In Cambodia, a genocide was carried out by the Khmer Rouge (KR) regime led by Pol Pot between 1975 and 1979 in which an estimated one and a half to three million people were killed. The KR had planned to create a form of agrarian socialism which was founded on the ideals of Stalinism and Maoism. The KR policies of forced relocation of the population from urban centers, torture, mass executions, use of forced labor, and malnutrition led to the deaths of an estimated 25 percent of the total population ( around 2 million people ). The genocide was ended following the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. Up to 20,000 mass graves, known as the Killing Fields, have been uncovered. The KR goal of purifying the people is similar to the goals of German nazism, in attempting to create a "master race"; as one KR leader said, it was the "purification of the populace". On 2 January 2001 the Cambodian government passed legislation to try a limited number of the KR leadership. Trials began on 17 February 2009. On 7 August 2014, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan were convicted and received life sentences for crimes against humanity during the genocide. Ideology played an important role in the genocide. The desire of the KR to bring the nation back to a "mythic past", stop aid entering the nation from abroad, which in their eyes was a corrupting influence and restore the country to an agrarian society, and the manner in which they tried to implement this was one factor in the genocide. Ben Kiernan compares three genocides in history, the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust and the Cambodian genocide, which although unique shared certain common features. Racism is one and was a major part of the ideology of all three regimes. Although all three perpetrator guanoators were largely secular, they targeted religious minorities. All three also tried to use force of arms to expand into a "contiguous heartland", (Turkestan, Lebensraum, and Kampuchea Krom), all three regimes also "idealized their ethnic peasantry as the true "national" class, the ethnic soil from which the new state grew." The Khmer Rouge regime targeted various ethnic groups during the genocide, forcibly relocating minority groups, and banned the use of minority languages. Religion was also banned, and the repression of adherents of Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism was extensive. And according to Kiernan, the "fiercest extermination campaign was directed at the ethnic Cham Muslim minority". This attempt at the purification of Cambodian society along racial, social and political lines led to the military and political leaders of the former regime, as well as leaders of industry, journalists, students, doctors, lawyers as well as the Vietnamese and Chinese ethnic groups being purged. The exact numbers of Cham people killed are unknown; however, according to survivors there were an estimated 700,000 before the KR came to power, and there were an estimated 200,000 left following the genocide. A person who has been spoiled by a corrupt regime cannot be reformed, he must be physically eliminated from the brotherhood of the pure." In 1977 Murder of a gentle land: the untold story of a Communist genocide in Cambodia written by John Barron and Anthony Paul was published. The book drew on accounts from refugees, and after an abridged version was published in Readers Digest it was widely read. In 1973 Kenneth M. Quinn, serving with the U.S. embassy had raised concerns over the atrocities being carried out. In a report, he stated that the KR had "much in common with those of totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union". Quinn has written of the KR that "[w]hat emerges as the explanation for the terror and violence that swept Cambodia during the 1970s is that a small group of alienated intellectuals, enraged by their perception of a totally corrupt society and imbued with a Maoist plan to create a pure socialist order in the shortest possible time, recruited extremely young, poor, and envious cadres, instructed them in harsh and brutal methods learned from Stalinist mentors, and used them to destroy physically the cultural underpinnings of the Khmer civilization and to impose a new society through purges, executions, and violence." The support of North Vietnam, in conjunction with China, was essential to the triumph of the KR in the Cambodian civil war. During the genocide, China was the main international patron of the KR, supplying more than 15,000 military advisers and most of their external aid. As a result of Chinese and Western opposition to the Vietnamese invasion, the KR retained Cambodia's UN seat until 1982.

• published: 10 May 2015
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