Titans of History (75 page)

Pol Pot, the communist Khmer Rouge leader who created the democidal hell known as Democratic Kampuchea, only ruled Cambodia for four years, but in that short time he murdered millions of innocent people—half the population—impoverished the country, killed all intellectuals, even people who wore spectacles, and tried to restart time at a diabolic Year Zero.

Born as Saloth Sar, Pol Pot (a revolutionary name he adopted in 1963) was the son of a wealthy farmer. His family were courtiers to the Cambodian royal family and in 1931, as a child of six, he moved to the capital city, Phnom Penh, to live with his brother, an official at the royal palace, and was educated at Catholic and French schools. In 1949 he went to Paris on a scholarship to study electronics, and became involved with the French Communist Party and with other left-wing Cambodian students studying in Paris. Pol Pot was never academically inclined and was forced to return home after failing his exams.

After a spell as a teacher, in 1963 Pol Pot began to devote all his energy to revolutionary activities. That same year he was appointed head of the Workers' Party of Kampuchea—effectively the Cambodian communist party, also referred to as the Khmer
Rouge, which strongly opposed the existing government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. The prince—and sometime king—had led the country with irresponsible self-indulgence since independence from France in 1953. Pol Pot forged links with North Vietnam and China, which he visited in 1966. He was impressed with Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution. Indeed Mao was to be his main patron and hero. The following year he spent time with a hill tribe in northeastern Cambodia, and was impressed by the simplicity of peasant life, uncorrupted by the city.

In 1968 the Khmer Rouge launched an insurrection, seizing the mountainous region on the border with Vietnam. The United States, embroiled in the Vietnam War and fearing that North Vietnamese troops were using Cambodia as a safe haven, began a bombing campaign, which radicalized Cambodia in Pol Pot's favor. In 1970, Prince Sihanouk was overthrown in a right-wing coup by former defense minister Lon Nol. The Khmer Rouge's shadowy army of guerrillas in black pajamas soon controlled the countryside.

On April 17, 1975 the capital finally fell to the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot—ruling with a tiny clique of comrades such as Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan under the anonymous cover of the Organization—declared that 1975 was “Year Zero” and started to purge Cambodia of all noncommunist influences. All foreigners were expelled, newspapers were outlawed and large numbers of people with the merest taint of association with the old regime—including all religious leaders, whether Buddhist, Christian or Muslim—were executed. There were even reports of people being killed because they wore spectacles—a sign of “bourgeois intellectuals.”

Pol Pot—now known as Brother Number One—then embarked on an insane and doomed attempt to turn Cambodia into an agrarian utopia. The cities were cleared of their inhabitants, who were forced to live in agricultural communes in the countryside.
In terrible conditions, with food shortages and crippling hard labor, these communes soon became known as the Killing Fields, where several million innocent Cambodians were executed. Despite a massive shortfall in the harvest of 1977 and rising famine, the regime arrogantly rejected the offer of outside aid.

The capital, Phnom Penh, once a vibrant city of 2 million people, became a ghost town. Following Chairman Mao's dictum that the peasant was the true proletarian, Pol Pot believed that the city was a corrupting entity, a haven for the bourgeoisie, capitalists and foreign influences.

City dwellers were marched at gunpoint to the countryside as part of the plans of the new regime to abolish cash payments and turn Cambodia into a self-sufficient communist society, where everyone worked the soil. The regime made a distinction between those with “full rights” (who had originally lived off the land) and “depositees” taken from the city, many of whom were massacred outright. Those depositees—capitalists, intellectuals and people who had regular contact with the outside world—who could not be “re-educated” in the ways of the revolution, were tortured and killed at a number of concentration camps, such as the S-21 prison camp (also known as Strychnine Hill), or taken straight to the Killing Fields, where their rations were so small that they could not survive. Thousands were forced to dig their own graves before Khmer Rouge soldiers beat their weary bodies with iron bars, axes and hammers until they died. The soldiers had been instructed not to waste bullets.

