“Revolutionary events” even affected such a delicate side of human relations as marriage and family. Young people were deprived of the right to create full-fledged families and choose partners according to their taste. The management determined married couples without caring at all about their feelings. Often newlyweds saw each other for the first time only at the wedding. Weddings were collective. From 6 to 20 couples were declared spouses at the same time. Songs and dances were naturally prohibited. Instead, they heard speeches about the need to work hard. What follows is even greater absurdity. The husband and wife lived separately. Once every three weeks they were allowed to retire to a specially designated empty house to perform marital duties. One of the victims of arbitrariness, while testifying, described her feelings this way: “We never even had lunch together. We have absolutely nothing to talk about. This depresses me. I feel sorry for my husband: they didn’t ask him either; like me, he has submitted to coercion and is also unhappy.”

In just four years of rule, Pol Pot managed to turn Cambodia, which under him became known as Kampuchea, into a cemetery. They also began to call it the Land of the Walking Death. After all, even Ieng Sary, clearly interested in downplaying the number of victims of the regime, testified that the country lost about three million people. Among these unfortunates were Pol Pot's four brothers and sister. Of the 643 doctors, only 69 survived.

Nevertheless, Cambodia was not enough for the ambitious tyrant. Putting forward the racist slogan of “caring for the Khmer race,” he decided to seize Vietnam, which, according to the ideologists of the regime, was once part of ancient Cambodia in its southern part. Pol Pot seriously said that by observing the proportion of killing “1 Khmer – 30 Vietnamese”, it was possible to destroy all the inhabitants of the neighboring state. By provoking the war, the dictator encouraged constant clashes on the border with Vietnam.

However, a tyrant who uses brutal pathological methods bullying his own people, he could not remain in power for long in the 20th century. During the four years of his reign, Pol Pot did not have a moment of peace. Already in 1977, a mutiny began in the army. He, however, was suppressed, and his leaders were burned alive. However, in January next year Pol Pot's regime nevertheless fell under the onslaught of Vietnamese troops and the rebellious people. Pol Pot and his henchmen, sentenced to death in absentia, managed to escape into the jungles of Thailand. Fortified in a secret base, the former head of Kampuchea created the National Liberation Front of the Khmer People. At the same time, representatives of the Khmer Rouge operated in Phnom Penh for some time. They were supported by the United States, which insisted on the presence of Pol Pot's men at the UN. But in 1993, after the first democratic elections were held in the country under UN supervision, the Khmer Rouge, who had boycotted them, were forced to finally go into the jungle.

For several years, scanty reports appeared in the press about imaginary illnesses and even the death of Pol Pot. Nevertheless, in 1997 he gave several interviews to journalists. The former dictator of Kampuchea said that “his conscience is clear, that the Vietnamese forced him to commit genocide of his own people... and as for the millions of dead, this is all an exaggeration.” The Tuol Seng Memorial, created in memory of Pol Pot’s “killing fields” on the site of a former torture center, was also considered by Pol Pot to be “an instrument of Vietnamese propaganda.” “My job was to fight, not to kill people,” he said cynically.

In June 1997, the former dictator's associates, frightened by the terror he unleashed within the organization, placed Pol Pot, his second wife Mia Som and daughter Set Set under house arrest. A few months later, the United States unexpectedly demanded his extradition to an international tribunal. Thus, Washington tried to save face in front of the world community, realizing that by this time their protégé had already become a political corpse. Greatly surprised by this turn of events, the Khmer Rouge decided to exchange their leader for their own safety. But the death of Pol Pot on the night of April 14-15, 1998 disrupted their plans. According to the official version, he died of a heart attack.

Whether this is true or not, it will hardly ever be possible to say for sure. One thing is clear - Pol Pot managed to combine the most terrible aspects of fascist and communist practices on the scale of the unfortunate little Kampuchea-Cambodia.

An entire people, with its ancient cultural traditions and reverence for faith, was brutally mutilated by a Marxist fanatic. Pol Pot, with the silent connivance of the whole world, turned a prosperous country into a huge cemetery.

Imagine that a government comes to power and announces a ban on money. And not only for money: commerce, industry, banks are prohibited - everything that brings wealth. The new government declares by decree that society is again becoming agrarian, as it was in the Middle Ages. Residents of cities and towns are forcibly relocated to the countryside, where they will engage exclusively in peasant labor. But family members cannot live together: children should not fall under the influence of the “bourgeois ideas” of their parents. Therefore, the children are taken away and raised in the spirit of loyalty to the new regime. No books until adulthood. The books are no longer needed, so they are burned, and children from the age of seven work for the Khmer Rouge state.

