Pol Pot and The Killing Fields of Cambodia | Great Crimes and Trials of the Twentieth Century

On Christmas Day, 1978, the newly unified country of Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Kampuchea, formerly Cambodia. In two weeks, the Vietnamese had toppled the hostile Khmer Rouge government led by Pol Pot. In doing so, they also ended an atrocity the likes of which had not been seen since the Nazi Holocaust: the brutal Khmer Rouge had killed a quarter of the population of Kampuchea during the three years it held power. Some 20,000 ’Killing Fields’ scattered across Kampuchea held the remains of some 1.7 million people, executed as enemies of the state. Many more had died of starvation and famine. Please note that this programme was made in 1995. In 1998, Pol Pot was placed under house arrest by the Khmer Rouge commander Ta Mok, who seized control of the movement. He died shortly after. Many of the other surviving Khmer Rouge leaders have been tried for crimes against humanity in Cambodia since the establishment of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in 1997. The remaining Khmer Rouge movement su