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ANNOUNCER: July 28, 1997. TED KOPPEL, ABC News: (voice-over) His regime will have a place as one of the bloodiest in the history of man and yet a few faded pictures have provided our only glimpse of him these past 18 years. Most Americans are only familiar with the terror he unleashed because of a Hollywood movie, "The Killing Fields." But the Cambodians who died because of his insane policies may have been as many as two million. For a moment a few weeks ago, it appeared that this man might actually be brought to justice before an international tribunal. But still, he remained invisible, until tonight. An ABC News exclusive -- the trial and sentencing of Pol Pot. ANNOUNCER: This is ABC News Nightline. Reporting from Washington, Ted Koppel. TED KOPPEL: It's not that words fail, but that we've devalued them through over use and careless application. We've exhausted some of their meaning and we journalists, with our screaming headlines, are more to blame than most. There are, for instance, differences between bad and evil, mass murderer and genocide. But in our competition for your attention, we tend toward the extreme so that now when such words are needed, they are less potent than they ought to be. We should have saved a special word or two in this century of ours for the exterminators of millions, for Hitler and Stalin and Mao and the most elusive and mysterious of them all, the only one still alive, the man you will meet tonight, Pol Pot. He worked at something of a disadvantage because his country, Cambodia, was so small to begin with, perhaps seven or eight million people when Pol Pot led his Khmer Rouge guerrillas out of the jungle to seize Cambodia's capital of Phnom Penh. Still, he did what he could. During the mid and late `70s, the Khmer Rouge began a killing rampage during which they shot and hacked, beat and tortured, worked and starved between one and two million of their follow Cambodians to death. Those were truly evil times and Pol Pot was the principal architect of that evil. He needed help, of course, and he got it. Some were more enthusiastic than others, but Cambodia remains a country teeming with killers, their accomplices and their accessories. When word came, then, just a few weeks ago, in early June, that Pol Pot had been arrested by some of his former comrades in the Khmer Rouge, reaction was mixed. There was widespread skepticism that the event had happened, even some suggestion that Pol Pot himself might have staged it. But if it was true, then surely there should be a trial, an international war crimes tribunal in which Pol Pot could testify as to what he had done and why and with whose help. That last point bothers a lot of people. Pol Pot had a great deal of assistance and his accomplices are not eager for his testimony. But there was a trial of sorts and tonight you will see it. (voice-over) Such as it was, the trial was held under a shed in the Anlong Veng region of Cambodia in the northern part of the country last Friday. It is not a place for westerners to visit uninvited. DAVID McKAIGE, Asiaworks Cameraman: As far as I know, no other westerners have been there before and gotten out alive. Some westerners have been captured in the past by the Khmer Rouge in that area and we have reason to believe they've all been killed. TED KOPPEL: (voice-over) So these are the Khmer Rouge you find yourself thinking, women and children, a few scattered men in uniform, gathered for what looks a lot more like a village meeting than the trial of a genocidal killer. Nor, if the truth be told, does the crowd seem particularly conscious of participating in an historic event. They have the look of people conditioning by hundreds of political indoctrination sessions. (Clip from trial) TED KOPPEL: (voice-over) The man at the microphone issues a denunciation and they chant "Crush! Crush! Crush!" followed by the regimented clapping of hands. Thirty years ago, we saw millions of Chinese during the Cultural Revolution participate in similar robotic demonstrations. Nor is this in any sense what we in the west would recognize as a trial. Some of the indictments refer only obliquely to Pol Pot himself. But the onlookers know what is expected. The administrative head of the region complains that Khmer Rouge territory keeps diminishing, getting smaller and smaller and the crowd chimes in on cue, "Crush, Crush the Pol Potists!" they chant. The reporter from whom we acquired this video, the man invited by the Khmer Rouge to witness the event, is Nate Thayer, who writes for "The Far Eastern Economic Review." (interviewing) When you were first brought to the scene and you first spotted Pol Pot, just take me through what was happening in your head at that moment? NATE THAYER, "Far Eastern Economic Review" :I was shocked. In fact, I was sitting as far away, standing as far away as I am from you and I couldn't believe it. I had to talk even closer and then I had to turn around and leave and come back and at the point we arrived, the show trial began and it was an extremely surreal historic moment. TED KOPPEL: (voice-over) Sitting on a chair, not part of the crowd but not removed from them either, is a white- haired old man who seems vaguely disinterested in the proceedings, alert, but not expected to play an active role. This grandfatherly figure is Pol Pot, who ordered policies that led to the deaths of more than a million Cambodians back in the 1970s. The microphone has been taken over by the new chief of staff of the Khmer Rouge military. The men he has replaced, three generals who remained