WHO WERE THE KHMER ROUGE?
• Maoist regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975-1979 • Founded and led by Pol Pot, who died in 1998 • Abolished religion, schools and currency in a bid to create agrarian utopia • Up to two million people thought to have died from starvation, overwork or execution Later he became a high school teacher, earning a reputation as a tough and exacting instructor. But his leftist activism had attracted the attention of the police and in the late 1960s he was detained for several months. By then conflict was spreading through the country. US and south Vietnamese forces had invaded Cambodia in search of communists from north Vietnam. They bombed swathes of eastern Cambodia, driving villagers into the arms of leftist rebels fighting the unpopular US-backed government. Duch joined the rebels, who were calling themselves the Khmer Rouge. He served as a sector security chief and, in 1971, spent three months interrogating captured French anthropologist Francois Bizot. Mr Bizot described him as a “tru