An eighteen-hour working day is established for the new agrarian class, hard labor is combined with “re-education” in the spirit of the ideas of Marxism-Leninism under the leadership of the new masters. Dissidents who sympathize with the old order do not have the right to life. The intelligentsia, teachers, university professors, and literate people in general are subject to extermination, since they can read materials hostile to the ideas of Marxism-Leninism and spread seditious ideology among workers re-educated in the peasant field. The clergy, politicians of all stripes, except those who share the views of the ruling party, people who made a fortune under the previous authorities are no longer needed - they are also destroyed. Trade and telephone communications are curtailed, temples are destroyed, bicycles, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, holidays, love and kindness are cancelled. IN best case scenario- labor for the purpose of "re-education", otherwise - torture, torment, degradation, in the worst case - death.

This nightmare scenario is not the sophisticated figment of a science fiction writer's fevered imagination. It represents the horrifying reality of life in Cambodia, where the murderous dictator Pol Pot turned back the clock, destroying civilization in an attempt to realize his twisted vision of a classless society. His “killing fields” were littered with the corpses of those who did not fit into the framework of the new world formed by him and his bloodthirsty minions. During the rule of Pol Pot's regime, about three million people died in Cambodia - the same number as the unfortunate victims who perished in the gas chambers of the Nazi death factory Auschwitz during the Second World War. Life under Sex Pot was unbearable, and as a result of the tragedy that took place on the soil of this ancient country in Southeast Asia, its long-suffering population came up with a new eerie name for Cambodia - the Land of the Walking Dead.

The tragedy of Cambodia is a consequence of the Vietnam War, which first broke out in the ruins of French colonialism and then escalated into conflict with the Americans. Fifty-three thousand Cambodians died on the battlefields. From 1969 to 1973, American B-52 bombers used carpet bombing to drop as many tons of explosives on this tiny country as were dropped on Germany during the last two years of World War II. Vietnamese fighters - the Viet Cong - used the impenetrable jungles of the neighboring country to set up military camps and bases during operations against the Americans. American planes bombed these strong points.

Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia's ruler and heir to its religious and cultural traditions, renounced his royal title ten years before the outbreak of the Vietnam War but remained head of state. He tried to lead the country along the path of neutrality, balancing between warring countries and conflicting ideologies. Sihanouk became king of Cambodia, a French protectorate, back in 1941, but abdicated the throne in 1955. However, then, after free elections, he returned to lead the country as head of state.

During the escalation of the Vietnam War from 1966 to 1969, Sihanouk fell out of favor with the political leadership in Washington for not taking decisive action against arms smuggling and the establishment of Vietnamese guerrilla camps in the Cambodian jungle. However, he was also quite mild in his criticism of punitive air raids carried out by the United States.

On March 18, 1970, while Sihanouk was in Moscow, his prime minister, General Lon Nol, with the support of the White House, carried out a coup d'état, returning Cambodia to its ancient name Khmer. The United States recognized the Khmer Republic, but within a month it invaded it. Sihanouk found himself in exile in Beijing. And here the ex-king made a choice, entering into an alliance with the devil himself.

Little is known about Pol Pot. This is a man with the appearance of a handsome old man and the heart of a bloody tyrant. It was with this monster that Sihanouk teamed up. Together with the leader of the Khmer Rouge, they vowed to merge their forces together for the common goal of defeating American troops.

Pol Pot, who grew up in a peasant family in the Cambodian province of Kampong Thom and received his primary education in a Buddhist monastery, was a monk for two years. In the fifties he studied electronics in Paris and, like many students of that time, became involved in the leftist movement. Here Pol Pot heard - it is still not known whether they met - about another student, Khieu Samphan, whose controversial but exciting plans for an "agrarian revolution" fueled Pol Pot's great power ambitions.

According to Samphan's theory, Cambodia, in order to achieve progress, had to turn back, renounce capitalist exploitation, the fattening leaders fed by the French colonial rulers, and abandon devalued bourgeois values ​​and ideals. Samphan's perverted theory said that people should live in the fields, and all temptations modern life should be destroyed. If Pol Pot had, say, been hit by a car at that time, this theory would probably have died out in coffee shops and bars without crossing the boundaries of the Parisian boulevards. However, she was destined to become a monstrous reality.

