The Most Evil Men and Women in History - Episode Ten - Pol Pot (2002) (380p)

In April 1998, one of history's most reviled mass murderers died. This was a leader who showed his people no mercy. As ruler of Cambodia, Pol Pot was responsible for killing nearly two million people, that's a quarter of the country's population. In his four-year reign, Pol Pot tortured and starved the Cambodians to death. Men, women, children and babies were often brutally clubbed to death with hammers and buried alive. He turned Cambodia into a killing field. When I first spoke with Pol Pot, he refused to take responsibility for an absolutely cataclysmic, catastrophic destruction of innocent people. As the architect of a brutal social experiment driven by racial and political hatred, Pol Pot's regime left behind a tragic legacy of misery and mass graves. No one, no one had a clue at how many people had been slaughtered and how many people had died, no one. On the 17th of April 1975, a guerrilla army known as the Khmer Rouge entered the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, victors of a five-year war against the government backed by the Americans. The Khmer Rouge leader was a man most Cambodians had never heard of. When it was announced that Pol Pot, a rubber plantation worker, was the new prime minister, no one had ever heard that name. It wasn't until late 1978 when his picture began to appear in communal dining halls that his own brothers and sisters realized that it was their brother who was in charge of this government. Pol Pot was born in 1925 on a rice farm north of Phnom Penh in a Cambodia ruled by the French. At the age of six, he was sent to the capital to train as a Buddhist monk, but the boy from the village only felt like an outsider in the bustling modern city. He didn't have a sense of the multicultural nature of the Cambodian cities like Phnom Penh, which were mostly ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese, or if he did have that sense, he resented it. When he visited Saigon, he said he felt like a dark monkey from the mountains. Cambodians' political culture is steeped in resentment towards its neighbors and its racial neighbors. It's steeped in a deep feeling of being a lesser culture. Pol Pot, in many ways, was a reflection of all of these things. In 1949, Pol Pot went to Paris as a student. There, his innate racism would find expression in extreme communism. The years that Pol Pot was in Paris was probably the most hardline Stalinist party in western Europe, a very rigid doctrinaire party. The terrible things that happened under the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 did indeed have a lot to do with ideology, but more to do with racism, with chauvinism, with nationalism. Those were the driving forces and the driving ideologies behind what many call genocide. Pol Pot returned to a newly independent Cambodia in 1953 and joined the underground communist party. Outlawed by King Sihanouk's government, Pol Pot and his comrades fled to the countryside to wage a vicious guerrilla war. Even then, Pol Pot had his sights on ultimate power. Pol Pot was more likely than not responsible for the execution of his predecessor as leader of the communist party in 1962. He was a man who was able to hold on to power while eliminating any and all opposition. Pol Pot's ruthless march to power was boosted in 1970 when the Vietnam War spilled over into Cambodia. Pursuing communist North Vietnamese troops across the border, the United States bombed huge areas of Cambodia, killing thousands of peasants in the process. This only increased support for Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. There was this terrible mixture of historical events and terrible Cambodian political reality which ended up with an orgy of mass murder of which Pol Pot, without any question, was the architect. By April 1975, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge were in the capital, Phnom Penh. When they achieved victory in April 75, they felt they were in a position to put in place and to carry out an extreme, pure, total revolution of a sort that was more extreme, more total, purer than any other revolution in history. When Pol Pot and his army arrived in Phnom Penh, they immediately evacuated the entire population into the countryside. In what would be known as year zero, Pol Pot began to destroy and rip up Cambodian society, reducing it to a state of primitive barbarity. It was very frantic, it was very chaotic, very scaring. They just scream and scream into the bullhorn that said we have to leave. Two million Cambodians living in Phnom Penh were evacuated in 72 hours. It's the take the basket and dump it upside down theory. You broke up every organization that anybody ever had. They were cut from their family, they were cut from their friends, they were cut from their professions, everything. Believing the city people to be contaminated by their past lives, Pol Pot would rewrite their histories. Money was banned, the Buddhist religion outlawed, and the country's name changed to Kampuchea. Then he dispersed the city people to peasant villages throughout Cambodia, where they would grow rice and build dams for the revolution. Here, in this idealized peasant state, he would purify them through hard labor and brutality. They did regard the city population as enemy, but mixed with that was a strong ethnic belief that the peasants were the real Cambodians. We were from day one because of our skin color, we're targeted. Lighter skin meant that you were probably came from a more corrupt class. Darker skin for good because it meant you work in the field. It meant you worked to grow