Democratic Kampuchea

Cambodia, 1976–1979. Draft, not yet reviewed

Democratic Kampuchea was the official name of the Cambodian state under the general secretaryship of Pol Pot and the Communist Party of Kampuchea, commonly known as the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge's one-party regime killed millions of its own people through mass executions, forced labour, and starvation, in an event which has come to be known as the Cambodian genocide. The killings ended when the Khmer Rouge were ousted from Phnom Penh by the People's Army of Vietnam.

Seat of power: Phnom Penh

Rulers

Culture

• In deportations that became markers of the beginning of their rule, the Khmer Rouge demanded and then forced the people to leave the cities and live in the countryside.
• From 1976 to 1979, an estimated 20,000 people were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng; it was one of between 150 and 196 torture and execution centers established by the Khmer Rouge and their secret police.
• On 26 July 2010, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia convicted the prison's chief, Kang Kek Iew, for crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
• As a result of poor conditions, starvation, disease and violence, around one quarter of Cambodia's population of 8 million died.

Picture

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, in Phnom Penh, is in a former secondary school that the Khmer Rouge regime turned into an internment facility known as Security Prison 21.

Image: Michael Gruijters at Dutch Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, file

Sources

• Democratic Kampuchea (Wikipedia)
• Democratic Kampuchea (Wikidata)
• About the picture (Wikipedia)

Text adapted from the Wikipedia articles listed as sources, CC BY-SA 4.0.