Behind the Killing Fields: A Khmer Rouge Leader and One of His Victims 9780812201598

Citation preview

Behind the Killing Fields

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Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights

Bert B. Lockwood, Jr., Series Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher

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Behind the Killing Fields A Khmer Rouge Leader and One of His Victims

Gina Chon and

Sambath Thet

universit y of pennsylvania press phil adelphia · oxford

Copyright © 2010 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania  19104-4112 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chon, Gina.   Behind the killing fields : a Khmer Rouge leader and one of his victims / Gina Chon and Thet Sambath.    p.  cm. — (Pennsylvania studies in human rights)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn 978-0-8122-4245-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)   1. Noun Chea, 1926–  2. Pol Pot. 3. Sambath, Thet. 4. Political atrocities—Cambodia. 5. Genocide—Cambodia. 6. Cambodia—History—1975–1979. 7. Cambodia—Politics and government—1975–1979. 8. Parti communiste du Kampuchea. I. Sambath, Thet. II. Title. DS554.83.N86C47  2010 959.604'2—dc22

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This book is dedicated to the Cambodian people and the victims of the Khmer Rouge regime

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Contents 1. Introduction

1

2. The Faceless Father

9

3. The New World Order

13

4. The Lost Childhood

44

5. The Vietnam Factor

47

6. The Missing Brother

79

7. The Enemies

82

8. The Year Zero

121

9. The Implosion

124

10. The Rebuilding

140

11. The Homecoming

144

12. The Understanding

152

13. The Killing Fields

159

Bibliography

167

Index

169

Acknowledgments

177

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1. Introduction I don’t know why it happened like that, why they tried the extreme way. When we were students, we thought in a good way and did everything step by step. I joined the movement because I thought something good would come out of it. But finally, it turned bad and now my name is connected to a bad thing. —­Mey Mann, a Khmer Rouge intellectual who had sailed to Paris with Pol Pot in 1949, before he died

The corroded, rusting pistol, a relic from his glory days as Pol Pot’s most senior lieutenant in charge of Cambodia, always stayed nearby, just in case. The top surviving Khmer Rouge leader knew that in his beloved country he was despised by many. And the enemies who have dogged him for half a century, the enemies who have tried to destroy Cambodia, were still out there, ready to take him down at any moment. But the man who considered himself to be the moral leader of the Khmer Rouge said he won’t go easily, for he was a survivor. The frail eighty-­three-­year-­old grandfather has long outlived the nearly 2 million Cambodians who perished under the Khmer Rouge rule. And he has endured longer than his best friend, Pol Pot, who died from supposedly natural causes in April 1998. Nuon Chea, who was also known as Brother Number Two by his comrades, said he had not come this far for nothing. “They might kill me while I’m sitting here,” he mused. “But if something happens, I will not allow them to shoot me first. Why should I be killed when I have struggled for decades and have not died yet?” Those who would be happy to see Nuon Chea follow in Pol Pot’s footsteps may not have to wait for long. Nuon Chea himself believes he will die soon. The effects of years of warfare have taken their toll on his body. In a remote area of the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Pailin in northwestern Cambodia where he lived before he was taken into custody, Nuon Chea

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2

Chapter 1

suffered from old age and jungle living. His arms shook as he pushed himself to his feet, his chest heaved with every breath, and he spent most of his days reclining in a chair because it was too difficult to walk. When we spoke, he sometimes had to take a rest, and in those moments he wondered aloud when he would die. Nuon Chea has had a stroke, suffers from heart problems, and has battled malaria more than once. He often traveled to Thailand for medical treatment and there were several times when he thought he would not be able to finish his story. Now Nuon Chea sits in prison, waiting to tell his version of events to a court. In September 2007, Cambodian authorities arrived at his home with an arrest warrant. But Brother Number Two did not reach for his rusty pistol when they came for him. Instead, he said goodbye to his wife and got into a helicopter for the short trip to Phnom Penh. Still, he fights to die on his own terms, and before his body gives out, Nuon Chea wants the world to know that the Khmer Rouge were not the monsters that everyone said they were. “The Khmer Rouge were compatriots but now we are on the black list. It is very bad that the people consider the Khmer Rouge to be evil,” he said, shaking his head in disapproval. The surviving victims of the Khmer Rouge, those who lost scores of loved ones in that hellish time, would find these statements absurd, at the very least. But Nuon Chea does not completely live in the world most of us inhabit. He exists in another place, erected so he can stand to live with himself and justify his life. For Nuon Chea to say his life’s work was a colossal mistake would be too much for him now. He acknowledges that many people living in the countryside died needlessly, but says that others were spies who were trying to destroy the movement. Nuon Chea said those traitors deserved to be “smashed” or “resolved,” meaning killed in Khmer Rouge lingo. Many Cambodians still don’t understand the motivations of the Khmer Rouge, marked as one of the twentieth century’s bloodiest and strangest political movements. The ultra-­Maoist guerillas cut their country off from the rest of the world and forced their people to work literally to death, turning Cambodia into a massive labor camp. The foundations of Cambodian society were destroyed. In a case of “autogenocide” as the Khmer Rouge chose their own people as their victims, almost 25 percent of the population died because of starvation, illness, and executions. Friends and family of Nuon Chea were among those who were tortured and killed. Pol Pot and Nuon Chea were so convinced of the traitorous behavior of their former brothers that anyone who questioned their judgment was also accused of betrayal. And all the

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Introduction

3

while, Cambodians were told that the mysterious “Angka,” or organization, would provide everything they needed. The effects of the Khmer Rouge can still be seen today in the pervading poverty and violence that plagues Cambodia. Street justice has taken the place of an inadequate court system and lack of rule of law. About 35 percent of the people live below the poverty line, and the annual average per capita GDP is $723, according to the U.S. State Department. Corruption is rampant, partly because of inadequate salaries, with civil servants earning as little as $20 a month. Crumbling infrastructure and a poor health care system contribute to keeping Cambodia one of the poorest countries in the region. About thirty years after the Khmer Rouge were ousted from power following a Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1979, a combined UN-­Cambodia trial began, finally shedding light on the Khmer Rouge rule. The first defendant to face questioning, in February 2009, was Kaing Guek Eav, otherwise known as Duch, who was head of the notorious S-­21 interrogation center where thousands were tortured and killed. Cambodians have had to wait for years to hear from their persecutors because the process has stalled on numerous occasions since negotiations for a tribunal began more than ten years ago. As the trial progresses, it is possible that Nuon Chea and some of his former colleagues may die before they ever face justice, as happened to Pol Pot. Ke Pauk, a Khmer Rouge commander who was cited as a likely suspect in a tribunal, died in February 2002 from liver disease. Former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary, who is also Pol Pot’s brother in law, has been hospitalized on numerous occasions for various ailments. He was arrested in November 2007. Khieu Samphan, the public face of the Khmer Rouge and Nuon Chea’s next-­door neighbor, was also arrested in November 2007. He is in better health than his former comrades, but he is still in his eighties. Nuon Chea said he will appear before a tribunal, but he doesn’t believe he will receive a fair trial: “I love justice, but it does not exist in this world.” Perhaps many Cambodians would agree on this point. Now that Pol Pot is gone, Nuon Chea is the prime target for a Khmer Rouge tribunal. He is described as Pol Pot’s right-­hand man; in the early years of the communist movement, which ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, he had more power than Brother Number One himself. He was the political ideologue of the Khmer Rouge and came up with many of the regime’s policies. The sorrow and loss suffered by many Cambodians can be linked to Nuon Chea. Few details of his life were known because of his obsession with secrecy and his work behind the scenes as Pol Pot’s shadow and alter ego.

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Chapter 1

This is the first time in his life that he has spoken extensively to anyone outside the Khmer Rouge circle. This story is our version of what Nuon Chea conveyed to us, based on more than 1,000 hours of interviews obtained over a six-­year period. He said he is the only one left alive who knows the full story of why people were killed during the Khmer Rouge regime, and the only surviving leader who admits his involvement in the purges of his fellow cadre. “I release my secret because I want the world to know what we were doing and what happened in the three years that caused people to die,” Nuon Chea said. “People should realize that the Khmer Rouge leaders were not cruel.” This is not a historical textbook about the Khmer Rouge regime, nor is it a story based solely on facts, for much of it comes from the perspective of Nuon Chea. This account delves inside the mind of a man who presided over violence in the name of creating utopia and is still able to rationalize the atrocities. It is our hope that this story transcends the Cambodian context to also tell the tale of a man who made the ultimate moral transformation a human being can make. Nuon Chea did not begin his life with a vision to destroy his nation. And the crimes perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, like other tragic events in history, cannot be explained through ideology alone. The leaders of such regimes are shaped by their personal experiences, which permeate their policymaking. And their good intentions and their best theories can become horrifically perverted in practice. As a college student, Nuon Chea considered himself an idealistic freedom fighter who loved his country enough to spend years in hiding and on the run, fighting to save it from foreign domination by the French, the Japanese, the U.S., and finally the Vietnamese. So what went wrong in his heart? How does a person come to believe that killing masses of people is justified for the greater good of the cause? How does he still believe that he has served his nation well? I talked with numerous Khmer Rouge intellectuals and soldiers during my two years living in Cambodia, and those were the questions that always troubled me. I couldn’t comprehend how these people, who had seemingly good intentions, brought such destruction and death on a country they professed to love. It is easy to write off men like Nuon Chea, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden as monstrous lunatics. But no matter how much they are demonized, in the end they are human beings—­husbands, fathers, neighbors. That is what haunted me and what I wanted to understand. We wanted to challenge ourselves to suspend our judgment as much as we

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Introduction

5

could and view Nuon Chea as a human being to see if that would offer clues into a heart of darkness. Nuon Chea still talks about poverty and the suffering of the poor, as if the Khmer Rouge had not played a major role in the current status of Cambodia. At times, he shows compassion, expressing his sympathy for the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Then he talks about enemies of the Khmer Rouge and describes them as “worms in the flesh.” We did not wish to be apologists for Nuon Chea, and we tried to put his words into a context that would help promote understanding of men who commit the unthinkable. Readers may be turned off by the fact that Nuon Chea does not weep and beg for forgiveness for all that he has done. But if Hitler had lived to be an old man, would he have eventually seen his terrible deeds for what they were and apologize to the world? Would it make a difference? In his first court appearance after he was found hiding in a dirt hole, Saddam Hussein remained defiant and arrogant, defending his decision to invade Kuwait and calling himself the president of Iraq. We hope this book is not seen as an automatic regurgitation of Nuon Chea’s words, without any critical examination of them. While Nuon Chea represents one side of the Khmer Rouge story, a parallel tale is told by one of his victims and the coauthor of this book. Nuon Chea represents how a human being can become inhumane; Sambath Thet is a symbol of humanity. He has donated his own money, sacrificed time with his family, and risked his life to tell this story. And throughout all his time with Nuon Chea, Sambath said he never once thought of revenge. He just wanted to understand. In alternating chapters, you will hear Nuon Chea’s rationale for policies that put Cambodia on the path to destruction, and you will see how those decisions affected Cambodians like Sambath, who were forced to bear the results of the Khmer Rouge madness. Sambath, whom I met in 2000 while working for an English-­language newspaper in Phnom Penh, lost both parents and an older brother during the Khmer Rouge rule. He was seven years old when the Cambodian communists came to power. They forced him to build dams and transport human feces that were to be used as fertilizer. He often went hungry and once saw a man eat his feces for nourishment. Sambath slept in the jungle, using a burlap rice sack as his blanket. When he was able to, he ran through the dark to his grandfather’s house miles away and ate the fish and rice his grandfather had hidden for him. “But I stopped going because my grandfather was scared he would be killed,” he told me.

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6

Chapter 1

I thought Sambath would shake with rage every time he heard one of Nuon Chea’s “explanations.” During one of the many long road trips home from Nuon Chea’s house to Phnom Penh, I asked Sambath whether he hated Nuon Chea. “No, I don’t hate him,” he said. “I know the Khmer Rouge killed my family. But I am a journalist. So I just want to find out the truth. Revenge is no good. Finding out the truth is better.” After I left Cambodia, Sambath would often travel to see Nuon Chea on his own. During the visits, they would talk of their personal lives, Sambath’s farm, and Nuon Chea’s children. And Sambath learned the complexities of explaining and defining evil. “When you talk to Nuon Chea, you cannot believe he is cruel,” Sambath told me. For the first two years, our visits were kept secret because Nuon Chea did not want the government to know he was talking to journalists. Scrunched in the back seat of a rented car or truck during what was a nine-­hour journey before the roads were improved, Sambath and I rode along Cambodia’s potholed streets. When we saw the signs warning of landmines, we knew we were close to the town of Pailin, where many of the residents are former Khmer Rouge cadre. During the car ride from Pailin to Nuon Chea’s home, I didn’t speak, so the driver would mistake my Korean looks for that of a Cambodian peasant. Sambath sometimes told the driver I was mute. When we came to the fork in the dirt road that led to Nuon Chea’s home, we asked the driver of the rented car to leave. We pretended to walk down the left fork in the road until the car was gone, and then we doubled back and continued on the right fork to Nuon Chea’s home. When we arrived, Nuon Chea’s wife would tell the military police, who were sometimes guarding the home on orders of the local government to prevent outsiders from entering, that I was her cousin and Sambath was my husband. Because of the stigma of death that surrounds him, Nuon Chea was forced to live the life of a recluse before his arrest. A sign that warns against trespassing is posted on a gate outside his home. His modest wooden house is sparsely furnished, with his few decorations being large portraits of King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand in his bedroom and of former King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia in his living room. He has a toilet in his home, a rare fixture in the Cambodian countryside, where most people have outhouses or nothing at all. Since he became a communist more than fifty years ago, it has been his habit to go to the bathroom inside because he was afraid of being captured if he went outdoors. A jungle littered with landmines passes as his backyard, and Thailand is just on the other side. He expected to live out the last of his days here, and he said he will leave this world with a relatively

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Introduction

7

clear conscience. To those who accuse him of crimes against humanity, he asks, “What is the real truth and how do you find it out? What is hiding inside the events? The husband beats the wife and the wife beats the husband, so the violence is in the family and outsiders cannot understand. So for everything, we have to find out the cause and not accuse people of this and that.” The first time we talked to Nuon Chea, during a meeting arranged by two of his longtime aides, I had expected to see a man frozen in time, still stocky and strong, wearing the signature Khmer Rouge black uniform and spouting Maoist slogans. But when we walked up the stairs to Nuon Chea’s home and saw him standing before us, he was dressed in a cream-­colored short-­sleeved shirt and pajama-­looking pants. His tinted eyeglasses made him look slightly sinister, but other than that he looked like any other Cambodian grandfather, with his thinning white hair and numerous missing teeth. He was friendly and welcoming, offering us glasses of water and apologizing for living so far away. Although he stood to greet us, he soon had to sit down and we helped him into a chair. For the first few months of interviews, Nuon Chea followed the lead of his comrades and denied knowing anything about the killings. I know now that he was sizing us up, deciding whether he could trust us. He told us he was in charge of political education, and that all other aspects of the movement were handled by Pol Pot or others. And because of denials and reluctance to speak publicly, very little is known about the Khmer Rouge from the perspective of its leaders. But slowly Nuon Chea let us in on the madness that took over the Cambodian communists, and it is obvious that he is still gripped by the paranoia that finally destroyed the Khmer Rouge. Eventually Nuon Chea seemed to consider us his friends. We had lunch or dinner at his home. We met his children and he invited us to his daughter’s wedding to a former communist cadre. He even told me to say hello to my parents from him, having no inkling of the outrageousness of his request. He was very happy to know I’m Korean, and he told me of the time that he had visited North Korea, one of the Khmer Rouge’s staunchest allies, during a trip with Pol Pot. He told me how hardworking the North Koreans were and that he thought it was a great country. He then walked into his bedroom and brought out a half-­empty bottle of ginseng wine that was given to him twenty-­some years ago by North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung. Nuon Chea has hardly any family pictures because most of them were destroyed during the years of war. His house is barren of trinkets and mementos. But he still had that North Korean wine. He insisted we all have a drink.

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Chapter 1

Given the devastation brought upon Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge, Nuon Chea’s belief that he has fulfilled his duty to his nation and to Buddhism would make him seem delusional. But he always spoke lucidly and methodically, and never became upset or raised his voice when we contradicted his observations. He came across as charismatic and even good humored, often joking with his wife and laughing at some of the good times he had in the old days. As he played with his grandchildren, it was hard to imagine him as the feared Brother Number Two. Still, he is someone who has spent most of his life in isolation, surrounded by those who told him what he wanted to hear. The illusion became reality. With a straight face, he said, “I never did anything which made my mother or father unhappy. I loved and respected them and followed their advice.” What follows, then, is the story of Nuon Chea, the times that shaped him, and the choices he made, which left his country in shambles, his name cursed, his dreams still fantasy. And, in turn, it is also the story of how his policies affected Sambath, who became an orphan because of the Khmer Rouge but in the end chose understanding over revenge.

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2. The Faceless Father My father was very brave and he had a high spirit, even when they tortured him. —­Sambath

He has never told this tale, a story of a man he hardly remembers. His wife doesn’t know, and he and his siblings never speak of it. The pain is still too raw. It is the tale of his father’s slaying at the hands of his own people, the beginning of the end for Sambath’s family. By the time the Khmer Rouge were ousted from power in 1979, Sambath had lost both parents and a brother. He felt like an old man at the age of eleven. But while these events were unfolding around him, his seven-­year-­old mind could not comprehend the lasting impact they would have. He only knew that his world was in a constant state of change, and there was nothing he could do to stop the motion. When Sambath was born in 1968, Cambodia would only have two more years of relative peace before civil war broke out. Still, the early 1970s were an idyllic time for Sambath. The fighting had not yet reached his home in Battambang province’s Prey Russey village in northwestern Cambodia. Sambath remained protected from the campaign of the Khmer Rouge, which had been gaining strength since the late 1960s. In Prey Russey, which means bamboo forest in Khmer, villagers hunted wild pigs and deer. Elephants chomped on the rice fields and tigers roamed the jungle surrounding his village. “There were no roads for a car,” Sambath said of his village. “There was only a path for ox carts.” His father was a prosperous farmer, at least in comparison to other villagers. They sometimes borrowed rice or money from him, which they paid back with interest. Sambath’s mother bought rice from villagers and sold it at the market and rice mills. There were five farmhands who worked on the land year round, but dozens more were hired for the annual rice harvest. His father was a gregarious man who liked to make jokes and talked in a booming voice. He would often take his kids swimming in the large pond in front

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Chapter 2

of his home. He was also fashionable, dressing in the nicest clothes his income could provide. Their home was a popular place with neighbors, partly because they owned the only radio in the village. During holidays, villagers would gather at their home to play cards and bet on fighting cocks. But Sambath remembers none of this. He cannot remember his father’s face or much else about him, so he relies on the little his relatives told him about those years, when the family still spoke of the Khmer Rouge and what they did to his family. His only memory of his father is when he carried Sambath to a bunker because he worried about bombs dropping from the American planes that sometimes passed overhead. In 1973, the malice of the Khmer Rouge was already obvious. The mostly uneducated peasant cadre used their positions to exact revenge for past perceived wrongs or disputes, or to get rid of people they simply did not like. As the Khmer Rouge captured more territory, they warned Sambath’s father that if he did not join the revolutionary movement, he and the rest of his family would be killed. Sambath’s father sent his family to the district’s town to escape the fighting, while he and Sambath’s older brother stayed behind to protect the family home and other property. “My family could not live there any longer because the Khmer Rouge soldiers were very cruel,” Sambath said. “They killed monks in my village and said they were useless because they did nothing.” Sambath’s father ended up joining the movement, showing the minimum amount of support he could get away with, and provided cows to the Khmer Rouge for transport of materials and ammunition. Sambath’s father had wanted to join the forces of President Lon Nol, who had ousted Prince Norodom Sihanouk in a U.S.-­backed coup in 1970, and who opposed Angka’s policies. But he saw that the government forces were weak and incapable of standing up to the Khmer Rouge, who had taken over many areas, bringing an ominous future with them. His aunts and uncles told Sambath that his father was a brave man who was not scared of the Khmer Rouge. Still, he tolerated them to protect his family. But the Khmer Rouge soon asked for too much. In a meeting of about 1,000 people, they demanded that all the villagers hand over their property, equipment, and gold to the rebel cadre. His father spoke out against the Khmer Rouge demands, accusing the soldiers of misleading the people by asking for support to reinstall Sihanouk as a ruse to gain power. Sambath’s father told the Khmer Rouge that he had obtained his property through his hard work and that it belonged to him. “He told the Khmer Rouge it was not right and they were cheating the people,” Sambath said. “He said if Angka decided to

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The Faceless Father

11

collect all the people’s property, he would not support the organization at all.” For his outspokenness, Sambath’s father was accused of supporting Lon Nol. Sambath’s father wasn’t immediately killed, though that was the protocol increasingly being used for those standing in the way of the revolution. He was under the protection of Doung, a local Khmer Rouge leader who liked Sambath’s father’s sincerity. Otherwise he would have been dead before that meeting ended. One Khmer Rouge cadre who wanted to see Sambath’s father killed was Yorth, who had borrowed money from him and had been unable to pay him back. When Doung was moved to another posting, Yorth took over the area and seized his chance. In 1974, the Khmer Rouge came for Sambath’s father, tied him up, and took him away to a nearby rice field. Sambath’s older brother, Voeurng, had been looking after some cows when he heard that his father had been arrested. He secretly followed his father’s captors and hid behind some trees. Later he detailed his father’s murder to the rest of the family. The ten Khmer Rouge soldiers formed a circle around Sambath’s father and kicked him, passing him from one cadre to another. They stabbed him dozens of times, gouging both of his eyes. “They tortured my father very cruelly,” Sambath said. “However, he did not shout for help or implore them for his life. He was brave and he still verbally attacked them.” Sambath and the rest of his family were lucky. Usually, when the Khmer Rouge killed a traitor, they also killed his family. But Sambath and his relatives were scattered throughout the town and the Khmer Rouge were unable to find them. His brother Voeurng escaped death with the help of Doung, who heard about the murder and moved him to another area. After Sambath’s father was killed, three men came to see his mother and asked her to marry another cadre. This was more threat than request. They told her that if she did not agree, her whole family would be killed, including her elderly parents. After they left, Sambath’s mother lay in a hammock and wept. Sambath’s grandmother and grandfather implored her to marry the cadre, but Sambath and his siblings begged her not to go through with it. All Sambath’s mother could do was cry. Her children were angry, especially her older sons. They lodged protests and called the Khmer Rouge immoral, though they knew that in the end it was useless. The Khmer Rouge controlled everything at this point, even whom people married. “She missed my father and she just wanted to take care of her children,” Sambath said. “But there was no way to choose. One way was to have life and the other way was no life.” The man who married Sambath’s mother and some of his father’s killers

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Chapter 2

are still alive. Sambath knows who they are, but he has never tried to see them or contact them. “I don’t think about revenge. I do not want to see them at all. I suffered a lot but I’ve tried to keep my heart calm because now, it’s finished.” He hasn’t been back to his village since 1973, fearing it would dredge up too much pain. And when he married and had children of his own, he kept his past a secret. He did not want to be reminded of how he and his family suffered, and wishes he could make the past disappear. He did not ask his siblings or his aunt and uncles about his parents until he began work on this book. But sometimes at night the memories return. “I tried to forget them but I could not,” Sambath said. “I don’t want my family to know how my father was tortured and killed. It is too horrible and cruel and inhumane. I try not to remind myself because my family was a disaster.” Yet he always wondered why the Khmer Rouge regime had turned Cambodia into the Killing Fields. There were always rumors that it was the fault of Vietnam, China, the Soviet Union, or the United States. Sambath never believed the rumors, and he thought only the top Khmer Rouge leaders knew the reasons, the rationale for the violence and the murders. “I tried to find out the truth for all Cambodians and the victims,” Sambath said. “It is not just for my family members who were killed. I put my family’s story aside to find out the truth so all people can learn.” More than twenty­five years later, Sambath would meet the top surviving leader of the Khmer Rouge, the man responsible for his family’s suffering. And he would come to know Brother Number Two better than he ever knew his father.

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3. The New World Order After we toppled Lon Nol, the society was very complicated. There was a crisis because the people were in disorder. The war corrupted many people and the people became bad. So we needed to change society, to clean society. That’s why when I talk about our regime, people don’t understand, because we changed everything. We had to start over. —­Nuon Chea

Crammed inside the stifling tank, Nuon Chea and Pol Pot could hardly breathe. Sweat rolled down their faces. They had already traveled for several hours, slowly making their way to Phnom Penh from Peam commune in Kompong Chhnang province, where Nuon Chea had been living for the last few weeks. Afraid straggling Lon Nol soldiers would shoot at them if they exposed themselves, they poked their heads out to get some fresh air only a few times during the long journey. Even though they had achieved victory, they assumed their enemies were still out there. Pol Pot had ordered soon-­to­be Khmer Rouge defense minister Son Sen to arrange for a tank to pick them up so they could travel to the capital through discreet but secure means. Still, it was not the grandest way for Brothers Number One and Number Two to arrive in Phnom Penh after their triumph. With the fall of the capital on April 17, 1975, the two men were now the most powerful people in the country. But they remained anonymous and hidden from the public. “If we came by one tank, no one would think we were big leaders, just soldiers. But it was so hot in there,” Nuon Chea said, smiling wistfully at the memory. Their victory had been remarkably swift, considering that the launch of their armed struggle in 1968 was less than impressive. The first explosion, as Nuon Chea called it, occurred in Bay Damram in Battambang province on January 17, 1968. In the morning, three Khmer Rouge militiamen stormed a police outpost there while a few officers were cleaning their guns. They fought with the officers, seized several weapons, and ran away. But in the

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adrenaline rush and confusion, the Khmer Rouge members forgot to grab the ammunition. They returned for the bullets, but the ammunition turned out to be the wrong kind for the weapons they had snatched. This was the birth of the Democratic Kampuchea military. But Nuon Chea acknowledged that the goal in taking up arms was not an ambitious one. The aim was not revolution, but self-­preservation. “The armed struggle did not mean we wanted to overthrow the government or change the law,” he said. “We just wanted to defend ourselves because Lon Nol was arresting and killing our members. We were not planning a big offensive because we had no weapons.” But as persecution of their ranks intensified and their movement gained strength, the Khmer Rouge turned from defense to offense. Six years later, Khmer Rouge leaders met and decided to take Phnom Penh during the spring of 1975, around the time of the Khmer New Year. The heavy fighting in the push toward the capital began in January 1975. Pochentong Airport, located on the outskirts of downtown Phnom Penh, was coming under constant rocket and mortar fire. The days of the Khmer Republic were numbered. On April 1, President Lon Nol, America’s Cambodian partner in the fight against communism, was forced to leave the country while the Khmer Rouge captured the important ferry town of Neak Luong. Eleven days later, the U.S. embassy was evacuated. By April 15, the Khmer Rouge were on the outskirts of the city. In a final, desperate attempt to save themselves, Khmer Republic officials gave notice to Norodom Sihanouk, who had been ousted by Lon Nol in a 1970 coup, of a ceasefire offer to transfer power to the prince. Sihanouk rejected the offer, as he had no power to make decisions on his own. Although he had been the public face of the rebel movement since major conflict began in 1970, it was Pol Pot who controlled the show. As Khmer Rouge soldiers were about to enter the city, Phnom Penh was relatively calm, with none of the chaos that would mark the fall of Saigon two weeks later. Although some Cambodians clamored to leave Phnom Penh, many residents simply waited to see how these new, mysterious rulers would wield their power. Nuon Chea and Pol Pot had chosen to wait until Phnom Penh was secure before coming to claim their victory. They would not see the triumphant Khmer Rouge soldiers marching through the capital on April 17, 1975. They would not see their fellow citizens lined along the streets, cheering the black-­clad soldiers, boys really, whom Cambodians hoped would finally bring peace. And they would not witness the moment when the celebration soured, when the city would be emptied of its more than 2 million people. They would not see the half-­eaten meals left on the table, the smoldering

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buildings and the confusion that engulfed Phnom Penh citizens, who did not understand why they were being told to leave their homes. Hospitals were vacated and patients still in their beds were wheeled out of the facilities and onto the streets. Nuon Chea would not see his younger sister, Lao Poun, rushing to gather what she could after Khmer Rouge forces killed her husband, a Lon Nol soldier. Many Lon Nol troops discarded and buried their uniforms in hopes of saving themselves. In some sectors, Lon Nol soldiers were hunted down and killed. Lon Nol’s brother and Pol Pot’s old friend, Lon Non, was executed, along with scores of other government officials. Although Nuon Chea denies there was an order from Khmer Rouge leaders to kill Lon Nol officials and soldiers, he acknowledged that many likely died from revenge killings. “We let all Lon Nol soldiers return to their families in the countryside and work in the cooperatives,” Nuon Chea said. “But I know my younger brother­in-­law was killed at that time.” While Lon Nol soldiers were trying to avoid death at the hands of Khmer Rouge soldiers, other residents of the capital were busy packing. It was all part of the leadership’s vision for a new Cambodia. In a secret meeting a year before the “liberation,” Nuon Chea and Pol Pot had revealed their plan to turn the nation’s cities into ghost towns once the Khmer Rouge had achieved victory. Only those on the military committee and zone leaders were invited to the meeting. Pol Pot’s brother-­in-­law and soon-­to-­be foreign minister Ieng Sary and nominal Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan were not immediately told of the plans. “We all agreed to evacuate people from the town because they had no rice, oil, and food,” Nuon Chea said. “Phnom Penh was in disorder and confused and Lon Nol soldiers had weapons. Who would protect their safety? When our troops entered Phnom Penh and clashed with the enemy, many people would have been killed. Because of this, we decided to evacuate the people for their security. This is a way to avoid war in the town.” But historians say the bizarre order forcing residents to migrate to rural areas was a quest to cleanse the soul of sinful city dwellers. The Khmer Rouge saw Phnom Penh residents as capitalists who needed to be purified and taught the ways of the uncontaminated farmer. At the meeting, zone leaders decided how much of the population their areas could support. In an effort to show their loyalty and dedication, zone leaders tried to outdo one another other in estimating how many city residents they could handle. Those in charge of the Northwest zone agreed to accept 2 million while the Eastern Zone decided to take in 1.5 million. The zone leaders were asked to

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prepare the areas for the influx of new people and make a tally of their rice and other food supplies. Nuon Chea claims the Khmer Rouge were going to allow the evacuees to return to their homes and restore private property once living standards were raised and stability had returned. “It did not mean that we were going to make them stay outside for their whole life,” Nuon Chea said. “We were going to send them back to their houses, and they could get back their own property and what belongs to them. They would return to their houses when the situation was better and living conditions were good.” As the tank slowly rumbled toward the capital, Nuon Chea and Pol Pot caught glimpses of their new charges, looking haggard and weary as they dropped clothing and other items along the road when they became too burdensome. The metal hulk made a strange sight for the masses of people traveling in the opposite direction toward the countryside. “Some were riding bicycles and many were walking,” Nuon Chea said. “I know it was difficult for them to travel but this was to escape death.” The trip was agonizing and brutal. They walked for days with barely any food or water. Many died from exhaustion, illness, and malnutrition. When Nuon Chea arrived in Phnom Penh a week and a half after the Khmer Rouge victory, he was greeted with silence and was satisfied by the quiet. It was what he and Pol Pot had planned all along. “Nobody came to welcome us and nobody knew us, knew that we were the leaders. So we traveled in peace,” Nuon Chea said. “Phnom Penh was empty and very dirty. Lon Nol had no sanitation for the people. There was garbage everywhere and bad smells from the toilets. There was no electricity and there were some dead people left in the houses.” The once loud and bustling Phnom Penh was a city in ruins, with bombed-­out buildings and stacks of appliances that would eventually rust in the middle of the road. The evacuation of the cities marked the beginning of Year Zero, deemed as such to illustrate Khmer Rouge plans for Cambodia’s new beginning. As Nuon Chea surveyed the capital, he thought about what would come next. After decades of hiding, running, and moving to avoid capture, their time had finally come. This was their chance to create a new, perfect world, without all the greed, decadence, and arrogance that had caused Cambodia to spiral into wickedness. Nuon Chea envisioned a society in which the people were clean and pure, not muddied by the dirty habits of the past. The Khmer Rouge planned to erase Cambodia’s 2,000-­year history and rebuild the ideal society. They would go farther than any other communist regime in history,

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repainting their country from a blank canvas. All the foundations of culture and society would be banished or twisted, from religion to marriage and family. The class divisions of the past would be eliminated and everyone would work equally toward the industrialization of the nation. “We wanted people to be not too poor and not too rich,” Nuon Chea said. “If they are too poor and have nothing to eat, they will try to steal, but if they are too rich, where will the money go? To bars and girls.” Individuality no longer existed and the concept of privacy vanished. Everyone would wear the same black clothes, eat the same food, and live in the same kinds of homes. This new nation would be Democratic Kampuchea. Pol Pot was the new leader, but his identity would remain hidden for the first two years of Khmer Rouge rule. The leadership was simply dubbed the “Center.” The Communist Party of Kampuchea also remained nameless for two years and was known only as “Angka,” the Organization. In one of the most sweeping changes of any communist regime, the Khmer Rouge eliminated what they saw as the main evils of capitalism: money, markets, and private property. To rebuild the country from a clean slate, Cambodians could not be tainted with these sordid aspects of the past. The exchange of goods was controlled by the state, and the government owned all property. “We did not prohibit money and markets forever but we closed them temporarily,” Nuon Chea said. “The people were going to have money again and the markets would be reopened. But after liberation, if we did not stop all these operations, how could we have controlled the situation and how would the poor people survive? We did not say that money is useless, but we must know how to use it and think about the interest of our nation and our people.” The Khmer Rouge did have money printed in China in preparation for future use. “The printed money was sent to us in 1975 or 1976 but we were trying to decide the right time to use it,” Nuon Chea said. “We wanted to wait until the situation was normal.” Nuon Chea and Pol Pot developed a plan under which people could earn money by selling goods or raising pigs and cows after their workday ended. Private crops could be grown outside people’s homes, but the rice fields would still belong to the government. Cadre could use the money to buy extra food and materials for their homes that they did not receive in their rations. The Khmer Rouge also intended to establish state-­run markets that would be operated by the cooperatives. In 1978, plans were drawn up to reintroduce money and reopen markets. But in the beginning, cash was outlawed because Khmer Rouge leaders were worried that if money still existed it would be used to corrupt and bribe cadre, which would destroy the movement.

