For the Khmer Rouge, the revolution was not complete until it had remade the very soul of Cambodia. Inspired by the most radical currents of communist thought, Pol Pot’s regime set out not merely to redistribute land or abolish class, but to dissolve the ties of family, erase old identities, and stamp out every trace of difference.

The violence of Cambodia’s “Year Zero” was not only physical, it was a campaign to reorder how people lived, loved, and remembered.

In the days after Phnom Penh’s fall in April 1975, entire cities were emptied and families herded into the countryside. In the eyes of the revolution, the old world had to be destroyed so the new could be built. Families, long the bedrock of Cambodian society, were broken up as a matter of policy. Husbands and wives were separated into different work teams, often hundreds of kilometres apart. Children were taken from their parents and raised in communal dormitories, their loyalty redirected from blood relations to the collective and the party. Mothers and fathers, once the centre of a child’s universe, became strangers glimpsed only in passing, if at all.

The abolition of the family was not a side effect, but a conscious act of social engineering. The Khmer Rouge’s leaders believed that personal attachment was a threat to revolutionary unity. Love for family, tradition, or religion could compete with loyalty to Angkar(a word meaning “organization” in the Khmer language) that directed every aspect of life.

Children were taught to inform on parents who mourned the past, expressed doubt, or held secret religious or cultural rituals. Confessions wrung from children sent parents to re-education or, more often, to the Killing Fields. The revolution prided itself on making children “blank slates,” unburdened by the old ways – tools for a new society.

Identity and memory

The assault on family was mirrored by a war on identity and memory. Names were changed; personal histories erased. Ethnic minorities such as Vietnamese, Chinese, Cham Muslims, and others were targeted for persecution or extermination, not just for political reasons but because their very existence was seen as an obstacle to the regime’s dream of homogenous purity.

Speaking a foreign language, practicing forbidden customs, or clinging to ancestral beliefs became acts of resistance punishable by death. Even among ethnic Khmers, difference was treated with suspicion: those who wore glasses, spoke French, or had “soft hands” from office work were considered unfit for the new Cambodia.

Religion, too, was an enemy. Buddhist monks were defrocked and sent to labour camps. Pagodas became storage sheds or prisons. Rituals for the dead, so central to Cambodian life, were outlawed, denying families the comfort of mourning and disrupting the spiritual map of an entire people. Ancestors, once honoured and remembered, were to be forgotten. Only the revolution, and the living embodiment of the party, deserved reverence.

This campaign of social engineering was carried out with a zeal that left little space for compassion or dissent. Daily life became a round of collective labour, communal meals, and constant surveillance. Meals were eaten in silence; conversations were dangerous.

Fear and hunger replaced intimacy and trust. The old rhythms of festivals, marriages, and funerals disappeared. Children grew up without the words or rituals to express grief, and adults learned to guard every word.

Forbidden

Yet even as the Khmer Rouge sought to erase difference, resistance endured in whispers and hidden gestures. Some parents risked their lives to share food with their children or pass down a forbidden lullaby.

In secret, families marked the anniversaries of the dead or spoke the names of ancestors. Sometimes, the smallest act of memory became an act of rebellion against the all-consuming demands of the regime.

When the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979, the survivors emerged into a world that was at once familiar and utterly changed. Families that had been scattered struggled to reunite; children searched for parents who were gone, or who no longer recognised them. The old bonds could not be easily rebuilt. Cambodia’s fields, haunted by bones and silence, testified to what had been lost not just in bodies, but in the destruction of trust, tradition, and belonging.

Today, Cambodia still lives with the wounds of this assault on its social fabric. The loss of parents, the erasure of ancestry, the absence of rituals, all are carried in the memories of survivors and in the gaps that shape the next generation. The lesson is a stark one: the violence of radical social engineering does not end when the guns fall silent. Its aftershocks echo in every family that was torn apart, every story that cannot be told, and every silence that settles in the space where difference once flourished.