The Khmer Rouge is the name that was popularly given to members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) and by extension to the regime through which the CPK ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The name was coined in the 1960s by then Chief of State Norodom Sihanouk to describe his country's heterogeneous, communist-led dissidents, with whom he allied after his 1970 overthrow.
The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum or simply Tuol Sleng is a museum chronicling the Cambodian genocide. Located in Phnom Penh, the site is a former secondary school which was used as Security Prison 21 by the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 until its fall in 1979. From 1976 to 1979, an estimated 20,000 people were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng and it was one of between 150 and 196 torture and execution centers established by the Khmer Rouge. On 26 July 2010, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia convicted the prison's chief, Kang Kek Iew, for crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. He died on 2 September 2020 while serving a life sentence.
Kang Kek Iew, also spelled Kaing Guek Eav, aliasComrade Duch or Hang Pin, was a Cambodian convicted war criminal and leader in the Khmer Rouge movement, which ruled Democratic Kampuchea from 1975 to 1979. As the head of the government's internal security branch (Santebal), he oversaw the Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison camp where thousands were held for interrogation and torture, after which the vast majority of these prisoners were eventually executed.
Son Sen, alias Comrade Khieu (សមមិត្តខៀវ) or "Brother Number 89", was a Cambodian Communist politician and soldier. A member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea/Party of Democratic Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge, from 1974 to 1992, Sen oversaw the Party's security apparatus, including the Santebal secret police and the notorious security prison S-21 at Tuol Sleng.
The Killing Fields are a number of sites in Cambodia where collectively more than one million people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge regime during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately after the end of the Cambodian Civil War (1970–1975). The mass killings were part of a broad state-sponsored genocide.
Nuon Chea, also known as Long Bunruot or Rungloet Laodi, was a Cambodian communist politician and revolutionary who was the chief ideologist of the Khmer Rouge. He also briefly served as acting Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea. He was commonly known as "Brother Number Two", as he was second-in-command to Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, General Secretary of the Party, during the Cambodian genocide of 1975–1979. In 2014, Nuon Chea received a life sentence for crimes against humanity, alongside another top-tier Khmer Rouge leader, Khieu Samphan, and a further trial convicted him of genocide in 2018. These life sentences were merged into a single life sentence by the Trial Chamber on 16 November 2018. He died while serving his sentence in 2019.
François Bizot is a French anthropologist, the only Westerner to have survived imprisonment by the Khmer Rouge.
Rithy Panh is a Cambodian documentary film director and screenwriter.
The Santebal was the secret police of the Khmer Rouge's Democratic Kampuchea (DK) regime in Cambodia.
Ghost Game is a 2006 Thai horror film about 11 contestants on a reality TV show who must stay in an abandoned military prison where atrocities took place years before.
Kampuchea, officially known as Democratic Kampuchea from 5 January 1976, was a one-party totalitarian state which encompassed modern-day Cambodia and existed from 1975 to 1979. It was controlled by the Khmer Rouge (KR), the name popularly given to the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), and was founded when KR forces defeated the Khmer Republic of Lon Nol in 1975.
Vann Nath was a Cambodian painter, artist, writer, and human rights activist. He was the eighth Cambodian to win the Lillian Hellman/Hammett Award since 1995. He was one of only seven known adult survivors of S-21 camp, where 20,000 Cambodians were tortured and executed during the Khmer Rouge regime.
S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine is a 2003 documentary film directed by Rithy Panh. Rithy, himself a survivor of the Khmer Rouge, brought together two former prisoners of the regime with their former captors at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, the former Security Prison 21 (S-21) under the Khmer Rouge.
Chum Mey is one of only seven known adult survivors of the Khmer Rouge imprisonment in the S-21 Tuol Sleng camp, where 20,000 prisoners, mostly Cambodians, were sent for execution. Formerly a motor mechanic working in Phnom Penh, he was taken to the prison on 28 October 1978, accused of being a spy. His life was only spared because of his ability to repair sewing machines for Pol Pot's soldiers. In 2004, he described the killing of his wife and son:
"First they shot my wife, who was marching in front with the other women," he said. "She screamed to me, 'Please run, they are killing me now'. I heard my son crying and then they fired again, killing him. When I sleep, I still see their faces, and every day I still think of them".
