title: “The Devil S Due” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-26” author: “Gordon Metheny”
But even as visitors drifted in and out of the small second-floor museum gallery last week, the photographs were being transformed by events halfway around the world. Former Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, the man principally responsible for the death of at least one sixth of the entire population of his country, was reported captured by a renegade force of his own soldiers. Now the photographs take on a new meaning. They are evidence.
Of all the great man-made calamities of the 20th century, few were as grimly dispiriting as the Cambo-dian holocaust of 1975 to 1979, in which more than a million people died. Of these, according to David Chandler, a leading Cambodia scholar, as many as 100,000 were killed outright for (mostly imaginary) crimes against the regime; the rest succumbed to starvation and disease in the forced relocation of virtually the entire population of Phnom Penh into the countryside. The West, as is customary, responded with a devastating barrage of Amnesty Internationalreports and op-ed pieces on behalf of the helpless multitudes. The slaughter ended only in 1979 when the Vietnamese, provoked by a series of border clashes, threw the Khmer Rouge out of Phnom Penh. Pol Pot escaped to the jungle near Thailand with a small but potent guerrilla army, and for the next 18 years nobody did much to bring him to justice while he waged a low-level civil war against the Vietnam-backed puppet government that ruled the country until 1993. (The Vietnamese convicted him and his foreign minister, Ieng Sary, in a meaningless show trial in absentia.) Revolted as they were by genocide, Western countries, including the United States, covertly supported the Khmer Rouge for much of that time, on the principle that no enemy of Vietnam could be all that bad.
Nor did Pol Pot’s capture last week, announced both by the two co-prime ministers of Cambodia’s bizarrely divided government and by Khmer Rouge radio, bespeak a sudden seizure of conscience among the notoriously opportunistic politicians of Phnom Penh. Nearing 70 and reportedly bedridden with malaria, Pol Pot was set upon by his former comrades, who saw him as an obstacle to cutting favorable deals for themselves with the government’s competing factions. Ieng Sary, who was also Pol Pot’s lifelong friend and brother-in-law, defected last summer, accepting a pardon in exchange for a ceasefire; he has emerged as the de facto baron of a rich swath of western Cambodia. A few weeks ago Pol Pot’s onetime defense minister, Son Sen, made overtures to one of the co-prime ministers, and an outraged Pol Pot had Son Sen murdered. He also killed Son Sen’s powerful wife and whomever among his children and associates he could lay his hands on, and for good measure had the corpses run over by a tractor. But then he was left to fight almost alone, trapped with about 250 loyalists between 1,000 well-armed guerrillas and a heavily mined area near the Thai border. His fate is a useful reminder that, as the late columnist Murray Kempton once observed, politicians are always willing to proclaim death to dead tyrants.
News of the government’s plan to turn over Pol Pot to a United Nations tribunal for trial electrified Cambodia last week - partly because it was the first time in recent memory that the co-prime ministers, Norodom Ranariddh and Hun Sen, have agreed on anything. Just a few days earlier, in fact, two people were killed in a nighttime fire fight in the heart of Phnom Penh between Ranariddh’s guards and police forces loyal to Hun Sen. (A rocket landed near the American ambassador’s residence, shattering several windows - and possibly derailing Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s plans to visit Phnom Penh on her way to Hong Kong this week.)
Cambodians who lost family members or friends in the holocaust - which includes practically everyone in the country - naturally welcomed the prospect of justice. ““Two of my brothers were killed by Pol Pot,’’ said Ahmed Yaya, a deputy in the National Assembly. ““I want to see his face, have him go on trial to explain what he did and why, and to answer for his crimes.’’ And Cambodians who participated in the holocaust - and there are quite a few of those, too, some still living among the people they once terrorized - might reasonably hope that vengeance will spend itself on Pol Pot, particularly now that Ieng Sary has been pardoned. Already scholars and activists are taking sides on the question of whether Pol Pot’s associates should be tried as well. Ben Kiernan, the Yale professor who heads the Genocide Program, argued last week that ““other Khmer Rouge officials may be just as guilty as he is - and they should not be offered amnesty.’’ But Michael Doyle, a professor of international relations at Princeton and a senior fellow of the International Peace Academy, said he feared the consequences of a witch hunt. ““Every single Cambodian family has uncles, aunts, fathers and mothers, children and nephews and nieces who were killed,’’ he said. ““But every Cambodian family also has the suspicion that someone in the family was implicated in the Khmer Rouge movement . . . Cambodia is not ready to deal with the crimes of that period in a comprehensive fashion.''
