Nuon Chea, also known as Long Bunruot or Rungloet Laodi, was a Cambodian communist politician and revolutionary who was the chief ideologist of the Khmer Rouge....

The Khmer Rouge was an aggressively controlling regime that dominated Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. In just these four years of control, it conducted hundreds of thousands of government endorsed murders. 

The Khmer Rouge had its origins in the mid 1960’s among the Cambodian branch of the Communist party, however, the party didn’t make any major political moves until 1970, when they entered into an alliance with the then leader of the government, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, to gain the public’s support. By 1975, they had taken control of the nation's capital (History). 

The goal of the Khmer Rouge, which was being led by noted Marxist Pol Pot at the time, was to bring the country of Cambodia back to ‘Year Zero’, a sort of rural, non industrialized utopia, through a new focus on farming and forced labor. Private religion was banned and money and private property was distributed among all the people towards to goal of equality. Another step in the plans of the regime was the re-education of the nation towards primitive thinking which consisted in part with the execution of “anyone thought to be an intellectual of any sort” (BBC News). Outside of the mandated deaths, people were also dying from starvation and injuries from back-breaking labor. In 1979, Vietnamesse troops helped the Cambodian people overthrow the Khmer Rouge, after which the main regime leaders retreated remote areas of the country to avoid persecution. 

Nuon Chea, when he was sentenced, was the oldest surviving member of the Khmer Rouge leadership. Chea, when in power, was referred to as “Brother Two”, Pol Pot’s second in command in Cambodia, and thought by some to be the true mastermind of the extermination of the educated (Mydans). Chea was arrested in 2007 and convicted at age 93 for “directing the forced evacuation of perhaps two million people from the capital, Phnom Penh, and overseeing the torture and killing of more than 14,000 people in a notorious prison, Tuol Sleng” (Mydans). His trial was a complex one, Chea himself frail and sick, barely able to sit up in his chair, but also persistent on the fact that his actions were just patriotic justice for Cambodia, saying “We didn’t kill many. We only killed the bad people, not the good” (Mydans). After a long trial and being sentenced to life in prison, which some found too lenient, he passed away in the Khmer Soviet Friendship Hospital due to his poor health. 

“Khmer Rouge.” History, A&E Television Networks, 12 Sept. 2017, www.history.com/topics/cold-war/the-khmer-rouge.

“Khmer Rouge: Cambodia's Years of Brutality.” BBC News, BBC, 16 Nov. 2018, www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-10684399.

Morto Nuon Chea, sterminatore perché comunista autentico

Si è spento all’età di 93 anni Nuon Chea, ideologo dei Khmer Rossi, braccio destro di Pol Pot. Il regime che contribuì a costituire provocò 2 milioni di morti in quattro anni e immani sofferenze anche ai sopravvissuti. Era comunismo puro, senza tappe intermedie.

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Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge second in command dies aged 93

Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge second in command dies aged 93

[RFI English] The man known as ‘brother number two’ in the Khmer Rouge regime of Cambodia has died at the age of 93. Nuon Chea was convicted of genocide by a UN-backed court last year.The reign of terror he took part in, led by Pol Pot, left some two million Cambodians dead between 1975 to 1979.

“We can confirm that defendant Nuon Chea……

Skulls of Khmer Rouge victims

The Khmer Rouge (Khmer: ខ្មែរក្រហម Khmer Krahom; English: Red Khmers) was the name given to the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea in Cambodia. It was formed in 1968 as an offshoot of the Vietnam People's Army from North Vietnam. It was the ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, led by Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, and Khieu Samphan. Democratic Kampuchea was the name of the state as controlled by the government of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979.

