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Nascent Drama

After Cambodian independence following the 1954 Geneva Conference, right and left wing parties struggled against each other for power in the new government. King Norodom Sihanouk played the parties against each other while using the police and army to suppress extreme political groups.
 
After his return to Phnom Penh, Pol Pot became the liaison between the above-ground parties of the left (Democrats and Pracheachon) and the underground communist movement. He married Ponnary on July 14, 1956. She returned to Lycee Sisowath but now as a teacher, while he taught French literature and history at Chamraon Vichea, a new private college.
 
In January 1962, the government of Cambodia rounded up most of the leadership of the far-left Pracheachon party ahead of parliamentary elections due in June. The newspapers and other publications of the party were also closed. This event effectively ended any above-ground political role for the communist movement in Cambodia.
 
In July 1962, the underground communist party secretary Tou Samouth was arrested and later killed while in custody. The arrests created a situation where Pol Pot could become the de facto deputy leader of the party. When Ton Samouth was murdered, Pol Pot became the acting leader of the communist party. At a party meeting attended by at most eighteen people in 1963, he was elected Secretary of the central committee of the party. In March 1963, Pol Pot went into hiding after his name was published in a list of leftist suspects put together by the police for Norodom Sihanouk. He fled to the Vietnamese border region and made contact with Vietnamese units fighting against South Vietnam.
 
In early 1964, Pol Pot convinced the Vietnamese to help the Cambodian Communists set up their own base camp. The central committee of the party met later that year and issued a declaration calling for armed struggle. The declaration also emphasized the idea of "self-reliance" in the sense of extreme Cambodian nationalism. In the border camps, the ideology of the Khmer Rouge was gradually developed. The party, breaking with Marxism, declared rural peasant farmers to be the true working class proletarian and the lifeblood of the revolution. This is in some sense explained by the fact that none of the central committee were in any sense "working class". All of them had grown up in a feudal peasant society. The party adapted elements of Theravada Buddhism to justify their non-standard communism.
 
After another wave of repression by Sihanouk in 1965, the Khmer Rouge movement under Pol Pot rapidly grew. Many teachers and students left the cities for the countryside to join the movement.

In April 1965, Pol Pot went to North Vietnam to gain approval for an uprising in Cambodia against the government. North Vietnam refused to support any uprising because of agreements being negotiated with the Cambodian government. Sihanouk promised to allow the Vietnamese to use Cambodian territory and Cambodian ports in their war against South Vietnam.
 
In early 1966 fighting broke out in the countryside between peasants and the government over the price paid for rice. Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge was caught by surprise by the uprisings and was unable to take any real advantage of them. But the government's refusal to find a peaceful solution to the problem created rural unrest that played into the hands of the Communist movement.
 
It wasn't until early 1967 that Pol Pot decided to launch a national uprising, even after North Vietnam refused to assist it in any real way. The uprising was launched on January 18, 1968 with a raid on an army base south of Battambang. The Battambang area had already seen two years of great peasant unrest. The attack was driven off by the army, but the Khmer Rouge had captured a number of weapons, which were then used to drive police forces out of Cambodian villages.
 
The road to power for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge was opened by the events of January 1970 in Cambodia. Sihanouk, while out of the country, ordered the government to stage anti-Vietnamese protests in the capital. The protesters quickly went out of control and wrecked the embassies of both North and South Vietnam. Sihanouk, who had ordered the protests, then denounced them from Paris and blamed unnamed individuals in Cambodia for them. These actions, along with intrigues by Sihanouk's followers in Cambodia, convinced the government that he should be removed as head of state. The National Assembly voted to remove Sihanouk from office. Afterward, the government closed Cambodia's ports to Vietnamese weapons traffic and demanded that the Vietnamese leave Cambodia.
 
The North Vietnamese reacted to the political changes in Cambodia by sending Premier Phạm Văn Đồng to meet Sihanouk in China and recruit him into an alliance with the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot was also contacted by the Vietnamese who now offered him whatever resources he wanted for his insurgency against the Cambodian government. Pol Pot and Sihanouk were actually in Beijing at the same time but the Vietnamese and Chinese leaders never informed Sihanouk of the presence of Pol Pot or allowed the two men to meet. Shortly after, Sihanouk issued an appeal by radio to the people of Cambodia to rise up against the government and support the Khmer Rouge. In May 1970, Pol Pot finally returned to Cambodia and the pace of the insurgency greatly increased.
 
Earlier, on March 29, 1970, the Vietnamese had taken matters into their own hands and launched an offensive against the Cambodian army. A force of 40,000 Vietnamese quickly overran large parts of eastern Cambodia reaching to within 15 miles (24 km) of Phnom Penh before being pushed back. In these battles the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot played a very small role.

In October 1970, Pol Pot issued a resolution in the name of the Central Committee. The resolution stated the principle of independence mastery which was a call for Cambodia to decide its own future independent of the influence of any other country. The resolution also included statements describing the betrayal of the Cambodian Communist movement in the 1950s by the Viet Minh. This was the first statement of the anti-Vietnamese/self sufficiency at all costs ideology that would be a part of the Pol Pot regime when it took power years later.
 
