Establishment of the half pot regime in Cambodia. Pol pot - life path

I'll torture you like Pol Pot Kampuchea

In fact, the post is gloomy. Here is Pol Pot. He graduated from a Catholic school, studied in Paris. Carried away by the teachings of the great helmsman Mao

Returning to Cambodia and having received power, he began to restore his hellish order in the country. In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia. The country began to build a "100% communist society", which cost the entire Khmer people too dearly. The leaders of the Communist Party, developing their concept of the Cambodian revolution, used Marxist theory the dictatorship of the proletariat and the idea of ​​annihilating hostile classes and all enemies of the revolution. Pol Pot established a communist agrarian dictatorship in the Cambodian kingdom, banning foreign languages, religions and currencies. The Khmer Rouge adopted a republican form of government and in January 1976 proclaimed a new constitution. In the proclaimed Democratic Kampuchea, Khieu Samphan became president, Ieng Sari took over as minister of foreign affairs. But all power was concentrated in the hands of the country's prime minister, leader and ideologist of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot. The real name of this Cambodian politician is Saloth Sar. He began to resort to the pseudonym "Paul" back in the 1950s, and since 1976 he has been using it constantly. The pseudonym "Pol Pot" is an abbreviation for the French "politique potentielle" - "the politics of the possible"

Khmer Rouge uniform

On July 15, 1979, the People's Revolutionary Tribunal was organized in Phnom Penh to consider the crimes of genocide committed by the leaders of the Khmer Rouge. Two months later, on August 19, the People's Revolutionary Tribunal found Pol Pot and Ieng Sari guilty of genocide and sentenced them in absentia to death with confiscation of all property.

Pol Pot's grave

On the grave of Pol Pot, who died in 1998, there are still a lot of pilgrims, wreaths, memorial candles. There are Cambodians who still believe that Pol Pot wanted the best, but it turned out not quite what he intended. His ideas in the province are still strong in many ways, and there are still units of the Khmer Rouge in the jungle.

Life story
Salot Sar, who became famous under the party nickname Pol Pot, was a completely atypical dictator. Being at the pinnacle of power, he adhered to absolute asceticism, ate poorly, wore a discreet black tunic and did not appropriate the values ​​of the repressed, declared enemies of the people. Great power did not corrupt him. For himself personally, he did not want anything, devoting himself entirely to serving his people and building a new society of happiness and justice. He had no palaces, no cars, no luxurious women, no personal bank accounts. Before his death, he had nothing to bequeath to his wife and four daughters - he had neither his own house, nor even an apartment, and all his meager property, which consisted of a pair of worn-out tunics, a walking stick, and a bamboo fan, burned down with him in a fire made of old car tires, in which he was cremated by former associates the very next day after his death.
There was no cult of personality and there were no portraits of the leader. No one in this country even knew who ruled them. The leader and his comrades-in-arms were nameless and called each other not by name, but by serial numbers: “comrade first”, “comrade second” - and so on. Pol Pot himself took a modest eighty-seventh number, he signed under his decrees and orders: "Comrade 87."
Pol Pot never allowed himself to be photographed. But one artist somehow sketched his portrait from memory. Then the drawing was reproduced on a photocopier, and images of the dictator appeared in the barracks and barracks of the labor camps. Upon learning of this, Pol Pot ordered all these portraits to be destroyed, and the “leakage of information” to be stopped. The artist was beaten with hoes. The same fate befell his "accomplices" - the copyist and those who received the drawings.
True, one of the portraits of the leader still managed to see his brother and sister, sent, like all other "bourgeois elements" for re-education in a labor concentration camp. “It turns out that little Saloth rules us!” my sister exclaimed in shock.
Pol Pot, of course, knew that his close relatives were repressed, but he, as a true revolutionary, believed that he had no right to put personal interests above public ones, and therefore did not make any attempts to alleviate their fate.
The name Saloth Sar disappeared from official communications in April 1975, when the Khmer Rouge army entered the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. There was a rumor that he died in the battles for the capital. Later it was announced that someone named Pol Pot would become the head of the new government.
At the very first meeting of the Politburo of the "upper comrades" - Angka - Pol Pot announced that from now on Cambodia would be called Kampuchea, and promised that in a few days the country would turn into a communist one. And so that no one would interfere with him in this noble cause, Pol Pot immediately fenced off his Kampuchea with an “iron curtain” from the whole world, severed diplomatic relations with all countries, banned postal and telephone communications and tightly closed entry and exit from the country.
The USSR "warmly welcomed" the appearance on the world map of another small cell, painted over in red. But very soon the “Kremlin elders” were disappointed. At the invitation of the Soviet government to pay a friendly visit to the USSR, the leaders of "fraternal Kampuchea" responded with a rude refusal: we cannot come, we are very busy. The KGB of the USSR tried to create an agent network in Kampuchea, but even the Soviet Chekists could not do it. Almost no information was received about what was happening in Kampuchea.