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In his youth, Nuon Chea saw how power and money sullied people. He saw how people turned ugly. It seemed that no matter if they were rich or poor, both classes thought they never had enough. Money always left people wanting more. Nuon Chea knew money was a necessary evil, but evil, nonetheless. He remembered his parents struggling to pay back loans, and his mother going without the food she needed when she was pregnant with his younger brother and sisters. Those memories made him vow that the Khmer Rouge would eliminate the forces that made his mother and father suffer. During the depression that hit the world economy in the 1930s, rice farmers in Cambodia were particularly hard hit. The financial burdens exposed them to the pressure of moneylenders, who charged interest rates of 100 to 200 percent. Nuon Chea’s family suffered from enormous debt. “My father owed a rich man. He had no money to pay him back and the rich man came to demand the money,” he said. “My father escaped out the back of the house. He asked me where my father was and I told him he was not there and had left for the rice field. My father owed that man since before I was born, and until I was around twenty years old he could not pay him back.” Nuon Chea had the privileged position of being the oldest boy among the six surviving siblings; four brothers and sisters had died in their youth. And if anyone was going to raise the family out of its modest farming origins, his mother thought, it would be Nuon Chea. From the moment Nuon Chea came into the world on July 7, 1926, he was his mother’s favorite, and he carried the family’s hopes for a better future. Special sacrifices were made to make sure he never lacked anything. When Nuon Chea was a baby, a nanny was hired to look after only him to make sure he didn’t cry and had everything he needed. “My mother always praised him, saying he was very clever and good at studying,” said Lao Poun, Nuon Chea’s younger sister. “My mother loved him the most.” Nuon Chea rarely talks about his father, but he often speaks fondly of his mother. Everyone who is part of or knows the family mentions Nuon Chea’s close relationship with his mother, Deng Peanh, and points out that they looked like each other. A photograph of his mother, next to a photo of his father in a dark business suit, no longer reflects the resemblance Nuon Chea and his mother once shared. But when he was growing up it was a trait that brought the two closer. “Nuon Chea looked exactly like his mother. They had the same face, the same body, the way they walked was the same. The only difference was one is a man and one is a woman,” neighbor Sok Yun said. Nuon Chea was born in the rice bowl of Cambodia. With its fertile, rich soil, Battambang province in the northwest could feed the whole country.

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On a plot of land of over an acre, Nuon Chea’s family lived in a thatch-­roofed house of wood and brick. Fruit was plentiful, and whenever Nuon Chea had a craving he could pick from the orange, papaya, and mango trees outside his home. On his way to school, he often passed by monks in their bright orange robes as they walked through the village collecting food from the villagers. The sounds of birds chirping and pagoda bells ringing filled the air. Oxcarts and bicycles were the only modes of transportation. The water of the Sang Ke River was clean enough that Nuon Chea often took baths there and drank the cool water. Farming was the basis of life and work. As is true for most Cambodians today, the standard of living for Wat Koh villagers depended on the weather and the harvest. His parents did not own their rice field, which produced about 80 sacks of rice a year to eat and to sell. His mother’s grandfather owned 20 acres of land at Phnom Sampov, about 7 miles from the provincial town, and allowed Nuon Chea’s parents to farm there. It would have been an ideal place to grow up, if it weren’t for the French, the barangs as the Cambodians called them. After more than 500 years of fending off attacks from and being ruled by Vietnam and Thailand, King Norodom signed treaties in 1863 and 1864 that made Cambodia a protectorate of France, in hopes of shielding the kingdom from the clutches of its neighbors. By this time, parts of northwestern Cambodia, including Nuon Chea’s home province of Battambang, were controlled by Thailand. The French were not satisfied with Cambodia’s protectorate status, which gave them power only over Cambodia’s foreign policy. After several uprisings against the French, King Norodom in 1884 was forced to sign a treaty that gave the French control over Cambodia’s governmental affairs. Cambodia was essentially turned into a French colony, and Cambodian peasants would soon see their suffering rise, as they would pay the highest taxes per capita in French Indochina. Battambang’s exposure to the Westerners was delayed until 1907, when the province changed hands from the Thais to the French. When the French took over, they modernized the country by building roads and other infrastructure. A railway linked Battambang to the capital and to Thailand, and the Battambang market was built in 1936. But Cambodia remained an agriculture-­based economy as the French did little to develop the industrial sector, which was essentially nonexistent. Revenues from taxes were siphoned off to France and to Vietnam, France’s prize possession in Indochina. The Khmer were seen as lazy and not as industrious as their Vietnamese counterparts. As a result, Vietnamese civil servants filled many Cambodian government jobs and Vietnamese coolies were used to work on

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Cambodian rubber plantations. The policy only heightened the Cambodian inferiority complex when it came to Vietnam. Although the French eliminated debt slavery and feudal farming establishments, these anachronistic systems still existed in the countryside. And poor Cambodian peasants who could not pay the exorbitant taxes were forced to contribute through the corvée service, which imposed forced labor for up to 90 days on public projects. “During the French time, the French treated Cambodians very badly, so the feelings of hatred and revenge started then,” Nuon Chea said. Nuon Chea grew up in a time of unrest in Southeast Asia, as independence movements in the 1920s and 1930s were taking their first steps in throwing off colonialism. Cambodia, however, would mark this period with relative calm. Communist revolts were taking place in Vietnam and Laos, while Thailand was going through its own political upheaval with a 1932 bloodless coup that ended the era of absolute monarchy and instigated the democracy movement there. In 1930, Ho Chi Minh founded the Indochinese Communist Party, which was supposed to be an umbrella organization composed of communist members from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. But in reality Vietnam controlled the ICP, and there were few representatives from Cambodia and Laos. Still Cambodia was not immune to the nationalist fervor erupting across the region, and the population occasionally demonstrated its hostility. The anger of Cambodians against French rule flared up in 1933 when Battambang residents rose up against taxation. The country’s first Khmer­language newspaper, Nagaravatta, was established in 1936. The publication used subtle means to encourage independence and called on Cambodians to abandon their complacency and catch up with the Chinese and Vietnamese in economic prosperity. Although it was expected that Cambodian children help their parents tend the farm once they were old enough, Nuon Chea never learned the ways of the land. As evidence of his mother’s favoritism, he was allowed to spend most of his days alone with his nose buried in a book. “Sometimes I helped my father look after cows and helped carry water, but I did not help out much because I just focused on studying,” he said. “I was not a child who liked to go for walks and play around. I tried to learn and save money. Even with friends, I chose them carefully.” Deng Chhoeng, Nuon Chea’s aunt, described him as “a good child. He was quiet and stayed at home and always thought about studying. He didn’t really make friends or play outside. So the old people loved him because he liked to study and did not get in trouble.” Nuon Chea also wasn’t close to his siblings, although he said he had a normal relationship with them

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when they were growing up. “Sometimes we fought and did not talk to each other but then we were friends again,” he said. The French had done little to improve the primitive Cambodian school system, and opened the first high school offering a full secondary education only in 1935. But education was still seen as a key factor for success for the average Cambodian farmer. Nuon Chea’s family recognized his scholastic nature and encouraged his studious habits. Nuon Chea was aware of his family’s and particularly his mother’s hopes for him. “My mother put all her expectations on me,” he said. Nuon Chea bitterly recalled how the underprivileged were treated under the old ways, with status based on income and not character. Although Nuon Chea criticized the French, it was the Cambodians themselves and how they behaved under colonial rule that he found the most shameful. He described it as the “bow and kneel” time, when the upper class and government officials humiliated the poor. He relayed one story about a district secretary who kidnapped a poor man who owed him money. The official forced the poor man to work for him as a cyclo driver, but the man ran away. He was soon arrested by the police and handed back over to the official, who beat him as Nuon Chea and other villagers watched. “At that time if we wanted to meet a district chief, we had to walk on our knees,” he said. “Everything was in the hands of capitalists and feudalists. I hated the people who worked for the French more than I hated the French. It was not the French who beat their students. I hated clerks and district officials and rich people and capitalists. Even students in town and students from the countryside had different ideas and town students looked down on students from the countryside. I was treated badly and beaten by students from town. They hit me on my head frequently.” But the greatest travesty in Nuon Chea’s eyes was the way teachers treated their students in colonial times. In Cambodia, as in Asian culture in general, elders are given special respect. Teachers were given even greater reverence because of their place in society as educators. But instead of fulfilling their duty, Nuon Chea felt that Cambodian teachers during the colonial period betrayed the people. “The teachers at that time were very powerful. Parents were scared of teachers and their children were beaten. For me, school at that time was like hell. Teachers borrowed from the rich people and so the rich people’s children were favored. One time the children were playing outside and chasing each other. One child, Beut Lan, chased a rich child and the rich child got tired and the rich child’s parents saw them. The father talked to the teacher and asked why the teacher let his child run and become very tired. The next day the teacher called Beut Lan to the front of the class and he was

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beaten and kicked. The teacher owed the rich child’s parents so he needed to pay attention to this child. During class time, the teacher called the other students to watch the beating and told us not to follow Beut Lan.” He recalled the memory as if it were yesterday. When World War II broke out, Cambodia bounced between the French and the Japanese according to the tide of the conflict. The Cambodian pie was divided even farther when Battambang and parts of Siem Reap province were taken over by Thailand after the Franco-­Thai war of 1940-­41, reducing Cambodia’s territory by one-­third. But across the region the attention World War II demanded from the Western colonial powers provided an opening for independence movements burgeoning in Singapore, Indonesia, Burma, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. In 1941, Ho Chi Minh established guerrilla forces called the League for the Independence of Vietnam, Vietminh for short, to emphasize the nationalist fight for independence over the class struggle of communism. Japanese troops arrived in Phnom Penh that same year, after France had surrendered to Germany. Still Japan allowed France to retain administrative control of Cambodia. The French Vichy government chose Norodom Sihanouk, eighteen, to succeed his grandfather to the throne. Although the French thought the young Sihanouk would be pliable, he proved to be more politically astute than his predecessors, and he would play a key role in Cambodia’s future throughout the next sixty years. In 1942, the first mass demonstrations against the French were organized in Phnom Penh, while the pro-­independence Khmer Issarak (Liberated Khmer) movement created in Thailand was fanning out along the Thai-­Cambodian border. During these momentous changes in Cambodia, Nuon Chea was sent to Thailand when he was sixteen to finish his last two years of high school. When Thailand regained control of Battambang after brief fighting with the French, Nuon Chea had been unable to continue his studies at his French school in Battambang. But Thai officials told Battambang residents that competent students could study in Thailand. Nuon Chea’s father knew a Cambodian monk who lived in Bangkok, who said Nuon Chea could stay at a pagoda there. His move to Thailand made him a local celebrity in his village. “Nuon Chea was well known because he got a higher education in Thailand,” neighbor Soy Sovann said. “There were others who got a higher education, but they went only to Phnom Penh. Everybody knew Nuon Chea was smart.” His name was changed to Rong Loeut to make him sound like a Thai native. This would be the first of dozens of name changes he would make in his life. Soon after meeting the monk, Nuon Chea packed some rice and dry fish and

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traveled by train to Bangkok with his father and the monk. His father stayed a few days to help him settle in, but then he was on his own. In Thailand, Nuon Chea lived at Wat Benchamabophit (Marble Temple), where many Cambodian monks had lived since construction on the pagoda finished in 1910. The temple, now a tourist attraction, is made of Italian marble; the interior of the main building is decorated with lacquer and gold. Numerous bronze Buddha statues stand against the walls of the inner courtyard. The pagoda was much nicer than any Nuon Chea had seen in Cambodia, with each monk having his own room. It was the first time he was exposed to some aspects of modern life and his first taste of customs of a different land. “I was very surprised when I lived in the pagoda because Thai monks sat on a chair at a table to have rice,” he said. “In Cambodia, I never saw monks sit on a chair at a table. Cambodian monks only sat on a mat.” Nuon Chea was relieved to learn that Thai teachers treated students better than their Cambodian counterparts did. As in Cambodia, Nuon Chea spent much of his time reading. When he wasn’t attending school or studying, he served the monks and attended Buddhist sermons. Every morning, he cleaned bowls for the monks to use to pick up food from the villagers. Nuon Chea’s parents sent him a paltry sum to buy food, which forced him to reheat his rice several times because he couldn’t always afford to buy more. He depended on the generosity of monks for his meals. According to Nuon Chea’s sister Poun, Nuon Chea’s mother told relatives that “the monk chief loved Nuon Chea and praised him.” Once a week, Nuon Chea listened to the sermons and prayers of the monks, as was required of the boys who stayed there. When Nuon Chea graduated from high school in 1944, he took examinations to attend the necessary two years of preparatory classes at the University of Moral Science and Politics before he could become a law school student. Contrary to historians’ reports, Nuon Chea said he did not earn a scholarship but was able to attend the university by passing the examinations. As always, Nuon Chea was a good student and did not let his mind wander to girls, parties, and other distractions that captivate young people’s attention when they have their first taste of freedom. “I always listened to lectures and went to school every day,” he said. Up until this point, Nuon Chea did not yet see a part for himself in his country’s political future. “At that time, I did not join a political movement because I was trying to learn, but I had a spirit of loving the nation since then.” His university years would change that. The government affairs of Thailand, not the colonial predicament of Cambodia, led to Nuon Chea’s political birth. Although Thailand had avoided

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colonization, making it the only independent Southeast Asian nation, the country could not resist the suction of World War II. Brief skirmishes between Thailand and Japan led the two countries to sign an alliance pact at the end of 1941. Soon after, Japanese troops arrived in Thailand and used the country to launch attacks against the British-­controlled territories of Singapore, Burma, and the Malay peninsula. During the years of World War II, Thailand was under the dictatorship of Prime Minister Phibul Songkhran, an ally of the Japanese. In 1942, Thailand was rewarded by Japan with land from Burma and the Malay peninsula after Thailand declared war against Britain and the United States. But as Japan acted more like a conqueror than an ally, anti-­Japanese sentiment grew and coalesced into the Free Thai (Thai Serei) movement, organized with the help of the United States by Phibul’s chief rival, Finance Minister Pridi Banomyong Pridi. He declared null and void Phibul’s statement of hostilities against the Allied forces, saying it was against the will of the Thai people. “I saw Thai people living with shortages and being oppressed by authorities, while the people in Cambodia and Laos were treated badly and killed by the French,” Nuon Chea said. “All these things made me think about the nation and politics. I decided to join the struggle because I saw oppression of Thais, Cambodians and Laotians.” When Nuon Chea arrived at the university, the institution was at the center of the Free Thai movement aimed at ridding Thailand of Japanese influence. Nuon Chea found himself caught up in the political stirrings of the students. Established in 1934 by Pridi, the University of Moral Science and Politics, now Thammasat University, was the first Thai institution of higher education open to the public. Because it was established in the spirit of providing an equal opportunity for education for everyone, the faculty and students from the start saw themselves as promoters of democracy and the university quickly became known for its political activism. While Nuon Chea was taking in this politically charged scene, Allied bombing raids in Bangkok threatened to derail his studies. He sometimes had to hide in a nearby train station. The bombings forced the university to discontinue classes, and Nuon Chea returned home to Battambang. But he was desperate to carry on in some way, conscious of the fact that he was the only child in his family to receive a higher education. He continued his studies through correspondence courses, with professors sending lessons out to his home. “At that time, I started thinking about politics because that school was a good school and I started to get ideas,” Nuon Chea said. “Thai teachers were

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democratic and taught the students to love the people. Most of the teachers were Thai Serei and so were the students. I realized I was tired of past society. I began to read books about nationalism and the struggle for independence.” The nationalist sentiments of the Thai students nurtured Nuon Chea’s ambitions for his own country. He dreamed of an independent Cambodia free of foreign domination. The upheaval in Thailand finally gave him the political language to put his country’s own dilemma into context. He began reading Thai Communist Party newspapers. When he was able to return to Bangkok toward the end of the war, he attended events held by Thai politicians who were drumming up grassroots nationalist support in the villages. “In the evening, I always listened to the campaign speeches of politicians from various parties,” Nuon Chea said. “They talked on the roofs of cars and had loudspeakers. Thousands of people came to listen.” He became friends with a group of progressive students who held meetings to debate politics and the future of society. They asked him to give speeches on the treatment of Cambodians under colonialism. “I talked about suppression by France and how the Cambodian people suffered and were slaves of France,” Nuon Chea said. “I told them teachers beat students and I talked about Cambodian youths’ future. I talked on behalf of the Battambang people. I did not have much ability at that time but I talked about what I saw in society.” In 1944, when it became clear that Japan was losing the war, the National Assembly overthrew Phibul. Thailand went through three prime ministers before Pridi was appointed in 1946. Soon afterward, Battambang and the other northwestern areas seized by Thailand were returned to Cambodia. Around this time, when Nuon Chea was twenty, he was invited to join the Thai Democratic Youth Organization, which was supported by the Thai Communist Party and communists in the Soviet Union and China. Members included teachers, scholars and lawyers, most of whom had great influence over the left-­leaning students of Thammasat. Nuon Chea recruited members for the organization by attending seminars or lectures and choosing those he saw as having a nationalist spirit. He read every book he could get his hands on about patriots who fought to free their countries from colonial rulers. “I read George Washington’s biography. He was a good leader and liberated his country. I praise George Washington. He was a compatriot and he had a spirit of loving the nation so I respect him.” Though tuition was free, Nuon Chea didn’t have enough money to buy his law school books. To support his studies, he worked as a clerk at the Ministry of Agriculture, but quickly grew bored. He then worked at the Ministry

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of Finance as a clerk on the central registration team, which collected taxes and accepted expense documents from the finance departments of all the provinces. Meanwhile, in Cambodia, the Japanese removed the French Vichy government, three years after the French had cracked down on anticolonial protesters in1942. King Norodom Sihanouk declared an independent government, but the new regime would not last long: the French would soon return. Vietnamese communists were having better luck in their independence fight, finding the opening they needed with the end of World War II. After the August Revolution, Ho Chi Minh and his followers took control of northern Vietnam, declaring independence on September 23, 1945, with the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). The breakdown of negotiations with the French led Ho Chi Minh to declare war on France in 1946. The First Indochina war had begun. In China after forces briefly united to fight the Japanese during World War II, civil war resumed in 1946 between Mao Zedong’s Communist troops and Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalist supporters. Meanwhile, the best hope in Cambodia was the Democratic Party, which had been formed in 1946 after France gave permission for its creation. The party was supported by the masses because of its goals of independence and democracy, and won 50 of 67 seats in the Constituent Assembly. The following year, the party won 54 of 90 seats in the National Assembly, prompting King Sihanouk to dissolve the Assembly in 1948. Eventually the party would not be able to survive the persecution and manipulation by its opponents. In Thailand, Phibul regained his status as prime minister after a military coup in 1947. Thammasat students, including Nuon Chea, rallied against him. Nuon Chea was tasked with organizing demonstrations against Phibul, setting up tables, chairs, and loud speakers where thousands of students would gather. Thai soldiers sometimes clashed with the demonstrators and fired shots into the crowd to disperse the protesters. Nuon Chea also campaigned for Pridi, a staunch supporter of anticolonial movements like the Khmer Issaraks, who operated along the Thai border and wielded more strength than the fledgling Cambodian communists backed by the Vietnamese. At night, Nuon Chea and other students secretly attached sticks to roadside trees to put up posters denouncing Phibul and his power grab. These activities may seem insignificant, but Nuon Chea was ecstatic to be fully engaged in the political events unfurling around him. And the clandestine meetings with other political activists led to an aura of being part of something bigger than himself. “We told people not to accept Phibul and his bad government of the

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past,” Nuon Chea said. “What we were doing was bringing democracy back to Thais.” Nuon Chea remained untouched by the cynicism and cutthroat tactics that often characterize politics. Foreign domination angered him, and he fought against it with zeal, but those feelings were tempered by his naïveté and idealism. His time at Thammasat University was punctuated by big ideas and big dreams, mixed with the innocence and outrage of youth. He had not yet formed specific ideas on Cambodia’s future; he just knew he wanted his nation to be free and independent like Thailand. Swept up in the fervor of nationalism, he became convinced that Southeast Asia was on the cusp of a new world order in which Asians would have control over their own fates, and he wanted to be part of it. “At the beginning, I didn’t understand about the concepts of a political party, but I felt that I loved my country and felt patriotic,” he said. “The idea of revolution came later but that’s why I walked the other way. That’s why I chose the way of revolution.” Cambodia was going through its own political awakening, as various anti­ colonial movements embraced armed resistance. Pro-­independence forces attacked the French in the countryside, but the groups were not unified. The Thais backed the Khmer Issaraks in the northwest while the Vietnamese coordinated Cambodian leftists working along the eastern border. But after the military coup in Thailand the Khmer Issaraks had to turn to the Vietnamese communists for support. The Vietnamese tried to combine the Issaraks and the Cambodian communists, but many Issaraks were against Marxist-­Lenin doctrine. The disagreement eventually led to a split in the Cambodian independence groups. It was a complex and confusing period in Cambodian politics as various anticolonial groups alternately united and competed with one another. The Issarak forces numbered in the tens of thousands but were not under one organization. They aligned under distinct leaders with differing agendas. The disorder only helped King Sihanouk, who later claimed the independence fight as his own. In this disarray, Nuon Chea returned home briefly in 1949 to attend the funeral for his father, who died during a cholera epidemic that ravaged the village. “I was very sad that my father died before he reached old age,” Nuon Chea said. Nuon Chea returned to Bangkok after the funeral, and a few months later he took the next step in his political career. Already engrossed in the leftist movement through his membership in the Thai Democratic Youth Organization, Nuon Chea joined the Thai Communist Party in March 1950. As a party member, Nuon Chea began his formal education as a cadre. He assumed the

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name Kam Phon to hide his identity. When Nuon Chea had work to do for the party, he left the pagoda to avoid attracting the attention of the monks. He stayed with his Thai communist sponsor, Roum Vong Phan, whom Nuon Chea suspected of being a member of the Chinese Communist Party. Nuon Chea began thinking about returning to Cambodia. The war against the French continued in Vietnam while Chinese communists had just declared victory in 1949, establishing the People’s Republic of China. Years later, China would become the top supporter of the Khmer Rouge, contributing millions of dollars to the movement of their Cambodian comrades. The victory in China gave greater hope to communists in Southeast Asia. In February 1950, the Central Committee of the Indochinese Communist Party decided to back the formation of independence armies in Cambodia and Laos to fight for liberation from France. With the help of the Vietnamese communists, about 200 independence activists gathered in April 1950 at Kompong Som Leu in southwestern Cambodia to hold the first national meeting of the Cambodian resistance effort. Delegates established the United Issarak Front, and Nuon Chea’s uncle-­in-­law, Sieu Heng, who had joined the pro-­leftist independence movement five years earlier, was chosen as one of the front’s leaders. Nuon Chea continued his work in the Thai government. He stayed at the Ministry of Finance for four years before he moved to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in July 1950. He was appointed a clerk in the department that handled French Indochina and Burma. There he learned more about the political situation in his own country. During this time, he heard about the assassination of the leader of the popular Democratic Party in Cambodia, Ieu Koeuss, killed by a member of the rival conservatives, who were aligned with the French. The Democratic Party represented the philosophies of the communists and Ieu Koeuss’s death sparked anger among those who supported the leftist movement. “I got information about French people shooting Cambodians and Laotians dead along the Mekong,” Nuon Chea said. “I got news frequently about the bad treatment of Cambodians by France. I thought I could not stay here. I had to go to Cambodia and help liberate my country. How could I stay in Thailand when France was treating Cambodians as slaves?” Nuon Chea had never considered the material wealth that various careers could bring him. While his relatives obtained jobs that allowed them to buy cars and nice homes, Nuon Chea only contemplated how he could best serve his country. In law school, he had considered being a diplomat, which is why he applied to work at the Foreign Affairs Ministry. “But later I thought it was

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useless because Cambodia was a colony and under oppression by France,” he said. “So if I continue at the Foreign Affairs ministry, what could I do for the nation? That’s why I quit and decided to work for the nation.” Because of his political activism and work as a civil servant, Nuon Chea had trouble finding time to study. And as he became more immersed in the political environment, he felt he would be selling out if he pursued a career in law. At the end of each year of law school, students took an exam to determine whether they could go on to the next year. Nuon Chea failed the test and remained in his first year of law school during his three years there. In the end, he quit school and dedicated his life to his causes. After a few months of working in the Communist Party, he asked to become a true resistance fighter, which meant returning to Cambodia to lobby for independence. Vietnamese communists knew Cambodians were involved in the Thai Communist Party, and they asked the Thais to take one of its Cambodian members to work in Cambodia, building up the movement there. A Thai Communist Party member arranged for Nuon Chea to meet a Vietnamese counterpart at a market near a railway station in Bangkok. The Vietnamese arrived alone, and they talked for an hour, without revealing their names. The Vietnamese asked Nuon Chea to return to Cambodia to work secretly to build up a pro-­independence network. Nuon Chea eagerly agreed. The two met later at a Bangkok bus station and traveled to the Issarak’s Ta Sanh office in Samlot district in Battambang, where Nuon Chea would begin his fight for independence. When Nuon Chea returned home in 1950, he did not tell his family that he had come back to Cambodia. To hide his identity and raise money for the communist movement, Nuon Chea briefly tried to make it in the capitalist business world. In 1956 he worked as a clerk in an import business run by a Chinese man. The company imported clothes, eyeglasses, and other items from Hong Kong and Singapore. Although his Chinese boss liked him because he was honest, Nuon Chea hated his job. The pay was good and eased the cost of living burden, but he felt he was drowning in a world of immorality. As an assistant, Nuon Chea did the dirty work that ensured the smooth operation of the import business. Every Saturday, he met secretly with customs officials, who borrowed the company car and asked him to introduce them to girls. Customs officials also threw parties, which the company had to partly sponsor. Nuon Chea’s boss sent him to the parties to hand over envelopes filled with money. After six months he quit. “I could not be patient when I saw this, so I stopped working there. How could I find a girl for them?” he said. “I was a compatriot

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so why should I respect corrupt people?” The communist party decided that Nuon Chea should work only for the movement. This provided Nuon Chea with money to buy food, but since the party had few resources, he often ate only watergrass. While he lived a chaste life, he saw his relatives being seduced by money and power, taking bribes to buy fancy cars. Many of Nuon Chea’s family members were relatively wealthy and worked for the government, including his brother Lao Bun Long, a customs official. With his education, Nuon Chea could have pursued that life, but he detested everything about it. “My brother was really corrupt and was always buying different secondhand Mercedes. All civil servants were corrupt. Society was very bad,” he said. “But it was a separate issue from me. I never blamed my brother for what he was doing because he was independent and I could not interfere. And he is the only one who always fed my mother and gave her money. For me, I was never able to help my mother.” In rare meetings with family members, the conversation would inevitably turn to material goods. “They talked about corruption and how much money they made and I did not like to listen so I tried to avoid them,” Nuon Chea said. “That’s why I told my mother that what my relatives were doing was up to them but I did not want it.” Family members often asked Nuon Chea why he was poor when he went to college and could have a well-­paying job. They often pointed to Sak Sutsakhan, a distant cousin, who was an army colonel and would go on to become a top commander under Lon Nol. Nuon Chea’s mother also compared him to the colonel, who had studied in France. “They told me I did not try hard enough,” Nuon Chea said. “They told me I learned like Sak Sutsakhan but I had nothing and I was useless. What they were saying was to make me confess to my involvement in the communist movement.” But to Nuon Chea, his tattered clothing and meager belongings were a badge of honor, evidence of his moral fiber. Growing up in Phnom Penh, Pol Pot also witnessed the practices of what he believed to be an elitist, corrupt society. It seemed the world was absent of decent, simple people. All he saw was decadence and greed. He would come to hate the feudalist regime and the monarchy, although Khmer Rouge principles stipulated that imperialists and colonialists were the main enemy. Like Nuon Chea, Pol Pot detested the undeserving respect demanded by public officials. “Pol Pot hated the feudalist regime because he was treated badly,” Nuon Chea said. “Pol Pot hated the feudalist regime more than colonialism because there was no democracy.”

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While Pol Pot was a novice in a Phnom Penh monastery, he was often sent to the royal palace to pick up food that the king had arranged for the monks. One of the palace cooks responsible for feeding the monks stole money from the food budget and only made fried pumpkin for the monks. “When the cook in the royal palace died, she would be born again as an imp because she stole the money,” Pol Pot told Nuon Chea. “When she died, there was a rumor that she became a hellish being or a demon. I was very scared of demons and monsters.” When he went to the royal palace to pick up the food, the women of the king’s harem sometimes tried to seduce Pol Pot. “They always caught boys who were handsome and beautiful,” Nuon Chea said. “Pol Pot said that many girls were in the King’s harem and that it was an immoral place.” Nuon Chea and Pol Pot often talked about their youth growing up away from their parents. When Pol Pot was around nine or ten, he was sent to live with his cousin, a consort of the king’s son. After Pol Pot finished his stint as a monk novice, he lived with his older brother, a clerk in the palace. His brother often yelled at and beat him, treating him as the maid of the household. Like Nuon Chea, Pol Pot went on to college in a foreign country. In 1949, he earned a government scholarship to study radio-­electricity in France, where he lived an austere life. While other students went dancing or visited seaside towns, Pol Pot researched politics and watched demonstrations by French workers. “He liked to visit gardens,” Nuon Chea said. “He couldn’t afford to eat good food so he ate only soup that the French workers ate. He never went to a restaurant or bar. He just read books.” Pol Pot was particularly fascinated by the May Day protests when he saw French police using clubs to control the crowds. Besides reading about politics, Pol Pot read true crime books about investigations conducted by French police. While he wore secondhand clothes, his rich college friends like Lon Non, younger brother of General Lon Nol, bought new clothes. Pol Pot had first met Lon Non at the Collège Norodom Sihanouk junior high school. “He and Lon Non were close friends and went on walks together in France,” Nuon Chea said. “And when they returned they contacted each other and went on walks until Pol Pot escaped to the forest. Lon Non never gave any news to Pol Pot and he didn’t know what Pol Pot was doing. I don’t know what happened to him. He was probably killed.” Lon Non was executed in Phnom Penh soon after the Khmer Rouge took power. During his time in Europe, Pol Pot traveled illegally to the former Yugoslavia, which had fallen out of favor with the Soviet Union after Tito broke ties with Moscow. The trip made a huge impression on Brother Number One. Pol Pot was part of a volunteer labor group made up of Cambodian and

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French students. “Pol Pot really liked it,” Nuon Chea said. “He saw how Yugoslavian people worked together and built the country by themselves. Pol Pot did work, digging and farming in cooperatives.” Cambodia would later outdo Tito’s Yugoslavia in creating massive labor camps. When Pol Pot returned from France, his mother was seriously ill, perhaps with cancer. Pol Pot found her to be incontinent when he visited her, and was forced to clean and wipe her after she went to the bathroom. “She wanted me to serve her before she died because she gave birth to me and it was to show gratitude,” Pol Pot told Nuon Chea. His father died in the late 1950s before Pol Pot left for the jungles. He attended his father’s funeral and organized a traditional cremation ceremony for him. “I said to him Bang (elder brother), you met and served your mother and father before they died,” Nuon Chea said. “But for me, I did not arrive on time when my father died and my mother died while I was fighting Youn (the Vietnamese) at the border. I could not serve and meet them before they died. I felt very regretful when I was reminded about this. But I thought liberating the country was very important.” After Nuon Chea and Pol Pot met in the 1950s and began developing the principles of the Khmer Rouge movement, they remembered with disgust the sinfulness of the past. After they officially formed the Cambodian Communist Party in the 1960s, Nuon Chea and Pol Pot would gradually come to the decision that they needed to implement a total revolution in every aspect, radically altering the Cambodian way of life. They wanted to change not just the economic structure, but society as a whole. Cambodia would become a puritanical culture, void of the vices that degraded past society. The focus on morality as a characteristic of the ideal revolutionary was a major component of this new world. Greed, lust, envy, materialism, selfishness, vanity, and dependency were all traits that cadre had to work to eliminate from their minds. Gambling, adultery, drinking alcohol, and even music and dancing were prohibited or disdained. Militaristic revolutionary songs replaced the gentle, high-­pitched pop tunes of Khmer singers. The sound of women gossiping and children laughing disappeared, replaced by an eerie silence. In a strange twist of the hierarchy of crimes, cheating on a spouse and stealing food were seen as worse crimes than killing, and often punished with death. All Cambodians were now judged by their ability to work and serve the nation. The Khmer Rouge demanded that cadre subjugate their personal desires for the national good. The group even changed the native language so that every term was in

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the context of war and revolution. The respectful titles and formal ways of speaking that exist in most Asian cultures disappeared. Everyone was addressed as comrade, brother, father, sister, mother. “Struggle” was the operative word and a term Nuon Chea used repeatedly in every interview. Farmers “struggled” to grow rice, while food items other than rice were called strategic crops. Nuon Chea applied Khmer Rouge values to himself, saying he had to set an example because he was a leader. His relationship with his children is now strained because he did not allow them to profit from his status. “Now you look at my children, they have no positions,” Nuon Chea said. “My children blame me a lot. They are not happy with me because I have nothing to give them. They said I just thought about the party and did not think about my family.” The Khmer Rouge leadership forced their vision of the new world onto their fellow Cambodians through the cooperative system. Set up during the civil war of 1970-­75, the cooperative would serve as the basis for controlling the population. All Cambodians would now live in a communal fashion and work toward the common good. They would plant rice, raise animals, catch fish, and plant fruit trees to develop Cambodia into a self-­sufficient country that would not need any outside help. People were forced to be totally dependent on the leadership to provide for them. In some zones, Cambodians were not allowed to forage for themselves. Those who were allowed to scavenge did not have time because of the long hours they worked. “If there was privacy and everyone did things by themselves, no one would have had anything to eat,” Nuon Chea said. “The cooperatives were very good to help all the people who were moved from the towns to the countryside. If we did not create them, people could not survive because the people who moved from the towns had no rice fields, and the poorest people in the countryside had no cows for cultivation. The cooperatives allowed us to collect the people together and have everyone eat equally.” But the cooperatives were overwhelmed with the influx of new people that came with the emptying of the cities after the Khmer Rouge victory. In some areas, the population doubled. The increasing competition for food and shelter created tensions between city and countryside people. Rural Cambodians were already suspicious of city dwellers; some were angry with them, seeing them as the face of the unfair government policies of the past. Furthermore, some of the urban residents had never farmed before and often made mistakes in their work, at the cost of producing food for the cooperative. The animosity between the two groups was exacerbated by further divisions the

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Khmer Rouge established to label the people. To keep track of those with the appropriate revolutionary spirit, Cambodians were divided into three categories. The top tier, which included the poor and middle peasants and workers, had full rights. In the next level were the candidates, those who had been upper-­class peasants and petty bourgeois. The lowest group was the depositees, comprising capitalists and foreigners. All the people who were evacuated from the cities were labeled depositees, regardless of whether they had come to the city from the countryside as refugees. The people were also divided into “new” and “old” people. The new people, or April 17 people, were the city residents. The old people, or base people, were all the citizens living in the countryside at the time of the Khmer Rouge victory. The old people were given special privileges and had positions of power in the cooperatives. They were seen as the true symbols of the revolution. The new people had to work harder to earn the respect of the cooperative leadership and often survived by bartering their hidden stashes of gold and other items for food. Nuon Chea denied for the first two years of our interviews with him that the people were divided. “We are the same person and leaders never think and consider people to be ‘old’ and ‘new’,” he initially said. Later he acknowledged that the people were split into groups to “make sure who they were.” “The base people are those who were in the struggle and the April 17 people are those who were liberated,” Nuon Chea said. “We always advised our cadre to take care of the new people and to make them equal. Even though they are April 17 people, they still had the right to work in the cooperative. In the beginning we grouped them like that so it would be easy to recognize where they were from. We wanted to know who was working for us.” Nuon Chea said that for party membership purposes the people had to be divided into categories, just as they were when he first joined the communist movement as a college student in Thailand. At that time, it took him six months to become a full-­rights member of the party. Just as it took time to prove that he was a worthy member of the movement, so too did the new people have to show the Khmer Rouge that they were true comrades in arms. In Phnom Penh, top Khmer Rouge officials were presented with similar tests. When it came time to set up a government, Nuon Chea and Pol Pot made sure that government officials would not stray from the plight of the people. The Khmer Rouge set up what seemed to be a normal government structure, but it was just a façade. Nuon Chea took charge of party organization and political education. In 1976, he became president of the Democratic Kampuchea People’s Representative Assembly and Pol Pot became prime

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minister. Ieng Sary was minister of foreign affairs and Khieu Samphan acted as liaison with Sihanouk and later replaced him as head of state. Son Sen was defense minister and head of security issues. A Constitution drawn up in December 1975 officially abolished private property and the monarchy. But in this surreal world where reality and fiction blended together, nobody worked at the ministries. The offices were empty. For the Ministry of Finance there was no work to do because the Khmer Rouge had banned money. The Ministry of Defense did not command any troops. All the soldiers had been sent to the zones and were under the command of zone leaders. Many of the ministers went to the countryside to work in the cooperatives. “The ministries were only in name because we had no people to work because there was no work to do,” Nuon Chea said. “All the people were in the provinces to work in the cooperatives, so why should we have people sitting in a chair in the Finance Ministry office. That was the style of the old government.” Even though he was head of the National Assembly, Nuon Chea never went to that office: “There was nothing to debate because we had no laws to pass.” Only the Foreign Affairs Ministry had a full-­time staff. The main focus, Nuon Chea contended, was on raising people’s living standards, which meant concentrating on the cooperatives. “Our style of working was different from past governments. We started from the bottom and worked to the top. We organized cooperatives first and made them strong before we worked on the national government.” Intellectuals who returned from France and other foreign countries to help rebuild Cambodia were put to work planting rice. Instead of utilizing their knowledge, the Khmer Rouge felt the intellectuals had to understand the farmers first, Nuon Chea said. “We wanted them to learn and know the people’s situation and the countryside conditions first because they had lived overseas for a long time and they did not know how people were living here. We allowed them to live with people and eat with people and let them know how difficult life is for farmers. We wanted them to become melted into one flesh.” To ensure that cadre maintained their revolutionary spirit and correct political thought, self-­criticism sessions were held on a regular basis. In Phnom Penh, sessions were organized every week for the various cadre, soldiers, workers, and leaders who lived there. Nuon Chea usually presided over those meetings. Self-­criticism sessions were seen as a crucial component in encouraging cadre to be better people, to improve their revolutionary stance. “The self-­criticisms did not mean that we attacked this person or said something

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was right and wrong. The purpose was to eliminate individualism and selfishness,” Nuon Chea said. The criticism sessions were used, however, to root out “traitors.” Cadre were encouraged to outdo each other in reporting their mistakes. Some sessions took on a mob lynching mentality where accusers would torment the accused for hours. “Some people asked one person 100 questions,” Nuon Chea said. “One man was sometimes criticized by three or four people and more than three hours would be spent criticizing one person.” But the cadre being targeted had to maintain a strong appearance because crying or becoming upset revealed a sullied conscience. Minor indiscretions were treated as the ultimate sin and turned into political mistakes. Eating a piece of fruit in secret was deemed an “economic crime,” while thoughts of wanting nicer clothes or liking a pretty girl were categorized as corrupt and immoral thinking. “Sometimes a lower leader said he raped a girl and said he was sorry,” Nuon Chea said. “Then people questioned him about why he raped the girl and did he know how the poor people struggled to help the movement. Some commented that he was ungrateful. There were so many mistakes like this.” These criticisms could lead to accusations of being a spy for the Vietnamese, the KGB or CIA. The cadre at the center of these interrogations often left the meeting determined to repent for his mistakes, working longer hours to throw off any suspicions that arose during the self-­criticism session. During interviews, Nuon Chea often emphasized how difficult it was to train cadre to be good revolutionaries, a never-­ending task that involved constantly fighting temptation. He noted that the criticisms had to be done continuously because there were always other forces, such as greed and envy, vying for control of the human spirit. “Even though we self-­criticized I would ask whether we got rid of all the bad things in the classes. It was still not completely clean,” he said. “That’s why I always told Democratic Kampuchea leaders, ‘Comrades, you must criticize yourself. You are good, but you are good only today. To be better, you have to continue to self-­criticize.’” The top leaders held their own self-­criticism sessions once a month. Nuon Chea said he often commented on the behavior of Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary, and Southwest Zone leader Ta Mok, and once in a while Pol Pot. Although he told people to criticize him, very few dared, except for Pol Pot. “I criticized Pol Pot and said that he worked really hard but he did not take care of his health,” Nuon Chea said. “He was always worried and did not want to blame other people. Pol Pot criticized me, saying I was not good at communicating in politics, especially with the intellectuals and dignitaries. He said I did not know how to use polite and diplomatic words.”