Those who were spared immediate execution became slave laborers in the program of agrarian collectivization. Hundreds of thousands of civilians—often uprooted and separated from their families—were worked to death, or starved because of a lack of rations. Many more were executed in the fields for the most minor indiscretions—such as engaging in sexual
relations, complaining about conditions, stealing food or espousing religious beliefs.

Some of the Killing Fields containing mass graves have now been preserved as a testimony to the genocide perpetrated by Pol Pot and his followers. The most infamous of them is Choeung Ek, where 8895 bodies were discovered after the fall of the regime.

The country was now riddled with spies and informers, and even children were encouraged to inform on their parents. Pol Pot went on to conduct purges within the Khmer Rouge itself, leading to the execution of more than 200,000 members.

External enemies proved more difficult to suppress, however. With only China maintaining support for the regime, Cambodia become embroiled in a conflict with Vietnam, whose forces invaded and captured Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979, forcing Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to flee to the western regions and over the border into Thailand. The new Vietnamese-controlled regime tried Pol Pot in absentia for genocide and sentenced him to death. Undeterred, Pol Pot directed an aggressive guerrilla war against the new regime, and kept an iron grip on the Khmer Rouge. As late as 1997 he ordered the execution of his colleague Song Sen, along with his family, on suspicion of collaborating with Cambodian government forces. Shortly afterward he himself was arrested by another senior Khmer Rouge figure, and sentenced to life imprisonment, dying in April 1998 of heart failure.

In his murderous, almost psychotic, schemes for a communist utopia, Pol Pot, Brother Number One, outran anything in George Orwell's imagination. During a reign of just under four years, he oversaw the deaths of between two and five million men, women and children—over a third of the entire population of Cambodia.

1925–2003

Hitler and all German people knew that the Israelis are not people who are working in the interest of the people of the world, and that is why they burned the Israelis alive with gas
.

Idi Amin, telegram to Kurt Waldheim, secretary general of the United Nations, 1972

Idi Amin represents the disastrous tendency of post-colonial African states to fall into the hands of murderous, long-serving, corrupt and inept dictators—from Doctor Hastings Banda of Malawi and President Mobutu of Zaire to the Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Empire and President Mugabe of Zimbabwe. Amin was one of the worst. Illiterate, garrulous and burly, as terrifying as he was ridiculous, Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada was a buffoonish bully and sadistic mass murderer who earned the soubriquet the Butcher of Uganda. The
soi-disant
Last King of Scotland impoverished Uganda, once the jewel of Africa, a megalomaniacal cannibalistic loon who killed so many of his countrymen that the crocodiles of Lake Victoria could not consume them fast enough.

As a boy, Amin was abandoned by his father, and received little in the way of formal education. In 1946 he enlisted in the King's African Rifles, and went on to distinguish himself by his marksmanship and sporting abilities—he was nine times heavyweight boxing champion of Uganda. In the 1950s he participated in the suppression of the anti-British Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya,
serving with distinction but attracting suspicion for using excessive brutality. Nevertheless, he was promoted to warrant officer, and in 1961 became only the second native Ugandan to receive a commission.

After Uganda gained its independence from Britain in 1962, Amin emerged as a high-ranking military officer under Prime Minister Milton Obote, becoming deputy commander of the army in 1964. This was a period of economic boom and an era in which the new federal constitution balanced the desire for regional autonomy with the centralizing impulses of national government. Yet all of this was destroyed by Obote, who in 1966 arrested several government ministers and suspended Parliament and the constitution. In their place Obote installed himself as executive president with vast powers; Amin was made overall commander of the army and played a leading role in suppressing the opposition to Obote's coup, resulting in hundreds of deaths.

In January 1971, when the president was out of the country, Amin seized power, encouraged by his patron Britain. Initially he was welcomed by many who had grown resentful of Obote's growing tyranny. Such supporters were further encouraged by Amin's early acts of reconciliation: political prisoners were released, the emergency laws relaxed, the secret police disbanded. Amin also promised free elections.