rice to support the revolution. Little more than nameless, faceless slaves, the city people would literally be worked to death. We worked 12 to 16 to 18 hours working in the field, growing rice, harvesting rice, building dams. There's a lot of people do a lot of harsh work. I mean, people work, they work you until you drop dead. The community slogan that time was to keep you with no gain and to destroy you with no loss. So we knew that human life was cheap and that we if we did not produce, we would be killed. Fear and the threat of arbitrary casual death was everywhere. At one point I remember just working and then they just walk up and shoot the person in the head. In fact, most of Pol Pot's victims were killed not by bullets, but beaten to death with blunt instruments. We still didn't know who Pol Pot was. We didn't know what kind of a man he was. We didn't know what he looked like. And I remember just hearing all these accolades and praise about this mighty person, this strong person, this person who loved us, this person who wanted to bring our country back to its glory days. In Pol Pot's peasant utopia, starvation claimed most lives. The huge influx of city people into the rural areas meant there was not enough rice to feed them. Even the peasants themselves began to starve. And indeed, rice was withdrawn and exported by the party center while these people were dying in massive numbers of starvation. Life wasn't even cheap. To Pol Pot, it had no value at all. Cambodia became a macabre network of killing fields. Even today, the exact number of mass graves into which the victims' bodies were thrown is not known. You know, Pol Pot was a remarkable man. He was generous, he was kind, he was loving, almost grandfatherly. He had all of the characteristics of a great leader. There are a lot of Cambodians who don't believe that what happened under Pol Pot, in fact, was his doing because he was too good a man. Pol Pot believed that what he did, he did for the good of his country. Few Westerners ever got to meet Pol Pot whilst he was in power. One who did was American journalist Elizabeth Becker, who interviewed him in 1978. What struck me first was that he was much more handsome and a charming smile. There was some charm to the man. And we were told to sit down, put the cameras away, and we were to sit there and listen to Pol Pot. And when the time was up, the time was up, and he said goodbye. With her was another journalist, Dick Dudman, and British academic Malcolm Caldwell. To Caldwell, he was more indulgent. He told Malcolm Caldwell how wonderful the communist experiment was in Cambodia. Two totally different interviews. One was a lecture and the other was an interview. Later that night, back at their hotel, an unremarkable meeting with Pol Pot was about to turn into an unforgettable nightmare. A few hours later, I woke up because I could smell a gun being fired. And then I heard shots on the second floor. Lots of shots. I didn't count them, but lots and lots of shots. And so I went upstairs, and Malcolm's body was on the floor, and white with death. The gunman walked in and murdered Malcolm. Why Malcolm? The friend, the one friend of the regime. And not us. Some documents suggest it would have been me. Another one suggested it was Caldwell. Why? It doesn't make any sense, but nothing makes sense there. Needless to say, after all that, I couldn't imagine how Cambodians lived through almost four years of that. I mean, what I went through in two weeks, they lived through four years. I saw their whole lives, their whole country, everything destroyed. Within two years of Pol Pot coming to power, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians lay rotting in mass graves. Starvation, overwork, and summary execution had all taken its toll on the city people and the peasants. To prove yourself worthy, to be kept alive, you have to be protected in the field. You have to be a protected person. They were monsters, so we didn't see them. I didn't see them as human beings. He never accepted that he was responsible for any of the suffering. He never accepted that any of the people who died were executed for anything but the right reasons. And for him to admit the slightest remorse or the slightest responsibility would be intolerable. Compelled by the racism that was so much a part of his agenda, Pol Pot turned his attention to Cambodia's ethnic minorities. The Chinese were probably the largest ethnic minority in Cambodia, and half of those perished in the Pol Pot period. The ethnic Choms, the ethnic Muslims, were the ones who were particularly targeted and just slaughtered. Pol Pot's most extreme persecution was reserved for the Vietnamese who lived in Cambodia. There were reports in the Khmer Rouge period of Cambodian men married to Vietnamese being instructed to kill their Vietnamese wives. Husbands who had been married to Vietnamese were also killed. People who could speak Vietnamese were also killed. People who looked Vietnamese were also killed. There are no confirmed reports of any ethnic Vietnamese surviving the entire Pol Pot period. Yet while Pol Pot's control over Cambodia grew, so did his paranoia. Midway through his reign of terror he began to see enemies everywhere, even amongst his own supporters. There was a huge bloodletting in 1977, purge teams traveling around to other zones, purging the leadership, killing them, killing their family members, reaching down into the peasantry for their relatives who were suspect in killing them as well. When he took over in 1975, there were 22 members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. By the end of his reign and power, three years, eight