 The organization is remembered especially for orchestrating the Cambodian Genocide, which resulted from the enforcement of its social engineering policies.[1] Its attempts at agricultural reform led to widespread famine, while its insistence on absolute self-sufficiency, even in the supply of medicine, led to the deaths of thousands from treatable diseases such as malaria. Arbitrary executions and torture carried out by its cadres against perceived subversive elements, or during purges of its own ranks between 1975 and 1978, are considered to have constituted genocide.[2]

  By 1979, the Khmer Rouge had fled the country, while the People's Republic of Kampuchea was being established.[3] The governments-in-exile (including the Khmer Rouge) still had a seat in the UN at this point but it was later taken away, in 1993, as the monarchy was restored and the country underwent a name change to the Kingdom of Cambodia. A year later thousands of Khmer Rouge guerrillas surrendered themselves in a government amnesty. In 1996, a new political party the Democratic National Union Movement was formed by Ieng Sary, who was granted amnesty for all of his roles as the deputy leader of the Khmer Rouge.[4] The organisation itself was officially dissolved sometime in December 1999.

 Historical legacy

 After taking power, the Khmer Rouge leadership renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea. The Khmer Rouge subjected Cambodia to a radical social reform process that was aimed at creating a purely agrarian-based Communist society.[5] The Khmer Rouge forced around two million people from the cities to the country to take up work in agriculture. They forced many people out of their homes and ignored many basic human freedoms; they controlled how Cambodians acted, what they wore, whom they could talk to, and many other aspects of their lives. Over the next years, the Khmer Rouge killed many intellectuals, city-dwellers, minority people, and many of their own party members and soldiers who were suspected of being traitors.[6]

 The Khmer Rouge wanted to eliminate anyone suspected of "involvement in free-market activities." Suspected capitalists encompassed professionals and almost everyone with an education, many urban dwellers, and people with connections to foreign governments.

The Khmer Rouge believed parents were tainted with capitalism, so they separated children from their parents, indoctrinated them in communism, and taught them torture methods with animals. Children were a "dictatorial instrument of the party"[7] and were given leadership in torture and executions.[1]

 One of their mottos, in reference to the New People (usually urban civilians), was: "To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss."[8] The philosophy of the Khmer Rouge had developed over time. It started as a communist party[6] that was working together and searching for direction from the Vietnamese guerrillas who were fighting their own civil war.[9]

Pol Pot was a key leader in the movement after he returned to Cambodia from France. He had become a member of the French Communist Party (PCF) which gave guidance to the ideas of the Khmer Rouge.[6]

 The movement gained strength and support in the northeastern jungles and established firm footing when Cambodia's leader Prince Sihanouk was removed from office during a military coup in 1970. The former prince then looked to the Khmer Rouge for backing. With the threat of civil war looming, the Khmer Rouge gained support by posing as a "party for peace."

After four years of rule, the Khmer Rouge regime was removed from power in 1979 as a result of an invasion by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and was replaced by moderate, pro-Vietnamese Communists. The Khmer Rouge survived into the 1990s as a resistance movement operating in western Cambodia from bases in Thailand. In 1996, following a peace agreement, their leader Pol Pot formally dissolved the organization. Pol Pot died on April 15, 1998, having never been put on trial.[10]

  Ideology

The Khmer Rouge's ideology was based on an extreme version of Khmer nationalism and xenophobia. It combined an idealization of the Angkor Empire (802–1431), with an existential fear for the existence of the Cambodian state, which had historically been liquidated under Vietnamese and Siamese intervention.[11] Their ideology was also influenced by colonial French education, which posited Khmers as "Aryans among Asians", who were morally superior to Chinese or Vietnamese. The spillover of Vietnamese fighters from the Vietnam War further aggravated anti-Vietnamese feeling. The Khmer Rouge explicitly targeted the Chinese, Vietnamese, and even their partially Khmer offspring for extinction; although the Cham Muslims were treated unfavorably, they were encouraged to "mix flesh and blood", to intermarry and assimilate. Some people with partial Chinese or Vietnamese ancestry were present in the Khmer Rouge leadership; as in the Soviet Union, they either were purged or participated in the ethnic cleansing campaigns.[12]

