Table Of ContentAlso by Philip Short
Banda
The Dragon and The Bear
Mao: A Life
Pol Pot
POL POT
Anatomy of a Nightmare
PHILIP
SHORT
Owl Books
Henry Holt and Company, LLC
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New York, New York 10010
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An Owl Book ® and ® are registered trademarks of Henry Holt and Company,
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Copyright © 2004 by Philip Short
All rights reserved.
Originally published in Great Britain in 2004 by John Murray Library of
Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Short, Philip.
Pol Pot : anatomy of a nightmare / Philip Short—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A John Macrae book.”
ISBN-13: 978-0-80508006-3
ISBN-10: 0-8050-8006-6
I. Pol Pot. 2. Genocide—Cambodia. 3. Political atrocities—Cambodia. 4.
Cambodia— Politics and government—1975—1979. 5. Prime ministers—
Cambodia—Biography. I.Title.
DS554.83.P65S53 2005
959.604’2—dc22
2004054080
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First published in hardcover in 2005 by Henry Holt and Company First Owl
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3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4
For Mao Mao
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Note on Pronunciation
Maps
Prologue
1. Sâr
2. City of Light
3. Initiation to the Maquis
4. Cambodian Realities
5. Germinal
6. The Sudden Death of Reason
7. Fires of Purgation
8. Men in Black
9. Future Perfect
10. Model for the World
11. Stalin’s Microbes
12. Utopia Disbound
Afterword
Dramatis Personae
Notes and Sources
Index
Acknowledgements
History is to a great extent detective work. Contemporary documents, the
statements of witnesses, their later recollections, compared and combined with
other sources, provide essential clues as to the nature of the ‘crime’ — that is to
say, the historical truth — concealed beneath. The biographer strives to draw
from this amorphous mass of detail a credible portrait of the hero, or anti-hero,
of his tale.
Many people helped me to assemble the mosaic of fragments of truths, half-
truths and lies, related by the perpetrators of the Cambodian nightmare as well
as by its victims, on which this book is based. Caroline Gluck gave me the first
pointers. Bill Herod and Michael Vickery offered early encouragement. David
Ashley, Ben Kiernan, Henri Locard, William Shawcrosss, Sacha Sher and Serge
Thion shared documents. Christopher Goscha allowed me to translate the
Vietnamese-language copies of dozens of original Khmer Rouge texts which he
had been authorised to transcribe by hand at the Military Library in Hanoi.
Others assisted with Chinese archival materials. Nil Samorn, my Khmer
research assistant, spent two years accompanying me across Cambodia, reading
and translating, with undented good humour, thousands of pages of opaque
Khmer Rouge internal journals, CPK Standing Committee minutes and prison
confessions, which form much of the documentation for the later chapters.
Stephen Heder and David Chandler generously read the typescript, offering
pithy and often pungent comments which gave me much food for thought even
if, on certain points, we continue to differ.
Several of the leading protagonists of the Khmer Rouge revolution told me
their life stories, often at length over a period of months. They include the
former Head of State, Khieu Samphân; Pol Pot’s brother-in-law, the Khmer
Rouge Foreign Minister, Ieng Sary; Nikân, whose brother, Son Sen, was
Defence Minister; Phi Phuon, the Chief of Security at the Khmer Rouge Foreign
Ministry; and two other former officials, Suong Sikoeun and In Sopheap, as well
as a host of lower-ranking individuals. Their motives were mixed. Some were
more truthful, others less so. But like interviewees everywhere, the more they
talked the more of themselves they revealed. Without their co-operation, this
book would not have been possible.
Some historians argue that anything the former Khmer Rouge leaders say
should be disbelieved on principle. I take a different view. If the interviewee has
no obvious interest in lying, if his story is plausible and if there is no convincing
evidence to the contrary, I tend to believe that he is telling if not the truth then at
least his version of it. The same applies — although with many more caveats —
to confessions obtained under torture at Khmer Rouge interrogation centres. The
information they contain cannot be dismissed out of hand simply because the
source is nauseous.
Several of the Cambodian students who were with Pol Pot during his years in
Paris in the early 1950s, notably Keng Vannsak, afterwards a staunch anti-
communist; Thiounn Mumm, who became a Khmer Rouge minister, Ping Sây
and the late Mey Mann, also shed light on hitherto unsuspected aspects of his
life. Vannsak and Mumm kindly provided previously unpublished photographs
from their private collections, as did Bernard Hamel, former Reuters
correspondent in Phnom Penh. Youk Chhang and his colleagues at the
Documentation Center of Cambodia allowed me access to their holdings of
Khmer Rouge documents and pictures. I am grateful to Serge Corrieras, Chris
Goscha, Michael Hayes of the Phnom Penh Post, Ben Kieman, Roland Neveu
and Kathleen O’Keeffe for help in obtaining other illustrations.
My thanks go too, as always, to my editors, Roland Philipps in London and
John Macrae in New York; to my agents, Jacqueline Korn and Emma Sweeney;
and to Jane Birkett, without whose eagle eye for repetitions, mixed metaphors,
lapsed commas and other punctual misdemeanours, this would be a poorer book.
Phnom Penh — La Garde-Freinet,
July 1 2004
Description:A gripping and definitive portrait of the man who headed one of the most enigmatic and terrifying regimes of modern timesIn the three and a half years of Pol Pot's rule, more than a million Cambodians, a fifth of the country's population, were executed or died from hunger. An idealistic and reclusiv
