Pol Pot

April 17, 1975 · 2,000 total casualties

The fall of Phnom Penh ends the Cambodian Civil War and marks the beginning of one of the 20th century's worst genocides. Within hours of entering the city, the Khmer Rouge orders the total evacuation of the capital.

April 17–20, 1975 · 20,000 total casualties

The largest forced urban evacuation in history. Never before had an army emptied an entire capital in a matter of days. It was the opening act of an ideology that viewed cities as corrupt, money as poison, and the entire pre-revolutionary population as class enemies to be re-educated or eliminated.

1975–1977 · 500,000 total casualties

The collectivization campaign was the engine of mass death. Unlike Nazi concentration camps with their industrial killing apparatus, the Khmer Rouge killed through the mundane machinery of bureaucratic agriculture — ration books, work quotas, forced relocations. Death came from engineered starvation, disease, and exhaustion, administered by teenagers who had never known another world.

1977–1978 · 100,000 total casualties

The Eastern Zone purges reveal the self-devouring logic of revolutionary paranoia. By eliminating his most experienced commanders for suspected disloyalty, Pol Pot destroyed the military capacity that might have resisted the Vietnamese invasion — while simultaneously creating the refugee pool that would supply Vietnam's liberation army.

1975–1979 · 17,000 total casualties

S-21 is the most documented site of Khmer Rouge atrocity because the regime's own bureaucratic obsession with record-keeping left behind thousands of photographs, confession documents, and prisoner lists. These records became the primary evidence for the ECCC tribunal. The systematic photography of prisoners — ordered so Angkar could verify deaths — created an archive of faces that still haunts Cambodia.

1977–1978 · 30,000 total casualties

The border raids were strategically catastrophic for the Khmer Rouge — they provoked the most battle-hardened army in the world, fresh from defeating the United States, into committing to the destruction of Democratic Kampuchea. The Ba Chúc massacre provided Vietnam with both the justification and the motivation for full-scale invasion.

1979–1998 · 10,000 total casualties

The nineteen-year survival of the Khmer Rouge as a political and military force is one of history's most damning Cold War legacies. The United States, China, and ASEAN all provided diplomatic cover for a genocidal movement because its enemy — Vietnam — was in the Soviet orbit. Cambodia's recovery was delayed by decades as a direct consequence.