A short history of Cambodia

The poverty in Cambodia is a direct result of the day the Khmer Rouge took control of the country in 1975. Under the leadership of Pol Pot, stringent rules of conduct were imposed on the lives of its people. Pol Pot began by declaring, "Year Zero," and that society was about to be "purified." Capitalism, Western culture, city life, religion, and all foreign influences were to be extinguished in favor of an extreme form of peasant Communism.

All foreigners were thus expelled, embassies closed, and any foreign economic or medical assistance was refused. The use of foreign languages was banned. Newspapers and television stations were shut down, radios and bicycles confiscated, and mail and telephone usage curtailed. Money was forbidden. All businesses were shuttered, religion banned, education halted, health care eliminated, and parental authority revoked. Thus Cambodia was sealed off from the outside world. Cambodia was renamed Democratic Kampuchea and a four-year purge began in which the Khmer Rouge regime tried to eliminate all signs of the educated classes. All of Cambodia's cities were then forcibly evacuated. At Phnom Penh, two million inhabitants were evacuated on foot into the countryside at gunpoint. As many as 20,000 died along the way.

Millions of Cambodians accustomed to city life were now forced into slave labor in Pol Pot's "killing fields" where they soon began dying from overwork, malnutrition and disease, on a diet of one tin of rice (180 grams) per person every two days.

The goal was to create an agrarian society.
The result was the genocidal killing of 20 per cent of the Cambodian population.

Through the use of torture and execution centres, such as Tuol Sleng and the infamous killing fields of Choeng Ek, the Khmer Rouge devastated an already poverty-stricken nation.

On December 25, 1978, Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia seeking to end Khmer Rouge border attacks. On January 7, 1979, Phnom Penh fell and Pol Pot was deposed. The Vietnamese then installed a puppet government consisting of Khmer Rouge defectors.

Pol Pot retreated into Thailand with the remnants of his Khmer Rouge army and began a guerrilla war against a succession of Cambodian governments lasting over the next 17 years. After a series of internal power struggles in the 1990s, he finally lost control of the Khmer Rouge. In April 1998, 73-year-old Pol Pot died of an apparent heart attack following his arrest, before he could be brought to trial by an international tribunal for the events of 1975-79.

From the United Nations "Cambodia - Poverty Net" and United Human Rights Council