ON a flaming pyre of tyres, sticks and a grubby mattress, Pol Pot was slowly reduced to ashes early yesterday in the jungles where his genocidal ultra-Maoist experiment began. Without a word, a toast or a bow, a young Khmer Rouge soldier set the heap topped by bougainvillea aflame with a plastic cigarette lighter shortly before 10 am. A handful of young soldiers in motley uniforms and plain clothes looked on. Dogs and pigs roamed around. Mortars popped in the distance. No one wept. A purplish-black haze soon wafted above the crude wooden coffin and up over the jungle clearing, just inside the Cambodian border at Chong Sa-Ngam Pass.
On top of the plank coffin sat Pol Pot's upturned rattan chair. His other favourite possessions - a bamboo fan and a Khmer scarf - also went up in flames. Under the coffin was the blue and pink mattress on which he was laid out after dying on Wednesday night. None of the senior Khmer Rouge leaders who helped shape his vision of Utopia attended. Minutes earlier, Mia Som, the 40-year-old peasant woman who knew Pol Pot only as an ageing husband named Saloth Sar, lit incense at his deathbed as she performed a brief Buddhist ceremony with their daughter Set-set, 14. Both stayed away from the cremation.
'She gave him a simple ceremony. It was Buddhist, it was religious,' said Khmer Rouge spokesman Nuon Nou. Before he could say whether or not the austere intellectual who once ordered the annihilation of the 'superstitious' had recently found faith in higher powers, an incoming artillery shell exploded nearby. Nuon Nou fled back to the last Khmer Rouge stronghold of Srabua, saying simply 'danger, danger' and only deepening the enigma surrounding 'Brother No 1'. A few minutes earlier he had declared the Khmer Rouge movement as dead as its founder.
'As of 9.52 . . . there is no Khmer Rouge,' Nuon Nou said, claiming the creation of a new party with the old faces. 'Everything is finished. No Pol Pot and no Khmer Rouge.' Pol Pot, he insisted, had struggled to live out his last eight months of house arrest as a peasant in an ordinary Khmer Rouge village. 'He was never one of them. He had never really lived among them. In the last few days he got his wife to dye his hair so people wouldn't wonder who this old man was.' After about three hours, Pol Pot was dust. His remains will be passed to relatives - but not his first wife Khieu Phonary, who shared his youthful visions in Paris and later lost her sanity as their dreams evaporated under the weight of up to two million deaths.
The ashes will be returned to his birthplace on Cambodia's eastern border with Vietnam, his one-time backer whose troops drove him to within a few hundred metres of the Thai border in 1979. Pol Pot, said to have been 73 years old, left a small amount of money for Mia Som and Set-set. A Thai military source at the cremation said it was in no way a ceremony. 'Today they tried to show that Pol Pot was not important. There were only a few people and they were just hanging around.'