Pol Pot: Cambodia's Elusive Butcher

By Scott Neuman, FOX News

NEW YORK — After leading one of the century's worst genocides, Pol Pot slipped into the jungles of Southeast Asia in 1979 ahead of invading Vietnamese troops. He left behind the skeletons of as many as 2 million Cambodians, who suffered starvation and execution in the country's infamous "killing fields."

Born Saloth Sar on May 19, 1928, Pol Pot led a Cambodian peasant army to victory against the U.S.-backed Lon Nol republic in 1975, or "Year Zero," as the Khmer Rouge called it. They immediately embarked on a bloody restructuring of society.

As many as two million people were executed as enemies of Pol Pot's utopian revolution or died of disease, starvation or overwork until the Vietnamese invasion launched on December 25, 1978, drove the Khmer Rouge from power.

Shortly after he was ousted from the capital Phnom Penh, a smiling and healthy-looking Pol Pot told journalists that several thousand Cambodians had died "due to some mistakes" in implementing his policies, but he denied committing crimes against humanity.

Educated in Paris and inspired by the ideology of Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot arrived on the scene in Cambodia in the 1970s at a time when the country was being inexorably drawn into the war in neighboring Vietnam.

The nominal monarch, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, had been overthrown, many believe with the help of the United States. Washington had been frustrated by Sihanouk's inability or unwillingness to shut down Viet Cong bases in the country's east.

After Sihanouk's ouster, Gen. Lon Nol was installed, but his government was overthrown in 1975 by the Khmer Rouge, under the leadership of Pol Pot.

"The Khmer Rouge were viewed initially as nationalist reformers," Clark Neher, the Director of Northern Illinois University's Center for South East Asian Studies told FOX News. "We soon discovered how naive that notion was."

When Pol Pot's forces marched into the capital, they literally emptied the city at gunpoint. In an effort to "purify" Cambodia and to create a "classless utopia," the Khmer Rouge forced the city dwellers into the fields, in what has been described as the century's most devastating experiment in social engineering.

In 1979, Vietnam, unhappy with the Chinese-supported Khmer Rouge on its western flank, invaded Cambodia ostensibly to end the killings, and drove Pol Pot from power.

"Nearly everyone believed that Pol Pot continued as leader of the Khmer Rouge," Neher said. "He set himself up as an anti-Vietnamese nationalist. He very cleverly used that to strengthen his nationalist credentials and that helped him maintain power within the Khmer Rouge."

After years in hiding Pol Pot reportedly fled his northern stronghold of Anlong Veng after ordering the execution of his defense minister, who had allegedly had the fatal audacity to begin arranging talks with the government.