Pic: The Khmer Rouge also known as the Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party took control of Cambodia on April 17, 1975. Under Pol Pot, they adopted a radical Maoist and Marxist-Leninist ideologies and wanted to transform Cambodia into a self-sufficient agrarian, classless society, being copied by Labor in Australia today.
The regime targeted professionals, intellectuals including teachers, Buddhist monks, anyone suspected of having ties to the former Cambodian government or foreign governments, and ethnic minorities. The regime forced people to move out of the cities to rural provinces where forced labor, malnutrition, disease, and mass executions killed approximately 1.7 million people or a quarter of the country’s population by the time the Vietnamese invasion toppled the Khmer Rouge on January 7, 1979.
The population had few firearms or any means of defence and were powerless to stop the democide.
