A Final, Bloody Chapter

By Terry McCarthy/Phnom Penh

Choan See was just 12 years old when he became a Khmer Rouge soldier in 1983. See was proud "to kill Vietnamese" in the war to end the occupation of his country, but after Hanoi finally withdrew its troops in 1989, he longed for an end to the fighting. His wife and three children, however, were kept as virtual hostages in the Khmer Rouge stronghold of Anlong Veng, close to the Thai border, and he had little choice but to stay with the guerrilla army in its fight against the Phnom Penh government. "Life was very hard," See says. "All that time in the jungle, I regret it now."

Three weeks ago, See and his family were awakened by the sound of gunfire--but the shots were coming from the north, inside Anlong Veng, and not from the south, where he knew government troops had their front lines. A mutiny had split the ranks of the Khmer Rouge, and See and his family, along with thousands of other inhabitants of the village, fled south, where they found government trucks waiting to drive them to safety. "People were shouting, 'If you move south, you will live--if you move north, you will die!' "

So began the final chapter in the three-decades-long history of the Khmer Rouge, one of the century's most brutal, self-destructive regimes. More than a million people died during the rule of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. Since then tens of thousands more have been killed and maimed by the guerrilla war and the country's treacherous minefields.

As the rest of Cambodia held elections in 1993 and received millions of dollars in aid and investment, the Khmer Rouge found itself on the sidelines politically and economically, unable to buy the motorcycles and television sets that were proliferating across the country. A small trickle of defectors in the early '90s became a flood by 1996, when cadres in the gem-mining town of Pailin, the other principal Khmer Rouge base, joined the government side.

Last year a power struggle in the leadership in Anlong Veng led to the arrest and show trial of Pol Pot, but he was replaced by Ta Mok, another hard-liner impervious to change. Mok, a one-legged man known widely as "the Butcher," resisted the March 24 mutiny, and by last week he had clawed back some territory in Anlong Veng. But with the Khmer Rouge's having lost so many civilians, observers say, it is just a matter of time before its final rump--estimated at 500 to 1,000 soldiers--is dissolved. "Ta Mok has painted himself into a corner," says Stephen Heder, a Cambodia scholar at London's School of Oriental and African Studies. In addition, the U.S. is putting pressure on Thailand, which has ties with the Khmer Rouge, to force Ta Mok to end the war, possibly under some formula in which Pol Pot would be handed over to an international tribunal in exchange for amnesty for the other Khmer Rouge leaders.

Last week two more people were added to the list of Pol Pot's victims. In March 1996, British mine clearer Christopher Howes and his interpreter, Houn Hourth, were abducted by Khmer Rouge guerrillas near the famous Angkor temples. Their fate had been a mystery, with reported live sightings as recently as last June, plus ransom hoaxes and all the usual false leads attached to a Westerner's missing in Indochina. But Ke Pauk and Yim Panna, two senior Khmer Rouge leaders who had been instrumental in organizing the Anlong Veng mutiny, told TIME in separate interviews that both men were in fact killed shortly after their capture. Howes was moved to Anlong Veng, where he was taken out to a field and shot in the back by a man named Bao on the orders of a close aide to Pol Pot.

The deaths of the two men were as saddening as they were senseless. Howes' father Roy had put an advertisement in Cambodian newspapers last Christmas pleading for information and pointing out that his son "was working so that the people of Cambodia, whom he greatly admired, might live happily without the daily fear of death and dreadful injury."

Asked why Howes was killed, Panna said, "That was Pol Pot's rule. He didn't want any foreigners involved in our society." It was of course this hostility to outsiders that kept the Khmer Rouge stuck in the jungle while the rest of Cambodia benefited from rapid economic development fueled in part by foreign investment. And it was resentment at missing out on this progress that prompted the latest, final rebellion in the Khmer Rouge ranks.

"It is time now to end the war--we need to open to the outside world," said Panna. "The Khmer Rouge policy has killed itself." After it killed so many others, its own demise is most welcome.