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As a Khmer Rouge leader, Nuon Chea developed a reputation for being coarse and unsympathetic. He acknowledged that his directness could alienate people. “Some people did not like me because I spoke loudly and strongly,” he said. He criticized Son Sen about his thoughts on winning and losing. “Son Sen always had to win against other people and boast about it. Sometimes we won but the party lost. Winning is a personal thing, but your personal desires should lose so that the party could win. Son Sen always wanted to defeat other people.” Eastern Zone leader So Phim talked about his attitude, saying he was bad-­tempered and got angry too easily. He said he was impatient during the civil war and wanted to achieve victory immediately, causing him to lose too many soldiers to his overly ambitious military offenses. “I asked him to be patient and cool down his temperament because we needed a long-­term victory,” Nuon Chea said. So Phim, in turn, told Nuon Chea that he spoke too briefly so that people did not understand his comments and orders. For Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot politely told him that he should frequently visit farmers living in the countryside, because as an intellectual Khieu Samphan was not able to connect with the people. “I did not frequently visit the farmers because no one organized any trips for me,” Khieu Samphan said. “Comrade, if you want to visit any place, please inform us and the top leaders will arrange it for you,” Pol Pot said. “I am worried about disturbing Angka,” Khieu Samphan said. “Please make friends with the lower cadre because you are a thinking man and you do not talk much,” Pol Pot said. “So you are far away from the farmer.” Because many of the leaders at the Center were intellectuals, Pol Pot often told session participants that they had to pay attention to the people and to the farmers. “If we did not take care of them and pay attention to them, how could we have collected forces to get victory during the five years of fighting against Lon Nol and imperialist America?” Nuon Chea asked. Pol Pot gave the same advice to Ieng Sary, asking him to be closer to the lower cadre, as sometimes he did not think about other people. To remind themselves of the burden placed on those working in the cooperatives, the leaders were assigned kitchen-­cleaning duties. Nuon Chea maintained the rotating schedule. Leaders took turns getting up at 5 a.m. to clean the kitchen and the dining area. “Khieu Samphan was very good at cleaning the kitchen,” Nuon Chea said, chuckling. “But Ieng Sary’s wife always brought her assistant and made her do the cleaning.”

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Now, Nuon Chea said, he realizes that the gap between the intellectuals of the Khmer Rouge leadership and the people they ruled ultimately made the new world they wanted to create a fantasy. Like most communist revolutionaries, the Khmer Rouge leaders dreamed of raising up the proletariat and the peasants, not only in economic terms but also in intellectual aspects. They envisioned that farmers, after being educated, would take leadership positions and become responsible for building the working-­class utopia. But reality did not reflect their desires. The farmers whom they took as the base of their revolutionary forces, as the ideal cadre, couldn’t measure up to their naïve expectations. “We wanted the farmer to be the intellectual, to use his brain and not just use his physical strength. But it was impossible,” Nuon Chea said. “Like (Southwest Zone leader) Ta Mok, he doesn’t want to think. Even when you call him to a meeting, he doesn’t want to go. He would rather act than go to a meeting. So the farmer has experience but if we want to promote the farmer to a high position, it is very difficult. We wanted to raise the farmer because the farmer’s stance was good but it was impossible. The farmer is very patient and can struggle for a long time. The intellectual could not compare to him in patience and struggling. But the intellectual knows theory, how to comment. If you let the farmer comment, he will not. But if you let the farmer do manual labor, he can do it.” The differences between the local leaders, who were mainly farmers, and the Khmer Rouge leaders, who were intellectuals, caused some awkwardness and tension. In the early years of their struggle, Nuon Chea, Pol Pot, and others with a higher education had to learn how to work with the peasants and understand their habits. “You always have to follow the farmer style, so when they are drinking, you have to drink with them,” Nuon Chea said. “We must bend according to their tradition.” On one of the many trips to see Pol Pot during the 1960s, Nuon Chea brought some cakes to give to Brother Number One, who was hiding in the jungles. But because of the long journey, Nuon Chea offered some of the cake to the local militia who were escorting him on the trip. “They ate it all and I had no cake to give to Pol Pot,” Nuon Chea said. “This is a small thing but I want to remind people about how to work with the farmer. We must understand their living condition. If you let them eat, they will eat it all. They are good at finding food and gaining support from the people. But their weak point is that they lack theory.” Pol Pot was also mindful of the differences between himself and the soldiers under his charge. He knew his privileged upbringing and studies in Paris caused a gulf between him and his men. And because of his somewhat timid

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nature, he was intimidated by those with military experience, fearing they might one day use it against him. “Pol Pot knew that he was a student from France so he should be careful, because most of the cadres are farmers,” Nuon Chea said. “That’s why (communist leader) Tou Samouth was important. As a monk, he was the symbol to unify the intellectuals and the farmers.” Tou Samouth was the leader of the communist movement until he disappeared in 1962, after which Pol Pot took his place. Pol Pot felt especially nervous about So Phim, whose Eastern Zone was so important to the Khmer Rouge efforts. As one of the few Khmer Rouge cadre who had fought in the army in the French colonial era, So Phim had a long-­standing history of carrying a gun. But it was his talent as a soldier that intimidated Pol Pot. “When I worked in the Eastern zone, it was like going to another country and not like working with our cadre,” he often told Nuon Chea during their years in power. To prove his own moral character, Nuon Chea worked hard to ensure that his ideas of national interest were always placed above his family’s interests. Unlike Ieng Sary and Son Sen, he made sure his family members did not hold high-­ranking positions in the regime so others would learn from his example. Nuon Chea’s wife worked as a cook, inspected food products, and advised people on how to conserve rice, fish, and meat. She acted as the chief cook for Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan, and Noun Chea. She made noodles and raised cows and pigs. When a delegation traveled to China or North Korea, Pol Pot would ask Nuon Chea to bring his wife because she had been part of the resistance for a long time, but Nuon Chea always said no. “I did not want others to criticize me,” he said. “Some leaders have cars and their wives are also high ranking but I criticized and advised my wife and children to let Angka take care of them. As leaders, we have to be careful in our living. When I ate with Pol Pot and other leaders, even my wife did not come to eat with me. That means we did not take the wife to interfere with us and not take the husband’s status to govern or influence other people. I wanted my wife to be equal to other people. Rations belonging to me were for me and rations for her were for her.” The spouses of other leaders, however, held high positions and received favored treatment. Ieng Sary’s wife was made minister of social affairs while Son Sen’s wife was head of the ministry of culture and information. Nuon Chea looked down on this practice, but kept quiet about the matter to maintain unity among the leaders. Meanwhile, Pol Pot increasingly pitied his wife, Khieu Ponnary, who was well known in Cambodia for being the first woman to earn a French baccalaureate. After years of working in the resistance, she

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began showing strong signs of mental illness in 1974, Nuon Chea said. “She could work and followed Pol Pot to Vietnam, but she was very nervous. She could not think well and sometimes she didn’t speak.” The children of the leaders were also treated well. Ieng Sary’s children were sent to China to study and returned as doctors and pharmacists. “China said Cambodian leaders choose only their own children to learn in China,” Nuon Chea said. “After that, Pol Pot made them come back.” While other leaders manipulated the system to make certain their children had an easy life during the Khmer Rouge years, Nuon Chea deliberately avoided showing favoritism to his offspring. Nuon Chea’s children were allowed to attend school in Phnom Penh, but they were also forced to work in the fields. “They planted vegetables and I had to educate them to work as others do. When my children saw me, they complained that they were having difficulties, too,” he said. “But I was not interested in this matter even though they are my children.” While Nuon Chea managed to visit his mother twice during the Khmer Rouge years, Pol Pot never bothered to see any relatives and did not know where his brothers and sisters were taken after the victory. Pol Pot also never visited his native village Prek Sbauv in Kompong Thom province. “We only thought about the people,” Nuon Chea said. “We had no time to think about our relatives. Millions of people had nothing to eat. If we thought about our relatives, other comrades would not have respected us and followed our model because they would think we only took care of our family.” Because the Khmer Rouge leadership had been forced to sacrifice family ties for the sake of the leftist movement, they did not think it was too much to ask their comrades to do the same. Under the Khmer Rouge, the family unit was basically destroyed. Children living in the countryside were usually separated from their families. The family name was also banned. Everyone took on a revolutionary nom de guerre, which consisted of only one name. From the moment a child was old enough to walk and carry things, the child was sent to work. Hundreds of youths under ten were grouped together in child labor camps to build dams and work on other construction projects. Those over ten were placed in mobile work brigades. The children worked long hours and often ate just one ration of rice gruel in a day. Many died of malnutrition and other illnesses. Academic education was replaced by political and revolutionary teachings. Cambodian youths, brainwashed by propaganda, played a key role in the Khmer Rouge party. They were encouraged to report traitorous activities of their parents, and siblings spied on each other.

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Many youngsters became little executioners, killing adults with the cool ferocity of hardened soldiers. The institution of marriage was also twisted under the Khmer Rouge to fit party needs. Because they wanted to double the population, the Khmer Rouge wanted to increase the number of marriages. But because the war killed so many men, there were more women in society. The Khmer Rouge took matters into their own hands. “The man always wants to choose a beautiful girl, so that’s why we forced them to get married and Angka chose the wife,” Nuon Chea said. Young women were forced to marry men who were twice their age and vice versa. The opinions of the prospective groom and bride did not matter. Marriage became a government policy and an institution that served the revolutionary cause. Again, Nuon Chea thought the purpose of marriage should be to serve the movement, as he too had married with the interest of the party in mind. A year after Pol Pot married, in 1956, Nuon Chea asked party members to find a woman for him. Ma Mong, one of the original three members chosen by Nuon Chea to rebuild the party, told Nuon Chea he had a distant relative, Ly Kimseng, from a poor farming family, who would make a good wife. Nuon Chea agreed to meet her. He traveled to Kompong Chhnang province by bus, then walked twelve miles to his future wife’s village in Norm commune. Nuon Chea’s mother also had a wife in mind for him, but the woman came from a rich family, and Nuon Chea refused. “It’s hard to live with a woman who has a different purpose and she could not bear the burden of struggling with me,” he said. “So I chose a person who has the same determination as me. For me, I do not care if a girl is charming and beautiful because I do not choose the body but her views and character.” When Nuon Chea arrived at Ly Kimseng’s home, she was too shy to meet him and refused to come outside. Her parents devised a plan in which Nuon Chea would talk to the mother outside while her daughter was watering the vegetables. Ly Kimseng said she was so nervous that “I almost spilled all of the water from my bucket” as Nuon Chea watched her. The two were married in a simple, small ceremony. None of Nuon Chea’s family members were invited. “I just told my mother I would be married,” he said. “She said she would come to the wedding party but I told her she should not go because it was difficult to get there. I told her that after the marriage I would take my wife to see her. My mother blamed me and asked why I wouldn’t allow her to join the wedding party. I did not allow her because I was worried it would damage the organization.” The Khmer Rouge also outlawed Buddhism, a foundational institution

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of Cambodian society. Still, Nuon Chea asserted that Buddhism remained a part of Khmer Rouge society. “In the Khmer Rouge, we said don’t lie, don’t drink, don’t have affairs with other people’s wives, don’t do drugs, don’t steal. So all this is like how a monk lives. A monk can’t do any of these things.” But under the Khmer Rouge, pagodas were destroyed, the practice of Buddhism was banned, and monks were forced to work like everyone else in the fields. Nuon Chea said that the moral principles of Buddhism were correct, but the idea of praying and wishing for something was not beneficial to the people. The Khmer Rouge believed religion made people lazy as they relied on faith instead of hard work to produce results. “We had to give up our beliefs and prayers,” Nuon Chea said. “If we pray for a candle, how will it come? We have to make it by ourselves. If we have no water, we must make a dam. So communists educated people to believe in people power.” People could still respect Buddhism, but most people did not have time because they were working. “We did not look down on religion and pagodas, but we would like everything to be true,” he said. “Believing you can get something through prayer was not the truth.” He also claimed there was no policy to force monks to give up their lifestyle, but the changes in society made it so. “The monks also joined in building dams and canals because there was nobody to give them offerings of food and nobody to make Buddhist ceremonies. All the people were at the rice fields so the monk automatically worked, too.” Both Nuon Chea and Pol Pot reflected on their experiences as monks when they made Khmer Rouge policy on religion. As a novice, Pol Pot was treated poorly and abused at the pagoda. When he was sent to collect food for the monks, he often wandered the city and watched soccer matches near the Royal Palace. His heroes were soccer players. He later became a fan of Brazil’s Pelé and Argentina’s Diego Maradona. When he returned late to the pagoda, he was often beaten by the monks or other pagoda boys. “When he told me this, he did not show his anger to monks or the pagoda boys who beat and kicked him,” Nuon Chea said. “I don’t know how his heart was and what he was thinking about how he was treated badly in the pagoda. His face was simple when he told me about this. It was a hard life in the pagoda. Sometimes when there was good food, they confiscated it from him and they did not give him food to eat because he was smaller than they were.” In Thailand Nuon Chea had spent three months as a monk, taking advantage of a Thai law that allowed civil servants to be monks and still receive their salary. In Cambodia, it is still tradition for boys to become a monk for some time before returning to a secular life. Nuon Chea chose the monastery

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while he was working at the Ministry of Finance, partly because “I was very lazy and tired of my work because I was writing only numbers and it was boring.” Later, as Khmer Rouge leaders, both he and Pol Pot often used Buddhist language in their teachings to cadre, telling them to smash people’s ideas and smash the bad elements within themselves. “We educated the people to go from the old society to the new society. That’s why we used the word ‘smash,’” he said. “We had to smash their old way of thinking.” Smash was also used by the Khmer Rouge as a euphemism or code word for kill. In the end, with so much normal, everyday activity prohibited, Cambodians learned to survive by becoming mute shells of their former selves. They hid their feelings and wore blank faces as they strictly followed orders to create the perfect world envisioned by the Khmer Rouge leaders. Those who were brave enough to disobey Khmer Rouge moral principles often faced death. Mothers who stole food for their children, and husbands and wives who arranged secret rendezvous were often arrested and killed. But to this day Nuon Chea believes that the Khmer Rouge goal of creating a pure, clean society was an admirable one. Much as Islamic fundamentalists today pride themselves on the moral superiority of their values, Nuon Chea argues that the puritanical nature of Khmer Rouge society is better than the Cambodia of today. He points to the prostitution, high crime rate, and popularity of casinos as evidence of today’s moral degradation. The Khmer Rouge were right in placing morality as the foundation for building society. “Knowledge has to take morality as the base,” he said, citing one of his favorite mottos. “Without morality, knowledge is useless.” Considering their original intentions, the Khmer Rouge could have given their fellow Cambodians the government they deserved. They had enough intelligence, passion, and sympathy for the suffering of the Cambodian people to accomplish their goals. At that time, they were their country’s best and brightest, with college educations and experience gleaned from studies abroad. As they debated how they would eliminate poverty and free Cambodia from its Western influences, it seemed that they were going to do great things. There was no preordained destiny that the Khmer Rouge would turn their country into the Killing Fields. And the start of Nuon Chea’s political journey did not foreshadow the man he would become as Brother Number Two. In those early, exciting days, there was no hint of the blood-­stained future.

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4. The Lost Childhood When I was lucky enough to have rice, I ate it quietly and in secret because I was worried I would be killed if the Khmer Rouge saw me. —­Sambath

Sambath did not understand who the Khmer Rouge were when the group came to power. He just knew that people were starving and forced to work like slaves. In the mornings, he went to the cooperative to have rice or porridge. Sambath was still allowed to go to school, so he and about 30 other students his age would gather in the classroom. In the beginning, he was taught grammar and the Khmer alphabet, with the teacher writing vowels and consonants on the chalkboard. But the children had no books or pencils. Soon the teacher showed up to work, but no longer taught. Instead she sat in front of the classroom and forced the children to cut the grass growing along the side of the road. Within a month, Sambath was told school was over. The children were needed in the fields. Sambath’s job was to carry human feces used to fertilize the rice fields. The feces were kept in a tank and then dumped on the ground to dry. He piled the fertilizer in a basket and carried it on his head to rice fields a quarter mile away. Each day he made the trip, again and again, until he was told to stop for the day. “It smelled and I didn’t really know what I was doing,” he said. Others saw opportunity in the piles of waste. Sambath once watched a man taste the feces for nourishment, a supplement to the meager rations. A few people stood beside the man, asking him how it tasted. In the beginning, there was still rice or porridge to occasionally take to his other family members. But soon the rice mostly disappeared. “It was like a big party when we had rice,” he said. “I ate as much of it as possible because it was rare to have it. I was always hungry, day and night.” Sometimes his mother asked him and his sister to take scarce rice and other food to his grandparents, who lived several miles away. Sambath always traveled at night

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so he wouldn’t be discovered, and he dared not carry a lamp because he could be arrested and killed if caught. Later in 1975, after the Khmer Rouge had been in power for several months, Sambath’s mother bled to death giving birth to the child of her new Khmer Rouge husband. There was no medicine or properly trained medical staff who could have prevented her death. Sambath’s baby sister died as well. Sambath’s mother seemed to have a premonition that she wouldn’t live long. Before she died, she told Sambath’s grandparents to take care of her children. She gave them her gold, rings, a necklace, and a bracelet that she had kept hidden from the Khmer Rouge. The jewelry could be used as bargaining items if the situation worsened. After his mother died, Sambath lived with his grandparents. There he ate only watery porridge. Even though there was sugar cane surrounding his grandparents’ home, he was not allowed to touch it, much less eat it, for fear he would be accused of stealing Angka property. His grandparents told him that they were new people so they had to work harder so Angka would trust them. Near his home there were “old people”—­those who had already lived for several months or years under Khmer Rouge rule—­and they were treated better than his family, given more powerful positions and more to eat. “Don’t steal anything and don’t be lazy,” his grandparents told him. Still, as he got weaker and weaker, he stole some sugar cane and went with his grandfather to catch eels in secret, which also would have been seen as a betrayal if they were caught. There was never any meat or rice to eat. For nourishment, Sambath began eating the dried cow meat that had been twisted into a rope to tie up hammocks. Soon he had no rope to tie his hammock. He ate lizards, centipedes, and other insects, anything he could find that would fill his belly. He even grilled cockroaches. “I had no food and was hungry all the time so I was forced to eat everything,” he said. “The cockroaches smelled bad but it tasted good to me then.” One evening he was about to eat some porridge his grandmother had kept for him. He lit a lamp to find some cockroaches to eat with the porridge, since it was a watery gruel that would hardly ease his hunger. In his search, he knocked over the lamp, igniting a blaze. His sister, who was being allowed to visit, used the porridge to extinguish the fire. Although that precious food was now gone, the whole family would have been in grave danger if someone saw the flame, since Cambodians were not allowed to eat at night. Sambath went without anything to eat for a day and a half. “My grandparents were worried that they would kill all of us because we

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destroyed Angka’s house or we would be accused of stealing something to eat and being Angka’s enemy,” Sambath recalled. Later he was moved from his grandparents’ home to make small dams to protect rice fields. He lived in the jungle without extra clothing, a blanket, hammock, or mosquito net. And he was scared to sleep alone, without his family. “I was very cold and I heard animals shouting at night,” he said. Most of his fellow dam builders were older. One teenager pitied Sambath and gave him a burlap sack to use as a blanket. But still Sambath was kept awake by the animals. The teenager sometimes gave Sambath some fish or eel to eat since he had nothing but watery gruel. Sambath now had to work much harder than before. He had a quota of building 15 to 20 meters of the dam per day, difficult for a nine-­year-­old boy. He had the same work requirements as people twice his age. When Sambath met his cousin by chance, they agreed to sneak away to see their grandfather. After dinner, they ran through rice fields in the dark, risking their lives in the hopes that their grandfather would be able to provide more sustenance than porridge. “We were scared of ghosts so we agreed to run together and we did not look back,” he said. At his grandfather’s home, Sambath talked of how he didn’t have enough food to eat. His grandfather fed them rice and some soup. In the morning before the others were awake, they returned to their work area, about eight miles away. They traveled there often after dinner to have rice and fish that their grandfather saved out of his rations and scrounged for. But eventually Sambath and his cousin stopped going, afraid of being punished. Even though Sambath was not yet ten years old, he understood the ways of the new regime. The intense labor forced on Sambath and millions of other Cambodians was part of the Khmer Rouge plan to turn Cambodia into a thriving nation, a country that would no longer have to worry about potentially threatening neighbors. Vietnam, in particular, was the demon that drove the Khmer Rouge to set ridiculous goals of development and work the people to their deaths trying to achieve them. The vast dam and irrigation projects and the Khmer Rouge insistence on ever-­bigger rice harvests would not save the nation. In the end, Sambath and his fellow Cambodians labored in vain.

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5. The Vietnam Factor Pol Pot said we had to run faster than Vietnam. If Vietnam runs equal with us then Vietnam will catch us and throw us against the wall. Our movement was also very quick in victory and that pushed us to urgently build up our human resources. We had just over three years and that was nothing. —­Nuon Chea

The local leaders in Preah Vihear province knew that Nuon Chea was coming, and they had time to prepare. Brother Number Two would see the bounty that graced this cooperative. They made sure he noticed the few well-­fed residents, and when he walked into the communal dining area he saw chickens and chunks of meat hanging from wooden posts. The rice paddies were filled with workers in the standard black uniform, laboring under the sun. The snapshot said prosperity. But cooperative leaders couldn’t produce miracles. Wanting to see how the Khmer Rouge vision for the ideal society was being implemented on the ground, Nuon Chea visited the cooperatives from time to time to check on progress. In Preah Vihear he found the clash of perception and reality. Surrounded by such seeming abundance, he asked for a chili to spice up his lunch and was shocked when the peasants told him they had none to offer. Chilis used to be plentiful in the country, and a small dish of them was usually around during meals for Cambodians to add to their soup. “Why did you not plant chilis around your house?” Nuon Chea asked. “The cooperative takes care of everything that is grown,” they replied. “It’s not good to follow this way,” Nuon Chea said. “We encourage people to farm and plant even at their houses.” But that was reality in the new Khmer Rouge-­controlled Cambodia. Their vision for a perfect world gave way to a nightmare of starving people and bugs eaten as a meal. Growing chilis outside your house was out of the question. There was no time for leisure or work outside the cooperative’s goals.

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If you had energy to plant, hoe, or dig, it was for the country and not for yourself. This was all in the name of economic progress. And the main drive of their breakneck efforts came from their desire to catch up with and pass their neighbors. Once the Khmer Rouge secured their victory, their most important goal was to rapidly build up their country to surpass the Vietnamese in development. The Khmer Rouge believed that Vietnam wanted to be Cambodia’s big brother and even take over the country. This drove them to see the race for development as a zero sum game—­there would only be one winner. Vietnam had already repeatedly stated its desire to establish an Indochina Federation, which made being independent of their neighbor, and indeed, the rest of the world, one of the Khmer Rouge’s top priorities. They were obsessed with beating Vietnam, believing that whoever could achieve industrialization first would prove which communist party was superior. This time, the Cambodian communists believed they had the upper hand. The Khmer Rouge thought they had singlehandedly defeated the most powerful army in the world. The United States had poured in millions of dollars in aid and military support for the Lon Nol government, but it was still defeated. Only by having a correct political line were the Cambodian communists able to achieve their military victory, Nuon Chea and Pol Pot believed. They felt the Khmer Rouge had been right all along in their approach to their armed struggle, going against the wishes of the Vietnamese and Chinese. They discounted all other factors, particularly Vietnam’s own fight against Lon Nol. After all, Khmer Rouge forces, which came from a small and backward country, had defeated the world’s superpower before the Vietnamese could do the same. “Our victory encouraged the North Vietnamese to win against America,” Nuon Chea said. “We controlled Phnom Penh so America lost one part already, and this was very important for the Vietnamese victory.” In a speech to cadre in July 1975, Pol Pot said the Khmer Rouge triumph was of extreme significance because “never before had there been such an event in the annals of the world’s revolutionary wars.” Their victory proved to the Khmer Rouge leaders that it was Cambodia’s destiny to achieve glory on an unprecedented scale Their perspective led to delusions of grandeur and unrealistic expectations for Cambodia’s growth. The plans for development were primitive, ill-­planned, and not based on sound macroeconomic policy. Instead of a country that could be seen as a model for other developing nations, as the Khmer Rouge leaders had envisioned, Cambodia resembled a prison work

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camp governed by martial law. The goals of eliminating poverty were moot, as the Cambodian communists had grossly exacerbated the problems they pledged to resolve. The leaders relied on revolutionary zeal and the spirit of the cadre to lift them into the modern world. The Khmer Rouge called their movement the Great Leap Forward, borrowing the name given to the rapid development program that left China’s countryside in ruins. Pol Pot had predicted that they could increase the population from 8 million to 15 million during the first few years of their rule. In his testimony to a Khmer Rouge tribunal in 2009, S-­21 prison chief Duch said it was a misperception to say Pol Pot was a follower of Mao Zedong, since Pol Pot wanted to go beyond what the Chinese had “accomplished.” “Pol Pot’s theory was even crueler than the theory of the Gang of Four,” Duch said, referring to the Chinese leaders who were instigators of the Cultural Revolution. In their quest for modernization, Cambodians were forced to work long hours with little food and barely any time to rest. Men, women, the young and old were all expected to rebuild Cambodia, literally from the ground up. Nuon Chea had heard outsiders say the Khmer Rouge program was too extreme, but he did not see it that way at the time. “We wanted economic power, and then we would have political power against neighboring countries,” he said. “Pol Pot and I agreed that we must make people’s living better through agriculture and economic progress. This was for the Great Leap Forward. But some people didn’t understand it, and they mocked us and made a joke of it. We agreed to go faster so our enemies could not attack us. Pol Pot said if we did not develop faster and try to make it work, we would die and Vietnam would swallow us up.” The Khmer Rouge planned to meet their impossible goals by doing it all on their own, although they ended up receiving aid from China and North Korea in the form of equipment and advisers. “We did not want foreign aid because we had to maintain our country’s reputation and we had to try to solve this by ourselves,” Nuon Chea said. Khmer Rouge leaders lived in a bubble, with no international mail service and few telephone hookups. Except for flights to China and Vietnam, Cambodians was completely cut off from the rest of the world. They didn’t even have televisions, mostly relying on radios for news of the outside world. Adding to the burden of the unrealistic development plans was the limited amount of food and equipment in the country. Khmer Rouge leaders had little to work with. Phnom Penh did not have the war booty that was found in Saigon. The United States did not give nearly as much aid to Cambodia as it did to Vietnam, and because the Khmer Rouge had controlled the

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Mekong River and the roads leading to Phnom Penh before they declared victory, there were scant supplies and goods found in the city. After the final offensive on the capital, Phnom Penh was a city in ruins. There were small supplies of rice and medicine, but not enough to feed and care for the country’s population. Infrastructure was damaged. In the cities, homes remained empty. Markets were turned into banana or coconut fields. “After the war, we had nothing, no rice, oil, salt. The leaders had to face this situation and solve it,” Nuon Chea said. “We didn’t want to make people do hard work but we had nothing at the beginning. If there had been no war, then we would have had all the equipment and would only need a small number of people to work.” The Cambodian leaders also had to deal with their own insecurities and lack of experience in governing a nation. When Pol Pot visited leaders in other countries, he often felt uneasy, aware that Cambodia was considered to be young in its resistance movement. “When he met foreign leaders, he did not feel good,” Nuon Chea said. “He told me that he was worried when he met them because he thought he had no ability. But finally he tried to make himself feel brave and strong because he was one of the nation’s representatives. He did not feel as stable because he was a young leader and the Vietnamese and Chinese leaders were veterans.” Pol Pot was self-­conscious about the way the country would be perceived by outsiders, and he was known to be strict about meal preparation when foreign visitors came to Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge rule. “He always went to see the cook when foreigners came,” Nuon Chea said. “He was very concerned about food for the people. He was worried that if they didn’t like the food, then Cambodia would be criticized. Also the food could make foreigners sick and then Cambodia would have a bad reputation. Even when they left Cambodia, we followed them in case they got diarrhea from Cambodian food. It was to take care of our dignity and our country’s reputation. If they got sick, they would have blamed us.” Before Pol Pot left for one of his first trips to Vietnam as leader of the movement, he told Nuon Chea that he was worried. “I don’t know what will happen while I’m there,” he told Nuon Chea. “But I will try to be strong and firm because I am one leader who represents the communist party and the Cambodian people. So I must be smart and not be intimidated by other people.” Nuon Chea challenges anyone who describes Pol Pot as ambitious and hungry for power. Instead, he describes him as unsure of himself, trying to find his footing as leader of a new country. “He was shy and not ambitious at all,” he said. “But the situation in our years in power forced him to be like that. Still, when he was in power, if any leader voiced an argument, Pol Pot would

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stay quiet and withdraw himself from the conversation.” As the competition with Vietnam heated up, Pol Pot would grow stronger in his actions. From the beginning the Vietnamese communists played the role of the overbearing sibling, always telling the Khmer Rouge what to do, even if it meant placing Cambodia’s needs second. That relationship worked in the early years when the Khmer Rouge needed Vietnamese guidance, but, as the Cambodian communists began to form their own identity and policies, the mentor-­mentee dynamic became increasingly contentious until it reached open hostility. By the time the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh, 13 days before the fall of Saigon, the Cambodians and Vietnamese were merely pretending to be friends. The war against the French and the United States had suspended the traditional animosity between Cambodia and Vietnam. Now that that the communists had achieved victory, their historic competitiveness and longstanding suspicions would reemerge. But even when both sides were in a cooperative mood, the hostilities of the past were never forgotten. Cambodian culture had reached its height in the fourteenth century, when the Angkor Empire, which built the magnificent temples in Siem Reap province, controlled southern Vietnam, southern Laos, and parts of Burma and Thailand, in addition to Cambodia. But after the decline of the empire, Cambodia increasingly lost territory. One of the most stinging losses was an area known as Kampuchea Krom, or lower Cambodia to Cambodians, which is present day southern Vietnam, including Ho Chi Minh City. Many Cambodians, including Nuon Chea, still dream of bringing Kampuchea Krom back into their nation’s fold. They point to the temples of Angkor as symbols of what the country could have been and as evidence of Cambodia’s glorious destiny. But Nuon Chea and Pol Pot both had personal experiences with the Vietnamese that colored their opinions of their neighbors from an early age. While Nuon Chea studied at a mediocre school in Battambang province as a young boy, Pol Pot was sent to the exclusive École Miche primary Catholic school in Phnom Penh, where he learned French. He competed in soccer, and his team often traveled to northern Vietnam to compete against teams there. Playing soccer against the Vietnamese boys evidently gave birth to his animosity toward his neighbors. “I hated Vietnamese youths from the time I was young,” Pol Pot told Nuon Chea. “I did not like them because the Vietnamese were rude and too clever at playing unfair tricks while playing football against me and other Cambodian children.” Pol Pot often told Nuon Chea a story from his childhood to represent the

