The chief ideologue of Cambodia's bloody Khmer Rouge regime has died at 93. Nuon Chea was serving life in prison for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
FILE - In this Nov. 16, 2018 file photo released by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, Nuon Chea, who was the Khmer Rouge's chief ideologist and No. 2 leader, sits in a court room before a hearing at the U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Chea, the chief ideologue of the communist Khmer Rouge regime that destroyed a generation of Cambodians, died Sunday, Aug. 4, 2019, the country’s U.N.-assisted genocide tribunal announced. He was 93.
He was serving life in prison after convictions by the U.N.-backed tribunal on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.At the long-awaited Khmer Rouge trials, he told a court that he and his comrades were not “bad people,” denying responsibility for any deaths. Three decades after his accused crimes, Nuon Chea took the stand as an old man with white hair and sunken cheeks. Frail from a variety of health problems — including high blood pressure, heart problems and cataracts — he peered over eyeglasses as he defiantly defended the regime he served.
Vietnam, a onetime communist ally of the Khmer Rouge, suffered several bloody attacks from them and finally struck back in late 1978, chasing the Khmer Rouge from power in early 1979 and installing a client regime of former members of the Khmer Rouge who had split with the group. One of them was Cambodia’s current prime minister, Hun Sen.
In an interview with government agents a year after his surrender in 1998, Nuon Chea said he joined the communist movement in Thailand in 1950. Other sources say he became a communist in 1948 and returned to Cambodia a year later. Nuon Chea said he and Pol Pot worked together in mapping out “a strategic path and tactics” that the party adopted at a clandestine congress at the Phnom Penh railway station in September 1960.
“Except for Nuon Chea, Pol Pot was the least accessible Cambodian leader since World War II,” David Chandler, an American scholar on Cambodia, wrote in “Brother Number One,” a biography of Pol Pot.
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