Biography:
Pol Pot was a Cambodian communist revolutionary, politician, and dictator. He led the Khmer Rouge and ruled Democratic Kampuchea from 1976 to his overthrow in 1979. Born into a farming family, Pol Pot was educated at elite Cambodian schools and studied in France, where he adopted communist ideologies. He returned to Cambodia, became a teacher, and rose to lead the Communist Party of Kampuchea. His regime is responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 to 2.2 million Cambodians through executions, forced labor, starvation, and disease.
| Occupation | Prime Ministers |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 25 May 1925 |
| Age | 100 Years |
| Birth Place | Prek Sbauv, Kampong Thom Province, Cambodia, French Indochina |
| Horoscope | Gemini |
| Country | Cambodia |
| Date of death | 15 April, 1998 |
| Died Place | Choam, Trapeang Prei, Anlong Veng, Oddar Meanchey, Cambodia 14.35386°N, 104.12128°W |
Height, Weight & Measurements
No reliable or publicly verified data exists for Pol Pot’s height, weight, or body measurements. Historical records from his era rarely included such personal details for political figures.
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Dating & Relationship Status
Pol Pot married Khieu Ponnary in 1956, a teacher and fellow communist activist. She was considered his long-time partner until her mental health declined in later years. There is no credible record of Pol Pot having other publicly acknowledged relationships or marriages.
His family was of mixed Chinese and ethnic Khmer heritage, but did not speak Chinese and lived as though they were fully Khmer. His father Loth, who later took the name Saloth Phem, was a prosperous farmer who owned 9 ha of rice land and several draft cattle. Loth's house was one of the largest in the village and at transplanting and harvest time he hired poorer neighbors to carry out much of the agricultural labour. Sâr's mother, Sok Nem, was locally respected as a pious Buddhist. Sâr was the eighth of nine children (two girls and seven boys), three of whom died young. They were raised as Theravada Buddhists, and on festivals travelled to the Kampong Thom monastery.
In summer 1935, Sâr went to live with his brother Suong and the latter's wife and child. That year, he began an education at a Roman Catholic primary school, the École Miche, with Meak paying the tuition fees. Most of his classmates were the children of French bureaucrats and Catholic Vietnamese. He became literate in French and familiar with Christianity. Sâr was not academically gifted and was held back two years, receiving his Certificat d'Etudes Primaires Complémentaires in 1943 at the age of 18. He continued to visit Meak at the king's palace, and it was there that he had some of his earliest sexual experiences with some of the king's concubines.
That year, he passed exams that admitted him into the Lycée Sisowath, meanwhile living with Suong and his new wife. In summer 1948, he sat the brevet entry examinations for the upper classes of the Lycée, but failed. Unlike several of his friends, he could not continue on at the school for a baccalauréat. Instead, he enrolled in 1948 to study carpentry at the Ecole Technique in Russey Keo, in Phnom Penh's northern suburbs. This drop from an academic education to a vocational one likely came as a shock. His fellow students were generally of a lower class than those at the Lycée Sisowath, though they were not peasants. At the Ecole Technique, he met Ieng Sary, who became a close friend and later a member of his government. In summer 1949, Sâr passed his brevet and secured one of five scholarships allowing him to travel to France to study at one of its engineering schools.
Sâr arrived in Saigon (the future Ho Chi Minh City) on 13 January 1953, the same day on which Sihanouk disbanded the Democratic-controlled National Assembly, began ruling by decree, and imprisoned Democratic members of parliament without trial. Amid the broader First Indochina War in neighboring French Indochina, Cambodia was in a civil war, with civilian massacres and other atrocities carried out by all sides. Sâr spent several months at the headquarters of Prince Norodom Chantaraingsey—the leader of one faction—in Trapeng Kroloeung, before moving to Phnom Penh, where he met with fellow Cercle member Ping Say to discuss the situation. Sâr regarded the Khmer Việt Minh, a mixed Vietnamese and Cambodian guerrilla subgroup of the North Vietnam-based Việt Minh, as the most promising resistance group. He believed the Khmer Việt Minh's relationship to the Việt Minh and thus the international movement made it the best group for the Cercle Marxiste to support. The Cercle members in Paris took his recommendation.