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situation of the Cambodian communists. When he was young, he once saw a boxing match in front of the Royal Palace. The contenders were a Vietnamese boxer, healthy and strong, and a Cambodian boxer, thin and weak. The Cambodian boxer, who worked full time as a cyclo driver, was not as skilled. The Vietnamese boxer knocked him down repeatedly, as Cambodian onlookers shouted, “Kampuchea’s child, get up and struggle.” The Cambodian tried to get up, but the Vietnamese boxer hit him over and over. “The cyclo driver did not have training. He boxed with the Vietnamese but all he had was anger and hatred,” Pol Pot recounted. “But the Vietnamese boxer had training. The Cambodian man had no training from a coach so how could he box against someone who had proper training? That’s why if we only have a fighting spirit but no training, we can not succeed. We must have a tactic to win.” In the early years of the communist movement, Vietnam provided guidance and leadership when the Cambodian network was struggling. Because of their lack of training and expertise in the ways of revolution, Nuon Chea and other Cambodians welcomed Vietnamese participation. When Nuon Chea began his work in the Cambodian resistance in the 1950s as a member of the pro-­communist faction of the Issarak movement, he was responsible for propaganda, spreading the communist doctrine and anti-­French slogans to Cambodians living areas of Battambang, Pursat, and Banteay Meanchey provinces. He also worked with three other Issarak members to write articles in newspapers and magazines. The publications were printed in the forests of northwestern Cambodia. “I reminded Cambodians to love their nation,” Nuon Chea said. “Even when I joined the Communist Party, my spirit was of patriotism. I was young and very much enjoyed my work. I considered Vietnam to be a friend because we had the same purpose at that time.” Nuon Chea also joined the Ho Chi Minh-­created Indochinese Communist Party, becoming one of about 40 Cambodian members. The ICP was going through a reevaluation of its purpose. The group had been officially dissolved in 1945 to conceal the Vietminh’s communist connections in an effort to attract a wider range of independence supporters. But as the war against the French raged on and Vietnam was gaining the support of Chinese and Soviet communists, a decision was made to once again reveal the leftist base of the Vietminh. The next step was recognizing the burgeoning nationalist struggles in Laos and Cambodia. In February 1951, more than 200 delegates gathered at the Second National Party Congress in Tuyen Quang province in north Vietnam to reestablish the ICP under a new name, and to split the party into three groups to

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reflect the independence movements in the countries of French Indochina. The dominant member was the newly established Vietnamese Workers’ Party. The Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party (KPRP) and the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party played minor roles and were not official communist parties. The Vietnamese also made it clear that they would continue to have influence over their communist brothers in Cambodia and Laos, saying they would supervise the activities of their neighbors as the future could still allow for a united party. “The ICP understood that its focus was too narrow and no progress would be made in increasing national forces,” said Nuon Chea, who was working in Ta Sanh during the ICP Congress. “So it changed its strategy to fight the colonialists. The three parties had the same theory and same Marxist-­Leninist doctrine. But Vietnam still had influence over us. The Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party was considered to be young and the Vietnamese helped educate its members.” In northwestern Cambodia where Nuon Chea worked, a committee was formed to explain the new structure to Cambodian supporters and to build up the KPRP. Sieu Heng, Nuon Chea’s uncle-­in-­law and one of the early leaders of the Cambodian communist movement, was chief of the committee and second in command of the Vietnamese-­backed leftists, while Nuon Chea was made deputy of the committee. Although Sieu Heng was responsible for the northwest region, he spent most of his time in Vietnam. It was thus left up to Nuon Chea and the few others working in the area to update members about the movement. “We tried to explain to our members why we divided the Indochinese Party into three parts because some did not understand this division,” Nuon Chea said. “Even some Vietnamese Workers’ Party members did not understand and thought Cambodia and Laos were weaker than Vietnam. They said we could not use Marxist doctrine because we had no labor class. And some Cambodians did not want to join the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party.” The Cambodian communists struggled to forge an independent identity, as they were still seen as lackeys of the Vietnamese and called the “Khmer Viet Minh.” That label infuriated Nuon Chea, and he would fight against it for the next three decades, trying to prove to the Vietnamese and the rest of the world that the Cambodian communists were worthy of their own revolution. “France said Cambodia was under the Vietnamese party,” he said. “It had propagandized and called us Khmer Viet Minh. But Khmer is not Viet Minh and Cambodians were solely Cambodians.” Still, Nuon Chea acknowledged that the Cambodian communists were a young group that did not have

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clear direction. Because the Vietnamese were the only organized party, the Cambodians still relied on their neighbor for guidance. “Khmers had tried to build the party by itself and to be independent,” he said. “However, we did not have a clear political principle, strategy, and measures. We only fought against France and French colonialism. Our struggle was very difficult. Vietnam had not yet liberated its country. Cambodia and Laos were far away from other countries but we were close to Vietnam.” With the split of the ICP, both the Laotians and Cambodians had difficulties establishing an official communist party. The Laotians did not hold a founding party congress until 1955; Cambodia would do so in 1960. Just as the Chinese communists were exerting their influence on the Vietnamese, the Vietnamese in turn were trying to maintain their big brother role over the Cambodians. The Vietnamese wrote the statutes for the KPRP, appointed its leaders, and set up the organization of the group. The Vietnamese dictated to the Cambodians when and where they would fight against the French. In addition to the obstacles posed by the Vietnamese, Cambodians were still confused about which group to join. Membership in the KPRP did not constitute an entrance into an official communist party, and therefore Cambodians still joined the ICP, even though that party had been formally dissolved. “Some people still considered themselves as higher than the KPRP and they were in the Indochinese Party,” Nuon Chea said. “This was wrong thinking and even the Vietnamese did not understand. The KPRP had equal status with the Vietnamese party.” While France was trying to maintain its tenuous hold over Indochina, Pol Pot returned to Cambodia in January 1953 after more than three years studying in Paris. At the same time, Nuon Chea was preparing to leave Cambodia to begin his revolutionary education in Vietnam. The future partners would not meet until two years later. Nuon Chea’s journey would take him back to Thailand, through Laos, and eventually to Vietnam, as he met communist party members in each country. Always mindful of the impression that the Vietnamese controlled their Cambodian counterparts, Nuon Chea emphasized that he went to Vietnam to be “advised, not taught” by his communist neighbors. He left Cambodia at the end of February, walked through the forests along the border, and arrived four days later at Thailand’s border town of Aranya Prathet. He traveled with three assistants, one who delivered messages and two who were bodyguards/escorts. “We had no food to eat, but the assistants who were with me caught eel. It was very good and tasty,” Nuon Chea said. “Both my legs were swollen. I almost could not walk.” He rested in

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Aranya Prathet for a few days at a Thai communist member’s house. During that time, he bought new clothes and new shoes that would make him look like a city person instead of a farmer. He also tried to eat a lot to regain his strength. Three years of living in the forests had taken their toll, and Nuon Chea was thin and pale. When he felt rested, his group left by train for Bangkok. “When I was on the train, I was trying to act like a normal, simple citizen because I could speak Thai,” he said. “Two Thai police were sitting near me, and they said, ‘Don’t arrest them now, we will take action when we arrive in Bangkok.’ I was very worried when I heard this but I tried to be quiet and imitate a Thai citizen. I had a Thai-­language newspaper to read as usual. But when I arrived in Bangkok they didn’t do anything to me.” After the day-­and-­a-­half journey, he was taken to another communist member’s house. There he heard that Soviet leader Josef Stalin had died on March 5, 1953. At a tailor shop that served as a base for the Thai Communist Party, they held a ceremony in honor of Stalin. “We respected Stalin’s sacrifice and mourned his death,” Nuon Chea said. He stayed in Bangkok for three days, and was sad to leave the capital. He had wanted to visit his old friends from his college days, but already he was learning to bury his emotions for the good of the cause. “I wanted to visit the pagoda where I lived and the primary school and university where I used to learn, but I had no chance to see it,” he said. “I missed my teachers at Thammasat (university) and I missed the train station where I hid from bombs dropped in World War II. I missed the Thai Communist Party members who used to demonstrate with me. I really wanted to visit my friends who worked in the ministries. But my principle of secrecy forced me not to meet them and did not allow me to do what I wanted.” Wearing glasses and pretending to be a Thai teacher, Nuon Chea left Bangkok for the Lao border. It was the first of many identities he would assume in his work as a revolutionary. He and his escorts walked along the Thai-­Lao border for days until he met his next escorts, who walked with him for two weeks to arrive in May 1953 at the Vietnamese-­Laos friendship office. Nuon Chea didn’t know precisely where he was going when he made these stops; his escorts kept the locations secret from even him. “That was a communist trick to hide from the enemy,” Nuon Chea said. “A trip may just take one hour but they would take you around and around so it takes seven days to get there.” The Laotians held a ceremony for their guests, and Nuon Chea was presented with a bicycle as a gift. When he left Laos for Vietnam, he rode his bicycle through the mountains of Vietnam’s communist-­controlled territories in the

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north. Two weeks later, he arrived at the Vietnamese-­Cambodian friendship office, where escorts took him to his final destination. He studied guerrilla warfare at a school in Tay Nguyen in central Vietnam. There he met about 10 other pro-­communist Issaraks, including the movement’s leader, Son Ngoc Minh. All of them had made their way separately to Vietnam to be part of the Cambodian delegation. The members caught up with one another about their respective territories in Cambodia, and Son Ngoc Minh asked Nuon Chea how the situation was in the Northwest. The group was in Vietnam to study and research documents from the Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam to help the Cambodians build their own party and principles. Although Son Ngoc Minh was leader of the Issaraks, Nuon Chea was chief of the study group, as he “knew methods of learning,” and led discussions and assigned research topics to the Cambodians. The documents, all translated into Vietnamese, focused on politics, military strategy, and administration. Top Vietnamese communist leaders Truong Chinh, secretary general of the Vietnam Workers’ Party, Pham Van Dong, communist party central committee member and deputy prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, military commander Vo Nguyen Giap, and Ho Chi Minh himself visited the Cambodian delegation. According to Nuon Chea, Truong Chinh told the Cambodian delegation that “Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos occupy three separate rooms but we have only one roof, and if the roof is broken, the water will leak in.” When Ho Chi Minh visited the Cambodians, he invited Son Ngoc Minh to visit his house. “Ho Chi Minh liked to walk and ride horses. He was a compatriot and he gave up everything for the struggle,” said Nuon Chea, who also studied Vietnamese at this time. While Nuon Chea was in Vietnam, King Sihanouk returned to Cambodia, after failing to secure independence from France. The king lived in self-­imposed exile in northwestern Cambodia. After several months of negotiations, France cut its losses and transferred major powers to Sihanouk on November 9, 1953. Sihanouk declared himself the father of Cambodian independence. But a complete split from France would not occur until the Geneva conference a year later. “France did not give us perfect independence,” Nuon Chea said. “That’s why our struggle was called the struggle in the enemy’s stomach.” Still, Sihanouk’s victory was a blow to the independence movement. Many noncommunist Issaraks deserted the anticolonial fight, feeling the goal of ridding Cambodia of French domination had been achieved. But many pro-­communist Issaraks, including Nuon Chea, found Sihanouk’s declaration of independence laughable and continued their fight.

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At the guerrilla warfare school, Nuon Chea organized classes for the Cambodian students, handing out documents, raising questions, and stimulating debate. He also motivated members who did not feel as enthusiastic about sitting in a jungle hideout to study. “We learned not to memorize but to think and analyze,” he said. “We wrote about how we were treated and who was the enemy and how society affected poor people.” He also noted that at this time there weren’t any major disputes between the Cambodians and Vietnamese communists. They were united in their cause, and the Cambodians were glad to have the Vietnamese on their side:. “We were all happy and cooperated with the Vietnamese, and we were close.” The group learned about Vietnamese policy by visiting cooperatives and rice fields. They also watched movies from Vietnam, China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea. One story focused on a poor family who sold their daughter to their landlord, who raped and impregnated her. The girl tried to escape and gave birth in the forest, but the landlord’s henchmen hunted her down and beat her. Finally the poor people rose up against the landlord. “They showed this story because Vietnam had a reform movement to provide land to farmers. The landlords in Vietnam were cruel and fierce. The purpose of the movie was to make people get up and struggle for the land,” Nuon Chea said. “Vietnamese soldiers were from poor families and this made them want to seek revenge against landlords. It is actually a Chinese story and it is well known. We watched these movies while the Vietnamese soldiers were preparing troops to attack the French at Dien Bien Phu.” In early 1954, world leaders met in Geneva to discuss the Korean conflict in April and the Indochina war in May. To boost his leverage at the conference, Ho Chi Minh felt he needed a decisive military victory. On March 13, with 50,000 troops and 55,000 support soldiers, Vietnamese forces launched an assault on French soldiers stationed at Dien Bien Phu, a valley village in northwestern Vietnam. By the time the French surrendered on May 7, 25,000 Vietnamese had died along with more than 1,500 French soldiers. Although Vietnamese casualties were 15 times higher than France’s, the perseverance and dedication of the natives proved to be the dominant foe in the end. Aided by elderly men and women and children, Vietnamese forces brought a Western power to its knees. The image was uplifting to other Asian independence activists and gave Ho Chi Minh the negotiating power he needed in the Geneva Conference. But it was disastrous for the Cambodian communists. There were ominous signs from the start. The Cambodian communists were not allowed to have a seat at the conference, as was granted to their

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counterparts from Vietnam and Laos. Cambodia was recognized as an independent nation and National Assembly elections were to be held in 1955. But King Sihanouk, who was criticized by the Cambodian communists for doing little to achieve independence, received all the glory. The Khmer Issaraks, who controlled up to 50 percent of the country and had at least 5,000 troops by 1954, would end up the biggest loser. The Geneva agreement divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel and provided for regroupment areas for pro-­independence forces in Vietnam and Laos. But in Cambodia there was no provision for the guerrillas. Because hostilities were to be ceased and the Vietminh had to withdraw from foreign lands, including Cambodia, the Cambodian communists were left with nothing. At the meeting, they could not find support from their communist brothers from China, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam, which were all looking out for their own interests. The Cambodian communists left the meeting worse off than when they arrived. The movement would almost be destroyed as more than 1,000 Cambodian leftists fled the country for Vietnam, following the thousands of Vietminh forces who were returning home. About 1,000 Cambodian communists were left in their own country, but the movement was devastatingly split and recovery was questionable. And with independence achieved, the communists had lost their goal, their purpose. A few days after the conference ended on July 21, 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced that U.S. policy was the fostering of noncommunist governments in South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. While Nuon Chea was in Vietnam, various parties were preparing for the National Assembly elections—­the first to give Cambodians a real choice in political parties. The clandestine communist party established a legitimate political group, the Pracheachon Party, to participate in the election. The Democratic Party also fielded candidates. To ensure a victory for the leftists, Pol Pot was in Phnom Penh trying to bring together the Pracheachon and the Democratic Parties in an alliance. But King Sihanouk had his own plans. The monarch was ready to increase his political role, but as king he could only hold a ceremonial role in the government. On March 2, he abdicated the throne to make his father king and formed his own political party, Sangkum Reastr Niyum (Popular Socialist Community). Sihanouk forced his opponents to work in secret since civil servants who refused to join his party were fired. He also lashed out at communism and the leftists, while Democrats criticized corruption in the government and pointed to the dangers of working with the U.S. At this point, Vietnam was already receiving U.S. financial and military assistance. In May 1955, Cambodia and the United States signed

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an agreement that gave Cambodia military aid to stem the communist incursion. In the end, a crackdown on his opponents and voter fraud would give Sihanouk’s party more than 80 percent of the votes and all 91 seats in the National Assembly. The victory marked the beginning of Sihanouk’s one-­man rule, which lasted until he was overthrown by one of his own generals fifteen years later. It was only after these elections that Nuon Chea felt it was safe enough to travel to Phnom Penh, where he was for the first time to meet Pol Pot and the movement’s deputy leader, Tou Samouth, a monk from Kampuchea Krom. Sieu Heng, Nuon Chea’s uncle, was still leader of the group, but his time with the communists would soon come to an end. Nuon Chea was first told to return to the northwest region of Cambodia, but since the communists were trying to build up a base in Phnom Penh, it was decided he would be best used in the capital. Nuon Chea didn’t know whom he was supposed to meet that night in the park in 1955. In the typical clandestine fashion that surrounded all party activities, communist party member Chan Samorn simply told him there was an appointment for him to meet a man at 7 p.m. Chan Samorn took Nuon Chea to the park on his bicycle, dropped him off, and rode away. Nuon Chea sat on a cement bench and waited. Soon, two men on a bicycle rode toward him and stopped near the bench. One man got off the bike and approached him as the other rode away. Pol Pot and Nuon Chea were about to meet for the first time. “I welcomed Pol Pot and we just talked about living conditions,” Nuon Chea said. “We didn’t talk about politics or the structure of the movement in the beginning, because we had just met and what we were doing was very secret. We did not know and we did not ask where each other’s homes were.” That meeting marked the beginning of a friendship that would last until Pol Pot’s death forty-­three years later. Unlike the others in the upper echelons of the Khmer Rouge regime, Nuon Chea never studied in France and didn’t consider himself to be in the same class as Ieng Sary and Pol Pot. But it was Nuon Chea who would become Brother Number Two and Pol Pot’s most trusted lieutenant, not Ieng Sary, Pol Pot’s brother-­in-­law who had studied with Pol Pot in France. In those early years, bonded by their close work with Tou Samouth, they solidified their partnership. Nuon Chea was appointed secretary of Phnom Penh municipality, with Pol Pot as his deputy. Nuon Chea found the communist party in chaos. “When the Issaraks returned to the country to live under Norodom Sihanouk, they

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were split and there was no communication between the members,” said Nuon Chea, who found work helping a Chinese farmer. “Some were arrested and suppressed while others were busy making a living. Some confessed to the government that they were part of the old resistance forces, and some were gambling and drinking. Others ran away from their villages. Detectives were looking for Khmer communists and Sihanouk’s police started to oppress and arrest Issarak members at the countryside and town. Some were killed.” The communists also had to contend with Song Ngoc Thanh’s new movement, the Khmer Serey, which was against the monarchy and eventually backed by the United States. The two groups competed for members, and Nuon Chea accuses the Khmer Serey of inserting members into the communist movement to act as spies. “The Khmer Serey sent their people to become our members to destroy us,” he said. “This is the problem and danger we had. When they came to join our movement, they acted like they were good, but when we took power they tried to do bad things.” While the communists were trying to rebuild their organization, Sihanouk was trying to eliminate it. He took up some of the causes of the leftists, and promoted socialism, neutrality, and anti-­Americanism. Although he had accepted U.S. military aid, he said he would not take sides in the war in Vietnam. Conscious of the appeal the communists had for the country’s youth, Sihanouk banned known leftists from teaching at state schools. Internationally, Sihanouk declined to join the U.S.-­backed Southeast Asian Treaty Organization, which won him praise from North Vietnam and aid from China in 1956. The North Vietnamese especially saw Sihanouk’s neutral stance as helpful to their cause because it would mean that the United States could not use Cambodia to increase its military presence. The North Vietnamese favorable feelings toward Sihanouk, however, created complicated relations with the Cambodian communists. In principle, as communist comrades, the North Vietnamese were supposed to help their Cambodian counterparts. But in reality they sometimes discouraged the Khmer Rouge cause or refused to aid them in their own independence fight. Meanwhile Sihanouk, using his top henchman, Lon Nol, increased crackdowns on communist activists with arrests, assassinations, and torture. Lon Nol, appointed chief of staff of the Cambodian army in 1955, was known for his ruthlessness and willingly carried out Sihanouk’s dirty work. In the same year Nuon Chea was married, he and Pol Pot decided it was finally time to create their own path, separate from the Vietnamese. They had been building the movement up slowly, member by member, and now the

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organization needed a political platform. “Cambodia had no principle,” Nuon Chea said. “We were still connected to Vietnam’s tail but Vietnam was busy fighting the south. We decided to go our own way, to have our own strategy. We thought if we Cambodian leaders are under them, how can we make our country independent?” The two searched for the principles that would be the basis of the communist party. Pol Pot was in charge of researching national issues, such as government leaders and the situation in Phnom Penh. Nuon Chea was in charge of collecting news on the situation in the countryside, including agriculture and local party members. Pol Pot often went to the National Library to study French documents, books, and other publications. Nuon Chea never went to the library, but bought books about politics and political principles, including books about Vietnam, the Soviet Union, China and other communist publications. Nuon Chea read The Resistance Will Win, by Vietnamese communist leader Truong Chinh, who wrote the book in 1947 as a set of directives on guerrilla warfare. He read essays on building a political party by Chinese president Liu Shaoqi, who would later become one of the most prominent victims of the Cultural Revolution. Nuon Chea also studied books by Vladimir Lenin and Stalin, while Pol Pot read Lenin’s Left­Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. But Nuon Chea’s favorite readings came from Mao Zedong. “I liked reading books about how to work in secret and Vietnamese books that talked about the torture and arrest of communist members,” Nuon Chea said. “Chinese books talked about secret work and the people who pretended they were communists but were really spies.” He took these lessons to heart. He knew he could never be too careful, and he learned that if you were dedicated to a righteous cause, there would always be bad people who wanted to stand in your way. Nuon Chea and Pol Pot gathered facts on Cambodian society, including the number of large landowners and the percentage of society in the upper, middle, and lower classes. “We especially researched and analyzed Cambodian society, disputes, poverty, what people faced and needed since French colonialism, and the present government of Sihanouk,” Nuon Chea said. “I researched the struggle by Cambodians against France and the people who killed the French tax collectors. I researched the leaders of old independence movements and how some Cambodian leaders were defeated and cheated and their movement failed.” While they gathered ideas, Nuon Chea and Pol Pot presented their conclusions and thoughts to local members for feedback. Party members had strong debates on whether to have a nationalist revolution, which would fight

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against imperialism and foreign invasion, or a democratic revolution, which would focus on changing people’s way of thinking to implement democracy. Nuon Chea, Pol Pot, and Tou Samouth agreed to concentrate on a nationalist revolution because they thought it was more important to make their country independent. After that revolution succeeded, they would focus on democracy. “We wanted to protect the nation first and deal with the internal [issues] after that,” Nuon Chea said. “The members who wanted a democratic revolution were from the countryside, and they did not understand because they were oppressed by commune chiefs and district chiefs. The commune and district chiefs demanded taxes from them and they were oppressed, so they saw them as the main enemy, instead of the imperialists from overseas.” After all the research was conducted, Nuon Chea and Pol Pot made one of the most important decisions about their revolution—­who its core members would be. They decided the farmers would act as the base of the party, after research showed that 80 percent of Cambodians tilling the land lived in poverty. Although neither of them had ever been a farmer, they needed the anonymity provided by the countryside. Government crackdowns made working conditions in Phnom Penh more difficult each day. In rural areas, the Cambodian communists could easily build up their guerrilla movement to eventually surround provincial towns, attacking from the outside in. And philosophically, Nuon Chea and Pol Pot thought farmers were the cleanest of all the classes, as laborers strove to become members of the upper class and were then beholden to act like capitalists. “Laborers are mostly bought by capitalists and once their salary has been increased, they then suppress other laborers,” Nuon Chea said. “But the farmer is free.” Despite the arrests, Nuon Chea and Pol Pot continued with their work. While they were finishing their party platform, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward in 1958, aimed at accelerating the pace of development in China’s rural and urban areas. It proved to be a disastrous plan. Twenty million Chinese would die because of famine and other failures of government policy. Yet the Great Leap Forward would be admired by the Cambodian communists. The Khmer Rouge would try to outdo the Chinese in creating an agricultural utopia In Vietnam, the North Vietnamese approved the beginning of military operations in the South and the construction of the Ho Chi Minh trail to funnel supplies to its fighters. By this point, the United States had provided South Vietnam with nearly $1.5 billion in aid, and the number of U.S. military advisers in Vietnam would grow to 1,500 by 1960. Communists in Laos

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also launched an armed struggle against the royal government. Communists in Cambodia were not ready to take up a violent revolution, but they did form an official communist party. Twenty-­one delegates gathered in narrow rooms at the Phnom Penh railway station on September 30, 1960, for the founding congress of the Workers Party of Kampuchea. They originally chose October 1 as the date to hold the Congress, but that was the birthday of the People’s Republic of China and they did not want to be accused of being under China. Only the movement’s main members were invited, including Pol Pot’s brother-­in-­law and future Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary and future defense dinister Son Sen, who had studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. Because of the earlier defection of Nuon Chea’s uncle, Sieu Heng, to the government, Tou Samouth was appointed secretary general, while Nuon Chea was made second-­in-­charge as deputy secretary general. Sieu Heng’s betrayal would shake the movement’s core, but Nuon Chea would be even more affected by his relative’s move. Pol Pot became a member of the party’s permanent committee. In addition to electing new leaders, the Congress approved the political principles and statutes of the party, created by Nuon Chea and Pol Pot. The date of the Congress later proved to be a flash point on when the party was created, and would be used to accuse party members of being enemies of the state. Some argued that 1951 was the birth of the Cambodian Communist Party, after the Indochinese Communist Party was split, indicating that the movement was born from Vietnamese guidance. But others argued that 1960 was the first congress, cutting off the roots of the party from Vietnam. “I agree the Cambodia communist party was created in 1951, but the Congress in 1960 was to clearly separate from Vietnam and to not be involved with 1951, when we had no political program and just followed Vietnam,” Nuon Chea said of the controversy. “We did not consider Vietnam our enemy in the 1950s and ‘60s, but a friend. But we did not need an elder brother and Vietnam had an idea to govern our party.” Whatever the birth date of the party, it was clear in 1960 that the Cambodian communists were still connected to the Vietnamese. Nuon Chea traveled to Vietnam to the office in the forests of Tay Nguyen to tell his counterparts there about the new Cambodian communist principles. He met with Nguyen Van Linh, who would later lead the Tet offensive, and other leaders. He explained the principles of the Cambodian communist party and gave them one copy of the party platform. “This was the first time we made a document by ourselves,” Nuon Chea said. “It was our political strategy to show them our

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principles so they would recognize our party. While I was explaining, there was fighting near us so I was taken into a bunker. I ended up staying in the bunker for three days while I explained our political program to them.” While Sihanouk was fighting the communists in his own country, he was becoming increasingly close to the leftists of North Vietnam. The monarch­turned-­politician was weary of U.S. involvement in South Vietnam and decided Cambodia’s survival would be guaranteed by helping the North. The U.S.-­instigated coup and assassination of South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dien Diem in 1963 only added to his concerns. After the coup Sihanouk renounced U.S. aid and turned for help to other communist nations, mainly China. The following year, Sihanouk allowed Vietnamese communists to secretly station troops on Cambodian land. Sihanouk’s relationship with the North Vietnamese and the Chinese caused bitter rifts between the Cambodian communists and their comrades in Vietnam and China. In the years that followed, thousands of Vietnamese communists would cross the border to take up their struggle on Cambodian land, increasingly threatening the tightrope Sihanouk was trying to walk by declaring a “neutral” stance. “The Vietnamese dared not help our members because they were scared it would affect and damage their relations with Sihanouk,” Nuon Chea said. Meanwhile, the conservative right, headed by Lon Nol, became increasingly unhappy with Sihanouk’s “neutral” stance, which would eventually end his reign. The following year, 1964, the United States passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which gave it a blank check to respond to communist aggression in Vietnam. The United States launched its first aerial raids against the North Vietnamese in February 1965. Later that year, Pol Pot traveled to Vietnam to present the political program of the Cambodian Communist Party and to introduce himself to his neighboring comrades. Although Nuon Chea had already introduced the party’s platform, the meeting gave Pol Pot a chance to get to know his Vietnamese counterparts in Hanoi. In preparation for his visit, Pol Pot exercised for a month and tried to walk more than 7 miles a day to strengthen his legs. Accompanied by a Vietnamese guide and one Cambodian bodyguard, Pol Pot walked for days along the Ho Chi Minh trail through the forests, dodging American bombs along the way. Although it was a successful trip in that China and Vietnam agreed with the Cambodian communist platform, the trip still left a sour taste in Pol Pot’s mouth. When he returned, he told Nuon Chea that Vietnam considered Cambodia its younger brother, and not an equal. Pol Pot also said the Vietnamese told him that Cambodia had no need to build up its industry because

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that would be Vietnam’s job, while Cambodia could focus on agriculture and making rice. “What Vietnam said means that they do not want us to move ahead to be an industrial country,” Pol Pot said. He also met Ho Chi Minh, whom Pol Pot called comrade instead of uncle, as Ho Chi Minh was customarily called by his people. “Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese side were disappointed and they were not happy because I called him comrade Ho Chi Minh and that made us equal,” Pol Pot told Nuon Chea. “They wanted me to call him uncle Ho instead of comrade. They think our country is small and under their supervision and control.” After his trip to Vietnam, Pol Pot was even more determined for Cambodia to fight independently of Vietnam and to rely on its own resources for victory. Their resentment of the Vietnamese would reach its height during the Khmer Rouge rule and still lingers today. Even now, Nuon Chea always refers to the Vietnamese as “Youn,” a racist term used by Cambodians. As the Khmer Rouge plodded toward revolution, the Vietnamese seemed to be sprinting. Just over a week after the start of the Khmer Rouge armed struggle, the Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive on January 30, 1968. The attacks in the provincial capitals surprised Americans, who expected a lull in fighting while the Vietnamese celebrated the lunar New Year. In Saigon, the U.S. Embassy was briefly penetrated. Although the offensive was a military disaster for the Vietnamese communists, who faced a morale crisis and lost more than 10,000 troops, the attacks had a damaging affect on the American psyche. Until the Tet offensive, Americans believed they had been winning the war, but the images of the U.S. Embassy being attacked changed many minds. At the end of 1968, Pol Pot visited Vietnam for a second time and went to China to discuss the Khmer Rouge’s new plans for an armed struggle. The Vietnamese and the Chinese would make their unhappiness known to Pol Pot. Nuon Chea heard the same comments from the Vietnamese leaders he met. Both the Chinese and Vietnamese did not want their Cambodian counterparts to do anything that would upset Sihanouk and push him toward the United States. With the importance of the Ho Chi Minh trail and the sanctuary Cambodia provided to Vietnamese bases, the Vietnamese felt that keeping Sihanouk happy was more important than aiding their Communist Cambodian brothers. Nuon Chea said the Vietnamese asked the Khmer Rouge to stop fighting on four or five occasions. Nguyen Van Linh talked to Nuon Chea in 1968 about the Khmer Rouge decision, asking if there was any possible way he could halt the armed struggle. When he realized that the

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Khmer Rouge would continue, he asked that the Khmer Rouge avoid destroying bridges and roads needed by the Vietnamese communists to transport goods, weapons, and ammunition donated by China. “What they said was for their own interest because Sihanouk was helping North Vietnam attack the South,” Nuon Chea said. “Foreigners say the Vietnamese helped us but they did not do anything for us.” The only real aid provided by Vietnam was allowing Cambodians to run to the Vietnamese bases in Cambodia to escape from Lon Nol attacks. Trying to persuade Nuon Chea to take the struggle slowly, Nguyen Van Linh said that the Khmer Rouge should learn from the Vietnamese party about how to struggle and how to create a revolution. He told Nuon Chea that after the Vietnamese had won, they would help Cambodia in its fight against the United States. “If we let them help us like this, then we are under them and we would have to listen to their orders,” Nuon Chea said. “And if we stopped our struggle, our forces would be finished.” Despite the hapless and clumsy beginnings of the revolution, the Khmer Rouge still managed to recruit several thousand troops, compared to the 35,000 government soldiers. The growing force alarmed both Sihanouk and his underlings. Lon Nol, seizing on Sihanouk’s fears of losing power, persuaded the prince to question whether the Vietnamese were aiding the Cambodian communists, which would be a violation of the Geneva Conference agreement. Lon Nol considered the Vietnamese communists the source of all Cambodia’s troubles. In many ways, he mirrored Pol Pot and Nuon Chea in that he, too, desired Khmer purity in the population and to restore Cambodia to its Angkor-­era glory. To appease Lon Nol and the rest of the conservatives, Sihanouk applied for membership in U.S.-­supported organizations, such as the World Bank. But seeing Sihanouk’s increasingly erratic posturing, Lon Nol secretly let it be known that he wanted better relations with the United States. Sihanouk had already been losing touch with the situation in his country, as he engrossed himself in filmmaking and recording music. Lon Nol was essentially running the government, and it would only be a matter of time until he would assert himself further. As Lon Nol increased his power base, Cambodia would be pulled into the U.S. war in Vietnam in a terrifying manner. In March 1969, the U.S. began its secret bombing campaign in Cambodia to eliminate Vietnamese communist bases along the border. Over the next 14 months, 3,630 bombing raids would be flown over Cambodia’s borders in an operation known collectively as “Menu.” Individual operations were labeled by meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Snack, Dinner, Dessert, and Supper. In America,

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the bombings would not be fully known to the public until 1973. Although the aerial attacks were intended to wipe out communist forces in Cambodia, the bombing was not having the intended effect. The Vietnamese communists simply moved farther into Cambodia to avoid the bombing. And scores of innocent Cambodian peasants were killed. Some villagers, ignorant of modern warfare, did not know what to make of the B-­52 planes roaring through the sky. They just understood that the horrible metal objects falling from the sky left their family members dead or injured and the ground shaking. Craters left by the explosions can still be seen today. Worst of all, the U.S. war in Vietnam had now expanded. “I could not stay in a house,” Nuon Chea said. “I always slept in trenches to hide from the bombing. I was lucky because a bomb from a B-­52 once fell at the entrance of my house, but I left in the morning so I was not killed.” Although Sihanouk publicly denounced the bombings, he reestablished relations with the United States a few months later. But Sihanouk was still trying to play both sides and officially recognized the Provisional Revolutionary Government established by the Vietnamese communists in the South. In the meantime, Lon Nol solidified his power base and in August 1969 put together a new cabinet under his control. He then began to negotiate secretly with Son Ngoc Thanh, the CIA-­backed independence activist, who agreed to work with Lon Nol partly out of his hatred for Sihanouk. All the elements were in place for a takeover. While Sihanouk was losing his grip on power, he went on vacation to France and then traveled on to the Soviet Union and China in early 1970. Lon Nol and his allies rigged demonstrations against the Vietnamese communists in Svay Rieng province, which then moved to the capital. The National Assembly used the protests to criticize Sihanouk’s pro-­Vietcong stance. The Vietnamese embassy was ordered to withdraw all Vietnamese troops from Cambodia by March 15, an impossible request. Three days later, on the anniversary of the first U.S. bombing raid on Cambodian soil, a radio broadcast announced that the National Assembly had withdrawn its confidence from Sihanouk as head of state. Lon Nol later renamed Cambodia the Khmer Republic and ended monarchal rule. Tried in absentia, Sihanouk was found guilty of treason for aiding the Vietnamese communists by allowing them to establish bases in Cambodia and using the port town of Sihanoukville to deliver shipments. Sihanouk received the news of his removal while he was in the Soviet Union. Stunned and hurt, he traveled on to China, where, unbeknownst to the prince, Pol Pot was also visiting.

