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The Witch Doctor President and Other Horrific Rulers

Khalid Elhassan December 25, 2019 32 min

24. The Genocidiere

Cambodian communist revolutionary Saloth Sar, better known to history as Pol Pot (1925 – 1998), was a monster who hid beneath a charismatic façade. When he led the Khmer Rouge into seizing power in 1975, there was this little in his background that would have hinted at the horrors he was about to unleash. The country, which was renamed Democratic Kampuchea, was transformed into a nightmarish ideological tyranny, masterfully depicted in the 1984 movie, The Killing Field.

Skulls from the Cambodian Genocide. The New York Times

During the Khmer Rouge’s years in power, about a quarter of Cambodia’s population was killed in a horrific genocide carried out by Pol Pot and his followers, which was made even worse by its irrationality. In an attempt at social engineering, Cambodian cities were evacuated, and the urban masses were forcibly converted into peasants toiling on poorly run collective farms. Roughly three million were murdered or starved to death before the nightmare ended when the Khmer Rouge were driven from power in 1979.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.