A brief history of Cambodia The Khmer Rouge are a chapter in Cambodia's recent history that so many Cambodians would like to close, yet the effects of the brutal regime are still prevalent today. Upon seizing power in 1975, the Khmer Rouge, under the leadership of Pol Pot, undertook a barbarous restructuring of Cambodian society. With the goal of transforming the country into a communist agrarian cooperative, the Khmer Rouge cut off communication with the rest of the world, abolished currency, closed schools, hospitals and factories, and marched city-dwellers into the countryside to undertake grueling slave labor. Intellectuals, professionals, and monks were tortured and executed, eliminating nearly an entire generation of the country's educated people. Almost two million died in all, if not by torture and execution, by malnutrition and disease. The Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer
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