Titans of History

Nguema finally fell in August 1979 in a military coup led by his nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo—who continues to rule to this day—although not before setting fire to much of the country’s wealth. He tried to flee, but was locked in a cage suspended in a cinema, where he was tried for 80,000 murders and sentenced to death. The new regime had to get Moroccan mercenaries to carry out the execution—fear of his magical powers prevented local troops from doing it themselves.

During his decade-long reign of terror, Nguema had brought Equatorial Guinea to its knees. Out of its population of over 300,000, some 100,000 had been killed and 125,000 had fled into exile as Nguema transformed his country into a hell on earth. After a reign of almost thirty years, his nephew’s tyranny remains one of the most corrupt and repressive in Africa. Torture is endemic, and local radio hails him as a god while he grooms his son to succeed him.

POL POT

1925–98

Pol Pot does not believe in God, but he thinks that heaven, destiny, wants him to guide Cambodia the way he thinks it the best for Cambodia … Pol Pot is mad … like Hitler.

Prince Norodom Sihanouk, former ruler of Cambodia

Pol Pot, the communist Khmer Rouge leader who created the democidal hell known as Democratic Kampuchea, only ruled Cambodia for four years, but in that short time he murdered millions of innocent people—half the population—impoverished the country, killed all intellectuals, even people who wore spectacles, and tried to restart time at a diabolic Year Zero.

Born as Saloth Sar, Pol Pot (a revolutionary name he adopted in 1963) was the son of a wealthy farmer. His family were courtiers to the Cambodian royal family and in 1931, as a child of six, he moved to the capital city, Phnom Penh, to live with his brother, an official at the royal palace, and was educated at Catholic and French schools. In 1949 he went to Paris on a scholarship to study electronics, and became involved with the French Communist Party and with other left-wing Cambodian students studying in Paris. Pol Pot was never academically inclined and was forced to return home after failing his exams.

After a spell as a teacher, in 1963 Pol Pot began to devote all his energy to revolutionary activities. That same year he was appointed head of the Workers’ Party of Kampuchea—effectively the Cambodian communist party, also referred to as the Khmer Rouge, which strongly opposed the existing government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. The prince—and sometime king—had led the country with irresponsible self-indulgence since independence from France in 1953. Pol Pot forged links with North Vietnam and China, which he visited in 1966. He was impressed with Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Indeed Mao was to be his main patron and hero. The following year he spent time with a hill tribe in northeastern Cambodia, and was impressed by the simplicity of peasant life, uncorrupted by the city.

In 1968 the Khmer Rouge launched an insurrection, seizing the mountainous region on the border with Vietnam. The United States, embroiled in the Vietnam War and fearing that North Vietnamese troops were using Cambodia as a safe haven, began a bombing campaign, which radicalized Cambodia in Pol Pot’s favor. In 1970, Prince Sihanouk was overthrown in a right-wing coup by former defense minister Lon Nol. The Khmer Rouge’s shadowy army of guerrillas in black pajamas soon controlled the countryside.

On April 17, 1975 the capital finally fell to the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot—ruling with a tiny clique of comrades such as Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan under the anonymous cover of the Organization—declared that 1975 was “Year Zero” and started to purge Cambodia of all noncommunist influences. All foreigners were expelled, newspapers were outlawed and large numbers of people with the merest taint of association with the old regime—including all religious leaders, whether Buddhist, Christian or Muslim—were executed. There were even reports of people being killed because they wore spectacles—a sign of “bourgeois intellectuals.”

Pol Pot—now known as Brother Number One—then embarked on an insane and doomed attempt to turn Cambodia into an agrarian utopia. The cities were cleared of their inhabitants, who were forced to live in agricultural communes in the countryside. In terrible conditions, with food shortages and crippling hard labor, these communes soon became known as the Killing Fields, where several million innocent Cambodians were executed. Despite a massive shortfall in the harvest of 1977 and rising famine, the regime arrogantly rejected the offer of outside aid.