7 Pol Pot 7after he failed examinations, and he returned to Phnom
Penh in 1953.
Pol Pot taught at a private school in Phnom Penh from
1956 to 1963, when he left the capital because his Communist
ties were suspected by the police. By 1963 he had adopted
his revolutionary pseudonym, Pol Pot. He spent the next
12 years building up the Communist Party that had been
organized in Cambodia in 1960, and he served as the par-
ty’s secretary. An opponent of the Norodom Sihanouk
government and of the military government of General
Lon Nol, he led the Khmer Rouge guerrilla forces in their
overthrow of Lon Nol’s regime in 1975. Pol Pot was prime
minister of the new Khmer Rouge government from 1976
until he was overthrown by invading Vietnamese in January
- It is estimated that from 1975 to 1979, under the
leadership of Pol Pot, the government caused the deaths
of more than one million people from forced labour, star-
vation, disease, torture, or execution while carrying out a
program of radical social and agricultural reforms.
Following the Vietnamese invasion of his country, Pol
Pot withdrew to bases in Thailand to lead the Khmer
Rouge forces against the new Hanoi-supported govern-
ment in Phnom Penh, which refused to consider peace
negotiations as long as he remained at the head of the
party. Although ostensibly removed from the military
and political leadership of the Khmer Rouge in 1985, he
remained a guiding force in the organization, which con-
tinued its guerrilla campaign into the 1990s, though with
diminishing intensity. By 1997 the Khmer Rouge were in
deep decline, their ranks riddled by desertions and fac-
tionalism. In June of that year, Pol Pot was forcibly ousted
from the organization’s leadership and placed under house
arrest by his colleagues, and in July he was convicted of
treason. Pol Pot died of natural causes in 1998.