Cambodia's communists wanted to operate clandestinely but also established a socialist party, Pracheachon, to serve as a front organization through which they could compete in the 1955 election. Although Pracheachon had strong support in some areas, most observers expected the Democratic Party to win. Sihanouk feared a Democratic Party government and in March 1955 abdicated the throne in favor of his father, Norodom Suramarit. This allowed him to legally establish a political party, the Sangkum Reastr Niyum, with which to contest the election. The September election witnessed widespread voter intimidation and electoral fraud, resulting in Sangkum winning all 91 seats. Sihanouk's establishment of a de facto one-party state extinguished hopes that the Cambodian left could take power electorally. North Vietnam's government nevertheless urged the Khmer Party not to restart the armed struggle; the former was focused on undermining South Vietnam and had little desire to destabilize Sihanouk's regime given that it had—conveniently for them—remained internationally un-aligned rather than following the Thai and South Vietnamese governments in allying with the anti-communist United States.
Sâr rented a house in the Boeng Keng Kang area of Phnom Penh. Although not qualified to teach at a state school, he gained employment teaching history, geography, French literature, and morals at a private school, the Chamraon Vichea ("Progressive Knowledge"); his pupils, who included the later novelist Soth Polin, described him as a good teacher. He courted society belle Soeung Son Maly before entering a relationship with fellow communist revolutionary Khieu Ponnary, the sister of Sary's wife Thirith. They were married in a Buddhist ceremony on 14 July 1956. According to Philip Short, Sâr had chosen this date in order to coincide with the symbolic Bastille Day All correspondence between the Democratic Party and the Pracheachon went through him, as did most communication with underground elements. Sihanouk cracked down on the movement, whose membership had diminished by half since the end of the civil war. Links with the North Vietnamese communists declined, something Sâr later portrayed as a good thing as "it gave us the chance to be independent and develop ourselves". He and other members increasingly regarded Cambodians as too deferential to their Vietnamese counterparts; to deal with this, Sâr, Tou Samouth, and Nuon Chea drafted a programme and statutes for a new party that would be allied with but not subordinate to the Vietnamese. They established party cells, emphasising the recruitment of small numbers of dedicated members, and organized political seminars in safe houses.
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| Husband | Khieu Ponnary (m. 1956-1979) Mea Son (m. 1986) |
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Net Worth and Salary
Pol Pot was not active on social media, as his leadership and death predate the rise of online platforms. However, he remains a subject of global discussion due to the legacy of his regime and the Cambodian genocide.
Career, Business and Investments
- Business and Investments: Pol Pot did not engage in commercial business or private investments. His regime sought to dismantle market economies and collectivize property, making private enterprise irrelevant within his ideological framework.
While Sâr was at the school, King Monivong died. In 1941, the French authorities appointed Norodom Sihanouk as his replacement. A new junior middle school, the Collége Pream Sihanouk, was established in Kampong Cham, and Sâr was selected as a boarder at the institution in 1942. This level of education afforded him a privileged position in Cambodian society. He learned to play the violin and took part in school plays. Much of his spare time was spent playing football (soccer) and basketball. Several fellow pupils, among them Hu Nim and Khieu Samphan, later served in his government. During the new year vacation in 1945, Sâr and several friends from his college theatre troupe went on a provincial tour in a bus to raise money for a trip to Angkor Wat. In 1947, he left the school.
At a 1959 conference, the movement's leadership established the Kampuchean Labour Party, based on the Marxist–Leninist model of democratic centralism. Sâr, Tou Samouth and Nuon Chea were part of a four-man General Affair Committee leading the party. Its existence was to be kept secret from non-members. The Kampuchean Labour Party's conference, held clandestinely from September to October 1960 in Phnom Penh, saw Samouth become party secretary and Nuon Chea his deputy, while Sâr took the third senior position and Ieng Sary the fourth.
Education
This article provides an overview of Pol Pot’s life, political career, and the absence of personal wealth, reflecting the realities of his revolutionary and authoritarian government.
