Indoctrinating innocents: From the Khmer Rouge to Hamas, the art of child indoctrination

Ham Sarun always dreamed of being a teacher. Growing up in the Prey Veng province of eastern Cambodia, on the east bank of the Mekong River, life was quiet and provincial.

Sarun grew up in a village where agriculture was the family’s main source of income.

“I studied up to grade three in school, but some of my siblings got to reach grade five. When I was a child, I dreamed of being a teacher, but I lost my dream because of the Khmer Rouge.”

It was the Khmer Rouge that took Sarun’s adolescence from him when it took over Cambodia and initiated a genocide against its own people. Sarun was conscripted into a movement where ideology demanded obedience and childhood had no value.

Instead, it was the beginning of one of the most radical and deadly social experiments of the 20th century – a descent into terror that would claim nearly two million lives and one-quarter of Cambodia’s population in just under four years.

And in less than 72 hours, Phnom Penh was emptied.

By the end of that week, the capital, once a vibrant metropolis of nearly 2.5 million people swollen by refugees, was a ghost town. Hospitals, schools, shops, and temples were all abandoned. Even the sick and dying were dragged from their beds and forced onto the roads.

Some people died on their way out. Others were shot because they couldn’t walk fast enough.

Khmer Rouge soldiers, often no older than teenagers, stormed into homes, hospitals, and schools shouting orders through megaphones and firing into the air. Loudspeakers repeated the same line: “Leave the city for three days. The Americans will bomb!” Fearful and war-weary, the citizens obeyed. Few realized it was a lie.

The goal of this mass expulsion was total transformation. The Khmer Rouge viewed cities as parasites. In their eyes, Phnom Penh represented colonialism, capitalism, foreign influence, and class hierarchy. Their solution was to erase it entirely, and within 72 hours one of Southeast Asia’s most vibrant cities was silenced – its buildings left to rot, and its population dispersed.

The ideological engine driving this was a unique and extreme fusion of Maoism, xenophobia, and Cambodian peasant nationalism. Pol Pot and his comrades believed that only by destroying all remnants of modern society could they achieve true revolutionary purity. They envisioned a Cambodia where everyone labored collectively in the countryside, disconnected from the past, religion, foreign influence, and even one another. Money, schools, religion, markets, and family units were abolished. People were stripped of their names and histories.

“This is Year Zero,” the Khmer Rouge stated. “What was here before is gone. We begin again.”

This chilling decree symbolized the erasure of everything that had come before.

Life in the so-called “new society” quickly devolved into a nightmare. In the vast rural labor camps, what would come to be called the Killing Fields, former doctors, teachers, artists, and shopkeepers were forced to perform backbreaking agricultural work.

The regime enforced silence. Speaking too much or too little was suspect. Smiling or crying could be misread as betrayal. Neighbors were encouraged to inform on each other. Children were recruited to spy on their parents. The family unit, once the cornerstone of Cambodian society, was dismantled. Even language was controlled; personal pronouns were eliminated in favor of the uniform “comrade.”

By 1977, paranoia within the regime had reached such extremes that the Khmer Rouge turned on its own ranks. Cadres were arrested, tortured, and sent to execution centers like Tuol Sleng, code named S-21, a former high school in Phnom Penh converted into a torture prison. There, inmates were photographed, shackled, electrocuted, waterboarded, and forced to sign false confessions of working for the CIA or KGB. Of the estimated 17,000 people sent there, only a handful survived.

By the time of his conscription, most of the domestic oppression against innocent Cambodians was long underway, and Sarun found himself guarding the border closest to his province, the border with Vietnam, which had just recovered from its own deadly civil war.

“The Khmer Rouge filled us with their ideology, telling us that everyone had to work hard and be ready to fight the Vietnamese,” Sarun explained. “The Khmer Rouge picked me and told me to work hard, to train, and to be angry at the Vietnamese. They told us that the Vietnamese had invaded Cambodia.”

The Khmer Rouge’s collapse in January 1979 was as swift as its rise had been shocking. Though deeply feared, the regime was structurally hollow. Its military was disorganized, its economy was in ruins, and its population was exhausted and resentful, all of which led to the rapid collapse of the regime. Years of purges had decimated its own ranks, leaving leadership paranoid and the chain of command fractured. The Khmer Rouge had no air force, minimal heavy weaponry, and no real capacity to resist a large-scale invasion.

