Cambodian Genocide / Khmer Rouge

On April 17, 1975, Khmer Rouge soldiers in black pajamas entered Phnom Penh and immediately began forcing the entire population of 2.5 million at gunpoint onto the roads — hospital patients on their IVs, the elderly on crutches, newborns in their mothers' arms — in the name of 'Year Zero,' a radical agrarian utopia that would erase history, abolish money, religion, and family, and rebuild society from nothing. Over the next four years, Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea killed up to two million Cambodians — roughly one in four people — through execution, starvation, forced labor on irrigation projects, and the systematic torture of anyone deemed an intellectual, a class enemy, an ethnic minority, or simply insufficiently loyal; the death machine ran on teenage soldiers, paranoid ideology, and a bureaucratic apparatus of confession that forced victims to name friends and relatives before death. Vietnam invaded on December 25, 1978, drove the Khmer Rouge to the Thai border jungle within two weeks, and liberated Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979 — but Cold War politics meant the Khmer Rouge kept Cambodia's UN seat until 1982, continued receiving Chinese and American support, and most perpetrators died free; the first conviction did not come until 2010, thirty-five years after the killing began.