Born to a prosperous farmer in Prek Sbauv, French Cambodia, Pol Pot was educated at some of Cambodia's most elite schools. Arriving in Paris in October 1949 on an academic scholarship, he later joined the French Communist Party in 1951 while studying at École française de radioélectricité. Returning to Cambodia in 1953, he involved himself in the Khmer Viet Minh organisation and its guerrilla war against King Norodom Sihanouk's newly independent government. Following the Khmer Viet Minh's 1954 retreat into North Vietnam, Pol Pot returned to Phnom Penh, working as a teacher while remaining a central member of Cambodia's Marxist–Leninist movement. In 1959, he helped formalise the movement into the Kampuchean Labour Party, which was later renamed the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). To avoid state repression, in 1962 he relocated to a jungle encampment and in 1963 he became the CPK's leader. In 1968, he relaunched the war against Sihanouk's government. After Lon Nol ousted Sihanouk in a 1970 coup, Pol Pot's forces sided with the deposed leader against the new government, which was bolstered by the United States military. Aided by the Viet Cong militia and North Vietnamese troops, Khmer Rouge forces advanced and controlled all of Cambodia by 1975.
At the time, Cambodia was a monarchy but the French colonial regime held effective political control of the country. Sâr's family had connections to the Cambodian royalty: his cousin Meak was a consort of King Sisowath Monivong and later worked as a ballet teacher. When Sâr was six years old, he and an older brother were sent to live with Meak in Phnom Penh; informal adoptions by wealthier relatives were then common in Cambodia. In Phnom Penh, he spent 18 months as a novice monk in the city's Vat Botum Vaddei monastery, learning Buddhist teachings and to read and write the Khmer language.
Access to further education abroad made Sâr part of a tiny elite in Cambodia. He and the 21 other selected students sailed from Saigon aboard the SS Jamaïque, stopping at Singapore, Colombo, and Djibouti en route to Marseille. Sâr arrived in Paris on 1 October 1949. In January 1950, Sâr enrolled at the École française de radioélectricité to study radio electronics. He took a room in the Cité Universitaire's Indochinese Pavilion, then lodgings on the rue Amyot, and eventually a bedsit on the corner of the rue de Commerce and the rue Letellier. Sâr earned good marks during his first year. He failed his first end-of-year exams but was allowed to retake them and narrowly passed, enabling him to continue his studies.
In Paris, Ieng Sary and two others established the Cercle Marxiste ("Marxist Circle"), an organisation arranged in a clandestine cell system. The cells met to read Marxist texts and hold self-criticism sessions. Sâr joined a cell that met on the rue Lacepède; his cell comrades included Hou Yuon, Sien Ary, and Sok Knaol. He helped to duplicate the Cercle's newspaper, Reaksmei ("The Spark"), named after a former Russian paper. In October 1951, Yuon was elected head of the Khmer Student Association (AEK; l'Association des Etudiants Khmers), establishing close links between the organisation and the leftist Union Nationale des Étudiants de France. The Cercle Marxiste manipulated the AEK and its successor organisations for the next 19 years. Several months after the Cercle Marxiste's formation, Sâr and Sary joined the French Communist Party (PCF). Sâr attended party meetings, including those of its Cambodian group, and read its magazine, Les Cahiers Internationaux. To many young people in France and Cambodia, communism seemed to be the future; the Chinese Communist Party won the Chinese Civil War and the French Communist Party was one of the country's largest, attracting the votes of around 25% of the French electorate.
In Cambodia, growing internal strife resulted in King Sihanouk dismissing the government and declaring himself prime minister. In response, Sâr wrote an article, "Monarchy or Democracy?", published in the student magazine Khmer Nisut under the pseudonym "Khmer daom" ("Original Khmer"). In it, he referred positively to Buddhism, portraying Buddhist monks as an anti-monarchist force on the side of the peasantry. At a meeting, the Cercle decided to send someone to Cambodia to assess the situation and determine which rebel group they should support; Sâr volunteered for the role. His decision to leave may also have been because he had failed his second-year exams two years in a row and thus lost his scholarship. In December, he boarded the SS Jamaïque, returning to Cambodia without a degree.
