Hundreds pay respects to Ta Mok "The Butcher"

[PatricVadec]

Hundreds of Cambodians have paid their respects to Ta Mok, a former Khmer Rouge leader nicknamed "The Butcher".


In a traditional Buddhist funeral ceremony, incense was burned and prayers recited over Ta Mok's body, which was daubed with white powder.

The ceremony took place in Ta Mok's former stronghold of Anlong Veng, in the north of Cambodia.

Ta Mok, who died on Friday, was the regime's military commander and linked to many atrocities of the 1970s.

About 1.7 million people died under the Khmer Rouge, through a combination of starvation, disease and execution.

Ta Mok was the only Khmer Rouge leader who refused to bargain with authorities following the collapse of the regime, and he was arrested in 1999 near the Thai border.

He was transferred to hospital from prison last month, suffering from high blood pressure and tuberculosis.

Ta Mok died in the capital Phnom Penh. His body was transported to the house of one of his daughters in Anlong Veng, some 305km (190 miles) north.

Here Ta Mok ruled as a local warlord in the late 1990s, after the Khmer Rouge were forced out of the capital.

Irony

Though Ta Mok was one of the most vicious leaders of the Khmer Rouge, he is remembered in this area as tough but generous - a man who brought public works projects and some employment to a poor region.

On Saturday, local people filed through the house to light incense and contribute money towards his funeral, as 11 Buddhist monks sat in attendance.

"He is the one who allowed me to survive," a weeping Sarann Chanthy, 50, told the news agency AFP.

"When I heard the news that Ta Mok died, I was shocked and cried until I fainted," she said.

"He was very important for the villagers in Anlong Veng. Sometimes in the past I was angry with him over something, but I've lit incense to pray for his forgiveness - I wish him to go rest in a better place," she said.

Correspondents say there is an irony in Ta Mok being given a Buddhist funeral. Religion was banned under the Khmer Rouge, with bodies thrown unceremoniously into mass graves and no mourning allowed.

Negotiations between Ta Mok's family and authorities are under way to decide where he should be buried. His family are thought to favour a burial on the grounds of his former home in Anlong Veng.

Ta Mok was expected to be one of the first people tried for genocide and crimes against humanity at UN-backed hearings due to start next year.

from:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5205534.stm

[PatricVadec]

Ta Mok, military commander of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge movement, was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people during the Pol Pot regime of the late 1970s.
Born in 1926, he was named Chhit Choen and trained as a Buddhist monk at Pali High School in Phnom Penh.

During the 1940s he was an active opponent of both French colonial rule and the Japanese occupation.

Joining the Cambodian Communist Party, he rose to become a member of its Central Committee, and commanded its forces in the south-west of Cambodia.

Under the alias Ta Mok - uncle Mok - he served as the Khmer Rouge's chief of staff, after having been a member of the Kymer Issarak movement, and lost part of a leg in combat in 1970.

During the Vietnam war, Cambodia's neutrality was fatally compromised. The Viet Cong used the country as a base from which to launch attacks into Vietnam.

And the United States began a secret bombing campaign in 1969, before briefly invading the country the following year.

By the mid-1970s, Cambodia was in civil war. The Khmer Rouge, which initially presented itself as a peace-loving and democratic organisation, finally took control of the country in 1975, renaming it Democratic Kampuchea.

With Pol Pot at its head, the five years of Khmer Rouge government saw up to two million people murdered.

In an ideologically-driven campaign against so-called "parasites" - intellectuals, city-dwellers and disabled people among them - mass genocide in "killing fields" became the order of the day.

Ta Mok, who became commander-in-chief of the army in 1977, was the driving force behind a number of purges. Massacres ascribed to him, including one of 30,000 people in the Angkor Chey district, earned Ta Mok the nickname 'Butcher'.

Late in 1978, Vietnam decided to act. Its forces invaded Cambodia, and the Khmer Rouge fled. Ta Mok went north, becoming supreme military commander of the remnant forces.

In 1997, following a split within the movement, Ta Mok became leader of one faction. He arrested Pol Pot, who was condemned to house arrest for life and who died in his custody in 1998.

After years of cat-and-mouse in the vast forests that separate Cambodia from Thailand, Ta Mok - the last major Khmer Rouge figure still at large - was finally arrested, inside Thai territory, on 6 March 1999.

Two days earlier, the United Nations had published a report which recommended the establishment of an International Criminal Court.

Transferred to Phnom Penh, Ta Mok was initially accused of membership of the now-banned Khmer Rouge before being charged with genocide and crimes against humanity.

If he had lived long enough, he would have been a key defendant in the trials of Khmer Rouge leaders, which are scheduled to begin in mid-2007.

Correspondents say his death deprives Cambodians of a chance to see justice done.

[img]http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41826000/jpg/_41826238_topafp*****.jpg[/img]
Photo taken when he was captured in 1999

from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5128664.stm

[MoFo]

Good Riddance

[DaGreatRV]

Damn, now he can't be trailed in a court of law.
He took the easy way out.

[Cedan]

these people were ****ed up! all the educated people were "parasites"?? what did they want, a stone age country?

[PatricVadec]

these people were ****ed up! all the educated people were "parasites"?? what did they want, a stone age country?

Yep,Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, was achieving his dream of Year Zero, the return of Cambodia to a peasant economy in which there would be no class divisions, no money, no books, no schools, no hospitals.