From 1970 to 1975, Pol Pot's "revolutionary army" became a powerful force in Cambodia, controlling vast agricultural areas. On April 17, 1975, the dictator's dream of power became a reality: his troops, marching under red flags, entered the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. A few hours after the coup, Pol Pot called a special meeting of his new cabinet and announced that the country would henceforth be called Kampuchea. The dictator outlined a bold plan for building a new society and said that its implementation would take only a few days. Pol Pot announced the evacuation of all cities under the leadership of newly appointed regional and zonal leaders, ordered the closure of all markets, the destruction of churches and the dispersal of all religious communities. Having received his education abroad, he hated educated people and ordered the execution of all teachers, professors and even kindergarten teachers.

The first to die were high-ranking members of the cabinet and functionaries of the Lon Nol regime. They were followed by the officer corps of the old army. Everyone was buried in mass graves. At the same time, doctors were killed because of their “education.” All religious communities were destroyed - they were considered “reactionary”. Then the evacuation of cities and villages began.

Pol Pot's perverted dream of turning back time and forcing his people to live in a Marxist agrarian society was helped by his deputy Ieng Sari. In his policy of destruction, Pol Pot used the term "getting out of sight." “They removed” - they destroyed thousands and thousands of women and men, old people and babies.

Buddhist temples were desecrated or turned into soldiers' brothels, or even simply slaughterhouses. As a result of the terror, out of sixty thousand monks, only three thousand returned to the destroyed temples and holy monasteries.

Pol Pot's decree effectively eradicated ethnic minorities. Using Vietnamese, Thai and Chinese was punishable by death. A purely Khmer society was proclaimed. The forced eradication of ethnic groups was especially hard on the Chan people. Their ancestors - people from what is now Vietnam - inhabited the ancient Kingdom of Champa. The Chans migrated to Cambodia in the 18th century and fished along the banks of Cambodian rivers and lakes. They professed Islam and were the most significant ethnic group in modern Cambodia, preserving the purity of their language, national cuisine, clothing, hairstyles, religious and ritual traditions.

Young fanatics from the Khmer Rouge attacked the vats like locusts. Their settlements were burned, the inhabitants were driven into swamps infested with mosquitoes. People were forcibly forced to eat pork, which was strictly prohibited by their religion, and the clergy were mercilessly destroyed. If the slightest resistance was shown, entire communities were exterminated, and the corpses were thrown into huge pits and covered with lime. Of the two hundred thousand Chans, less than half remained alive.

Those who survived the beginning of the campaign of terror later realized that instant death was better than hellish torment under the new regime.

According to Pol Pot, the older generation was spoiled by feudal and bourgeois views, infected with “sympathies” for Western democracies, which he declared alien to the national way of life. The urban population was driven from their habitable places to labor camps, where hundreds of thousands of people were tortured to death by backbreaking labor.

People were killed for even trying to speak French - the biggest crime in the eyes of the Khmer Rouge, as this was considered a manifestation of nostalgia for the country's colonial past.

In huge camps with no amenities other than a straw mat for sleeping and a bowl of rice at the end of the working day, in conditions that even prisoners of Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War would not have envied, traders, teachers, entrepreneurs worked, the only survivors because they managed to hide their professions, as well as thousands of other citizens.

These camps were organized in such a way as to, through “natural selection,” get rid of the old and sick, pregnant women and young children.

People died in hundreds and thousands from disease, hunger and exhaustion, under the batons of cruel overseers.

Without medical assistance other than traditional herbal treatments, the life expectancy of prisoners in these camps was depressingly short.

At dawn, men were marched in formation into the malarial swamps, where they spent twelve hours a day clearing the jungle in an unsuccessful attempt to reclaim new cropland from them. At sunset, again in formation, urged on by the bayonets of the guards, people returned to the camp to their cup of rice, gruel and a piece of dried fish. Then, despite terrible fatigue, they still had to go through political classes on Marxist ideology, during which incorrigible “bourgeois elements” were identified and punished, and the rest, like parrots, kept repeating phrases about the joys of life in the new state. Every ten working days there was a long-awaited day off, for which twelve hours of ideological classes were planned. Wives lived separately from their husbands. Their children began working at the age of seven or were placed at the disposal of childless party functionaries, who raised them to be fanatical “fighters of the revolution.”

From time to time, huge bonfires made of books were made in city squares. Crowds of unfortunate tortured people were driven to these bonfires, who were forced to chant memorized phrases in chorus, while the flames devoured the masterpieces of world civilization. “Lessons of hatred” were organized when people were flogged in front of portraits of the leaders of the old regime. It was an ominous world of horror and hopelessness.

The Polpotites severed diplomatic relations in all countries, postal and telephone communications did not work, entry into and exit from the country was prohibited. The Cambodian people found themselves isolated from the rest of the world.

