Pol Pot

Encyclopedia : P : PO : POL : Pol Pot

A government portrait of Pol Pot.

Saloth Sar (May 19, 1925 – April 15, 1998), better known as Pol Pot, was the ruler of the Khmer Rouge and the Prime Minister of Cambodia (officially Democratic Kampuchea during his rule) from 1976 to 1979, having been de facto leader since mid-1975. During his time in power Pol Pot instigated an aggressive regime of agricultural reform, designed to create a utopian rural based Communist society. The means to this end included the extermination of intellectuals and other "bourgeois enemies". Today the excesses of his government are widely blamed for causing the deaths of up to two million Cambodians.

Biography

Pol Pot was born in Prek Sbauv in Kampong Thum province. He studied electronics at the EFR in Paris from 1949 to 1953. There he became involved with the Communist Party and joined a group of young left-wing Cambodian nationalists, who later became his fellow leaders in the Khmer Rouge. He married Khieu Ponnary, the sister of Ieng Thirith, in 1956.

Democratic Kampuchea

Out of a population of approximately 8 million people, Pol Pot's regime killed one-quarter. The Khmer Rouge targeted Buddhist monks, Western-educated intellectuals, people who appeared to be intelligent (for example, individuals with glasses), the crippled and lame, and ethnic minorities like ethnic Laotians and Vietnamese. They were thrown into the infamous S-21 camp for interrogation.

Immediately after the fall of Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge began to implement radical communist reforms and placed the king, Norodom Sihanouk, in a purely figurehead role. The Khmer Rouge ordered the complete evacuation of Phnom Penh and all other major towns and cities. Those leaving were told that the evacuation was due to the threat of severe American bombing.

In his article "Blue Scarves and Yellow Stars: Classification and Symbolization in the Cambodian Genocide", Dr. Gregory H. Stanton wrote: "Key officials of Pol Pot's regime had read André Gunder Frank's Marxist theory that cities are parasitic on the countryside, that only labor value is true value, that cities extract surplus value from the rural areas". Therefore immediately after taking power, the Khmer Rouge evacuated all the cities at gunpoint, including those who were not supposed to be moved, such as patients in hospitals and newborns.

In 1976 people were reclassified as full-rights (base) people, candidates and depositees - so called because they included most of the new people who had been deposited from the cities into the communes. Depositees were marked for destruction. Their rations were reduced to two bowls of rice soup, or "juk" per day. This led to widespread starvation.

The Khmer Rouge leadership boasted over the state-controlled radio that only one or two million people were needed to build the new agrarian communist utopia. As for the others, as their proverb put it, "To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss."

Hundreds of thousands of the new people, and later the depositees, were taken out, shackled, to dig their own mass graves. Then the Khmer Rouge soldiers beat them to death with iron bars and hoes or buried them alive. A Khmer Rouge extermination prison directive ordered, "Bullets are not to be wasted."

The Khmer Rouge also classified by religion and ethnic group. They abolished all religion and dispersed minority groups, forbidding them to speak their languages or to practise their customs.

According to Fr Ponchaud's book Cambodia: Year Zero "Ever since 1972 the guerrilla fighters had been sending all the inhabitants of the villages and towns they occupied into the forest to live and often burning their homes, so that they would have nothing to come back to." The Khmer Rouge refused offers of humanitarian aid, a decision which proved to be a humanitarian catastrophe: millions died of starvation and brutal government-inflicted overwork in the countryside.

Property became communal, and education was dispensed at communal schools. Pol Pot's regime was extremely harsh on political dissent and opposition. Torture was widespread. In some instances, throats were slit as prisoners were tied to metal bed frames.

Thousands of politicians and bureaucrats accused of association with previous governments were killed, while Phnom Penh was turned into a ghost city with many dying of starvation, illnesses, or execution. Land mines, which Pol Pot praised as his "perfect soldiers," were widely distributed around the countryside.

