Pol Pot (1928-98)

Cambodian dictator. Born on 19 May 1928, to a prosperous and well-connected peasant family in Kompong Thom province, Saloth Sar studied in Phnom Penh and Kompong Cham and became a member of Ho Chi Minh's Indochinese Communist party in 1946.

In 1949, he travelled to Paris to study radio electronics. On his return four years later, he fought briefly against the French in the Indochina war, which resulted in the colonial power's withdrawal from the area in 1954.

At some point, Saloth Sar began calling himself 'Pol Pot' as a nom de guerre. He became a member of the new Communist Party of Kampuchea (Cambodia) in 1960 and its secretary in 1963. He went north to organise the guerrilla war against the government of Prince Sihanouk and, on the overthrow of the latter in 1970, led Khmer Rouge troops in a bitter civil war with the right-wing regime of General Lon Nol, who had changed the country's name to the Khmer Republic.

The Khmer Rouge defeated that government in April 1975 – seeing the fall of Saigon to the Vietcong, Lon Nol escaped from Phnom Penh by helicopter. Pol Pot took total power, even though this was not made public until the following year. The country had yet another name change – to Kampuchea.

As he asserted his independence, Pol Pot quarrelled with Vietnam, which had supported his guerrilla campaign, and imposed his authority on the Kampuchean people. With unbelievable brutality, 'Big Brother Number One' (as he was called) tried to create a truly Communist state by destroying all Western technology and returning to an agrarian society organised on a collective basis.

During the four years of his rule, which began with the declaration of Year Zero, at least one million people died during a reign of terror. Many of them were 'intellectuals', which could simply mean that a person spoke a foreign language or just wore glasses. Pol Pot's victims were buried in mass graves known as the 'killing fields', a name that later became the title of a 1984 Hollywood film about the events.

In January 1979, the Khmer Rouge was brought down by a Vietnamese invasion. Pol Pot fled from Phnom Penh but continued to fight in the countryside and jungle, retiring as head of the Khmer Rouge only in the late 1980s. In 1997, he was sentenced to death in absentia by former Khmer Rouge colleagues in what was considered little more than a show trial. He died of natural causes on 15 April 1998.

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