A False Dawn - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 90

stroke had left him mostly bedridden, passing his time by listening to Khmer Rouge and
Voice of America broadcasts on a small transistor radio. In October 1997 the enigmatic
leader had finally broken his silence in an interview with Nate Thayer, the first he had
given since he was toppled from power. For two hours he reflected on his legacy, talking
about his childhood and his years in Paris. On the 1975-9 years, Pol Pot was unrepent-
ant. He admitted that his movement had made “mistakes,” but shifted responsibility for
the regime's horrific loss of life to a familiar scapegoat. Tuol Sleng, the Khmer Rouge-
era prison known as S-21, was a “Vietnamese exhibition”; deaths were caused by “Viet-
namese agents” who withheld rice from the people. To the last, he depicted Cambodia as
an innocent victim of nefarious foreign forces. “If we had not carried out our struggle,” he
told Thayer, “Cambodia would have become another Kampuchea Krom in 1975.” After
the interview was over, Pol Pot rose, and, hobbling back to the Toyota that brought him
from his house arrest, turned to one of his guards. “I want you to know,” Thayer heard
him say, “that everything I did, I did for my country.” 94
Thayer's interrogation was the closest Pol Pot would ever get to a real trial. His health
declined rapidly. In March 1998, when government forces overran Anlong Veng, the re-
maining Khmer Rouge fled north into a sliver of territory along the Thai border and Pol
Pot was confined to a three-room hut. It was here, on the evening of April 15, 1998, that
he died, just as the news broke that his captors had decided to turn him over to an inter-
national tribunal. The cause of death was heart failure. On April 17, 23 years to the day
since his movement's triumphant march into Phnom Penh, journalists were allowed in to
see a bloated corpse laid out on a bare mattress. *
The next day, Pol Pot's body was taken to a dusty forest clearing, dumped onto a pile
of old tires and burned, along with his last remaining personal effects—a mattress and
wicker chair—and a few handfuls of flower petals, an echo of the Buddhist ritual that the
Khmer Rouge had done their best to eradicate. As Seth Mydans wrote in the New York
Times , “There were no words of eulogy and no tears as the flames crackled and grew …
As the tires and the kindling burned away, Pol Pot's blackened skeleton remained within
the orange flames, its right arm and fist raised upward.” 95 It was a fittingly anonymous
end for the architect of the Khmer Rouge horror, attended by just a handful of low-rank-
ing soldiers. None of his family, or any senior members of the movement, was present.
“Pol Pot has died, like a ripe papaya,” Ta Mok chillingly told a Cambodian reporter.
“Now he's finished, he has no power, he has no rights, he is no more than cow shit. Cow
shit is more important than him. We can use it for fertilizer.” 96 Like his former boss,
Ta Mok trod a path of escalating paranoia, seeing “enemies” around every corner. On
December 25 Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea abandoned Ta Mok's border hideout and
surrendered to the government. Three months later “The Butcher” was captured by Cam-
bodian troops, officially bringing the Khmer Rouge revolution to an end. Seven years