The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide
'Year Zero': a capital emptied within days
On 17 April 1975 Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh and within days drove its entire population into the countryside. Money, schools and religion were abolished, and 'class enemies' and the educated were killed; thousands were tortured to death in the S-21 prison. By estimates 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians died, nearly a quarter of the population. The regime fell to a Vietnamese invasion in January 1979.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 5 years later
Europe
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 22 years earlier
- 1961 Berlin Wall built — 14 years earlier
- 1968 May 1968 in France — 7 years earlier
- 1989 Invention of the World Wide Web — 14 years later
- 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall — 14 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 18 years earlier
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 14 years earlier
- 1985–1991 Perestroika — 10 years later
- 1989 Revolutions of 1989 — 14 years later
- 1991 Dissolution of the Soviet Union — 16 years later
Middle East
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 4 years later
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 5 years later
- 1990–1991 Gulf War — 15 years later
Africa
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 12 years earlier
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 8 years earlier
- 1967–1970 Nigerian Civil War and Biafra — 8 years earlier
- 1974 Lucy is discovered — 1 year earlier
- 1983–1985 The Ethiopian famine — 8 years later
Americas
- 1969 Moon landing — 6 years earlier
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 5 years earlier
- 1973 Chilean coup d'état — 2 years earlier
- 1980 Eruption of Mount St. Helens — 5 years later
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 8 years later
Oceania
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 21 years earlier
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 16 years earlier
- 1992 The Mabo decision — 17 years later
Alive at the time
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 86)
- Mao Zedong (aged 82)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 57)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 45)
- Haile Selassie (aged 83)
- Golda Meir (aged 77)
- Jorge Luis Borges (aged 76)
- Hirohito (Emperor Shōwa) (aged 74)
- Dmitri Shostakovich (aged 69)
- Leonid Brezhnev (aged 69)