Death to glasses!
As soon as the Khmer Rouge army entered Phnom Penh, Pol Pot immediately issued a decree on the abolition of money and ordered the national bank to be blown up. Anyone who tried to collect banknotes scattered in the wind was shot on the spot.
And the next morning, the inhabitants of Phnom Penh woke up from the order of Angka shouted into the loudspeakers to immediately leave the city. The Khmer Rouge, dressed in traditional black uniforms, banged on the doors with rifle butts and fired incessantly into the air. At the same time, the supply of water and electricity was cut off.
However, it was impossible to immediately withdraw three million citizens from the city in organized columns. The "evacuation" lasted almost a week. Separating children from their parents, they shot not only the protesters, but also the slow-witted ones. The Khmer Rouge went around the dwellings and shot at everyone they found. Others, who resignedly obeyed, in anticipation of evacuation, were under open sky without food and water. People drank from a pond in a city park and sewers. Hundreds more died of "natural" death - from an intestinal infection, were added to the number of those who died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. A week later, only corpses and packs of cannibal dogs remained in Phnom Penh.
Disabled people unable to walk were doused with gasoline and set on fire. Phnom Penh became a ghost town: it was forbidden to be there on pain of death. Only on the outskirts survived the quarter where the leaders of the Khmer Rouge settled. Nearby was the "object S-21" - a former lyceum, where thousands of "enemies of the people" were brought. After being tortured, they were fed to crocodiles or burned on iron bars.
The same fate befell all the other cities of Kampuchea. Pol Pot announced that the entire population was turning into peasants. The intelligentsia was declared enemy number one and subjected to mass destruction or hard labor in the rice fields.
At the same time, anyone who wore glasses was considered an intellectual. Bespectacled Khmer Rouge killed immediately, barely seeing on the street. Not to mention teachers, scientists, writers, artists and engineers, even doctors were destroyed, since Pol Pot abolished healthcare, believing that thereby freeing the future happy nation from the sick and sick.
Pol Pot did not, like the communists of other countries, separate religion from the state, he simply abolished it. The monks were ruthlessly destroyed, and the temples were turned into barracks and slaughterhouses.
The national question was solved with the same simplicity. All other nations in Kampuchea except the Khmers were to be destroyed.
Detachments of the Khmer Rouge, using sledgehammers and crowbars, destroyed cars, electronics, industrial equipment and construction equipment throughout the country. Even household appliances were destroyed: electric shavers, sewing machines, tape recorders, refrigerators.
During the first year of his reign, Pol Pot managed to completely destroy the entire economy of the country and all its political and social institutions. Libraries, theaters and cinemas were destroyed, songs, dances, traditional festivities were banned, national archives and "old" books were burned.
The villages were also destroyed, since from now on the peasants had to live in rural communes. The population of those villages that did not agree to voluntary resettlement was exterminated almost completely. Before being pushed into the pit, the victims were hit in the back of the head with a shovel or hoe and pushed down. When too many people were to be liquidated, they were gathered in groups of several dozen people, entangled with steel wire, passed current from a generator mounted on a bulldozer, and then pushed the unconscious people into a pit. The children were tied in a chain and pushed all together into water-filled pits, where they, bound hand and foot, immediately drowned.
To the question “Why do you kill children?”, Asked by one journalist to Pol Pot, he answered: “Because they can grow up dangerous people».
And in order for “real communists” to grow out of children, they were taken away from their mothers in infancy and “soldiers of the revolution” were raised from these “Campuchean Janissaries”.
In carrying out his “reforms”, Pol Pot relied on an army almost entirely composed of fanatics of twelve or fifteen years old, who were crazed by the power that machine guns gave them. They were accustomed to murder from childhood, soldered with a mixture of palm moonshine with human blood. They were told that they were "capable of anything", that they had become "special people" because they drank human blood. Then these teenagers were explained that if they showed pity for the "enemies of the people", then after painful torture they would be killed themselves.
Pol Pot managed to do what none of the revolutionary leaders had been able to do before - he completely abolished the institution of family and marriage. Before entering the rural commune, the husbands were separated from their wives, and the women became the property of the nation.
Each commune was led by a village headman, a kamafibal, who, at his own discretion, appointed partners for men. However, men and women lived separately in different barracks and could meet only once a month, on a day off. True, this single day could only be called a day off conditionally. Instead of working in the rice fields, the Communards worked for twelve hours straight to raise their ideological level in political classes. And only at the end of the day, the “partners” were given time for a short solitude.
There was a comprehensive set of prohibitions that applied to all Khmers. It was forbidden to cry or otherwise show negative emotions; to laugh or rejoice at something, if there was no proper socio-political reason for it; pity the weak and sick, automatically subject to destruction; read anything other than Pol Pot's Little Red Book, which is his creative adaptation of Mao Zedong's quotes; complain and ask for any benefits for yourself ...
Sometimes those guilty of non-compliance with the prohibitions were buried up to their necks in the ground and left to slowly die from hunger and thirst. Then the heads of the victims were cut off and put on stakes around the settlement with signs: “I am a traitor to the revolution!”. But most often people were simply beaten with hoes: in order to save bullets, it was forbidden to shoot "traitors to the revolution".
The corpses of criminals were also a national treasure. They were plowed into marshy soil as fertilizer. The rice fields, conceived by Pol Pot as the basis of a labor utopia, a country without money and needs, very quickly turned into huge mass graves for the burial of people slaughtered with hoes or who died from exhaustion, disease and hunger.
Shortly before his death, Mao Zedong, having met with Pol Pot, spoke very highly of his achievements: “You won a brilliant victory. With one blow, you are done with the classes. The people's communes in the countryside, made up of the poor and middle sections of the peasantry, throughout Kampuchea are our future."
A Farewell to Arms
Pol Pot's big mistake was that he quarreled with the neighboring revolutionary Vietnam when the Khmer Rouge began ethnic cleansing, destroying all the Vietnamese. Vietnam did not like this, and in December 1978, Vietnamese troops crossed the Cambodian border. Mao had died by that time, and there was no one to intercede for Pol Pot. The Viet Cong armored forces, without encountering serious resistance, entered Phnom Penh. Pol Pot, at the head of the surviving army of ten thousand, fled into the jungle to the north of the country.
Once, before going to bed, his wife came to pull a mosquito net over his bed and saw that her husband was already stiff. Pol Pot died of a heart attack on April 14, 1998. His body was laid on a pile of boxes and car tires and burned.
Shortly before his death, the seventy-two-year-old Pol Pot managed to give an interview to Western journalists. He said he had no regrets...

