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Pol Pot

© John Walsh

Pol Pot (1925-98) was born Saloth Sar in circumstances of comparative obscurity in provincial Cambodia. His father was a landowning farmer in what is now Kompong Thong province. At the age of nine, Pol Pot was sent to the capital Phnom Penh ro receive education at a Buddhist temple (wat). This was common across mainland Southeast Asia (http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/1817... where it was Buddhist monks which administered education for those outside the tiny privileged ruling elite. Cambodia was then governed by French colonialists and by absolute monarchy. The prospects for change for the poor seemed remote. Only the early successes of the Chinese Communist Party seemed to offer any hope of improvements. Yet Communism appealed to very few Cambodians and the desire to change was also low.

Pol Pot's personal history seems to have followed that of a number of other important twentieth century East Asian leaders. His academic ability was limited and he received some technical education. During the Second World War he may or may not have been involved in fighting against the Japanese or French alongside Ho Chi Minh (http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/1817... In any case, he was rescued from the tedium of primary school teaching by subsequently winning a scholarship which enabled him to receive education overseas, in his case in France and it was while he was there that his political consciousness was raised and he began to embrace some Communist-related ideas. Although he was later to lead the Khmer Rouge (the Red Khmers or Cambodian Communist Party) and his revolution of Cambodian society was of almost unprecedented severity and totality, awareness of his personal ideology remains vague. The slogans he and his party employed rarely coincided with Marxist thought and there is little common ground with any brand of Communism other than the power-mad personal cult of Maoism and its intolerance of all but peasants.

Events, as always, conspired to raise him from continued obscurity as the American War in Vietnam, together with the extensive bombing of Cambodia, led to opposition to American-backed Lon Nol and the preparation of the way towards revolutionary change. Years of fighting lay ahead and great misery for almost every Cambodian (http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/1817... The ultimate triumph of the Khmer Rouge in 1975 left Pol Pot as Prime Minister and he launched a program of genocide and massive societal change. In the years that followed, more than one million people were tortured or worked to death or else just executed, sometimes by children in the so-called 'Killing Fields.' The disorder this led to eventually inspired the Vietnamese leadership to invade Cambodia and restore what order was possible. This eventually led to the Sino-Vietnamese War (http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/1817...

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