In what may be the last days of Cambodia's brutal Khmer Rouge, exclusive interviews with defectors reveal the tragic fate of Christopher Howes

By TERRY MCCARTHY /PHNOM PENH

t first, Christopher Howes paid little attention to the four armed men who approached him in the village of Preah Koh, near the famous Angkor temples in northern Cambodia. The 36-year-old former British army engineer was busy supervising 24 of his staff in their efforts to clear land mines from the area. That morning--March 26, 1996--they had started work late because one of their trucks had broken down. Howes had been in Cambodia for only five months, but he already knew that after three decades of war, almost every male in the country over the age of 12 had a gun.

Quickly the situation went bad. The men were Khmer Rouge, and as they levelled guns at Howes and his interpreter, a larger group of the communist guerrillas emerged from the treeline to capture the rest of the deminers. Initially, according to radio intercepts at the time, his captors told Howes he could leave to organize a ransom payment for his Cambodian staff. When Howes refused to abandon his men, the Khmer Rouge marched Howes and his interpreter, Houn Hourth, into the jungle. The other deminers were released.

For two years the mystery of Howes and Hourth has endured. The efforts of Cambodian and Thai military intelligence along with detectives from Britain's Scotland Yard could not separate fact from rumor about the two men. All that was known was they were taken north in the direction of Anlong Veng, the last Khmer Rouge stronghold in Cambodia.

The Khmer Rouge leadership denied on their radio station that they had anything to do with the disappearance of Howes and Hourth. But there were rumored sightings of Howes alive in Khmer Rouge captivity as recently as last June and macabre stories of the soldier-turned-deminer being forced to teach the guerrillas how to make their own mines. He was variously reported to be suffering from malaria and chronic diarrhea--plausible assumptions for anyone living in the jungles of northern Cambodia. In November 1996 Howes' employers, the Mines Advisory Group, paid $120,000 to a man who claimed he could get the Briton released from the Khmer Rouge, but the man vanished with most of the money, and no news of Howes was forthcoming. Anlong Veng refused to yield up its secrets.

The climate changed radically last month, however, when there was a mutiny in Anlong Veng followed by bitter fighting within the Khmer Rouge. Thousands of defecting civilians and Khmer Rouge troops came south to join the government in a move that analysts say finally heralds the demise of the brutal group. Last week TIME spoke separately to two senior Khmer Rouge leaders who had come out of Anlong Veng, and both described Howes' fate in detail. According to their accounts, the rumors of Howes being kept in captivity were all false: Howes and his interpreter, Hourth, were executed shortly after they were captured, on orders that originated from Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge at the time.

"Christopher Howes was killed one week after he was captured," said Ke Pauk, 68, commander of the northern zone in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge rule two decades ago and one of the instigators of the recent mutiny in Anlong Veng. He said the order to kill Howes came through So Saroeun, a close ally of Pol Pot (the former leader denied involvement in a rare radio interview last week). The murder was carried out, Pauk continued, by a soldier named Bao in a spot near Anlong Veng called Konleng Pienic Tmei (the place of new commerce). "He was asked to sit down first, then Bao shot him in the back with a pistol. His body was burned and his bones spread on the ground. Now that place has been cleared by a tractor to make a rice field." Pauk gave the names of three other Khmer Rouge soldiers who were involved--Tem, Kong and Nguon. He said Hourth had been killed even earlier, three days after the kidnapping.

"Yes, both of them were killed," said Yim Panna, 42, a commander of Khmer Rouge division 980 who also defected to the government last month. Panna, who was interviewed at a different location, was unable to confirm where the killing took place, but otherwise gave the same account as Pauk, citing the same names of the men who captured Howes.

Cold-blooded killing and obsessive secrecy--these have been the twin pathologies of the Khmer Rouge since they presided over Cambodia's Killing Fields from 1975 to 1979. Tens of thousands of their real or imagined enemies were shot or clubbed to death, but usually out of view, in the jungle, away from the eyes of the survivors. Victims were "sent for" at night, or "called away to study." Nothing more would be heard of them; their bodies were thrown into unmarked pits. Howes' case would probably have also remained unsolved, had it not been for the latest upheavals in the Khmer Rouge.

In the wake of two years of defections and the "arrest" last June of the infamous Pol Pot by his own men, many Khmer Rouge cadres in Anlong Veng began to realize that their jungle revolution was against the tide of history, that they stood to gain by going over to the government. In August 1996 cadres in the other principal Khmer Rouge stronghold, around the gem mines of Pailin in western Cambodia, had made their peace with Phnom Penh, and Anlong Veng was looking very isolated. Ta Mok, the one-legged leader who took control from Pol Pot, was unpopular with civilians in Anlong Veng because he would not allow them to do any trading with the outside. Instead he forced each family to produce 100 sharpened punji sticks per day to add to the defenses around the jungle camp. Secret negotiations between the would-be defectors and the government to arrange the mass exodus had been going on for more than a year.

The mutiny began after nightfall on March 24th. Initially the rebels took much of the town of Anlong Veng, but by last week Ta Mok's forces had reportedly clawed back some territory. However, thousands of civilians under his sway had already escaped to government-controlled areas, and observers say it is just a matter of time before the final rump of the Khmer Rouge is dissolved. "Ta Mok has painted himself into a corner," observes Steve Heder, a Cambodia scholar at London's School of Oriental and African Studies. Heder says Thailand, which has always kept close ties with the Khmer Rouge, is being pressured by the U.S. to force the guerrillas to end the war now, possibly under some formula in which Pol Pot would be handed over to an international tribunal in exchange for amnesty for the other leaders.

The deaths of Christopher Howes and Houn Hourth are just two of the countless crimes that Pol Pot has to answer for, but they are particularly saddening. Howes' mission in Cambodia was humanitarian. His father, Roy Howes, put an advertisement in Cambodian newspapers last Christmas pleading for information about his missing son, pointing out that Christopher had been "working so that the people of Cambodia, whom he greatly admired, might live happily without the daily fear of death and dreadful injury." But Pol Pot's program for Cambodia has been as xenophobic as it is self-destructive, and foreigners by definition have been the enemy.

Asked why Howes was killed, Panna said "that was Pol Pot's rule. He didn't want any foreigners involved in our society." Ironically it was this hostility to outsiders that prompted the latest rebellion in the Khmer Rouge ranks, by people who saw their lives in the jungle going nowhere while the rest of Cambodia benefited from rapid economic development. "It is time now to end the war. We need to open to the outside world," said Panna. "The Khmer Rouge policy has killed itself." After the killing of so many others, it is about time.