Vladimir Simonov

A whole nation with its traditions of ancient culture and reverence for faith was brutally mutilated by a Marxist fanatic. Pol Pot, with the silent connivance of the whole world, turned a flourishing country into a huge cemetery.
Imagine that a government comes to power and announces a ban on money. And not only for money: commerce, industry, banks - everything that brings wealth is prohibited. The new government announces by decree that society is once again becoming agrarian, as it was in the Middle Ages. Residents of cities and towns are forcibly relocated to countryside where they will be engaged exclusively in peasant labor. But family members should not live together: children should not fall under the influence of the "bourgeois ideas" of their parents. Therefore, children are taken away and brought up in the spirit of devotion to the new regime. No books until adulthood. Books are no longer needed, so they are burned, and children from the age of seven work for the Khmer Rouge state.
An eighteen-hour working day is established for the new agrarian class, hard labor is combined with "re-education" in the spirit of the ideas of Marxism-Leninism under the leadership of the new masters. Dissidents who show sympathy for the old order have no right to life. The intelligentsia, teachers, university professors, generally literate people are subject to extermination, since they can read materials hostile to the ideas of Marxism-Leninism and spread seditious ideology among workers reeducated in the peasant field. The clergy, politicians of all stripes, except for those who share the views of the ruling party, people who made a fortune under the previous authorities are no longer needed - they are also being destroyed. Trade and telephone communications are curtailed, temples are destroyed, bicycles, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, holidays, love and kindness are cancelled. In the best case - labor for the purpose of "re-education", otherwise - torture, torment, degradation, in the worst case - death.
This nightmarish scenario is not the convoluted figment of the fevered imagination of a science fiction writer. It is the epitome of the horrifying reality of life in Cambodia, where the murderous dictator Pol Pot turned back time by destroying civilization in an attempt to fulfill his twisted vision of a classless society. His "killing fields" were strewn with the corpses of those who did not fit into the framework of the new world formed by him and his bloodthirsty minions. During the reign of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, about three million people died - the same number of unfortunate victims perished in the gas chambers of the Nazi death factory Auschwitz during World War II. Life under Pol Pot was unbearable, and as a result of the tragedy that broke out on the land of this ancient country in Southeast Asia, its long-suffering population came up with a new eerie name for Cambodia - the Land of the Walking Dead.
The tragedy of Cambodia is a consequence Vietnam War, which first broke out on the wreckage of French colonialism, and then grew into a conflict with the Americans. Fifty-three thousand Cambodians died on the battlefields. Between 1969 and 1973, American B-52 bombers bombed this tiny country with as many tons of explosives as were dropped on Germany in the last two years of World War II. Vietnamese fighters - the Viet Cong - used the impenetrable jungle of a neighboring country to set up military camps and bases during operations against the Americans. These strongholds were bombed by American planes.
Prince Norodom Sihanouk, ruler of Cambodia and heir to its religious and cultural traditions, renounced his royal title ten years before the start of the Vietnam War, but remained head of state. He tried to lead the country along the path of neutrality, balancing between warring countries and conflicting ideologies. Sihanouk became king of Cambodia, a French protectorate, back in 1941, but abdicated in 1955. However, then, after free elections, he returned to the leadership of the country as head of state.
During the escalation of the Vietnam War from 1966 to 1969, Sihanouk fell out of favor with Washington's political leadership for not taking decisive action against arms smuggling and the establishment of Vietnamese guerrilla camps in the jungles of Cambodia. However, he was also quite soft in his criticism of the US-led punitive air raids.
On March 18, 1970, while Sihanouk was in Moscow, his Prime Minister, General Lon Nol, with the support of the White House, staged a coup d'état, returning Cambodia to its ancient name Khmer. The United States recognized the Khmer Republic, but a month later they invaded it. Sihanouk found himself in exile in Beijing. And here the ex-king made a choice, entering into an alliance with the devil himself.
Little is known about Pol Pot. This is a man with the appearance of a handsome old man and the heart of a bloody tyrant. It was with this monster that Sihanouk teamed up. Together with the leader of the Khmer Rouge, they vowed to merge their forces together for a common goal - the defeat of American troops.
Pol Pot, who grew up in a peasant family in the Cambodian province of Kampong Thom and received his primary education in a Buddhist monastery, spent two years as a monk. In the fifties he studied electronics in Paris and, like many students of that time, became involved in the left movement. Here Pol Pot heard - it is still not known whether they met - about another student, Khieu Samphan, whose controversial but imaginative plans for an "agrarian revolution" fueled Pol Pot's great-power ambitions.
According to Samphan's theory, Cambodia, in order to achieve progress, had to turn back, renounce capitalist exploitation, fattening leaders fed by the French colonial rulers, abandon devalued bourgeois values ​​and ideals. The perverted theory of Samphan was that people should live in the fields, and all temptations modern life should be destroyed. If Pol Pot, say, had been run over by a car at that time, this theory would probably have died out in coffee houses and bars without stepping over the boundaries of Parisian boulevards. However, she was destined to become a monstrous reality.
From 1970 to 1975, Pol Pot's "revolutionary army" turned into a powerful force in Cambodia, controlling vast agricultural areas. On April 17, 1975, the dictator's dream of power became a reality: his troops, marching under red flags, entered the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. A few hours after the coup, Pol Pot called a special meeting of his new cabinet and announced that the country would henceforth be known as Kampuchea. Dictator outlined audacious plan building a new society and stated that its implementation would take only a few days. Pol Pot announced the evacuation of all cities under the leadership of the newly minted regional and zonal leaders, ordered the closure of all markets, the destruction of churches and the dispersal of all religious communities. Having been educated abroad, he harbored a hatred for educated people and ordered the execution of all teachers, professors and even kindergarten teachers.
The first to die were high-ranking members of the cabinet of ministers and functionaries of the Lon Nol regime. They were followed by the officer corps of the old army. All were buried in mass graves. At the same time, doctors were killed because of their "education". All religious communities were destroyed - they were considered "reactionary". Then the evacuation of towns and villages began.
Pol Pot's twisted dream of turning back time and forcing his people to live in a Marxist agrarian society was helped by his deputy, Ieng Sari. In his policy of destruction, Pol Pot used the term "get out of sight". "Cleaned" - destroyed thousands and thousands of women and men, old people and babies.
Buddhist temples were desecrated or turned into soldiers' brothels, or even just slaughterhouses. As a result of the terror, out of sixty thousand monks, only three thousand returned to the destroyed temples and holy cloisters.
Pol Pot's decree effectively eradicated ethnic minorities. The use of Vietnamese, Thai and Chinese was punishable death penalty. A purely Khmer society was proclaimed. The forcible eradication of ethnic groups had a particularly hard effect on the Chan people. Their ancestors - people from today's Vietnam - inhabited the ancient Kingdom of Champa. The Chans migrated to Cambodia in the 18th century and were engaged in fishing along the banks of Cambodian rivers and lakes. They professed Islam and were the most significant ethnic group in modern Cambodia, maintaining the purity of their language, national cuisine, clothes, hairstyles, religious and ritual traditions.
Young Khmer Rouge fanatics attacked the vats like locusts. Their settlements were burned, the inhabitants were expelled into the swamps, teeming with mosquitoes. People were forcibly forced to eat pork, which was strictly forbidden by their religion, the clergy were ruthlessly destroyed. At the slightest resistance, entire communities were exterminated, and the corpses were thrown into huge pits and covered with lime. Of the 200,000 vats, less than half survived.
Those who survived the beginning of the campaign of terror later realized that instant death was better than hellish torment under the new regime.
According to Pol Pot, the older generation was corrupted by feudal and bourgeois views, infected with "sympathy" for Western democracies, which he declared alien to the national way of life. The urban population was driven from their habitable places to labor camps, where hundreds of thousands of people were tortured to death by overwork.
People were killed even for trying to speak French - the biggest crime in the eyes of the Khmer Rouge, as it was considered a manifestation of nostalgia for the country's colonial past.
In huge camps with no amenities other than a straw mat as a bed for sleeping and a bowl of rice at the end of the working day, in conditions that even prisoners of Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War would not envy, merchants, teachers, entrepreneurs, only survivors because they managed to hide their professions, as well as thousands of other townspeople.
These camps were organized in such a way as to get rid of the elderly and the sick, pregnant women and young children through "natural selection".
People died in hundreds and thousands from disease, hunger and exhaustion, under the clubs of cruel overseers.
Without medical assistance, except traditional methods treatment with herbs, the life expectancy of the prisoners of these camps was depressingly short.