To intensify the fight against real and imaginary enemies, Pol Pot organized a sophisticated system of torture and execution in his prison camps. As during the Spanish Inquisition, the dictator and his minions proceeded from the premise that those who ended up in these damned places were guilty and all they had to do was admit their guilt. To convince its followers of the need for brutal measures to achieve the goals of “national revival,” the regime attached special political significance to torture.

Documents seized after the overthrow of Pol Pot show that Khmer security officers trained by Chinese instructors were guided by brutal, ideological principles in their activities. The Interrogation Guidelines S-21, one of the documents later submitted to the UN, stated: “The purpose of torture is to obtain an adequate response to it from the interrogated. Torture is not used for entertainment. Pain must be inflicted in such a way as to cause a quick reaction. Another goal is psychological breakdown and loss of the will of the interrogated. When torture, one should not proceed from one’s own anger or self-satisfaction. You should beat the person being tortured in such a way as to intimidate him, and not beat him to death. Before starting the torture, it is necessary to examine the health of the interrogated person. instruments of torture. You should not necessarily try to kill the interrogated. During interrogation, political considerations are the main thing, causing pain is secondary. Therefore, you should never forget that even during interrogations you should constantly conduct propaganda work. At the same time, you must avoid indecisiveness. and hesitation during torture, when there is an opportunity to get answers to our questions from the enemy. We must remember that indecisiveness can slow down our work. In other words, in propaganda and educational work of this kind it is necessary to show determination, persistence, and categoricalness. We must engage in torture without first explaining the reasons or motives. Only then will the enemy be broken."

Among the numerous sophisticated methods of torture that the Khmer Rouge executioners resorted to, the most favorite were the notorious Chinese water torture, crucifixion, and strangulation with a plastic bag. Site S-21, which gave the document its name, was the most notorious camp in all of Cambodia. It was located in the northeast of the country. At least thirty thousand victims of the regime were tortured here. Only seven survived, and only because the administrative skills of the prisoners were needed by their owners to manage this terrible institution.

But torture was not the only weapon of intimidation of the already frightened population of the country. There are many known cases when guards in camps caught prisoners, driven to despair by hunger, eating their dead comrades in misfortune. The punishment for this was terrible death. The culprits were buried up to their necks in the ground and left to slowly die from hunger and thirst, while their still living flesh was tormented by ants and other living creatures. The victims' heads were then cut off and displayed on stakes around the settlement. They hung a sign around their necks: “I am a traitor to the revolution!”

Dith Pran, a Cambodian translator for American journalist Sidney Schoenberg, lived through all the horrors of Pol Pot's rule. The inhumane ordeal he had to endure was documented in the film The Killing Fields, in which the suffering of the Cambodian people was revealed to the world for the first time in stunning nakedness. The heartbreaking tale of Pran's journey from a civilized childhood to a death camp left viewers horrified.

“In my prayers,” Pran said, “I asked the Almighty to save me from the unbearable torment that I was forced to endure. But some of my loved ones managed to flee the country and take refuge in America. For their sake I continued to live, but it was not life , but a nightmare."

Pran was lucky enough to survive this bloody Asian nightmare and reunite with his family in San Francisco in 1979. But in the remote corners of a devastated country that has experienced a terrible tragedy, mass graves of nameless victims still remain, above which mounds of human skulls rise in silent reproach.

In the end, thanks to military power, and not morality and law, it was possible to stop the carnage and restore at least a semblance of common sense to the tormented land. To its credit, the UK protested against human rights abuses in 1978 following reports of rampant terror in Cambodia through intermediaries in Thailand, but this protest fell on deaf ears. Britain made a statement to the UN Commission on Human Rights, but a representative of the Khmer Rouge hysterically retorted: “The British imperialists have no right to talk about human rights. The whole world knows their barbaric essence. The leaders of Britain are drowning in luxury, while the proletariat has the right only for unemployment, illness and prostitution."

In December 1978, Vietnamese troops, who had been in conflict with the Khmer Rouge for many years over disputed border areas, entered Cambodia with several motorized infantry divisions supported by tanks. The country fell into such disrepair that, due to the lack of telephone communications, it was necessary to deliver combat reports on bicycles.

In early 1979, the Vietnamese occupied Phnom Penh. A few hours earlier, Pol Pot left the deserted capital in a white armored Mercedes. The bloody dictator hurried to his Chinese masters, who provided him with refuge, but did not support him in the fight against the heavily armed Viet Cong.