Sarun was among those forced to defend his starved and exhausted country.

“I fought the Vietnamese along the border. Two or three times a month, we saw combat against the Vietnamese, and it was a busy border. I was ordered to do it by my commander.

“Some who were with me believed in their teachings; some didn’t. We were taught we were a loving family and to love our country but to hate the enemy. At the beginning, I believed what the Khmer Rouge taught us, but then I stopped.”

Finally, Vietnam launched its assault in December 1978, provoked by years of cross-border attacks and an ideological rift. The Khmer Rouge forces were overwhelmed within weeks. Phnom Penh fell on January 7, 1979, with almost no organized defense.

What sealed their fate was the total alienation of the Cambodian people. The regime had terrorized its own citizens so thoroughly that few were willing to fight for it. Many even welcomed the Vietnamese as liberators. The Khmer Rouge, built on secrecy, fear, and ideological extremism, had no capacity for resilience once its control began to crack. Its leaders fled west toward the Thai border, retreating into the jungle, where they would regroup as guerrillas. But their genocidal regime was, for the time being, broken.

The Vietnamese unearthed thousands of photographs taken by the Khmer Rouge of Tuol Sleng’s victims – men, women, children, and infants, all photographed before their execution. The images are now part of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, one of the world’s most chilling memorials.

The Khmer Rouge’s disastrous social experiment was dystopian Orwellianism. Apart from attempting to strip citizens of their names and identities and reshaping the calendar in their image, behind everything was the Angkar.

For nearly two years after seizing control of Cambodia, the Communist Party of Kampuchea governed behind a veil of anonymity, referring to itself simply as Angkar, “the Organization.” Power appeared faceless, like Big Brother, but with eyes and ears everywhere, reinforcing the sense that authority was everywhere and nowhere at once.

The myth of the Angkar was only punctuated on September 29, 1977, when Pol Pot delivered a marathon speech lasting several hours in which he publicly acknowledged the existence of the Communist Party of Kampuchea for the first time. The address marked the first official unveiling of the regime’s true political structure, revealing that Cambodia was ruled by a tightly controlled and long-hidden party leadership that had operated in near total secrecy.

Angkar stood at the center of this system. Children were taught that loyalty to the Organization superseded all other bonds. “The Khmer Rouge said that all the children are protected by the Angkar, not protected by their parents,” explained Pheng Pong Rasy, director of genocide education in Cambodia at the Documentation Center of Cambodia, an organization that has spent decades trying to document the Cambodian genocide.

“The children were taught that they have to do everything for Angkar.”

One story he shared emphasized the point. A woman he once interviewed had been a child during the Khmer Rouge years. Her story began even before the regime seized power.

Four years later, in 1976, the Khmer Rouge brought the children back to the village to see their parents. By then, both had risen within the organization. The boy had become the chief of a military unit. His sister was working as medical staff for the Khmer Rouge. They arrived in uniform, carrying the authority and status the regime had granted them.

The following month, the father committed another violation. This time, there was no beating.

The son executed him. He killed his father in front of the people of the village.

“This is war,” Rasy said. “This is about ideology. This is about position.” The boy, he explained, carried out Angkar’s orders “very perfectly… very honestly.” He had absorbed the ideology so completely that killing his own father became an act of duty.

The sister could not live with it. After witnessing what her brother had done, she fled the village. The trauma was unbearable. “She couldn’t take the pain,” he said.

Her brother, Rasy added, is still alive today.

Rasy's research makes clear that child indoctrination under the Khmer Rouge did not rely on a single method but on children’s availability and impressionability, which made them uniquely valuable to the regime.

“First of all, the children had no school to go to study,” Rasy explained. “The schools were closed at that time because of the bombing by the US.” With classrooms shuttered, children were more vulnerable. “So, the children are free,” he said, describing how easily they could be absorbed into the revolutionary system.

The Khmer Rouge treated this as the perfect opportunity.

“Children are like blank paper,” Rasy said. “They can receive all the ideology from the Khmer Rouge.” Unlike adults, children carried no professional identity, no education to unlearn, and no lived memory of a different society. They could be shaped entirely around the movement’s needs.

