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In the late 1970s, after Cambodia had been caught in the cross fires of the United States war with Vietnam, the U.S attempted to set up a new ruling system in the small country to help it get back on its feet. However, on April 17, 1975, in Cambodia’s capital of Phnom Penh, the weak and leaderless American backed Lon Nol regime fell to the determined and nationalistic Communists. From April 1975 to January 1979, a Communist regime called the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, ruled Cambodia and executed one of the most violent and devastating genocides in history. In a mere four years, the Khmer Rouge annihilated over two million people; a shocking one quarter of Cambodia’s population.

Within this four-year genocide, three waves of killing took place. The first aimed to wipe out anyone associated with the previous Lon Nol regime. The Khmer Rouge banned all institutions in order to “cleanse” the society of any ideas or ways of living that promoted individual success. Everyone was forced to work 12-14 hours a day with a diet of just watery soup to survive. In late 1975, the second wave of murder broke out against large classes of people including professionals and civil servants who had either been condemned by enemies or prisoners, or had revealed fatal details of their past through autobiographies for their new rulers. If the regime thought citizens did not work hard enough, were too educated, or showed sympathy when others were killed, they would be next. With this outbreak of massacre came the establishment of the national prison network.

The systematic process of destruction began in Tuol Sleng, a high school in Phnom Penh that had been transformed into Security Office 21, which served as headquarters for exposure and determination of enemies of the Khmer Rouge. Here the regime exhibited their precision and organization through meticulous arrest and execution records. Although Tuol Sleng was labeled as an interrogation center, as author and spectator Doug Bandow puts it, “Khmer Rouge interrogation meant torture. And torture often meant death.” In Tuol Sleng, authorities first forced confessions from their victims to justify their arrests and the omnipresence of the Communist Party. After the interrogations, members of the infamous regime did not simply kill victims of their “social revolution.” Instead, they tortured the inmates as painfully as possible. Some of these deadly weapons included wooden bathtubs where prisoners were drowned, houses of scorpions that government officers let loose on inmates, and electric shock wires. The Khmer Rouge also strung barbed wire around the cellblocks to prevent any suicide attempts. Just like every other decision and aspect of society, the Khmer Rouge believed they held the power to decide when an individual had the right to die.

The main portion of the Cambodia Genocide took place in a region called Choeng Ek, which has come to be known as the Killing Fields. Here the Khmer Rouge put their social revolution into full effect by separating all the children from the rest of society and brainwashing them with their ideals of totalitarian egalitarianism, a concept that life means nothing and the collective means everything. The young generation quickly accepted their new way of life and became brutal enforcers of the Khmer Rouge torture against the rest of society. Once loving children mercilessly beat and whipped their parents and grandparents, forcing them to dig ditches for the 20,000 people buried at the Killing Fields.

The final wave of killing began in 1976, when the brutality of the regime swept through all classes of the new society, including Khmer Rouge followers and military officials themselves. The government had become so deranged that it began to engulf its own followers as the communists began to see enemies everywhere. The chaos and destruction of the Khmer Rouge did not cease until 1979 when the Vietnamese invaded and liberated 600,000 Cambodian people who fled to Thai refugee camps. The country was in ruins, covered in land mines and the corpses of an entire generation eliminated by the Communist regime. Even after the Khmer Rouge died with their leader, Pol Pot, and the United Nations sent the largest peacekeeping expedition in history to Cambodia in 1991, the country continues to deal with the devastations of the genocide and remain slow on their journey back toward strength and unity as a nation.