[12] 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.

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.

Khieu Samphan, considered "one of the most brilliant intellects of his generation"[citation needed], was born in 1931 and specialized in economics and politics during his time in Paris.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[13] 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.

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.

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.

[14] 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.

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[16] and Greg Grandin,[17] 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.

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.

"[19] 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.

[25] William Shawcross wrote that the United States bombing and ground incursion plunged Cambodia into the chaos that Sihanouk had worked for years to avoid.

The Standing Committee of the Khmer Rouge's Central Committee (Party Center) during its period of power consisted of the following: In power, the Khmer Rouge carried out a radical program that included isolating the country from foreign influence, closing schools, hospitals, and factories, abolishing banking, finance and currency, outlawing all religions, confiscating all private property and relocating people from urban areas to collective farms where forced labor was widespread.

The Khmer Rouge attempted to turn Cambodia into a classless society by depopulating cities and forcing the urban population into agricultural communes through brutal totalitarian methods.

During their four years in power, the Khmer Rouge overworked and starved the population while at the same time executing selected groups who had the potential to undermine the new state (including intellectuals) and killing many others for even minor breaches of rules.

Through the 1970s and especially after mid-1975, the party became increasingly paranoid, blaming failures caused by its agricultural policies on external enemies (usually the CIA and Vietnam) and domestic traitors.

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.

Along with Heng Samrin, Pen Sovan was one of the foremost founding members of the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation (KUFNS or FUNSK) after becoming disillusioned with the Khmer Rouge.