Cambodia’s Pol Pot Lost In Translation Reports That Kingpin Surrendered May Be Due To Language Mistake

The whereabouts of Pol Pot, the fugitive Khmer Rouge communist leader, remained a mystery Thursday, a day after reports that the man responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his countrymen had surrendered.

In Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, questions multiplied as to whether the surrender announcement broadcast on Khmer Rouge radio was true or whether it was merely part of an elaborate strategic endgame being played by the country’s competing political factions.

The confusion was fanned by two principal players in the drama, Gen. Nhek Bunchhay, the deputy army chief of staff, who had seemed to corroborate the surrender report to the Associated Press, and his patron, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, Cambodia’s first prime minister.

The general on Thursday backed away from his earlier comments, saying that he had actually told the AP that Pol Pot had been surrounded rather than had surrendered. He didn’t address the fact that he reportedly made those comments in Khmer, not English, and that the Khmer words for “surround” and “surrender” are not similar.

Ranariddh was evasive when asked by reporters whether he could confirm the surrender of Pol Pot, saying that he had not heard the broadcast.

When pressed, Ranariddh said the general had reported to him that the Khmer Rouge leader had been deserted by all but “five or 10 people” but that “Pol Pot has not been found.”

He further quoted the general as saying that rebellious Khmer Rouge forces are “ready to capture Pol Pot, to deliver him to us in order for us to send him to the international tribunal.”

Ranariddh is locked in a bitter power struggle with Second Prime Minister Hun Sen, his partner in an increasingly fragile, U.N.-brokered coalition government.