"Killing field" Pol Pot grew up on Gandhian tales of ahimsa

“At the same time, I saw the movement in India of Mahatma Gandhi,” an ailing PolPot said in the interview published on Thursday.

“He was well known and I was very pleased with that. And later on Nehru,” he said, recalling his days as a student in France, living on a small stipend and searching for cheap reading material at used book shops along the Seine River.

“I started as a nationalist and then a patriot and then I read progressive books. Before that time I never read (the French Communist newspaper) L’Humanite.”

“It scared me. But I got used to it because of the student movement,” he said in reference to the Marxist Circle of Cambodian Students that he joined while studying in Paris under his original name Saloth Sar.

Many of his fellow members later became senior officials in the Khmer Rouge hierarchy which is blamed for the deaths of as many as two million Cambodians from execution, starvation or disease during their reign in the 1970s.

Pol Pot denied responsibility for those deaths, saying only a few “traitors” had been executed and that other deaths were the work of the hated Vietnamese who were trying to topple his radical agrarian dream to consume Cambodia.

Despite his ideological activity with friends in Paris, Pol Pot told the Review his real political awakening came when he returned to Cambodia and saw impoverished conditions at home.

“What influenced me most was the actual situation in Cambodia,” he said, denying that a summer trip to Tito’s Yugoslavia where he joined a youth work brigade, had prompted his idea to create an agrarian utopia.

The reclusive 72-year-old Pol Pot, who before July 25 had not been seen by the outside world for 18 years, said he was born with the secretiveness that became his hallmark and that of the guerrilla movement.