How Pol Pot came to power – Interesting facts on how Pol Pot came to lead Khmer Rouge
Pol Pot started out started out the same as the rest of us, and he was born in 1928 in Kampong Thum Province in Cambodia. He went to technical high school in the capital, Phnom Penh. Then in 1949 he went to study electronics in Paris. It was Paris where he joined the French Communist Party and Marxist-Leninists. He also became a part of the Khmer Students’ Association (KSA), which was said to be about two hundred students who belonged. Pol Pot and other members wrote a letter to Sihanouk, the leader of Cambodia at the time, and said that he was the “strangler of infant democracy.” Due to this action, a year later KSA was closed.
Pol Pot returned to Cambodia in 1953 and started training and preparing to rule Cambodia. First he allied with forces of Viet Minh, which were operating in the Kampong Cham Province. Next he moved to the capital and become a main person to contact for above ground parties on the left and the underground secret communist movement.
In 1960 the KPRP held a secret session at the Phnom Penh railroad station. As an outcome of the meeting Pol Pot was named to the Political Bureau and stood in the third highest highest position and the name was changed to Worker’s Party of Kampuchea (WPK). In 1962, Samouth, the party’s general secretary, was murdered by the government and Pol Pot was nominated to take his place. Once Pol Pot had this control, he used it to his advantage by edging out pro- Vietnamese veterans.
In 1963 the committee established an insurgent base in Ratanakiri Province. In 1965 Pol Pot went to North Vietnam and China for training and to improve his prestige. In 1966, three years after the move, the committee changed its name to Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). The name change was kept a secret and promoted people to be against the government.
In 1968 the Khmer Rouge, the armed section of CPK, initiated a national insurgency across the entire country of Cambodia. Vietnamese supported Khmer Rouge by providing them with shelter and weapons. After a little of two years the insurgency grew and the insurgency told the public that it was the Communist Party of Kampuchea.
A great factor in increasing Khmer Rouge’s support was the United States. The U.S. tried to intervene and bombed Cambodia. Khmer Rouge used this to their advantage, and they gained most of the peasants support in the villages that were hit by the American bombs. Historians have been able to prove this correlation.
In 1975 Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia after they captured Phnom Penh and the Lon Nol government surrendered because they had ran out of ammunition. Khmer Rouge started their plan as soon as they came to power, without even knowing it. Due to Pol Pot’s admiration for farmer’s way of life, he had everyone moved to industrialized areas and forced them to live the farming life, and this is where the cruelty began.
Khmerguy owns a website about Khmer music at KhmerPortal.com.
