Cambodia's ruthless dictator cheated justice, dying before he could answer for the atrocities committed during his unrelenting quest to create a rural Utopia
Pol Pot
Born May 19, 1925 in Prek Sbauv
1949 Studies left-wing politics in France
1953 Returns to Cambodia and joins Communist Party, which he leads a decade later
1975 Khmer Rouge is victor of civil war and occupies Phnom Penh; reign of terror kills 1.5 million in next four years
1979 Goes into hiding after Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia
1998 Dies April 15 in Cambodian jungle
On April 17, 1998, barely 500 m inside Cambodia from Thailand, a frail, 73-year-old former dictator--known by his nom de guerre, Pol Pot--was cremated under a pile of rubbish and rubber tires. He had died two days earlier in a two-room hut, held prisoner by former colleagues who had accused him of betraying the revolutionary movement he had once led. It was an ignominious end for a man who inscribed a merciless agenda on the psyche of two generations of Cambodians.
Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot presided over a communist regime known as Democratic Kampuchea. His harsh, utopian policies, derived in part from Maoist China, drove an estimated 1.5 million Cambodians--or one in five--to their deaths from malnutrition, illness or overwork. At least 200,000 more were executed as enemies of the state. The ratio of deaths to population made the Cambodian revolution the most murderous in a century of revolutions.
There was rough justice in the closing months of Pol Pot's life, when he must have been fearful--as everyone in Democratic Kampuchea had been--that each day might be his last. Pol Pot had emerged on two recent occasions to talk to journalists. He spoke fondly of his young daughter and fretfully about his health. Pressed to acknowledge responsibility for the past, he said, "I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people. Even now, and you can look at me, am I a savage person?" Pol Pot had either evaded the question or missed the point. No one had died because of his villainous appearance. Instead, victims had been sacrificed in a ruthless campaign to refashion Cambodian society. In the 1980s, Pol Pot had told his followers that "mistakes" had been inevitable during his rule because, using a revealing simile, "We were like babies learning to walk."
Pol Pot's own childhood was cosseted and secure. He was born in 1925, when Cambodia was still a protectorate of France. His father was a prosperous landowner, with élite connections. His sister and a female cousin were dancers in the royal ballet in the capital, Phnom Penh, living comfortably under the king's protection. Saloth Sar, as he was called in those days, went to live with them when he was six years old. He attended a series of French-language schools. Only a few hundred other Cambodians enjoyed this privilege. His academic record was lackluster; he earned no high-school diploma. He seems to have been relatively popular without making much of an impression. "His manner was straightforward, pleasant and very polite," a former classmate told me. "He thought a lot but said very little."
In 1949, because of his fluency in French and his political connections, Saloth Sar was given a scholarship to study radio-electricity in France. He lived in Paris for the next three years, neglecting his studies and spending much of his time, he told an interviewer later, reading "progressive books." In 1952 he joined the French Communist Party, drawn by its anti-colonial stance. Soon afterward, because he had failed to pass any examinations, his scholarship was revoked and he went home.
After Cambodia became independent in 1954, Saloth Sar led a double life, teaching in a private school in Phnom Penh while he worked in secret in a small, beleaguered communist movement. He enjoyed the conspiratorial rituals of underground politics and dreamed of seizing power. By 1963 he was in command of Cambodia's Communist Party. Fearful of the police, he fled the capital and sought refuge with a handful of colleagues at a Vietnamese military base, "Office 100," on the Vietnam-Cambodia border. For the next two years he chafed under humiliating Vietnamese protection.
In 1965 Saloth Sar was summoned to North Vietnam for consultations. Walking north along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, he took two months to reach Hanoi, where he was taken to task for his nationalist agenda. The general secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Le Duan, told him to subordinate Cambodia's interests to Vietnam's, to help Vietnam defeat the United States and to postpone armed struggle until the time was ripe.
Although bruised by these attacks, Saloth Sar said nothing to antagonize his patrons. Soon afterward, however, he travelled to China and was warmly welcomed by radical officials. Inspired by the early phases of the Cultural Revolution, Saloth Sar transferred his loyalties to a new set of patrons and a more vibrant revolutionary model. The visit to China was a turning point in his career. Prudently, however, he said nothing to the Vietnamese about his change of heart. Back home, he established his headquarters in a remote, heavily wooded section of the country. For the next four years, with a group of like-minded colleagues, he polished his utopian ideas and nourished his hatreds.