However, the killing soon started. An abortive invasion from Tanzania by Obote supporters in 1972 prompted Amin to create Special Squads to hunt down suspected opponents. He created an all-powerful secret police, the Public Safety Unit, dominated by Muslim Nubian and southern Sudanese tribesmen who delighted in killing. As he gradually killed more and more ministers, lawyers and anyone of any prominence, he created a further special murder corps called the State Research Unit under Major Farouk Minaura, a Nubian sadist. Massacres followed—targeted
initially against Obote's Langi tribe and the neighboring Acholi clan. But anyone suspected of harboring dissent was deemed a legitimate target. Amin's victims included Chief Justice Benedicto Kiwanuka, Joseph Mubiru, the former governor of the Ugandan central bank, Anglican archbishop Janani Luwum and two of his own cabinet ministers. Rumors began to emerge that Amin practiced blood rituals over the bodies of his victims, even indulging in cannibalism. Many of the bodies, dumped in the Nile or on the streets or found hooded and tied to trees, were sliced open with organs missing, clearly the victims of tribal rites. Amin himself often asked to be left alone with bodies in the morgues, which he visited frequently, and it was clear he tampered with the cadavers. “I have eaten human flesh,” he boasted. “It is saltier than leopard flesh.” The terror extended to his own wives: the beautiful Kay died during an abortion, but Amin had her body dismembered and then sewn together again. Lesser women suspected of disloyalty were simply murdered.

Increasingly, Amin ruled by autocratic whim. In addition, huge amounts of money were diverted to secure the support of the Ugandan military. As money ran short, Amin simply ordered the central bank to print more. Inflation soared, economic life entered on a downward spiral and consumer goods ran short.

With his popularity plummeting, Amin sought a scapegoat and settled on Uganda's wealthy Asian community, who controlled much of country's trade and industry. In August 1972 he ordered Asians with British nationality to leave the country within three months. As some 50,000 fled, including much of the country's skilled workforce, the economy began to collapse.

As his country suffered under his depredations, Amin started to lose touch with reality, possibly suffering the insanity of tertiary syphilis. He began awarding himself various medals, including the Victoria Cross, and such titles as Lord of All the
Beasts of the Earth and the Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular. He also insisted on being carried on a wooden litter, with British expatriates (organized by Major Bob Astles, his chief British henchman) serving as bearers. Equally strange was the bizarre correspondence he engaged in with other world leaders. He thus offered Ted Heath, the former British prime minister and keen amateur conductor, a job as a bandmaster after his 1974 election defeat; on another occasion, he advised Israeli prime minister Golda Meir to “tuck up her knickers” and run to the US. More sinister was his praise for the Palestinian terrorists who carried out the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and his admiration for Hitler's treatment of the Jews.

In June 1976 Idi Amin invited an Air France plane hijacked by Palestinian and German terrorists to land at Uganda's Entebbe airport. Upon landing, the hijackers released all non-Jewish passengers and took the rest into the airport terminal, demanding the freedom of some forty Palestinians imprisoned in Israel and a further thirteen in Kenya, France, Switzerland and West Germany. Captain Michel Bacos—followed by the rest of the crew—refused to leave without the remaining passengers, while a French nun offered to take the place of one of the hostages but was forced to leave by Ugandan soldiers.

If their demands were not met by July 1, said the hijackers, they would begin executing the eighty-three Jewish hostages and twenty others held. On the night of July 3, after an extension to the deadline, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (later assassinated for making peace with the Palestinians) dispatched a commando unit which staged a stunning raid. The surprise was complete: no one could have expected faraway Israel to cross half of Africa to rescue its own. Despite Ugandan resistance, Operation Thunderbolt
rescued almost all of the passengers. Three hostages were killed, as was one Israeli soldier, Yonatan Netanyahu—the older brother of the future Israeli premier Binyamin Netanyahu—in whose memory the operation was retrospectively renamed Operation Yonatan. All seven of the terrorists and forty-five Ugandan soldiers were killed. The whole assault lasted just thirty minutes. The raid was an astonishing achievement that symbolized Israeli military power and daring.