Pol Pot's death poses great challenges

By Harvey Stockwin

HONG KONG (JP): Pol Pot, the Cambodian ruler who, as leader of the Khmer Rouge, instigated and sustained the horrific "killing fields" during his brief period controlling the country 1975- 1979, is said to have died of a heart attack late on Wednesday April 15 somewhere in his longtime sanctuary on the Thai- Cambodian border.

While various sources seem to confirm this event, a degree of skepticism is in order. Pol Pot has been reported dead on several occasions in the past as the rumor mills of Southeast Asia have confused wishful thinking or political gossip with hard fact.

The very circumstances preceding the heart attack increase doubt. Some former leaders of the Khmer Rouge were said to be thinking of surrendering to the Hun Sen government in Phnom Penh. One such leader was reported to be talking of clearing his way to respectability by giving Pol Pot over to those, presumably the Americans, who would put him on trial before an international tribunal.

Other reports in the Hong Kong press only this morning had Pol Pot bring moved "among safe houses" while still being "deep in Khmer Rouge territory", and planning to seek political asylum in a third unspecified country. Against this typically murky background of Cambodian plot and counter-plot, it needs to be pointed out that some of Pol Pot's henchmen had reason to either kill him off, or to pretend that he was dead.

The Thai Deputy Foreign Minister, who reportedly has urged the Cambodians to allow for Pol Pot's body to be verified by some impartial witnesses before it is cremated, is to be commended.

Whether Pol Pot has definitely died, from a heart attack or any other cause, will never be known for certain unless some credible third party sees the body before it is quickly buried or burnt.

Assuming that the sheer number of reports on this occasion do finally indicate his passing, the death of Pol Pot ends the career of the man who, relatively speaking, was by far the greatest political butcher of the 20th century.

Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong all killed millions more of their own or other peoples, but they practiced their political butchery in far larger nations. But as Pol Pot brutalized a whole people, and killed around two million Cambodians, he used his genocidal instincts to eliminate between a fifth and a quarter of the whole Khmer race. This feat compares with, and eclipses, Hitler's ruthless attempt to eradicate the Jews in Europe.

The savage irony about this is that Pol Pot ended up fulfilling the very fear which gave his Khmer communist movement some meaning.

From the days they studied communist ideology in Paris until the moment when they gained power in 1975, Pol Pot and his comrades in extremism were motivated by the pervasive underlying Khmer fear of being a race in danger of extinction:

As Pol Pot ordered the execution of all foreign correspondents caught in Khmer Rouge territory during the 1970-1975 struggle against the then Cambodian ruler, Lon Nol;

as he emptied Phnom Penh of every one of its inhabitants immediately after Lon Nol was defeated, and sent them off to toil in the countryside;

as he sealed Cambodia off completely from the outside world in the pursuit of a mindlessly utopian Year Zero;

and as the thousands upon thousands of Cambodian were simply slaughtered --- sometimes for infringements as minor as owning a pair of spectacles, thereby indicating foreign influence --- Pol Pot sought to save Cambodia by destroying it.

It is hard to find words to describe the terror which Pol Pot unleashed upon what many foreigners had earlier taken to be a calm and pleasant kingdom. Another few years in power and Pol Pot might have achieved the extinction of the Khmer race. Ironically, the very nation which Cambodians feared might extinguish them, Vietnam, probably saved it when Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Pol Pot regime in 1979.

But it is still too soon to be sure that Cambodia can be redeemed. The outside world agreed to the Paris Peace Accords in an effort to save Cambodia from itself, but redemption for the nation is not yet at hand. As part of the Pol Pot legacy, a mindless violence permeates Cambodian politics and society.

Instead of pursuing a strong coalition with the remaining royalists, the present ruler Hun Sen, himself a defector earlier from the Khmer Rouge, seeks, sometimes violently, to rid himself of all opposition. The Khmer Rouge remnants seek to survive by doing deals with Hun Sen, as one of their former leaders Ieng Sary has already done. The royalists, whether King Sihanouk or his son Prince Ranariddh, too often lack the gravitas which their nation so desperately needs.

So it is too soon to be sure that the deeply-feared process of Cambodian self-destruction, which Pol Pot's brief rule set in train, has been reversed.

For the rest of the world, and the so-called United Nations, the death of Pol Pot, if confirmed, poses a stark challenge. Will humanity so organize itself in the 21st century as to make absolutely certain that such barbarity never visits itself upon any nation ever again?