His chance came in 1970 when Cambodia's ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was overthrown in a pro-American coup. The Vietnamese communists swiftly allied themselves with the Khmer Rouge--as Sihanouk had dismissively labeled Pol Pot's group--against the new regime in Phnom Penh. The Vietnamese provided the rag-tag Khmer Rouge with arms and training. When they withdrew in 1972, Pol Pot felt betrayed. But by then, the Phnom Penh army had been badly battered and the Khmer Rouge had become a formidable guerrilla force.
The war ended in April 1975, when the Khmer Rouge occupied Phnom Penh. Most of the city's 2 million people, exhausted by years of violence, welcomed the invaders. They saw these silent, heavily armed young men as fellow Khmers, with whom a new society might be built. Their optimism was tragically misplaced. Within days, the Khmer Rouge drove them all into the countryside to become workers in agricultural communes. They also emptied Cambodia's other towns and abolished money, markets, schools, newspapers, religious practices and private property.
The Khmer Rouge spurned anyone with money or education. The revolution derived its energy, they believed, from the empowerment of the rural poor, from their recent victory and from what they thought was the intrinsic superiority of Cambodians to the hated Vietnamese. Pol Pot assumed that the Cambodian revolution would be swifter and more authentic than anything Vietnam could carry out. His Chinese patrons, hostile to Vietnam, agreed. By mobilizing mass resentments, as Mao Zedong had done, Pol Pot inspired tens of thousands of Cambodians, especially teenagers and people in their early 20s, to join him in dismantling Cambodian society and liberating everyone from the past.
The methods he chose were naive, brutal and inept. In 1976 a hastily written Four Year Plan sought to triple the country's agricultural production within a year--without fertilizer, modern tools or material incentives. The plan paid no attention to Cambodian geography or common sense; the nation's farmers were prostrate after five years of civil war. Attempting to meet impossible quotas and frightened of reprisals, Khmer Rouge workers cut back the grain allotted for consumption. Tens of thousands of Cambodians starved to death. Thousands more collapsed from overwork and the almost total absence throughout the country of medical attention.
Pol Pot refused to accept responsibility for these disasters or to ameliorate rural conditions. Instead, he blamed "hidden enemies, burrowing from within" and set off a wholesale purge of the Communist Party. His paranoia, propping up his self-assurance, knew no bounds. In 1977 he made a state visit to China, which promised him military assistance against Vietnam and moral support for his radical agenda. Sporadic fighting between Cambodia and Vietnam flared up toward the end of the year, and full-scale war between the two countries broke out in 1978. Pol Pot declared that if every Cambodian soldier killed 30 Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge could win the war. He also asked China to send troops to help him. The Chinese refused. Trained as guerrillas, the Khmer Rouge were outmaneuvered and outgunned.
On Christmas Day 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia with more than 100,000 troops. The country cracked open like an egg. Pol Pot fled by helicopter to Thailand; when the invaders entered Phnom Penh on Jan. 7, the city was deserted. The Vietnamese established a puppet government composed largely of former cadres who had fled the Khmer Rouge reign of terror. Several of these men remain in power in Cambodia today.
Aside from brief forays to Bangkok and Beijing for medical treatment, Pol Pot spent the next 18 years in fortified encampments in the forests of Thailand and northern Cambodia, protected by Thai military forces and what remained of his guerrilla army. Throughout the 1980s, he conducted seminars for Khmer Rouge military leaders. He often mesmerized them with his sincerity, his low, melodious voice and his genteel charisma. To his disciples, there seemed to be no connection between this smooth-faced teacher and the violence of his past--except perhaps for his repeated emphasis on "enemies." In fact, Pol Pot's disconnection from reality seemed to many to be proof of his unworldliness, ardor and enlightenment.
Pol Pot remarried in the mid-'80s, after his first wife, a highly educated revolutionary he had married in 1956, succumbed to mental illness. In the mid-'90s, deprived of foreign support, the Cambodian communist movement gradually fell apart. In 1996, Pol Pot's brother-in-law, Ieng Sary, who had served as his foreign minister, defected. Thousands of Khmer Rouge followed suit. The remnants of the movement were commanded by a veteran military leader, Ta Mok, who arrested Pol Pot after the former dictator had ordered some of Ta Mok's subordinates killed.
Listening to a broadcast of the Cambodian service of the Voice of America on April 15, 1998, Pol Pot learned that Ta Mok planned to deliver him to the Americans for trial. Soon afterward, he told his wife that he felt faint. He lay down. By 10 p.m. he was dead, reportedly from heart failure, possibly from suicide. His death, like his life, left many questions unanswered.
