By James Aitchison

His beguiling smile gave him the appearance of a doting uncle.  “He wouldn’t even kill a chicken,” his friends said.  But beneath the façade, Pol Pot was a mass murderer.  His genocidal regime caused the deaths of two million Cambodians between 1975-1979 — a quarter of the country’s population.

The twentieth century threw up many brutal dictators — Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, Bashar al-Assad and Kim Jong-il — but Pol Pot’s reign of terror earned him a special place among the world’s most evil leaders …

Twelve hours’ drive north of Phnom Penh, in the tangled jungles of the Dangrek Mountains, thirteen kilometres from the village of Anlong Veng and surrounded by land mines, the man known to the world as Pol Pot died on 15 April 1998.  This was his last hide-out from where he continued to wage a bloody guerrilla war against government forces.  Even though he was protected by his most loyal Khmer Rouge soldiers, Pol Pot’s final years were marked by paranoia and fear of betrayal.  After his death, he was cremated on a pile of old tyres.

Today, his grave is easily accessible by a dirt track opposite the Sangam Casino, about twenty metres from the main road to the Choam border crossing with Thailand.  Despite Pol Pot’s brutality, countless people make the trek to his grave.  Defying all logic, they revere his memory as though he were a saint.  Many pray to him for good luck and health.  Some believe the violent old dictator’s spirit will give them winning lottery numbers.

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Pol Pot entered the world as Saloth Sâr, the youngest of seven children, on 19 May 1928.  He was raised in Prek Sbauv, on the banks of a river in Kompong Thom.  His parents owned nine hectares of rice paddies, three of vegetable gardens, and six buffalo.  In French Cambodia, they were comfortable members of the rural class.

From his birth, Saloth Sâr was a man of contradictions.  The future Communist dictator had royal connections.  His cousin has been a palace dancer and one of King Monivong’s principal wives.  At the age of six, he joined his siblings at the palace.  A year in a royal monastery was followed by six in an elite Catholic school.  He was known as a serious, studious but charming young man; significantly, he never worked a day in a rice field.  After high school, Saloth was awarded a scholarship to study radio electricity in Paris.

Like many young Asian intellectuals studying in post-war Europe, Saloth adopted nationalist ideals and became a member of the French communist party.  He studied Marx, whose texts he found difficult, but was inspired by Stalin and Mao.  Then he adopted his code name Pol Pot.  He forged lasting friendships with other young idealists: Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary and Son Sen. 

However, Pot’s political activities took precedence over his studies.  When he failed his course three years in a row, his scholarship was terminated in 1952.

He arrived back in Cambodia to find revolution in the air.  After being whipped by the Japanese in World War II, the French colonialists were trying to re-establish control over Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.  Like Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, the new Cambodian boy king Norodom Sihanouk wanted independence from France.  It came in 1954.  France abandoned their Indochinese ambitions and left an ominous, unresolved power vacuum. 

When Sihanouk dismissed the government and declared himself prime minister, he faced opposition from young militants and homegrown communists.  His secret police cracked down hard on dissidents, making them even more determined to challenge the status quo.  By 1963, Pot — by then working as a history teacher — and his friends had taken leadership of the Khmer Communist Party, the Khmer Rouge.  Soon they would have to flee into the jungle.

Sihanouk played a complicated hand of cards.  He was overtly neutral yet perceived to be a left-leaning nationalist in Western circles.  He enjoyed China’s support yet feared the war in neighbouring Vietnam would spill over into his own country.  He repressed the pro-Vietnamese leftists, mainly rural, moderate and Buddhist by nature, while allowing the new left — urban, French-educated, radical, and anti-Vietnamese — to flourish.  For Sihanouk, it was a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

China, meanwhile, was also supporting Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam and Pol Pot’s Marxists in Cambodia. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, Sihanouk was deposed in 1970 by right-wing General Lon Nol with American support.  Sihanouk fled into exile in Beijing, from where he now aligned himself with the Cambodian insurgency.  With his endorsement from afar, even more recruits joined the Khmer Rouge.  Cambodia was then officially in the grip of a civil war. 

The timing could not have been better.  Already, Pot had purged the Khmer Rouge of moderate communists and those with pro-Vietnamese sympathies.  Pot and his friends had established a unique top-down power structure with themselves at the core — an organisation known as Angkar — and ruled it with vicious efficiency.  Pot became “Brother No. 1”.

The carpet bombing of Cambodia by American B-52s was a turning point for Pol Pot’s political fortunes.  While American bombing continued, Pot recruited thousands of peasants.  According to one United States Army report, up to 150,000 civilians died by American bombing between 1969 and 1973.  The US dropped three times as many bombs on Cambodia than they had on Japan in World War II.  Small wonder peasants flocked to Pot’s banner.  Tragically, many were apolitical with little understanding of communism.  Later, they would prove highly expendable.

