Titans of History

The capital, Phnom Penh, once a vibrant city of 2 million people, became a ghost town. Following Chairman Mao’s dictum that the peasant was the true proletarian, Pol Pot believed that the city was a corrupting entity, a haven for the bourgeoisie, capitalists and foreign influences.

City dwellers were marched at gunpoint to the countryside as part of the plans of the new regime to abolish cash payments and turn Cambodia into a self-sufficient communist society, where everyone worked the soil. The regime made a distinction between those with “full rights” (who had originally lived off the land) and “depositees” taken from the city, many of whom were massacred outright. Those depositees—capitalists, intellectuals and people who had regular contact with the outside world—who could not be “re-educated” in the ways of the revolution, were tortured and killed at a number of concentration camps, such as the S-21 prison camp (also known as Strychnine Hill), or taken straight to the Killing Fields, where their rations were so small that they could not survive. Thousands were forced to dig their own graves before Khmer Rouge soldiers beat their weary bodies with iron bars, axes and hammers until they died. The soldiers had been instructed not to waste bullets.

Those who were spared immediate execution became slave laborers in the program of agrarian collectivization. Hundreds of thousands of civilians—often uprooted and separated from their families—were worked to death, or starved because of a lack of rations. Many more were executed in the fields for the most minor indiscretions—such as engaging in sexual relations, complaining about conditions, stealing food or espousing religious beliefs.

Some of the Killing Fields containing mass graves have now been preserved as a testimony to the genocide perpetrated by Pol Pot and his followers. The most infamous of them is Choeung Ek, where 8895 bodies were discovered after the fall of the regime.

The country was now riddled with spies and informers, and even children were encouraged to inform on their parents. Pol Pot went on to conduct purges within the Khmer Rouge itself, leading to the execution of more than 200,000 members.

External enemies proved more difficult to suppress, however. With only China maintaining support for the regime, Cambodia become embroiled in a conflict with Vietnam, whose forces invaded and captured Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979, forcing Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to flee to the western regions and over the border into Thailand. The new Vietnamese-controlled regime tried Pol Pot in absentia for genocide and sentenced him to death. Undeterred, Pol Pot directed an aggressive guerrilla war against the new regime, and kept an iron grip on the Khmer Rouge. As late as 1997 he ordered the execution of his colleague Song Sen, along with his family, on suspicion of collaborating with Cambodian government forces. Shortly afterward he himself was arrested by another senior Khmer Rouge figure, and sentenced to life imprisonment, dying in April 1998 of heart failure.

In his murderous, almost psychotic, schemes for a communist utopia, Pol Pot, Brother Number One, outran anything in George Orwell’s imagination. During a reign of just under four years, he oversaw the deaths of between two and five million men, women and children—over a third of the entire population of Cambodia.

IDI AMIN

1925–2003

Hitler and all German people knew that the Israelis are not people who are working in the interest of the people of the world, and that is why they burned the Israelis alive with gas.

Idi Amin, telegram to Kurt Waldheim, secretary general of the United Nations, 1972

Idi Amin represents the disastrous tendency of post-colonial African states to fall into the hands of murderous, long-serving, corrupt and inept dictators—from Doctor Hastings Banda of Malawi and President Mobutu of Zaire to the Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Empire and President Mugabe of Zimbabwe. Amin was one of the worst. Illiterate, garrulous and burly, as terrifying as he was ridiculous, Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada was a buffoonish bully and sadistic mass murderer who earned the soubriquet the Butcher of Uganda. The soi-disant Last King of Scotland impoverished Uganda, once the jewel of Africa, a megalomaniacal cannibalistic loon who killed so many of his countrymen that the crocodiles of Lake Victoria could not consume them fast enough.