Pol Pot: The Hidden Legacy

Many Americans may not realize it, but the Khmer Rouge, the hard-line Marxist-Maoist-Stalinist organization which opposed the US during and ruled Cambodia immediately after the Vietnam War, but were swept out of power by the Vietnamese in the late Seventies are back in power today. The Khmer Rouge was responsible for the infamous Killing Fields of genocide in the 1970Â's.

When the dictator Pol Pot, former head of the Khmer Rouge, was discovered alive last year, the international community began talking about putting him on trial. That was bad news for the Khmer Rouge, since many of Pol Pot's closest collaborators are now in charge of the Cambodian government. They donÂ't want to be identified for their roles in Pol Pot's crimes.

Conveniently, Pol Pot died last week. The Cambodian government had him cremated before an autopsy could be performed. And, as Western governments began to talk about holding a war crimes trial in spite of Pol Pot's death, the Khmer Rouge began a serious spin campaign.

To mix communist metaphors, they're trying to sell the Khmer Rouge Â"with a human face.Â" Yet, for most people, the face of the Khmer Rouge remains the face of Pol Pot. And under him, more than one million people died, one-seventh of Cambodia's population.

Pol Pot set out to remake, re-educate, society. His classrooms were concentration camps, and the lessons he taught were suspicion and fear, mistrust, unthinking obedience. If you wore glasses, if you even knew how to read, then you might be punished for clinging to the old capitalist class structure. Death was the easy punishment. It was the survivors you had to pity.

The world knew much of what Pol Pot was doing, but felt helpless. The mighty United States had just failed to win a land war in Southeast Asia. What could anyone do to stop the genocide? At last the Vietnamese themselves, who had once been Pol Pot's mentors, invaded Cambodia and overthrew him. The Vietnamese left in 1991, when the Soviet Union fell, and for a brief time it appeared, that representative democracy might govern in Cambodia.

But today Pol Pot's colleagues in the Khmer Rouge are running Cambodia againÂ…enormously relieved that Pol Pot will never stand trial for his crimes. They're trying to tell us that the Killing Fields never happened; or, if they did, they were only one man's fault. The trial may never take place but the jury is still out.

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