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 The Khmer Rouge (Khmer: ខ្មែរក្រហម —
“Khmer Krahom” in Khmer) was the name given to the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, who were the ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, led by Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Son Sen and
Khieu Samphan. The regime led by the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979 was known as the Democratic Kampuchea.
This organization is remembered primarily for its policy of
social engineering, which resulted in genocide. Its attempts at agricultural reform led to widespread famine, while its insistence on absolute self-sufficiency, even in the supply of medicine, led to the deaths of
thousands from treatable diseases (such as malaria). Brutal and arbitrary executions and torture carried out by its cadres against perceived subversive elements, or during purges of its own ranks
between 1976 and 1978, are considered to have constituted a genocide.
The clandestine Communist Party of Kampuchea itself constituted the secret leadership of the
Khmer Rouge, as its official name was known only to a few insiders: it called itself the Angkar (the organization) and only announced officially its existence in 1977, almost two years after the
establishment of Democratic Kampuchea. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, the organization's remaining guerrilla forces became known as the National Army of Democratic
Kampuchea. In 1981 the party itself was dissolved, and substituted by the Party of Democratic Kampuchea
After taking power, the Khmer Rouge leadership renamed the country to Democratic Kampuchea. The Khmer Rouge subjected Cambodia to a radical social reform process that was aimed at creating a purely
agrarian-based Communist society.The city-dwellers were deported to the countryside, where they were combined with the local population and subjected to forced labor. About 2 million Cambodians are estimated
to have died in waves of murder, torture, and starvation, aimed particularly at the educated and intellectual elite.[citation needed]
Losing power following a Vietnamese military intervention in December 1978, the Khmer Rouge maintained control in some regions and continued to fight on as guerillas. In 1998 their final
stronghold, in Anlong Veng District, fell to the government.
Following their leader Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge imposed an extreme form of social engineering on Cambodian society — a radical form of agrarian communism
where the whole population had to work in collective farms or forced labor projects. In terms of the number of people killed as a proportion of the population (est. 7.1 million people, as of 1975), it
was the most lethal regime of the 20th century.
The Khmer Rouge wanted to eliminate anyone suspected of "involvement in free-market activities".
Suspected capitalists encompassed professionals and almost everyone with an education, many urban dwellers, and people with connections to foreign governments.
The Khmer Rouge believed parents were tainted with capitalism. Consequently, children were separated from parents and brainwashed to socialism as well as taught torture methods with animals.
Children were a "dictatorial instrument of the party" and were given leadership in torture and executions.
 Flag of Democratic Kampuchea
One of their mottoes, in reference to the New People, was:
"To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss." The ideology of the Khmer Rouge evolved over time. In the early days, it was an orthodox communist party and looked
to the Vietnamese Communists for guidance.
It became more anti-intellectual when groups of students who had been studying in France returned to Cambodia.
The students, including future party leader Pol Pot, had been heavily influenced by the example of the French Communist Party (PCF).
After 1960, the Khmer Rouge developed its own unique political ideas. Contrary to Marxist doctrine, the Khmer Rouge considered the farmers in the countryside to be the proletariat and the
true representatives of the working class, a form of Maoism which brought them onto the Chinese side of the Sino-Soviet Split. They starting to incorporate Khmer nationalism into their ideology, as
well as anti-intellectualism by this time. This was evident in the persecution of ethnic Chinese, Thais, Muslims, Christians (most of them Catholics), etc[citation needed].
By the 1970s, the ideology of the Khmer Rouge combined its own ideas with the anti-colonialist ideas of the PCF, which its leaders had acquired during their education in French universities in the
1950s. The Khmer Rouge leaders were also privately very resentful of the Vietnamese, and were determined to establish a form of communism very different from the Vietnamese model and also
from other Communist countries, including China.
After four years of rule, the Khmer Rouge regime was removed from power in 1979 as a result of
an invasion by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and was replaced by moderate, pro-Vietnamese Communists. It survived into the 1990s as a resistance movement operating in western Cambodia
from bases in Thailand. In 1996, following a peace agreement, their leader Pol Pot formally dissolved the organization. Pol Pot died on 15 April 1998, having never been put on trial.
The Khmer Rouge is remembered mainly for the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million people or 1/5 of the country's total population( range from 850,000 to 2.5 million) under its regime, through
execution, torture, starvation and forced labor. Because of the large number of deaths, and because ethnic groups and religious minorities were targeted, the deaths during the rule of the Khmer Rouge
are often considered a genocide as defined under the UN Convention of 1948.
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