Pol Pot leads a guerrilla war in the jungle in 1979. (AP Photo)
One of the bloodiest dictators of the twentieth century died on April 15, 1998 in the mountains of Cambodia, perhaps of a heart attack, perhaps of suicide
On April 15, 1998, twenty-five years ago, Pol Pot died, leader of the communist armed movement of the Khmer Rouge and the regime with which he had ruled Cambodia until twenty years earlier and which was considered one of the bloodiest in the history of the twentieth century . Pol Pot was 72 years old, in poor health and, after a long argument within the group, had been placed under house arrest by the Khmer Rouge for almost a year. He died in a village in what was still guerrilla-controlled territory, that of Along Veng, a town in northern Cambodia in the Dangrek mountain range that separates the country from Thailand.
His death, which occurred just when it appeared the Khmer Rouge had agreed to hand him over to an international tribunal, has been the subject of many hypotheses and theories.
Officially, Pol Pot died of a heart attack that happened while he was sleeping, but according to some witnesses present at the scene, including journalist Nate Thayer, who was the only one to interview him a year earlier, he killed himself instead by shooting a lethal dose ingested dose of drugs. In any case, he escaped any trial for his crimes: his body was shown to a group of journalists and three days later cremated on a pile of tires according to traditional Buddhist rites. The cremation site was then covered with a rusty sheet of metal flanked by a small shield.
Today it is part of a kind of tourist circuit dedicated to Khmer Rouge sites and is frequented by tourists and onlookers, mainly Cambodians.
The place where Pol Pot was cremated (Wikicommons)
Pol Pot led a communist dictatorship in Cambodia for less than four years, between 1976 and 1979, and an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians died during that time, or about a quarter of the country’s total population. The Khmer Rouge regime was responsible for mass murders of alleged political opponents, but not only. A large part of the population died of hunger, the consequences of forced labor and a lack of medical care. Pol Pot’s methods of government were so extreme that they could almost be viewed as a social experiment: the regime combined elements of Marxism with an ideology reverting to a rural society of the Khmer tradition (Cambodia’s largest ethnic group) and led to what what is known as the Cambodian Genocide.
Pol Pot’s regime was overthrown in 1979 by the military intervention of Vietnam (another communist regime), then supported by the Soviet Union (it was in the middle of the Cold War).
Pol Pot and the other Khmer Rouge leaders moved to the forests and mountains bordering Thailand, where, also with US support, they waged a long-running guerrilla war. Although Pol Pot was at the forefront of a communist movement, he was more or less openly supported by the US government for a long time during and after the war in which the US Army was deployed in Vietnam. The Cambodian dictator was viewed as a possible obstacle to Vietnamese expansion in the region.
Pol Pot was not his real name: he was born Saloth Sar in May 1925 in Prek Sbauv, a small village in north-eastern Cambodia, into a wealthy peasant family. He took the “wartime” name of Pol Pot in 1963 when he was already a revolutionary guerrilla: numerous theories have been put forward as to the meaning of the name, but it’s possible that he had none in particular. During his lifetime, the Cambodian dictator went by many different names and nicknames, including Pouk, Hay, Pol, 87, Big Uncle, Big Brother, Brother Number 1, 99, and Phem. He said to one of his secretaries: “The more often you change your name, the better: it confuses the enemy.”
His family had ties to Cambodia’s King Sisowath Monivong: a cousin of Pol Pot was one of the ruler’s concubines. At the time Cambodia was a French protectorate, the monarchy had limited powers, but proximity to the court ensured high status. This made it possible for Saloth Sar to first attend French schools in the capital Phnom Penh and then go to Paris from 1949 to attend a radio electronics high school: He stayed in France for three years, his school career was unsuccessful, but he made contact the French Communist Party, was influenced by the writings of Stalin and Mao (he later admitted he did not “really understand” Marx’s), and joined the Khmer Marxist circle founded by Cambodians in the French capital.
In 1953 he returned to Cambodia, which had just gained independence from France: he worked as a teacher and was one of the founders of the Cambodian Communist Party (1960). When King Norodom Sihanouk, who had centralized powers and limited democratic activities in those years, launched an operation to arrest all Communist Party members, Pol Pot moved to the forests in the north of the country, where he became the leader of a revolutionary movement . He helped feed and train it for at least a decade, and also maintained ties with North Vietnam and China, from which he solicited military assistance.
In 1970, General Lon Nol seized power in Cambodia in a coup and brought the country closer to the United States and South Vietnam: these were the years of the war in Vietnam and Cambodia’s fortunes were greatly influenced.
In 1970, the invasion of a border region of Cambodia by the Vietcong, the communist resistance force against the US-backed South Vietnamese regime, led to a massive bombing of the country by US air forces. The effects of the US bombings largely hit civilians and had the unforeseen impact of the increased membership of Cambodians in Pol Pot’s revolutionary movement, which had begun to be defined as the “Khmer Rouge”.