loyal to Pol Pot, are also seated, but they are handcuffed. Although this video was shot only three days ago, these men may already be dead. The new military head is cataloging the violence that broke out only weeks ago after Pol Pot ordered the murder of his own defense minister, Son Sen, and his entire family. Women were raped. Adults and old people, even children, were killed, four or five every night. The catalog of horrors is a small scale version of the mass killings in the `70s. The military chief could be reading from an agricultural report. "Trucks were ordered to roll over them, breaking their arms and legs. Gasoline was poured on them and they were set on fire." The three handcuffed generals looked impassive, but their fidgeting fingers give them away. Pol Pot gives no sign of listening, but his former followers are announcing the end of everything he has tried to created over the past 35 years. "We have sacrificed everything for the movement," says the military chief, "but in the end, we are killing one another. Why?" The political judgment is about to be rendered. He is about to deliver the reason for this show trial, the reason that a reporter and a cameraman have been invited to bear witness. "From now on," he said, "international opinion cannot accuse our resistance movement of being something it is not." There is no Pol Pot. And so the message cannot be missed, he spells it out again, even more explicitly. As Pol Pot sits resting on his cane, his movement is dissolving in front of him. "The world should understand," says the new defense chief, "that we are not Khmer Rouge. We are not followers of Pol Pot." (Commercial Break) TED KOPPEL: (voice-over) He is 72, suffers from bouts of malaria, has high blood pressure and a weak heart. Still, his record of survival and cunning is such that Pol Pot's rivals consider him quite capable of staging this trial himself. For two hours last Friday, Pol Pot was bombarded with words, but he did not appear to have been physically mistreated in any way. "I saw it with my own eyes," says this man, "the Pol Pot regime is the real killing regime. We no longer want any bloodshed." And from another man, "We've all undergone tough lives full of massacres. Hundreds of thousands of people were injured and killed. Why? (interviewing) It's a morality play. It's a commercial message, in a sense." NATE THAYER: It was also a public humiliation, a public denunciation and this is a part of the psychology of not just communism, but also of Cambodian political culture. It wasn't just a sentencing. It was to denounce and humiliate those that they accused themselves, Pol Pot's top loyalists, of unspeakable crimes against his own people. TED KOPPEL: (voice-over) The sentence, when it came, was strikingly mild. These are criminal acts, he says, and the betrayal by Pol Pot and his clique of people, armed forces and cadre. In conclusion, we have all decided to condemn and sentence his clique to life imprisonment. As Pol Pot is led away, he does, for the first time, seem like a feeble old man. But is he, indeed, the man we believe him to be? The two western journalists on the scene, both old hands in this region, were convinced, as was cameraman Klaus Bracht (ph), who shot the last interview with Pol Pot in 1979. KLAUS BRACHT: I'm sure that, you know, I had a black and white photograph and I compared the video to that photograph. The shape of the nose the same, the shape of the ear, the eyes. I have no doubt. TED KOPPEL: (voice-over) What about the relatively mild sentence, though? This remains, after all, one of the worst killers of our time. Nate Thayer was told that there was sharp disagreement among those who sentenced Pol Pot. NATE THAYER: They said very clearly that many of the top leadership wanted to execute Pol Pot and the other three under detention and it was a debate within the top leadership that had been taken before, a decision that had been taken before this trial that we're seeing today to not execute him but to denounce him and to sentence him to basically life under house arrest, under detention, a life that I believe is, in fact, a very short one given my impression of the state of his very precarious health. TED KOPPEL: (voice-over) The world has been waiting 18 years to see this man again, to see him arrested, to see him brought to justice. Nate Thayer has invested an enormous amount of energy in tracking down Pol Pot. NATE THAYER: I witnessed history. I did. TED KOPPEL: You're emotional about it? NATE THAYER: I am. (Commercial Break) TED KOPPEL: In 1978, two American journalists, Dick Dudman (ph), of the "St. Louis Post Dispatch," and Elizabeth Becker, of " The Washington Post," accepted an invitation from the Khmer Rouge to tour Cambodia. After two weeks and 1,000 miles, they were granted an interview with Pol Pot. We asked the two of them, Dick Dudman, who's now retired, and Elizabeth Becker, who's now the deputy Washington editor of the"New York Times" to screen and comment on the material we've shown you. ELIZABETH BECKER, "New York Times":That's, that is Pol Pot. He has a lot more age spots. His skin has collapsed under his neck, but that's exactly the same face. I thought there would be some question but, from the initial reports I read, but there' s no doubt whatsoever. I was surprised that he looked as well as he did, quite frankly. He had a couple of the features, the combing back of the hair, the small minute use of the hands. A defeated man, but that's Pol Pot, no question. DICK DUDMAN, "St. Louis Post Dispatch" :What a crazy trial it was. I was looking for a cheerleader who told those