Pol Pot, Brother No 1 in the Khmer Rouge regime, is a name that sends shivers down the spines of Cambodians and foreigners alike. It is Pol Pot who is most associated with the bloody mad­ness of the regime he led between 1975 and 1979, and his policies heaped misery, suffering and death on millions of Cambodians. Even after being overthrown in 1979 he cast a long shadow over the Cambodian people: for many of them, just knowing he was still alive was traumatic and unjust. He died on 15 April 1998.

Pol Pot was born Saloth Sar in a small village near Kompong Thorn in 1925. As a young man he won a scholarship to study in Paris and spent several years there with leng Sary, who would later become foreign minister of Democratic Kampuchea. It is here that he is believed to have developed his radical Marxist thought, later to transform into the politics of extreme Maoist agrarianism.

In 1963, Sihanouk's repressive policies sent Saloth Sar and comrades fleeing to the jungles of Ratanakiri. It was from this moment that he began to call himself Pol Pot. Once the Khmer Rouge was allied with Sihanouk, following his overthrow by Lon Nol in 1970 and subsequent exile in Beijing, its support soared and the faces of the leadership became familiar. However, Pol Pot remained a shadowy figure, leaving public duties to Khieu Samphan and leng Sary.

When the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975, few people could have anticipated the hell that was to follow. Pol Pot, with the help of others, was the architect of one of the most radical and brutal revolutions in the history of mankind. The year 1975 was proclaimed as Year Zero; Cambodia was on a self-destructive course to sever all ties with the past.

Pol Pot was not to emerge as the public face of the revolution until the end of 1976, after returning from a trip to his mentors in Beijing. He granted almost no interviews to foreign media and was seen only on propaganda movies produced by government TV. Such was his aura and reputation that by the last year of the regime a cult of personality was developing around him and busts were produced.

He was fervently anti-Vietnamese, a sentiment fuelled by the fact that the Vietnamese con­sidered the Cambodian revolution of secondary importance to their own. Fittingly, it was the Vietnamese that turned out to be his greatest enemy, invading Cambodia on 25 December 1978 and overthrowing the Khmer Rouge government. Pol Pot and his supporters were sent fleeing to the jungle near the Thai border, from where they spent the next decade launching attacks on government positions in Cambodia.

Pol Pot spent much of the 1980s living in an armed compound in Thailand, and with the connivance of both China and the West was able to rebuild his shattered forces and once again threaten the stability of Cambodia. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s his enigma increased as the international media speculated as to the real fate of Pol Pot. His demise was reported so often that when he finally passed away, many Cambodians refused to believe it until they had seen his body on TV or in newspapers. Even then, many were sceptical and rumours continue to circulate about exactly how he met his end.