Pol Pot

Pol Pot was a Cambodian politician, revolutionary, and dictator who ruled Democratic Kampuchea from 1975 until his overthrow in 1979 during the Cambodian–Vietnamese War. Ideologically a Maoist and Khmer ethnonationalist, Pot led Cambodia's Communist movement, known as the Khmer Rouge, which seized power in 1975 and established a one-party state under the Communist Party of Kampuchea. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge perpetrated the Cambodian genocide, in which an estimated 1.5–2 million people died—approximately one-quarter of the country's pre-genocide population. In December 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia to remove the Khmer Rouge from power, ending the genocide and establishing a new Cambodian government, with the Khmer Rouge restricted to the rural hinterlands in the western p