Jungle Trial Left Pol Pot `Anguished'; U.S. Awaits Proof Event Was No Ruse
He made his way to his place before a Khmer Rouge tribunal with the aid of a cane cut from the bamboo that grows in the jungles of northern Cambodia. But after silently listening to a succession of his former followers condemn him as a genocidal criminal and call for him to be "crushed," a stooped and visibly anguished Pol Pot had to be helped off by men gripping both his arms.
The once mighty leader of the world's deadliest guerrilla force had just been sentenced to "life imprisonment" in a show trial in Anlong Veng, stronghold of Khmer Rouge remnants that revolted against him last month, according to Nate Thayer, an American reporter who witnessed the scene. While the trial was clearly stage-managed, Thayer said, he had no doubt Pol Pot's downfall was genuine.
The account of Thayer, the first journalist to see Pol Pot in 18 years, nevertheless drew skepticism yesterday from the leader of the recent Cambodian coup and a State Department spokesman. Hun Sen, who deposed his rival co-prime minister in the coalition government early this month, told reporters in Phnom Penh that the trial was "a political game of the Khmer Rouge." Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander who defected from the group in 1977, asserted that Pol Pot is still "the leader of the Khmer Rouge forces." State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns, attending a conference of Southeast Asian nations in Malaysia with Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, said: "Despite our very great respect for Mr. Thayer, I think it would be perilous for us to say for certain that Pol Pot is in custody or not in custody, has been put on trial or has not been put on trial." "We don't know if this is a ruse or the real thing," Burns said. "It could be a concocted story -- not by Thayer, but by the Khmer Rouge -- and we just don't know. We'll just have to wait for positive proof of his demise or his trial or whatever it is. We don't have independent confirmation of what has happened." Even if the trial was genuine, Burns said, Washington would not accept it as justice for the man who presided over the deaths of more than 1 million Cambodians by execution, disease, starvation and overwork during the Khmer Rouge's 1975-79 rule. "They're a bunch of murderers and thugs and genocidal assassins, and we would never accept their justice," he said. Thayer, 37, a staff correspondent for the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review and an occasional contributor to The Washington Post, provided additional details of the jungle proceeding in a Review press release yesterday. The weekly said the full account will appear in its next issue Thursday. Under an arrangement with the Review, ABC News and its "Nightline" program last night broadcast excerpts from a videotape shot by an American cameraman who accompanied Thayer. Dressed in loose black cotton pants, a light green shirt, white plastic sandals and a blue- and white-checked krama Cambodian scarf, the white-haired Pol Pot, who is believed to be at least 69, sat silently as speaker after speaker denounced him before an audience of about 500 Khmer Rouge villagers and guerrillas. Sitting nearby were three Khmer Rouge generals who remained loyal to Pol Pot. As the speakers read denunciations into a microphone, the villagers and uniformed soldiers responded with ritual chants and applause. "Crush, crush, crush Pol Pot and his clique," they chanted. "You could see the anguish on his face as he was denounced by his former loyalists," said Thayer, who speaks Khmer, the Cambodian language. "He was close to tears." Khmer Rouge officials interviewed by Thayer said Pol Pot suffers from a weak heart, high blood pressure and bouts of malaria. Thayer reported that in debating his fate, Pol Pot's captors considered killing him, halting his medical care or letting him live out his days under house arrest. He said they apparently decided on the third option. Although he described the event as a "classic, 1960s Cultural Revolution-style show trial" of the kind staged by the Khmer Rouge's Maoist mentors in China, Thayer said he was sure the trial was "not a ruse," in that Pol Pot's disgrace was real. He added: "Pol Pot is finished. The Khmer Rouge as we have known them no longer exist." In condemning Pol Pot, seven leaders of a mutinous Khmer Rouge group that deposed him last month charged him and the three military commanders with murdering former Khmer Rouge defense chief Son Sen and his family, of "destroying national reconciliation" and of stealing money from the movement, Thayer said. The commanders, denounced as "drunk and corrupt," were also accused of raping wives of comrades. The presiding officer then announced the sentence -- life imprisonment for all four -- but indicated they would not be turned over to an international tribunal as demanded by the Cambodian government. In Beijing, meanwhile, Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk said he will withhold recognition of Hun Sen's choice of Foreign Minister Ung Huot as the new "first prime minister" in the coalition government, saying that the title still belongs to his ousted son, Prince Norodom Ranariddh. Hun Sen, who launched a bloody purge of Ranariddh's Funcinpec party after staging the coup three weeks ago, had picked Ung Huot, a Funcinpec member, in an apparent attempt to assuage international criticism. Branigin reported from Washington, Richburg from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.