Confined, Pol Pot Tells Of Feeling 'Bit Bored'
New York Times
Published: October 24, 1997
Confined to a wooden hut with nothing to read and nothing to do, Pol Pot, the man who created the Khmer Rouge ''killing fields'' in Cambodia in the 1970's, says he is getting bored.
Old, sick and weary, he said in an interview published today that he often did not have the strength to get out of bed or even to listen to one of his favorite radio stations, the Voice of America.
''I feel a little bit bored, but I have become used to that,'' he said in the interview, conducted last Thursday by Nate Thayer, a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review. It was the first interview Pol Pot had given in nearly 20 years.
''You know, I can't even play with my daughter or my wife anymore because in the morning, even after I wake up, I can't get out of bed,'' he complained. ''I stay still while my wife occupies herself with gardening and sewing. My daughter gathers wood and works in the kitchen.''
Pol Pot, who said he is 72, has spent the last 19 years in the jungle, since fleeing a Vietnamese invasion that ended his four-year rule of terror in which at least one million Cambodians died.
In July his Khmer Rouge followers turned against him and condemned him to live out his days under house arrest in a small hut in their stronghold of Anlong Veng, where the interview was conducted.
Pre-publication excerpts made public on Wednesday showed him to be unrepentant, telling Mr. Thayer that he may have had made some ''mistakes'' but that ''my conscience is clear.''
In the full interview, Pol Pot offered a glimpse into his feelings about his place in history as well as his small joys and daily irritations.
Rejected by his comrades and confined to his home with his wife and 12-year-old daughter, he said: ''For me it is over. Over politically and over as a human being.''
He complained that his hut is infested with mosquitoes and other insects, that his books have been taken away and that ''I have nothing to do now.''
The interview came at a time of renewed suffering in Cambodia, where Pol Pot's legacy of violence, political chaos and shattered lives continues to overwhelm attempts at re-establishing a civil society.
After a coup in July, the country's latest strongman, Hun Sen, has quashed and sometimes killed his opponents and frightened away foreign businesses, driving Cambodians further into the poverty Pol Pot bequeathed them.
From 1975 to 1979, Pol Pot systematically dismantled Cambodian society, destroying industry, civil service, education, religion, commerce and culture in a radical attempt to impose a collectivist agrarian utopia. At least one million and as many as two million Cambodians died of torture, execution, starvation, disease and overwork.
At one point in the interview, Mr. Thayer wrote, Pol Pot turned to one of his captors and murmured, ''I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country.''
Mr. Thayer reported that Pol Pot went so far as to propose that the bones and skulls of his victims that still lie in heaps around Cambodia were actually placed there by the Vietnamese to discredit him.
One of Pol Pot's notable characteristics as a leader was the secrecy -- often described as paranoia -- that led him to hide his identity and frequently change dwellings.
''Since my boyhood I never talked about myself,'' he told Mr. Thayer. ''That was my nature. I was taciturn. I'm quite modest. I don't want to tell people that I'm a leader.''
His birth date has been a matter of dispute. Pol Pot told Mr. Thayer he had been born in January 1925, but had lied about the date to remain eligible for a scholarship.
Like many an old man, his own failing health seemed to interest him as much as his monumental deeds of the past, and Mr. Thayer said Pol Pot steered the conversation in the direction of his illnesses. ''You look at me from the outside, you don't know what I have suffered,'' he said. ''If you allow me, I would like to tell you about my sickness.''
Then he described in intimate detail a frightening night in late 1995 when he suffered what was apparently a stroke.
''One night I got up to go to the bathroom,'' Pol Pot said. ''My left eye was closed. I thought that maybe nothing was wrong. But when I came back my eye just did not work anymore. Now my left side from my head to my toe does not work. And my left eye is 95 percent blind.''
Mr. Thayer reported that Pol Pot spoke of his daughter with ''genuine fatherly affection.''
''She is a good daughter, a good person; she gets along with the others quite well,'' Pol Pot said.
Asked if he thought she would be proud, when she is grown, to say she is the daughter of Pol Pot, he responded: ''I don't know about that. It's up to history to judge.''