But in a sense, the whole 20th century has been building toward this trial - the first of a mass murderer who couldn’t say he was only following orders; a chance to see, close up, the process by which ideological monomania turns into genocide. As Chandler points out in his 1992 biography of Pol Pot, ““Brother Number One,’’ the Khmer Rouge leader, in the years before he took power, was uniformly described as thoughtful, decent, honest and even-tempered. He was a likable child, born during the sleepy French-colonial years into a prosperous farm family that had the good fortune to place several female members as royal consorts. Pol Pot - born Saloth Sar - spent part of his childhood in and around the palace. Like most of those who event-ually led rebellions against France, he studied in Paris, and he returned to Phnom Penh in the 1950s as a gifted teacher, ““eloquent but unpretentious,’’ according to Chandler, ““honest, humane, easy to befriend - up to a point - and easy to respect.''
But also, by then, a committed communist. By the time the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, just two weeks before the fall of Saigon, Cambodia was a coun-try devastated by years of civil war and by American bombing directed at the Vietnamese bases in the eastern part of the country. The wise and inspiring teacher suddenly unmasked himself as a brutal dictator intent on remaking Cam-bodian society by destroying it from the top down. Every institution was system-atically demolished; schools, Christian churches and Buddhist temples were indiscriminately closed and razed. Regarding even Mao as a backslider for permitting vestiges of family life, Pol Pot decreed that all meals be taken in communal dining halls. Private property was outlawed, and even money was abolished; the central bank was dynamited, raining worthless currency on the nearly deserted streets of the capital.
And, of course, there were the purges, beginning with admitted enemies and inevitably spreading to longtime associates. As many as 20,000 people passed through Tuol Sleng, all but a handful killed after a confession was extracted by torture. Some of the victims were prominent Khmer Rouge who’d had a falling-out with Pol Pot, but others were just teenage soldiers or workers who had confessed to missing their parents and tried to go home. And some of them, of course, were the wives, friends - or children - of other prisoners.
Meanwhile, of course, a much greater holocaust was raging in the countryside, to which virtually the entire population of Phnom Penh had been deported to grow rice. There, tens of thousands of suspected ““intellectuals’’ - anyone who showed evidence of education, or prerevolutionary wealth, or even just had the misfortune of wearing eyeglasses - were summarily executed, sometimes with a blow to the back of the head. Many more who escaped execution were simply worked to death, or died of famine in the food shortages that have afflicted every attempt to impose mass collectivization on agriculture in this century. Dith Pran, the New York Times news assistant whose escape from Cambodia was told in the movie ““The Killing Fields,’’ survived by posing as a humble taxi driver, following one simple rule: ““If you tell the truth, or argue even a little, they kill you.''
So now, says Sochua Mu, who heads a women’s-rights organization in Phnom Penh and lost 33 relatives to the Khmer Rouge, ““it’s the end of the nightmare.’’ Even in his remote jungle hideaway, where he has not been seen by an outsider since 1979, Pol Pot has haunted Cambodians’ dreams and shadowed every political discussion, every reminiscence of the past and hope for the future. Provided that he really has been captured (the two prime ministers offered no pictures or other proof), and that he is actually turned over to the government for trial, and that the government doesn’t fall apart into civil war in the meantime, this infinitely sad and beautiful country can, perhaps, begin healing its ghastly wounds. Eleven million people are too few to bear so much of the burden of our century’s awful history.
1971-Born in 1928 to a farming family in French indochina, Pol Pot joined the anti-French resistance as a teenager and in 1963 became head of Cambodia’s Communist Party after allegedly ordering his predecessor’s assassination. by 1971 he is fighting a civil war against Gen. Lon Nol, who is aided by the U.S. and by South Vietnamese troops.
1975-The Khmer Rouge has grown from a force of 4,000 to more than 70,000, and is gaining a reputation for brutality. In February, it launches a rocket attack on downtown Phnom Penh, killing 12 schoolchildren.
1975-Fighting in alliance with the forces of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge topples Lon Nol in April, triggering celebrations in Phnom Penh. Soon Pol Pot seizes power, and starts the radical experiments that create the ‘killing fields.’
1978-Khmer Rouge violence peaks. Pol Pot purges enemies, empties the cities and works urbanites to death in the countryside. He invites his own fall, however, when he begins launching border raids against Vietnam.
1979-Vietnam seizes the capital and drives Pol Pot into the jungle, where he vows to fight ‘for eternity if necessary.’ The Vietnam-backed government sentences him to death in absentia for ‘genocidal crimes.’
1989-After many failed attempts to capture Pol Pot, and facing rising Cambodian nationalism, Vietnam pulls out its troops. The Khmer Rouge later boycott U.N.-sponsored elections, opting to stay in the jungle.
1996-Defectors abandon the Khmer Rouge amid rumors that Pol Pot is dead, while the man he deposed, Sihanouk, has regained the throne. The endgame climaxes with reports of Pol Pot’s capture last week.