 Although a radical movement, the Khmer Rouge also drew on the idioms of Cambodian Buddhist culture. The time that the party spent in the forests in the 1960s, supposedly accumulating knowledge, has similarities to Buddhist lore. Before coming to power, the Khmer Rouge also demonstrated characteristics of "the Buddhist ideals of propriety and social justice", more so than the current government. Rather than maintaining a bureaucracy based on names and reputation, the Khmer Rouge also used charismatic leadership that is characteristic of Buddhist societies.[12]

 The Khmer Rouge's social policy focused on working towards a purely agrarian society. Pol Pot strongly influenced the propagation of this policy. He was reportedly impressed with how the mountain tribes of Cambodia lived, which the party interpreted as a form of primitive communism; as a result, those minorities received more lenient and sometimes even favorable treatment than the urbanized "bourgeois" Chinese and Vietnamese.[12] Pol Pot wanted to remove social institutions and to transform the society into an agrarian one. This was his way of "[creating] a complete Communist society without wasting time on the intermediate steps" as the Khmer Rouge said to China in 1975.[13] The evacuation of the cities disproportionately affected Chinese and Vietnamese, who were not accustomed to agricultural work, segregated from Khmers in labor camps, and forbidden to speak their own language or practice non-Khmer religion.[12]

  Name history

The term "Khmer Rouge", French for "Red Khmer," was coined by Cambodian head of state Norodom Sihanouk and was later adopted by English speakers. It was used to refer to a succession of Communist parties in Cambodia which evolved into the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) and later the Party of Democratic Kampuchea. The organization was also known as the Khmer Communist Party and the National Army of Democratic Kampuchea.

  Origins

 The history of the communist movement in Cambodia can be divided into six phases: the emergence of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), whose members were almost exclusively Vietnamese, before World War II; the 10-year struggle for independence from the French, when a separate Cambodian communist party, the Kampuchean (or Khmer) People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP), was established under Vietnamese auspices; the period following the Second Party Congress of the KPRP in 1960, when Saloth Sar (Pol Pot after 1976) and other future Khmer Rouge leaders gained control of its apparatus; the revolutionary struggle from the initiation of the Khmer Rouge insurgency in 1967–68 to the fall of the Lon Nol government in April 1975; the Democratic Kampuchea regime, from April 1975 to January 1979; and the period following the Third Party Congress of the KPRP in January 1979, when Hanoi effectively assumed control over Cambodia's government and communist party.

 In 1930, Ho Chi Minh founded the Communist Party of Vietnam by unifying three smaller communist movements that had emerged in northern, central and southern Vietnam during the late 1920s. The name was changed almost immediately to the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), ostensibly to include revolutionaries from Cambodia and Laos. Almost without exception, all the earliest party members were Vietnamese. By the end of World War II, a handful of Cambodians had joined its ranks, but their influence on the Indochinese communist movement and on developments within Cambodia was negligible.

 Viet Minh units occasionally made forays into Cambodian bases during their war against the French, and, in conjunction with the leftist government that ruled Thailand until 1947, the Viet Minh encouraged the formation of armed, left-wing Khmer Issarak bands. On April 17, 1950 (25 years to the day before the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh), the first nationwide congress of the Khmer Issarak groups convened, and the United Issarak Front was established. Its leader was Son Ngoc Minh, and a third of its leadership consisted of members of the ICP. According to the historian David P. Chandler, the leftist Issarak groups, aided by the Viet Minh, occupied a sixth of Cambodia's territory by 1952; and, on the eve of the Geneva Conference, they controlled as much as one half of the country.[14]

 In 1951 the ICP was reorganized into three national units — the Vietnam Workers' Party, the Lao Itsala, and the Kampuchean (or Khmer) People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP). According to a document issued after the reorganization, the Vietnam Workers' Party would continue to "supervise" the smaller Laotian and Cambodian movements. Most KPRP leaders and rank-and-file seem to have been either Khmer Krom, or ethnic Vietnamese living in Cambodia. The party's appeal to indigenous Khmers appears to have been minimal.