In early 1972, Pol Pot controlled a northern region of the country, where he began a land redistribution, confiscation of motorized vehicles, and forced collectivization. The goal was to create a fully self-sufficient agrarian society in which the leaders of the party—then known by the name “Angkar”—would control all aspects of Cambodian life. The war against Lon Nol’s regime continued for a few more years until the latter fled in April 1975 when the Khmer Rouge invaded the capital.
The escape of 8,000 Khmer Rouge members to Thailand in 1979 (AP Photo/JLR)
Within hours, the Khmer Rouge forced the population of Phnom Penh – some 2 million people – out of the city in what was one of the largest forced migrations in recent history, turning the Cambodian capital into a so-called “city specter”. The guerrillas claimed it was a temporary measure to avoid the risk of an American bombing raid.
Hundreds of thousands of people were instead taken to work in the fields. Survivors of the regime said that working in the countryside was exhausting: people had to work more than 10 hours a day and were usually given only two bowls of rice, one for lunch and one for dinner. Anyone who was stolen – even just fruit – was killed. Many Buddhist monks and members of high social classes were killed. The category of teachers was hardest hit: survivors still tell us that people who wear glasses were arrested because glasses were associated with a high level of education.
Photo A diplomat speaks with Khmer Rouge leaders at the entrance of the French Embassy in Phnom Penh April 17, 1975. (AFP/Getty Images) Hundreds of people walk towards the French Embassy in Phnom Penh April 17, 1975. (CLAUDE JUVENAL /AFP/Getty Images)Cambodians during the forced Khmer Rouge migration in Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. (AFP/AFP/Getty Images)Cambodians during the forced Khmer Rouge migration in Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975 (AFP/AFP/ Getty Images)Khmer Rouge celebrate entering Phnom Penh, April 17, 1975. (CLAUDE JUVENAL/AFP/Getty Images)Khmer Rouge celebrate entering Phnom Penh, April 17, 1975 (SJOBERG/AFP/Getty Images ) A Woman next to the body of a dead man in Phnom Penh, April 17, 1975. (CLAUDE JUVENAL/AFP/Getty Images) Cambodians during the forced migration imposed by the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. ( CLAUDE JUVENAL/AFP/Getty Images) A doctor supported by some Westerners helps an injured man at the French embassy in Phnom Penh. (SJOBERG/AFP/Getty Images) The Khmer Rouge enter Phnom Penh, April 17, 1975. (SJOBERG/AFP/Getty Images) The Khmer Rouge enter Phnom Penh, April 17, 1975. (SJOBERG/AFP/Getty Images) The Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. (SJOBERG/AFP/Getty Images)
Pol Pot established one of the most violent and terrible dictatorships of the 20th century: prisons and death camps were established in different parts of the country during the four years of the regime. The testimonies collected in the decades that followed tell of torture, mass killings, and widespread cruelty. The country was organized into a series of agricultural cooperatives where forced labor was practiced, violence was rampant and families were separated. The ambition to create the Cambodian “new man” justified the suppression of any dissent and any perceived sign of weakness.
Human skulls from a mass grave in Cambodia (AP Photo/Peter Stalder)
From December 1976, Pol Pot was preparing Cambodia for a war against Vietnam, by which time Northern forces and the Vietcong had managed to unite the country, taking advantage of the withdrawal of American forces: Vietnam had thus become a socialist republic, but continued to be viewed by Pol Pot as a threat to his own revolution. Underlying the mutual distrust were various reasons of historical nature and border disputes: above all, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam wanted to assert its influence in the region after defeating the Americans, while Pol Pot’s regime did not intend to accept any kind of political interference. Overestimating its own strength, Cambodia believed it could compete militarily with its neighbors.
Clashes in the border regions, which began after some Khmer Rouge incursions, escalated into a full-scale invasion of Cambodia by Vietnamese troops on Christmas Day 1978. Within months, Pol Pot’s regime fell, but the Khmer leadership fled to the Cambodian borders of Thailand, where they continued military opposition to the new Vietnam-backed Cambodian government. Pol Pot officially left military command in 1985 but remained very influential in the years that followed: he spent a few years between Thailand and China until Vietnam withdrew from Cambodia in 1989.
He then settled in a small village in the north of the country, where he remained throughout the 1990s, while his troops deserted and the few Khmer Rouge leaders who stayed by his side slowly abandoned him.
Pol Pot’s body shown to journalists (AP Photo/David Longstreath)
Again in 1997, in a final act of violence and paranoia, he ordered and effected the assassination of his heir, Khmer Rouge leader Son Sen, and twelve of his family members and closest allies. He was then placed under house arrest by another leader of the movement, Ta Mok: it was also during this period that Pol Pot gave the only interview since the fall of his regime. He showed no sign of remorse, justifying every decision his government made with an anti-Vietnamese stance, saying he didn’t believe in the millions dead. His death and that of other leaders of the movement, which took place without a trial, added complexity to the process of coming to terms with the history of this horrific period in Cambodia.
The first convictions of Khmer Rouge leaders came in 2014: two of those convicted in 2018 were also found guilty of genocide.
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