Pol Pot

[MAY 19, 1925–APRIL 15, 1998]

Cambodian leader of that country's underground communist party, Khmer Rouge, from 1962; became head of the genocidal regime of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) in 1975 and ruled until his overthrow in early 1979

Pol Pot was born Saloth Sar, in Kompong Thom province, on May 19, 1925 (or 1928). His father, Phen Saloth, owned twelve hectares of land, and had connections at Cambodia's court. Sar's sister was a consort of King Monivong. From age six, Sar lived in Phnom Penh with his brother Suong, a palace protocol officer. He spent a year in the royal Buddhist monastery, and six years in an elite Catholic school. Phnom Penh's inhabitants were mostly Chinese traders and Vietnamese workers. Sar's upbringing was strict, and he had little or no contact with Khmer vernacular culture.

In 1948 Sar received a scholarship to study radioelectricity in Paris (at École Française de radioélectricité). There he joined the Cambodian section of the French Communist Party. He also met Khieu Ponnary, the first Cambodian woman to earn a baccalauréat degree.

Sar's fellow students in Paris, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary, and Son Sen, remained in his circle until 1996. He chose a racial alias, or, nom de plume: the "Original Cambodian" (khmaer daem). Having repeatedly failed his course, he went home in January 1953. King Norodom Sihanouk had declared martial law to suppress Cambodia's independence movement, which was radicalized by the French colonial force and Vietnamese communist influence. Sar's brother Saloth Chhay joined the communists and took him along. After independence in 1954, Sar became a teacher, and two years later he married Khieu Ponnary, on July 14, 1956 (Bastille Day). Sar rose secretly within the Khmer communist movement, and in 1962 became Party leader after his predecessor, a former Buddhist monk, was mysteriously killed. Sar soon thereafter went underground, criticizing Sihanouk's neutrality and Hanoi's support of it.

The "Original Khmer" treasured the Cambodian "race," not individuals or "hereditary enemies," especially Vietnamese. He saw a need for war and secrecy as "the basis of the revolution." He trusted few of the more pragmatic, veteran Khmer communists who had been trained by the Vietnamese. Sar adopted the codename "Pol," later "Pol Pot," but never publicly admitted his real name.

After visiting Mao's China between 1964 and 1965, Sar returned home to launch a rural insurgency in 1967. Three years later, the U.S.–backed general, Lon Nol, overthrew Sihanouk. At about this time, the Vietnam War came crashing over the border as well. Khmer Rouge forces defeated Lon Nol in 1975, and Pol Pot became Prime Minister of the new Democratic Kampuchea regime. The DK evacuated Cambodia's cities, launching a series of political and ethnic massacres, and in 1977, raids on Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos.

Running a secretive party, Pol Pot even came to be called "the Organization" (angkar)—a shadowy institution which documents or reported making speeches, or was sometimes "busy working." His wife, Ponnary, went mad. One day in late 1978, a poster bearing Pol Pot's image was put up in a communal mess hall in Kompong Thom. Only upon seeing the poster did his brother, Suong, learn who was running the country. Terrified of being identified as someone who knew too much about his brother, Suong kept quiet about his relationship to the ruler. Two months later, the regime fell to a Vietnamese invasion.

In Thailand in 1988, Pol Pot blamed most of his regime's killings on "Vietnamese agents." However, he acknowledged having massacred the defeated Lon Nol government's leaders and troops, defending his actions by insisting that "[t]his strata of the imperialists had to be totally destroyed." Pol Pot's army continued to wage war from the Thai border until broken by defections and mutinies that occurred from 1996 to 1999. He died in the jungle on April 15, 1998.

Pol Pot never faced trial for his crimes. From 1979 to 1993, the United Nations, at the insistence of China and the United States, legitimized Pol Pot's anti-Vietnamese cause and supported his exiled Khmer Rouge as Cambodia's representatives. In 1999 the UN proposed establishing an international tribunal to judge his surviving accomplices for genocide and crimes against humanity.

SEE ALSO Cambodia; Khmer Rouge

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chandler, D. P. (1992). Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot. Boulder, Colo.: Westview.

Kiernan, Ben (1985). How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930–1975, 2nd edition. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004.

Kiernan, Ben, ed. (1993). Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations, and the International Community. New Haven, Conn: Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies.

Kiernan, Ben (1996). The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979, 2nd edition. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002.

Ben Kiernan