At dawn, the men were sent in formation into the malaria swamps, where they cleared the jungle for twelve hours a day in an unsuccessful attempt to win new cropland from them. At sunset, again in formation, urged on by the bayonets of the guards, people returned to the camp to their bowl of rice, liquid gruel and a piece of dried fish. Then, despite the terrible fatigue, they still had to go through political classes on Marxist ideology, in which incorrigible "bourgeois elements" were identified and punished, while the rest, like parrots, kept repeating phrases about the joys of life in the new state. Every ten working days, a long-awaited day off was due, for which twelve hours of ideological studies were planned. The wives lived separately from the husbands. Their children began to work at the age of seven or were placed at the disposal of childless party functionaries, who trained them as fanatical "fighters of the revolution."
From time to time, huge bonfires made of books were made in the city squares. Crowds of unfortunate tortured people were driven to these fires, who were forced to chant memorized phrases in chorus, while the flames devoured the masterpieces of world civilization. "Lessons of hatred" were organized, when people were whipped in front of portraits of the leaders of the old regime. It was an ominous world of horror and hopelessness.
Pol Potovtsy broke off diplomatic relations in all countries, postal and telephone communications did not work, entry into and exit from the country were prohibited. The Cambodian people found themselves isolated from the whole world.
To intensify the fight against real and imaginary enemies, Pol Pot organized a sophisticated system of torture and executions in his prison camps. As in the days of the Spanish Inquisition, the dictator and his henchmen proceeded from the premise that those who fell into these damned places were guilty and they had only to admit their guilt. In order to convince its followers of the need for brutal measures to achieve the goals of "national revival", the regime gave torture a special political significance.
Documents seized after the overthrow of Pol Pot show that Khmer security officers, trained by Chinese instructors, were guided by cruel ideological principles in their activities. Interrogation Manual S-21, one of the documents later handed over to the UN, stated: "The purpose of torture is to get an adequate response from the interrogated. Torture is not used for entertainment. Pain must be inflicted in such a way as to cause a quick reaction "Another goal is the psychological breakdown and loss of will of the interrogated. During torture, one should not proceed from one's own anger or self-satisfaction. Beating the bearer should be done in such a way as to intimidate him, and not beat him to death. Before proceeding to torture, it is necessary to examine the state of health of the interrogated and examine instruments of torture.You should not try to kill the person being interrogated without fail.In interrogation, political considerations are the main thing, inflicting pain is secondary.Therefore, you should never forget that you are engaged in political work.Even during interrogations, you should constantly conduct agitation and propaganda work.At the same time, indecision should be avoided and hesitation in the course of torture, when possible The possibility of getting answers to our questions from the enemy. It must be remembered that indecision can slow down our work. In other words, in propaganda and educational work of this kind, it is necessary to show determination, perseverance, and categoricalness. We must proceed to torture without first explaining the reasons or motives. Only then will the enemy be defeated."
Among the many sophisticated torture methods used by Khmer Rouge executioners, the most favorite were the notorious Chinese water torture, crucifixion, and strangulation with a plastic bag. Site S-21, which gave the document its title, was the most infamous camp in all of Cambodia. It was located in the northeast of the country. At least thirty thousand victims of the regime were martyred here. Only seven survived, and even then only because the administrative skills of the prisoners were needed by their masters to manage this terrible institution.
But torture was not the only tool to intimidate the already frightened population of the country. There are many cases when the guards in the camps caught the prisoners, driven to despair by hunger, eating their dead comrades in misfortune. The punishment for this was a terrible death. The guilty were buried up to their necks in the ground and left to a slow death from hunger and thirst, and their still living flesh was tormented by ants and other living creatures. Then the heads of the victims were cut off and put on stakes around the settlement. A sign was hung around the neck: "I am a traitor to the revolution!"
Dit Pran, Cambodian translator for American journalist Sydney Schoenberg, lived through all the horrors of Pol Pot's rule. The inhuman ordeals he had to go through are documented in the film "Field of Death", in which the suffering of the Cambodian people first appeared before the whole world with stunning nakedness. The heartbreaking narration of Prana's journey from civilized childhood to the death camp horrified viewers.
“In my prayers,” Pran said, “I asked the Almighty to save me from the unbearable torment that I had to endure. But some of my loved ones managed to flee the country and take refuge in America. For their sake, I continued to live, but it was not life but a nightmare."
Pran was lucky enough to survive this bloody Asian nightmare and reunite with his family in San Francisco in 1979. But in the remote corners of a devastated country that survived terrible tragedy, there are still mass graves of nameless victims, over which mounds of human skulls rise in mute reproach.
In the end, thanks to military might, and not morality and law, it was possible to stop the bloody slaughter and restore at least a semblance of common sense to the tormented land. Britain should be given credit for speaking out in 1978 against human rights violations after reports of rampant terror in Cambodia through intermediaries in Thailand, but this protest went unheeded. Britain issued a statement to the UN Commission on Human Rights, but a Khmer Rouge spokesman hysterically retorted: "The British imperialists have no right to talk about human rights. The whole world is well aware of their barbaric nature. Britain's leaders are drowning in luxury, while the proletariat has the right only unemployment, sickness and prostitution."
In December 1978, Vietnamese troops, who had been in conflict with the Khmer Rouge for many years over disputed border areas, entered Cambodia with the help of several motorized infantry divisions, supported by tanks. The country fell into such decline that, due to the lack of telephone communications, it was necessary to deliver combat reports on bicycles.
In early 1979, the Vietnamese occupied Phnom Penh. A few hours earlier, Pol Pot left the deserted capital in a white armored Mercedes. The bloody dictator hurried to his Chinese masters, who provided him with shelter, but did not support him in the fight against the heavily armed Viet Cong.
When the whole world became aware of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime and the devastation that reigned in the country, aid rushed to Cambodia in a powerful stream. The Khmer Rouge, like the Nazis in their time, were very pedantic in recording their crimes. The investigation uncovered journals in which executions and torture were recorded daily in great detail, hundreds of albums with photographs of those sentenced to death, including the wives and children of intellectuals who were liquidated on early stages terror, detailed documentation of the notorious "killing fields". These fields, conceived as the basis of a labor utopia, a country without money and needs, in fact turned out to be mass graves of the day of burial of people crushed by the yoke of cruel tyranny.
Pol Pot, who seemed to have gone into oblivion, has recently reappeared on the political horizon as a force claiming power in this long-suffering country. Like all tyrants, he claims that his subordinates made mistakes, that he faced resistance on all fronts, and that those who died were "enemies of the state." Returning to Cambodia in 1981, in a secret meeting among his old friends near the Thai border, he declared that he was too gullible: "My policy was correct. Overzealous regional commanders and leaders on the ground perverted my orders. Accusations of massacres are vile false. If we really destroyed people in such numbers, the people would have ceased to exist long ago. "
A "misunderstanding" at the cost of three million lives, almost a quarter of the country's population, is too innocent a word to describe what was done in the name of Pol Pot and on his orders. But, following the well-known Nazi principle - the more monstrous the lie, the more people are able to believe in it - Pol Pot still strives for power and hopes to gather forces in rural areas, which, in his opinion, are still loyal to him.
He again became a major political figure and is waiting for an opportunity to reappear in the country as an angel of death, seeking revenge and completion of the previously begun work - his "great agrarian revolution."
There is a growing movement in international circles to recognize the massacre committed in Cambodia as a crime against humanity - like Hitler's genocide against the Jews. In New York, there is a Cambodian Documentation Center run by Yeng Sam. Like the former prisoner of the Nazi camps Sim on Wiesenthal, who for many years collected evidence against Nazi war criminals around the world, Yeng Sam, a survivor of the terror campaign, accumulates information about the atrocities of the criminals in his country.
Here are his words: "Those who are most guilty of the Cambodian genocide - members of the cabinet of the Pol Pot regime, members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, military leaders of the Khmer Rouge, whose troops took part in the massacres, officials who oversaw executions and directed the system of torture - continue active in Cambodia, hiding in the border areas, they are waging a guerrilla war, seeking to return to power in Phnom Penh.
They were not brought to international legal responsibility for their crimes, and this is a tragic, monstrous injustice.
We, the survivors, remember how we were deprived of our families, how our relatives and friends were brutally murdered. We have witnessed how people died from exhaustion, unable to endure slave labor, and from the inhuman conditions of life to which the Khmer Rouge condemned the Cambodian people.
We have also seen Pol Pot's soldiers destroy our Buddhist temples, shut down our children's schools, suppress our culture and eradicate ethnic minorities. It is difficult for us to understand why free, democratic states and nations do nothing to punish the guilty. Doesn't this issue cry out for justice?"
But there is still no fair solution to this issue.