The casualty list from the civil war, Pol Pot's consolidation of power, and the later intervention by Vietnam is disputed. Credible Western and Eastern sources put the death toll of the Khmer Rouge at 1.6 million. A specific source, such as a figure of three million deaths between 1975 and 1979, was given by the People's Republic of Kampuchea. Fr Ponchaud suggested 2.3 million—although this includes hundreds of thousands who died prior to the CPK takeover; the Yale Cambodian Genocide Project estimates 1.7 million; Amnesty International estimated 1.4 million; and the United States Department of State, 1.2 million. Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot, who could be expected to give underestimations, cited figures of 1 million and 800,000, respectively. The CIA estimated that there were 50,000 to 100,000 executions.

In 1976, Sihanouk was placed under house arrest and Pol Pot became Prime Minister and the official Cambodian head of state, with colleague Khieu Samphan as President.

By 1978, the human catastrophe in Pol Pot's Cambodia was apparent. The regime's efforts to purge Vietnamese elements from Cambodia increased, resulting in raids into Vietnamese territory. In late 1978, in response to threats to its borders and the Vietnamese people, Vietnam invaded Cambodia to overthrow the Khmer Rouge.

The Cambodian army was easily defeated, and Pol Pot fled to the Thai border. In January 1979, Vietnam installed a new government under Heng Samrin, composed of Khmer Rouge who had fled to Vietnam to avoid the purges. Pol Pot retained a sufficient following to keep fighting in a small area in the west of the country. At this point the PRC, which had earlier supported Pol Pot, attacked, creating a brief Sino-Vietnam War.

Pol Pot espoused a mixture of radical ideologies, the so-called "Anka" Doctrine, adapted to Khmer nationalism. Envisaging a primitive egalitarian agrarianism, the Khmer Rouge favored a completely agrarian society to the point that all modern technological contrivances were banned. Pol Pot was quite the opponent of Soviet orthodoxy. Because he was anti-Soviet, the People's Republic of China considered him preferable to the pro-Vietnamese (therefore pro-Moscow) government. The Western powers took more or less the same line, offering diplomatic support to the Khmer Rouge after they were ousted from power by the Vietnamese in 1979.

Aftermath

Pol Pot

The U.S. opposed an expansion of Vietnamese influence in Indochina, and in the mid-1980s supported insurgents opposed to the regime of Heng Samrin, approving $5 million in aid to the KPNLF of former prime minister Son Sann and the pro-Sihanouk ANS in 1985. Despite this, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge remained the best-trained and most capable of the three insurgent groups who, despite sharply divergent ideologies, had formed the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK) alliance three years earlier. China continued to funnel extensive military aid to the Khmer Rouge, and critics of U.S. foreign policy claimed that the U.S. was indirectly sponsoring the Khmer Rouge due to its diplomatic recognition of the CGDK.

Pol Pot officially resigned in 1985, but continued as de facto Khmer Rouge leader and dominant force within the anti-Heng alliance. Opponents of the Khmer Rouge claimed that they were sometimes acting in an inhumane manner in territory controlled by the alliance.

In 1989, Vietnam withdrew from Cambodia. Pol Pot refused to cooperate with the peace process, and kept fighting the new coalition government. The Khmer Rouge kept the government forces at bay until 1996, when the demoralized troops started deserting. Several important Khmer Rouge leaders also defected.

Pol Pot ordered the execution of his life-long right-hand man Son Sen and eleven members of his family on June 10, 1997 for wanting to make a settlement with the government (the news did not reach outside of Cambodia for three days). Pol Pot then fled his northern stronghold, but was later arrested by Khmer Rouge military Chief Ta Mok, and sentenced to lifelong house arrest. In April 1998, following a new government attack, Ta Mok fled into the forest taking Pol Pot with him. A few days later, on April 15, 1998, Pol Pot died, reportedly of a heart attack. His body was burned in the Cambodian countryside, with several dozen Khmer Rouge in attendance. According to them, while his body burned, his right hand was raised high in a fist.

Till this day, his death remains a controversy, to whether he was murdered or of natural causes...

|- style="text-align: center;"

See also

• The Killing Fields
• Democratic Kampuchea
• The Killing Fields (film)
• Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum
• Khmer Rouge
• Loung Ung
• Holiday in Cambodia - a song by the Dead Kennedys

Reference

• Published in the US under the title: ''Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare"