Here are some excerpts from I Am Pol Pot:

Chapter 1

Nurodum Sihacook the gentle butcher – When a scorpion smells like a rose.

A journal entry by Saloth Sâr, better known as Pol Pot

10 June 1997:

Translated from Khmer to English:

The stench was overwhelming. It smelled like a slaughterhouse for animals. I was on a road in Kampuchea. It was barely a road. I’m not sure a large car could have made it over the dirt pathway and there were ruts that could easily trap a car. Green foliage of all types grew along the side. This was and still is Kampuchea, a hot, humid, jungle filled country.

It was not dead animals I smelled. It was people. They had been the cadre of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. They weren’t just killed. Some had their stomachs slit and their intestines pulled out. They were covered in flies, swarming all over them. Some hung from trees, others lie in ditches. They were captured by government troops and then savagely killed. And who led this vicious government that would allow such brutality? It was none other than Nurodum Sihacook. He had been a king, but he abdicated as king to run for office and become prime minister of Cambodia. It was he who always used the European term Cambodia. A squat man with a puffy face and squeaky voice; that man who probably never had to eat without a sliver spoon in his mouth; the man who thought he was as good at music as misleading Kampuchea; the man who probably never had to wipe his own ass his whole life was responsible for this. I always called our country Kampuchea.

To the rest of the world Sihacook had a reputation as a gentle peaceful ruler – a democratically elected former king who abdicated his thrown to be a real politician. Even many of the peasants liked him, despite the fact that he tried to keep them out of the capitol city and refused to let them wear their traditional peasant clothing in Phnom Penh.

Sihacook was a farce. He fooled nearly everyone. He was a shrewd politician. He followed a policy of "extreme neutrality." He was able to keep his country from being swallowed into the Vietnam War and he was able to preserve the country's independence up until the 1970s. To do this he often pitted various powers against each other. He refused to cooperate with the U.S. war in Vietnam. He not only refused to join SEATO (Southeast Asian Treaty Organization, formed under US influence in 1954) but also criticized the organization while on a trip to Beijing. He developed relations with the Soviet Union and Poland. He accepted aid from China. He had made the statement that "Although we are not communists we do not oppose communism as long as the latter is not imposed on our people from outside."

But inside the country, he was no different than Adolf Hitler. He rounded up the Communist Party members and sympathizers and put them in concentration camps, most of these people were destined to die. And as with Hitler, the middle classes of the city, the petite bourgeois and other conservatives not only didn’t care, they cheered him on for his brutality. It was the same thing, as in Germany, here in Kampuchea all over again.

Sihacook's tolerance of international communism, such as in China and Vietnam; was largely a diplomatic tactic. He killed us here at home. He had many of our leaders assassinated. I remember the day, in 1960, that our party's chairman walked towards the huge gray brick building that was known as the parliament at the time. A car pulled up and a group of armed police got out. They arrested him and took him off. We found his pasty white body a day later, in a ditch, outside the city. His throat had been slit.

There were other killings. I remember seeing a comrade sitting in a café when a group of soldiers, obviously Sihacook’s goon squad, walked up and fired a gun point-blank at his head. As he laid there, blood spouting from his head, his eyes staring out with that “death look,” the soldiers simply walked back to their Jeeps and left. Another day, another killing – to them it was no big deal.

There was one person he fooled in the wrong way and that was the US President Richard Nixon. I developed a love-hate relationship with the man over time. He killed hundreds of thousands of my people and tried to wipe us out. Yet he hated our worst enemy and he hated him for all the wrong reasons. I love what Nixon had to say about him in his memoirs.

Nixon had visited with Sihacook in 1953. He wrote that he was "vain and flighty. He seemed prouder of his musical talents than of his political leadership, and he appeared to me to be totally unrealistic about the problems his country faced."

Vain and flighty, that’s putting it mildly. He flitted around like a fairy. But he was ruthless to the core. In response to student riots in 1963, he drew up a list of the party's central committee and promised to wipe them out. What did we have to do with the riots? We didn’t start them. The students didn’t like Sihacook and his policies. So he took it out on us.

Unlike former President Lyndon Johnson, who respected Cambodia's independence and opposed trying to remove Sihacook, Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were eager to see him go. They were blinded by Vietnam. They thought if they could control Kampuchea, they could win the Vietnam War. Just as with the rest of the world, Nixon was duped. He and the CIA came up with an elaborate plan to get rid of Sihacook and they couldn’t have done us a bigger favor.

The greasy slick bastard always wore a suit and tie to impress his Western supporters. He met with every world leader he could, capitalist or communist, and he was also a gracious host.

“All my life, I have fought against all forms of colonialism, imperialism, expansionism and neo-colonialism of which my nation, Cambodia, was victim,” he wrote.

Yes, he was against all those things, as long as it was on his terms. Those who stood in his way, locally, got murdered. Some of our party members actually tried to run for office in a coalition with the Democrats who ran against him. Some of our people even tried to serve in his cabinet. But it was always the same. He’d give them a position, and then kill them.

He was no man of the people. Sihacook was well-known for leading what some have termed an extravagant lifestyle, and being an unabashed "ladies man." He married his sixth wife, Monique, an Italian-Cambodian, in 1952.

After being ousted in a coup, Sihacook wrote a book, My War with the CIA In the book’s introduction, he wrote that enough evidence was available at the time “to prove the unceasing and determined intervention of the (US) in the internal affairs of my country, and particularly the role of the (US) Central Intelligence Agency, in a series of plots which culminated in the military coup of 18 March 1970.”

He should have seen that coming all along.

Sihacook either allowed or was unable to stop US forces to pursue North Vietnamese soldiers across the Cambodian border in January 1968. However, Washington twisted Sihacook’s readiness to accept the principle of hot pursuit to justify the intensive bombing of Cambodia between 1969 and 1973.

The US bombing of Cambodia officially started in March 1969. The so-called Vietcong and North Vietnamese who were pursued and killed turned out to be Cambodian farmers, monks, teachers and students; and the bombing caused the destruction of Cambodian roads, pagodas, schools and plantations. Nurodum Sihacook wrote about this, as he seemed unable to stop it.

The war had moved into Cambodia well before that. A 1968 editorial from “The Sangkum,” a Sihacook publication, accused the US of bombing a village in Kandal province.

In a 1968 interview with Look magazine, Nurodum Sihacook accused US troops of attacking a Cambodian post, which was flying the Cambodian flag, more than eight kilometers inside the Cambodian border and killing three people. This is far from the concept of “hot pursuit,” he said an interview.

When I finally went to the countryside, I realized how much damage the US had done. Large areas of farmland were nothing but craters. Buildings of all types were nothing but rubble. The dead, victims of the bombings lay strewn all over the countryside, their pasty white bodies lying on the ground, swollen from the hot sun and covered with flies.

As with Nixon, we eventually found that we needed each other, as the US war intensified and began to drag Kampuchea into it. As much as we hated Nurodum Sihacook, when he was finally down and out, he turned to his worst enemy, us, for help.

In the short run we did help him. In the long run he paid a price for that help. We circulated our own axioms by our ruling party during Democratic Kampuchea:

“A king is unnecessary, for his shit stinks the same as his own people’s.”[1]

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[1] Pol Pot’s Little Red Book, (see Acknowledgements), p. 301.