Khmer Rouge Apology for Genocide

Date: December 29, 1998 • Location: Rome, Italy

Leaders of the Khmer Rouge apologize for the Cambodian genocide that claimed over one million lives.

Khmer Rouge is the name that was popularly given to members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), and by extension to Democratic Kampuchea, which ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The name was coined in the 1960s by Norodom Sihanouk to describe his country's heterogeneous, communist-led dissidents, with whom he allied after the 1970 Cambodian coup d'état.