Communist Party of Kampuchea
캄푸치아 공산당
The Cambodian communist party that emerged in 1951, when the Indochinese Communist Party was divided by country, as the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party and was later renamed via the Workers' Party of Kampuchea. Led by Pol Pot from 1963, its members were known as the Khmer Rouge; it took power in April 1975 and established Democratic Kampuchea. Driven out by the Vietnamese invasion of 1979, it was officially dissolved in 1981.
In depth
In February 1951 the congress of the Indochinese Communist Party decided to form separate Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese parties, and the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party came into being with Son Ngoc Minh as acting chairman. The English source notes that sources differ on the founding date and first congress, and the French source says the party statutes were promulgated on 5 August 1951. After the 1954 Geneva Conference about 1,000 members, including Son Ngoc Minh, left for North Vietnam, and those who stayed formed the legal Pracheachon party, which contested the elections of 1955 and 1958.
In the 1950s students in Paris, among them Pol Pot, Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan, organised the secret Cercle Marxiste, and in the 1960s they took over the party apparatus. On 28–30 September 1960 twenty-one leaders held a secret congress in a vacant room of the Phnom Penh railway station, renamed the party the Workers' Party of Kampuchea, and appointed Tou Samouth general secretary and Nuon Chea deputy. After Tou Samouth was murdered by the government on 20 July 1962, Pol Pot became general secretary at the Second Congress in February 1963. Under Democratic Kampuchea the party projected 1960 as its founding date, downplaying its earlier history.
In July 1963 Pol Pot and most of the Central Committee moved to Ratanakiri Province to set up a base. Sources differ on when the party took the name Communist Party of Kampuchea: the English source gives 1966 in its introduction and 1971 in its history section, and the French source attributes it to a Central Committee decision of September 1966. The party launched a national insurgency in 1968, and after Lon Nol deposed Sihanouk in 1970, the exiled Sihanouk allied with the party and became the nominal head of a Khmer Rouge-dominated government-in-exile. By 1973 the party exercised de facto control over most of the country, and on 17 April 1975 it captured Phnom Penh.
In power the party hid behind the name Angkar (‘the Organisation’), and only on 29 September 1977 did Pol Pot reveal its existence in a speech. It forced urban residents into rural collective farms, closed schools, hospitals and factories, and abolished money, banking, religion and private property, causing mass deaths through execution, overwork, disease and starvation. Purges peaking in 1977–1978 targeted older members suspected of links to Vietnam.
In early 1979 a pro-Vietnamese dissident group led by Pen Sovann held its own congress near the border and formed a separate party. On 7 January 1979 Vietnamese forces and the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation captured Phnom Penh and established the People's Republic of Kampuchea, and Pol Pot's party withdrew to the Thai border to wage guerrilla war. According to the French source, Pol Pot and Nuon Chea decided in December 1981 to dissolve the party in order to ‘unite with other national forces’, and it was officially dissolved on 6 December and replaced by the Party of Democratic Kampuchea.