Those who knew him say he was a remarkable human being--a soft-spoken teacher and a spellbindingly charismatic leader of men. But history will remember Saloth Sar, 68, indelibly known as Pol Pot, as one of the 20th century's human monsters. During his brutal reign over Cambodia, the self-styled Maoist let loose a wave of terror that resulted in the death of as many as 2 million people. After a long illness, he lay close to death of malaria last week in a rain-soaked jungle hideout on the Thai-Cambodian border. Pol Pot had shrouded his life in such mystery that at week's end as many observers were announcing his death as were denying it. Nearly all, however, agreed that the end seemed nigh--and to some that was cause for celebration. Said King Norodom Sihanouk: "This will be the end of a terrible period of our history."

Little is certain about Pol Pot except that he killed with conviction. Born to a prosperous rural farm family, he studied electronics in Paris in the early 1950s, became enamored of communism and rose to be secretary general of Cambodia's Communist Party in 1963. He went by many noms de guerre, and his real character was just as elusive as his true identity. Calling himself Brother Number One, he launched the Khmer Rouge in the '60s on a mission to model Cambodia into a rural utopia that would sustain itself without money, private property or industry. "He thought he had the wheel of history in his hand," says David Chandler, author of the authoritative 1992 biography Brother Number One.

When the former schoolteacher's red-scarved rebels bested Cambodia's Lon Nol government in April 1975, they marched victoriously into Phnom Penh and promptly drove the city's residents into the countryside at gunpoint. Within a week the capital had been reduced to a ghost town. Because of the intense spring heat, thousands of women and children died in the first days of the exodus. In the ensuing months intellectuals, bureaucrats--anyone with a high school education or a pair of spectacles--died or were murdered. By the time Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia in December 1978 and drove the Khmer Rouge into the hills, perhaps 2 million people lay dead, many of them thrown into mass graves, some left shackled to bedposts in interrogation rooms for the Vietnamese to dispose of.

Pol Pot has shown a resilience that belies his short 3 1/2-year campaign of terror. Except for a damp-eyed comment to supporters in 1981 that some "errors" had been made, he has unflinchingly directed the Khmer Rouge's most important decisions since he vanished into the jungle in 1978. In the 1980s the U.S. and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations even supported the organization's participation in Cambodia's United Nation delegation on the ground that its military might--derived from China's patronage--was necessary to help noncommunist Khmer guerrillas drive the Vietnamese out of Cambodia. Pol Pot announced his "retirement" in 1985. But his leadership has been visible in key Khmer Rouge decisions since then, most importantly the boycott of the U.N.-sponsored elections that brought a coalition government to power in 1993. Since then, the rebels have continued to embarrass the Cambodian government with regular dry-season attacks on towns, railways and roads in the country's northwestern provinces.

Will the demise of its charismatic leader mean the end of the Khmer Rouge? Possibly. Pol Pot's declining health has already left the group without a dominant leader. But analysts in Cambodia say several of his lieutenants are just as bloodthirsty and radical as he was. Only last month Khmer Rouge soldiers massacred 11 ethnic Vietnamese and a Cambodian in Pursat province, hacking one woman to death with an ax. Still, the hope in Phnom Penh is that through attrition and penury the Khmer Rouge will dwindle. In 1994 the Cambodian government outlawed the Khmer Rouge and urged civilians and guerrillas to defect. Thousands did, bringing the estimate of guerrillas down to around 5,000. Though defections have slowed, they may increase with the loss of the wellspring. "Pol Pot has been the unifying force of the movement," says Christophe Peschoux, a Phnom Penh-based expert on the Khmer Rouge. "With him gone, loyalties may change."

In the annals of world villainy, Saloth Sar will sit at the top among those who slaughtered in icy intellectual pursuit of an idea. His vision of the good society and his thirst for power drove him to sacrifice roughly one-quarter of his countrymen. And now his influence extends beyond the Khmer Rouge itself. Cambodia's coalition government--a combination of Royalist supporters and former Communists--was elected by a popular vote in 1993, but it has since devolved into an autocracy led mainly by co-Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a former Khmer Rouge guerrilla. During the last year, the government has shut down newspapers and jailed or threatened members of fledgling opposition parties. Just three weeks ago, Thun Bunly, a prominent opposition newspaper editor, was shot to death by unknown assailants . Pol Pot, says Chandler, "put a new level of brutality into government behavior that continues in Cambodia today." With a legacy like that, it's not surprising so many people want to believe he's dead.