‘Killing Fields’ Are Unavenged

With his death in a jungle camp where he was being held captive by former associates, Pol Pot has cheated justice one last time, denying an international tribunal the chance to call him to account for the genocide that killed more than a million fellow Cambodians.

Recent reports indicate that the United States had been working with other nations on plans to capture and put on trial the deposed Khmer Rouge leader. As the State Department and Amnesty International emphasized Thursday, others who played key roles in Cambodia’s reign of terror in the latter half of the 1970s remain at large. Efforts to bring these war criminals to justice should not cease.

His captors say that Pol Pot, who was known to be ailing, died in his sleep. Journalists who saw the body identified it as the former dictator’s.

Certainly the timing of his death comes as a relief to Pol Pot’s erstwhile comrades, some of whom have achieved a measure of political legitimacy in Cambodia. Pol Pot himself insisted in a rare interview last year that his conscience was clear, though he conceded that “mistakes” were made in the monstrous program he instituted to return Cambodia to a subsistence economy and purge it of its educated class and all others who might challenge his rule. Had Pol Pot been put on trial his testimony would have implicated many others in crimes against humanity.

In an ironic coincidence, the reports of Pol Pot’s death came on a day when Los Angeles juries convicted three gang members of murdering Haing Ngor, the Cambodian who as an actor relived some of his own horrifying experiences under the Khmer Rouge in the 1984 film, “The Killing Fields.” Ngor survived Pol Pot’s reign and helped depict some of the chaos, lunacy and brutality he had witnessed. Unlike Pol Pot, who gave the orders that caused the deaths of so many, the killers of Haing Ngor have been brought to justice.