On April 17, 1975, tanks rolled into the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, to cheering crowds who believed that the country’s long civil war might finally be over.
But what followed was one of the worst genocides of the 20th century. During a brutal four-year rule, the communist-nationalist ideologues of the Khmer Rouge killed between 1.6 million and 3 million people through executions, forced labor and starvation. It represented a quarter of the country’s population at the time.
