Best Books on Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge

Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge governed Cambodia and killed somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million people, roughly a quarter of the country's entire population. They emptied the cities, abolished money, banned religion, and attempted to restart Cambodian civilization from year zero. Understanding how this happened, and why the world largely watched in silence, requires some of the most difficult reading in modern history. ## How the Khmer Rouge Came to Power The Khmer Rouge did not emerge from nowhere. Cambodia had been destabilized for years before April 1975. The U.S. bombing campaign against North Vietnamese supply routes in Cambodian territory, which began in 1969 under Nixon and Kissinger, killed tens of thousands of Cambodian civilians and drove rural populations into the arms of Khmer Rouge recruiters. The 1970 coup that replaced Prince Sihanouk with the pro-American Lon Nol created a civil war the government was poorly equipped to fight. When Khmer Rouge forces entered Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, they immediately began evacuating the city. Hospitals were cleared of patients, including people in the middle of surgery. The entire urban population, roughly two million people, was marched into the countryside to work on agricultural collectives. The stated goal was to build an agrarian utopia. The reality was forced labor, starvation, and systematic murder of anyone the regime considered an enemy: the educated, ethnic Vietnamese and Chinese, Buddhist monks, and anyone who wore glasses. ## A Survivor's Account **"First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers"** by Loung Ung is the book that brings this history into human scale. Ung was five years old when the Khmer Rouge took power. Her family, prominent and educated, was exactly the kind the regime targeted. She and her siblings survived by hiding their identities and separating from each other. The book is written in present tense from the perspective of the child Ung was, which creates an immediacy that makes it almost unbearable to read in places. It is also essential. You cannot understand the Khmer Rouge as a historical phenomenon without understanding what it meant for a family to live inside it. ## Inside the Security Apparatus **"Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison"** by David Chandler is a different kind of book entirely. S-21, also known as Tuol Sleng, was the Khmer Rouge's main interrogation and detention center in Phnom Penh. An estimated 17,000 people were imprisoned there. Fewer than a dozen survived. Chandler, a historian of Southeast Asia, analyzes the documents left behind at S-21: confessions extracted under torture, prisoner records, internal communications. He reconstructs not just what happened but how the perpetrators understood what they were doing. The bureaucratic apparatus of mass killing is in some ways more disturbing than the violence itself. The Khmer Rouge kept meticulous records. ## A French Hostage's Perspective **"The Gate"** by Francois Bizot occupies unusual territory in this literature. Bizot was a French ethnologist who had studied Cambodian Buddhism for years when he was captured by the Khmer Rouge in 1971, before they came to power. He was held for three months and interrogated by Duch, the man who would later run S-21. Bizot is the only Westerner known to have been captured by the Khmer Rouge and released. His account of Duch is devastating because it resists easy demonization. Duch was intelligent, ideologically committed, and completely sincere. Bizot later testified at Duch's trial before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. ## The Aftermath The Khmer Rouge regime ended in January 1979 when Vietnamese forces invaded and drove Pol Pot into the jungle. The international response was strange: despite what had happened, China, the United States, and other Western governments continued to support the Khmer Rouge's seat at the United Nations throughout the 1980s, largely because they opposed the Vietnamese-backed government that replaced it. Pol Pot died in 1998, still free. The trials of surviving Khmer Rouge leaders did not conclude until 2018. ## Further Reading Explore more books on the Cold War at [/category/cold-war](/category/cold-war).