Cambodia - The Khmer Rouge, or NADK (National Army of Democratic Kampuchea)

The Khmer Rouge is dead for now with maybe a couple of thousand KR running around the jungles of Anlong Veng still playing revolution. The KR's legacy is still shaping Cambodia's future. Like the Afghans, the KR was another CIA Frankenstein, and responsible for between 1.7 to 2 million deaths during their vicious, extreme and xenophobic experiment in radical collective agrarianism between 1975 and 1979 in a genocide unparalleled in modern times. Perhaps a quarter of the Khmer population perished from executions, torture, disease, starvation and exhaustion in only four years at the hands of the KR. The KR and leader Pol Pot were ousted from power in January 1979 by the Vietnamese and retreated to Cambodia's western jungles, where they fought a war of attrition against the government, slaughtering ethnic Vietnamese and abducting foreign tourists, until early 1999. In the KR's final years, starting with the August 1996 defection of Brother #3 Ieng Sary, some 15,000 guerrillas defected to the government side, reducing the KR to an armed barbershop quartet. The defecting rebels were played like cards by Hun Sen and Ranariddh before the July 1997 coup. After the coup, KR completely disintegrated, as the last remaining holdouts-Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea-scrambled to cut deals to save their asses. Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot's former spokesman and nominal leader of the Khmer Rouge, had closed a deal with Ranariddh-granting the KR henchman amnesty and a significant role in a Funcinpec political alliance-just hours before the putsch began. That deal died with the coup, but Khieu Samphan is now living comfortably, along with Nuon Chea, in the former KR headquarters-now the semiautonomous zone run by Ieng Sary-of Pailin. Another KR bigshot, Son Sen, was reportedly shot dead by Pol Pot. As for Pol Pot himself, he was put on a show trial by the remaining KR forces in July 1997 and sentenced to life under "house arrest." He died under mysterious circumstances close to the Thai border on April 15, 1998. Unlike some other insurgencies across the globe, the Khmer Rouge never built a Web site, but a Yale research team has put together a biographical database for the Web containing about 6,000 biographies of Khmer Rouge leaders and their victims. More are being added. There is also a geographical database of maps of the killing fields and mass graves, as well as an archive of more than 6,000 photos of KR victims after their arrest. Check out:

Yale Research Database

http://www.yale.edu/cgp