ABSTRACT
On 17 April 1975, the Khmer Rouge – a group of Maoist-inspired communist rebels headed by Pol Pot – victoriously entered Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, thus ending a bloody civil war in which perhaps 600,000 Cambodians had died. They immediately ordered the inhabitants of the capital to leave the city “for a few days,” usually on the pretext that the departure was for their own safety since the United States was supposedly about to bomb the capital. The city dwellers were not allowed to return. Instead, they were dispersed into the countryside to participate in Cambodia’s agrarian revolution. The inhabitants of the cities were referred to as “new people” and generally had fewer rights and were treated worse than the “old people” who had lived in Khmer Rouge controlled zones during the war.
