![]() ![]() On a visit to China in 1975, two Khmer Rouge members bragged they would "be the first nation to create a completely Communist society without wasting time on intermediate steps." He sought to triple agricultural production in a year, absent the manpower or means necessary. Pol Pot envisioned a Cambodia absent of any social institutions like banks or religions or any modern technology. During the Khmer Rouge's nascent days, the movement's leader, Pol Pot, had grown to admire the way the tribes on the outskirts of Cambodia's jungles lived, free of Buddhism, money or education, and now he wanted to foist the same philosophy on the entire nation. Simultaneously, the Khmer Rouge were planning the steps necessary for a radical shift to an agrarian society. Similar evacuations took place every time the Khmer Rouge took over a new city. When the Khmer Rouge succeeded in capturing the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh in 1975, they evacuated the entire population of the city more than 2.5 million people to camps in the countryside. ![]() The pacifist talk belied a sinister agenda, one that would remain hidden to the outside world for years. ( See pictures of spiritual healing around the world.) As the country descended into civil war, the Khmer Rouge presented themselves as a party for peace and succeeded in mobilizing support in the countryside. The prince's imprimatur lent the movement legitimacy, although while he would nominally serve as head of state, he spent much of the Khmer Rouge's rule under house arrest. The flash point came when Cambodia's leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was deposed in a military coup in 1970 and leaned on the Khmer Rouge for support. The Khmer Rouge took root in Cambodia's northeastern jungles as early as the 1960s, a guerrilla group driven by communist ideals that nipped the periphery of government-controlled areas. Today, more than 30 years after Vietnamese soldiers removed the Khmer Rouge from power, the first genocide trials will start a bittersweet note of progress in an impoverished nation still struggling to rehabilitate its crippled economic and human resources. Follow Khmer Rouge killed nearly two million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979, spreading like a virus from the jungles until they controlled the entire country, only to systematically dismantle and destroy it in the name of a Communist agrarian ideal. ![]()
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