ANLONG VENG, Cambodia - Ten years after the death of brutal Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, his cremation site has become a symbol of spiritual comfort to some in the village where he died.
Villagers pray at the site, asking for blessings of luck, happiness, and even protection from malaria despite the mayhem he wrought upon their country. He died April 15, 1998, apparently of heart failure.
"I know it is odd, but I just do as many people here do, asking for happiness from his spirit," said Orn Pheap, 37, who lost a grandfather and two uncles during the Khmer Rouge's 1975-79 reign of terror.
"I don't know how long I can stay angry with him, since he is already dead," she said. Her house sits 100 yards from the site.
Officials in Anlong Veng, 190 miles north of the capital, Phnom Penh, say that only a few of the area's 35,000 residents pray at the site.
For most, Pol Pot is remembered as a murderous tyrant with fanatical communist beliefs. Under his leadership, the Khmer Rouge turned the country into a vast slave-labor camp, with 1.7 million deaths from starvation, forced labor and execution.
But Cambodians believe in the influence of spirits and superstitious forces on their daily lives and fortunes. Last week, the site - a pile of dirt covered by a knee-high corrugated-zinc roof - was cluttered with clay jars filled with half-burned incense sticks, a sign of prayer and worship.
Many may still view their former tormentor as a powerful figure, said Philip Short, author of a biography,
Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare
.
"Evil or good is not the issue," Short wrote in an e-mail. "He has imposed himself on Cambodians' imaginations, and in that sense he lives on" in the spirit world.
Once a jungle war zone, Anlong Veng is now a sprawling border market town bustling with the kinds of capitalist activities Pol Pot and his comrades sought to stamp out. Ramshackle shops are filled with clothing, housewares, pirated DVDs, and other goods from nearby Thailand.
Cambodian pop songs blare from a coffee shop near the cremation site, which has been designated a tourist attraction. It is among the few remnants of Khmer Rouge history, which the government is trying to preserve.
Some Cambodians have traveled to Anlong Veng to spit on the site, which is referred to as his grave, and curse him in anger, said Sat Narin, 37, who owns a nearby clothing shop.
"Given his bad reputation, he should not be venerated," he said. "But somehow he is popular with some people."
Among worshipers who seek blessings from Pol Pot's ghost are ethnic Vietnamese who live in the community - a sharp irony given Pol Pot's massacres of ethnic Vietnamese during his rule.
A 33-year-old Vietnamese resident, who goes by her adopted Cambodian name of Van Sothy, recalled a nightmare in which she saw a black-clad man sitting on a tree near her hut.
When she described the vision, her Cambodian neighbors advised her to bring offerings of fruit and chicken to the cremation site to ask his spirit for protection.
"I have prayed at his grave ever since," she said.
If Pol Pot were alive, he would most likely be facing war-crimes charges along with five former comrades now detained by Cambodia's U.N.-backed genocide tribunal. The long-delayed trials are expected to start later this year.