Pol Pot
Politician — born 1925
Pol Pot was the Cambodian revolutionary who led the Khmer Rouge.
Pol Pot was a Cambodian revolutionary and politician whose 1975–1979 service as the Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea produced one of the most-violent genocidal regimes of the 20th century — the Khmer Rouge regime, during which approximately 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians (roughly a quarter of the 1975 Cambodian population) died from execution, forced labor, starvation, and disease. He was born Saloth Sâr on May 19, 1925, in Prek Sbauv, Kampong Thom Province, French Cambodia, into a moderately prosperous Khmer farming family. His father Pen Saloth was a rice farmer and his mother Sok Nem was a homemaker.
His education at the Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh (1942–1948) and his subsequent French government scholarship to study radio electronics in Paris (1949–1953) — where he joined the Cercle Marxiste Cambodian student political circle in 1951 — launched his political career. His 1953 return to Cambodia after his scholarship was revoked for academic failure produced his early-career underground Khmer People's Revolutionary Party engagement.
His 1963 election as the General Secretary of the underground Workers' Party of Kampuchea (later renamed the Communist Party of Kampuchea, or Khmer Rouge) produced his subsequent two-decade Khmer Rouge guerrilla-warfare campaign against the Cambodian governments of King Norodom Sihanouk and General Lon Nol. The April 17, 1975 Khmer Rouge capture of Phnom Penh — at the conclusion of the 1970–1975 Cambodian Civil War — installed his Khmer Rouge regime in power.
His 1975–1979 Khmer Rouge regime evacuated the entire urban population of Cambodia to forced agricultural labor in the countryside, abolished money, schools, hospitals, and the Buddhist religion, and conducted systematic mass executions of perceived political enemies (including former government officials, military officers, intellectuals, ethnic minorities, and Buddhist monks). The 1979 Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia ousted the Khmer Rouge regime and confined the remaining Khmer Rouge forces to the Cambodia-Thailand border region. He continued to lead the Khmer Rouge guerrilla insurgency from the border region until his July 25, 1997 trial by his own Khmer Rouge faction. He died on April 15, 1998, at age 72, in Anlong Veng, Cambodia, of an apparent heart attack — although suicide and poisoning have also been suggested.
His name Pol began as a 1963 underground revolutionary alias. Pol has been a rare but enduring boys' name across Catalan and Eastern European-tradition American naming.