After taking Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975, the Communist Party of Kampuchea held the whole population in agricultural cooperatives and labour worksites in pursuit of what the US Holocaust Memorial Museum calls a ruthless agrarian ideology. The emptying of the cities in April 1975 is covered by the atlas's separate entry on the evacuation; this entry covers the regime that followed until its fall in January 1979. Overwork, starvation and disease killed vast numbers, while a network of security offices imprisoned, tortured and executed people accused of being enemies; the Documentation Center of Cambodia has mapped 196 Democratic Kampuchea prisons and 19,733 mass grave pits at 388 sites, and Yale's Cambodian Genocide Program holds a 100,000-page archive of the regime's security police. The ECCC demographic expert report estimated 1.75-2.2 million deaths, of which 0.8-1.3 million were violent, and found that about 36 per cent of Cham and nearly all Vietnamese remaining in Cambodia perished against 18.7 per cent of ethnic Khmer. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia convicted Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan of crimes against humanity including extermination, enslavement at cooperatives and worksites, persecution of Buddhists, the Cham and former Khmer Republic officials, torture and forced marriage, and of genocide of the Vietnamese; the expulsion and killing of the Vietnamese minority is covered in its own atlas entry.
The Communist Party of Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge) held Cambodia's population in agricultural cooperatives and worksites under forced labour, and killed perceived enemies, former officials, Buddhists and minorities through a network of security centres
The lower bound is the Yale Cambodian Genocide Program's estimate of approximately 1.7 million deaths, about 21 per cent of the population; the upper is the top of the 1.75-2.2 million range in the 2009 demographic expert report prepared for the ECCC by Ewa Tabeau and They Kheam, who estimated 0.8-1.3 million of these deaths as violent and the rest from starvation, overwork and disease, and stressed that no population statistics exist for the period. The range covers all deaths under Democratic Kampuchea and so includes the 2,000-20,000 deaths the atlas attributes to the April 1975 evacuation and the Democratic Kampuchea-era killing of ethnic Vietnamese counted in that entry.
The ECCC's Case 002/02 judgments found extermination, enslavement at cooperatives and worksites, torture, forced marriage and rape, and persecution of Buddhists and the Cham, and the Documentation Center of Cambodia mapped 196 Democratic Kampuchea prisons and 19,733 mass grave pits.
Cambodia