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First among equals in the horrors of political violence

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  • First among equals in the horrors of political violence

    First among equals in the horrors of political violence
    by Michael Sheridan

    Sunday Times (London)
    October 24, 2004, Sunday


    POL POT The History of a Nightmare. By Philip Short. J Murray £25 pp671

    In the hierarchy of mass murderers of the last century, the Cambodian
    dictator Pol Pot remains unchallenged for the sheer extremism of
    his theory and the implacable way it was put into practice. Stalin,
    Hitler and Mao killed many more victims, but they had wider canvases to
    paint with blood. The Cambodian experiment traumatised just one small
    country and may have claimed "only" 1.5m lives. Yet it astonished
    even Mao by its radicalism and proved that the Marxist utopia was a
    vision doomed to failure no matter how ruthless its social engineers.

    So, if Pol Pot belongs, strictly speaking, in the second rank of
    butchers, alongside Saddam Hussein, perhaps, or the Young Turks who
    orchestrated the Armenian pogroms, he still ranks first among equals
    in the theory and practice of political violence.

    Philip Short's book sets out to show that rage and murder were
    intrinsic to the Cambodian revolution. Their roots lay deep in the
    Khmer psyche of absolute submission to absolute rulers and a blind
    insistence on carrying theories through to the end. He reckons that Pol
    Pot was not a classic communist functionary but more like one of the
    ancient despots of Angkor Wat, in whose grandeur the revolutionaries
    gloried.

    Like the author's biography of Mao, this is in essence a political,
    not a personal history. Pol Pot revealed almost nothing about himself;
    indeed, utmost secrecy was his code of practice and few witnesses
    survived to testify about his daily life.

    We know more about Hitler's table talk, Stalin's drinking bouts and
    Saddam's wedding feasts than we do about Pol Pot's shadowy meetings in
    jungle huts and his summits in the salons of Hanoi and Pyongyang. And
    there is more documentation available for the Nazi Wannsee conference
    of 1942 than there is for the meetings in 1975 at the Khmer Rouge
    headquarters in Phnom Penh's French colonial railway station, at which
    the draconian decision to evacuate the cities of Cambodia was taken.
    This leaves the biographer with a tough task. Short has dug around
    assiduously for fresh material to illuminate the mind of the tyrant. At
    the end, though, we are still left groping for answers.

    Pol Pot's youth provides few clues. Like Mao, he came from a prosperous
    village family, precisely the sort of suspicious class background
    that would suffice for a death sentence later on. Like Stalin, he
    was exposed at a young age to the certainty of faith, spending a
    year as a novice monk at the Buddhist temple of Wat Bottum Vaddei,
    near the gilded royal palaces of Phnom Penh.

    It is in Pol Pot's adolescence that Short finds the most peculiar
    anecdote about his subject. Within the palace walls, Pol Pot's sister,
    Roeung, was living as a secondary wife, in practice a concubine, to
    the polygamous if elderly King Monivong. The boy would be allowed
    to visit his sister in this "hothouse world", as Short terms it,
    because at 15 he was deemed a child. According to Keng Vannsak,
    a contemporary of Pol Pot who later became his political mentor in
    Paris, the harem women would indulge in sex play with him, stopping
    short of intercourse.

    There are so few other details known of Pol Pot's intimate life that
    this gem might seem a gift to Freudians.

    Short passes briskly onwards, alas, to explore in burdensome detail
    the development of Cambodian revolutionary theory in the 1930s. It
    was a unique model.

    It took its austerity from the Buddha, its extremism from Robespierre
    and its leadership doctrine from Stalin. There was to be no compromise,
    only violence.

    Subterfuge was everything: it was only in 1976, a year after the fall
    of Phnom Penh, that Pol Pot emerged in public as the leader, and only
    then did the Khmer Rouge reveal itself as a Marxist-Leninist party.

    Pol Pot was fortunate in his enemies. The playboy King Sihanouk -who
    outlived him and who has just abdicated the throne -ruled a fantasy
    realm of brutality and gross corruption that made 1950s Cambodia
    ripe for revolution. When the uprising came, Pol Pot's black-clad
    legions faced the military strongman Lon Nol. "As silent as a carp,"
    the French called him, while the despairing Americans put their
    faith in B-52s to prolong his regime and Lon Nol himself resorted to
    sorcerers, spells and a line of magic sand drawn in a circle around
    Phnom Penh. The B-52s did not save Cambodia, but became a symbol of
    the West's blundering complicity in its destruction.

    Yet Short's most valuable contribution to the debates that still swirl
    around the Cambodian fiasco is to bring clear thinking to the big
    questions of blame. He takes issue with William Shawcross, who argued
    shortly after the war that the pathological brutality of the Khmer
    Rouge followed years of severe trauma under American bombing. Not at
    all, says Short. Cruelty was ingrained in the Cambodian independence
    fighters of the 1950s, the Issaraks, who devoured the cooked livers of
    their victims. And Pol Pot institutionalised the killing of captives
    before Kissinger and Nixon made Cambodia a cockpit of the cold war.

    Short is brisk about the cynical policy of Vietnam, whose only
    redeeming role in the affair was to invade Cambodia and topple Pol Pot
    in 1979 after his excesses spilt across the border. He also indicts
    the Chinese, who have largely escaped censure for their complicity
    with the Khmer Rouge. Mao openly envied Pol Pot's extremism. The
    ultra-radical Gang of Four backed him. Then Deng Xiaoping played
    power politics by sustaining him with weapons for a decade in the
    jungles along the Thai border.

    Pol Pot's revolution, like Stalin's, consumed his enemies, then his
    comrades and finally his own family. His brother perished on a forced
    march in 1975, his first wife, Khieu Ponnary, went mad, while sundry
    relatives and in-laws fell to his purges. A few of his surviving
    cronies will face an international tribunal next year. It will be
    Nuremberg without Hitler, for Pol Pot died, apparently of natural
    causes, in 1998. Of the 20th century's great killers, only Saddam,
    it seems, is likely to have his day in court.

    Available at the Books First price of £20 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165
    8585 and www. timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

    --Boundary_(ID_cbFO1YWSJMHxnTJavnxxGw)--
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