Despite--or perhaps because of--his paranoia, ineptitude and distance from reality, Pol Pot's place in history is assured, thanks largely to the damage he inflicted on his people. In the late 1970s, along with Mao Zedong, he enjoyed a moment of fame among those who felt, as he did, that the best way to change the world was to dismantle most of its social structure, violently and at once, regardless of the human cost. In his headlong rush toward independence and ideological perfection, Pol Pot was spurred by more experienced communist powers, eager to see if the Cambodian experiment, more radical than anything they had tried, might work.
When the extent of the disasters in Cambodia was known, Pol Pot survived in relative comfort and became a useful bit player in the cold war. When that conflict ended and Pol Pot lost his capacity for harm, his former friends began to consider bringing him to justice. He cheated their half-hearted efforts by dying in his bed, leaving history as his only judge.
David Chandler is a visiting professor at Georgetown University and the author of Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot
Pol Pot's death in April 1998 heralded the end of the brutal career of a man responsible for overseeing one of the worst genocides of the 20th century. Between 1975 and 1979 his regime claimed the lives of more than 1m people - through execution, starvation and disease - as the Khmer Rouge tried to turn Cambodia back to the middle ages. For many survivors of that era, the joy of his demise will only be tempered with the regret that he was not called to account for his crimes against humanity. The "people's tribunal" at which his former colleagues sentenced him to life imprisonment last year was widely regarded as little more than a show trial. Ideologue
Many precise details of Pol Pot's life remain shrouded in mystery.
Warped nationalism
Year zero
Pol Pot's relatives recall dictator's childhood
A visit to his Cambodian village
August 18, 1997Web posted at: 2:15 p.m. EDT (1815 GMT)
PREK SBOV, Cambodia (CNN) -- It's hard to believe that this sleepy settlement on the Stung Sen River produced Pol Pot, the brutal dictator -- now reportedly held by the Khmer Rouge rebels he once led -- responsible for up to 2 million deaths during Cambodia's brutal "killing fields" rule in the late 1970s.
Prek Sbov is where Saloth Sar, the boy who later became known as Pol Pot, was born in 1925, according to relatives still alive.
The peaceful village 90 miles north of the capital Phnom Penh is also where his younger brother, Saloth Nhep, 71, still lives and remembers his infamous sibling with affection. "When he was young, he was really gentle, as I knew him. His character was kind and he studied hard."
Asked to sum up his relationship with his brother -- a man most of the world knows as a monster -- Saloth Nhep says, "We simply loved each other."
As a boy, Saloth Sar left the village for schooling and Saloth Nhep saw him only occasionally after that. "I last saw him in the 1960s. He visited the village, then he went away forever."
Didn't know Pol Pot was his brother
Astonishingly, it was not until near the end of the Khmer Rouge 1975-1979 regime that Saloth Nhep who, like millions of other Cambodians was a victim of Pol Pot's forced labor camps, realized that the secretive dictator was his brother. "Just before liberation in 1979 I found out when I saw a picture of him," he said.
"He made much difficulty for people," Saloth Nhep remembers. "I am very angry. What he did was wrong."
But, the brother adds, "I don't want to keep on hating."
A few houses away, lives another brother, Saloth Seng. Pol Pot "broke my heart. He made me stop loving him," Saloth Seng, 85, told the New York Times.
The only other sibling still alive is a sister, Saloth Roeung, 81.
The people of Prek Sbov do not hold the family responsible for Pol Pot's evil doings, according to Saloth Nhep.
But, he says, he is pleased his mother and father did not live to see all that Pol Pot did. Describing them as devout Buddhists, Saloth Nhep says they instilled in their children respect for human life.
Why the boy born as Saloth Sar chose to ignore that upbringing is a mystery.Cambodian strongman seeks arrest of Pol Pot
Khmer Rouge leaders support ousted prince
July 31, 1997Web posted at: 1:30 p.m. EDT (1730 GMT)
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (CNN) -- Cambodia's new strongman Hun Sen has urged neighboring Thailand to help arrest notorious Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot and bring him before an international tribunal. Meanwhile, Khmer Rouge guerrillas said Thursday they supported the nation's ousted co-premier, Prince Norodom Ranariddh.
Hun Sen made his comments Wednesday in an interview on ABC's "Nightline." He said his two-stage plan called for the Cambodian government to gain control of the Anlong Veng area -- the rebels' main headquarters -- through Khmer Rouge defections and military force.
"I want to send him to an international court," Hun Sen said of Pol Pot. "This is an international problem."
Hun Sen added that Pol Pot's show trial a week ago by comrades who turned against him was political theatrics that has denied justice to Cambodia, which is still suffering from the genocidal rule Pol Pot imposed between 1975 and 1979.
"I think it is a farce, political farce," Hun Sen said. "They took him off in an air-conditioned Landcruiser. It doesn't seem to me that he was under much strain at the time."
