A Pot of Winter

Pol Pot (born Saloth Sâr; 19 May 1925 – 15 April 1998) was a Cambodian politician, revolutionary, and dictator who ruled Democratic Kampuchea from 1975 until his overthrow in 1979 during the Cambodian–Vietnamese War. Ideologically a Maoist and Khmer ethnonationalist, Pot led Cambodia's Communist movement, known as the Khmer Rouge, which seized power in 1975 and established a one-party state under the Communist Party of Kampuchea. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge perpetrated the Cambodian genocide, in which an estimated 1.5–2 million people died—approximately one-quarter of the country's pre-genocide population. In December 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia to remove the Khmer Rouge from power, 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. He is widely believed to be one of the most brutal despots in modern world history. Born to a prosperous farmer in Prek Sbauv, French Cambodia, Pol Pot was educated at some of Cambodia's most elite schools. Arriving in Paris in October 1949 on an academic scholarship, he later joined the French Communist Party in 1951 while studying at the École française de radioélectricité. Returning to Cambodia in 1953, he involved himself in the Khmer Viet Minh organisation and its guerrilla war against King Norodom Sihanouk's newly independent government. Following the Khmer Viet Minh's 1954 retreat into North Vietnam, Pol Pot returned to Phnom Penh, working as a teacher while remaining a central member of Cambodia's Marxist–Leninist movement. In 1959, he helped formalise the movement into the Kampuchean Labour Party, which was later renamed the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). To avoid state repression, in 1962 he relocated to a jungle encampment and in 1963 he became the CPK's leader. In 1968, he relaunched the war against Sihanouk's government. After Lon Nol ousted Sihanouk in a 1970 coup, Pol Pot's forces sided with the deposed leader against the new government, which was bolstered by the United States military. Aided by the Viet Cong militia and North Vietnamese troops, Khmer Rouge forces advanced and controlled all of Cambodia by 1975. 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. "Year Zero" was announced by the Khmer Rouge on April 17, 1975, where everything before that date must be purged. 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. In the Killing Fields, more than 1.3 million people were executed