When the whole world became aware of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime and the devastation that reigned in the country, help rushed to Cambodia in a powerful stream. The Khmer Rouge, like the Nazis in their time, were very pedantic in recording their crimes. The investigation discovered journals in which daily executions and torture were recorded in great detail, hundreds of albums with photographs of those sentenced to execution, including the wives and children of intellectuals liquidated in the initial stages of the terror, and detailed documentation about the notorious “killing fields.” These fields, conceived as the basis of a labor utopia, a country without money and needs, in fact turned out to be mass graves of the day of burial of people crushed by the yoke of cruel tyranny.

Pol Pot, who seemed to have faded into oblivion, has recently re-emerged on the political horizon as a force vying for power in this long-suffering country. Like all tyrants, he claims that his subordinates made mistakes, that he faced resistance on all fronts, and that those killed were “enemies of the state.” Returning to Cambodia in 1981, at a secret meeting among his old friends near the Thai border, he declared that he had been too trusting: “My policy was correct. Overzealous regional commanders and local leaders perverted my orders. Accusations of massacres are vile lie. If we really destroyed people in such numbers, the people would have ceased to exist long ago."

A "misunderstanding" at the cost of three million lives, almost a quarter of the country's population, is too innocent a word to describe what was done in the name of Pol Pot and on his orders. But, following the famous Nazi principle - the more monstrous the lie, the more people are able to believe it - Pol Pot is still eager for power and hopes to gather forces in the rural areas, which, in his opinion, are still loyal to him.

He has again become a major political figure and is waiting for an opportunity to reappear in the country as an angel of death, seeking revenge and completion of the work previously begun - his “great agrarian revolution.”

There is a growing movement in international circles to recognize the Cambodian massacre as a crime against humanity - like Hitler's genocide in relation to Jews. There is a Cambodian Documentation Center in New York under the leadership of Yeng Sam. Like the former prisoner of the Nazi camps Sim on Wiesenthal, who long years collected evidence against Nazi war criminals around the world, Yeung Sam, a survivor of the campaign of terror, accumulates information about the atrocities of criminals in his country.

Here are his words: “Those most guilty of the Cambodian genocide - members of the cabinet of the Pol Pot regime, members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, military leaders of the Khmer Rouge, whose troops took part in the massacres, officials who supervised the executions and supervised the system of torture - continue active work in Cambodia. Taking refuge in the border areas, they wage a guerrilla war, seeking to return to power in Phnom Penh.

They were not brought to international legal responsibility for their crimes, and this is a tragic, monstrous injustice.

We, the survivors, remember how we were deprived of our families, how our relatives and friends were brutally killed. We witnessed how people died from exhaustion, unable to endure slave labor, and from the inhuman living conditions to which the Khmer Rouge doomed the Cambodian people.

We also saw Pol Pot's soldiers destroy our Buddhist temples, stop our children's schools, suppress our culture, and exterminate our ethnic minorities. It is difficult for us to understand why free, democratic states and nations do nothing to punish those responsible. Doesn't this issue cry out for justice?"

But there is still no fair solution to this issue.

Actually, this is a gloomy post. Here is Pol Pot. He graduated from Catholic school and studied in Paris. Became carried away by the teachings of the great helmsman Mao

Having returned to Cambodia and having received power, he began to restore his hellish order in the country. In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge regime came to power in Cambodia. The country began to build a “one hundred percent communist society,” which cost the entire Khmer people too much. The leaders of the Communist Party, developing their concept of the Cambodian revolution, used the Marxist theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe destruction of hostile classes and all enemies of the revolution. Pol Pot established an agrarian communist dictatorship in the Cambodian kingdom, banning foreign languages, religion and currency. The Khmer Rouge adopted a republican form of government and proclaimed a new constitution in January 1976. In the proclaimed Democratic Kampuchea, Khieu Samphan became president, Ieng Sary took over the post of foreign minister. But all power was concentrated in the hands of the country's prime minister, leader and ideologist of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot. The real name of this Cambodian politician is Saloth Sar. He began using the pseudonym “Paul” back in the 1950s, and since 1976 he has used it constantly. The nickname "Pol Pot" is an abbreviation of the French "politique potentielle" - "politics of the possible"

Khmer Rouge uniform

On July 15, 1979, the People's Revolutionary Tribunal was established in Phnom Penh to try the crimes of genocide committed by the leaders of the Khmer Rouge. Two months later, on August 19, the People's Revolutionary Tribunal found Pol Pot and Ieng Sary guilty of genocide and sentenced them to death in absentia with confiscation of all property

Pol Pot's grave

At the grave of Pol Pot, who died in 1998, there are still a lot of pilgrims, wreaths, and memorial candles. There are Cambodians who still believe that Pol Pot wanted the best, but it didn’t turn out exactly as he intended. His ideas in the province are still strong in many ways, and there are still Khmer Rouge detachments in the jungle.