In early 1972, Pol Pot toured the insurgent/Vietnamese controlled areas and Cambodia. He saw a regular Khmer Rouge army of 35,000 men taking shape supported by around 100,000 irregulars. China was supplying five million dollars a year in weapons and Pol Pot had organized an independent revenue source for the party in the form of rubber plantations in eastern Cambodia using forced labor.
 
The Khmer Rouge advanced during 1973. After they reached the edges of Phnom Penh, Pol Pot issued orders during the peak of the rainy season that the city be taken. The orders led to futile attacks and wasted lives among the Khmer Rouge army. By the middle of 1973, the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot controlled almost two-thirds of the country and half the population. Vietnam realized that it no longer controlled the situation and began to treat Pol Pot as more of an equal leader than a junior partner.
 
In late 1973, Pol Pot made strategic decisions about the future of the war. His first decision was to cut the capital off from contact from outside supply and effectively put the city under siege. The second decision was to enforce tight command on people trying to leave the city through the Khmer Rouge lines. The city people were considered like a disease that needed to be contained so that it would not infect areas run by the Khmer Rouge. He also ordered a series of general purges. Former government officials, along with anyone with an education, were singled out in the purges. A set of new prisons was also constructed in Khmer Rouge run areas. The Cham minority attempted an uprising around this time against attempts to destroy their culture. While the uprising was quickly crushed, Pol Pot ordered that harsh physical torture be used against most of those involved in the revolt. As previously, Pol Pot tested out harsh new policies against the Cham minority before extending them to the general population of the country.
 
The Khmer Rouge also had a policy of evacuating urban areas to the countryside. When the Khmer Rouge took the town of Kratie in 1971, Pol Pot and other members of the party were shocked at how fast the liberated urban areas shook off socialism and went back to the old ways. Various ideas were tried to re-create the town in the image of the party, but nothing worked. In 1973, out of total frustration, Pol Pot decided that the only solution was to send the entire population of the town to the fields in the countryside. He wrote at the time "if the result of so many sacrifices was that the capitalists remain in control, what was the point of the revolution?". Shortly after, Pol Pot ordered the evacuation of the 15,000 people of Kompong Cham for the same reasons. The Khmer Rouge then moved on in 1974 to evacuate the larger city of Oudong.

Internationally, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were able to gain the recognition of 63 countries as the true government of Cambodia. A move was made at the United Nations to give the seat for Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge. The government prevailed by two votes.
 
The Khmer Rouge were positioned for a final offensive against the government in January 1975. At the same time at a press event in Beijing, Sihanouk proudly announced Pol Pot's "death list" of enemies to be killed after victory. The list, which originally contained seven names, expanded to twenty-three, including all the senior government leaders along with the military and police leadership. The rivalry between Vietnam and Cambodia also came out into the open. North Vietnam, as the rival socialist country in Indochina, was determined to take Saigon before the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh. Shipments of weapons from China were delayed and in one instance the Cambodians were forced to sign a humiliating document thanking Vietnam for shipments of what were in fact Chinese weapons.

In September 1975, the government formed a Supreme National Council with new leadership, with the aim of negotiating a surrender to the Khmer Rouge. It was headed by Sak Sutsakhan who had studied in France with Pol Pot and was cousin to the Khmer Rouge Deputy Secretary Nuon Chea. Pol Pot's reaction to this was to add the names of everyone involved to his post-victory death list. Government resistance finally collapsed on September 17, 1975.
 
The Khmer Rouge came to Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. A new government was formed, at first with Khieu Samphan as prime minister and leader of the nation, but since holding an inferior position in the party, Khieu Samphan was obliged to hand Pol Pot the post, confirming him as prime minister and head of government on May 13, consolidating his power and making him de facto dictator of Cambodia. Khieu Samphan was instead made head of state after the abdication of Norodom Sihanouk in January 1976, as the new constitution was adapted and a republic proclaimed.
 
The name of the country was now officially changed to Democratic Kampuchea. The Khmer Rouge tried to impose the concept of "Year Zero" and targeted Buddhist monks, Western-educated intellectuals, educated people in general, people who had contact with Western countries or with Vietnam, the crippled and lame, and the ethnic Chinese, Laotians and Vietnamese. Some were put in the S-21 camp for interrogation involving torture in cases where a confession was useful to the government. Many others were summarily executed. Confessions forced at S-21 were extracted from prisoners through such methods as removing toenails with pliers, suffocating a prisoner repeatedly, and skinning a person while alive.
 
Immediately after the fall of Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge began to implement reforms following the concept of "Year Zero" ideology and placed the former king, Norodom Sihanouk, in a purely ceremonial role. The Khmer Rouge ordered the complete evacuation of Phnom Penh and all other recently captured major towns and cities. Those leaving were told that the evacuation was due to the threat of severe American bombing and it would last for no more than a few days.
 
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge had been evacuating captured urban areas for many years, but the evacuation of Phnom Penh was unique in scale. The first operations to evacuate urban areas occurred in 1968 in the Ratanakiri area and were aimed at moving people deeper into Khmer Rouge territory to better control them. From 1971-1973, the motivation changed. Pol Pot and the other senior leaders were frustrated that urban Cambodians were retaining old habits of trade and business. When all other methods had failed, evacuation to the countryside was adopted to solve the problem.
 
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