POL POT, the ultra left wing former dictator blamed for the death of some two million Cambodians, has died of malaria, a senior member of his Khmer Rouge guerrillas said yesterday. However, Cambodian government officials and intelligence reports in neighbouring Thailand could not confirm the claim.
A deputy Khmer Rouge commander said Pol Pot (68) had died on Wednesday after a prolonged battle with malaria. Pol Pot has not been seen in public since just after the 1978 Vietnamese invasion.
The officer said his unit, of the Khmer Rouge's 320th Division, was "going to Pol Pot's funeral," which, he said, was taking place today at a jungle base at Phnom Malai, in Cambodian territory south of the Thai town of Aranyaprathet.
Earlier yesterday, Cambodian intelligence sources and others in Phnom Penh said the former dictator was fatally ill and may have died earlier this week.
King Sihanouk, who was twice allied with the Khmer Rouge over the previous 25 years and has carried on a correspondence with the guerrilla's nominal leader, Khieu Samphan, said he could not confirm that Pol Pot had died.
The king, responding to a question, said. "If Pol Pot is really dead, Cambodia and its people will be rid of their worst criminal.
With the death of Pol Pot, there will be a strong chance that the Khmer Rouge Movement ... will be reduced to a few groups of bandits or outlaws without ideology or ideals," the king wrote from Beijing, where he is recuperating from a bout of partial paralysis. "This, then, will be the end of the most terrible of tragedies in our history," he said.
Mr Ly Thuch, head of co Prime Minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh's cabinet, said they had not received firm evidence of Pol Pot's death.
"I think it would be good news because of what he had done to our country in the past," he said, adding he hoped Khmer Rouge guerrillas would return to the national fold.
Those who survived the Cambodian terror were overjoyed at the report of Pol Pot's demise, but it was a pleasure mingled with regret that he had never been punished.
"I rejoice at his death," said Mr Tat Ly Hok (50), a co president of the Khmer Journalists' Association, who lost six members of his family during Pol Pot's rule.
"But I am still unsatisfied that he did not face a legal trial. The anger of the people is so very strong that we wish to see him die, from a death sentence. So we are very sorry that he died from Pol Pot was glorified as "Brother Number One" in Khmer Rouge propaganda. He is held responsible by many for the deaths of around two million Cambodians by execution, starvation or disease during the Khmer Rouge's 1975-1979 experiment in agrarian communism.
Known to a wider audience as the "Killing Fields", the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot brought Cambodia back to a time of barbarism. Towns and cities were emptied as populations were driven into the countryside to work from dawn until dusk with their hands. Knowledge of foreign languages or literature would invite a heating or execution. The former rice baskets of Asia became a wasteland of poverty.
The nightmare only came to an end when Vietnam, stung by a series of brutal Khmer Rouge border incursions, invaded Cambodia and installed its own government. But throughout the 1980s, the red starved rebels remained players in the Cambodian saga, enlisted by China and the West as a tool with which to punish Vietnam for its invasion.
Only with the holding of UN brokered elections in 1993 were the Khmer Rouge pushed to the side. But they remained a thorn for the new coalition government, occupying up to a sixth of the country's soil, and carrying out hit and run attacks on troops, trains and civilians.
