Foundation of the party and first divisions

The party was founded in 1951, when the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) was divided into separate Cambodian, Lao and Vietnamese communist parties. The decision to form a separate Cambodian communist party was taken at the ICP congress in February of the same year. Different sources claim different dates for the party's founding and first congress. Son Ngoc Minh was appointed as acting chairman of the party. The party congress did not elect a full Central Committee, but instead appointed a Party Propagation and Formation Committee.^[7]

At its formation, the Cambodian party was called the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP). The Vietnamese heavily dominated the ICP, and the Vietnamese party actively supported the KPRP during its initial phase of existence. Due to the reliance on Vietnamese support in the joint struggle against French colonial rule, the party's history would later be rewritten, stating 1960 as the year of the party's foundation.^[8]

According to Democratic Kampuchea's version of party history, the Viet Minh's failure to negotiate a political role for the KPRP at the 1954 Geneva Conference represented a betrayal of the Cambodian movement, which still controlled large areas of the countryside and which commanded at least 5,000 armed men. Following the conference, about 1,000 members of the KPRP, including Son Ngoc Minh, made a Long March into North Vietnam, where they remained in exile. In late 1954, those who stayed in Cambodia founded a legal political party, the Krom Pracheachon, which participated in the National Assembly elections of 1955 and 1958.^[8]

In the September 1955 election, it won about 4% of the vote but did not secure a seat in the legislature. Members of the Pracheachon were subject to constant harassment and arrests because the party remained outside Prince Norodom Sihanouk's Sangkum. Government attacks prevented it from participating in the 1962 election and drove it underground. It is speculated that the decision of Pracheachon to file candidates for the election had not been approved by the now renamed "Workers' Party of Kampuchea" (WPK).^[8] Sihanouk habitually labeled local leftists the Khmer Rouge, a term that later came to signify the party and the state.

During the mid-1950s, two KPRP factions, the "urban committee" (headed by Tou Samouth) and the "rural committee" (led by Sieu Heng), emerged. In very general terms, these groups espoused divergent revolutionary lines. The prevalent "urban" line endorsed by North Vietnam recognized that Sihanouk, by virtue of his success in winning independence from the French, was a genuine national leader whose neutralism and deep distrust of the United States made him a valuable asset in Hanoi's struggle to "liberate" South Vietnam. Champions of this line hoped that the prince could be persuaded to distance himself from the right-wing and to adopt leftist policies.

The other line, supported for the most part by rural cadres who were familiar with the harsh realities of the countryside, advocated an immediate struggle to overthrow the "feudalist" Sihanouk. In 1959, Sieu Heng defected to the government and provided the security forces with information that enabled them to destroy as much as 90% of the party's rural apparatus. Although communist networks in Phnom Penh and other towns under Tou Samouth's jurisdiction fared better, only a few hundred communists remained active in the country by 1960.

Paris students' group

During the 1950s, Khmer students in Paris organized a communist movement, which had little connection to the hard-pressed party in their homeland. The men and women who returned home and took command of the party apparatus during the 1960s came from their ranks. They led an effective insurgency against Sihanouk and Lon Nol from 1968 until 1975 and established the regime of Democratic Kampuchea.

Pol Pot, who rose to the leadership of the communist movement in the 1960s, was born in 1928 (some sources say in 1925) in Kampong Thum Province, northeast of Phnom Penh. He attended a technical high school in the capital and then went to Paris in 1949 to study radio electronics (other sources say he attended a school for printers and typesetters and also studied civil engineering). Ieng Sary was a Chinese-Khmer born in 1930 in South Vietnam. He attended the elite Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh before beginning courses in commerce and politics at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (more widely known as Sciences Po) in France. Khieu Samphan, considered "one of the most brilliant intellects of his generation", was born in 1931 and specialized in economics and politics during his time in Paris. In talent, he was rivaled by Hou Yuon (born in 1930), who studied economics and law. Son Sen (born in 1930) studied education and literature, while Hu Nim (born in 1932) studied law.

Most members of the Paris student group came from landowners' or civil servants' families. Three of the Paris group forged a bond that survived years of revolutionary struggle and intraparty strife. Pol Pot and Ieng Sary married Khieu Ponnary and Khieu Thirith (also known as Ieng Thirith), purportedly relatives of Khieu Samphan. These two well-educated women also played a central role in the regime of Democratic Kampuchea.

At some time between 1949 and 1951, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary joined the French Communist Party. In 1951, the two men went to East Berlin to participate in a youth festival. This experience is considered a turning point in their ideological development. Meeting with Khmers fighting with the Viet Minh (whom they subsequently judged too subservient to the Vietnamese) convinced them that only a tightly disciplined party organization and a readiness for armed struggle could achieve revolution. They transformed the Khmer Students' Association (KSA), to which most of the 200 Khmer students in Paris belonged, into an organization for nationalist and leftist ideas.

