Tyrant's wheels turn circle

By James East

PHNOM PENH - Peter Sainsbury's black stretch Mercedes is a limousine with a history and a very dark one at that - it used to be Pol Pot's car.

The New Zealander bumps around Cambodia's crumbling capital, Phnom Penh, the new and proud owner of the diesel Mercedes.

He drives through the same streets Pol Pot once emptied at gunpoint. At least 1.7 million people died from starvation, fighting or execution in the 1975-79 reign of terror that followed.

But Mr Sainsbury, a writer from Wellington, is a car enthusiast and knew there was something different about the Mercedes when he spotted its owner repairing a burst tyre by the Russian Embassy this year.

The owner, a fruit-and-vegetable trader, told him he had found the limo in northwest Cambodia, where it had been abandoned by Khmer Rouge leaders fleeing the advance of the Vietnamese invasion force in 1979.

Car documents and information supplied by Cambodians backed the trader's tale.

Mr Sainsbury snapped up the Mercedes for $US550 ($1080) and has since spent more than $US4000 renovating it. "When I bought it, it had a single-cylinder Chinese hand-cranked engine used by rice farmers and could only go 20 km/h," he says.

"I replaced the engine, had a new floor welded in and had everything stripped down, replaced and resprayed."

Mr Sainsbury's limo is now the talk of the town among the expatriate community, where it is known as the Pol Potmobile. Everyone wants a ride. Even Hollywood has caught wind of the car and hopes to hire it for a movie shoot.

Built like a tank and sounding almost as bad, the four-cylinder Mercedes stands out among the foreign aid workers' four-wheel-drives, and the trishaws and motorbikes that throng the capital.

But the former radio reporter, who moved to Cambodia last year to write for the English-language Phnom Penh Post, says he drives the limo with a clear conscience.

"This car is not a shrine to Pol Pot. I just like the idea of having a stretch Mercedes," he says.

"Of course, the history is interesting but it is also a practical car - it has three rows of seats."

He is now trying to build a log of the car's history by tracking down archive photographs of it with Pol Pot and his henchmen.

As for the Cambodians, most are so worn down by years of fighting and poverty that the sight of the dictator's car is not worth a second glance.

"They know it's Pol Pot's old car," Mr Sainsbury says. "But most people just see it simply as a car to be used."