All events · Cold War Proxies

Khmer Rouge Forced Evacuation of Cambodian Cities

1975 · East & Southeast Asia

Displacement

Displaced

2 million

an estimated 2 to 2.5 million residents of Phnom Penh (whose wartime population had swollen with refugees) were forced into the countryside within days of the city's fall; nationwide, the evacuation of virtually all urban centers affected several million people in total

Share of the population affected

80%

of the urban population of Cambodia in April 1975, above all Phnom Penh, swollen by five years of war refugees, 1975

Killed

2,000–20,000

deaths in transit or in camps

Open on the interactive map →

What happened

When Khmer Rouge forces captured Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975, they immediately ordered the entire city, whose population had swollen to an estimated 2 to 2.5 million with wartime refugees, evacuated within days, at gunpoint and often on foot, with little food or water. Similar evacuations swept every other Cambodian city and town in the following weeks as the new Communist Party of Kampuchea leadership sought to remake the country into an agrarian, self-sufficient society under what it called "Year Zero." The forced marches and subsequent collectivized labor in rural communes killed an unknown but large number of people from exhaustion, starvation, and disease, and became a defining feature of the broader Khmer Rouge period, during which an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians died of execution, forced labor, and famine by 1979.

Parties

The Khmer Rouge forcibly evacuated Phnom Penh and other Cambodian cities within days of taking power, driving urban residents into rural labor communes

Disputed

The Khmer Rouge justified the evacuation as a security and food-supply necessity in the face of feared US bombing and famine; most historians and Cambodian survivors regard it as a deliberate first step in a genocidal social transformation program.

The denominator

Phnom Penh held roughly 600,000 people before 1970 and about 2-2.5 million when the Khmer Rouge entered, most of them displaced villagers already living in the city as refugees; with Battambang and the other provincial towns the urban total was near 2.5 million, out of a national population of roughly 7.3 million.

Where the baseline comes from

Fall of Phnom Penhopen-edited
Khmer Rougeopen-edited

On the death toll

Khieu Samphan claimed that the evacuation of Phnom Penh's roughly 2-2.5 million residents caused 2,000-3,000 deaths, a figure the US Library of Congress country study on Cambodia calls probably an understatement, the same study putting deaths during the movement at almost 20,000. The ECCC found that many died of exhaustion, malnutrition and disease for want of food, water, medical care and transport, without fixing a number. These figures cover the April 1975 evacuation itself, not the 1.5-3 million who died under Democratic Kampuchea overall.

Documented forms of violence

Summary Execution

The ECCC in Case 002/01 convicted Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan of murder and extermination for the execution of Khmer Republic officials at Tuol Po Chrey during the evacuation, alongside political persecution and the forced transfer itself as an inhumane act.

Formal findings

Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) (2014) — Case 002/01: Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan convicted of crimes against humanity — murder, political persecution and other inhumane acts comprising forced transfer and attacks on human dignity — for the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh and the subsequent population movements; life sentences, upheld on appeal in 2016 — source

Movements mapped

Phnom Penh → Battambang province700,000
Phnom Penh → Kampong Cham province600,000
Phnom Penh → Pursat province500,000

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Cambodia

Related entries

Overlaps with: Cambodian Refugee Exodus to Thailand
Some of those driven from Cambodia's cities in April 1975 were among the Cambodians who later fled to the Thai border camps.
Continued as: Democratic Kampuchea: Cooperatives, Forced Labour and Mass Killing under the Khmer Rouge
The people evacuated from Cambodia's cities in April 1975 were then held in the Khmer Rouge cooperatives.

Sources

Fall of Phnom Penhopen-edited
Day One: April 17, 1975NGO
Khmer Rouge Orders the Evacuation of Phnom Penh's Populationpress