Inside the KSA and its successor organizations was a secret organization known as the Cercle Marxiste. The organization was composed of cells of three to six members, with most members knowing nothing about the overall structure. In 1952, Pol Pot, Hou Yuon, Ieng Sary, and other leftists gained notoriety by sending an open letter to Sihanouk calling him the "strangler of infant democracy". A year later, the French authorities closed down the KSA, but Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphan helped to establish in 1956 a new group, the Khmer Students' Union. Inside, the group was still run by the Cercle Marxiste.

The doctoral dissertations written by Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphan express basic themes that were later to become the cornerstones of the policy adopted by Democratic Kampuchea. Hou Yuon espoused the central role of the peasants in national development in his 1955 thesis, The Cambodian Peasants and Their Prospects for Modernization, which challenged the conventional view that urbanization and industrialization are necessary precursors of development. The principal argument in Khieu Samphan's 1959 thesis, Cambodia's Economy and Industrial Development, was that the country had to become self-reliant and end its economic dependency on the developed world. In its general contours, Khieu's work reflected the influence of a branch of the "dependency theory" school, which blamed the lack of development in the Third World on the economic domination of the industrialized nations.

Clandestine existence in Phnom Penh

After returning to Cambodia in 1953, Pol Pot threw himself into party work. At first, he went to join with forces allied to the Viet Minh operating in the rural areas of Kampong Cham Province (Kompong Cham). After the end of the war, he moved to Phnom Penh under Tou Samouth's "urban committee", where he became an important point of contact between the above-ground parties of the left and the underground secret communist movement. His allies, Ieng Sary and Hou Yuon, became teachers at a new private high school, the Lycée Kambuboth, which Hou Yuon helped to establish.

Khieu Samphan returned from Paris in 1959, taught as a University of Phnom Penh law faculty member, and started a left-wing French-language publication, L'Observateur. The paper soon acquired a reputation in Phnom Penh's small academic circle. The following year, the government closed the paper, and Sihanouk's police publicly humiliated Khieu by beating, undressing, and photographing him in public—as Shawcross notes, "not the sort of humiliation that men forgive or forget". Yet the experience did not prevent Khieu from advocating cooperation with Sihanouk to promote a united front against United States activities in South Vietnam. As mentioned, Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon, and Hu Nim were forced to "work through the system" by joining the Sangkum and accepting posts in the prince's government.

From 28 to 30 September 1960, twenty-one leaders of the KPRP held a secret congress in a vacant room of the Phnom Penh railroad station. Approximately 14 delegates represented the rural faction, and seven represented the urban faction.^[9] This pivotal event remains shrouded in mystery because its outcome has become an object of contention (and considerable historical rewriting) between pro-Vietnamese and anti-Vietnamese Khmer communist factions. The party was renamed the Workers Party of Kampuchea at the meeting. The question of cooperation with, or resistance to, Sihanouk was thoroughly discussed. A new party structure was adopted, and for the first time, a permanent Central Committee was appointed with Tou Samouth (who advocated a policy of cooperation) as the party's general secretary.^[8]

His ally Nuon Chea (Long Reth) became deputy general secretary. At the same time, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary were named to the Central Committee to occupy the third and the fifth highest positions in the party hierarchy. Another committee member was veteran communist Keo Meas. In Democratic Kampuchea, this meeting would later be projected as the founding date of the party, consciously downplaying the history of the party before Pol Pot's ascent to leadership.^[8]

On 20 July 1962, Tou Samouth was murdered by the Cambodian government. At the WPK's second congress in February 1963, Pol Pot was chosen to succeed Tou Samouth as the party's general secretary. Tou's allies Nuon Chea and Keo Meas were removed from the Central Committee and replaced by Son Sen and Vorn Vet. From then on, Pol Pot and loyal allies from his Paris student days controlled the party center, edging out older veterans whom they considered excessively pro-Vietnamese.

Insurgency in rural Cambodia

In July 1963, Pol Pot and most of the central committee left Phnom Penh to establish an insurgent base in Ratanakiri Province in the northeast. Pol Pot had shortly before been put on a list of thirty-four leftists whom Sihanouk summoned to join the government and sign statements saying Sihanouk was the only possible leader for the country. Pol Pot and Chou Chet were the only people who escaped. All the others agreed to cooperate with the government and were afterward under 24-hour watch by the police.