Stuart Robert Glass was a Canadian adventurer and yachtsman killed by the Khmer Rouge in August 1978 while sailing a little yacht named "Foxy Lady" through Cambodian waters. One of nine "Western" yachtsmen known to have been seized by the Democratic Kampuchean regime, between April and November 1978. He was the sole Canadian victim of the 1975–79 Cambodian genocide.
The Cambodian genocide was the systematic persecution and killing of Cambodian citizens by the Khmer Rouge under the leadership of Communist Party of Kampuchea general secretary Pol Pot, who radically pushed Cambodia towards an entirely self-sufficient agrarian socialist society. It resulted in the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people from 1975 to 1979, nearly a quarter of Cambodia's population in 1975.
Mam Nai or Mam Nay, nom de guerre Comrade Chan (សមមិត្តច័ន្ទ), is a Cambodian war criminal and former lieutenant of Santebal, the internal security branch of the Khmer Rouge communist movement, which ruled Democratic Kampuchea from 1975 to 1979. He was the leader of the interrogation unit at Tuol Sleng (S-21), assisting convicted war criminal Kang Kek Iew, the head of the camp where thousands were held for interrogation, torture and subsequent killing.
Khun Srun was an important Cambodian writer. He was born in Char village (ភូមិចារ), Rorvieng sub-district (ឃុំរវៀង), Samrong district (ស្រុកសំរោង), Takéo province, into a poor Hakka Chinese Cambodian family. When he was eight, his father, Khun Kim Chheng, a Hakka Chinese man who had fled Communism, died, and he and his six siblings were raised by his Hakka mother, Chi Eng, a small shopkeeper and a devout Buddhist. He began his schooling during the country's first years of independence, when the doors to higher education and professionalization were inching open to all Cambodians, regardless of their social and economic class. A brilliant student, he studied Khmer literature and psychology at the university in Phnom Penh, becoming widely read in sciences, mathematics, and European literature. Amid the turmoil of the 1960s, he worked as a professor of mathematics and a journalist while writing fiction and poetry. He also worked as a member of the textbook editorial committee at the Ministry of Education. In less than four years, he published three collections of poems, short tales, and philosophical anecdotes; two collections of autobiographical short stories, The Last Residence and The Accused; and a final volume of poems, For a Woman. He was influenced by both existentialism and Cambodian Buddhism. In 1971, he was imprisoned during 7 months by the right-wing Lon Nol government for refusing to collaborate, but still refused to align himself with the extreme left. In 1973, after being imprisoned for a second time, he finally joined the communist guerrillas. He was only 28, and his life as a writer was finished. After the Khmer Rouge took power, in 1975, Khun Srun was assigned work as a railway engineer). On the 20th of December 1978, he, his wife and their two youngest children were victims of the last purges. They were arrested, transferred to Tuol Sleng prison and probably killed in Choeung Ek, few days before the end of Pol Pot's regime. Only Khun Srun's nine-year-old daughter, Khun Khem, survived, taken by Khmer Rouge cadres and forced to live among them in the forest on the Cambodian-Thai border.
Dany Pen is a Khmer-Canadian human rights activist, artist and educator.
Bou Meng is one of only seven known adult survivors of the Khmer Rouge imprisonment in the S-21 Tuol Sleng camp, where 20,000 Cambodians were tortured and executed. He was arrested with his wife, Ma Yoeun, in 1976 and taken into S-21; they never met again after then. Bou Meng was tortured for weeks, with many kinds of torture devices and he had to fabricate confessions. He was spared from being slaughtered only because he was a highly skilled painter. His wife, according to the records of Tuol Sleng, was tortured and killed on August 16, 1977. His children ended up in a children's center, where they eventually starved to death.
