Pol Pot Read Online Free PDF Page A

the big fish, the perpetrators — ‘them’; not ‘us’ — the small fry.
    No one wants to make ‘shrimp soup’, as the Cambodian saying has it. The shrimps — the petty thugs and killers — abound in every village. The holocaust that consumed Cambodia required the complicity of so large a proportion of the population that one has to ask how the victims would have behaved if the roles had been reversed.
    The question ‘Why?’ must be rephrased.
    The cardinal issue is what it is about Cambodian society that has allowed, and continues to allow, people to turn their backs on all they know of gentleness and compassion, goodness and decency, and to commit appalling cruelties seemingly without conscience of the enormity of their acts and certainly without remorse. It is a question one can ask, in greater or lesser measure, about the Germans (and others) during the time of the Nazis; the Rwandans; the Turks (in Armenia); the Serbs (in Bosnia); the Bosnians (in Serbia); the Israelis in Palestine and the Palestinians in Israel; not to mention all the terrorist organisations occupying the moral high ground inspired by Islamic fundamentalism.
    The explanation does not lie in some chromosomal abnormality, some genetic predisposition to violence, a neuropathic ‘Bell curve’ on the part of the nations concerned. Cambodians, or for that matter Rwandans, are not biologically more prone to cruelty than Americans or West Europeans. The causes are rooted in history — which creates the conditions for nations to seek extreme remedies to perceived ills; in geography — which generates the pressures that seem to justify them
    (lebensraum,
    said Hitler; ‘national survival’, said Pol Pot); in culture — which erects or fails to erect moral and intellectual prohibitions against them; and in the political and social system — which affords or denies the individual the right to act according to his own lights.
    Context is not all, however. Evil is as evil does.
    The individual, whatever the context, has a personal responsibility. Evil, at this level, consists in deliberately ignoring what one knows to be right. The weaker the moral code, the easier evil becomes to commit. Jacques
    Vergès, a radical French lawyer who, as a student in the 1950s, befriended many of the future Cambodian communist leaders, maintains that what distinguishes men from animals is
    crime.
    Nature, knowing no human law, is savage. Man alone is criminal. Or, to put it in Old Testament terms, man alone is evil. When we contemplate what happened in Cambodia, we are looking not at some exotic horror story but into darkness, into the foul places of our own souls.
    History, culture, geography, politics and millions of individuals have all played their part in the Cambodian nightmare, albeit in differing measures. The same is true of all such tragedies, which is why the particular agony of a small, distant country has a larger significance, on which those who make policy, and public opinion, would do well to ponder. That is reason enough for recounting the story of the man who became Pol Pot. For if there is one lesson worth retaining from the travails of the Cold War and the miseries it brought in its wake, it is the folly of seeking simple answers to complicated questions. It is a lesson which governments still show no sign of learning.
    1
     
    Sâr
     
     
    THE VILLAGE OF
    Prek Sbauv
    extends along the east bank of the River Sên, which flows southward from the town of Kompong Thom to the Great Lake, the Tonle Sap. Wooden stilt-houses stand half-hidden amid orange and purple bougainvillea, morning glory, yellow-flowering
    anh kang
    trees, cactus hedges and palms. Fishermen row flat-bottomed canoes, with a lazy sweeping motion, standing with a single oar at the stern, to string out nets on stakes in the shallows. The water gleams yellowish-brown. Buffalo with small, erect pink ears peer out suspiciously from the mud. It is a gentle, idyllic place.
    Nhep’s home