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After the coup, the Chinese still tried to work with Lon Nol, asking that he keep routes open for Chinese supplies to reach the Vietnamese. But he turned them down, so the Chinese moved to their next alternative. In a Chinese­brokered deal, Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge now joined forces to fight a common enemy. Sihanouk would be the symbol of the movement, calling on his countrymen to join the Khmer Rouge in the fight against Lon Nol. For Sihanouk, the alliance with the Khmer Rouge would end in disaster. But for the Khmer Rouge having the prince on their side gave them a tremendous boost in their chances for victory and lent their movement an air of credibility. For the first time, they looked at their armed struggle as a revolution, and their position changed from defense to offense. After almost twenty years of scraping by, forced to live in hiding, Nuon Chea and Pol Pot now saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Their time had finally come. But they did not forget the wrongs committed against them in the past. When the war ended, their long memories would come to haunt those who wronged them. In particular, the Khmer Rouge remembered how they were treated by the Vietnamese. “When we started our armed struggle, nobody supported us. Even Vietnam did not support us,” Nuon Chea said repeatedly. “They said we were fighting our father [Sihanouk]. So we were alone.” But with the overthrow of Sihanouk, the neighboring communists who had been opposed to the Khmer Rouge armed struggle now backed the Cambodian cause. The Vietnamese and Chinese agreed that the Khmer Rouge made the right decision in replacing their political movement with a violent one. But the Khmer Rouge leadership knew by this point that their fellow Asian communists were fair-­weather friends. China supported the Khmer Rouge with supplies, but the bulk of China’s aid went to Vietnam, which received about $1 billion total from China and the Soviet Union every year. And the growing influx of Vietnamese soldiers and residents into Cambodia caused tensions between the two allies. Vietnamese took over villages in Cambodia and imposed their leadership or policies without Khmer Rouge permission. And Vietnamese residents who escaped from the bombing in their homeland into Cambodia acted as if they were the natives. Although the United States and other world powers believed the Cambodian and Vietnamese communists were in perfect sync with each other, the inside story revealed a somewhat delicate relationship. Because they were allies in the fight against the United States, the Vietnamese and Cambodians had to work together, and neither side could fully air frustrations about the other. “During the fighting against American soldiers, the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge

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were united but the Vietnamese had their idea for a long time to govern our party and govern Cambodia,” Nuon Chea said. “They were waiting for their chance. When we were fighting against America, we learned and found out who we had to be careful of.” For the Vietnamese, the overthrow of Sihanouk meant the end of dependence on Cambodia as a safe haven. To drum up support for their own cause to have Sihanouk back in power, Vietnamese soldiers wore T-­shirts bearing Sihanouk’s photograph. The Khmer Rouge lodged their complaints with the Vietnamese. “If you wear a Sihanouk T-­shirt, this is just a way to hide your face and people will think you are coming to Cambodia to take Cambodian land,” Nuon Chea told Nguyen Van Linh. “There is no benefit to wearing this T-­shirt and Khmers won’t accept it. If you want to come to help, you should just act normally.” In 1970, Nguyen Van Linh met Nuon Chea along the border and asked whether the Khmer Rouge could help the Vietnamese recruit Cambodians to support the Vietnamese cause. “I told him, ‘It’s impossible,’” Nuon Chea said. “The right to recruit depends on the Cambodian party. If we allowed Vietnam to recruit, then they would choose only people who listened to Vietnam and insert their people into our party.” Nguyen Van Linh also asked whether the Khmer Rouge could help lobby Cambodian youths to be Vietnamese soldiers on the Vietnamese bases in Cambodia. “We denied their request,” Nuon Chea said. “So the Vietnamese not only interfered about our land but also about our party work and administration.” Vietnamese residents and soldiers often came to Cambodia to sell or buy supplies, including food and other items. But they crossed the border illegally and traveled freely through Cambodian villages, which infuriated some Khmer Rouge commanders. The Vietnamese also paid a higher price than Cambodians for goods, which caused inflation and difficulties for the Khmer Rouge, who did not have the same kind of funding and resources. “The Vietnamese were in disorder in zones liberated by the Khmer Rouge,” Nuon Chea said. “We told them not to walk freely because we still had spies and enemies, but they never respected our wishes and went to our markets. This made it difficult for us to work because we worried that the spies would come in during the resistance. They stirred up things inside our zones.” Sometimes the tensions erupted. When Vietnamese soldiers came into Kompong Thom province, Khmer Rouge commander Ke Pauk had them arrested. Wanting to avoid opening up more conflicts, Nuon Chea told Ke Pauk to release the Vietnamese. “We need cooperation from Vietnam as they are also attacking America,” he told him. “They need us and we need them.”

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But Ke Pauk resented the Vietnamese incursion onto Cambodian land. “Brother, don’t release them because they don’t respect our local authority,” Ke Pauk replied, almost shouting. “This is a small issue, so please release them,” Nuon Chea countered, talking to Ke Pauk in a soothing voice. Eventually he complied. The tensions between the Cambodian and Vietnamese communists also led to armed clashes. When Khmer Rouge veteran Khoy Thoun’s troops arrested Vietnamese soldiers who were in Kratie province to buy goods, Nuon Chea again had to defuse the situation. “The Vietnamese leaders were very angry about this and I tried to calm both sides,” Nuon Chea said. “I told Nguyen Van Linh that it was wrong to arrest them and that lower leaders had done this without permission.” When asked about the situation, Khoy Thoun told Nuon Chea that the Cambodian soldiers had acted on their own without orders from him. Another Khmer Rouge commander, Ta Mok, often talked about how the Vietnamese cheated the Khmer Rouge. He told Nuon Chea, “Vietnamese soldiers asked us to help transport weapons and ammunition that we confiscated from Lon Nol soldiers at the battlefield. But they took them for themselves.” “They did not respect what we told them,” Nuon Chea said in various interviews. “We tried to be patient and understanding because we also were in the struggle and had the same purpose. But they never asked permission from us and they never gave us information about where they were.” Pol Pot also complained about Vietnamese soldiers who stayed in Cambodia. During one of Pol Pot’s visits to his neighboring country, the Vietnamese had suggested that the fighting in Cambodia should be led by a mixed Cambodian-­Vietnamese military command, with Pol Pot as its leader. The idea was rejected. “We did not follow them. They organized it by themselves and appointed people by themselves,” Nuon Chea said. “We knew they just appointed Pol Pot as commander but everything was led and ordered by the Vietnamese. We would not be trapped by them.” Nuon Chea was the main Khmer Rouge liaison with the Vietnamese during Cambodia’s civil war. Since he had traveled to Vietnam in 1953 for training, he knew the personalities of his Vietnamese counterparts, which made him the ideal negotiator. Nuon Chea also understood the delicate balance that had to be maintained in the Khmer Rouge relationship with Vietnam. Although the Cambodian communists were angry about Vietnamese behavior, they could not act on it while they were both fighting American soldiers. “I am the compromiser and I was close to Nguyen Van Linh and we could

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talk easily,” Nuon Chea said. “At that time we always had problems with Vietnamese soldiers, but we tried to compromise to avoid conflict because we had many enemies like Lon Nol and the Americans. So if we had another enemy, then how could we do an offensive and defensive war? We tried to get victory over one and then we would solve the other problems later.” With the Khmer Rouge emphasis on racial purity and hostility between Cambodia and its neighbors, Vietnamese living in Cambodia were targeted by the Khmer Rouge, just as they had been with Lon Nol. Vietnamese citizens were labeled spies. Many were arrested and others fled to Vietnam. Cambodians who had escaped to North Vietnam after the Geneva Conference and returned to Cambodia after the coup were also targeted. Their loyalty was questioned and they were seen as having chosen Vietnam over Cambodia. “Some Cambodians believed too deeply in Vietnam since we fought together with them,” Nuon Chea said. “They thought Vietnam was a bigger, more important party.” In July 1971, top leaders of the Cambodian communist party gathered in the Northern Zone to expand the Central Committee and initiate a new phase of the revolution: the overthrow of imperialism. The Khmer Rouge leaders also drafted organizational plans to set up government ministries after their planned victory. While they were meeting, Lon Nol, who was still recovering from a stroke, prepared another offensive known as Chenla II, revenge for the Vietnamese attack on Phnom Penh’s Pochentong Airport. But the Cambodian government soldiers were no match for the seasoned Vietnamese troops, the best-­trained fighters in Southeast Asia. Lon Nol soldiers suffered heavy casualties after months of brutal fighting to control the road from Phnom Penh to Kompong Thom province. By the end of the year, Cambodian government soldiers had been defeated. Still, Lon Nol would not give up. He eliminated the National Assembly and the constitution, effectively ruling as a dictator. As the Khmer Rouge movement took control of more territories, it wanted to clarify its mission and its past. In 1972 the Khmer Rouge published a party history, partly meant as a message to those who had participated in the movement in the early years, when it was closely tied to the Vietnamese. The movement named September 30, 1951 as the party’s birth date, combining the September 30, 1960, founding party congress and 1951, when the Indochinese Communist Party split into three groups. The Khmer Rouge were sending a signal to the cadre who saw the Vietnamese as the father of the Cambodian communist movement. The debate over when the party was

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formed, an indirect commentary on Khmer Rouge ties with the Vietnamese, would flare up again in their years of power. But first would come another perceived betrayal by the Vietnamese. Pol Pot and Nuon Chea knew the Vietnamese communist leaders wanted something from them. U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger had been pressuring Vietnam for months to convince its Cambodian counterparts to participate in a ceasefire agreement. In one of their first meetings on the issue, Vietnamese leaders came to the Khmer Rouge base in Kompong Cham to meet with Pol Pot and Nuon Chea. Pham Hung, head of the communists’ Central Office for South Vietnam, and his deputy, Nguyen Van Linh, again asked the Khmer Rouge to subvert their goals for a Vietnamese victory. The four met several times about the ceasefire. Nuon Chea often described Nguyen Van Linh as a gentle man who was easy to talk to, while Pham Hung “was a bit hot-­headed.” “We are going to stop fighting and the U.S. wants the Cambodian side to stop as well,” Pham Hung told Pol Pot and Nuon Chea. “Will Cambodia sign an agreement with Vietnam on this issue?” “The situation in Vietnam and the situation in Cambodia are different,” Pol Pot replied. “Cambodia is like a boat that is rowing quickly to its destination. If it stops temporarily, it would be difficult to continue again.” But Pham Hung insisted that Cambodia must also agree to the ceasefire. He said it would be difficult for the Khmer Rouge to continue their resistance on their own. The meeting ended without either side budging. The Khmer Rouge then received a telegram from Vietnam that quoted Henry Kissinger as saying that the United States would destroy Cambodia in 24 hours if the Khmer Rouge did not stop the war. Nuon Chea and Pol Pot discussed their options. “We wondered how they could destroy us because we are in the forest and B-­52s are only good at killing people in the town,” said Nuon Chea, who mentioned Kissinger’s threat on numerous occasions. “In the forest we were split into small groups and when B-­52s started bombing us, our troops moved closer to Lon Nol’s soldiers.” Nuon Chea also said that they didn’t trust the Vietnamese agreement on the ceasefire. The Vietnamese had misled the United States in the past in the Tet offensive, when both sides temporarily halted the conflict because of the Chinese New Year and the Vietnamese used the lull to launch a major offensive against the United States. Nuon Chea said he and Pol Pot knew that the Vietnamese would not adhere to the ceasefire this time either. “Vietnam wanted America to believe it would stop fighting because at that time,

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Vietnamese forces were getting weaker and they needed this time to get more troops sent from north,” Nuon Chea said. He and Pol Pot felt they needed to be firm in their stance, to prove to the Vietnamese and to the Americans that they would not back down. At one of the meetings about the ceasefire, Nuon Chea and Pham Hung met alone. Pham Hung asked him Cambodians’ thoughts on ending the war and their thoughts on the Khmer Rouge, who didn’t want to stop fighting the Americans. “I replied to him that Khmer people are happy and glad when they don’t follow the Vietnamese and are not under the Vietcong,” Nuon Chea said. “Pham Hung’s face became red like blood but he did not say anything.” When Nuon Chea told Pol Pot what had happened at the meeting, Pol Pot made a joke, saying, “Comrade, you do not know about diplomacy.” But Nuon Chea took the matter seriously, telling Pol Pot the meaning of diplomacy. “You are of the party and I am of the party so we have to speak exactly and faithfully,” Nuon Chea said. Without Khmer Rouge participation, the cracks in the Khmer Rouge-­Vietnamese alliance were now in full view. In the end, Hanoi acknowledged that it could not sway its allies. After four years of negotiations, the U.S. and Vietnam finally resolved their conflict in the Paris Peace Accords, signed in January 1973. Nuon Chea cited Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho’s own negotiations with Kissinger during the Accord talks as reasons why Cambodia didn’t participate. “He dominated over Kissinger because he told him that he had no right to demand anything because you invaded us,” Nuon Chea said. “So that’s why in negotiations, you must be strong. If there are any weak points, they will take advantage of you.” The ceasefire agreement finalized the U.S. exit strategy from Vietnam, although it would be another two years before American troops fully withdrew from the area. The United States dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs on Cambodia, which Nuon Chea considered punishment for not signing the ceasefire. The Khmer Rouge believed that the Vietnamese agreement to the ceasefire amounted to another betrayal, another moment when the Vietnamese had let them down and abandoned them. “We had the same purpose and were friendly, but it was only a picture,” Nuon Chea said. “The internal situation was different. They made promises but then they acted in another way.” Sensing the coming triumph, Khmer Rouge leaders came together in 1973 in Kompong Cham to talk for the first time about the final push for victory, taking over Phnom Penh. But before the Khmer Rouge could pursue a takeover of the capital, Pol Pot asked Nuon Chea to reinforce relations with the

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Vietnamese because the Khmer Rouge needed to borrow ammunition from them. The Khmer Rouge needed a fresh supply of bullets after a paper factory in Kratie’s Chhlong district was destroyed by American bombs. The factory doubled as a storage facility for ammunition that had been transported to Chhlong on 30 military trucks. Nuon Chea had told Pol Pot that the ammunition should not be stored in one place, but be divided between different locations. But Pol Pot thought it wouldn’t be a problem because the storage location was kept secret. “The detectives and enemies inside our resistance movement passed news to Lon Nol soldiers and they sent three aircraft to bomb and destroy all our ammunition,” Nuon Chea said. “The ammunition was to be used to attack Phnom Penh.” Nuon Chea asked Eastern Zone leader So Phim to arrange a meeting with Nguyen Van Linh. The two met in February 1975 at So Phim’s office. Though an interpreter was present, Nuon Chea discussed the ammunition request in Vietnamese. “The Cambodian Communist Party needs to borrow one million bullets to attack and liberate Phnom Penh,” Nuon Chea told Nguyen Van Linh. “Do you think you can liberate Phnom Penh?” Nguyen Van Linh asked, somewhat incredulously. “Yes, we can because the enemy is weak and our troops are close to Phnom Penh. They are already standing near Pochentong Airport,” Nuon Chea replied. “So, comrade, you would liberate your country before us?” Nguyen Van Linh asked. “We will win and liberate our country first because you had been busy negotiating,” Nuon Chea joked. “It won’t be a problem if you liberate first,” Nguyen Van Linh said. He agreed to allow the Khmer Rouge to borrow the ammunition. The Cambodians ended up using about half the bullets. In the final days of the Khmer Republic, the Khmer Rouge used the ammunition to close in on Phnom Penh, taking the capital before the Vietnamese communists were able to claim Saigon. But the Vietnamese assistance didn’t make the Khmer Rouge grateful. Instead, it made them even more suspicious of their neighbor’s intentions. After the Khmer Rouge took power, the leaders immediately began putting together a plan to beat Vietnam in development. Pol Pot and Nuon Chea seemed oblivious to the preposterous and unrealistic nature of their plans. They believed that revolutionary fervor would help them achieve their goals. Rice production became the key to making Cambodia a prosperous

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nation. The leaders called for three tons of rice paddy per hectare—­a goal rarely achieved even in the best of times. Before the overthrow of Sihanouk in 1970, Cambodians typically harvested one ton per hectare. “Making rice was the most important thing for us and our top priority,” Nuon Chea said. “Besides this, we tried to produce Khmer traditional medicine to cure people. If we depended only on modern medicine, then we had no money to buy it.” The plan also called for two rice harvests per year, boosting the yield to six tons per hectare. A Khmer Rouge slogan promised, “If we have rice, we have everything.” Revenues from agricultural exports, especially rice sales, would finance Cambodia’s development, the leaders believed. Building dikes, dams, and canals was given top priority, with the goal of solving the country’s irrigation problems by 1980. Also by 1980, Cambodia was to have 500 rice-­milling machines and 1,000 tractors, but the plan did not state from where this equipment would come. Other crops such as jute and cotton were to be grown, but there were no specific procedures on where or how they would be farmed. And Cambodians were to be rewarded for the progress. “In 1977, there are to be two desserts per week,” the plan said. “In 1978, there is one dessert every two days. Then in 1979, there is one dessert every day, and so on. So people live collectively with enough to eat; they are nourished with snacks. They are happy to live with this system.” The Khmer Rouge also planned to develop light and heavy industry, but did not specify where they would get the material resources and expertise for this industrial development. A cornucopia of other subjects were discussed, none of them based on proven economic theory. With the help of China, the Khmer Rouge planned to search for oil reserves and mine minerals. Pol Pot was interested in finding a powerful European nation to handle the exploration since China did not have much experience with oil. “This plan was to prevent Vietnam from disturbing us and claiming it was their land,” Nuon Chea said. “This was an idea to protect the nation and sea borders. We communicated with other European countries on this matter but it was not yet settled because we only had three years.” The Khmer Rouge planned to mine for various minerals and coal, even though there was no evidence that Cambodia had such resources. “We start thinking about our own coal from now on,” the plan said. “The research must have direction, not head all over the place, that is, research with common direction as well as for particular necessities. The most important are coal and iron; if there’s any we’ll find it.” Cambodians would also fish, export rubber, and make car tires. Other

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ideas for development came from travels abroad. During one visit to China, Pol Pot watched workers make boats out of wood. He thought Cambodians could do the same in Kompong Som. “Our expectations were very high because we had many natural resources,” Nuon Chea said. “The cooperatives were working for the people, so we could get progress in a few years. Vietnam knew about our plan and that we would make a lot of progress, so they tried to destroy us. They did not want us to rise up. Vietnam was poor in natural resources. We had a lot of land for rice, oil and fish.” The Khmer Rouge leadership in mid-­1976 discussed the “Four-­Year Plan for Socialism in All Fields,” which called on Cambodia to modernize through collectivization of farming and industry. Seen as the next step in building a socialist revolution, the plan was to be implemented in 1977. It focused mostly on agriculture and industry, though it also addressed communications, science, and education. The goals were vague, egregious, and often ludicrous. Furthermore, engineers and other educated people who could be useful in trying to meet the unrealistic targets were persecuted as class enemies and often killed. But Pol Pot believed Cambodians could achieve what had never been accomplished before in other communist countries. “We are faster than they are,” he told cadre at that time. “If we examine our collective character, in terms of a socialist system, we are four to ten years ahead of them. We have new relations of production; nothing is confused, as it is with them.” But nothing seemed to work as they had planned. Many of the deaths were the result of the impractical demands imposed on the people to bring about modernization in Cambodia. Hundreds of thousands of people died from starvation, malnutrition, and overwork. And when the results were less than what was outlined in the Great Leap Forward, there would be a price to pay. But Nuon Chea denied that the Khmer Rouge leadership forced people to work excessive hours and gave them only rice gruel to eat. Although he acknowledged that the people faced hardships under the new Democratic Kampuchea, he said the leadership allowed people to work only 8 hours a day and to have rice three to four times a day. “The enemies inside the town and at the borders were taking this opportunity to destroy our way by forcing people to work hard. I am not clear whether it was the CIA or other people, but the enemies were there.” Nuon Chea said the Khmer Rouge sent trucks loaded with rice and spoons to the countryside, but the enemies threw the rice into the waters of the Tonle Sap River and gave people only porridge. “Our party had no principle to let people overwork and not give them enough to eat,” he said. “We wanted our people to have enough rice and food to have strength to work.”

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Part of the problem was a gap between the top echelons of the leadership and the lower-­level members, Nuon Chea said. The top leadership was not able to inspect the countryside frequently, and therefore relied on the reports of the zone leaders, who told the Center that everything was going well. “They forced the people to not eat until midnight and they created big cooperatives and could not govern them well,” Nuon Chea said. “We educated them to make the cooperatives smaller but they did not listen. Some wrongly carried out our policies and went too far, forcing people to work too hard. Our party had no political principle to let people work hard and not give them enough to eat. We wanted people to have enough rice and food to have strength to work. We had no laws and there was anarchy.” Scared of being deemed traitors if they failed to meet expectations, district cadre and other local leaders inflated their results, saying they had outperformed the goal by three times. Ludicrous reports of bountiful harvests and extraordinary progress in building dams and canals were reported to the Center. This led to a pernicious cycle in which the leaders increased production goals based on the fake numbers reported by the local leaders, making the demands even more impossible to meet than before. In the Khmer Rouge years in power, the leadership planned to transform 50 percent of cooperatives into advanced cooperatives, which would have sufficient water supply, an abundance of livestock, and rice harvests that met production goals. “Some cooperatives tried to trick me. They took chickens and pork and hung it in the cooperative hall,” Nuon Chea said laughing. “I suspected they were just hanging it to show they have enough food. As for the people who were skinny, they did not allow them to come close to us, only fat people came to see me. I knew some areas had shortages, but I did not think it was so extreme that they died of hunger.” In Kompong Speu, Nuon Chea saw a rice field with varying degrees of aged rice plants, which meant that some of the plants were ready to be harvested while others were not. He saw it as evidence of carelessness. When he traveled at dawn along Road No. 6 to visit Siem Reap province, he saw many people walking in a line. Nuon Chea asked them where they were going and the peasants told him they were going to the farm fields to work. “I asked them how they could see to cultivate because it was still dark. I then asked them who ordered them to do this, and they told me it was their leader. When I got back to Phnom Penh, I told Pol Pot about this.” Nuon Chea said he was perplexed by what he saw because that area was governed by comrade Soeung, whom he considered to be competent. “Maybe it was the people under him who forced them to do that,” he said. “There

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were many problems like this. In another place, one man was farming and his shovel broke. They punished him by shaving his head and writing on his head with a red pen. It’s unfair to treat the people like this—­the people will get angry.” Nuon Chea said he later found out that some had tried to inform him about the problems in the areas, but were prevented from doing so. “The bad people did not allow the farmers to come see me because they were worried that the people would report bad things,” he said. “I found this out later from people I met after the Vietnamese invasion. They told me they tried to see me but the people in charge of security did not allow it.” Nuon Chea made two visits to his hometown during his rule to see his mother and get a sense of how his own village was meeting the challenge of the new world order. Rhos Nhim, leader of the Northwest Zone, took special care to ensure that Nuon Chea saw a picture-­perfect communist society. He never left his side. “Rhos Nhim followed me and sat near me all the time,” Nuon Chea said. “He said he needed to protect the leader’s security. He did not allow anyone to come to see me except my mother, sisters, and brother. When I visited my mother, my younger sister wanted to talk to me. She was trying to come close to me but Rhos Nhim was always close to me. She dared not talk to me.” In the northwest region, which was to provide 40 percent of Cambodia’s annual rice harvest, people were malnourished. The situation worsened in 1977, when many died of starvation and sickness. In some areas people received adequate and regular rations of 250 grams of rice per day, while others received rice gruel. Meat and other sources of protein were a rarity. Rice harvests were often confiscated and sold to China, or deemed to be a surplus supply and taken away from the zone. As a result, there was often little food left for the peasants themselves. But many preferred to be on the brink of starvation than face the punishment given to traitors. Cambodians accused of betraying the movement—­even just sneaking some extra rice or planting vegetables around their homes—­faced unimaginable horrors, making the long hours in the field and watery porridge seem mild.

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Figure 1. Nuon Chea as a toddler, on tricycle in far left corner. He is with other residents of his village; a local teacher in a suit is seated in the middle. Photo provided to author by Nuon Chea.

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Figure 2. Nuon Chea’s mother. Date of photo is unknown. Nuon Chea was close to his mother, and he visited her during the Khmer Rouge rule. Photo provided to author by Nuon Chea.

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Figure 3. Nuon Chea’s father. Date of photo is unknown but he died of cholera when Nuon Chea was in his early twenties. Photo provided to author by Nuon Chea.

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Figure 4. Sambath Thet during one of his countless trips to see Nuon Chea in Pailin. Courtesy of author.

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Figure 5. Pol Pot in front and Nuon Chea walking right behind him. Photo was taken in northern Cambodia in 1979, after Vietnam ousted the Khmer Rouge from power earlier that year. Photo provided to author by Nuon Chea.

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Figure 6. Closer shot of the same picture of the two friends. Photo provided to author by Nuon Chea.

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6. The Missing Brother I saw a man hanging from a tree with a scarf around his neck. He committed suicide because he had a love affair and he knew if he was caught, he would be killed by Angka. —­Sambath

Thet Vorn, the oldest sibling in Sambath’s family, was in the tenth grade when the Khmer Rouge took over. With his handsome features and gentle nature, he was liked by everyone and had a girlfriend whom he expected to marry. Sambath and the other three brothers and two sisters looked up to him. He lived apart from the family to study in the town, where he learned about health care through his uncle, a medic, who allowed Vorn to stay with him. Sambath only saw Vorn when he visited the village to see his parents and siblings. When Sambath’s family left the village to escape the fighting, he saw his brother more frequently, since they were now living in the same town. High school had ceased to exist, and Vorn now was part of the mobile youth brigade. He worked diligently under the Khmer Rouge, making dams and canals to prove his worthiness. Because of his education, he was called on to help the battalion chief of the mobile brigade, who was illiterate, to write documents when he was not making dams. He was trusted enough that he was given a bicycle to inspect the irrigation at the rice fields. But soon some of Vorn’s colleagues began to disappear, arrested on suspicion of plotting against the government. As the web of accusations grew, Vorn’s friends told him to run away, fearing the investigation would reach him soon. He refused to escape, saying he was doing nothing wrong. In the meantime, the accusations against residents of Sambath’s area increased and the punishments became harsher. A man who had two wives was accused of having an affair with his wife’s younger sister, a criminal offense under the new regime. The Khmer Rouge told him to end the affair. He continued, and the Khmer Rouge, who seemed to know everything, found out.

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The villagers were called to a meeting so the man could be criticized and the others could be warned not to follow his example. Sambath wanted to go, but was told the man was going to be killed. Too scared to attend, he stayed away, but his brothers went and told him about it afterward. After the accused confessed, he was beaten to death with sticks. When he stopped moving, the Khmer Rouge cut open his chest and pulled out his liver and gall bladder. They said the organs were going to be used for medical study. “I was very scared when I heard about this killing and I dared not do anything wrong,” Sambath said. The culture of accusation and suspicion created a lynch mob mentality, and no one could be trusted, not even family members. As a result, residents were desperate to be left alone and avoid the negative attention of Khmer Rouge cadre. Cambodians wished for invisibility—­better not to exist than risk Khmer Rouge punishment if they were accused of a crime. An elderly woman living near Sambath talked and shouted to herself in her home, pretending she was crazy so she would be left alone. Others feigned stupidity to hide their education or wealthy backgrounds. And some just stopped talking. Still, Vorn would not flee, believing his innocence would save him. One day in 1977, Sambath saw Vorn riding toward him on a bicycle. His brother was on his way to inspect a dam and called out to Sambath to come over. Sambath had just returned from carrying fertilizer to the rice field and was now cutting grass along the road near his home. Surprised to see his brother with a new Chinese bicycle, he ran over to him. “How are you?” his brother asked Sambath, gently ruffling his hair. “I have no food or rice to eat,” Sambath told him. “I only have porridge.” Vorn remained quiet and looked at the ground. After a few moments of silence, Sambath asked him, “Brother, could you bring me a fighting cock?” Sambath had always dreamed of owning a fighting cock along with a dog and birds. Vorn smiled at the childish request. “Yes,” he said. “I will bring one for you.” “When will you give it to me?” Sambath asked anxiously, wanting to have his pet as soon as possible. Even though the Khmer Rouge had forced him to act beyond his years, he was still a child at heart. “Tomorrow I will bring it for you. Wait for me here,” Vorn said, and rode away to inspect the rice fields. Sambath was ecstatic. He thought he would have a handsome fighting cock all his own, not knowing the Khmer Rouge banned cock fights, and

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that all chickens belonged to Angka. Vorn knew that, but he didn’t want to disappoint his little brother, who had already lost both his parents at such a young age. The next day, as he cut the grass along the side of the road, Sambath watched for his brother. When he took breaks, he stood at the roadside to catch a glimpse of Vorn. He finally saw him riding his bike up the road. “Brother, where is my chicken?” Sambath asked. “Oh, I forgot it. I will bring it for you tomorrow,” Vorn said. But Sambath could tell he looked distracted and worried. Vorn patted Sambath’s head again and said he had to hurry off to look at the rice fields. The following day, Sambath again waited along the road during his breaks and watched out for his brother while he cut grass. Vorn never showed up. For the next few days, Sambath waited for his brother to bring the fighting cock. He never came. Sambath finally gave up. He wondered if his brother did not love him any longer. “I thought if he loved me, he would bring one to me,” Sambath recalled. “For weeks, I still expected that he would bring me a fighting cock. I dreamed that I would be getting it any day.” Only after the Vietnamese had ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979 did Sambath find out what had happened to Vorn. Because he had helped write documents for cadre accused of betraying the regime, Vorn was also labeled a traitor. Villagers told Sambath’s grandparents that Vorn had been taken to prison and later killed by the Khmer Rouge. Another member of Sambath’s family had been lost to the Killing Fields. Vorn is just one of a countless number of Cambodians who were killed because of their supposed betrayal. The presence of enemies was a constant worry and threat to Khmer Rouge leaders, and their paranoia spread from Phnom Penh to the countryside. Cambodians struggled to keep from drawing attention to themselves and raising suspicions. But many of them still could not escape the label “traitor.” In the meantime, Khmer Rouge cadre whom Nuon Chea had once considered his brothers were taken to prison and tortured. Even Nuon Chea worried about being called an enemy. From the lowest farmer to the highest cadre, Cambodians never knew if they would be the next one to “disappear.” This ever-­present fear was one of the ultimate horrors of the Killing Fields.

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7. The Enemies If we did not kill the internal traitors in our party, if we did not smash the enemy, there would be no Cambodia today. If we looked at the resistance movement when we fought an enemy that had good weapons and artillery, we thought it was a big deal. But the internal enemies were the worst and even more dangerous to the party and country. But we did not kill innocent people. If we had a policy to kill all the people, then why did we struggle to liberate the country? Why did we try to make rice for the people and reconstruct the nation? It is impossible that we would build a house and then destroy our own house. —­Nuon Chea

“Now it reaches a top leader who betrayed Angka,” Duch told Nuon Chea. “What do you mean?” he asked Duch, head of the notorious S-­21 prison. “A confession points to Bang Hem,” Duch said, using the alias for Khieu Samphan. Nuon Chea was shocked. Khieu Samphan was a man so clean that he wouldn’t even take a new bicycle for his son, preferring a secondhand bike. Nuon Chea wondered why Duch would give such a report on a faithful servant of Angka. By now, at the end of 1978, many of Nuon Chea’s former colleagues and friends had already been executed as traitors. Most of them had been tortured and killed at S-­21. “Don’t say careless things,” Nuon Chea said angrily. “Don’t report this again and don’t say it again. I don’t believe people’s confession that lay blame on Khieu Samphan.” It was very dangerous, Nuon Chea now says of Duch’s report on Khieu Samphan. “I suspected Duch of betrayal at that time but I did not say anything because Vietnamese troops were attacking us along the border and we were busy trying to find a way to prevent an invasion. We did not know what Duch was doing or whether he was good or bad. Duch was not happy with me because I always blamed him for making mistakes.”

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Duch remained silent and never mentioned Khieu Samphan to Nuon Chea again. Nuon Chea said nothing about the accusation to anyone. “I never told Khieu Samphan about this because I didn’t think it was necessary,” he said. And he knew the implications of such an accusation. “I felt that if they now accused Khieu Samphan, that means later they would accuse all the people and I would be one of those people. If Khieu Samphan betrayed Angka, then it means everyone is betraying Angka. I wondered how the accusations had spread so much. I did not tell Pol Pot about it. I saw it was not right.” The idea of “enemies” had long been part of the Cambodian communist movement. A month after our first meeting with Nuon Chea, his aides who arranged our initial interview showed up unexpectedly at the Cambodia Daily office in Phnom Penh. They told us they wanted to see the capital, which they had never visited before, but didn’t have a place to stay and didn’t know anyone else in the city. They said mototaxi drivers had already cheated them, driving around in circles to prolong the ride, increasing the price. They looked to us for help. We felt responsible for them, so we found them a hotel room and showed them around town. We were a bit taken aback to see them, because Khmer Rouge cadre like to stay among themselves in their former strongholds. A year later, one of the aides told us that Nuon Chea had dispatched them to Phnom Penh to investigate us to make sure we weren’t government spies or had some other sinister purpose. We weren’t that surprised. We realized by then that it was an old habit Nuon Chea couldn’t shake. He had learned long ago to be suspicious of everyone he met. Before the Khmer Rouge came to power, Nuon Chea and Pol Pot had spent twenty years avoiding or fighting enemies. This shaped the way they thought, where they traveled, what they ate, and how they lived. And now that Nuon Chea and his comrades had taken power, enemies abounded and conspired to destroy the regime. This belief, still held today by Nuon Chea, fueled the paranoia and delusions that led to purges, torture, and murder. Not all the dangers were imagined. There were real plots to overthrow the regime or incite trouble, and these fed the distrust. By the time they took power, it seemed Khmer Rouge leaders couldn’t distinguish truth from fiction, and the two often mixed. Nuon Chea lived in constant wariness not only of the enemies he knew, but also of those he didn’t know. He said he applied that vigilance to “leaders around me and in the party.” The enemies were everywhere, and they were blamed for everything. According to Nuon Chea, there were Americans, Thais, Vietnamese, and

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French, so determined to overthrow the Khmer Rouge that they threw away rice, killed peasants, and created general havoc in the regime, aided by Cambodian conspirators. “We knew that there were many enemies hiding in our regime and planning to destroy our policies. So we were very busy trying to find the enemies.” In this culture of fear, Cambodians were encouraged to root out traitors and name spies. Eventually neighbors turned against neighbors, sisters turned against brothers, and husbands turned against wives. “There were many spies in Cambodia. They had been hiding in Cambodia and destroying the internal party for a long time,” Nuon Chea said, pointing his index finger for emphasis. Because the Khmer Rouge were trying to raise the people up, Nuon Chea and Pol Pot knew there would be those trying to foil them. That was the only way for them to explain why their policies were not working, when they believed Cambodia was destined for greatness. Their paranoia about enemies blinded them, causing them to see friends and brothers as traitors. For Nuon Chea, finding and catching the enemies became a test of who could outlast the other. It was a fatalist vision born out of years of persecution, and there was always a choice between survival of the nation and survival of the accused. Given those two options, killing a perceived traitor became the easy choice for Pol Pot and Nuon Chea. The ultimate horror came in the form of S-­21, the former high school that was turned into a detention and interrogation center and is now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. In the pretend world created by false confessions and nonexistent double lives, madness fed madness. According to documents from the Khmer Rouge tribunal, more than 12,380 prisoners were admitted into S-­21 and only a handful had managed to survive by the time the Vietnamese invasion ousted the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979. The reputation S-­21 has gained leads Khmer Rouge officials to distance themselves from the prison, often saying they only heard of the place, but had nothing to do with it. Surprisingly, Nuon Chea once asked if we would escort him to S-­21 so he could view it for himself. But because of health concerns and the difficulty of disguising himself, he decided against it. Nuon Chea doesn’t apologize for S-­21, even though his niece and others close to him were sent there. He often stated that the enemies responsible for killing people in the countryside had to be smashed. Others were conspiring to overthrow Pol Pot and had to be stopped. But for every person they killed, they found out through the traitors’ confessions obtained at S-­21 that there were more enemies. The “arms and legs” of the traitors were everywhere.

