J Murray £25 pp671

In the hierarchy of mass murderers of the last century, the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot remains unchallenged for the sheer extremism of his theory and the implacable way it was put into practice. Stalin, Hitler and Mao killed many more victims, but they had wider canvases to paint with blood. The Cambodian experiment traumatised just one small country and may have claimed “only” 1.5m lives. Yet it astonished even Mao by its radicalism and proved that the Marxist utopia was a vision doomed to failure no matter how ruthless its social engineers.

So, if Pol Pot belongs, strictly speaking, in the second rank of butchers, alongside Saddam Hussein, perhaps, or the Young Turks who orchestrated the Armenian pogroms, he still ranks first among equals in the theory and practice of political violence.

Philip Short’s book sets out to show that rage and murder were intrinsic to the Cambodian revolution. Their roots lay deep in the Khmer psyche of absolute submission to absolute rulers and a blind insistence on carrying theories through to the end. He reckons that Pol Pot was not a classic communist functionary but more like one of the ancient despots of Angkor Wat, in whose grandeur the revolutionaries gloried.

Like the author’s biography of Mao, this is in essence a political, not a personal history. Pol Pot revealed almost nothing about himself; indeed, utmost secrecy was his code of practice and few witnesses survived to testify about his daily life. We know more about Hitler’s table talk, Stalin’s drinking bouts and Saddam’s wedding feasts than we do about Pol Pot’s shadowy meetings in jungle huts and his summits in the salons of Hanoi and Pyongyang. And there is more documentation available for the Nazi Wannsee conference of 1942 than there is for the meetings in 1975 at the Khmer Rouge headquarters in Phnom Penh’s French colonial railway station, at which the draconian decision to evacuate the cities of Cambodia was taken. This leaves the biographer with a tough task. Short has dug around assiduously for fresh material to illuminate the mind of the tyrant. At the end, though, we are still left groping for answers.

Pol Pot’s youth provides few clues. Like Mao, he came from a prosperous village family, precisely the sort of suspicious class background that would suffice for a death sentence later on. Like Stalin, he was exposed at a young age to the certainty of faith, spending a year as a novice monk at the Buddhist temple of Wat Bottum Vaddei, near the gilded royal palaces of Phnom Penh.

It is in Pol Pot’s adolescence that Short finds the most peculiar anecdote about his subject. Within the palace walls, Pol Pot’s sister, Roeung, was living as a secondary wife, in practice a concubine, to the polygamous if elderly King Monivong. The boy would be allowed to visit his sister in this “hothouse world”, as Short terms it, because at 15 he was deemed a child. According to Keng Vannsak, a contemporary of Pol Pot who later became his political mentor in Paris, the harem women would indulge in sex play with him, stopping short of intercourse. There are so few other details known of Pol Pot’s intimate life that this gem might seem a gift to Freudians.

Short passes briskly onwards, alas, to explore in burdensome detail the development of Cambodian revolutionary theory in the 1930s. It was a unique model. It took its austerity from the Buddha, its extremism from Robespierre and its leadership doctrine from Stalin. There was to be no compromise, only violence. Subterfuge was everything: it was only in 1976, a year after the fall of Phnom Penh, that Pol Pot emerged in public as the leader, and only then did the Khmer Rouge reveal itself as a Marxist-Leninist party.

Pol Pot was fortunate in his enemies. The playboy King Sihanouk — who outlived him and who has just abdicated the throne — ruled a fantasy realm of brutality and gross corruption that made 1950s Cambodia ripe for revolution. When the uprising came, Pol Pot’s black-clad legions faced the military strongman Lon Nol. “As silent as a carp,” the French called him, while the despairing Americans put their faith in B-52s to prolong his regime and Lon Nol himself resorted to sorcerers, spells and a line of magic sand drawn in a circle around Phnom Penh. The B-52s did not save Cambodia, but became a symbol of the West’s blundering complicity in its destruction.

Yet Short’s most valuable contribution to the debates that still swirl around the Cambodian fiasco is to bring clear thinking to the big questions of blame. He takes issue with William Shawcross, who argued shortly after the war that the pathological brutality of the Khmer Rouge followed years of severe trauma under American bombing. Not at all, says Short. Cruelty was ingrained in the Cambodian independence fighters of the 1950s, the Issaraks, who devoured the cook ed livers of their victims. And Pol Pot institutionalised the killing of captives before Kissinger and Nixon made Cambodia a cockpit of the cold war.

Short is brisk about the cynical policy of Vietnam, whose only redeeming role in the affair was to invade Cambodia and topple Pol Pot in 1979 after his excesses spilt across the border. He also indicts the Chinese, who have largely escaped censure for their complicity with the Khmer Rouge. Mao openly envied Pol Pot’s extremism. The ultra-radical Gang of Four backed him. Then Deng Xiaoping played power politics by sustaining him with weapons for a decade in the jungles along the Thai border.

Pol Pot’s revolution, like Stalin’s, consumed his enemies, then his comrades and finally his own family. His brother perished on a forced march in 1975, his first wife, Khieu Ponnary, went mad, while sundry relatives and in-laws fell to his purges. A few of his surviving cronies will face an international tribunal next year. It will be Nuremberg without Hitler, for Pol Pot died, apparently of natural causes, in 1998. Of the 20th century’s great killers, only Saddam, it seems, is likely to have his day in court.

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