The authoritative historian of Cambodia, Chandler (1991) writes that the PPR left over a million dead, but existing estimates actually range from 741,000 to 3,315 million. Long delayed by domestic and global politics though, the ECCC might not have been constituted to eventually indict the PPR leadership more than three decades after the fall of the regime and more than a decade after the death of Pol Pot himself were it not for the massive death toll. The scale of a mortality crisis is not among the criteria included in the literal definition of genocide in the 1948 United Nations Convention. Curtailing food production and annihilating disease prevention and treatment capacities in particular, the leadership of the Pol Pot Regime (PPR thereafter) thus contributed to a general mortality crisis that might have indiscriminately killed more people than any of their more specific, targeted policies. The ECCC has thus reviewed specific actions and policies which took place in the context of the complete overhaul of Cambodia's political, administrative and social structures and the destruction of much of its infrastructure. In accordance with the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide ( United Nations 1951), the ECCC has focused on executions, deaths from exhaustion or starvation related to forced population movements and forced labour, and the treatment of specific ethnic and religious groups. In 2011, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) indicted the four highest-ranking surviving former Democratic Kampuchea officials. Today, many people in Cambodia remember its exact duration, “three years, eight months, and twenty days,” and are more likely to refer to this tragic period as “during Pol Pot”-the name taken by its actual leader, who died in 1998. The median value of 1.9 million excess deaths represents 21 percent of the population at risk.įrom April 1975 to January 1979, the government of Cambodia was officially known as Democratic Kampuchea. The 1.5 to 2.25 million interval contains 69 per cent of the simulations for the actual number of excess death, more than the wider (one to two million) range of previous plausible estimates. The resulting 95-percent simulation interval (1.2 to 2.8 million excess deaths) demonstrates substantial uncertainty with regards to the exact scale of mortality, yet still excludes nearly half of the previous death-toll estimates. Stochastically reconstructing population dynamics in Cambodia from extant historical and demographic data yields interpretable distributions of the death toll and other demographic indicators. The more plausible among those, methodologically, still vary from one to two million deaths, but this range of independent point estimates has no particular statistical meaning.
Estimates of excess deaths under Pol Pot's rule of Cambodia (1975-79) range from under one million to over three million.
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