Edition: U.S. / Global

DEATH OF POL POT; Pol Pot, Brutal Dictator Who Forced Cambodians to Killing Fields, Dies at 73

Published: April 17, 1998

Pol Pot, who created in Cambodia one of the 20th century's most brutal and radical regimes, died on Wednesday of heart failure, according to his Cambodian jailers. He was 73 years old.

Already enfeebled from malaria, Pol Pot had become seriously ill in recent months while under house arrest by some of his former allies. In the last two weeks he was encircled by the Cambodian Government Army and had retreated farther into the jungle. His wife said he died in his sleep.

Pol Pot conducted a rule of terror that led to the deaths of nearly a quarter of Cambodia's seven million people, by the most widely accepted estimates, through execution, torture, starvation and disease.

His smiling face and quiet manner belied his brutality. He and his inner circle of revolutionaries adopted a Communism based on Maoism and Stalinism, then carried it to extremes: They and their Khmer Rouge movement tore apart Cambodia in an attempt to ''purify'' the country's agrarian society and turn people into revolutionary worker-peasants.


The Khmer Rouge especially persecuted members of minority ethnic groups -- the Chinese, Muslim Chams, Vietnamese and Thais who had lived for generations in the country, and any other foreigners -- in an attempt to make one ''pure'' Cambodia. Non-Cambodians were forbidden to speak their native languages or to exhibit any ''foreign'' traits. The pogrom against the Cham minority was the most devastating, killing more than half of that community.

Assassination He Ordered Becomes His Undoing

Though Pol Pot was responsible for an untold number of deaths, he never faced charges until July 1997, when some of his former Khmer Rouge followers turned on him, denounced him for crimes against humanity in a carefully scripted show trial and put him under house arrest for life.

Pol Pot had incurred the wrath of his former allies by ordering the assassination of a political associate. In a pattern he established when he was in power, Pol Pot blamed Son Sen for his fading grip on the movement. He not only ordered Son Sen killed, but also told followers to execute more than a dozen of his relatives, including grandchildren.

In a magazine interview in October 1997, the sickly ex-dictator expressed regrets about the deaths of his rival's family: ''You know, for the other people, the babies, the young ones, I did not order them to be killed.''

The interview, with Nate Thayer for the Far Eastern Economic Review, portrayed a man succumbing to age, bored and preoccupied with his aches and pains, but free of remorse. ''I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people,'' he told his questioner. ''Even now, and you can look at me: am I a savage person?''

Many experts on Southeast Asia as well as the Cambodians who endured his rule would answer him with a resounding ''Yes.''

But Pol Pot, while acknowledging that ''our movement made mistakes,'' insisted that he had ordered killings in self-defense, to save Cambodia from its Vietnamese enemies, and that the numbers of dead were wildly exaggerated.

Yet even today his legacy fractures the country with continuing violence, political feuds, corruption and social fragility.

Pol Pol's army captured the capital on April 17, 1975, after a devastating five-year civil war. During it, the United States dropped more bombs on Cambodia in its campaign against Pol Pot than it had unleashed on Japan during World War II. After it, with breathtaking speed, Pol Pot and his black-clad followers immediately ordered weary Cambodians to leave their homes for the countryside and begin life at ''Year Zero.'' After three years of terror, he was driven from power in 1979 by an invasion from neighboring Vietnam.

From then on, Pol Pot used the geopolitics of the cold war to his advantage, convincing most of Asia and the non-Communist world that his Khmer Rouge Government was unlawfully thrown out by Vietnam. His exiled government retained the political recognition of the United States and much of the world throughout the 1980's while Vietnamese-occupied Cambodia was placed under severe international sanctions.


Pol Pot was one of the most secretive of national leaders. His bland face and unthreatening manner, his self-effacement, his rare and turgid public statements and his life in hiding -- even during his years of absolute power -- were some of his chief tactics in keeping his rivals off balance and his hold over his followers.

There was little evident in Pol Pot's background to suggest any personal drama. Since his childhood, the phrases used to describe him were uninspiring: polite, mediocre, soft-spoken, patient, even shy.

Still, people who knew him described him as warm and reassuring, especially in small groups.

An Interviewer Describes His Personal Appeal