Psst - want to buy a genocidal maniac's used car? Thanks to eBay, this rare claim to fame is now possible. For a mere 35,000 pounds ($72,000) minimum bid, Pol Pot's alleged former stretch limo could be yours.
"Currently on display at the famous French colonial Renakse hotel (Monireth Boulevard) - opposite the Kings' Royal Palace, the car was discovered by a previous editor of the Phnom Penh Post being used to transport water melon's to the Central Market (Psar Thmei) ... The current owner purchased the car in 2001 and has painstakingly restored it to its current glory.", eBay Says.
The eBay entry goes on to explain that the owner has moved to Lao and everything - well, the car at least - must go. Place your butt on the same upholstered seat that once hosted Pot, aka Saloth Sar, during his 1975-79 reign as leader of Democratic Kampuchea, under which up to 2 million Cambodians died.
But some former Khmer Rouge warned that the nearly 40-year-old black Mercedes may not be the most practical buy. Although the owner puts the lack of paperwork down to the Khmer Rouge's notorious habit of destroying things, Pol Pot's former photographer Nhem En does not dispute the vehicle's authenticity. It's the practicality and the price he has a problem with.
"This car is very old and very expensive. Maybe people with this sort of money should buy a new one?" En said by telephone, adding that the former driver was alive and well and living in Pailin and would undoubtedly recognize his former boss's vehicle.
However "many former Khmer Rouge leaders" got around in stretch limousines while the majority of the population was starving, he added, and the car may well be genuine, Nhem En said. The Khmer Rouge regime abolished ownership, currency and markets and destroyed bourgeois documentation in a drive to turn Cambodia into an agrarian utopia.
Nhem En has no doubt what Pol Pot would have thought about his car being sold for such an extravagant sum on the Internet, with an accompanying YouTube clip. He would, the photographer said in so many words, spin in his grave. The genocidal dictator died in 1998 without ever facing a courtroom.