One of the most famous figures of the Khmer Rouge, Nuon Chea, considered the ideologue of the murderous Cambodian regime of the late 1970s, died on Sunday, August 4, at the age of 93. His death was confirmed by the spokesman of the Cambodian court before which he was convicted for "genocide" and "crimes against humanity".
A former military official, Nuon Chea was the number two Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, whose regime killed some two million people between 1975 and 1979.
In 2014, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for "crimes against humanity", a sentence confirmed in 2016 on appeal.
He was also convicted in 2018 of "genocide" against Vietnamese, members of the Cham community and other religious minorities. This charge did not concern the mass killings of the Khmer by the Khmer who are not considered by the United Nations as genocide.
Born on 7 July 1926 in Battambang Province, northwest China, Nuon Chea studied law at the prestigious Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand from 1941 to 1948.
He had joined the youth movement of the Thai Communist Party, then joined Cambodia, where he had integrated the resistance against the French colonial power. He then helped to organize, with Pol Pot, who died in 1998, the future Communist Party of Kampuchea.
Number two of the Khmer Rouge military command from 1970 to 1975, he is also its chief political commissioner, charged, from their takeover in 1975, to hunt down the enemies of the revolution.
Considered a very secret personality, it appears from the documents that will leave the regime to its fall, "at the heart of the purge system," said Solomon Kane, author of a "Dictionary of Khmer Rouge".
Nuon Chea is "involved in various assassinations" and has played "a leading role in the killing of intellectuals".
Destroy the "enemies of the people"
Nuon Chea surrendered to the Cambodian authorities in 1998 as part of an agreement that ended the Khmer Rouge's activities.
He had, however, continued to live freely for almost ten years in the Pailin region (northwest), in a small wooden house with his wife, close to the Thai border.
He was finally arrested at the end of 2007, not without making a confession, he will not repeat in court, in front of the camera of Cambodian journalist Thet Sambath.
In "Enemies of the people" released in 2009, Nuon Chea calmly tells why the Khmer Rouge had executed the "criminals" impossible to "re-educate".
"They were killed and destroyed, and if we let them live, the party line would have been hijacked, they were enemies of the people."
A confession of frightening coolness had been broadcast during the hearing in 2011, in front of a Nuon Chea who had not flinched.
"The crimes he has committed must remain a lesson for all of us in the future," AFP Youk Chhang, director of the Cambodia Documentation Center, told AFP, a research organization that has provided extensive evidence in court. .
With AFP