Exit Pol Pot

Saloth Sar had that mischievous habit of striking out the last line from his own obituaries. Two years ago, he died' in malarial isolation,...

Saloth Sar had that mischievous habit of striking out the last line from his own obituaries. Two years ago, he died8217; in malarial isolation, and returned mockingly alive before the last epitaph was written on one of this century8217;s worst butchers.

For Pol Pot, his nom de guerre, death, including his own, was an idea, a relative idea, that could be written, re-written, and modified at the whimsy of the executioner. Wednesday, his heart stopped beating no official confirmation or denial, as usual while his wife was tying the mosquito net for him. Even in death, Pol Pot is steeped in folklorish mystery: an ailing old man, disintegrating since his fall to a Khmer Rouge faction last year, dying on the wreckage of a deadly dream, alone amidst blood-thirsty mosquitoes in the jungles. When the executioner dies, it seems, there are only mosquitoes to sing the dirge. More than two decades ago, when more than a million 8220;Khmer bodies with Vietnamese minds8221; perished in the fury of racial hate, there was no mourning.Only the macabre mirth of the Revolution.

Pol Pot, the manic loner, the unseen, elusive Brother No. 1, was the author of a tropical Holocaust. Killing Fields the term has assumed an awesome banality in the glossary of revolutionary madness. While the face of Saloth Sar remained enigmatically invisible, that excavated skull of the racially impure became a visual alternative to the paranoia of Pol Pot.

The story began 73 years ago in a northern Cambodian province. And Paris gave Sar the first revolutionary impulse. Paris in the early 8217;50s was resonant with the romance of dissent and an ideal place for a failed student of radio electronics. When he returned home in 1953 to become a teacher in Phnom Penh, Sar was full of Mao. A time when Prince Sihanouk was positioning himself as 8220;father of the Cambodian people8221;. The rebel flourished, and in 1963, the rebel fled to the jungles. Twelve years later, in Year Zero, he returned to conquer, to kill, to purify, to author an agrarian utopia. For three years, asthe Khmer Rouge, with Pol Pot as the helmsman, ruled from Phnom Penh, hate danced across Cambodia. Maoism enhanced by tribalism, civilisational superiority aggravated by racial insecurity the Khmer Rouge fantasy of national renewal found its ultimate realisation in a carnival of death. The Vietnamese invasion of 1978 brought an end to the Asian version of the Final Solution. But for Pol Pot, there was no finality in the struggle against hereditary enemies. As the Khmer slogan of eternal return goes: 8220;When the water rises, the fish eat the ants, but when the water recedes, the ants eat the fish8221;.

And when the journey reaches the jungles of no return, there are only mosquitoes to celebrate the retribution. And what a journey it was. Stalin8217;s purges, Mao8217;s Cultural Revolution, the Fuhrer8217;s Final Solution the Revolution of Saloth Sar too was the vindication of a twentieth century truism: the romance of the revolution as a prologue to the horror story of liberation. The liberator was history8217;s most effectivemurderer. Elsewhere in this world, racially smudged photocopies of Pol Pot are writing their own salvation theories in the blood of the enemy. So, you can never write off Saloth Sar officially. There will always be others to live his life. In spite of the mosquitoes.