months, and 20 days later, 18 of those 22 members of the Central Committee had been executed. Most of the executions took place at an old school called Tul Sling. Known as S21, it was established by Pol Pot to torture and kill his political enemies. It's a terrible institution that I think epitomizes some of the cruelties and logic of the Pol Pot regime. These people had defied the revolutions, therefore they were off to one side, they were not human beings. People who aren't human or should be, can be, must be gotten rid of. In less than four years, Pol Pot sent between 14 and 20,000 people to S21. Men, women, and children were tagged, photographed, and almost all were tortured into confessing. The whole ideology of the place was that because they were arrested, they were guilty, they must be because the party was never wrong, it never makes mistakes. The word for prisoner means guilty person rather than someone who's being held. And even if some of the people you kill turn out not to have been guilty of the crimes you've charged with, so what? You might find that out later, but at the time, it's probably better to get rid of them than to keep them around in case they are guilty. Pol Pot said that he had never heard of Tul Sling, S21, the torture chamber of which almost 20,000 people he ordered went through to their deaths after extensive torture. Although the Khmer Rouge tried to destroy the evidence, every torture process and every confession of every prisoner was recorded in detail. The documentation was very important to these people, but I think they were intended partly to convince Pol Pot and his colleagues who saw the documents themselves, saw copies of them, that they were on the right track. They knew there'd be no punishment for killing all these people, there'd be punishment for people who were tortured to death, and this did happen in many cases. The interrogators themselves are often pulled in and interrogated because they're betraying the revolution by going too far, by torturing people to death before the confession was complete, before the party had been proved right. Of the thousands who entered S21, just seven survived and only one was ever released. The rest were either tortured to death or killed and then buried at S21's customized killing field, Cheung Ek. This was a systematic regime doing some systematic cruel things to its own people for reasons that were demented but made sense to them. Appearing to be at the height of his power, Pol Pot's government was in fact imploding. His psychotic and lifelong hatred for the Vietnamese would be his undoing. Pol Pot really believed that Cambodia would disappear off the map unless he was able to dispense with the Vietnamese threat. They thought it required a genocidal way of thinking against Vietnamese generally. Also there's this much more primordial racist feeling that Vietnamese by nature could not exist and coexist with Cambodians, that there had to be an Armageddon. Every Cambodian should kill 30 Vietnamese. They could lose two million Cambodians. The Vietnamese would lose 60 million in this Armageddon and we would still have six million left. In response to continuous raids into Vietnamese territory on the 21st of December 1977, 150,000 Vietnamese troops stormed across the Cambodian border. By January the 6th, 1978, they were on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. With Cambodia you have a span of four years of daily persecution, humiliation, starvation, pain. So your soul as a human being gets desecrated more and more and more. So by the end of the fourth year, your hate, your anger, your hunger makes you a little less of a human being. Pol Pot and thousands of his Khmer Rouge henchmen fled Phnom Penh to northern Cambodia and Thailand. From here, Pol Pot continued a guerrilla war against the new Vietnamese government. It would be another 20 years before he was seen again, but this time he was on trial. The Khmer Rouge were people who no longer had faith in Pol Pot's leadership. They had arrested him, but they had arrested him not for crimes of genocide or crimes against humanity. They'd arrested him for essentially being a political enemy. Four months later, Nate Thayer was invited to interview Pol Pot, who was now under house arrest and close to death. When I first spoke with Pol Pot, he came up to me and he put his arm on my shoulder and he said, in his raspy voice, he said, Ngum Squawchamaw Yulhai, which means, I've known your name for a long, long time. And that was the first thing he said to me. And he gave me this gentle, shy smile and looked at me and gazed down and took me by the arm and walked me to a little bamboo hut where he begged me to understand why it was necessary for him to execute little babies. For hours, in a very rational way. And of course, we started off knowing that it might be very short, asking him the fundamental questions of, you are accused of causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of innocent Cambodians. And are you regretful? Are you sorry? And will you apologize? Which was a direct question repeatedly. And he refused to answer the question. And I did get angry and he threatened to end the interview three times within half an hour. Because that was not an acceptable answer to me as a journalist or as a human being. Cambodians deserve better and they deserved, and the world deserves better, than two journalists interviewing a genocidal maniac in the jungle in a bamboo hut. Two weeks later, in April 1998, Pol Pot died of natural causes. The madness unleashed on Cambodia by Pol Pot and his colleagues will never be forgotten, but so far it has gone unpunished.