Architect of a genocide: death of Pol Pot's henchman

Architect of a genocide: death of Pol Pot's henchman
By Justin Huggler
Published: 22 July 2006

In a military hospital in Phnomh Penh yesterday, an 80-year-old man, so weak he had to struggle for every breath, died. He was not, by all accounts, much to look at. One leg was missing. A chunk of one of his lungs had been removed years ago. He was suffering from tuberculosis and high blood pressure. For a week he had flitted in and out of a coma. But, though he betrayed little sign of it in his slow death, he had once been one of the most feared men of the twentieth century.

A man out of the world of nightmares, who was intimately involved in the systematic massacre of somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million of his own people. This feeble old man was once the comrade-in-arms of Pol Pot. He was Brother Number Four, part of the Khmer Rouge high command, and one of the architects of the Killing Fields.

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During their less than four years in power, the Khmer Rouge killed so many of their own people so fast that the historians have never been able to work out how many actually died. In the memorial at Choeung Ek fields, outside Phnomh Penh, there is a glass shrine that contains 8,000 human skulls, so large a number the deaths become impersonal, and it's just a minuscule fraction of the number who died there.

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The Killing Fields were extermination camps. The Khmer Rouge killed a quarter of the population of Cambodia at the time. But if this was a genocide, it was one that was not driven by race or religion. The killers and the victims were Cambodians. It was a genocide carried out by a people on itself.


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