PHNOM PENH: A reputation for cruelty, even by the standards of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime he led, set Ta Mok apart from his revolutionary comrades and earned him the nickname of “The Butcher.”

His uncompromising vision of Cambodia’s communist revolution separated him from the regime’s ideologues and policymakers, with a string of massacres and internal purges to his name.

Even as the regime was disintegrating in the mid-1990s, undermined by mass defections and amnesty deals struck between the government and other top cadres, Ta Mok continued to wage a bloody rebellion with a shrinking band of followers from the mountains of northern Cambodia.

It was there that he ousted Khmer Rouge supremo Pol Pot, putting him under arrest and briefly taking the reins of the dying movement, of which he had been a part of for nearly five decades.

Ta Mok, whose birth name was Ek Chhoeun before he adopted his nom de guerre which means “Grandfather Mok”, died on Friday at the age of 80 after languishing in jail since 1999.

Born into a rich peasant family in 1926 in southern Takeo province, Ta Mok trained as a teacher before joining the Indochinese Communist Party in 1950 amid the struggle against French colonialists.

He was appointed district chief in his home in southwestern Cambodia, where he was an active party organiser throughout the 1950s.

In 1963, Ta Mok was promoted to the central committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, from which he began consolidating his position in what would eventually become the Khmer Rouge power structure.

“He was not only a military commander, but one of the most important people in the political command as well,” said leading Cambodian genocide researcher Youk Chhang.

Five years later he took control of the Southwest Zone in the provinces bordering Vietnam, abolishing private property and creating the collective farms which would become a hallmark of the Khmer Rouge well before the regime swept into power in 1975.

The Southwest Zone under Ta Mok was also marked by the most violent excesses of the regime, and a bloody internal purge in 1973 cemented his reputation as a killer.

Ta Mok survived repeated setbacks and betrayals with a combination of military prowess and grassroots support grounded in his tightly knit family of six children and several brothers- and sons-in-laws.

His reputation for cruelty grew during the Khmer Rouge’s 1975-79 rule, during which his troops are estimated to have killed more than 30,000 people in one district northwest of Phnom Penh alone.

Ta Mok, the only regime leader not to have been educated abroad, was also considered the architect of the mass slaughter of Khmer Krom, an ethnic minority in southern Vietnam.

“There is significant evidence that Ta Mok ... played a central role in implementing the Communist Party’s execution policies,” said Cambodia scholar Stephen Heder in his book “Seven Candidates for Prosecution”.

“This included directing subordinates to arrest and execute party cadre and failing to prevent or punish atrocities perpetrated by his subordinates in the Southwest Zone.”

Ta Mok’s guerillas continued to fight successive Cambodian governments after the Khmer Rouge were pushed from power by an invading Vietnamese force in 1979.—AFP