PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — In the mid-1970s, a terrified Pech Song painted huge, mind-bending propaganda posters and racist, communist slogans for "beautiful" Pol Pot, to convince Cambodians they must kill and die for the regime.

To stay alive, Song also drew maps of the countryside so Pol Pot's forces could pepper Cambodia with landmines, designed to maim or kill opponents and defectors.

Later, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia, toppled Pol Pot and installed hand-picked pliant communists in 1979, Song continued painting the same colorful, stilted posters and exclamatory slogans, changing only the names and faces to reflect Hanoi's victory and occupation, and deleting the anti-Vietnamese phrases.

And when Vietnamese troops withdrew in 1989, Song kept right on applying paint to canvas to herald Prime Minister Hun Sen's government, illustrating its gradual evolution from Marxism to capitalism.

"The painter is responsible for the influence of his paintings, but the slogans were never true, they were propaganda," Song said in a Khmer-language interview at his downtown studio where he now churns out relatively bland paintings for tourists and earns between 200 to 1,000 US dollars a month.

"My political paintings were a total fabrication of reality. My posters and slogans never said, 'Go to the border to fight and be killed.' They just said, 'Go to the border to defend the country.'

"Yes, people believed my posters. For example, the government would put my posters along the road, just before calling a meeting of women to send their sons to the front lines, and some of the women then said yes they wanted their sons to go. So my posters influenced them."

The twisted story of Song's life is a portrait of an escape artist, disguised as a creator of propaganda.

He said he survived torture, and possible execution, by defending himself with evocative pictures of his tormentors, and by "following orders," while secretly idolizing the works of Michelangelo, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Picasso.

His father, mother and five siblings, however, perished during Pol Pot's reign, he said.

Song's Soviet-style propaganda posters portrayed Cambodian troops brandishing AK-47 assault rifles, leading tanks into battle while flags wave above smiling people who represent workers, farmers, soldiers and intellectuals.

Today, after Pol Pot's squalid cremation atop a junkpile in the jungle on April 18 -- by Khmer Rouge traitors whose own rebel forces are dwindling -- Song dreams of painting intellectual fare satirizing Cambodian politics, and illustrating the story of his life.

"But no one would buy those paintings. So I paint for tourists," the 50-year-old, bespectacled artist lamented, gesturing at his new pastoral creations.

Song, a former professor of painting at Phnom Penh's University of Fine Arts, is currently the assistant director of Phnom Penh's Department of Culture. He helps create official artistic works which adorn the capital of this war-torn Southeast Asian nation.

Just before Pol Pot seized power in 1975, 27-year-old Song was happily studying modern art, and painting billboards advertising movies, while US invasion forces bombed the countryside in a failed attempt to stop Pol Pot's advance.

During the first month of Pol Pot's regime, Khmer Rouge forces imprisoned and repeatedly beat Song, but spared him from possible execution when he convinced them he was loyal and possessed a valuable skill.

"I said, 'I'm a painter,' but they did not believe me. I was sitting in prison with my hands tied together, so to show them I was an artist, I took charcoal from a cooking fire and drew on the walls some pictures of people who had supported Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, in an effort to get them to like me."

Eventually they took him from prison and put him to work as one of their top official artists, so he could produce posters and slogans heralding Pol Pot's doomed, back-to-the jungle reign.

"I painted posters and slogans, and drew maps for planting landmines. They gave me all the artist materials I needed. They gave me food and everything, and they gave me a cement house to live in with my wife, children, and Khmer Rouge guards, near Battambang" in western Cambodia.

Pol Pot was hamstrung by a lack of maps, so Song was also ordered to update French colonial documents.

"The French maps were too old and did not show road and canals which were built since colonial time. So we travelled around and added to the maps whatever information was missing.

"The Khmer Rouge told me my maps were to be used to plant landmines, but they did not tell me the reason or who was the enemy. I did not think about it at all, I just thought if I did not draw these maps, I'll be killed. I was terrified."

Then one day, Song saw Pol Pot, the mysterious, paranoid leader who had changed his name from Saloth Sar.

Accompanying Pol Pot was his top henchman, Ta Mok, who is currently hobbling around northern Cambodia on one leg trying to avoid Washington's demand that he and other surviving Khmer Rouge leaders be put on trial for war crimes and genocide.

