Khmer Rouge · War Crimes & Atrocities
The Cambodian genocide under the Khmer Rouge (1975–1979) killed between 1.5 and 2.2 million people — approximately one in four Cambodians — making it proportionally the deadliest genocide of the 20th century. Unlike the Holocaust's industrial extermination facilities, the Khmer Rouge killed through engineered starvation, forced labor, systematic torture, mass execution, and the deliberate destruction of every institution — medical, religious, educational, familial — that sustains human life. The killing was not confined to specific sites: it was distributed across the entire territory of Cambodia, administered through the ordinary apparatus of agricultural governance. Every mass grave in Cambodia is a crime scene; the country's soil is its own archive of atrocity.
20,000+
deaths
Victims: The entire urban population — 2.5 million people, including hospital patients
17,000+
deaths
Victims: At least 14,000 detainees — cadres, intellectuals, and their families
17,000+
deaths
Victims: Prisoners processed through S-21, executed to save ammunition
100,000+
deaths
Victims: Eastern Zone cadres and civilians accused of having 'Vietnamese minds'
300,000+
deaths
Victims: Cham Muslims, ethnic Vietnamese and Chinese, and Buddhist monks
500,000+
deaths
Victims: The whole rural population conscripted into labor cooperatives
30,000+
deaths
Victims: Vietnamese border villagers, including the more than 3,000 killed at Ba Chuc