Pol Pot was sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life during the trial, but he was not found guilty of genocide, according to the Thursday edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review.
As many as 2 million Cambodians died during Pol Pot's "killing fields" rule.
Mediating missing set for Saturday
Meanwhile, Cambodia's neighbors announced a new mediating mission Thursday to resolve the crisis from a bloody takeover early this month.
Second Prime Minister Hun Sen toppled First Prime Minister Ranariddh in fighting that was triggered partly over negotiations the prince was holding with the Khmer Rouge.
The takeover shattered the government put in place by U.N.-sponsored elections in 1993 and plunged the country into new instability.
The Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) indefinitely postponed Cambodia's membership in response to the coup. Hun Sen initially rejected ASEAN mediation in the crisis but relented earlier this week.
The foreign ministers of the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand will meet Hun Sen on Saturday. Domingo Siazon, the foreign secretary of the Philippines, said they would propose that Ranariddh be allowed to return to Cambodia until new elections can be held.
Hun Sen has threatened to arrest the prince if he returns.
Khmer Rouge backs prince
On Thursday, the Far Eastern Economic Review reported that Khmer Rouge leaders sealed an agreement with Ranariddh's royalist party on July 4, the day before fighting that led to Ranariddh's ouster erupted.
Younger Khmer Rouge leaders, who sought to join forces with the royalists and other groups, then purged Pol Pot for his extreme opposition to the move, according to the magazine's correspondent, Nate Thayer, who was permitted to enter the guerrillas' jungle stronghold.
Khmer Rouge radio broadcasts on Thursday also made clear the rebel group's support of the prince. Rebel radio has launched regular attacks on Hun Sen since the prince's ouster.
"We still recognize Prince Norodom Ranariddh as the legal first prime minister of the country," said Khmer Rouge front man Khieu Samphan, one of the main leaders of the rebel faction that broke with Pol Pot.
The Khmer Rouge is now led by a nine-member panel, mostly younger cadres, with Khieu Samphan as the only member from the old guard, Thayer wrote.
One of the reasons the Khmer Rouge wanted to distance themselves from Pol Pot was to attract international support for their efforts to unseat Hun Sen, Thayer said.
Khieu Samphan said his political party, the National Solidarity Party, would join all other groups in opposing Hun Sen and any nominations to replace Ranariddh as co-premier.
Foreign Minister Ung Huot has been nominated for the post and is backed by Hun Sen. He is due to be approved by the Cambodian parliament within days.
Ranariddh has denied any links with the Khmer Rouge, but a senior royalist commander spoke recently of the possibility of striking a military alliance with the guerrillas.
Pol Pot looks frail in TV footage
Cambodians catch rare glimpse of reclusive rebel
Web posted at: 11:08 a.m. EDT (1508 GMT)
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (CNN) -- Cambodians got a rare glimpse of the notorious Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot Tuesday, when a U.S. television network showed exclusive footage of what is said to be Pol Pot's show trial by his former allies.
ABC-TV showed the video in the capital's central market and near Wat Phnom, a main temple and popular meeting place.
Stunned Cambodians stared at the TV images of the white-haired, feeble Pol Pot, the man deemed responsible for the deaths of up to 2 million people. Many victims of Pol Pot's reign of terror were executed, tortured or died from disease, starvation or hard labor in what became known as the "Killing Fields" between 1975 and 1979.
Report: Pol Pot near tears during Khmer Rouge trial
Cambodia's parliament reconvenes after six-month recess
In this story:
July 28, 1997Web posted at: 9:15 a.m. EDT (1315 GMT)
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- Rebel leader Pol Pot, responsible for Cambodian genocide two decades ago, was close to tears as he was denounced by hundreds of his former Khmer Rouge comrades at a show trial late last week, an American journalist who witnessed the scene said Monday.
Nate Thayer, a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, said in a press release that a white-haired and ill-looking Pol Pot, dressed in baggy black trousers, a gray shirt and blue scarf, listened in silence as he was condemned by a succession of speakers in Anlong Veng, a Khmer Rouge stronghold about 200 miles northwest of Phnom Penh.
After the 80-minute outdoor trial Friday -- and a sentence of life in prison -- Thayer said Pol Pot, 69, needed to be assisted by men gripping his arms.
"You could see the anguish on his face as he was denounced by his former loyalists. He was close to tears," Thayer said in the release issued by his magazine.
Pol Pot was the architect of the Khmer Rouge's brutal "killing fields" rule from 1975-79 during which up to 2 million Cambodians were killed by execution, torture, disease, starvation or hard labor.
