April 15, 1998: Pol Pot dies
Ten years ago today, Pol Pot, (a/k/a Brother Number One, Pol, Pouk, Hay, Grand-Uncle, '87', Phem, '99) architect of Cambodia's killing fields, dies of apparently natural causes while serving a life sentence imposed against him by his own "Khmer Rouge."
The Khmer people are the predominant ethnic group in Cambodia, accounting for approximately 90% of the 13.9 million people in the country. Thus, Khmer Rouge was the name applied by the French-speaking government Pot sought to overthrow meaning literally "Red Khmer."
Born into the wealth and privilege of an upper class Cambodian family, Pot was educated in French Catholic primary and secondary schools in the capital of Phnom Penh. After high school, he was sent to Paris for technical training. He didn't perform particulalry well there, but he became enamored with communism under the tutelage of French Marxists After he failed out of school, he returned to Cambodia devoted to the notion of advancing a communist revolution.
Pol Pot and fellow traveler Mao
The Khmer Rouge, organized by Pol Pot in the Cambodian jungle in the 1960s, advocated a radical communist revolution that would wipe out Western influences in Cambodia and set up a solely agrarian society. In that sense , they were rather like a southeast Asian Taliban, although unlike the Taliban, the KR did not have any religious overtones.
In 1970, aided by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops, Khmer Rouge guerrillas began a large-scale insurgency against Cambodian government forces, soon gaining control of nearly a third of the country.
Khmer Rouge troop. Generally, when you arm uneducated poor kids, charge them with rooting out undesireable elements and turn them loose on the countryside with no discipline or adult leadership, bad things happen.
By 1973, secret U.S. bombings of Cambodian territory controlled by the Vietnamese communists forced the Vietnamese out of the country, creating a power vacuum that was soon filled by Pol Pot's rapidly growing Khmer Rouge movement.
In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, overthrew the pro-U.S. regime, and established a new government, the Kampuchean People's Republic.
As the new ruler of Cambodia, Pol Pot set about transforming the country into his vision of an agrarian utopia. He began by declaring, "This is Year Zero," and that society was about to be "purified." Capitalism, Western culture, city life, religion, and all foreign influences were to be extinguished in favor of an extreme form of peasant Communism.
All foreigners were thus expelled, embassies closed, and any foreign economic or medical assistance was refused. The use of foreign languages was banned. Newspapers and television stations were shut down, radios and bicycles confiscated, and mail and telephone usage curtailed. Money was forbidden. All businesses were shuttered, religion banned, education halted, health care eliminated, and parental authority revoked. Thus Cambodia was sealed off from the outside world.
All of Cambodia's cities were then forcibly evacuated. At Phnom Penh, two million inhabitants were evacuated on foot into the countryside at gunpoint. As many as 20,000 died along the way.
Currency and private property was abolished. Anyone believed to be an intellectual, such as someone who spoke a foreign language, was immediately killed.
Skilled workers were also killed, in addition to anyone caught in possession of eyeglasses, a wristwatch, or any other modern technology. In forced marches punctuated with atrocities from the Khmer Rouge, the millions who failed to escape Cambodia were herded onto rural collective farms.
Between 1975 and 1978, an estimated two million Cambodians died by execution, forced labor, and famine. In 1978, Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia, capturing Phnom Penh in early 1979. A moderate communist government was established, and Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge retreated back into the jungle.
In 1985, Pol Pot officially retired but remained the effective head of the Khmer Rouge, which continued its guerrilla actions against the government in Phnom Penh.
In 1997, however, he was put on trial by the organization after an internal power struggle ousted him from his leadership position. Sentenced to life imprisonment by a "people's tribunal," which critics derided as a show trial, Pol Pot later declared in an interview, "My conscience is clear." Much of the international community hoped that his captors would extradite him to stand trial for his crimes against humanity.
On the night of April 15, 1998 the Voice of America, of which Pol Pot was a devoted listener, announced that the Khmer Rouge had agreed to turn him over to an international tribunal. According to his wife, he died in his bed later in the night while waiting to be moved to another location. His captors claimed that his death was due to heart failure.
Despite government requests to inspect the body, it was cremated a few days later at Anlong Veng in the Khmer Rouge zone, raising suspicions that he committed suicide.
Originally Posted by badger