Recruitment was framed as duty and pride. Children were told they were defending Cambodia from enemies, just as Sarun was. “They focused more on the external threat than the internal threat,” Rasy said. The emphasis was not on explaining Communism but on mobilizing fear and loyalty. Everyone was called to join the revolution. “They don’t care… oh, they are children,” he said. “What is the number of people who are joining the revolution?”

Daily indoctrination reinforced this new identity. In many rural areas, children attended what appeared to be school. “There is [some form of] a school,” Rasy said, “but it’s not really a school.” Children gathered for one or two hours a day, often under a tree or in a pagoda compound. “It was not about the education,” he explained. “It was not about A, B, C, D, or 1, 2, 3, 4, but about the ideology.”

As the regime weakened and war with Vietnam intensified in 1978, indoctrination turned into coercion. Rasy described how children working in mobile labor units were taken to the battlefield. “The Khmer Rouge forced the children to go to the battlefield and fight against the Vietnamese.” Many did not survive. “Almost all the children were killed,” he said of some eastern units.

However, the indoctrination did not end with the regime’s collapse in 1979. Rasy has interviewed many former child soldiers who held these beliefs into adulthood. “Most of them are still carrying out the order from the Angkar,” he said. “They still believe it.”

Some fled with retreating Khmer Rouge units to border regions and fought for years afterward. Others returned home in fear of revenge. Reintegration was slow and painful. Communities struggled to reconcile the fact that children had been both victims and perpetrators.

One of the Khmer Rouge’s greatest achievements was also one of its most severe crimes: transforming children into instruments of violence while convincing them they were righteous.

Rasy now works to reverse that process. He encourages survivors to speak so that younger generations understand what happened. “If the children learn how to kill,” he said, “they will kill somebody in the future.” The alternative, he believes, begins with truth. “If the children learn how to build peace, then they will think about how to keep the country safe.”

The Khmer Rouge built its power by reshaping childhood. It was not the first totalitarian movement to indoctrinate its children for the future, and it wasn’t the last.

The cultural, social, and educational indoctrination of Palestinian youth over the past few decades has been well documented.

Much like the Khmer Rouge’s attempt to reset society through ‘Year Zero,’ Palestinian education systems often introduce ideological narratives from the very first stages of learning. Palestinian children are often taught the alphabet in the same way. Instead of “A for apple,” they are taught “H for hujum,” meaning “attack.” The same applies to the other letters.

“Indoctrination begins with narratives right in early grade textbooks,” he explained. “These narratives, which are reinforced by the strong cultural authority that teachers hold, particularly in the Middle East, are then echoed across youth movements, mosque sermons, and social media and broadcast media. So, this one message, which starts off with this authoritative platform in the classroom, gets many megaphones.”

Take, for example, IMPACT-se’s Review of the 2025-2026 Palestinian Authority School Curriculum, the latest examination of the tools used to indoctrinate Palestinian youth.

The report examined 290 textbooks and 71 teacher guides used across grades 1-12, spanning Arabic, Islamic, and Christian education, as well as history, geography, mathematics, and science. These are not peripheral materials. They are mandatory, state-approved texts, carrying the authority of official seals and ministries, and taught daily to children who have no choice but to absorb them.

Crucially, the same curriculum is used far beyond schools directly administered by the Palestinian Authority.

According to the report, these textbooks are taught in PA schools, Hamas-run schools, and UN Relief and Works Agency schools, as well as in many private institutions, across the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and east Jerusalem.The distinction often drawn between “PA moderation” and “Hamas extremism,” Sheff suggested, collapses when the educational foundation is examined. “This is not a factional issue,” he said. “It’s systemic.”

One Arabic-language reading comprehension exercise designed for fifth-grade students presents figures linked to religious extremism and acts of violence as admirable role models. Titled “Hooray for the Heroes,” the text urges children to aspire to emulate these figures, suggesting that true honor lies in following their path. By contrast, those who pursue ordinary, peaceful lives are portrayed negatively, depicted as choosing comfort and humiliation over sacrifice.

