He oversaw mass atrocities and is widely believed to be one of the most brutal despots in modern world history. Ideologically a Maoist and a Khmer ethnonationalist , Pot was a leader of Cambodia's Communist movement, known as the Khmer Rouge , from to He served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea from to , during which Cambodia was converted into a one-party state.
Between and , Pot perpetrated the Cambodian genocide , in which an estimated 1. Within two weeks, Vietnamese forces occupied most of the country, ending the genocide and establishing a new Cambodian government , with the Khmer Rouge restricted to the rural hinterlands in the western part of the country. Returning to Cambodia in , he involved himself in the Khmer Viet Minh organisation and its guerrilla war against King Norodom Sihanouk 's newly independent government.
To avoid state repression, in he relocated to a jungle encampment and in became the CPK's leader. In , he relaunched the war against Sihanouk's government. After Lon Nol ousted Sihanouk in a coup , Pol Pot's forces sided with the deposed leader against the new government , which was bolstered by the United States military.
Pol Pot transformed Cambodia into a one-party state that he called Democratic Kampuchea, seeking to create an agrarian socialist society that he believed would evolve into a communist one. Year Zero was an idea put into practice by Pol Pot where he believed that all cultures and traditions must be completely destroyed and a new revolutionary culture must replace it starting from scratch.
The Khmer Rouge emptied the cities, frogmarched Cambodians to labor camps and relocated the urban population to collective farms , where mass executions, abuse, torture, malnutrition and disease were rampant. At the Killing Fields , more than 1. Pursuing complete egalitarianism , money, religion, and private property were abolished and all citizens were forced to wear the same black clothing.