Today my story will be about one already forgotten person, the dictator of Cambodia, Pol Pot. But I will start as required by the laws of the genre with "spectacular scenes".

A long and bloody guerrilla war between Pol Pot's guerrillas and government troops of the American protege General Lon Nolom ended with the evacuation of the Cambodian elite in 36 American combat helicopters in April 1975. And as soon as Pol Pot's army entered the capital of the country, Phnom Penh, Pol Pot issued a decree on the abolition of money and ordered the national bank to be blown up. Anyone who tried to collect banknotes scattered in the wind was shot on the spot.

At the very first meeting of the Politburo, Pol Pot announced that from now on Cambodia would be called Kampuchea, and promised that in a few days the country would turn into a communist one. And so that no one would interfere with him in this noble cause, Pol Pot immediately fenced off his Kampuchea with an "iron curtain" from the whole world, severed diplomatic relations with all countries, banned postal and telephone communications and tightly closed entry and exit from the country.

And the next morning, the inhabitants of Phnom Penh woke up from the order shouted into the loudspeakers to immediately leave the city. Units called the Khmer Rouge, dressed in traditional black uniforms, pounded on the doors with rifle butts and continuously fired into the air. At the same time, the supply of water and electricity was cut off.

However, it was impossible to immediately withdraw three million citizens from the city in organized columns. The "evacuation" lasted almost a week. Separating children from their parents, they shot not only the protesters, but also the slow-witted ones. The Khmer Rouge went around the dwellings and shot at everyone they found. Others, who resignedly obeyed, were waiting for evacuation in the open air without food and water. People drank from a pond in a city park and sewers. Hundreds more died of "natural" death - from an intestinal infection, were added to the number of those who died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. A week later, only corpses and packs of cannibal dogs remained in Phnom Penh.

Disabled people unable to walk were doused with gasoline and set on fire. Phnom Penh became a ghost town: it was forbidden to be there on pain of death. Only on the outskirts survived the quarter where the leaders of the Khmer Rouge settled. Nearby was the "object S-21" - a former lyceum, where thousands of "enemies of the people" were brought. After being tortured, they were fed to crocodiles or burned on iron bars. Let's say, instructions for use special methods conducting interrogation of the enemies of the motherland and the revolution of the object §21 - a political prison in the north-east of the country. It says:

The purpose of torture is to obtain an adequate response from the interrogated person. Torture is not used for entertainment. Pain must be inflicted in such a way as to evoke a quick adequate reaction in the person being tried. Another goal is a psychological breakdown and loss of will in the interrogated. In torture, one should not proceed from one's own anger or self-satisfaction. It is necessary to beat the interrogated person in such a way as to intimidate him, and not beat him to death. Before proceeding to torture, it is necessary to check the state of health of the interrogated person, as well as to check the serviceability and sterilize the instruments of torture. You should not kill the interrogated ahead of time. During interrogation, political considerations are the main ones, while inflicting pain on the tortured is secondary. Therefore, you should never forget that you are doing political work. Even during interrogations, agitation and propaganda work should be constantly carried out. At the same time, it is necessary to avoid indecision and hesitation when it is possible to get direct answers from the enemy to our questions. It must be remembered that indecision can slow down our work. In other words, in propaganda and educational work of this kind, it is necessary to show determination, perseverance and categoricalness. We must proceed to torture without first explaining their reasons and motives. Only then will the enemy be defeated.