Why Khmer Rouge turned against Pol Pot
Khmer Rouge radio first denounced Pol Pot in mid-June, shortly after a bloody split in the secretive Maoist group's top leadership in which defense chief Son Sen and almost a dozen members of his family were slaughtered.
Pol Pot and three of his commanders were found guilty of murdering Son Sen and his family, of "destroying national reconciliation" and of stealing money from the party, Thayer said.
The three commanders were also said to have raped the wives of their comrades, he said.
Pol Pot executed Son Sen for allegedly betraying him during peace negotiations the Khmer Rouge was holding with First Prime Minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh, who was deposed earlier this month in a coup by his co-premier, Hun Sen.
Pol Pot fled through the jungles, carried on a stretcher by a few loyal guerrillas, until he was captured by his former men.
Thayer, the first Western journalist to see Pol Pot in 18 years, said the trial in northern Cambodia was clearly stage-managed but he said there was no doubt Pol Pot's downfall was genuine.
"This is not a hoax, this is not a ruse. Pol Pot is finished," he said. "The Khmer Rouge as we have known them no longer exist."
Hun Sen doesn't believe it
But in Phnom Penh, Hun Sen said on Monday that Khmer Rouge political leader Khieu Samphan could not control the guerrilla group and that Pol Pot was still in charge.
"Khieu Samphan cannot control the Khmer Rouge hard-liners, so Pol Pot must keep power," he said.
Since Ranariddh's ouster the Khmer Rouge guerrilla group has made clear it supports the prince, repeatedly criticizing Hun Sen's power-grab in its radio broadcasts.
On Monday, Khmer Rouge radio blasted a parliament session expected to approve the nomination of Foreign Minister to succeed Ranariddh as first prime minister, thus preserving the form of a coalition government set up after the U.N.-supervised elections of 1993.
Cambodia's acting head of state, , opened the on Monday following a six-month recess.
Chea Sim described Hun Sen's rout of forces loyal to Ranariddh as a "mopping up operation" necessary to prevent a terrorist overthrow of the government.
Pol Pot captured, but where is he?
Cambodian government urges
international tribunal
for 'killing fields' figure
June 21, 1997Web posted at: 10:24 a.m. EDT (1424 GMT)
Latest developments:
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (CNN) -- As the capture of hated Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot was confirmed Saturday, many of his fellow Cambodians called for the execution of the man whose "killing fields" rule in the 1970s led to the deaths of as many as 2 million people.
The Cambodian government announced that Pol Pot had been seized in a remote northern area by a faction of the Khmer Rouge rebel group that turned against him earlier this month. Efforts will be made to put him on trial before an international court, the government said.
While Cambodia does not have the death penalty, some people felt it should apply in Pol Pot's case. "I am so angry with him, I would like to chop him up like he killed so many people," said 40-year-old widow Chay Ky.
"In my opinion Pol Pot must be sentenced to death, but maybe a death sentence would be too easy for him. But for sure he should be kept in prison for the rest of his life," said 55-year-old security guard Teth Chhorn.
Government confirms Pol Pot's capture ...
First Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh and Second Prime Minister Hun Sen delivered news of the capture to reporters at a press conference in the capital city of Phnom Penh.
It was the first time both Cambodian leaders, who are engaged in a bitter political feud that has at times turned violent, have told the same story about the former Khmer Rouge leader's fate.
Ranariddh said that Pol Pot had been captured near the Khmer Rouge stronghold of Anlong Veng, and that Khieu Samphan -- a senior figure in the guerrilla group, reportedly taken hostage by Pol Pot as he fled -- was also in custody.
"This is the end of the Khmer Rouge," Hun Sen told reporters.
...but doesn't say where he is
The two premiers would not say how they had obtained confirmation of the capture or even when it took place.
They also did not elaborate on the precise whereabouts of Pol Pot and Khieu Samphan, nor when they might be brought to Phnom Penh. There was no information about the fate of other key Khmer Rouge leaders.
Pol Pot has not been seen in public since 1980, two years after his overthrow at the hands of an invading Vietnamese army. He was sentenced to death in absentia by a Phnom Penh court soon afterward.
Ranariddh said Pol Pot should be sent to an international tribunal to answer for the excesses of his 1975-79 "killing fields" reign of terror when the radical guerrilla group's name became synonymous with starvation, vicious torture and mass execution.
Khmer Rouge radio, which is under the control of the breakaway faction, announced on Friday in a broadcast from its guerrilla zone that its army captured the 69-year-old Pol Pot the previous day.
The breakaway Khmer Rouge faction which captured Pol Pot would be integrated into
government forces after formally surrendering, the two premiers said.
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