Khmer Rouge Leader Denies Role in 1.7 Million Deaths
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
PAILIN, Cambodia — The highest-ranking Khmer Rouge leader still alive denied any responsibility for the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians during the party’s brutal 1975–79 rule, saying unhesitatingly yesterday that he is ready to be judged by an international tribunal.
“I will go to the court and don’t care if people believe me or not,” Nuon Chea, who was the chief ideologue for the communist Khmer Rouge, said in an interview with the Associated Press.
He spoke a day after prosecutors at the tribunal examining the mass deaths submitted a confidential list of five former Khmer Rouge leaders they believe should be tried. Judges will decide whether to proceed with indictments.
“They didn’t specify the names of the people, but I know I’m included,” Nuon Chea said at his home in northwestern Cambodia near the border with Thailand.
Cambodian and foreign prosecutors submitted thousands of pages of documents to back their case over the mass deaths that resulted from hunger, disease, overwork, and execution as the Khmer Rouge sought to impose an austere, agrarian society on their homeland.
Nuon Chea — known as “Brother no. 2” in the Khmer Rouge, the right-hand man to the movement’s notorious leader, the late Pol Pot — has consistently denied any responsibility for mass brutality during the party’s reign.
“I was president of the National Assembly and had nothing to do with the operation of the government,” the ailing 82-year-old said. “Sometimes I didn’t know what they were doing because I was in the assembly.”
Cambodian scholars have disputed his claim, portraying him as a policymaker.
Prosecutors said the acts allegedly carried out by the five Khmer Rouge leaders “constitute crimes against humanity, genocide, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, homicide, torture and religious persecution.” Conviction could bring a maximum of life in prison.
Pol Pot died in 1998 and his former military chief, Ta Mok, died in 2006. The top surviving leaders are Nuon Chea; a former foreign minister, Ieng Sary, and a former head of state, Khieu Samphan. All three live freely in Cambodia but are in declining health.
