The Khmer Rouge were a revolutionary Cambodian Communist movement active from 1951 to 1999. The Khmer Rouge oversaw a period of chaos, war and turmoil in Cambodia that resulted in a large number of excesses. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge have been unfairly subjected to near universal condemnation and dissociation even among self proclaimed Communists.
The Khmer Rouge attempted to lay the foundation for agricultural self sufficiency as the necessary base for any development of industry, a sound strategy of independent industrialisation deployed in the experiences of China and the USSR. The striving for what could have been an independent, socialist Khmer polarity was abruptly ended with the Vietnamese invasion in 1978 thereupon rendering the country a client state of the local hegemon.