In the mid-1960s, the United States Department of State estimated the party membership to be approximately 100.^[10]

The region Pol Pot and the others moved to was inhabited by tribal minorities, the Khmer Loeu, whose rough treatment (including resettlement and forced assimilation) at the hands of the central government made them willing recruits for a guerrilla struggle. In 1965, Pol Pot made a visit of several months to North Vietnam and China. He probably received some training in China, which enhanced his prestige when he returned to the WPK's liberated areas. Despite friendly relations between Sihanouk and the Chinese, the latter kept Pol Pot's visit a secret from Sihanouk.^[11]

In 1971, the party changed its name to the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). The party statutes, published in the mid-1970s, claim that the party congress approved the name change in 1971.^[11] The change in the party's name was a closely guarded secret. Lower-ranking members of the party and even the Vietnamese were not told of it, and neither was the membership until many years later. The party leadership endorsed an armed struggle against the government led by Sihanouk. In 1967, the CPK made several small-scale attempts at insurgency but failed with little success.

In 1968, the Khmer Rouge launched a national insurgency across Cambodia. Though North Vietnam had not been informed of the decision, its forces provided shelter and weapons to the Khmer Rouge after the insurgency started. The guerrilla forces of the party were baptized as the Kampuchean Revolutionary Army. Vietnamese support for the insurgency made it impossible for the ineffective and poorly motivated Royal Cambodian Army to counter it effectively.

Rise to power

The political appeal of the Khmer Rouge was increased as a result of the situation created by the removal of Sihanouk as head of state in 1970. Premier Lon Nol, with the support of the National Assembly, deposed Sihanouk. Sihanouk, in exile in Beijing, allied with the Kampuchean Communist Party and became the nominal head of a Khmer Rouge-dominated government-in-exile (known by its French acronym GRUNK) backed by the People's Republic of China. Sihanouk's popular support in rural Cambodia allowed the Khmer Rouge to extend its power and influence to the point that by 1973, it exercised de facto control over the majority of Cambodian territory, although only a minority of its population.

The relationship between the massive carpet bombing of Cambodia by the United States and the growth of the Khmer Rouge, in terms of recruitment and popular support, has been a matter of interest to historians. Some historians, including Michael Ignatieff, Adam Jones^[12] and Greg Grandin,^[13] have cited the United States intervention and bombing campaign (spanning 1965–1973) as a significant factor which led to increased support for the Khmer Rouge among the Cambodian peasantry.^[14] According to Ben Kiernan, the Khmer Rouge "would not have won power without U.S. economic and military destabilization of Cambodia. ... It used the bombing's devastation and massacre of civilians as recruitment propaganda and as an excuse for its brutal, radical policies and its purge of moderate communists and Sihanoukists."^[15]

Pol Pot biographer David P. Chandler writes that the bombing "had the effect the Americans wanted – it broke the Communist encirclement of Phnom Penh", but it also accelerated the collapse of rural society and increased social polarization.^[16][17][18] Peter Rodman and Michael Lind claimed that the United States intervention saved the Lon Nol regime from collapse in 1970 and 1973.^[19][20] Craig Etcheson acknowledged that U.S. intervention increased recruitment for the Khmer Rouge but disputed that it was a primary cause of the Khmer Rouge victory.^[21] William Shawcross wrote that the United States bombing and ground incursion plunged Cambodia into the chaos that Sihanouk had worked for years to avoid.^[22]

By 1973, Vietnamese support of the Khmer Rouge had largely disappeared.^[23] China "armed and trained" the Khmer Rouge both during the civil war and the years afterward.^[24]

When the United States Congress suspended military aid to the Lon Nol government in 1973, the Khmer Rouge made sweeping gains in the country, completely overwhelming the Khmer National Armed Forces. On 17 April 1975, the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh and overthrew the Khmer Republic, executing all its officers.

Angkar

For roughly two years after the CPK took power, it referred to itself as the Angkar (Khmer: អង្គការ, ALA-LC: ʿʹanggakār [ʔɑŋkaː]; meaning 'Organization'). However, Pol Pot publicly declared on 29 September 1977 the existence of the CPK in a five-hour-long speech.^[7] He revealed the true character of the supreme authority in Cambodia, an obscure ruling body that had been kept in seclusion.

The CPK had been extremely secretive throughout its existence. Before 1975, secrecy was needed for the party's survival. Pol Pot and his closest associates relied on continuing the extreme secrecy to consolidate their position against those they perceived as internal enemies during their first two years of power. The revelation of the CPK's existence shortly before Pol Pot was due to travel to Peking resulted from pressure from China on the Khmer Rouge leaders to acknowledge their true political identity at a time when they increasingly depended on China's assistance against the threats from Vietnam.^[25]

Accordingly, Pol Pot, in his speech, claimed that the CPK's foundation had been in 1960 and emphasized its separate identity from the Communist Party of Vietnam.^[25] This secrecy continued even after the CPK took power. Unlike most totalitarian dictators, Pol Pot was not the object of an open personality cult. It was almost a year before it was confirmed that he was Saloth Sar, the man long cited as the CPK's general secretary.