Year Zero, Visualized

The Khmer Rouge renamed Cambodia "Democratic Kampuchea" and declared 1975 to be Year Zero—a complete erasure of Cambodian history, society, and identity. Everything that came before was corrupt; everyone connected to the past was suspect. This was not reform. This was civilizational reset at gunpoint.

The policies were radical beyond anything seen since Mao's Cultural Revolution—and in some ways more extreme. All money was abolished overnight; the Khmer Rouge burned currency and blew up the National Bank. Markets ceased to exist. Private property was eliminated. Religion was banned; Buddhist monks were defrocked, forced to marry, or killed. Pagodas became storage facilities or execution sites. The 2,000-year tradition of Cambodian Buddhism was to be erased.

The population was divided into categories that determined survival. "Base People" (មូលដ្ឋាន)—poor peasants who had lived in Khmer Rouge zones during the civil war—were considered ideologically pure. "New People" (ប្រជាជនថ្មី)—urban evacuees, former government employees, teachers, doctors, merchants, anyone educated—were corrupted beyond redemption. This distinction was often a death sentence.

The entire country was reorganized into agricultural cooperatives. Families were separated. Collective dining replaced family meals—a deliberate policy to destroy the family unit as a site of loyalty outside Angkar. Children were encouraged to report their parents. Marriage required party approval. Personal relationships were suspect.

The party called itself "Angkar Padevat" (អង្គការបដិវត្តន៍)—"The Revolutionary Organization"—but typically just "Angkar." Its identity was kept secret; Pol Pot's leadership was not publicly acknowledged until 1977. Angkar saw everything, knew everything, controlled everything. Its slogans became mantras of terror: "Angkar has the eyes of a pineapple." And most chillingly: "To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss."

The death toll of Democratic Kampuchea breaks down into three categories, each representing systematic policy failure and deliberate violence. Execution: approximately 500,000 to 1 million—shot, bludgeoned, or beheaded at killing sites across the country. Starvation: approximately 500,000 to 1 million—worked to death on inadequate rations while the regime exported rice. Disease and overwork: approximately 500,000—malaria, dysentery, and cholera in a country where medicine was banned as bourgeois.

The Khmer Rouge believed Cambodia could be transformed into an agrarian utopia through revolutionary will. They set impossible agricultural quotas—three tons of rice per hectare when traditional farming yielded one. When cooperatives failed to meet these quotas, the failure was interpreted as sabotage, evidence of "hidden enemies" within. The punishment was death. So cadres lied about production, reported false numbers, and watched their people starve.

Meanwhile, the regime exported rice to China in exchange for military equipment. Ships left Cambodian ports loaded with grain while children in the cooperatives ate tree bark, insects, and rice husks. Ration systems allocated thin rice gruel twice daily—roughly 250 grams of rice per person. Workers labored 12-16 hours daily in the fields. The human body cannot survive on such inadequate nutrition while performing heavy agricultural labor.

Western medicine was banned as a symbol of foreign corruption. The regime promoted "traditional remedies"—herbal treatments that were useless against malaria, dysentery, and the epidemics sweeping through malnourished populations. Hospitals were closed or converted to other uses. Trained doctors were killed as intellectuals. When people fell ill, they were often seen as shirking their revolutionary duties.

This was not famine caused by natural disaster or war. This was policy-driven starvation—an economic system that prioritized revolutionary ideology over human survival. The Khmer Rouge governed through hunger, using food as a weapon of control. Those who resisted, those who were suspected of resistance, those who simply couldn't work hard enough—they starved first.

Tuol Sleng was once Chao Ponhea Yat High School, a secondary school in a quiet Phnom Penh neighborhood. Under the Khmer Rouge, it became S-21—Security Prison 21—the regime's primary interrogation and extermination center. Between 14,000 and 17,000 people passed through its gates between 1976 and 1979. Approximately 12 are known to have survived. The survival rate was less than 0.1%.

The facility was run by Duch (Kaing Guek Eav), a former mathematics teacher who brought bureaucratic precision to mass murder. Every prisoner was photographed upon intake—men, women, children, the elderly—creating an archive of approximately 6,000 photographs that now form the core of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. These images show faces frozen in terror, confusion, defiance. Each represents a human being who entered S-21 and did not leave.

The purpose of S-21 was to extract confessions. Under torture—waterboarding, electric shock, pulling out fingernails, hanging from gallows with arms twisted behind the back—prisoners "confessed" to elaborate conspiracies involving the CIA, the KGB, the Vietnamese. The confessions were absurd, logically impossible, internally contradictory. They were also meticulously documented. Duch reviewed each confession personally, annotating them with corrections and demands for more detail.

Once they had confessed, prisoners were transported to Choeung Ek—the "Killing Fields"—a former Chinese cemetery 15 kilometers south of Phnom Penh. There, they were killed by blows to the head with farming implements—hoes, wooden clubs, palm fronds sharpened to a point. Bullets were too expensive. The bodies were dumped into mass graves. Over 8,000 bodies have been exhumed from Choeung Ek alone; many more remain.

S-21 was not unique—it was the most documented of 189-196 interrogation centers operating across Democratic Kampuchea. Similar facilities existed in every zone. But S-21's meticulous records—intake photographs, torture notes, execution logs, confessions—would later provide crucial evidence for the ECCC. The bureaucracy of terror kept its own record of atrocity. The filing cabinets testified when the perpetrators would not.

A common defense of international inaction is that "the world didn't know." This is false. Evidence of mass atrocities emerged almost immediately. Refugees fleeing to Thailand in 1975 described the evacuations, the executions, the starvation. By 1976, detailed accounts had reached Western governments and media. The question was never knowledge—it was action.

Some journalists managed to pierce Democratic Kampuchea's isolation. In December 1978, Elizabeth Becker and Richard Dudman became two of the only Western journalists to visit during the regime. Becker's colleague Malcolm Caldwell—a Marxist academic sympathetic to the Khmer Rouge—was murdered during that visit, likely by regime elements. Becker's subsequent book, "When the War Was Over," remains essential reading. Her audio recordings of interviews with Pol Pot were later used as evidence at the ECCC.

Why did the world not act? Cold War calculations trumped humanitarian concerns. After Vietnam's 1978 invasion of Cambodia, the United States, China, and their allies faced a choice: condemn the Khmer Rouge genocide or oppose Vietnamese expansion. They chose the latter. The Khmer Rouge retained Cambodia's UN seat until 1982—three years after their overthrow. The coalition government that replaced them at the UN included Khmer Rouge representatives until 1993.

The United States continued to provide indirect support to Khmer Rouge remnants fighting the Vietnamese-backed government. China was their primary patron. Thailand allowed them sanctuary along the border. The same international community that would eventually fund the ECCC had earlier funded, armed, and diplomatically recognized the perpetrators.

This is not ancient history. It is a reminder that genocide prevention requires political will, not just information. The evidence was available. The photographs existed. The refugees testified. The international community—democratic and authoritarian alike—chose geopolitical expedience over human lives.