Now we will never know why. Yet who can ever fathom the evil that men do. We stand disbelieving before genocide, when women's throats are slit with sharp palm leaves, when children's heads are smashed against tree trunks, when men are slaughtered with the crack of a hoe. These things happened every day in Cambodia for 3 1/2 terrible years, and when the world learned of it, people could only respond with dumb horror.
All Pol Pot ever said was that he was creating a "pure" communist society and whatever he did was done for his country. "My conscience is clear," he told journalist Nate Thayer in a rare interview last October, never admitting his appalling conduct, never regretting the countless executions, the million more dead of starvation and overwork, the living population maimed in body or mind, the entire country reduced to Stone Age survival. Nineteen years after the hated Vietnamese drove him back into the jungle, the evil that he did lives on in Cambodia's traumatized society, poisoned politics, governmental misrule and pitiful piles of bleached-white skulls. When Pol Pot died last week, alone in a small, thatched hut, his passing left only outrage that this man had cheated earthly justice.
Elusive and mysterious throughout his life, Pol Pot slipped just as stealthily into death, guarding his secrets to the end. The teenage guerrillas of the Khmer Rouge who had kept him under "house arrest" since a show trial last year blandly informed reporters that one of the world's most notorious mass murderers had died peacefully Wednesday night of a heart attack, discovered when his wife came to tuck in his mosquito net.
The timing of his demise was almost too uncanny, coming just as the beleaguered remnants of his once terrifying movement prepared to hand him over to Western justice in exchange for some kind of amnesty for themselves. Two weeks ago the Clinton Administration began drawing up plans for Pol Pot's capture and trial in an international court. Many who had trafficked with him--the Chinese, the Thais, the former Khmer Rouge cadres now running the government in Phnom Penh--had good reason to prefer his death to a revealing trial. But the 73-year-old's health had been failing. A stroke in 1995 paralyzed much of his left side, he was taking medicine for a heart complaint, and he suffered from chronic malaria. For the past three weeks he had been hustled between safe houses near the Thai border to avoid shelling. As government forces aided by growing legions of Khmer Rouge defectors closed in, Pol Pot must have realized the end was near.