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There is some truth to the accusations. Some top cadre were planning to stop Pol Pot’s Great Leap Forward, recognizing the havoc and chaos it was unleashing on Cambodian society. Other incidents increased suspicion, too, such as the 1977 rebellion in Siem Reap by residents who complained they didn’t have enough food. But many were killed for petty offenses, such as walking in an area where they weren’t allowed to go, or giving an incorrect response at a self-­criticism session. For the first half of the Khmer Rouge rule, Nuon Chea didn’t have direct control over S-­21, but as one of the top leaders of the movement he was involved in decisions to purge top cadre. And when Khmer Rouge defense minister Son Sen was dispatched to take care of border conflicts with Vietnam and growing tension with the Eastern Zone in the fall of 1977, Nuon Chea became the de facto head of the interrogation center, according to Brother Number Two and testimony from Duch in the spring of 2009. For example, Duch cited a case in which Nuon Chea ordered the arrest of one cadre because he allowed a radio operator to escape. Prior to Son Sen’s departure from Phnom Penh, Duch said he would send S-­21 reports to Son Sen, who would pass them on to Pol Pot and sometimes Nuon Chea. But even for Nuon Chea, the killing of enemies is sometimes difficult to explain. When we once asked him why the Khmer Rouge didn’t put the so­called enemies in prison for life, why the leaders felt they had to be killed, he replied, “That is an easy question to ask but a difficult one to answer.” After a pause, he continued. “But at that time, we had no proper prisons. And if we kept them, they would spread and produce their eggs and many more would have been killed.” The roots of the Killing Fields are found in Nuon Chea’s beginnings in politics, which had secrecy as one of the foundations of success, and the years of persecution he faced before the Khmer Rouge came to power. Over the years, the communist movement’s survival would be tested over and over, and scores of members would be killed. In their struggle, betrayal, assassination, and torture became almost common and normal, skewing their moral compass. In his testimony to the Khmer Rouge tribunal in April 2009, S-­21 prison chief Duch was asked who taught him how to interrogate and torture people. He answered that the Lon Nol regime and the French authorities before that taught him how to ruthlessly extract information from traitors. “About the beating up, I learned it from the Lon Nol and the French inspectors.” He added that the most common methods of torture at S-­21 were beatings with lashes or whips, electrocutions, and waterboarding.

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This is not an excuse for their behavior, but an explanation that Nuon Chea constantly pointed to, that the Khmer Rouge faced years of brutality before they came to power. “Do not accuse the Khmer Rouge of being cruel and pretend others were not like that,” he said. “Lon Nol and others killed our members and innocent people from 1955 to 1975. Revenge and vindictiveness were there before us and it continued with us.” The secretive nature Nuon Chea adopted when he first joined the communist movement intensified as his involvement deepened. He became suspicious of everything and prided himself on his ability to fool others and stay one step ahead of the authorities. When Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was captured in December 2003, Nuon Chea said that if it had been he, he wouldn’t have gotten caught because he was an expert at living in the shadows. Because of his ability to be nearly invisible, very little was known about Nuon Chea by scholars or journalists. There are even different reports on his real name. Nuon Chea claims his birth name was Lao Kim Rorn, not Long Bun Ruot, Long Reth, or other names historians have attributed to him. Nuon Chea often brags that from “1955 until the liberation, I never went to a coffee shop or noodle shop. This is dangerous and would damage the party. Second, I didn’t think emotionally and I did not try to contact family members. If you contact relatives, they will start to know things about you and one of them may tell the police.” In 1955, Nuon Chea was riding his bicycle in Phnom Penh when one of his uncles drove by in a car. His uncle called out to him, but he tried to flee, not wanting to be seen by a family member while working underground for the communist movement. But since his uncle was in a car, he caught up to Nuon Chea and invited him to his home. After the visit, Nuon Chea’s mother found out that her cherished son was back in Cambodia. Until then, his mother assumed he was still studying and working in Bangkok. She came to see him at a restaurant and sobbed because she had not seen her son for so long. “I tried to keep the place where I was staying hidden from her because I was worried if she knew where I lived, she would visit me all the time and then she would be followed by detectives,” Nuon Chea said. He paid his respects to her and apologized for not telling her he had returned. She told him that one of his cousins who had been highly educated like him now had a high position in the Cambodian army and she wondered why Nuon Chea did not have a job. Later that year, Nuon Chea saw his mother walking along a road, but he didn’t call out to her. When Nuon Chea married in 1957, he didn’t invite his mother to his wedding. He told her later that he was getting married, but that

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she shouldn’t come to the ceremony because the travel would be difficult. Even when he traveled near his mother’s home to recruit members and build communist bases, he did not see her. “I was worried it would damage the organization,” he said. “Vietnam praised me because I worked well in secret and no one knew me or arrested me.” When Nuon Chea and Pol Pot were young communists, the movement was dealt a devastating blow—­the defection of the movement’s leader and Nuon Chea’s uncle, Sieu Heng. This was Nuon Chea’s first experience of serious betrayal, an event that became burnished in his memory as a reminder that even the people closest to you could join the enemy. Sieu Heng started supplying Sihanouk with information about communist networks and membership after he returned from Vietnam in 1956. His defection became public in 1959 although Nuon Chea said he was aware of it before then because his mother had told him that Sieu Heng had gone to see the king. Nuon Chea told Pol Pot and Tou Samouth, deputy leader of the movement under Sieu Heng, to be especially careful. Deng Chhoeng, Sieu Heng’s wife, said her husband defected for his family. “I implored him to leave the movement and told him he could not live in a mousehole,” she said. “He must come out and join society to feed his family.” As his nephew-­in-­law, Nuon Chea had been close to Sieu Heng; he had lived with him for about six months when he was a teenager before he went to Bangkok to study. When Sieu Heng’s wife was trying to find her husband, who was hiding in the jungles along the Thai border after he joined the movement in the mid-­1940s, Nuon Chea helped her locate him. And after Nuon Chea was married, he lived with Sieu Heng for a few months before he moved to avoid the authorities. “Sieu Heng was a good man before, and my grandmother would not have allowed him to marry my aunt if he was not a good person,” Nuon Chea said. “But Sieu Heng did wrong and made a mistake. But I still have sentimental feelings for him because we used to be close.” Although Nuon Chea conceded that Sieu Heng had betrayed his comrades, he understood his situation. “Sieu Heng had a spirit of loving the nation, but he had to leave because his family was in a difficult living situation,” he said. “But he did not completely betray the movement, or else all the members would have been arrested because Sieu Heng knew me, Pol Pot, and Ieng Sary. But he did not destroy us.” Nuon Chea also said Sieu Heng’s defection was beneficial in some ways because it exposed the enemies of the party. “We knew that those who stayed with the movement were sincere and faithful,” he said. “His defection had a big effect but I was not discouraged. We lost him,

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but we had many other people working for the movement so it did not shake me. I was young at that time and there was no reason for me to lose hope.” But Nuon Chea was affected by his uncle’s defection since he was Sieu Heng’s relative. Fearing it would taint the party and he would be suspected of wrongdoing as well, Nuon Chea offered to resign, but the party declined. Still, there were rumors that Nuon Chea had joined Sieu Heng, and he thought he should at least step down as deputy of the party. He discussed the issue with Pol Pot, who said he could take over the deputy position if Nuon Chea wanted to give it up. Nuon Chea agreed, which marked the beginning of Pol Pot’s senior status and led to the designations Brother Number One and Brother Number Two. After Nuon Chea agreed to step down from the deputy position, he approached Tou Samouth and told him he wanted to become simply a central committee member. He asked that Pol Pot replace him. Later, when they had to choose a replacement for Tou Samouth as head of the Cambodian communist party, Pol Pot became head of the movement and Nuon Chea took the number two spot. Sieu Heng would be one of the first killed in his village after the Khmer Rouge took power. The year Sieu Heng’s defection became public marked the beginning of escalating persecution of communist activists in Phnom Penh. In October 1959, Lon Nol’s police assassinated a prominent member of the movement, Nop Bophan, editor of the communist Pracheachon newspaper. Party members in the countryside already faced significant oppression, and the movement lost many members to arrests and murders. Out of fear, Nuon Chea burned several documents Pol Pot had given him about meetings with party members. He began moving every three to four months. For a time he lived near communist leader Tou Samouth, but he didn’t talk openly to him because of all the detectives around his home. He and Pol Pot then shared a home while working on the party’s founding principles, but they pretended they didn’t know each other when they were out. Because Pol Pot always had many guests and visitors, they often met privately in Nuon Chea’s room, using the back door as an entrance. They put a bottle of wine on the table as a decoy, as though they were having dinner, in case anyone suddenly dropped by. At this time, Nuon Chea was pretending to be a teacher. He left his home every weekday under the pretense of going to work. “I rode my bicycle away from my house to work for the party and sometimes I rode to Kompong Speu province to meet members and strengthen the party,” he said. Every night Nuon Chea was prepared to run from the authorities, just in case. He slept wearing his daytime clothes and went to bed early so he could

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wake at 3 a.m. to escape arrest, since these mostly occurred in the middle of the night. He never took the same route home twice to throw off anyone who might be following him. Luck always seemed to be with him. He was once on his way to a communist member’s house when he learned the member had been arrested just hours earlier. He hid at another member’s home until he felt it was safe to return to his own house to pack. “Working in secret is much more difficult than fighting on the battlefield with a gun,” Nuon Chea said. “On the battlefield, you shoot your gun at the other side and you know if you won or lost. But in secret, we could not see our enemy. So we had to change our clothes, change our house.” Pol Pot often got information about the authorities’ heightening activities against communist members from friends who were soldiers and government officials. He would warn Nuon Chea and other members when he learned about upcoming crackdowns on the movement. “When any member was arrested, we had to change our house. If I stayed in one house for a long time, I didn’t feel good and became stressed,” Nuon Chea said. “The detectives would arrest the husband and if he did not confess, then they arrested his wife and children and tortured them in front of the husband. This is the way they forced people to confess. People don’t think that time was cruel, but it was very cruel. Sihanouk ignored it and tried to be good, but he let Lon Nol do it. Many Khmer Rouge members were killed and thrown away into the Kirirom (mountains). Some were not Khmer Rouge but they were accused and arrested.” Sometimes Nuon Chea stayed away for weeks, while his wife Ly Kimseang was left alone to raise the three children. Once when Ly Kimseang was in labor, Nuon Chea was not there because he was attending to party work. And because the only salary he received was a paltry sum from the party, his wife often had to work, selling groceries or taking odd jobs. When she wasn’t working, Ly Kimseang and her children stayed locked inside their home. The children were not sent to school until they were eight years old. “I was always worried and stayed inside,” she said. “When I went to the market, I always bought enough food to last us for days so I wouldn’t have to go out again for a while.” One of Nuon Chea’s sons, Thoeun, complained when he was young that he could not play outside and lived like a mouse. His other son, Say, said he would want to be reborn as a fly because he would have lots to eat. Tired of being trapped indoors, the children sometimes stole Ly Kimseang’s key so they could unlock the door and play outside. “I did not let them go outside to play with other children,” she said. “If I allowed them to go outside, it would damage their father’s movement.”

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The stakes became steadily higher. Nuon Chea and Pol Pot knew Lon Nol detectives were hunting down communist activists and if their leader, Tou Samouth, remained alone, he would be suspected of being part of the resistance. Lon Nol’s agents often suspected anyone who lived a somber life, devoid of dancing and drinking, of being a communist. Nuon Chea and Pol Pot found a woman, a widow with one child who had been part of the resistance against the French, to marry Tou Samouth. “He was a true resistance fighter and he never complained about any hard work or difficulties in living to serve the movement,” Nuon Chea said. “He loved the nation very much.” They also discussed moving the party headquarters from Phnom Penh to the countryside and moving Tou Samouth to the hill tribe area of Ratanakkiri province to avoid arrest. Sihanouk had stepped up his attacks on the communists, since 1962 was an election year. “We thought if we stayed in Phnom Penh, the government would destroy us,” Nuon Chea said. “What we were doing was to prevent news from getting out and damaging our forces because Sieu Heng had confessed and we thought he might name us.” Before Tou Samouth could be moved to Ratanakkiri, he disappeared. His disappearance terrified Nuon Chea and drove the communists farther into the shadows. On one evening in August 1962, Nuon Chea went to Tou Samouth’s home to give him some party documents. Tou Samouth’s wife told him that her husband had gone to the market to buy medicine for his son’s diarrhea and had not come back yet. Nuon Chea knew something was wrong. He noticed that the detectives who usually hung out outside Tou Samouth’s house to have drinks at a local refreshment stand were no longer there. “If they were there, I would have been arrested because they knew that anyone who came to Tou Samouth’s house was his colleague,” Nuon Chea said. “I rushed back home as fast as I could. I pedaled so hard on my bicycle that I broke the bicycle’s neck.” As he raced home, he constantly looked behind to make sure no one was following. “Before I got to my house, I traveled to many other places to throw people off my track and to not let them know where I lived,” he said. Nuon Chea prepared to move out of his home and immediately told Pol Pot of Tou Samouth’s disappearance. They sent their network to check the area hospitals and asked soldiers who were secret members of the movement if they knew where Tou Samouth was being detained. They also arranged for the evacuation of Tou Samouth’s wife and son. “If she stayed there, she would be arrested and tortured, and she might not bear the pain like her husband,” Nuon Chea said. There are conflicting beliefs as to who kidnapped Tou Samouth and what

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happened to him after his disappearance. Nuon Chea said his informants told him that Tou Samouth was kidnapped by Lon Nol’s men and kept at the general’s house until his “stomach was chopped up” and he was cremated at Ta Prum Meanchey pagoda. Some historians believe Pol Pot himself arranged Tou Samouth’s disappearance so he could take control of the party. Nuon Chea firmly believes the first explanation and says the party managed to survive only because Tou Samouth apparently did not reveal the names of other members to the authorities. At least, no one came for Nuon Chea, Pol Pot, and others. Tou Samouth became a symbol for the resistance movement, with his example being raised at guerrilla training courses. Before he was arrested, he swore to his members that he would never confess anything if he was captured: “I am faithful to the nation and will die for the people and the party.” Nuon Chea told members that if they were arrested and tortured they should follow Tou Samouth’s example and remain silent. “If he had confessed, the movement would have been finished,” he said. Later, the Khmer Rouge would extract thousands of their own confessions from those deemed enemies of the state. Although Nuon Chea and Pol Pot later realized that Tou Samouth had kept his word, at that time they did not know whether they were safe. Nor did they know what had happened to their mentor, their leader. It drove them to become even more vigilant about secrecy and security. Nuon Chea, with his wife and three children, began moving every month or two. They settled first at a house near O’Russei market, but Nuon Chea was still followed by detectives. The family moved around O’Russei four times before relocating to a home near Psar Doeum Tkao, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. But the owner of the home, who worked in the Ministry of Public Works, was a Khmer Rouge member and was arrested. Nuon Chea moved into another house where another Khmer Rouge member lived, but that man too was eventually arrested. Everywhere Nuon Chea went, he saw threats. “When I left my house for work, I did not tell my wife where I was going and what I was doing,” he said. “I just told her that if she didn’t see me, she should immediately move to another place because I was probably arrested.” In 1968, Ta Mok’s wife and baby son were arrested and imprisoned. She was later released, but their son had died in prison. “Ta Mok was very sad at that time but he did not allow the enemy to see his tears drop,” Nuon Chea said. “He just asked why his family was taken out of his house. It was very hard at that time, and we suffered because we could not even dare to help our relatives or the movement would be affected. Some of our members confessed and returned to the government.” During their work, other Khmer Rouge members

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ran into their wives and other relatives, but they stayed hidden and did not initiate contact. “Ma Mong told me when he was working, he saw his wife borrowing rice from other people. but he did not go see her because he was afraid the information would be spread to police,” he said of one leading cadre. Another member, Ban Yen, arrested while transporting weapons and ammunition, was tortured and beaten. He told authorities about a house in Phnom Penh near the Kirirom Cinema where weapons and ammunition were stored. “He was in too much pain and could not be patient with torture, so he confessed,” Nuon Chea said disdainfully. Police surrounded the house, and the owner was killed. Nuon Chea had been in the house hours before the police arrived. Every time, he managed to avoid capture, in part by keeping even close cadre in the dark about his identity and home. “I was lucky because they did not know who I was. I never told my real name when I met most members,” he said. “When one member was arrested, he was asked who else he knew and he answered that he knows Pa Asok. Pa Asok was my secret name. So no one could find me.” In March 1969, the United States began bombing Cambodia to rid the country of Vietnamese communist bases along the border. The ferocity of the campaign strengthened the Khmer Rouge leaders’ belief in enemies and the cruelty of those they were fighting against. In America, college campuses erupted with mass protests against the bombings. At Kent State University in Ohio, the National Guard shot 15 students, killing four of them. Nuon Chea often mentioned his gratefulness to the Kent State students when talking about the U.S. involvement in Cambodia. “I would like to thank the university students in Ohio for supporting us in our fight,” he said. At the same time, Lon Nol, now prime minister and defense minister, was making progress in his stepped-­up attacks on the Cambodian communists. Government detectives had discovered Pol Pot’s new jungle hideout in Ratanakkiri, and in one government offensive Pol Pot narrowly escaped. Sihanouk declared that Cambodia was embroiled in a civil war with the communists and ordered all rebels executed. Many wrongly accused innocent citizens were killed as well. Despite the growing cache of weapons now owned by the Khmer Rouge, they weren’t having much luck defending their cadre. The leftists were still arrested, tortured, and killed. The violence became a normality of their revolution. “Some of our members were paralyzed or became blind,” Nuon Chea said. “Some had mental problems because of torture. Many Khmer Rouge members were killed.” With the situation dire, Nuon Chea traveled to Pol Pot’s new hill tribe

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home in Ratanakkiri for a month-­long visit to talk about the situation in Cambodia. Pol Pot’s wife, Khieu Ponnary, who had been living in Phnom Penh, accompanied Nuon Chea. When Pol Pot fled to Ratanakkiri, Khieu Ponnary had been sent to the southwest to live at Ta Mok’s base. Pol Pot felt the journey to the remote hill tribe area would be too difficult and dangerous for her. But she later told Nuon Chea she wanted to go into hiding because she was being followed almost every day. Pol Pot asked Brother Number Two to bring her to the jungle hideout. Previously, she had been in hiding with Pol Pot in Svay Rieng, but that base was also discovered by Sihanouk’s police. The situation worsened for Cambodia after the Paris Peace Accords between the United States and Vietnam, when a massive American bombing campaign killed scores of people from February to August 1973. In one of the attacks, U.S. planes accidentally bombed the ferry town of Neak Loeung, which was still under the control of the Lon Nol regime. About 400 Cambodians were killed or wounded in that single raid. The Khmer Rouge were now forced to struggle on their own. In light of the cease fire, most of the Vietnamese troops in Cambodia returned home or lived in the border area. On the ground, Cambodians would now only have each other to unleash their violence upon. The conflict became more hideous with every passing day, and each side tried to outdo the other in viciousness. Although the Khmer Rouge were no doubt experts in cruelty, Lon Nol had years of experience doing Sihanouk’s dirty work and his men were also schooled in brutality. The limbs and organs of Khmer Rouge soldiers were strewn on tree branches to show other rebels what would happen to them if they came under the wrath of Lon Nol troops. Cambodian communists were beheaded and some had their livers eaten by their killers, according to Nuon Chea. While the Khmer Rouge and Sihanouk developed a partnership after the Lon Nol coup in 1970, the fight against Lon Nol went on without the Khmer Rouge leaders initially revealing their identities to the Cambodian people. Officially, Sihanouk was still chief of state as head of the National United Front of Kampuchea (FUNK) and the Royal Government of National Union of Kampuchea. But Sihanouk was in Beijing when the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh and would remain there until September 1975, when the Khmer Rouge felt Cambodia was stabilized enough to invite the monarch back to his homeland. The only name the people heard was Angka, the all­knowing and all-­present organization that was like an omnipotent god looming over everything. Angka knew what people were thinking and doing and was to be trusted to meet all of the people’s needs.

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Foreign Affairs Ministry officials and Khmer Rouge allies in China were pushing Pol Pot to announce his identity and that of his party. But both Nuon Chea and Pol Pot felt the situation was still too volatile and preferred to continue to work in anonymity. They needed time to consolidate power and make sure their enemies would not pounce when they revealed themselves, Nuon Chea said. “The diplomats pushed us to announce our party but we were not ready yet. We did not want to declare who the leaders were because we were very busy working and we wanted our party to be stronger before we made an announcement. If we announced in the beginning that we were communists, then only communist people would join. We first wanted the party to be well cooked.” It would be two years after the Khmer Rouge victory before the leaders felt ready to reveal their identities. The Khmer Rouge also began developing a system to detect spies who had infiltrated their movement. Before the infamous S-­21, there was S-­39, created by Pol Pot in 1971 to root out traitors, according to Nuon Chea. By this time, Khmer Rouge leaders were already deeply paranoid of enemies, whom they believed had grown exponentially in number since the civil war began. They had spent so many years looking over their shoulders that the existence of traitors became a given, ingrained in their psyches. If the authorities had been out to get them when they were a speck of a force, who was lurking in the shadows now that their victories in battle were growing? For Nuon Chea, the death and destruction he had witnessed on his journey to victory made him almost immune to the terror that would befall his so-­called comrades and brothers. Nuon Chea said a man named Mr. Porn, one of the cadre who had fled to Vietnam and returned after King Sihanouk was overthrown, was appointed chief of S-­39. The center was charged with investigating and following suspected enemies, “because at that time, we did not yet have control over the whole country so detectives were coming to our bases to spy.” But Pol Pot soon found that there were many problems in S-­39, an eerie foreshadowing of what was to happen in S-­21. Confessions and reports accused many cadre of betrayal, spying, and plotting to destroy the regime. The allegations seemed too numerous and preposterous to be true. “Their reports were not reasonable,” Nuon Chea said. “Pol Pot saw that it was not good and such reports would damage our unity. Porn accused this person and that person and it was too much.” Pol Pot shut down S-­39. After the Khmer Rouge victory, Nuon Chea said he and Pol Pot thought there would be no more war or internal divisions. But the situation was the

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same as before, except that this time it was hidden, like a wave under the sea. Instead of a war of guns, they encountered a war of espionage and treachery. Their obsession with secrecy and enemies united them, and Nuon Chea and Pol Pot were the most elusive of the Khmer Rouge leaders. Like Nuon Chea, Pol Pot assumed many aliases to keep his enemies guessing. Because Pol Pot’s birth name was Saloth Sar, with Sar meaning white, he changed his name to Kmao (black) in the 1950s. Later he called himself Puok (mattress) and then Pot. When he came to power, he added Pol to become Pol Pot, which had no particular meaning in Khmer. The name changing continued even after the Vietnamese invasion. He was called Phem in the 1980s. “At that time, we had enemies so we had to have codes and change our names many times,” Nuon Chea said. “There were some people on the inside who wanted to destroy us and use our codes against us. Pol Pot didn’t go out frequently. He was very careful about going anywhere because we knew enemies could see us but we couldn’t see them. Our neighbor had a principle to expand and swallow us to abolish the Cambodian race. But we did not see this clearly then, and we didn’t immediately see this war coming.” This paranoia blinded the Khmer Rouge leadership and prevented them from creating the kind of government they had promised to their followers. When they first arrived in Phnom Penh to take over as leaders of the new Cambodia, Nuon Chea stayed at a house near the main railway station, then moved on to what was known as House No. 1, near the Svay Pope pagoda. “When we moved from one house to another, we went by car but we moved only at night time. The car had tinted windows,” he said. Secrecy and security were still of utmost concern, even though Phnom Penh was virtually empty. Nuon Chea’s daily schedule varied, but if there were no events or emergencies that day, he normally woke at 4 a.m. to exercise and eat breakfast and then went to work at 7 a.m. He worked until 11 a.m., then ate lunch. He would return to work at 2 p.m., eat dinner at 5 p.m., and then work again from 7 p.m. until late at night. The Khmer Rouge leaders usually ate at the office to save gasoline. There were no restaurants to go to anyway. Nuon Chea and Pol Pot always ate their meals together and Khieu Samphan often ate with them. Ieng Sary usually ate with his Foreign Ministry staff, but sometimes he joined Pol Pot. Nuon Chea’s wife, often worried about poisoning, took strict measures to ensure the food was safe to eat. “I was worried that people would try to kill my husband and other leaders so I checked everything,” Ly Kimseang said. “I was worried about the servers who could poison the food when they brought

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it to the table.” There were people assigned to test the food in the kitchen before it was brought out. Whenever people sent food to Nuon Chea, the guards threw it away because they were worried about poison. When they traveled to the provinces, they took their own cooks because they didn’t trust the people preparing the food in the countryside. “We were very careful,” Nuon Chea said, “especially Pol Pot.” Their paranoia caused Nuon Chea and Pol Pot to hide their identities from the public, even after Pol Pot formally became leader of the country. Frustrated by his puppet role, Sihanouk asked to resign from his post as head of state in March 1976. His main supporter in China, Zhou Enlai, had died that January, and Sihanouk didn’t want to continue the charade any longer. He resigned on April 2, 1976, and Pol Pot became prime minister, but he still did not reveal his identity. “We did not reject him after we recruited him,” Nuon Chea said of Sihanouk. “When we took power, we let him be head of state, but he already knew that he would have no power and all his people were gone, so that’s why he wanted to quit. It’s up to Sihanouk to say now that he was used for a Khmer Rouge victory.” Sihanouk spent the remainder of his time under house arrest in the Royal Palace, and was not allowed to leave on his own. In later years, Sihanouk complained bitterly about the Khmer Rouge. Five of his children and other relatives died under the regime. Nuon Chea countered that the king’s relatives were not targeted, but rather faced the same hardships as everyone else. “Every person had relatives who died during the Khmer Rouge regime and the Vietnamese invasion,” he said. “We didn’t know about his children’s death because there was turmoil at that time.” Sihanouk was not the only one who held an empty title. Several leaders with prominent positions in the government, such as Khieu Samphan and Ieng Sary, were not involved in crucial decisions. Hou Youn, Vorn Vet, and other ministers also were left out of the loop. Power resided in the importance of one’s position in the communist party as opposed to one’s role in the government. Nuon Chea was not a deputy prime minister and did not control a ministry, but his position as deputy secretary general of the communist party of Kampuchea gave him vast power. He crafted many of the party policies, and in party leadership circles Angka was often defined as Brother Number One and Brother Number Two. Many of the regime’s most sensitive policies were discussed between Pol Pot and Nuon Chea, and no one else. Nuon Chea contends that Ieng Sary, and especially Khieu Samphan, were not informed about the leadership purges and other decisions that defined the regime. While Nuon Chea and Pol Pot grappled with internal enemies, external

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threats remained. On May 12, 1975, Khmer Rouge troops seized the U.S. container ship SS Mayaguez, which had been sailing in international waters—­ waters the Khmer Rouge claimed belonged to Cambodia. The seizure prompted an attack by U.S. forces and a rescue mission on May 15. U.S. authorities were unaware that the Mayaguez crew had already been released, and the offensive moved forward. But during the attack on Koh Tang island U.S. forces encountered surprisingly strong defense. The Khmer Rouge had already been entrenched on the island because of ongoing territorial disputes with Vietnam. At the end of the battle, 18 U.S. marines had been killed or were missing. Theirs are the last names listed on the Vietnam memorial wall in Washington, D.C. As U.S. forces withdrew from the island, they dropped a 15,000-­pound bomb on Koh Tang. Nuon Chea said the Khmer Rouge soldiers made a mistake by boarding the Mayaguez and arresting the crew. But he said the Americans had also made an error by entering Cambodian waters. Still, with the incident happening so soon after the Khmer Rouge victory, it proved to Pol Pot and Nuon Chea that the U.S. was still looking to fight and overthrow the Khmer Rouge. That meant other enemies must be out there as well. “We did not want another war with the Americans and wanted it solved in a peaceful way,” Nuon Chea said. “But the Americans lost the war and came back again. Maybe they wanted to test us.” The Khmer Rouge also learned from the Cultural Revolution in China, which was launched in 1966 by Mao Zedong and ended in 1976 with the arrest of the Gang of Four. The revolution in China and Mao’s policies influenced Pol Pot and Nuon Chea, particularly because China was Democratic Kampuchea’s main patron and ally, along with North Korea. The Chinese had their own problems with internal enemies, and responded with purges similar to the ones seen in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Lin Biao, who was once second only to Mao, eventually planned a coup and assassination attempts against the Chinese leader. After the failed attempts, Lin Biao and his family fled to the Soviet Union in September 1971. The plane mysteriously crashed. After Lin Biao’s death, Mao’s wife Jiang Qing and three other officials in the Gang of Four attempted to increase their power. The group controlled the media and tried to move the country in a more extreme direction, while others like Deng Xiaoping were trying to take a more moderate approach. They were arrested after Mao’s death in 1976. Nuon Chea said Lin Biao and the Gang of Four had tried to pervert Mao’s principles and only cared about power. It was another lesson to the Khmer Rouge that traitors can be those closest to you.

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The discovery of enemies had a profound affect on Pol Pot, and he often worried that they would kill him. He was especially scared of going to the Eastern Zone because of its proximity to Vietnam. During his Khmer Rouge trial, Duch cited a March 1976 document that said Pol Pot was prepared for assassination attempts against him, sending Khieu Samphan or Nuon Chea to attend events on his behalf. When meetings with Vietnamese officials required going to Vietnam, Nuon Chea often went in his place. “He was worried he would be smashed. He did not say it but I know he was scared.” Nuon Chea said. “He was a man who analyzed a lot. Pol Pot didn’t go out frequently and he was very careful about going anywhere because we knew enemies can see us but we can’t see them. We had many traitors trying to kill us. So even though we were in power, we kind of lived in hiding too.”

The Foot Soldiers While Pol Pot and Nuon Chea were caught up in the swirling conspiracies around them, the Cambodian countryside was being turned into mass graves. The killings, which began immediately after Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh on April 17, were carried out mainly by uneducated foot soldiers and farmers. With their new authority and the extremist, unrealistic policies of the Khmer Rouge regime guiding them, they became drunk on power. There were also revenge killings for past wrongs, and many Khmer Rouge foot soldiers became fanatical believers in their leaders’ conspiracy theories of traitors and spies who had to be rooted out. The murders perpetrated by the foot soldiers were often brutal. Many Khmer Rouge cadre, including Pat Vey, described seeing children under seven years old being held by their feet and hurled against trees, smashing their heads. In the countryside, the divisions between the “old” and “new” people and culture of fear that had been created pitted everyone against everyone else. While leaders in Phnom Penh came to see their own colleagues as enemies, the same happened in the countryside. Nuon Chea said there were many arrests in the countryside, and as each group was purged, the replacements would then arrest and kill their predecessors. “The second group would arrest the first group and then another group would come to replace the second group and arrest and kill them. The new group would not be happy with the old group of leaders and each side tried to control their areas.” But Nuon Chea said the leaders in Phnom Penh did not know about the killings and arrests in the countryside until after they happened because

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local leaders acted unilaterally. He also claims that cadre in the provinces exaggerated Khmer Rouge policy and didn’t understand what the leaders in Phnom Penh wanted. “I didn’t know during the three years that there was so much killing,” he said. “But especially after the Khmer Rouge collapsed, I knew there was too much killing. Other people told me that, too. The organization was firm but the bottom rung was weak. People in the remote areas and local authorities thought of their personal problems, but we didn’t think about this. We didn’t frequently inspect the areas. We had a principle to increase our population, not decrease it. Even people in the village could decide everything and not ask permission from the region. So in some places, the top leaders didn’t know what was going on and sometimes the region didn’t tell us, so everybody was doing what they wanted and not telling us. This is what I regret, that we could not control the whole thing. And our recruiting of comrades was not good. We recruited some bad people. I would like to accept all the mistakes they had done because I am the leader. But this mistake is the unintentional result of how we did our jobs, not because of a principle to smash the people.” Nuon Chea described one incident in Preah Vihear province in 1977 in which the deputy secretary of an area, Hong, wanted to kill people he envied, including his boss, the secretary, Comrade Man. Nuon Chea said the deputy secretary wanted power and was going after people who stood in his way. Hong threw a grenade at Man, killing him. Nuon Chea said he personally investigated this case and deemed Hong a traitor. But the punishment for killing was more killing. The cycle escalated to unimaginable levels. In another case, cadre from the Southwest Zone were sent to replace leaders in the Northwest because they were starving and killing people. But when cadre from the southwest arrived, they killed the old leaders, even though there had been no order to do so. “We sent them to govern, but they did not govern and turned to killing the old cadre,” Nuon Chea said. “After we learned about the killings, we called them to a meeting and asked them to stop. They said they didn’t know about it and they would investigate it. This is our carelessness and we were too confident in the cadre in the regions. They reported only the good things and didn’t allow us to know the bad things.” In the following snapshot of scenes across the country at that time, it was clear that the lynch mob mentality encouraged by Khmer Rouge leaders in Phnom Penh was well entrenched in the countryside. A man who would give his name only as Klaing, who was in charge of a mobile work brigade in three regions of the Northwest Zone, said in an

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interview that he was ordered in 1977 to arrest 200 people. Some were accused of not giving enough rice to the people; most were accused of moral crimes, such as rape. He said he called all youths to a meeting to criticize 49 cadre who were accused of raping women, and after the meeting he decided on his own to have them killed. Even though he didn’t have the top leaders’ approval, he said he did get the consensus of those who attended the meeting. “They raised their hands agreeing with my decision to smash them,” Klaing said. “I made this decision because I was the leader in this area, and other cadre in other areas made similar decisions. In every place, people decided to kill others on their own.” In Thoeun, now fifty-­five with five children, said in an interview that he was in Pursat province after the Khmer Rouge took power in April 1975. His battalion commander ordered him to the area of Prachrey to attack Lon Nol soldiers, who had refused to surrender and were still fighting. When he arrived there, he found that they were not fighting back but hanging out at their military base, perhaps waiting for someone to tell them what they should do next. But the soldiers’ fate was sealed. The soldiers were told that they were being taken to see King Sihanouk and the mysterious Angka. The approximately 900 Khmer Rouge soldiers responsible for this mission had been divided into three groups. The first group was responsible for gathering and transporting the Lon Nol soldiers, the second with tying them up. The third group, which included In Thoeun, did the killing. The soldiers were tied together in groups of ten and shot from behind. When new groups of Lon Nol soldiers arrived and saw the piles of dead bodies, some became so frightened they could no longer walk. Others cried and shouted for their parents to save them. Some refused to go farther and had to be pulled and kicked to move ahead. And others found enough strength to curse the Khmer Rouge soldiers and accuse them of lying. “Some said that we were not religious people,” In Thoeun said. “They dared to curse us because they knew they would be killed. They were supposed to be ordered to kneel down and then be shot from behind. But some soldiers got lazy and tired and there were too many Lon Nol soldiers. So they just shot them when they got to the pond’s edge. The pond was so full of soldiers that later the soldiers were killed at the edge of the pond because the water was too full of bodies.” The mission lasted the whole day, from about 9 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. Hundreds of Lon Nol soldiers were loaded onto trucks that could carry about 50 people. When that group was “smashed,” the Khmer Rouge cadre radioed for another truck full of soldiers to be brought.. With so many Lon Nol soldiers

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to kill, the Khmer Rouge were not allowed to take a break until the end of the day, when they could stop for dinner. But because of the stench of death In Thoeun had been breathing for hours, he said he could not eat rice for several days. Other soldiers drank wine with their meal to help them get over what they had just done. Prom Prein, another Khmer Rouge soldier in Pursat, also participated in the killings and saw some of the local leaders, such as district governors and high-­ranking police officers, in the group of people who were to be murdered. He saw some of his relatives as well, including an uncle and cousins. “They did not see me and I did not dare say they were my relatives,” he said in an interview. “I didn’t dare help them because I was worried I would be killed too. When I saw them, I tried to turn my face away. I knew they would call to me for help if they saw me.” Two years later, his mother and sister, accused of stealing rice, would be killed. Suy Vieth, whose parents had been accused of being detectives for Lon Nol, was forced to join the Khmer Rouge in 1973 when the group took over the area near his home in Samlot. In April 1975, he said, he helped kill at least 600 people, some of whom had tried to escape to Thailand. He said in an interview that he felt like vomiting when he saw their blood spray into the air and brain matter burst from their heads. But after a few months he could eat normally again. “If I did not follow my commander’s order, I would be killed too, so it was a way to survive,” he said. Suy Vieth said he has not told his wife or children about his past, which he called shameful. He often goes to pagodas to make offerings to try to cleanse himself of his sins. He constantly moves for fear that people in his area will learn about his past and seek revenge. Tep Paoch was chief of Taing Kok district in Kompong Thom at the beginning of the Khmer Rouge regime. During a visit by Pol Pot, Brother Number One saw dozens of people being transported in trucks to Kompong Cham province. They were headed to their execution. Pol Pot asked where the people were being taken and who had given the order to move them. Tep Paoch said in an interview that he was surprised Pol Pot didn’t know. He had assumed Brother Number One had given the directive. In 1977, Ke Pauk called him to a meeting and said he had received instructions from top leaders to investigate their cadre to find bad components. A regional chief gave Tep Paoch a list of more than 300 names of people sent to his area from Phnom Penh. He spent three months investigating the names before he told the region chief they had done nothing wrong. The regional chief blamed Tep Paoch for finding no wrongdoing and accused him of hiding

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the traitors. Thousands in his district were eventually executed as spies, Tep Paoch said. Nuon Chea distinguishes the killing of top cadre, which he said Pol Pot had ordered and was the right decision, from the murders of regular citizens in the countryside, which Nuon Chea repeatedly denied knowing about until it was too late. He said that when he and Pol Pot were informed of the killings in the countryside, they saw it as traitorous acts that needed to be punished with death. “The leaders let their men in their region kill people and then they didn’t report it to us, so they betrayed us,” Nuon Chea said. The killings in the countryside and reports of hunger, lack of food, and overwork led Nuon Chea and Pol Pot to believe they had enemies in their midst. They turned their eyes to their closest friends as possible culprits. Many of Nuon Chea’s old communist brothers would be arrested, tortured, and killed. Those who had formed the backbone of the Cambodian communist movement, those who had been there from the beginning, through the many years of hardship, would disappear, one by one.

