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The ideological guru of the Khmer Rouge was Cambodia's former head of state, Khieu Samphan. While a graduate student in France during the 1950s, he argued in a doctoral dissertation that a Communist-run Cambodia should "withdraw from the world economy and restructure the local economy on a self-centered basis" in order to purge the country of "decadent colonial influences." With unspeakable brutality, this deceptively bland program was imposed on "Democratic Kampuchea" (as that country was renamed) by the government of Premier Pol Pot after the Khmer Rouge took power. Phnom-Penh, once a placid, luxury-loving city of broad avenues and towering hibiscus trees, became a ghost town as the Khmer Rouge force marched the city's refugee-swollen population to resettlement on rural communes that were no better than slave-labor camps. Even the wounded were prodded at gunpoint from hospital beds —and left to die along the roadside if they were too weak to walk. At the camps, Cambodians of all ages were forced to work from dawn until after dusk planting rice. Families were separated, Buddhism abolished as the state religion and virtually every trapping of civilization disappeared: postal services, telephones, currency, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly.
A major goal of the Khmer Rouge was to destroy the intelligentsia. People who wore glasses were killed, on the suspicion that they knew how to read or write. Of the 500 physicians in Cambodia in 1975, only 57 survived the Khmer Rouge purge. People suspected of lagging on the job were punished by death, rendered by a hatchet blow on the back of the neck, or, as many refugees have reported, by evisceration. Groups of children who were found guilty of being the offspring of "undesirables" were reportedly chained together, then buried alive in bomb craters under dirt that was shoved on top of them by bulldozers. Between 1975 and 1978, from 2 million to 3 million Cambodians died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.
The Khmer Rouge excesses were condemned almost everywhere except in China, which had long favored an independent Cambodia, one that would be outside North Viet Nam's sphere of influence. Peking propped up the Pol Pot regime with vast amounts of military and economic aid. The North Vietnamese, meanwhile, never gave up their dream of taking all of Indochina. In early 1978 Hanoi used the excuse of some Khmer Rouge raids on Vietnamese border villages to invade Cambodia. Ostensibly, the Vietnamese soldiers involved were "volunteers" assisting a "National Salvation Front" headed by Heng Samrin and other obscure Khmer Rouge defectors. Last Christmas the Vietnamese and Heng Samrin's Cambodians launched a major assault on provincial capitals. On Jan. 7, Pol Pot and his surviving cadres abandoned the capital and fled to a Khmer Rouge mountain hideout.