“Brother Number Two”, Pol Pot’s right-hand man
Nuon Chea, who has died aged 93, “was Pol Pot’s righthand man in the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia that killed up to three million of its own people”, said The Times. Known as “Brother Number Two”, he was the regime’s chief ideologue, ensuring that its “ultraextremist brand of Maoist and Stalinist thinking was murderously implemented”. So committed was Nuon Chea to the Khmer Rouge that he personally authorised the murder of dozens of his own family. Two of his nieces were sent to the notorious Security Prison 21, a former school in the capital Phnom Penh that was used for interrogations and executions. Decades later, Nuon Chea was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity by UN tribunals.
Nuon Chea was born Lao Kim Lorn in 1926, to a well-off Chinese-Cambodian family in the western city of Battambang. His father was a corn farmer and trader, his mother a seamstress. He moved to Bangkok to complete his education, but in 1950, he joined the Communist Party of Indochina and returned to Cambodia to “participate in the struggle against French colonialism”, said The Washington Post. He adopted Nuon Chea as his “revolutionary name”, and went to North Vietnam for training for two years. Back in Phnom Penh, he met Pol Pot and was elected deputy secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, dubbed the “Khmer Rouge” – red Cambodians – by the nation’s postindependence leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk. In 1957, the party arranged Nuon Chea’s marriage to Ly Kim Seng.
Pol Pot, fearing arrest by Sihanouk’s police, fled into hiding on the Vietnamese border in 1963. Undetected by the police, Nuon Chea stayed behind in the capital to build up the party, sometimes visiting Pol Pot in his jungle hideouts. In 1970, Sihanouk was deposed by a military coup, and the power of the Khmer Rouge grew rapidly. Nuon Chea himself convinced the North Vietnamese to launch an invasion against the US-backed Khmer Republic. In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh; soldiers, officials and intellectuals were massacred.
After Pol Pot’s forces seized control, they declared “Year Zero”, said The Daily Telegraph, “abolishing religion, schools and currency, and set about turning the country into a peasant society”. Towns and cities were emptied; more than two million people left Phnom Penh in a matter of days. Families were separated, forced into new collectives and made to work in the countryside in the notorious “Killing Fields”, where, at a conservative estimate, 1.7 million people (more than a fifth of the population) died from execution, starvation, disease and overwork. Amid economic ruin, the revolution turned on itself and Nuon Chea, who ran state security, launched purge after purge.
The Khmer Rouge “utopia” was ended by a Vietnamese invasion in 1975, but the group waged guerilla war from its jungle bases in western Cambodia until 1998, when Pol Pot died. Nuon Chea then surrendered, but there was no immediate attempt to bring him to justice. In 2002, a BBC reporter found him living quietly in the countryside with his wife and grandchildren, proclaiming his innocence. But when he eventually came to trial before a UNbacked tribunal in 2011, he was damned by the files preserved at Security Prison 21, and by his own words. Interview recordings showed that he was unrepentant, saying: “We only killed the bad people, not the good.” He was convicted, first in 2014, and on separate charges last year, and sentenced to life imprisonment.