The Friends The enemies were not only in the countryside, but in the capital as well, embedded among the leaders. They were the men closest to Nuon Chea and Pol Pot. Among the accused were deputy prime minister of the economy Vorn Vet, industry minister Khoy Thoun, and Northwest Zone secretary Rhos Nhim. After decades of living as brothers fighting against a common enemy, they were now deemed traitors. “We never accused any top leader without evidence and witnesses,” Nuon Chea said. “We knew clearly about their betrayal and plans to topple the regime and kill innocent people in the provinces without the center’s orders and knowledge. Pol Pot had evidence and witnesses so he decided to arrest them. I have no regrets because when I read the confessions it was very clear what they were doing.” Most of those purged were taken to the former high school in Phnom Penh that was turned into the S-­21 prison for the regime’s most dangerous enemies. Classrooms were transformed into cells. Chalkboards were used to post rules for the prisoners, who were not allowed to scream or cry during torture. Among the methods used to extract confessions were whipping, mutilation, and sleep deprivation. Cadre pulled out prisoners’ fingernails, beat the soles of their feet, and poured water over their heads to simulate drowning. The torture continued until prisoners admitted their crimes—­real or

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imagined—­and offered up names of fellow traitors. The confessions contain a bizarre mixture of accurate biographical information and fantastical yarns with prisoners “admitting” that they were spies for the CIA, the Vietnamese, and the KGB. The stories of betrayal served the Khmer Rouge leadership’s purpose by providing “proof ” that they were right to accuse their comrades. When the Khmer Rouge were driven from power in 1979, only a handful of prisoners were known to have survived S-­21 out of at least 13,000 brought in for interrogation. Nuon Chea does not deny that these party members were killed in purges ordered by the leadership, and reiterates that they were traitors and needed to be “smashed.” In fact, “most of the leaders in the Center were on Vietnam’s puppet strings.” In the paranoia, many of the regime’s highest-­ranking members, all longtime communist party members, were accused of being spies. “We heard about the arrests, but we did not know clearly what was happening,” said Long Norin, a former Khmer Rouge Foreign Ministry official who lives in the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Malai in northwestern Cambodia. An intellectual educated in France, Long Norin now lives the life of a farmer, the very people the Khmer Rouge were supposed to save. “Everyone felt something strange was going on,” he said. During the purges “I was accused of being CIA, KGB. I came to join the movement with all my heart. It was a big deception for me and other patriots.” In information he provided to the Khmer Rouge tribunal in 2009, Duch said he was shocked by the horrific society Pol Pot created in which people started to disappear without being heard from ever again. “At that time, I did not even realize that half of my relatives or families were gone, were lost. . . . ​I only begged for my life and I was very scared at that time I would not live long enough.” Duch also told investigative judges that “in 1976, Pol Pot had eliminated the exploiting classes, private property, officials of the former regime, religions and teaching. . . . ​The decision of March 30, 1976, began a new period, during which the internal purges were dominant.” Duch also told the court that the decisions on whom to kill were made by either Son Sen or Nuon Chea. He also explained the principle of expanding the web of suspicion. “People who were followed or monitored, they would not be able to escape from being purged, as well. So when the superior was arrested, it was just a matter of time before his subordinates were also arrested,” Duch said in April 2009. Ney Seran, secretary of the Northeast Zone, was arrested in 1976 after having been named in a confession by another senior cadre imprisoned in S-­ 21. According to Nuon Chea, Ney Saran’s sin stemmed from Pol Pot ordering

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him to negotiate with the Vietnamese over border issues, a very delicate issue that would eventually lead to more fighting. Nuon Chea said that after official meetings with the Vietnamese Ney Saran would meet with them secretly to plot to overthrow the Khmer Rouge government. In his confession, he talks about a plot to kill Pol Pot and Nuon Chea and his involvement with Eastern Zone leader So Phim to overthrow the government. But he also says that he responded after being “severely tortured.” Another party leader, Keo Meas, was under suspicion prior to his 1976 arrest because he had been living in Vietnam before the Khmer Rouge victory. Nuon Chea said that when Keo Meas returned in 1975, he suspected him of being biased toward Vietnam. Keo Meas, a longtime communist party member and key member of the struggle, was sent to China to report on the border conflict between Democratic Kampuchea soldiers and Vietnamese troops along the border. According to Nuon Chea, on his way home from China, Keo Meas stopped in Vietnam to attend a meeting in which Vietnamese troops planned an attack on Cambodia. In one of his confessions, Keo Meas says, “I would like to state my resolution that if Viet Nam or the Soviets invade using any method I will follow the Party and you to condemn and hold a weapon with which to shoot back, and this you can believe entirely, even if I am old. Time will show this to you and the Party.” Nuon Chea said the significance of people like Keo Meas must not be underestimated, something he repeated on many occasions. “People try to win wars by spies, not by fighting. Vietnam sent many spies to our country but we could stop them,” he said. Surviving Khmer Rouge cadre said there was indeed a plot to overthrow Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, and the rest of the leadership. In Thoeun of Pursat province said there was a plan in 1976 to stage a coup that would be led by the Northwest and Eastern zones. He said cadre in those areas frequently had meetings in Sdao commune. The plan called for the Northwest zone cadre to capture Battambang province, followed by Pursat province, Kompong Chnnang province, and then Phnom Penh. At the same time, the Eastern Zone would attack from the areas east of the capital. “Everyone knew about the plot to overthrow Pol Pot’s leadership,” In Thoeun said. “They talked about revisionism and redoing what Pol Pot messed up.” With the acknowledgment that the goals of Angka were too extreme and unrealistic, the cadre who wanted to overthrow Pol Pot felt Cambodia needed to go slower and reform the country step by step, instead of at a breakneck pace that was literally killing the

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population. Many of the confessions of top leaders discuss this plot, with truth mingled with fiction. Nuon Chea said he was not particularly disturbed when his former comrades and friends were executed. “The party decided to kill them because they were betraying the party and the nation. I was not scared or sad when they were killed. They had done wrong and betrayed us, so they received the kind of treatment they deserved. We were friends, but friendship and political work are separate.” Nuon Chea went on to explain the difficulties of rooting out enemies, which consumed the Khmer Rouge leadership. “Solving internal disputes was very difficult,” he said. “We attack the enemy for one, two, ten hours and we know if we won or lost. But with internal problems, even after one or two years, it’s not solved.” Nuon Chea often spoke of the crimes perpetrated by his once brothers­in-­arms. These, according to Brother Number Two, are some of the egregious cases. Rhos Nhim

Rhos Nhim, a carpenter who joined the Issarak movement, received communist training by Vietnam and was sent to the northwest to build a base of support in Samlot. Nuon Chea said Rhos Nhim’s betrayal started then, even though he didn’t realize it until much later. “Vietnam educated him and inserted him into the party and he had many followers,” he said. When the Khmer Rouge took over, Rhos Nhim was in charge of the area that included Nuon Chea’s home province of Battambang. One of his first acts as head of the Northwest Zone was to arrest Nuon Chea’s uncle, Sieu Heng, the communist leader who had betrayed the movement. Nuon Chea said Rhos Nhim had met Sieu Heng after Nuon Chea’s uncle had defected to the government. Rhos Nhim worried that Sieu Heng would mention that visit if he was arrested but not killed, which would cause problems for Rhos Nhim. “Rhos Nhim wanted to kill Sieu Heng immediately to shut his mouth,” Nuon Chea said. When Rhos Nhim later told Nuon Chea about Sieu Heng’s arrest, Nuon Chea wondered why he had done so and who had ordered it. But Nuon Chea said he kept his thoughts to himself because he didn’t want to be accused of being biased toward a relative. Nuon Chea also wondered why no one had told him of the plan to arrest Sieu Heng beforehand. Rhos Nhim informed Nuon Chea he had told Sieu Heng’s son, who was also arrested and killed, not to follow his father, but he didn’t listen and so was detained as well. Rhos Nhim

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also accused Sieu Heng of telling Sihanouk about Tou Samouth and urging him to arrest the Cambodian communist leader. But Nuon Chea said it was unclear whether it was Sieu Heng who had told the government about Tou Samouth, because others arrested by authorities knew about him as well. But Rhos Nhim was not taken to S-­21 because of Sieu Heng’s unauthorized arrest. Instead, he was accused of killing seven Thai pilots who had been sent to Cambodia during Sihanouk’s rule in the early 1970s and keeping it a secret. He was also accused of contacting Eastern Zone leader So Phim to plot against the Khmer Rouge leadership. The two were relatives through the marriage of their two children. Nuon Chea said Rhos Nhim also didn’t provide enough food to the people, even though the people in his area cultivated a lot of rice. “Rhos Nhim is a traitor, and that’s why I say some people are bad,” Nuon Chea said. “They tried to burn Democratic Kampuchea’s principles.” In a June 1978 confession, Rhos Nhim said he attended a meeting in June 1977 that included So Phim and others in which they planned to overthrow the government, with the help of the Vietnamese, several of whom were also in attendance. “It was necessary to maintain secrecy because the Party was arresting one traitorous link after another,” he said in the confession. “If our links were exposed, then we would all be smashed to smithereens.” Chan Savuth, head of the hospital in his region in Battambang, said in an interview that in one of the meetings he attended in Sdao to overthrow Pol Pot, Rhos Nhim said secrecy was mandatory because anyone who was found to be part of the plot would surely be killed. Savuth said that, after receiving instructions from Rhos Nhim, he ordered seventy of his men to transfer medicine and medical equipment to store at his division headquarters. Asked by his men the reason for the move, he lied and said they were preparing to make war with Thailand. Rice was also kept in rice mills and gasoline was hidden throughout Battambang and Banteay Menachey province. They planned to destroy bridges across the Sangke River in Battambang to control the west side, where they had stored equipment, food, and other materials. “This plan was very big and important and if we won, things would be good again,” Savuth said. “We were encouraged because some center members from Phnom Penh like Vorn Vet supported this plot and we had So Phim in the Eastern Zone.” Rhos Nhim instructed Chiel Chhoeun, a division commander, to contact Thai communists, who would store rice, dry fish, and weapons for them until they staged their attack. They transported the goods to Thailand at night. “I was very sorry our plan was not successful,” Chiel Chhoeun said in an

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interview. “When I was detained in a reeducation camp, I wished that we had attacked first. I would have rather died in battle implementing this plan than stay in the camp.” Khoy Thoun

Khoy Thoun was seen as the most dangerous of all the traitors, but in the beginning, his crimes were not seen as politically motivated. He loved women, singing, and having a good time—­traits that were later seen as tantamount to treason in the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia. As Nuon Chea saw it, his behavior sullied the movement and caused cadre to disavow the revolution as they became caught up in such hedonistic activities. He spoke extensively of Khoy Thoun’s wrongdoings during many of our interviews. Even before the Khmer Rouge came to power and he was made commerce minister, Khoy Thoun’s penchant for fun was evident to the Khmer Rouge leaders. And he indulged his vices, something Nuon Chea and Pol Pot had previously tried to downplay while they focused on party unity to obtain victory. “He had been hiding in the party for many years,” Nuon Chea said. “But at that time, we did not know he betrayed our party. We did not suspect him because he was very clever and respected the high leaders.” Khoy Thoun had been a longtime member of the communist movement and was a trusted associate. He had been a Central Committee member and head of the Northern Zone, but was later put in charge of the economy. When Nuon Chea traveled to Ratanakkiri province to see Pol Pot in the early 1970s, Khoy Thoun helped organize the trips. He was also close to Pol Pot, and their wives later lived together in Khoy Thoun’s home in Kompong Cham. When Khoy Thoun’s wife suffered from liver disease, Pol Pot sent her to China for treatment. Nuon Chea said Khoy Thoun tricked them by working hard for the party. He attended meetings at the border in Svay Rieng province and presented ideas that would help the party. Khoy Thoun would always offer to give Nuon Chea a massage after meetings in the jungle, and sometimes did the same for Pol Pot. Nuon Chea called this one of Khoy Thoun’s “tactics.” “When I was taking a rest, he would say, ‘Brother, I will give you a massage.’ And when I was cold, he would give me a hot water bottle. He was very clever.” Now, Nuon Chea said, he realizes Khoy Thoun was “pretending” to serve the communist party. Back then, when Khoy Thoun made mistakes in the 1960s, they saw it as misinterpretation of orders as opposed to treacherous acts. In Kompong Cham, Khoy Thoun led a student protest that burned cars, which Nuon Chea

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said was wrong and now describes as a move to destroy the party. “We told him not to do this again,” he said. “But he made a mistake once more by distributing leaflets against Sihanouk. We had no plan against Sihanouk but against America. What Khoy Thoun did was wrong from Party’s principle. We were not against Sihanouk because he was neutral.” Nuon Chea asked his people to arrange a meeting with Khoy Thoun to tell him not to demonstrate against Sihanouk. “At that time, we did not know he had betrayed our party,” Nuon Chea said. “We just thought what he did was wrong.” As fighting increased between the Khmer Rouge and Cambodian government soldiers, Khoy Thoun caused more problems. Because the Khmer Rouge were working with their Vietnamese counterparts, a cordial relationship between the two groups was key. But according to Nuon Chea, Khoy Thoun’s men were arresting Vietnamese soldiers who bought goods in Cambodia, which created tension in an already strained situation. Vietnamese leader Nguyen Van Linh told Nuon Chea that Khmer Rouge soldiers arrested his men, who were entering Cambodia to buy goods. Nuon Chea told him that it was wrong to do this and the Khmer Rouge party principle did not allow this. Nuon Chea acknowledges, however, that Vietnam also made mistakes and caused disorder, such as not asking for permission to enter Cambodia. Still, Nuon Chea said Khoy Thoun was mostly to blame and his “arms and legs” did his dirty work: “He was trying to make us and Vietnam become enemies.” After his meeting with the Vietnamese, Nuon Chea called Khoy Thoun and other Cambodian leaders to a meeting to tell them that arresting Vietnamese soldiers was causing a split between Cambodian and Vietnamese. Khoy Thoun replied that he and the other leaders did not order the arrest of the Vietnamese soldiers, but that the rank-­and-­file cadre took them into custody on their own. Nuon Chea later discovered that in Khoy Thoun’s area, which included Kompong Cham province, he allowed his cadre to organize theatrical plays. He was also told that Khoy Thoun would have sex with the actresses and then force young men to marry the women so Khoy Thoun couldn’t be blamed for taking anyone’s virginity or for any unplanned pregnancies. Nuon Chea and Pol Pot told Khoy Thoun that the plays were not helpful to their cause. “The plays went on from the evening until early morning,” Nuon Chea said. “So how could people plant vegetables? I informed him not to put on plays. Khoy Thoun said to me that the people insisted on having plays to make them happy, raise their spirit, and attract more members. But they played at night until morning and this drama pulled fighters from the battlefield. If they were

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happy staying behind, who would go to the battlefield? They did not want to fight the enemies. It destroyed the party principle.” To Nuon Chea, Khoy Thoun’s moral sins became evidence of his treacherous ways and made it easy for Nuon Chea and Pol Pot to believe the next logical step was for Khoy Thoun to betray the party. Nuon Chea said Khoy Thoun tried to attract and contact people in Ratanakkiri and Siem Reap provinces to join his side. “When there is one master, he tries to expand his eggs in other areas. When we smashed them, they could not help each other and combine forces against us,” Nuon Chea said. Because of Khoy Thoun’s treachery, the Khmer Rouge were not able to obtain victory in all areas of Kompong Cham province. When the Khmer Rouge almost controlled the province, Khoy Thoun contacted Lon Nol’s men and then withdrew his troops to let Lon Nol’s soldiers from Phnom Penh attack the Khmer Rouge and control Kompong Cham. “Pol Pot and I had suspected other commanders since then but we did not suspect Khoy Thoun,” Nuon Chea said. “Khoy Thoun was very clever and respectful to leaders and he was very clever in persuading high leaders. But we were suspicious about why we could not win the battlefield in Kompong Cham.” After the Khmer Rouge took power, Khoy Thoun was made minister of commerce. He started to drink heavily, Nuon Chea said, and had an ample supply because of beer and wine left over by the former regime and residents forced to leave their homes. Khoy Thoun began to change, and “now he started to release the truth of his betrayal.” Nuon Chea described one incident in which a division belonging to Khoy Thoun stationed near Pochentong Airport was moving tanks and troops, which Nuon Chea said was strange. Pol Pot was in Sihanoukville at that time to welcome a delegation of Chinese officials. Nuon Chea said he was worried about a coup, partly because the leaders had very few troops in Phnom Penh. When Pol Pot returned, Nuon Chea said he told him about the troop movement. They kept a closer eye on Khoy Thoun. Always known for his love of women, Khoy Thoun used his position to have his way with them, Nuon Chea said. And those who stood in his way were eliminated. He killed one youth who was the boyfriend of a girl Khoy Thoun loved. Nuon Chea and Pol Pot suspected that he had killed others as well. “I would like to express clearly that people who were killed were not ordered to die by top leaders but by cadre who betrayed us and killed them,” Nuon Chea said. “And we have to kill those people for killing innocent people. They killed them because of their own revenge. They could do everything

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at that time because we had no court to judge them. So betrayers had their string in the center, regions, zones, district, communes, and cooperatives. They had their own secret code and signs among themselves but we did not know about it deeply at that time.” In 1976, the party called Khoy Thoun to a meeting where Pol Pot ordered his arrest for killing the boyfriend of his lover. Khoy Thoun was detained on December 25, 1976 and sent to S-­21. When asked why he didn’t try to diffuse the situation, Nuon Chea said Pol Pot would not allow him to see Khoy Thoun because Pol Pot “thought Khoy Thoun would kidnap me to use me for negotiation.” Nuon Chea chuckles at that thought now. Also at this time, Khmer Rouge leaders were realizing that the industrialization program was not going as well as expected. Instead of recognizing the overly ambitious nature and unrealistic goals of the plan, leaders blamed the failure on Khoy Thoun and saw it as further evidence of his traitorous behavior. Nuon Chea said Khoy Thoun was part of the Khmer Serey group, “and if he was allowed to continue, he would contact Vietnam to attack us. Even though he was Khmer Serey and had a bias to America, he would turn to contact Vietnam if he wanted to destroy us. He had stirred up the party’s internal circles. This was his tactic to destroy the party and the party’s principles.” During the investigations, the leadership discovered that Khoy Thoun used General Assembly meetings to recruit cadre to his side, Nuon Chea said. Those who came to the meeting were invited to Khoy Thoun’s house for a party. They, in turn, recruited others to join Khoy Thoun. “That’s why even though Khoy Thoun was arrested and killed, his arms and legs remained at large in Cambodia,” Nuon Chea said. Ultimately, Nuon Chea said, Khoy Thoun was working for the Vietnamese. Vietnam used its embassy in Cambodia to contact people and always invited Democratic Kampuchea officials to parties to persuade them to join their side. “The embassy really is the spy for the country. So how can we control these people when they can meet secretly somewhere? Like on the national day of Vietnam, our cadre would attend the party and this was a good chance for them to talk.” One of the most familiar pictures from Tuol Sleng shows Khoy Thoun sitting forlornly on a bed, his ankle in a metal shackle. During his year in captivity, Khoy Thoun was questioned on numerous occasions, and slowly his claims of innocence gave way to acquiescence. As evidence of his importance as a prisoner, Duch personally interrogated Khoy Thoun, and he was not tortured in those meetings, according to 2009 testimony from Duch. In

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a March 4, 1977, confession, he talked about a plan to form a new political party. “The party line would have as its content the same construction of socialism, so that the emotions of the masses would not be adversely affected, but the meaning would be different. This socialism would be built step by step, not by building up positions of solid collectivism as was currently being done. Room would be made for a reasonable extent of private property rights. Trading markets would be reopened. The spending of money would be reintroduced.” His report reflected criticisms made of the regime in private by some top leaders, who were too frightened to voice their opinions out loud. They were the basis for several confessions of leaders purged by Pol Pot. Khoy Thoun named hundreds of people who he said were involved in various plots, including minister of information Hu Nim. Nuon Chea said they discovered Hu Nim was part of the traitor Mao Say’s line: before he fled to the jungle in the 1960s to escape government persecution, Mao Say had sent Hu Nim to be part of the Khmer Rouge movement to be a spy. In Hu Nim’s S-­21 confession extracted before his 1977 execution, he says, “I needed two sponsors. I met Phlek Phoeun, whom I had known long before. He introduced me to Mao Say, who was a high CIA. They promised to support me in the election, on condition that I accept their commands and accomplish missions given by the CIA. In the end I consented to their requirements. From that time I was a CIA agent. They promised to promote me, and my activities were carried out in connection with Mao Say’s from then on.” Many of Nuon Chea’s accusations reflect statements taken from Khoy Thoun: “In the reports, they talked about their ways of destroying the party and I used this to educate the people and let people know they should be careful.” Many of the people were in the Northern Zone, but others who were implicated came from the Eastern Zone. Nuon Chea said Khoy Thoun also spearheaded the destruction of an ammunition warehouse and plotted to kill Pol Pot. Suspicion was cast on those close to Khoy Thoun, including Doeun, who headed the Party’s Center office, known as Office 870. Soon after Khoy Thoun was taken into custody, Doeun was arrested. Nuon Chea said Doeun was “Khoy Thoun’s man, as Khoy Thoun had pushed for his people to be appointed to the Center office.” In his confession, Doeun accused Khoy Thoun of being a longtime member of the CIA. Again, Nuon Chea’s accusations reflect what Doeun said in his confessions. Doeun destroyed equipment, and when he did deliver goods, it was only to his people. Nuon Chea said, matter­of-­factly, that Doeun was killed because he was “Khoy Thoun’s string.” “Khoy

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Thoun was the first one we found had betrayed the organization and we were very surprised,” Nuon Chea said. “After we arrested him we saw that there were many people under him and we knew that our internal organization was not clean.” Chou Chet

Chou Chet, secretary of the Western Zone, had been involved in the struggle since the 1950s. Nuon Chea said that initial issues for Chou Chet were personal ones, such as “having many problems with girls.” But he said those mistakes then began to affect policy. His disagreements with Khmer Rouge commander Ta Mok were also cited as problems. Chou Chet was Ta Mok’s deputy, but didn’t like his leadership style because “Ta Mok was outspoken.” Chou Chet often opposed Ta Mok and found ways to bring him down, according to Nuon Chea, who felt Chou Chet was under Vietnam’s influence. But it was only when Chou Chet was already in S-­21 in 1978 that Pol Pot and Nuon Chea learned of his ultimate crime. In his confession on May 20, 1978, he described the day he tried to poison Pol Pot. “That was when I put into action my plan to poison him by putting resin from my finger into his afternoon rice cake. . . . ​but it seemed like that day, everyone had overslept a bit . . . ​so we were behind schedule and Brother suddenly was of the opinion . . . ​we wouldn’t have any cakes now. . . . ​Fearing that I might be exposed, I threw the cake away in the water in front of the house.” When Pol Pot heard about this plot, he knew it was true because he remembered the cake left in his room. Pol Pot hadn’t been feeling well that day, so he didn’t eat it. “Pol Pot told me it was right because Chou Chet organized his visit to Kompong Speu and put rice cakes in his room,” Nuon Chea said. “They attempted to kill Pol Pot many times, and they also tried to kill me. But the public did not support the bad people who were going to assassinate us. Pol Pot told me he was lucky and that we must be more careful from now on.” Chou Chet, in his 71-­page confession, details an elaborate plan to overthrow Pol Pot with the help of Vietnamese military leader general Vo Nguyen Giap. He cites So Phim, head of the Eastern Zone, as one of the leaders of the plot. He also says he tried to find a cook to poison Pol Pot. As with the other confessions, there seem to be elements of truth in his reports. In one instance, Chou Chet says that at a February 1978 meeting to discuss continuing incursions and other problems with Vietnam, he raised the point that the Yuon (a derogatory term for the Vietnamese) were able to come into Cambodian

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territory because “of our negligence, and that was why a quantity of paddy and rice and oxen and buffalo had been lost.” Later, he describes a conversation with Pol Pot about the many recent arrests, which “made his back tremble with fear. I then asked what things were like now. He said all he wanted was to live in peace and survive.” He also describes seeing a cadre from Phnom Penh and asking what the situation was like in the capital. He said “they lived in a good deal of fear, as one person was disappearing after another. There were reasons for these disappearances, but one was still scared.” He describes a note from So Phim in March 1978 that makes similar observations. “An austere and severe plan was being implemented in both the countryside and the city, and those who didn’t comprehend it or were slow to comprehend it couldn’t run fast enough to keep up with the situation. They were therefore being accused of being enemies and even arrested and taken to be killed. There were contradictions between the cadre and the ordinary people, and contradictions about a lot of forces being expended and a lot being done but getting only a little of the results back.” So Phim

When the Khmer Rouge were still struggling for power, Nuon Chea had built up the Eastern Zone with So Phim, who was placed in charge of the zone after the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975. The two had known each other even longer than Nuon Chea had known Pol Pot. Because of their long history together, the two were very close. When So Phim came to Phnom Penh, he stayed at Nuon Chea’s home during the Khmer Rouge’s years in power. So Phim also had a skin disease that caused a constant rash, so he was sent to China for medical aid and would sometimes stay in a hospital in Phnom Penh. So Phim was like a brother to Nuon Chea. They had met at the beginning, in the early years of the struggle, before a Cambodian communist party or the Khmer Rouge existed. It was 1954, and both Nuon Chea and So Phim were in Vietnam, training under the Vietnamese communists, who had more experience than the Cambodians in fighting the French. Fate brought them together when both were ill, Nuon Chea with a stomach illness and So Phim with his skin disease. They stayed in a clinic and recuperated together. Later, when their health had improved, they met again on a Soviet ship traveling from North Vietnam to South Vietnam. So Phim became ill on the journey, and Nuon Chea nursed him back to health. “We took care of each other,” Nuon Chea said. “I loved him and he loved me. I was the closest to him because we used to struggle together and we took care of each other. He used to

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protect me.” When they arrived in southern Vietnam, the two stayed in villages along the Cambodian border, hiding their identities, waiting for a safe time when they could return home. Cambodia had just gained independence from France and the country was to hold its first elections. King Norodom Sihanouk, who soon abdicated the throne to participate in the elections, did everything to ensure a victory for himself. After Sihanouk’s decisive victory, So Phim and Nuon Chea traveled back to Cambodia and parted ways. When Nuon Chea was charged with rebuilding the communist network after it had been decimated in the post-­independence crackdowns, one of his first recruits was So Phim. They made an unlikely pair. Nuon Chea was the intellectual, the law student who left school to dedicate his life to freeing Cambodia from French colonialism. So Phim was the farmer, a government soldier under French rule who decided to take up arms against the colonial power. So Phim liked to drink and have a good time, while Nuon Chea lived a more austere life. So Phim never believed that the pen was mightier than the sword, but Nuon Chea would also come to see things So Phim’s way. And they were bonded in their cause. They worked together when the Cambodian communist movement always seemed to be on the brink of destruction, on the verge of disappearing. So Phim acted as Nuon Chea’s bodyguard and protector when Nuon Chea traveled to see Pol Pot in the jungles of Cambodia. When it came time to build the Eastern Zone, one of the most important to the Khmer Rouge because it bordered Vietnam, Nuon Chea built the network and put So Phim in charge. The Eastern Zone was a crucial area for the Khmer Rouge. Nuon Chea said Pol Pot took great care of that zone because So Phim had many troops and they were on the Vietnamese border. “This was one of the center leader’s weak points,” Nuon Chea said. “The Center did not have troops and every region was very powerful because it controlled the soldiers. So when we talked to the region leaders, we were very careful. Pol Pot was also scared of the Eastern Zone and worried about So Phim because he was a former soldier and he was strong.” But the Eastern Zone was also known to be more lax than other areas when it came to restrictions on the people. Not everyone wore the somber black uniforms that other Cambodians wore, and they had more rice to eat. There were also periodic border clashes with Vietnamese troops. Vietnamese tanks and soldiers would encroach on Cambodian land, according to Nuon Chea. But he said there weren’t problems with So Phim at that time. In the past when there had been problems in the Eastern Zone, Nuon

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Chea was always the one to resolve the issue because he was close to So Phim and respected by him. For example, shortly after the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975, there had been disputes between So Phim’s Eastern Zone and Ta Mok’s Southwest Zone. Pol Pot told Ta Mok that if he arrested So Phim’s people to release them, although Ta Mok said his men did it without his knowledge. In the meantime, Nuon Chea talked to So Phim and told him to calm down and give up his pride. So Phim had been planning to send troops to fight Ta Mok. There had been other times when cadre imprisoned in S-­21 accused So Phim of being a fellow traitor, but Nuon Chea defended him, saying the accusations weren’t true. In the end, though, Nuon Chea succumbed to the allegations against a man he thought of as his brother, and left him to a traitor’s fate. According to reports Nuon Chea received, which meant confessions extracted from S-­21, So Phim was selling rice to Vietnam without asking the Center if he could do so. In May 1978, one of the top military leaders in the Eastern Zone, Heng Samrin, who had been close to Nuon Chea and protected him during Brother Number Two’s visits to Pol Pot during the 1960s, fled to Vietnam along with hundreds of other cadre. It was more evidence of the betrayal in the crucial Eastern Zone. Once trusted cadre like Heng Samrin and Hun Sen, who had escaped to Vietnam, would eventually return to oust the Khmer Rouge and take the reins of power. Before So Phim’s arrest, Pol Pot and Nuon Chea tried to defuse the situation. Pol Pot wrote a letter to So Phim and asked Nuon Chea to write one too. Nuon Chea’s note encouraged So Phim to be careful and alert and to have a high revolutionary spirit. When Pol Pot read it, he told Nuon Chea he should change it because So Phim would suspect something was wrong because of the tone. But Brother Number Two told Pol Pot not to worry. It wouldn’t be a problem because he was confident in So Phim, he said. He also asked about So Phim’s health. “I don’t know what Pol Pot thought of me when I wrote this,” Nuon Chea said. “Pol Pot also let me read his letter and he encouraged So Phim to compromise. We had been together for a long time so we had sentimental feelings for him, and that’s why we wrote the letters, to have him continue to work in Democratic Kampuchea. It doesn’t mean we accused him of anything. We just tried to encourage him to not go to Vietnam and defect from us.” After they sent the letters, they did not hear from So Phim or see any changes in his zone, and the “problems” persisted. Finally, Pol Pot wrote

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leaflets that accused So Phim of betraying Angka and selling rice to Vietnam without permission from Khmer Rouge leaders, among other accusations. Nuon Chea wrote similar messages on other leaflets. The notes were dropped in So Phim’s area by helicopter, two weeks after Pol Pot and Nuon Chea had sent their letters. Before they took this step, Nuon Chea said he and Pol Pot thought long and hard about it because they knew it would provoke the situation, but they said their efforts to persuade So Phim proved to be useless. They dropped the leaflets to tell other cadre to not join So Phim. Pol Pot then directed Son Sen to solve the problem, and the defense minister sent troops into the Eastern Zone to arrest So Phim and others connected to him. Nuon Chea said it was not the proper way to handle it, and that if he had been asked to deal with it, he would have tried to negotiate with So Phim. Even so, Nuon Chea said he “dared not say anything or I would be accused of supporting or joining So Phim. If I asked Pol Pot to let me solve So Phim’s case, it would have been difficult to say, so I let him decide.” In Nuon Chea’s mind, So Phim’s life had to be sacrificed for the survival of the nation. “What could I do?” he said. “It was a national problem. If he did something wrong and it’s dangerous to the nation and I protected him, what would happen to the nation if we did not solve this problem? I separate the two clearly and I don’t take my personal feelings into account when it involves the nation. Even for my family and my children, if they make a mistake, let the state take care of it. But I still have feelings for him and miss him.” In the end, So Phim may have had a more tolerable fate than his comrades who were taken to S-­21. As troops closed in on him in June 1978, he knew that the end was near. He tried to escape to the Vietnamese border as other cadre in the Eastern Zone, like Hun Sen and Heng Samrin, had done, but Son Sen’s men were deployed there to arrest him. In the evening So Phim shot himself twice, once in the chest and once in the mouth. He was buried where he died, but later Son Sen ordered that the body be dug up to take a picture as evidence for Pol Pot. His body was put on a truck and driven around Kompong Cham to announce that he was a traitor. Later that night, when his wife and children prepared to bury So Phim, Son Sen’s men killed them.