The same fate befell all the other cities of Kampuchea. Pol Pot announced that the entire population was turning into peasants. The intelligentsia was declared enemy number one and subjected to mass destruction or hard labor in the rice fields.

At the same time, anyone who wore glasses was considered an intellectual. Bespectacled Khmer Rouge killed immediately, barely seeing on the street. Not to mention teachers, scientists, writers, artists and engineers, even doctors were destroyed, since Pol Pot abolished healthcare, believing that thereby freeing the future happy nation from the sick and sick.

Pol Pot did not, like the communists of other countries, separate religion from the state, he simply abolished it. The monks were ruthlessly destroyed, and the temples were turned into barracks and slaughterhouses.
The national question was solved with the same simplicity. All other nations in Kampuchea except the Khmers were to be destroyed.

Detachments of the Khmer Rouge, using sledgehammers and crowbars, destroyed cars, electronics, industrial equipment and construction equipment throughout the country. Even household appliances were destroyed: electric shavers, sewing machines, tape recorders, refrigerators.

During the first year of his reign, Pol Pot managed to completely destroy the entire economy of the country and all its political and social institutions. Libraries, theaters and cinemas were destroyed, songs, dances, traditional festivals were banned, national archives and "old" books were burned.

The villages were also destroyed, since from now on the peasants had to live in rural communes. The population of those villages that did not agree to voluntary resettlement was exterminated almost completely. Before being pushed into the pit, the victims were hit in the back of the head with a shovel or hoe and pushed down. When too many people were to be liquidated, they were gathered in groups of several dozen people, entangled with steel wire, passed current from a generator mounted on a bulldozer, and then pushed the unconscious people into a pit. The children were tied in a chain and pushed all together into water-filled pits, where they, bound hand and foot, immediately drowned.

To the question "Why do you kill children?" asked Pol Pot by one journalist, he replied: "Because they can grow into dangerous people."

And in order to grow up "real communists" from children, they were taken away from their mothers in infancy and "soldiers of the revolution" were brought up from these "Campuchean Janissaries".

In carrying out his "reforms" Pol Pot relied on the army, almost entirely composed of fanatics of twelve to fifteen years old, stunned by the power that machine guns gave them. They were accustomed to murder from childhood, soldered with a mixture of palm moonshine with human blood. They were told that they were "capable of anything", that they had become "special people" because they drank human blood. Then these teenagers were explained that if they showed pity for the "enemies of the people", then after painful torture they would be killed themselves.

Pol Pot managed to do what none of the revolutionary leaders could do before - he completely abolished the institution of family and marriage. Before entering the rural commune, the husbands were separated from their wives, and the women became the property of the nation.

Each commune was led by a village headman, a kamafibal, who, at his own discretion, appointed partners for men. However, men and women lived separately in different barracks and could meet only once a month, on a day off. True, this single day could only be called a day off conditionally. Instead of working in the rice fields, the Communards worked for twelve hours straight to raise their ideological level in political classes. And only at the end of the day the "partners" were given time for a short solitude.

There was a comprehensive set of prohibitions that applied to all Khmers. It was forbidden to cry or otherwise show negative emotions; to laugh or rejoice at something, if there was no proper socio-political reason for it; pity the weak and sick, automatically subject to destruction; read anything other than Pol Pot's Little Red Book, which is his creative adaptation of Mao Zedong's quotes; complain and ask for any benefits for yourself ...

Sometimes those guilty of non-compliance with the prohibitions were buried up to their necks in the ground and left to slowly die from hunger and thirst. Then the heads of the victims were cut off and put on stakes around the settlement with signs: "I am a traitor to the revolution!". But most often people were simply beaten with hoes: in order to save bullets, it was forbidden to shoot "traitors to the revolution".

The corpses of criminals were also a national treasure. They were plowed into marshy soil as fertilizer. Rice fields, conceived by Pol Pot as the basis of a labor utopia, a country without money and needs, very quickly turned into huge mass graves for the burial of people who were clogged with hoes or died of exhaustion, disease and hunger.

Shortly before his death, Mao Zedong, having met with Pol Pot, spoke very highly of his achievements: “You won a brilliant victory. With one blow you finished off the classes. our future".

About Leader

Being at the pinnacle of power, he adhered to absolute asceticism, ate poorly, wore a discreet black tunic and did not appropriate the values ​​of the repressed, declared enemies of the people. Great power did not corrupt him. For himself personally, he did not want anything, devoting himself entirely to serving his people and building a new society of happiness and justice. He had no palaces, no cars, no luxurious women, no personal bank accounts. Before his death, he had nothing to bequeath to his wife and four daughters - he had neither his own house, nor even an apartment, and all his meager property, which consisted of a pair of worn-out tunics, a walking stick, and a bamboo fan, burned down with him in a fire from old car tires, in which he was cremated by former associates the very next day after his death.

There was no cult of personality and there were no portraits of the leader. No one in this country even knew who ruled them. The leader and his comrades-in-arms were nameless and called each other not by name, but by serial numbers: "comrade first", "comrade second" - and so on. Pol Pot himself took a modest eighty-seventh number, he signed under his decrees and orders: "Comrade 87".

Pol Pot never allowed himself to be photographed. But one artist somehow sketched his portrait from memory. Then the drawing was reproduced on a photocopier, and images of the dictator appeared in the barracks and barracks of the labor camps. Upon learning of this, Pol Pot ordered all these portraits to be destroyed, and the "information leak" to be stopped. The artist was beaten with hoes. The same fate befell his "accomplices" - the copyist and those who received the drawings.

True, one of the portraits of the leader still managed to be seen by his brother and sister, sent, like all other "bourgeois elements" for re-education to a labor concentration camp. "It turns out that little Saloth rules us!" my sister exclaimed in shock.

Pol Pot, of course, knew that his close relatives were repressed, but he, as a true revolutionary, believed that he had no right to put personal interests above public ones, and therefore did not make any attempts to alleviate their fate.

The name Saloth Sar disappeared from official communications in April 1975, when the Khmer Rouge army entered the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. There was a rumor that he died in the battles for the capital. Later it was announced that someone named Pol Pot would become the head of the new government.

Pol Pot (1925-1998) - a bloody dictator who destroyed 3 million tribesmen in 3.5 years of his reign. Being at the pinnacle of power, he led an ascetic life, did not even have his own house. The unfortunate artist who once dared to draw him was beaten with hoes. Pol Pot managed to do what none of the revolutionary leaders could do before - he completely abolished the institution of family and marriage, and in the communes women became the property of the nation.

