Nuon Chea, who crafted Khmer Rouge’s policy, dies
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Nuon Chea, the chief ideologue of the communist Khmer Rouge regime that destroyed a generation of Cambodians, died Sunday, the country’s U.n.-assisted genocide tribunal said. He was 93.
Nuon Chea was known as Brother No. 2, the right-hand man of Pol Pot, the leader of the regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. The group’s efforts to realize a utopian society led to the death of some 1.7 million — more than a quarter of the country’s population at the time — from starvation, disease, overwork and executions.
Researchers believe Nuon Chea was responsible for the policies of the Khmer Rouge and was directly involved in its purges and executions.
He was serving life in prison after convictions by the U.n.-backed tribunal on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
But Nuon Chea never admitted guilt. At the long-awaited Khmer Rouge trials, he said that he and his comrades were not “bad people,” denying responsibility for any deaths.
For decades after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, Nuon Chea lived with his family in a wooden house in Pailin, a former guerrilla stronghold near the border with Thailand.
He was arrested in 2007 to face trial along with other surviving but ailing top Khmer Rouge leaders, and charged with crimes against humanity, genocide, religious persecution, homicide and torture.
Three decades after his accused crimes, Nuon Chea testified as an old man, frail from a variety of health problems. “I don’t want the next generation to misunderstand history. I don’t want them to believe the Khmer Rouge are bad people, are criminals,” Nuon Chea testified in 2011.
During his testimony, he insisted that mass graves found after the Khmer Rouge were ousted from power held the bodies of those killed by Vietnamese troops.