Former Khmer Rouge military chief Ta Mok, one of Pol Pot’s most ruthless henchmen and a key defendant in upcoming ”Killing Fields” trials, died on Friday in an army hospital in the Cambodian capital.
The one-legged 82-year-old, dubbed ”The Butcher” for overseeing mass purges during the ultra-Maoist regime’s four years in power, had been in hospital with breathing problems since last month.
He lapsed into a coma a week ago, his lawyer said.
”Ta Mok passed away this morning. He was an old man and died of natural causes, given his poor health and respiratory problems,” military doctor Tuoth Nara told Reuters.
Around 1,7-million people — a quarter of the population — are thought to have died under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, which seized power in the jungle-clad south-east Asian nation in 1975 and promptly emptied the cities into the countryside.
Many of their victims were tortured and executed. Others died of starvation, disease or overwork as the guerrilla movement’s ”Year Zero” dream of creating an agrarian utopia descended into the nightmare of the ”Killing Fields”.
They were ousted by invading Vietnamese troops in 1979.
But none of the Khmer Rouge leaders ever faced justice for the atrocities, one the darkest chapters of the 20th century, although a special Cambodian-United Nations court has just started work and is expected to be up and running in full next year.
Even though most of Cambodia’s 13-million people lost relatives to the Khmer Rouge, Ta Mok and others retained support in strongholds on the Thai border such as Anlong Veng, where they are revered as national heroes who took on old enemy Vietnam.
”Our grandpa told us when he dies he wants to be buried at Along Veng where people love him. It was his last home,” his 27-year-old grandson Sun Kosal said.
Justice delayed is justice denied
For the majority of Cambodia’s 13-million people, however, Ta Mok’s death is likely only to heighten the feeling that justice so long delayed is justice denied.
”I blame the court for the slow process,” said 65-year-old Bou Meng, one of the handful of survivors of Phnom Penh’s notorious Tuol Sleng S-21 interrogation centre, set up to root out enemies of the revolution.
”We have now lost another key witness against the Khmer Rouge and I am worried that other surviving leaders will die soon because they are old too,” he told Reuters.
”Brother Number One” Pol Pot died in 1998, shortly after an internal putsch in which Ta Mok seized power of the rump of the regime, by then holed up in jungle camps along the Thai border.
He held out as a self-styled warlord in Anlong Veng until he was arrested in 1999 and later charged by a military court with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The only other Khmer Rouge leader in custody is former Tuol Sleng chief Duch — real name Kang Kek Ieu — who is now a born-again Christian.
”Brother Number Two” Nuon Chea, former Foreign Minister Ieng Sary and ex-President Khieu Samphan, all of whom are expected to appear before the $53-million tribunal, remain free men.
With the exception of 59-year-old Duch, all are in their 70s or 80s and in various degrees of ill-health. – Reuters