The Butcher Of Cambodia

By Terry McCarthy/Siem Reap

Now we will never know why. Yet who can ever fathom the evil that men do. We stand disbelieving before genocide, when women's throats are slit with sharp palm leaves, when children's heads are smashed against tree trunks, when men are slaughtered with the crack of a hoe. These things happened every day in Cambodia for 3 1/2 terrible years, and when the world learned of it, people could only respond with dumb horror.

All Pol Pot ever said was that he was creating a "pure" communist society and whatever he did was done for his country. "My conscience is clear," he told journalist Nate Thayer in a rare interview last October, never admitting his appalling conduct, never regretting the countless executions, the million more dead of starvation and overwork, the living population maimed in body or mind, the entire country reduced to Stone Age survival. Nineteen years after the hated Vietnamese drove him back into the jungle, the evil that he did lives on in Cambodia's traumatized society, poisoned politics, governmental misrule and pitiful piles of bleached-white skulls. When Pol Pot died last week, alone in a small, thatched hut, his passing left only outrage that this man had cheated earthly justice.

Elusive and mysterious throughout his life, Pol Pot slipped just as stealthily into death, guarding his secrets to the end. The teenage guerrillas of the Khmer Rouge who had kept him under "house arrest" since a show trial last year blandly informed reporters that one of the world's most notorious mass murderers had died peacefully Wednesday night of a heart attack, discovered when his wife came to tuck in his mosquito net.

The timing of his demise was almost too uncanny, coming just as the beleaguered remnants of his once terrifying movement prepared to hand him over to Western justice in exchange for some kind of amnesty for themselves. Two weeks ago the Clinton Administration began drawing up plans for Pol Pot's capture and trial in an international court. Many who had trafficked with him--the Chinese, the Thais, the former Khmer Rouge cadres now running the government in Phnom Penh--had good reason to prefer his death to a revealing trial. But the 73-year-old's health had been failing. A stroke in 1995 paralyzed much of his left side, he was taking medicine for a heart complaint, and he suffered from chronic malaria. For the past three weeks he had been hustled between safe houses near the Thai border to avoid shelling. As government forces aided by growing legions of Khmer Rouge defectors closed in, Pol Pot must have realized the end was near.

When the communist guerrilla, then known only as Brother No. 1, took power in April 1975, he vowed to turn back the clock to "Year Zero." In the name of a bizarre blend of peasant romanticism and radical Maoism, the Khmer Rouge conducted a reign of terror intended to give birth to an agrarian utopia. At the point of their guns, they emptied Cambodia's cities, abolished money and markets, shut down schools and Buddhist monasteries and forced the entire country to wear black pajamas as a sign of "instant communism." Inspired by China's Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot carried its practices to the extreme. Anyone who questioned the system, anyone who spoke a foreign language, anyone who wore glasses, was executed. Thousands upon thousands perished from starvation and disease in the slave camps of the countryside, as the fatally isolated economy ceased to function.

Pol Pot ignored the disaster he was inflicting on his people. Living in a deserted Phnom Penh, he was obsessed with his own safety, regularly changing houses in paranoid addiction to secrecy. He trusted very few comrades for long: he had 16,000 Khmer Rouge cadres tortured to death in the infamous Tuol Sleng interrogation center--"strings of traitors," as he saw them, who had to be "burned out." Yet when confronted with this by Thayer, Pol Pot claimed he had never heard of Tuol Sleng and showed no sign of remorse. "I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people. Even now, and you can look at me, am I a savage person?"

The conundrum of the man is that he did not seem savage at all. Before fleeing into the jungle in 1963, the French-educated son of prosperous landowners, born Saloth Sar, taught school in Phnom Penh, and his former students remember him as a soft-spoken, even-tempered man who loved to recite his favorite poet, Verlaine. Francois Ponchaud, a French priest who first moved to Cambodia in 1965, says that when he heard the leader who called himself Pol Pot give a speech on the radio in 1977, "I remember saying to myself, this man knows how to speak. Not angry shouting, but with a gentle, well-modulated voice."

Even after his record of genocide was known the world over, Pol Pot inspired affection among the countryfolk who harbored him for nearly 20 years. "The people found him very kind--I mean the poor people," said Mit Sim, head of Pol Pot's bodyguards in northwestern Cambodia until 1994. During a visit to the area last fall, Sim led the way uphill to the remains of Pol Pot's house and pointed out a large rock at the edge of a nearby cliff. "This is where he would come and sit in the evening," said Sim. "When he was depressed he would call me, and I would come sit with him. He drank expensive ginseng tea, and he kept a bottle of Thai whisky, and he would talk about developing the country for the poor people."

In the end, Pol Pot's equanimity in the face of the unaccountable brutality he unleashed defies analysis. When writing his biography, Brother Number One, historian David Chandler says he often had the uneasy feeling that Pol Pot "was just outside my line of vision observing me." The dictator's legacy is equally disturbing, says Chandler, pointing to the bloody coup staged by one-time Khmer Rouge lieutenant Hun Sen last year and the continuing political assassinations as the country prepares for elections in July that Hun Sen hopes will legitimize his regime. "In Cambodia you simply get rid of people who are in the way."

Those who sought to bring Pol Pot to justice hoped to help break the cycle of violence. With his untimely death, Pol Pot performed one last disservice to his people: his specter will continue to haunt the Cambodian psyche for years to come.