Pol Pot, the soft-spoken and polite leader of the Khmer Rouge which massacred over a million people in the killing fields of Cambodia, was confirmed dead yesterday by officials of his guerrilla organisation, who said his body would be cremated in two or three days.
Ranked with Stalin and Hitler as one of the 20th century's most notorious mass killers, Pol Pot died late on Wednesday, allegedly from a heart attack, in a Cambodian village near the border with Thailand.
Journalists were allowed to photograph his body in a hut. He was dressed in trousers and shirt, and partly covered by a green sheet. Purple flowers were strewn behind his head which rested on a pink pillow and a straw fan was by his side. He had cotton wool in his nose and his white hair had turned dark.
In death, Pol Pot, believed to be in his 70s, cheated those who sought to bring him to justice for crimes against humanity. The former guerrilla leader had agreed to be tried by an international court, and Khmer Rouge forces, facing defeat at the hands of the Cambodian army, were said to be ready to hand him over to US forces. A senior US official was in Beijing just this week seeking China's co-operation for an international trial for a man described by the US State Department spokesman, Mr James Rubin, as "one of the most horrible war criminals of the 20th century".
Pol Pot was purged last year after a power struggle with a rival commander, Mr Ta Mok, and held under house arrest in a Khmer Rouge stronghold near the border with Thailand. His former comrades expressed relief at his passing. "His death is good for the Khmer Rouge. I hope his bad name will vanish with his death," said an officer called Gen Noun No. After earlier reports of his death proved premature, there was initial scepticism when the news broke yesterday. The Cambodian and Thailand governments said they wanted to see Pol Pot's body to confirm his passing .
Pol Pot is held responsible for the death of more than a million Cambodians during his 1975-79 rule when he tried to set up a moneyless, collective economy. Almost all intellectuals, the middle class, people connected with Vietnam, Buddhist monks and ethnic minorities faced extermination and many succumbed to starvation. The Cambodia Genocide Programme at Yale University estimates 1.7 million Cambodians died, leaving the countryside littered with bleached bones and skulls.
The former US secretary of state, Dr Henry Kissinger, told the BBC yesterday that the Khmer Rouge may have killed Pol Pot to avoid handing him over for trial. "I think so ill of the Khmer Rouge that I don't even exclude that they killed him in order to avoid pressure of this kind," he said.
The Nixon administration which Dr Kissinger served in has been criticised for helping create the conditions in which Pol Pot flourished by brutalising Cambodia with massive bombing during the Vietnam War. Nor did Washington take any steps to prevent genocide by a regime which was violently anti-Vietnamese. Dr Kissinger acknowledged that the US went too far in Indochina but said the "western self-flagellation" that blamed the US "for what the Cambodians did to each other makes as much sense as to say that the German murder of the Jews was caused by British bombing".
Pol Pot was routed by an invading Vietnam army in 1979 but the nation is still traumatised by the killings. "If he really is dead it's not the end yet. We still have more to do," said Mr Youk Chang, the director of Cambodia's genocide documentation centre.