people when to clap and when to shout. It was so obviously orchestrated. Another question that came to my mind while I was watching it is was who are these people who were watching the trial? How many of them participated in this orgy of killing in that country? One man can't kill a million people. ELIZABETH BECKER: Can I just say that I have no doubt that he's responsible and that I have no doubt that he's a monster and going through the Tusuling (ph) archives and all the works that scholars and journalists have done for the last two decades, there is no doubt that that man is chiefly responsible for what's called the auto genocide. What I thought was interesting was to see him now at the end of his political life, having been privileged to see him at the pinnacle and now see him at the end, that what the audience was so young, to see this man with gray hair, terribly aged with all these, his, the people who are denouncing him are generations younger. He has killed off his contemporaries. And even the three generals, I was surprised, the three generals are decades younger than him. It's a show trial in the sense that this was the way to make a political pronouncement and the announcement is Pol Pot has been denounced and declared no longer the leader of this political movement. DICK DUDMAN: He was in the jungle totally secreted. He wasn't like any other revolutionary leader. They usually build themselves up, Castro and the rest. ELIZABETH BECKER: I cannot exaggerate what a secretive man he was. It's not, it's indicative that we were the only two journalists to see him, that his own people didn't see him. Very few Cambodians, you can go to Cambodia today and it's very hard to find someone who actually saw Pol Pot. I thought he would commit suicide, quite frankly, and I think the only reason probably that he has allowed himself to be captured is because he probably is too old to flee and he is -- he no longer is of use to anyone. You know, if one is looking for the scheme behind the scheme behind the scheme, you know, the Chinese puzzles, it's more who is going to get out of being tried, the fear that if Pol Pot were to be brought to justice, other people would be implicated and I think that's the end game right now, how to avoid, if you're a person of some rank, how do you avoid being pulled in with Pol Pot and that's what makes me the angriest is that, you know, it's obvious this Pol Pot should be in an international trial. He shouldn't be in the shack, in the shed in the jungle and the, you know, I wish the democratic process were working better and that Hun Sen had not made his power grab. But it's amazing that they are pulling out of it and it is a different country. DICK DUDMAN: I agree it's a different country. They're in a bad patch right now, though, that they've got to get through. There's a streak of nasty, nasty cruelty that's still going on and we can hope that it's going to be over soon, but there's that struggle for control is in progress right now. ELIZABETH BECKER: Americans need to care about Pol Pot because he ranks as not -- as among a dozen or so of the worst tyrants of the century. His power grew out of the Indochina wars that our country took part in. He took a small country of about seven million people and he decided that he would make it perfect and from the first day of his victory in 1975 he threw the country upside down. He threw everyone out of the cities. He decided that you take the most romantic notions and turn them into a maniac's nightmare and that's what he did, that everyone would be out of the cities, that everything that people worry about modernity was going to be gotten rid of, no money, no marketplace and he got rid of all sort of like there was no spontaneity, no passion. It was one large labor camp. And so it's, if you want to know about the craziness of the worst of those idealistic dreams, of the ability of a country to be destroyed in this, in a few years, four or five years and done so by cutting people off from each other and cutting the whole country off from the world, he was, in some ways, the worst expression of communism. He took it to the worst degrees. And if you're going to understand the 20th century, the ideological wars of communism versus capitalism, how one fed the other, of, if you're going to understand the sense we have of Asia, of the cruelty that came out of that communism and the hopes now of a different Asia, you should understand Pol Pot. TED KOPPEL: Retired newsman Dick Dudman and "New York Times" editor Elizabeth Becker. I'll have a closing comment in a moment. (Commercial Break) TED KOPPEL: It' s not enough, this shadow play in the jungle, this farce of a trial. A million, perhaps as many as two million people died because of that mild looking maniac. If the Cambodian nation had been offered the chance to put Pol Pot on trial, if an independent court had chosen to exercise mercy, that would have been a fine expression of justice. But the fate of Pol Pot is actually incidental to what a real trial would have accomplished. We've seen Pol Pot now, but we should have heard from him. Well over half the population of Cambodia today is under the age of 25. They are too young to remember and too much of the older population was wiped out. Some answers should have been provided. And now it appears that Pol Pot will never even be asked. Tomorrow, I'll be reporting from the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. That's our report for tonight. I'm Ted Koppel in Bangkok. For all of us here at ABC News, good night.
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