Khmer Rouge “Brother Number Two” Nuon Chea, who died on Sunday aged 93, was considered the chief ideologue of the murderous Cambodian regime and a key architect of its killing machine.
Once leader Pol Pot’s most trusted deputy, he was arrested in September 2007 on charges of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity that occurred during the brutal Khmer Rouge reign from 1975 to 1979. But the unrepentant revolutionary lived long enough to be one of only a handful of former leaders to face justice.
The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia sentenced him to life in prison last year after he was found guilty of genocide against the ethnic Vietnamese and Cham Muslim minority groups.
He was previously convicted of crimes against humanity for the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh in 1975.
During his trial at the UN-backed court, the former law student denied a role in a regime whose policies led to the death of about two million Cambodians, telling judges that he was mainly in charge of educating fellow cadres.
Wearing his trademark sunglasses even in the dock, he frequently walked out of the courtroom in protest at proceedings.
Addressing the tribunal in October 2013 in his final statement, Nuon Chea blamed everything on “treacherous” subordinates. “I never educated or instructed them to mistreat or kill people, to deprive them of food or commit genocide,” he added.
Nuon Chea was accused of playing a critical role in a regime which starved, executed and worked to death a quarter of the population.
He and his fellow defendant Khieu Samphan were “dictators who controlled Cambodians by brutal force and fear”, according to prosecutor William Smith. Born Lao Kim Lorn in 1926 to a wealthy Chinese-Khmer family in Cambodia’s northwest, Nuon Chea studied law in Bangkok, where he joined the Communist Party of Thailand in 1950. A year later he transferred membership to the Vietnamese-dominated Indochinese Communist Party and rose quickly through the ranks of Cambodia’s Maoist insurrection.
Nuon Chea, a secretive cadre even by the standards of one of the world’s most enigmatic movements, was by then positioned as the second-in-command of the Khmer Rouge, also known as the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK).
“There is substantial and compelling evidence that Nuon Chea... played a leading role in devising the CPK’s execution policies,” wrote genocide scholars Stephen Heder and Brian Tittemore in their book “Seven Candidates for Prosecution”. — AFP
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