Salot Sar (party nickname - Pol Pot) was born in a small village in the family of a prosperous peasant of Chinese origin. At the age of nine, his parents sent him to Phnom Penh, where he served in a Buddhist monastery, studied the Khmer language and the basics of Buddhism.

Then he receives the basics of classical education in a Catholic school and even goes to France, where he studies radio electronics at the Sorbonne. In Europe, the ideas of Marxism settle in his head and he loses interest in studying. He was expelled from the university and in 1953 he returned to Cambodia, where he began his party activities.

Since 1963 he has been the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. But gradually, the supporters of Salot Sarah (Pol Pot) became the core of the Khmer Rouge, separating from the Communist Party. Their numbers grew rapidly due to joining the ranks of illiterate peasants, led by Comrade 87 (the secret nickname of Pol Pot).

In 1975, having won a bloody civil war, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh. The US ambassador ran with a suitcase in one hand and an American flag in the other. Soon it was announced that Cambodia would be called Kampuchea, and in a few days it would turn into a communist one.

Pol Pot decided to do all the transformations secretly from the world community, offending even his "brothers" - Soviet Union, responding with a rude refusal to an invitation to pay a friendly visit to Moscow. The dictator severed diplomatic relations with all countries of the world, forbade postal and telephone communications, entry and exit from the state. Even the KGB failed to create its agent network in the newly minted state.

Thus, practically no information was received from Kampuchea. What happened there became known a few years later, placing horror in the most cruel hearts.

Entering Phnom Penh, Pol Pot ordered to blow up the national bank, because now the money was not needed. After the explosion, bankrupts circled over the houses for a long time, but the revolutionaries shot on the spot those who tried to collect them. The supply of water and electricity to the houses was also cut off.

In the morning, three million citizens woke up from loudspeaker orders to leave the city immediately. To make people hurry, the Khmer Rouge in black uniforms banged on the doors with butts and fired into the air. Later, they started shooting at people who either hesitated or expressed dissatisfaction. Disabled people were doused with gasoline and set on fire.

Real chaos ensued. Warriors separated children from parents, wives from husbands. Even those who meekly obeyed found themselves in a critical situation - in the open air without food and water. Desperate people drank from the sewers, and then died from an intestinal infection.

A week later, Phnom Penh was empty, and corpses lay on the once busy beautiful streets, and packs of feral dogs that had become cannibals prowled. Only on the outskirts of life glimmered. The leaders of the Khmer Rouge lived here, and there was also a “C-21 facility”, where “enemies of the people” were brought, who, after torture, were fed to crocodiles or burned on iron bars.

Pol Pot announced that now the entire population will engage in agriculture 18 hours a day, living in communes where husbands were separated from wives, as women became the property of the nation. The village head himself made up the newly made couples, but this happened once a month, and even then at the end of the day, and all day, which was considered a day off, the tortured people listened to political reports.

Naturally, the peasants did not need cars, construction equipment and electronics. Therefore, all this was destroyed by the crazed Khmer Rouge with the help of sledgehammers and crowbars. Even electric shavers, sewing machines, tape recorders and refrigerators fell out of favor. Libraries, theaters and cinemas, national archives were burned.

The intelligentsia was systematically destroyed, and the survivors worked in the rice fields like convicts. At the same time, a person could be shot only because he wore glasses. Doctors were killed, because Pol Pot believed that the future happy nation should be healthy. They also did not stand on ceremony with the monks, and barracks and slaughterhouses were located in the temples.

When it was necessary to execute many people, they were gathered in a group, entangled with steel wire and passed current from a generator installed on a bulldozer, and then they pushed the unconscious people into a pit. The children were tied hand and foot, and thrown into pits filled with water, where they drowned.

Subsequently, Pol Pot was asked: “Why did you kill children?” To which he replied: “Because dangerous people can grow out of them.” The Khmer Rouge army consisted of teenagers of twelve to fifteen years old, who were accustomed to murder by drinking a mixture of palm moonshine with human blood.

Despite the horror that was happening, it was forbidden to cry, to pity the weak and sick. However, without a special political reason, laughing was also forbidden. If someone did not comply with these revolutionary rules, then they buried him up to his neck in the ground, and then cut off his head and put it on stakes with signs: "I am a traitor to the revolution!" The corpses of criminals were plowed into marshy soil as fertilizer. People even came up with a name for their long-suffering homeland - the Land of the Walking Dead.

In one year, Pol Pot and his associates managed to completely destroy the entire economy of the country and all its political and social institutions. And only Mao Zedong praised the achievements of Pol Pot: “You won a brilliant victory. With one blow, you are done with the classes. The people's communes in the countryside, made up of the poor and middle sections of the peasantry, throughout Kampuchea are our future."

It is not known how long the bloody rule of Comrade 87 would last, but he made a mistake by starting the ethnic cleansing of the Vietnamese. In December 1978, Vietnamese troops crossed the Cambodian border and, without encountering serious resistance, entered Phnom Penh. The remnants of the ten thousandth army, together with Pol Pot, fled into the jungle to the north of the country, where they began a guerrilla war.

The new authorities of Cambodia issued a death sentence to the dictator in absentia, accusing him of genocide. However, it was not possible to completely defeat the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot settled on the border with Thailand, receiving help from the enemies of Vietnam. He lived in the jungle for several more years.

In the late seventies, rumors began to circulate that Pol Pot had died, but then a refutation was received. In 1981, he even returned to Cambodia, where, at a secret meeting among his old friends, he declared that he was not guilty of anything, and overzealous regional and local commanders perverted his orders.

“Allegations of massacres are vile lies. If we really destroyed people in such numbers, the people would have ceased to exist long ago,” Pol Pot said. Shortly before his death, the seventy-two-year-old Pol Pot managed to give an interview to Western journalists. He also said that he had no regrets.

Initially, the cause of death was announced as heart failure, but a subsequent medical examination showed that death was due to poisoning. Comrade 87 left nothing to his wife and four daughters: all his meager property consisted of a pair of worn-out tunics, a walking stick, and a bamboo fan. His body, along with meager possessions, was burned in a fire made from old car tires, which was kindled by associates in the jungle.

Our reader Igor M. continues the story of his trip to Cambodia. Today we're not talking about ancient history of this country, but about the very recent past, when the dictator Pol Pot led the Khmer country to an unprecedented tragedy. Igor and other tourists were told about the horrors of that time by a Cambodian guide who miraculously survived the Khmer Rouge regime.

