Abridged from Andy Carvin's excellent site, "From Sideshow to Genocide: Stories of the Cambodian Holocaust"

5. The Coming of the Khmer Rouge

Invigorated by Vietnamese and Chinese support, the Khmer Rouge had grown in strength and size. But as far as the Nixon administration was concerned, they were a puppet militia of the Hanoi government - if the war with Hanoi could be settled, the civil war in Cambodia would end with it. It was with this logic in mind that the US signed the Paris Peace Accords with Hanoi on January 27, 1973. US troops would leave Vietnam, Vietnamese troops would leave Cambodia. and a cease-fire would take effect between North and South Vietnam.

The Khmer Rouge, however, immediately broke with Hanoi and vowed to continue their struggle against the Lon Nol government. In early February 1973, just days after the peace accords, the US re-instituted its massive B-52 bombing campaign in Cambodia in the feeble hope of sustaining the Lon Nol government. For eight months hundreds of thousands of tons of US bombs fell across Cambodia - more than the entire tonnage dropped on Japan during all of World War II. Nearly any place outside of Phnom Penh was fair game for attack, and thousands of small Cambodian villages were flattened or abandoned as a result of the raids.

The horrific drama of the 1973 bombing campaign climaxed in early August, when an American B-52 bomber accidentally dropped its load on the village of Neak Luong, southeast of Phnom Penh. Over 125 Cambodian residents were killed, yet the bombardier was fined only $700 for his mistake. As the story of Neak Luong reached the western press, Congress again demanded an end to the bombing. On August 15 Nixon halted the B-52 campaign.

Pol Pot

On New Year's Day of January 1975, the Khmer Rouge launched what it hoped was the final assault on Phnom Penh. The Cambodian capital was now swollen with over two million refugees, and the city starved slowly. The now-fanatical Khmer Rouge, strengthened by a steady stream of supplies from Hanoi and emboldened by surviving years of sustained US bombardment, made their push into the Phnom Penh suburbs.

On April 1, a weeping Lon Nol, crippled by nervous breakdowns and a series of minor strokes, fled Phnom Penh for Hawaii with his family and entourage, while Prince Sirik Matak and others remained behind in the hopes of organizing a last-minute peace talks. The Khmer Rouge rejected the talks and pressed further into the capital. US Ambassador to Cambodia John Gunther Dean quickly made plans to evacuate US embassy staff and their families along with key Cambodian government officials, including Sirik Matak, Lon Nol's brother Lon Non, and acting prime minister Long Boret. All three declined the offer. They would be executed by the Khmer Rouge two weeks later, along with the other remaining members of the Lon Nol government.

A Khmer Rouge rebel frisks a civilian in downtown Phnom Penh hours after the rebel forces led by Pol Pot took control of the Cambodian capital April 17, 1975.

On April 17, 1975, Khmer Rouge forced marched unopposed into central Phnom Penh. At first the residents of the city celebrated - the siege was over, there would be no more fighting. But hope quickly turned to fear as they noticed that the Khmer Rouge troops weren't celebrating with them. Embittered and toughened after years of brutal civil war and American bombing, the Khmer Rouge marched the boulevards of Phnom Penh with icy stares carved into their faces. The troops soon began to order people to abandon their homes and leave Phnom Penh. By mid-afternoon hundreds of thousands of people were on the move. No exceptions were made - all residents, young and old, had to evacuate as quickly as possible.

The Khmer Rouge believed that cities were living and breathing tools of capitalism in their own right - KR cadres referred to Phnom Penh as "the great prostitute of the Mekong." In order to create the ideal communist society, all people would have to live and work in the countryside as peasants. Peasants, or "old people", were the Khmer Rouge communist ideal -- simple, uneducated, hard-working and not prone to exploiting others. The city dwellers, on the other hand, were seen as "new people" (or "April 17 people"). They were the root of all capitalist evil, in the eyes of the Khmer Rouge. All city dwellers became enemies of the new communist state, a status that would cost hundreds of thousands of them their lives.

1. The Fall of Angkor and French Colonialism
2. Independence, and the Beginnings of War in Vietnam
3. The War Comes to Cambodia
4. US Involvement in Cambodia
5. The Coming of the Khmer Rouge
6. Cambodia Under Pol Pot
7. The Vietnamese Invasion
8. Rebuilding Cambodia