Killing Fields

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The Killing Fields (Khmer: វាលពិឃាត, Khmer pronunciation: [ʋiəl pikʰiət]) are sites in Cambodia where collectively more than 1,300,000 people were killed and buried by the Communist Party of Kampuchea during Khmer Rouge rule from 1975-79, immediately after the end of the Cambodian Civil War (1970–75). The mass killings were part of the broad, state-sponsored Cambodian genocide. The Cambodian journalist Dith Pran coined the term "killing fields" after his escape from the regime.^[1]

The Khmer Rouge regime arrested and eventually executed almost everyone suspected of connections with the former government or foreign governments, as well as professionals and intellectuals. Ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Thai, ethnic Chinese, ethnic Cham, Cambodian Christians, and Buddhist monks were the demographic targets of persecution. As a result, Pol Pot has been described as "a genocidal tyrant".^[2] Martin Shaw described the Cambodian genocide as "the purest genocide of the Cold War era".^[3] In 1979, Vietnam invaded Democratic Kampuchea and toppled the Khmer Rouge regime, ending the genocide.

After five years of researching 20,000 grave sites, analysis indicates at least 1,386,734 victims of execution. Estimates of total deaths resulting from Khmer Rouge policies, including from disease and starvation, range from 1.7 to 2.2 million, out of a 1975 population of roughly 8 million. Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to the subsequent Vietnamese invasion.

By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.2 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to "the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot",^[4][5] who were saved by international aid after the Vietnamese invasion.