ABSTRACT
In the 1940s, Pol Pot attended secondary and vocational schools in Phnom Penh and Paris. After World War II, Pol Pot became a leftist political activist, and while in Paris between 1949 and 1953, he adopted stringent Marxism. After returning to Cambodia in 1953, just in time for its independence from the French, Pol Pot became a primary school teacher and clandestine political operative for communist political groups. He gradually drifted away from North Vietnam's support and toward an alliance with Communist China. In reaction to cross-border attacks on its citizens, in 1979 the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and ended Pol Pot's reign of terror. He fled to far western Cambodia, where he directed a clandestine regime until his supporters, in 1998, turned on him in order to regularize their relations with a new, democratic regime formed in Phnom Penh after the departure of the Vietnamese in 1989.