According to Democratic Kampuchea's version of party history, the Viet Minh's failure to negotiate a political role for the KPRP at the 1954 Geneva Conference represented a betrayal of the Cambodian movement, which still controlled large areas of the countryside and which commanded at least 5,000 armed men. Following the conference, about 1,000 members of the KPRP, including Son Ngoc Minh, made a "Long March" into North Vietnam, where they remained in exile.

 In late 1954, those who stayed in Cambodia founded a legal political party, the Pracheachon Party, which participated in the 1955 and the 1958 National Assembly elections. In the September 1955 election, it won about four percent of the vote but did not secure a seat in the legislature.

Members of the Pracheachon were subject to constant harassment and to arrests because the party remained outside Sihanouk's political organization, Sangkum. Government attacks prevented it from participating in the 1962 election and drove it underground. Sihanouk habitually labelled local leftists the Khmer Rouge, a term that later came to signify the party and the state headed by Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan, and their associates.

 During the mid-1950s, KPRP factions, the "urban committee" (headed by Tou Samouth), and the "rural committee" (headed by Sieu Heng), emerged. In very general terms, these groups espoused divergent revolutionary lines. The prevalent "urban" line, endorsed by North Vietnam, recognized that Sihanouk, by virtue of his success in winning independence from the French, was a genuine national leader whose neutralism and deep distrust of the United States made him a valuable asset in Hanoi's struggle to "liberate" South Vietnam.

Advocates of this line hoped that the prince could be persuaded to distance himself from the right wing and to adopt leftist policies. The other line, supported for the most part by rural cadres who were familiar with the harsh realities of the countryside, advocated an immediate struggle to overthrow the "feudalist" Sihanouk.

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Khmer Rouge soldiers slit prisoner throats, ate organs, court told

PHNOM PENH, Jan 21, 2015:

A witness told Cambodia’s UN-backed court today that Khmer Rouge soldiers slit prisoners’ throats and ate their gall bladders during the 1970s, as the genocide trial of the two most senior surviving leaders resumed.

Nuon Chea, 88, known as “Brother Number Two”, and former head of state Khieu Samphan, 83, face charges over the killing of ethnic Vietnamese and Muslim minorities, forced marriage and rape during the 1975-1979 regime that left up to two million people dead.

In August, the pair were given life sentences for crimes against humanity — the first top Khmer Rouge figures to be jailed — after a two-year trial focused on the forced evacuation of Cambodians from Phnom Penh into rural labour camps and murders at one execution site.

The genocide trial, which began last July, has faced repeated delays due to boycotts by the defendants’ lawyers and most recently because of the brief hospitalisation of Khieu Samphan.

He attended the hearing today but shortly before court was adjourned received permission to follow proceedings from a holding cell, like Nuon Chea, with both men citing ill health.

The prosecution’s first witness, Meas Sokha, told the court that he saw Khmer Rouge soldiers kill hundreds of inmates at Kraing Ta Chan prison in Takeo province, around 80km south of here, where he was detained along with 11 other family members.

“While I was tending cows and buffaloes, I could see how prisoners were killed. Most of them had their throats slit,” said the 55-year-old.

“Two (Khmer Rouge guards) would hold a prisoner tight and another would slit the throat of the prisoner,” he said, adding that the Khmer Rouge played music through a loudspeaker “to hide the sounds of the killing”.

- Organs dried in sun – 

He told the court that at least 20 prisoners were killed per day after a week of starvation at the prison, where he was held for more than two years from 1976. His father and younger siblings also died at the jail.

The witness added that soldiers killed small children by throwing them against a tree before dropping their bodies into the mass grave at the prison.

He also told the court that Khmer Rouge cadres would eat the gall bladders of executed prisoners after drying them in the sun.

“Whenever there were killings, the guards would drink wine together with gall bladders,” said Meas Sokha.

