She’s looking straight in your direction,
but her look won’t fix yours (though it always feels it might) You can see
her as in a reverie, or pretended reverie She’s blurring or blanking you
out Staring through you Waiting for your next move. She’s already lost
interest and is waiting for the next guy. She doesn’t even see you.

The effect emphasises again the timing of your viewing, the duration of this
encounter. In 1997, he named himself supreme commander of the Khmer Rouge, arrested Pol Pot and placed him under house arrest. But the following year, Ta Mok was forced to flee into the jungle after a government attack, taking Pol Pot with him. A few days later Pol Pot died in a jungle shack, reportedly of a heart attack.

Ta Mok was the last leader of the Khmer Rouge still at large, but it didn’t last long. In 1999, he was finally captured and brought to Phnomh Penh.Several other high-profile Khmer Rouge leaders, including Brothers Number Two and Three, had given themselves up in return for a guarantee of immunity from the Cambodian Prime Minister, Hun Sen, who said Cambodia should bury the past. From there, strange stories emerged about him: that he had recast himself as a warlord, that he was protected by an all-female bodyguard.In the end, Ta Mok’s determination to keep the Khmer Rouge’s ideology alive was one of the factors blamed for the split in the group that brought about its downfall, after he tried to lead a crackdown against a more capitalist lifestyle in its territory. In December 1978, Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia, capturing Phnomh Penh a month later and deposing the Khmer Rouge, whose leaders fled into the west of the country.But in a strange postscript to their rule, the Khmer Rouge managed to cling on to dwindling pockets of Cambodia for the next two decades, fighting on as jungle guerrillas and trying to preserve their ideology.Ta Mok remained a pivotal figure, controlling the northern part of the Khmer Rouge’s territory from his base in Anlong Veng. But their horrific experiment in restructuring society lasted less than four years in the end. In practice, it meant being sent for torture and probably execution. Crimes that could get you sent there included “memory sickness” – any degree of nostalgia for pre-Khmer Rouge times.The Khmer Rouge tried to seal Cambodia off entirely from the outside world.

And some groups were executed automatically: Christians, Muslims, Buddhist monks, whose number Ta Mok had once hoped to join, professionals and intellectuals. They say anyone wearing glasses was liable to be killed as an intellectual.But they weren’t simply dragged away to be killed The Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia was an Orwellian nightmare They were sent for “re-education”. They were expected to produce three tons of rice per hectare, three times the average before the Khmer Rouge took power.Anyone who stood in the way of this insane plan was executed. Even the most minor infringement of the rules could get you sent to the Killing Fields. In fact, the Khmer Rouge had no intention of letting people back into the cities. They were forced to live in rural labour camps, working in the fields in 12-hour shifts without a break Thousands died from exhaustion, illness and starvation. They ordered the people out of Phnomh Penh and Cambodia’s other cities, telling them it was because of the threat of American bombing, and would only be for a few days.

They declared the Year Zero, the start of one of the most extraordinary and brutal attempts completely to reorder a society in modern history.In an attempt to create an agrarian communist Utopia, the Khmer Rouge attempted to abolish cities altogether. He fought in the resistance in the Forties, first against French colonial rule and later against the Japanese. But in 1964 he was training to become a Buddhist monk when he fell in with the Khmer Rouge The religious life was soon left far behind. By the end of the Sixties he was the Khmer Rouge’s military commander.The Khmer Rouge had emerged from Vietnamese communists’ attempts to create a front organisation for themselves in neighbouring Cambodia, but it had been taken over by Cambodians who, under Pol Pot, began to evolve a far more extreme form of communism.When the Khmer Rouge finally seized power on 17 April 1975, they abolished schools, hospitals, factories, banking, money, religion and private property. His background meant that, unlike many of the other Khmer Rouge leaders, he did not have a foreign education, and was not considered an intellectual. So many that the tribunals, which are due to start at last next year, may be forced into irrelevance by the fact they have almost no one to try.Ta Mok was born in 1926, into a poor peasant family His real name was Chhit Choeun Ta Mok was a nom de guerre he later took for himself.