The lesson explicitly praises individuals who “achieved martyrdom” or “died proudly for their cause,” naming figures such as Izzadin al-Qassam, after whom Hamas’s military wing is named.

Despite years of international pressure and repeated promises of reform to donors, the report concludes that there has been no meaningful change to the curriculum. Textbooks for the 2025-2026 school year remain virtually identical to those used since 2020-2021, preserving the same ideological framework.

Violence, jihad, and martyrdom continue to be glorified. Israel is erased from maps. Jews and Israelis are demonized. Peace agreements and concepts of coexistence are absent.

What gives this strategy its power is authority. “Textbooks are the official voice of the state,” Sheff explained. “They are mandatory. They carry legitimacy. Children don’t question them.”

The report documents how early this process begins. In grade one Arabic lessons, children learn letters through words such as shahid (“martyr”) and hujum (“attack”), embedding the language of violence at the very moment literacy is being formed.

“That framing becomes a moral compass,” Sheff said. “Once it’s set, it shapes attitudes, aspirations, and perceptions of the ‘other’ well into adolescence and beyond.”

As students progress through the system, the messaging does not soften. Instead, it deepens and expands across disciplines. IMPACT-se found that indoctrination is not confined to history or civics, where ideological content might be expected, but deliberately woven into STEM subjects. Mathematics exercises ask students to calculate the number of “martyrs” killed in various uprisings. Science and geography lessons frame armed struggle as a natural and inevitable force.

“There are countless ways to teach a child how to add,” Sheff said. “Choosing to teach addition by counting martyrs is a decision. If you are using math and science to indoctrinate children into hatred, you have clearly made a strategic choice about the future you want.”

After Oct. 7, as physical schooling in Gaza collapsed amid the war, the PA launched a Virtual Schools Initiative. By February 2025, more than 290,000 Gazan students were enrolled in condensed online learning programs.

Rather than moderating content during this humanitarian emergency, IMPACT-se found that the abridged materials reproduced the same inciting narratives almost verbatim. Violence, martyrdom, and dehumanization of Jews remained intact, ensuring ideological continuity even under the banner of emergency education. “Even when schools are destroyed,” Sheff said, “the curriculum survives.”

For Sheff, the implications are long term and deeply troubling. “If you look at a society’s textbooks,” he stated, “you can predict what that society will look like in 10 years.” By the time a teenager commits an act of violence, he argued, the groundwork was laid a decade earlier, through years of normalized messaging that presents violence as noble and peace as inconceivable.

“When peace is absent from the national story,” Sheff explained, “children have no conceptual framework for coexistence. They only learn that through struggle, sacrifice, and martyrdom, they achieve the highest form of identity the authorities want for them.”

In the end, Ham Sarun came to understand that the violence he carried out on Cambodia’s eastern border was inseparable from the terror inflicted elsewhere in his country.

“At the end, I felt exhausted because I knew what happened in my country, in the cities, and in my hometown,” he recalled. “What the Khmer Rouge did to the people there is the same as what they did along the border.

“I was a victim of the regime because I had to listen to orders,” he stated. “Otherwise, I would have been punished. If I didn’t listen to orders, I would have been killed. It was the same for the others.”

Childhood did not protect Sarun, and at an age when children should be enjoying life, he found himself conscripted into an army he didn’t want to fight for and for an ideology he was forced to absorb.

After the Khmer Rouge collapse in 1979, Sarun returned to his village. Rather than retreat into silence, he chose to speak. “People from my generation knew I was in the Khmer Rouge and my experiences,” he said. “But I told the younger soldiers about my experiences.” In 1982, he became his village’s military representative, sharing his story with younger generations. In 1990, he was sent to other provinces to do the same.

That impulse to warn the youth of the dangers of extremism rather than to justify one’s actions lies at the heart of Cambodia’s reckoning with its past. As Pheng Pong Rasy has argued throughout his work at the Documentation Center of Cambodia, the indoctrination of Cambodia’s young came before the violence.

Here, Cambodia’s history speaks beyond its borders. Although the Khmer Rouge was one of the most violent examples of indoctrination in such a short time frame, the methods and techniques it practiced are the same as those found in years of Palestinian education.

For many children, such indoctrination steals the innocence of youth away from them and leaves them with broken dreams.■