“I knew these gall bladders were from humans. There were many gall bladders dried in the sun near the fence.”

Scenes of cannibalism committed by Khmer Rouge soldiers have previously been described by other witnesses at the tribunal during the leaders’ first trial, including of cadres eating the livers of murdered inmates.

The complex case against Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan was split into a series of smaller trials in 2011 to try to obtain a faster verdict against the pair given their advanced ages and frail health.

They deny all charges against them and are appealing their life convictions.

Somewhere between 100,000-500,000 ethnic Cham Muslims and 20,000 Vietnamese were believed to have been killed during the regime’s rule.

Led by “Brother Number One” Pol Pot, who died in 1998 without ever facing justice, the Khmer Rouge dismantled modern society in Cambodia in their quest for an agrarian Marxist utopia.

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Khmer Rouge Genocide Trial Resumes in Cambodia

ENLARGE

The genocide trial of two former Khmer Rouge leaders resumes in Phnom Penh Friday, with worries persisting over whether the two aging men will see justice for the alleged mass murder of ethnic Vietnamese and Muslims in the 1970s.

Nuon Chea,

88 years old, former leader

Pol Pot

’s right-hand man, and

Khieu Samphan,

83, the Khmer Rouge’s former head of state, already were given life sentences for crimes against humanity in a separate, two-year trial at the same United Nations-backed court in August. They were the first senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge to be jailed for their roles in the deaths of up to two million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979.

Both men have appealed their convictions, which were based on their role in the forced removal of Cambodians from Phnom Penh to the countryside as Pol Pot, “Brother Number One”, pursued his goal of creating an agricultural utopia where money and private property had no meaning.

The second trial, which opened in July, resumes at 9 a.m. local time Friday. It centers on the Khmer Rouge’s treatment of ethnic Cham Muslims. Up to half a million Cham were killed during the militant communist movement’s four years in power. An estimated 20,000 Vietnamese were also killed.

Messrs. Noun Chea and Khieu Samphan will also face additional charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes in relation to the deaths through starvation and execution at prison camps such as the infamous Tuol Sleng, also known as S-21. In addition, they face charges of mass rape for their policies of forced marriage.

These crimes don’t fall under the designation of genocide, which the U.N. defines as an attempt to destroy in whole or in part a specific group of people. Prosecutors are scheduled to make an initial statement and the defendants will be given an opportunity to respond.

The trials were split into two to increase the probability of reaching a conclusion in at least one of the hearings before one or both of the accused dies.

Pol Pot died in 1998 without having been brought to trial, and many other Khmer Rouge leaders have also died or are in poor health. The regime’s former foreign minister,

Ieng Sary,

died in March last year aged 87, while his wife,

Ieng Thirith,

who was social affairs minister, was released in 2012 after being ruled unfit for trial because of dementia.

ENLARGE

Court officials estimate that second trial could extend into 2016.

Some Cambodians question the value of pursuing court proceedings against aging members of the former Khmer Rouge leadership. Prime Minister

Hun Sen,

himself a former Khmer Rouge officer who defected to Vietnamese forces in 1977, has argued that further prosecutions could undermine reconciliation efforts with former guerrillas, although many analysts consider this an unlikely prospect.

Some younger Cambodians also view the trials as an expensive exercise in exorcising a previous generation’s ghosts. With the World Bank projecting the economy to grow 7.2% this year, many people are focused on making their way in the present day.

Youk Chhang,

however, who survived the Khmer Rouge’s bloody rule and who now runs an organization dedicated to documenting the extent of the regime’s crimes, contends that the trials are crucial for building a stronger, more stable nation.

“Cambodia is still a poor country but money is not the solution to the problems we are facing now,” he said. “We want justice. We want a better society. We want a better future for our children. Seeking justice has never been easy for people here in Cambodia, but we need justice to lay the foundation for the country to government by rule of law, for our broken society to reconcile and move on.”

Write to James Hookway at [email protected]

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