As in Vietnam, jungle guerrilla tactics won victory after victory.  Soon, one hundred battalions of Khmer Rouge were closing in on Phnom Penh.  Women’s battalions launched fiery rocket attacks on the capital.  Eventually, Lon Nol’s government collapsed.  In a wry nod to humour, the general fled to the USA on April Fool’s Day 1975.  And while the citizens of Phnom Penh celebrated the end of the civil war, they had no inkling of the disaster and bloodshed heading down the road towards them …

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Pol Pot’s forces, many little more than boys, discovered a city with white flags everywhere.  People lined the streets, some cheering, others politely curious.  Some teachers, students and Lon Nol officials stepped forward to welcome the Khmer Rouge, offering to “work in coalition” with them.  Buddhist monks also greeted the conquerors.  Sadly, they believed peace had come to Cambodia.

The citizens of Phnom Penh soon had their illusions shattered.

Khmer Rouge swarmed through the city.  Their orders were to evacuate every citizen and march them into a new agrarian paradise in the country.  In one subterfuge, loudspeakers blared that American bombers were on their way to destroy Phnom Penh.  Citizens were given literally minutes to gather a few possessions and join the throng.  “Don’t worry, it’s only temporary,” they were promised.  “Angkar will look after you.”  Imperialist books were burned.  Hospital patients were either evacuated from their beds or executed on the spot.  One report described limbless Lon Nol soldiers hobbling and crawling with the crowd.  At one point, Khmer Rouge soldiers began asking people their occupations.

Within three days, Phnom Penh became a ghost town.  Its population of 2.5 million people was on the road, driven along at gunpoint into a terrifying future.  The exodus alone claimed twenty thousand lives.  Those who refused to leave were shot and their homes set on fire.  Hundreds of officers in Lon Nol’s defeated army were summarily executed.  Foreign journalists and residents were assembled in the French Embassy prior to their expulsion from the country.

On 17 April, Pol Pot announced “Year Zero”, when everything before that date must be purged.  All cultures and traditions had to be completely destroyed, replaced by a new revolutionary order.  Money and property ownership were abolished.  Buddhist monks were disbanded; no religious festivals or temples would be allowed.  Socialism, Cambodian-style, would be built on agriculture.  All the cities would be emptied and the people forced to work building irrigation dams and canals.  All citizens were forced to wear the same black clothing and red-and-white scarves.  Pot crowed that the Khmer Rouge had won a definitive victory that was “a precious model” for the world; “no country, no people, and no army has been able to drive the imperialists out to the last man and score total victory over them as we have.”

But early signs of paranoia were showing.  Pot ordered that “internal agents” opposed to Angkar — be they party members, soldiers, ministry officials or among the masses — were to be identified and killed.  Some of his earliest supporters soon found themselves shot and dumped into trenches.  Cambodia, said Pot, had to be “cleansed”.  Ethnic minorities such as the Krom, ethnic Vietnamese, and the Muslim Chams were ruthlessly exterminated, often without a trace.

And so began the years of the Killing Fields when 1.3 million people were executed and buried in mass graves.  Pol Pot’s dream of an agrarian economy proved disastrous.  The urban middle classes laboured alongside the peasants desperately trying to grow enough rice for survival.  Overworked and undernourished, people were formed into small farming groups.  Parents were separated from their children.  Family units were dissolved.  Gruel and potatoes replaced rice.  The countryside soon became one massive labour gang under the control of Khmer Rouge cadres.  Anyone who dared disobey was simply killed.  The educated classes and intellectuals were singled out for special treatment.  By 1976, in one village, “bodies piled up.  There was not enough ground to bury people.”  

Another terror was a visit from an Angkar cadre.  One arrived at a village in 1978 looking for “CIA, KGB and Vietnamese spies”.  Result: 930 people including children were massacred.

And because Angkar demanded rice for export to China, starvation became rampant.  Meanwhile, Pot’s re-education programme taught children such propaganda songs as: “Because of Angkar, we have a long life ahead … a life of great glory … now the glorious revolution supports us all …”

Arguably, Phnom Penh’s Tuol Sleng Prison (“S-21”) is one of the most notorious examples of Pol Pot’s regime.  Commanded by Khaing Khek Iev, alias Deuch, it was a former school before becoming Angkar’s torture centre.  Today, countless images of slain prisoners confront visitors. Under Deuch, so-called confessions were extracted using horrific methods.  Like the Nazis, Deuch maintained exhaustive archives and photographic records of his crimes against humanity.

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The end came in 1979.  By then, widespread purges had concentrated control of Angkar into the hands of Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, and their wives.  Constant border conflicts with Vietnam, including Khmer Rouge massacres of Vietnamese citizens, resulted in the Vietnamese Army sweeping into Cambodia.  The Khmer Rouge collapsed.  Phnom Penh fell on 7 January 1979.  The remains of Pot’s forces retreated into jungle hideouts, where many emboldened villagers hacked Khmer Rouge cadres to death in retribution.  In 1998, the Khmer Rouge commander Ta Mok placed a frail Pol Pot under house arrest and he died shortly after.

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Cambodia has progressed since Pol Pot’s time.  However, tourists often comment on the fact that Cambodia’s population looks “so young”; an entire generation appears to be missing.  To this day, Pol Pot’s surviving henchmen have never faced punishment for their crimes against their own countrymen, while legless victims of land mine explosions can still be seen in every city and village.