"I saw Pol Pot when he visited Region 40, near Sisophan, in 1976 or 1977. A big official came from China also at that time. I was there to do the decorations for the meeting, and all the banners welcoming them.

"I cannot remember the exact date, because I was so afraid and only thought about staying alive.

"At the meeting, Ta Mok was right next to me, drinking coconuts. I climbed a tree and got the coconuts for Ta Mok, because they ordered me to do so. Pol Pot was right there," Song added, pointing to a distance less than a stone's throw away.

"Ta Mok came many times to our region. Ta Mok had two legs then, and wore dark blue pants, and a silk 'krama' scarf the color of mangoes, and no hat.

"Pol Pot looked beautiful. He was young at that time. As an artist, I looked at his face and thought, 'Pol Pot is really beautiful.'

"I heard Pol Pot and Ta Mok talk about how they country could produce more rice. I never heard them order people to be killed. They acted like normal peasants.

"I could see people being killed when I travelled the countryside, but I never knew who ordered the people to be killed, or whether it was local or top officials who ordered it.

"I never saw the people at the top acting in a horrific way. I had the feeling they were just normal people."

Despite creating contradictory propaganda for various regimes from 1975 to 1992, Song insisted he never succumbed to being brainwashed, and instead kept an apolitical stance with an interest only in art.

"I had no opinion because I was just concerned about staying alive. At that time, I did not hate Pol Pot or Ta Mok. I did not know what was inside their heads, and I was very isolated, so I did not get to talk to many other people."

With hindsight, Song waxed philosophical about Pol Pot's motives and the way the international community now hopes to improve Cambodia.

"During Pol Pot's time, if ordinary people had food, they were happy. But now, people want cars and all sorts of things, so it is much harder for them to be happy.

"Now that we have freedom, people still have the same problems of how to find food. Pol Pot's ideas about making canals might have been good ideas, but he used people instead of machines, so he wore out the people," Song added.

"I do not know Pol Pot's motive. Maybe it is like when rich people want a coconut, they have a machine to get the coconut. But when poor people, who do not have the machine, tell a poor child to climb the tree and get the coconut, the child dies. The goal of getting the coconut is the same.

"When I painted anti-Vietnamese slogans, I just researched on how the Vietnamese looked, because that was my job as a painter. It does not mean I hate them. I now have Vietnamese friends. I was just making the best paintings I could.

"I agree I created racist paintings, and that was my job, and yes the people believed my paintings. But it is like knowing lots of different languages. I knew the language of Pol Pot and the language of the other regimes.

"I had to paint what the different regimes wanted. I do not want to do that anymore. I can say I love all of my paintings, but I do not love the officials in the paintings, because that is not what an artist does.

"But yes, I was responsible, for example, for the mothers who sent their sons to war. Even though it was my job, when I see people with limbs missing after being sent to war, I regret it.

"But I painted those paintings to make my living. And those sons went to the frontlines to make their living. If they knew how to paint, they might not have had to fight.

"And if I did not know how to paint, I also would have had to go and fight," Song added with a fatalistic shrug.

"Ironically, during Pol Pot's time after Pol Pot's time, the slogans and paintings were the same. 'Increase Production,' 'Protect the Border,' and 'Long Live the Communist Party.'

"The only difference between the two regimes was Pol Pot hated the Vietnamese, and there were always anti-Vietnamese slogans then. Those racist slogans were dropped when Pol Pot was kicked out by Vietnam.

"But the lettering for the slogans was always red, on white background. That never changed."

When Vietnamese troops reached his area in 1979 and discovered he had been making maps for Pol Pot, they hired Song to do the same for them.

"They had problems because all the roads and canals had been changed under Pol Pot," he said.

Song was allowed to return to Phnom Penh and given a job "revitalizing" Cambodia's painting, sculpture, photography, videos, music, and theater at the office where he still works today.

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Richard S. Ehrlich has a Master's Degree in Journalism from Columbia University, and is the co-author of the classic book of epistolary history, "HELLO MY BIG BIG HONEY!" -- Love Letters to Bangkok Bar Girls and Their Revealing Interviews.

His web page is located at http://www.oocities.org/asia_correspondent and he may be reached by email: animists *at* yahoo dot com