What were the human costs? Conservative estimates of the number of men, women, and children who died between 1975 and 1979 as a result of DK policies run between 800,000 (or 1 in 10) and one million (or 1 in 8) inhabitants of the country. These figures do not include those killed in the fighting with Vietnam. Most of the deaths were due to malnutrition, overwork, and untreated or wrongly diagnosed diseases. They can thus be traced to the “storming attacks” espoused by the regime, its empowerment of so many illiterate young people, its failure to punish their transgressions, and the notions of conspiracy and betrayal that dominated party leaders’ thinking.

Perhaps 100,000 men and women, and probably more, were executed without trial. In rural areas, most of the killings occurred when young cadre enforced what they understood to be the will of the organization. Some of these executions, perhaps most, were impulsive overreactions. The 14,000 men and women brought into Tuol Sleng, on the other hand, were “smashed” more carefully, sometimes over several months.

Despite his disingenuous denials to Nate Thayer in 1997, there is no doubt that Pol Pot knew about S-21 and monitored its progress. He probably had information about the killings, malnutrition, and horrendous conditions in the countryside as well. In the 1970s and 1980s, Pol Pot saw himself as a wartime leader and was unable or unwilling to perceive anyone’s death in terms of real suffering. Instead, he saw the deaths in terms of the exigencies of the party, by 1975 inseparable from his own, or as brought about by “enemies.” The victims were thought of as “strata” rather than as human beings. Pol Pot later blamed the “excesses” of Democratic Kampuchea, which he minimized, on the Vietnamese and their agents—people with “Cambodian bodies and Vietnamese minds” who had betrayed the revolution. When pressed by journalists to estimate the deaths that had resulted from his policies, he became evasive, mentioning “several hundred” victims on some occasions and “several thousand” on others.5

The PRK capitalized on the horror generated by events when it brought Pol Pot and Ieng Sary to trial, in absentia, in August 1979. Eloquent evidence poured into the tribunal, and the two men were condemned to death, a sentence suggested by the lawyer ostensibly working in their defense. In the 1980s, human rights activists in the West tried repeatedly to bring Pol Pot to trial at the International Court of Justice in the Netherlands. They failed, however, because the Thai were unwilling to hand him over and because his patrons in Washington and Beijing were more interested in punishing Vietnam than in bringing Pol Pot to justice.6