This is a continuation of the story about the excursion to Cambodia. Read the beginning here:

I thought for a long time whether to include this in the story or not. After all, what our guide told is very different from what people want to hear on the tour. And yet I decided that this story deserves to be known and remembered ...

As I said, we had two guides - Russian and Cambodian. Most of all I was struck and shocked by the story told by the Cambodian guide. He was born in 1970, studied in the USSR, so he knows Russian. And he also remembers the Pol Pot regime well, although he was a child in those years. What he told us shocked many. But I don’t remember what his name is - Cambodians have very complex names. But I remember the nickname 🙂 Usually Cambodians (Vietnamese, Thais) have straight hair, but this one has a little curly hair. Therefore, in a Soviet university, he was given the Russian nickname "Kucheryavenky". So just let it be "our guide".

Unfortunate intellectuals

In the early 70s, the President of Cambodia was Lon Nol, who opposed the communists and enjoyed the support of the United States. But in 1975, the communists, the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, won the civil war. It was the bloodiest dictator - according to some estimates, up to three million people (a third of the then population of the country) died in a few years of his reign.

As soon as Pol Pot came to power, the next day he announced: all residents must leave the cities, otherwise they will be bombed by Americans who do not like communism. The country's capital, Phnom Penh, was evicted in 72 hours. Moreover, all residents - including the elderly, children, pregnant women - were forced to leave the city on foot at the height of the hot season. On the way, many died from torment. Tens of thousands of people who expressed dissatisfaction were shot. And as soon as the cities were empty, on the orders of Pol Pot, all money and banks, all industry and the cities themselves, which were declared hotbeds of vice and anti-communism, were destroyed.

In fact, no Americans were going to bomb Cambodia. Just according to the plan of Comrade Pol Pot, for the construction of communism it is necessary for everyone to live in villages and grow rice.

After the deportation of the urban population in the country, the first thing they did was destroy the intelligentsia. It is clear that communism cannot be built with them, it must be built with the peasants. They exterminated everyone who wore glasses - once wearing glasses, it means "an unfortunate intellectual" and, of course, will support the imperialists. At first, people were shot, but ammunition had to be spent on this. Then they began to massively blow up with TNT explosives, and then they simply began to break the skull with a hoe.

The only Cambodian with glasses I saw on the tour was a guy who took the stage after the end of the Apsara folklore show. Probably the director (otherwise why would he go on stage?) And very smart (otherwise why would he need glasses?). Under Pol Pot, he would not have lived long ...

Together with the intelligentsia in the country, they destroyed all teachers and canceled schools. It would seem that the school of communism is not a hindrance, because even Lenin bequeathed to "study, study and study." But Pol Pot had a special view on many problems, which was fundamentally different from what the founders of communism taught. And in general, despite communist views, Pol Pot considered the enemies of the USSR and the countries of the Warsaw Pact and even called for a fight against Soviet expansion.

Traitor Frog

In his atrocities, Pol Pot relied on teenagers, whom he armed and trained to kill people without a twinge of conscience.
Photo: Juandax.

By the way, according to our guide, even before the communists, the Khmers had a very interesting institution of marriage. Grandmothers decided who their grandchildren would marry and wooed the young. And in the days of Pol Pot, the Communist Party made lists where it randomly indicated who should marry whom. For disobedience, and even the very idea that the Party could be wrong, there was a punishment - you yourself understand what.

But what about the "international community"? Foreign powers knew about the horrors of the Pol Pot regime, but as long as he did not directly touch them, they preferred not to intervene. Although the deeds of the Khmer Rouge have firmly entered folk art, leaving us a legacy of the Soviet ditty “I torture Kampuchia like Pol Pot” and the song Holiday in Cambodia (“Vacation in Cambodia”) by the American group Dead Kennedys, which has become a classic of punk rock.

The troubled times ended in 1979 when Cambodia decided to attack Vietnam. Brought up by Paul Then, youngsters with machine guns fought poorly, so Vietnam easily repelled aggression, entered Cambodia and overthrew the tyrant.

After the end of the communist nightmare, life began to improve. The international community began to actively help Cambodians, young people were invited to study. The guide said that the inhabitants of what was then Cambodia knew nothing about other countries. And when he was sent to study abroad, he opened the map and saw that the USSR was very big country. Which means she's very rich! - our guide realized and chose the USSR as a place of study. “I came to study in 1989, and you have just perestroika there ...” the guide summed up sadly. All the tourists nodded sympathetically - they say, we remember. But our guide went through the Pol Pot camps, you won’t scare him with some kind of perestroika! Therefore, he was not afraid of the new “Time of Troubles”, he graduated from the university in our country and safely returned to his homeland.

By the way, the twin brother of our guide was not so savvy and went to study in some small (judging by the size on the map) country - Japan. And now he also works as a guide, but with Japanese groups.

Having exterminated the teachers, the Khmer Rouge found educational institutions new application. So, on the territory of a school in Phnom Penh, they set up a prison in which they tortured tens of thousands of people to death. Now there is the Tuolsleng Genocide Museum, which contains not only photographs of the victims, but also much more terrible exhibits.
Photo Tuolsleng Genocide Museum .

Pol Pot lived, Pol Pot is alive, Pol Pot will live?

According to the official version, Pol Pot died in 1998 - either from heart failure, or from poisoning, or committed suicide. But the guide assured everyone that he had not died, but had gone somewhere. And he brought a bunch of evidence - starting from some rituals that would be performed by his family if he really died, and ending with the stories of his neighbor, who was once Pol Pot's guard.

Pol Pot is dead, but his work lives on. He led the country for only more than three years, but it is “thanks” to the Khmer Rouge regime that modern Cambodia is so poor. Wage around $70 is considered quite normal. Most adults are illiterate (remember, schools were destroyed along with teachers). There is no industry - it was purposefully destroyed under Pol Pot. And since there is no own electricity either (it is bought at a high price in Thailand), there will be no industry. In some major cities There is still electricity (spent from Thailand), but outside the cities it is not available in principle, or it costs a lot of money. Therefore, there are no electrical appliances, including refrigerators - what was cooked was immediately eaten. The guide himself told us that he also had no electricity at home, but he did have a laptop. Therefore, he usually arrives at the hotel to meet tourists early in order to have time to charge it at the hotel for free.