The Mistakes Although Nuon Chea said the leaders who were found to be traitors needed to be “solved” or killed, he sometimes told Pol Pot that he should calm down and not kill cadre who had been a part of the movement for a long time. “I

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told him not to use the hot means because we were former comrades and used to fight together,” he said. “I thought they should just be reeducated. But Pol Pot said he was responsible for this issue.” Nuon Chea said they also knew there were problems with S-­21. He blamed Son Sen and his man, Duch, for killing too many people and killing some unnecessarily. He also said he and Pol Pot were aware of the leaders who were arrested and killed in S-­21, but said they were unaware of those sent there from the provinces and other lower level cadre, who were mainly dealt with by Son Sen and Duch. Nuon Chea said that when he read confessions, he found the crimes that some of the prisoners were accused of were benign. He said some people were not guilty of anything, but they had walked somewhere, wore something, or ate something without permission. Or they were arrested just because another prisoner had accused them of wrongdoing, without proof. “They normally confessed when they were beaten painfully and seriously tortured,” Nuon Chea said. “This confession could not be valid and useable, so they must be released. Some of the accused were very young.” Nuon Chea said when he read these confessions, he made marks on the documents with a red pen to show they were invalid and that the prisoner was not guilty. He said that for those cases he asked that the authorities reconsider their case and then release them, but Nuon Chea said he didn’t know if they were let go in the end since it was up to Duch. “They just walked somewhere where they weren’t supposed to be walking when they were arrested,” Nuon Chea said. “They should not be treated like this.” But Duch said in his testimony to the tribunal that when someone was sent to S-­21, his fate was sealed, even if he was mistakenly sent there. It wasn’t even Pol Pot’s right to release anyone, and to admit that the regime had made a mistake in identifying an enemy would have been too destabilizing in a system that was clawing on to survival. Duch said everyone “sent to S-­21 was presumed dead already. S-­21 did not dare release anyone, otherwise we would be beheaded. . . . ​Pol Pot himself did not recognize his right to release anyone.” He cited an example in which a dentist was arrested and Nuon Chea asked that he not be killed. Instead, Nuon Chea asked he be kept alive so he could treat people’s teeth. Duch points out Nuon Chea could not give an order to have the dentist released but instead asked that he be spared so he could be of further use to the regime. In another confession, Democratic Kampuchea’s ambassador to the United Nations, Choun Prasit, was accused of being a traitor. Nuon Chea said he knew it wasn’t true and he kept the document to himself, hiding it from Pol Pot. “I thought they just faked these accusations,” Nuon Chea said. “But

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I did not say that out loud.” In his Khmer Rouge tribunal testimony, Duch said that Son Sen and Nuon Chea would sometimes ask him to remove the names of people accused of betrayal in S-­21 confessions. The rare occasions in which an S-­21 prisoner was spared death was at the request of Nuon Chea or Pol Pot, according to Duch, who said those detainees were seen as useful to the regime so they were not killed. Duch said in his tribunal testimony that he also believed mistakes were made and that only 50 percent of the confessions were true. He came to believe that certain cadre were used as scapegoats for problems facing the regime. And when certain high level cadre, such as Vorn Vet, were arrested, he became scared and fearful for what it meant for the value of his own life. Duch said he was sure Khoy Thoun’s confession “did not correspond to the truth, but I have no evidence to demonstrate it. Even the standing committee, in my opinion, did not really believe in it. It was about finding excuses to eliminate those who represented obstacles.” But he said he never told his superiors whether a confession was true or not true. Duch added, however, that “Pol Pot at one point did not even believe the confessions were of true information.” Brother Number Two said he was told that some cadre cited him as the reason they ended up in S-­21, saying he had called them to attend a meeting or an education session, but they were sent to the prison instead. Nuon Chea said that when he heard this, he told the cadre to stop using his name and sending people to S-­21 without the Center’s orders. When Nuon Chea once mentioned during an interview a time when Son Sen told him that Pol Pot suspected Nuon Chea of being a traitor after the Vietnamese invasion in 1979, he seemed to understand the problems a culture of fear and blame can create. “I did not believe Son Sen much because when we lost, everyone always tries to be right and blame each other, and then more problems happened. The accusations always occurred when something did not succeed,” he said. As Nuon Chea and Pol Pot realized they didn’t have good control over S-­21, Pol Pot ordered in 1978 that no more people should be sent to the interrogation center. He told the leaders that they should spread the word to cadre that random arrests were no longer allowed. Instead, those accused of committing a crime should be educated and criticized in their place of work. People could just be fired or sent to work on a farm, but those matters had to receive permission from the top leaders. “Because of disorder in sending people to S-­21, Pol Pot told people to not take people there,” Nuon Chea said. “Pol Pot knew S-­21 was not clean and not good.”

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Nuon Chea said he and Pol Pot did not know in detail what Duch was doing and whether he was a traitor as well. But Nuon Chea had received warnings. Ta Mok, who had once been in charge of Duch since they were both from the southwest, approached Nuon Chea two or three times to tell him that Duch was not good and that he should be removed from his position. “Please change Duch,” Ta Mok told Nuon Chea. “He tortured and killed many people and he is destroying Democratic Kampuchea.” Nuon Chea later told Son Sen three times about what Ta Mok had told him. Son Sen said he would investigate the matter. But he didn’t remove Duch and said he was good. Nuon Chea also told Pol Pot what Ta Mok had said: “I don’t know what he thought about that.” With border clashes intensifying and cadre defecting and fleeing to Vietnam, Pol Pot and Nuon Chea tried to soften their stance. But it was too late. The killings continued, despite Pol Pot’s order to stop them. Mon Nim, a division commander under the control of Defense Minister Son Sen and Pol Pot, said in an interview that when Khmer Rouge commander Heng Samrin fled to Vietnam, he was ordered to kill more than 670 soldiers from Heng Samrin’s division. But he refused to obey the order by Ke Pauk, who asked why they should be kept. Later, Pol Pot invited top cadre and military commanders to a meeting. He asked that the people not be split between the old and the new, those who were living in the cities and in the countryside, which surprised Mom Nim. Pol Pot also accused leaders of betraying the movement and killing too many people. He blamed Son Sen and Ke Pauk for what happened in the crackdown on the Eastern Zone. “Comrade Son Sen and Ke Pauk killed many people and buried them with a bulldozer. I knew this information through my spies,” Pol Pot said. “You betrayed people and made people leave the country to join with Vietnam. You have to correct yourself from now on.” Pol Pot went on to say that some people accused of being part of the CIA or KGB were actually innocent and only confessed because they were tortured. “Some confessed to being part of the CIA before they were born,” he said. “Spies would be selected from educated people, not simple uneducated people.” At the end of 1978, Pol Pot decided he wanted the Khmer Rouge to finally have some publicity, and he invited three westerners to visit Phnom Penh. Foreign correspondents Elizabeth Becker and Richard Dudman, along with lecturer Malcolm Caldwell, came to Phnom Penh for a ten-­day, strictly supervised visit. The night after their interviews with Pol Pot, Malcolm Caldwell was shot dead in the middle of the night. Elizabeth Becker, who later wrote

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about that visit in her book When the War Was Over, said the murder of Caldwell was an attempt to embarrass the Khmer Rouge regime. Nuon Chea said he was woken up that night by Pol Pot around 3 a.m. to let him know that Caldwell had been killed. Nuon Chea was shocked. At the time, tension was rising with Vietnam and Pol Pot worried that this was a tactic to damage Cambodia’s reputation. “Pol Pot said this was because of carelessness, but he didn’t say who was at fault,” Nuon Chea said. “We were very sorry about this, because we allowed him into the country so we had to protect him. We were not stupid enough to shoot a foreigner. I saw this as an enemy tactic to give us a bad name.” Pol Pot complained that this was a Foreign Affairs Ministry mistake because they, especially Ieng Sary, did not take care of the guests well. Pol Pot said the foreigners should have been housed in safer places and separated from each other. By the time of Caldwell’s murder, the Khmer Rouge regime’s days were numbered. They were now facing an even tougher enemy. After numerous border skirmishes, tensions between Vietnam and Cambodia increased. When the serious clashes began, Pol Pot called all the senior leaders to a meeting and said he wanted to make a clear stand against Vietnam and suggested cutting diplomatic ties. Nuon Chea was surprised at this suggestion, because it had not been discussed between the two before the meeting as they usually did before making major decisions. The leaders agreed, but Nuon Chea said it was a lack of democracy not to consult him first. Instead of bringing up his concern in the meeting, Nuon Chea went to Pol Pot afterward to discuss the issue. “I told Pol Pot we should not cut diplomatic relations because how could we then negotiate to solve the border problem. But Pol Pot said it was not a problem and he was responsible for it, so I stopped talking after that. That was my mistake because I did not struggle to change the idea in the meeting. I didn’t want to disturb things in the meeting.” Still, the intensifying dispute only proved to Nuon Chea that he was right in his belief that Vietnam was trying to take them down. Duch said that in the final days of the Khmer Rouge regime it was Nuon Chea who ordered that all remaining prisoners at S-­21 be killed so they could not be used by Vietnam in any way, such as propaganda purposes. “Vietnam tried to use many ways to destroy us,” Nuon Chea said. “They tried to split us and kill us, but they could not. Then they sent their people to spy on us and make internal problems for Democratic Kampuchea, but they could not succeed. And then finally they used armed force. It was only armed force that could wound us.”

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8. The Year Zero I always felt sad when I was on my own and questioned why I didn’t have a father and mother like the other children I saw. —­Sambath

When Vietnamese troops marched into Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge in January 1979, Sambath’s life was again turned upside down. He moved to the nearby Thmar Koul district with his grandparents, along with his two sisters and a brother, while his two other brothers were sent to live with an aunt. Sambath and his relatives once again became farmers, toiling in the rice fields to put food on the table. This time, they were no longer restricted from foraging for food and could move about with freedom. But they were still poor and were just barely surviving. Sambath compared himself to a parasite because he felt like he was not living a human existence. The Khmer Rouge had ruined Cambodia, pushing it back into the stone age. The country had been in isolation during that time, and it now seemed untouched by advances that had allowed other countries to move forward. After being cut off for so long, Cambodians had to learn again to live as civilized human beings. But many of the country’s best and brightest, the educated and artistic, businessmen and professors, had been killed during the reign of terror. Still, at least they were free of the Khmer Rouge. The country and Sambath were both starting anew, attempting to move forward and rebuild. The Khmer Rouge had called 1975 Year Zero, a wiping clean of everything that had come before and a promise of future glories. But for those who survived, Year Zero came in 1979. Their history, their friends, and their families had been erased. They were starting from the beginning. With the family unable to feed so many mouths, Sambath was sent to live with another relative, while his sisters stayed with their grandparents. Sambath returned to school, after having missed years of studying in a classroom, but he couldn’t afford supplies. To save money for school books, he skipped breakfast and horded the money given to him during Khmer New Year and

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other holidays. But the hunger pangs he had known for so long under the Khmer Rouge persisted. When he saw students eating porridge for breakfast, he walked away because he couldn’t bear the sight of it, sometimes hiding in the back of the school building where he wouldn’t have to watch. One of his classmates felt sorry for Sambath and occasionally bought him something to eat. But even when Sambath had food, the other children still had something Sambath never would. “I always felt sad because I had no mother or father,” Sambath said of that time. “They were all taken care of by their parents but for me. I didn’t have anyone who supported me. When I would see mothers hug their children, I had to look away. I didn’t know my future and I could not see a dream.” After school each day, Sambath cared for the cows and water buffalo, leading them to the field so they could eat. At night he worked in the rice fields and thought about his future. He wondered if he could make something of his life, or if was he destined to take care of animals and work the fields. Although the Khmer Rouge were out of power, the country was not at peace. The Cambodian communists continued to fight the Vietnamese invaders, leaving residents once again to flee battles and explosions. Sambath often ran into ditches to avoid the cross fire, and sometimes stayed there the entire night. While he worked in the fields, he and the other children would stop to watch the fighting around his village. Khmer Rouge soldiers lobbed rockets and artillery shells at the Vietnamese across rice fields. Still too young to grasp the politics and human costs surrounding the battles, Sambath watched eagerly. “It was better than a movie,” he said. “I saw tanks and people running and shooting.” He also saw many Khmer Rouge soldiers who had lost legs and arms. Soon after the Vietnamese invasion, Sambath and a few other neighborhood children stumbled on a mass grave of recently killed Khmer Rouge soldiers who had been fighting the Vietnamese. A putrid odor filled the air. Worms crawled on the bodies. “I tried to stay away from these places because I was afraid of ghosts, but the cows and buffalo I took care of needed to eat the grass around there,” he said. “But even the cows ran away from these graves because it smelled too bad.” In 1984, when Sambath was sixteen, his older brother Khon saw that his young sibling would not go far in his current life. He told Sambath he should head to the Thai border to the refugee camps, where everything was free, including English classes. He enticed Sambath with visions of plentiful bread

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and rice. “If you stay here, you will only take care of cows and buffalo for the rest of your life,” Khon told him. “Now all of us are pinning our hopes on you. We hope that you will be our family’s future.” Sambath and Khon hopped on a Vietnamese military truck headed to the Thai border. He was to live with his uncle, who worked as a medic for the American Refugee Committee, a nongovernmental organization. His brothers already lived at the camp and made a living by smuggling clothes and cigarettes from Thailand into Cambodia. Sambath attended classes and, for once, didn’t have hunger pangs. At school, he was given bread every day. He learned English at a private school and later was moved to a Khmer school where he was placed in the fifth grade. The UN Border Relief Organization provided rice, fish, vegetables, oil, and second-­hand clothes. Finally, Sambath was happy. For the first time he could remember, he felt secure and didn’t have to worry about anything except for learning. “I felt like I was living like a king because I was given everything,” Sambath said. While war raged on between the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese, Cambodians used their newfound freedom to address the horrors of the past. Many residents sought revenge against Khmer Rouge cadre who had made them suffer or murdered their loved ones. The killers were easy to find since many of them had been neighbors, friends, and even relatives. But Sambath said he and his surviving family members did not plot revenge against the revolutionaries who had caused them so much grief, even though Sambath knew who they were and where they lived. Instead, he tried to forget the family members he had lost, especially his parents. “We tried not to remind ourselves of the past,” he said. “But at night, I always missed them. I couldn’t sleep for hours because of this.”

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9. The Implosion In all my life, in all my struggles, I never suffered the way I did when the Khmer Rouge came to an end. —­Nuon Chea

Nuon Chea scrambled to pack his few belongings for his escape from the capital, just before the Vietnamese captured Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979. After months of escalating attacks, Vietnam had sent ten army divisions into Cambodia on December 25, 1978. The size of their forces, along with their better-­equipped troops, overwhelmed the Khmer Rouge. Vietnamese troops advanced so quickly that Nuon Chea had no time even to gather documents of policies or confessions at S-­21. He traveled in one vehicle while Pol Pot rode in another. The two arranged to meet in the north soon. They caught up with each other in Batambang the following day. With a Vietnamese-­installed government in Phnom Penh soon running the country, the Khmer Rouge tried to regroup in the northwestern provinces of Cambodia. Many of them were still in disbelief at how quickly the Vietnamese had pushed them out and how short-­lived their rule had been. Nuon Chea and Pol Pot talked about how they ran out of time to implement all their policies. An even more bitter pill to swallow was the fact that the leaders of the Vietnamese-­backed Cambodian forces were former Khmer Rouge cadre, many of whom had escaped from the Eastern Zone. There was Nuon Chea’s old friend Heng Samrin, and Hun Sen, who would eventually become prime minister and still holds that position today. Still, Nuon Chea and Pol Pot knew they had to remain positive. Now that the enemy had launched a full-­scale, open war, the survival of the Cambodian nation was at stake. Nuon Chea called cadre and military commanders to a meeting, asking them to continue fighting to liberate the country. Don’t lose hope, he told them. He pointed out that Cambodia still had many friends, like China, and that the country was still a member of the United Nations. He and Pol Pot believed that Vietnam, poor like Cambodia, couldn’t afford a protracted fight.

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Still, they knew their men were exhausted from the intense Vietnamese offensive. If you don’t continue to struggle, he told them, Cambodia will melt away. “We are like sugar canes in an elephant’s mouth,” he told the cadre. “It isn’t easy to get out of the mouth unless we try.” Privately, however, Pol Pot felt he had failed the movement. He requested to resign from his position as secretary of the party as he and other leaders walked north, escaping from Vietnamese soldiers. But Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary asked him to continue. “He thought he was unable to prevent the Vietnamese invasion, but I told him our country was in chaos so he had to continue,” Nuon Chea said. Later, Pol Pot said he was responsible for everything that had happened during the three years of the Khmer Rouge rule and that he was regretful about the death of so many people. “He said he accepted that mistakes were made,” Nuon Chea said. “As politicians, we must bear responsibility for what happened during our regime.” The Khmer Rouge still had one key friend, China. Nuon Chea traveled to China with Pol Pot to tell their big brothers and patron what had taken place in Cambodia. Chinese leaders asked Pol Pot whether the Khmer Rouge could successfully fight Vietnam. Yes, Pol Pot told them definitively. The Chinese still provided some help. On February 15, 1979, China publicly announced it would punish Vietnam for its invasion of Cambodia. Two days later, about 200,000 Chinese troops, supported by 200 tanks, entered northern Vietnam. It was a short conflict and the Chinese forces withdrew after a month, but the Chinese continued to support the Khmer Rouge with funding, weapons, and other supplies. Later, Nuon Chea went to China to meet Deng Xiao Peng. He told him that the Communist Party of Kampuchea would be dissolved and a new movement created to encompass other groups fighting against the Vietnamese-­installed government. Pol Pot and Nuon Chea decided that if the Khmer Rouge remained under the communist label, it would be difficult to gain broad support from the people and from abroad. The Khmer Rouge joined forces with Son Sann, a former prime minister and anti-­communist activist, and their one-­time ally Sihanouk. The United States funneled support to Son Sann as part of its Cold War strategy against communism and Soviet Union-­backed Vietnam. Although they were on the same side, in many ways the alliance was once again as Sihanouk had described his previous partnership with the Khmer Rouge: a marriage without love. Pol Pot often told Khmer Rouge soldiers not to rely on the other groups. The Khmer Rouge needed to liberate the country on their own, and see the

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other two factions as assistants. With the United States now on the side that also included the Khmer Rouge, Thailand was also an ally, which meant Chinese weapons and ammunition could be delivered to the Khmer Rouge via Thailand, Nuon Chea said. As the civil war in Cambodia raged on and residents wondered whether they would ever see peace, Pol Pot began pondering his personal life. Although he was still technically married, he had lived alone for more than a decade. Pol Pot’s first wife, Khieu Ponnary, had long suffered from mental illness, which worsened as each year passed. Pol Pot had asked her to stay with him since the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975, when she was staying in Kompong Cham with another cadre’s wife. At that time, Nuon Chea even went to her to ask her to return to her husband. But she didn’t say a word to Nuon Chea, her mind already lost to dementia. Before Pol Pot got engaged a second time, he sent a letter to the top cadre saying he wished to have a wife because he wanted to have some company so he would not be alone at the end of his life. In the letter, Pol Pot said he had been sad for many years because he had no wife to live with him and he wanted to have a family. Nuon Chea said Pol Pot acted correctly by informing the cadre of his marital wishes before he moved ahead with his decision. “We should understand from Pol Pot’s letter that he struggled for many years and was alone during most of that time,” Nuon Chea said. “And wanting to build a family is not wrong.” In 1985, Pol Pot decided to marry a much younger woman named Mea Son who had been his cook and asked for Nuon Chea’s help. Nuon Chea knows people accuse him of being the broker who arranged Pol Pot’s second marriage, but he said he did not initiate it. Rather, Pol Pot asked Nuon Chea to talk to Mea Son and ask if she would be Pol Pot’s wife, adding that he would be happy whether she said “yes” or “no.” Nuon Chea told her about Pol Pot’s wish to build a family because he had been without one for a long time. “I didn’t say anything else besides what Pol Pot told me, and then she asked me to let her think about it,” he said. “Later, another leader’s wife talked to her and she agreed.” Pol Pot and Mea Son had a simple wedding, attended by Nuon Chea, Son Sen, Khieu Samphan, and a few others. With ongoing fighting, Pol Pot was embarrassed to wear wedding clothes and insisted on a small, modest celebration, Nuon Chea said. As Pol Pot adjusted to his new personal life, the Khmer Rouge movement was also going through a transition. The elders of the party had now been fighting for thirty years, and as they entered their sixties they felt tired.

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It was time for others to lead the movement. In 1986, Nuon Chea resigned as deputy secretary of the party, wanting a rest from the work and stress. Pol Pot resigned the following year, allowing defense minister Son Sen to gradually take over his duties. Nuon Chea said Pol Pot’s brother-­in-­law Ieng Sary, Ta Mok, and other Khmer Rouge leaders were not made aware of Pol Pot’s choice of Son Sen beforehand. Pol Pot only approached Nuon Chea to consult him and lobby for his support. “We picked a new generation and the old people just worked as advisors,” Nuon Chea said. “We saw they had new ideas to lead the country and we are old. For me, I wanted to take a rest but there were actually even more difficulties until we came to the end.” After Pol Pot had decided on Son Sen and Nuon Chea agreed, the top leaders attended a meeting to choose Pol Pot’s successor. Ta Mok and Ieng Sary said nothing, but they preferred that Pol Pot stay on as secretary instead of the younger Son Sen, who had joined the movement after the veterans. Their unease with Son Sen would prove warranted, but by then it was too late for the Khmer Rouge. After an exhaustive, decade-­long battle that seemed as if it was approaching a stalemate, Vietnam decided it had enough war. Vietnamese troops agreed to leave and began withdrawing in 1989. The two sides negotiated a truce that led to the 1991 Paris Peace Accords. A UN peacekeeping mission would soon be established in Cambodia to help normalize the situation in the country. Son Sen and Khieu Samphan, as the public face of the Khmer Rouge, traveled to Phnom Penh for the signing of the peace agreements and were greeted by demonstrators who threw stones at Khieu Samphan, which left a gash on his head. After that trip, Son Sen began complimenting Cambodia interior minister General Sin Song, who had bought dried fish for him, and Pol Pot began to suspect Son Sen of betraying the movement. He told Nuon Chea that he regretted choosing Son Sen as his successor, saying he should have asked more people for their advice before making a decision. Nuon Chea said Son Sen’s wife was the main problem, since she was power hungry and her ambition interfered with her husband’s work. “Son Sen thinks only about power and his reputation, and nothing about actual work,” he told Pol Pot. Son Sen chose his relatives for positions of power, angering others in the Khmer Rouge hierarchy. Son Sen later told Nuon Chea that the area Pol Pot was in charge of was in disorder, leaving Nuon Chea even more suspicious. “I understand now that is when he started to attack Pol Pot,” Nuon Chea said. But no one could have imagined the extent of Pol Pot’s dissatisfaction with his political heir.

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As the suspicions of the Khmer Rouge period crept back into the movement, Pol Pot held a meeting with Nuon Chea to discuss the future. They knew how tarnished the Cambodian communist party, associated with the bloodshed of the Khmer Rouge rule, had become. They created a new political party, encompassing more than just the communists, to run in the 1993 elections sponsored by the United Nations. But they needed money to fund the new Party of Democratic Kampuchea. They ordered the areas under Khmer Rouge control to sell rice, timber, and mined gem stones. Each zone was required to send 80 percent of its earnings to the central leadership. Nuon Chea and Pol Pot also asked cadre to educate zone residents about the elections and find good candidates. The Khmer Rouge movement itself began to change after the 1991 peace agreement, when Pol Pot decided to ease restrictions on the members and the organization allowed cadre to engage in capitalist activities. The leadership gave families a cow, rice fields, land, and homes for their own use, no longer enforcing the communal system. With many of them living in the heavily forested, gem-­rich area of Pailin, Khmer Rouge soldiers increasingly relied on mining and logging, beginning what Nuon Chea saw as a downward spiral of morality. They became seduced with their newfound money and the trappings that came with it, wearing new watches and gold necklaces. The Khmer Rouge tried to control the burgeoning free market by setting prices, but those doing the selling put their own price tag on the goods, often much higher. Nuon Chea asked that money not be introduced even in the 1990s, but he was the lone voice of dissent. Pol Pot said as long as the Khmer Rouge forces still fought the enemy, giving them a little freedom, like allowing them to drink wine or have fun with girls, was not a problem. But Nuon Chea argued that if the cadre were given this freedom, they would not fight because their minds and interests would be occupied by other things. The two would argue about this point on many occasions, leading them to drift farther apart. The cadre also stopped criticism sessions, once a hallmark of Khmer Rouge principles, meant to better the individual and rid the mind of impure thoughts. “People started changing their ideas and we had two wars to fight: the actual war and the one against capitalism,” Nuon Chea said. “It started splitting us and I raised this issue, but the other leaders said it wasn’t a problem because times were not like they were in the past. The shaking of our foundation started then. If we didn’t have this, we would have been strong like before.” But it was not only the foot soldiers who became enamored with their new riches. Nuon Chea made sure he kept track of the money earned in his

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area. He collected and sent more than 50 million baht to Pol Pot before the 1993 elections. But other Khmer Rouge leaders began appearing with nice clothes, good food, and new electronic equipment that had never been seen before in the remote northwest area where the Khmer Rouge maintained a stronghold. One of the leaders who seemed to be most affected was Pol Pot’s brother-­in-­law Ieng Sary, which caused the two relatives to drift apart. More suspicion was cast on him when Ieng Sary reported to Pol Pot that robbers had stolen much of the money he had collected, though he didn’t have receipts and proper record keeping of income and expenses. As the 1993 elections approached, Pol Pot and Nuon Chea became skeptical about whether the voting would help their cause. In the end, the Khmer Rouge decided not to participate, believing that being part of the elections could mean the end of their movement. If they fielded candidates, they would have to lay down their weapons and fight using political means as opposed to armed force. But Nuon Chea and Pol Pot believed that despite the Paris Accords, Vietnam had not fully withdrawn from Cambodia. Pol Pot and Nuon Chea wanted to continue the armed struggle. The royalist Sihanouk faction, which had been part of the fight against the Vietnamese, participated in the voting. Because of disputed election results and accusations of vote tampering, the royalist Funcinpec party was forced to form a coalition government with the rival Cambodian People’s Party, made up of Vietnamese-­backed candidates, many of whom were former Khmer Rouge cadre who escaped to Vietnam in the late 1970s. After the elections, Nuon Chea and Pol Pot separated, with Brother Number One staying in Anlong Veng and Nuon Chea going to Samlot. Pol Pot’s health deteriorated and in 1995 he suffered a stroke. As his health declined, Pol Pot also lost faith in the old leaders and relied more on younger cadre, according to Nuon Chea. He no longer asked Ieng Sary, his own brother in law, to attend meetings. Nuon Chea told Pol Pot to invite Ieng Sary for the sake of party unity. “Pol Pot thought about this for a while and then he said he was responsible for this,” said Nuon Chea, knowing that meant Pol Pot felt he was making the right decision. Ieng Sary’s family was also unhappy that Pol Pot had married a second wife. But Nuon Chea said the real problem was the money earned in Ieng Sary’s area, most of which was not handed over to the central leadership to support the movement. “I did not ask what happened to the money but that’s what caused the problem,” Nuon Chea said. “I only had suspicions about Ieng Sary. I had no evidence so I chose not to say anything.”

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The internal problems worsened in 1996, which marked the beginning of the end of the Khmer Rouge. Exerting his power, Son Sen took the timber Khmer Rouge cadre had logged. He also confiscated motorbikes, television sets, oxcarts, and other belongings from residents in Malai and Pailin, two Khmer Rouge strongholds. He claimed those items belonged to the movement, harking back to the days of collective ownership. In Pailin, powerful general Y Chhien refused to obey Son Sen, which prompted Son Sen to call a meeting between people in Malai and Pailin, telling the residents they needed to listen to him because he was in charge. No one listened. Son Sen petitioned Pol Pot, who sent Ta Mok to ease the situation. But Ta Mok’s hotheaded personality only increased tensions, since he told the people there they had to listen to Son Sen. Finally, Pol Pot asked Nuon Chea to resolve the conflict. Nuon Chea told Son Sen that his actions had been wrong, and Son Sen told Brother Number Two he would give back the property. Nuon Chea then went to see Khmer Rouge commander Sok Pheap in Malai and asked him to not split the movement. Sok Pheap asked that Pol Pot resume leadership of the Khmer Rouge, saying that was the only way to prevent division. Nuon Chea took the request to Pol Pot, who declined—­Son Sen would stay in charge. “I saw the situation wasn’t good,” Nuon Chea said. “The forces weren’t attacking government troops but attacking each other.” But unlike years past, Pol Pot didn’t ask Nuon Chea what he thought. Soon afterward, Nuon Chea heard a Khmer Rouge radio broadcast saying Ieng Sary, Y Chhien, and others had betrayed the party and the movement. “I was shocked to hear this.” he said. “If I had known about it beforehand, I would have tried to prevent it because doing that was weakening our movement.” Ta Mok and Son Sen then asked Pol Pot for permission to attack and arrest the cadre in Pailin and Malai, but the forces there attacked first. As Ta Mok and Son Sen escaped to Anlong Veng, where Pol Pot was staying, they told Nuon Chea they were taking him to a meeting. But instead Nuon Chea found himself walking in the forest for 17 days to Anlong Veng. Sometimes he had to be carried because he lacked the strength to go on. As they walked, Pol Pot communicated with Ta Mok by radio, asking him why he had not organized his troops to attack the “defectors.” Ta Mok said they had no soldiers with them; Pol Pot said they should criticize each other for their mistakes. “How can we criticize each other when we have no rice to eat? We have no strength to even help ourselves,” Ta Mok told Brother Number One, according to Nuon Chea. “You are far away and you don’t understand the situation. You just give orders.”

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“Ta Mok dared to say this to Pol Pot,” Nuon Chea said, still taken aback by the confrontation, years later. When Nuon Chea and the others arrived at Pol Pot’s base in Anlong Veng, Pol Pot again asked why they had not attacked Y Chhien and Ieng Sary’s forces. Nuon Chea started to answer when Ta Mok interrupted. He told Pol Pot that they had barely escaped, let alone have the ability to fight back. “Pol Pot should not have given up on the old leaders like me, Ta Mok and Khieu Samphan,” Nuon Chea said. “That was a mistake.” In August 1996, Ieng Sary defected to the government and brought tens of thousands of dissatisfied Khmer Rouge soldiers with him. It was a huge blow to the already faltering Khmer Rouge and would kick off the demise of the movement. After the defection, Pol Pot asked Nuon Chea, Ta Mok, and Son Sen to criticize themselves for failing to prevent the split. The disagreements continued, with Pol Pot and Ta Mok choosing different people to be the new military commander in the north, a slap in the face to Ta Mok, who had built up Anlong Veng. Son Sen sided with Ta Mok. Later, the two became increasingly close, with Son Sen often going to Ta Mok’s house to visit. Nuon Chea later said he suspected Son Sen was trying to win Ta Mok over so he could use Ta Mok’s troops to attack Pol Pot. But Nuon Chea would never have the chance to find out if his suspicions were true. In June 1997, Nuon Chea was woken around midnight by the noise of several cars arriving at Son Sen’s house, 100 yards down the road. A few minutes later, he heard dozens of gunshots. Nuon Chea lay in bed, terrified. One of his former bodyguards then came to his home, sent by Pol Pot to reassure Nuon Chea that he was not also a target. “Uncle, don’t worry,” the bodyguard said. Nuon Chea felt better after that but the murder was shocking and gruesome, even by Khmer Rouge standards. Fourteen people, including Son Sen’s grandchildren, had been shot to death. Later, Nuon Chea asked Pol Pot if he would announce the deaths of Son Sen and his family on Khmer Rouge radio. On the radio, Khieu Samphan read a letter written by Pol Pot that said they had smashed a nest of enemies made up of Son Sen and his wife Youn Yat. Pol Pot later found out that Son Sen had been in touch with the Cambodian government and had betrayed the movement. Nuon Chea said he didn’t know about Son Sen’s betrayal at that time but had had his suspicions, wondering why Son Sen was constantly on the phone and why his television was so loud, as if to hide something going on in his home. Son Sen also seemed to have more expensive food and other items than most people. Still, Nuon

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Chea and the Khmer Rouge community were stunned by the killings. Nuon Chea called it too cruel, even for someone who had betrayed the party. “Pol Pot should have discussed it with me and Ta Mok first before deciding on Son Sen’s case,” Nuon Chea said. “I was very surprised when I heard the radio announcement. I thought Pol Pot knew he had made a mistake and felt sorry about the killing of Son Sen’s whole family. I told Pol Pot it was wrong.” Ta Mok was furious with Pol Pot over the killings. He made his feelings known the way he knew best: by force. After numerous disagreements with Pol Pot, Ta Mok felt the murder of Son Sen’s family showed that Pol Pot was no longer fit to lead the Khmer Rouge. On June 12, 1997, his soldiers attacked Pol Pot’s troops in the border area of Kbal Ansom. Pol Pot ordered his men not to shoot back, but to withdraw. Pol Pot’s men came to pick up Nuon Chea and his family and bring them to Pol Pot’s house, where Nuon Chea asked Pol Pot to let him negotiate to stop the fighting. Pol Pot refused. Their meeting lasted five minutes. That was the last time Nuon Chea saw Pol Pot alive. Two hours after their morning meeting, Pol Pot fled in a Land Rover without telling Nuon Chea. Pol Pot met Khieu Samphan, who was also escaping from the fighting, in the forest, and they traveled together. When Nuon Chea arrived that night at Pol Pot’s hiding place, Pol Pot did not ask for him and Nuon Chea didn’t try to meet him. The following morning, they left again to travel through the forest, as Ta Mok’s forces lobbed shells at them. As he heard explosions around him, Nuon Chea knew the Khmer Rouge movement was coming to an end. “I was very old and sick and I had to climb mountains and walk along small canals,” he said. “It was very hard at the end. In all our suffering, I never suffered as I did in that time. That was the most difficult situation.” While Nuon Chea tried to ease the aches in his body by taking a bath, he heard a noise and looked up to see some of Ta Mok’s soldiers pointing their rifles at him. “Point your weapons elsewhere,” Nuon Chea told them. “I don’t like having weapons pointed at me.” The soldiers told Nuon Chea to accompany them back to Ta Mok’s base. Brother Number Two agreed, knowing he had no choice. Pol Pot planned to escape to Thailand and had one of his men contact Thai officials to arrange it, but Pol Pot’s assistant was arrested before he could flee, Nuon Chea said he learned later. Ta Mok’s men arrested Brother Number One in the forest near the Thai border. After he was detained, the aging Pol Pot asked to see his captor. Pol Pot called Ta Mok “ta,” as in grandfather.

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He said they had no problems with each other so they should reconcile and unite, Ta Mok later told Nuon Chea. Ta Mok remained silent. “When Ta Mok arrested Pol Pot, I saw that we had finally lost,” Nuon Chea said. “They had attacked the head of the machine so the people will be split and I saw defeat.” Shortly after their first meeting, Pol Pot asked to see Ta Mok again. Pol Pot told him that the world was changing. He pointed to North and South Korea and the recent prisoner exchange they had as a show of reconciliation. Pol Pot said he and Ta Mok should reunite for the sake of the nation. Again, Ta Mok said nothing. After Pol Pot’s arrest, Ta Mok led the Khmer Rouge, becoming a tyrant in his own right, making decisions without consulting anybody, Nuon Chea said. Always a soldier at heart, Ta Mok still tried to find ways to fight against the Vietnamese-­backed Cambodian People’s Party, CPP, the main party in the government. Ta Mok threw his support with the royalist Funcinpec party, which was led by Sihanouk’s son, Prince Ranarridh, and was the main rival to the CPP. Funcinpec and the CPP were in a power sharing deal with each having a co-­prime minister position. But it was clear they were rivals, and their fighting came to a head in July 1997, when the CPP executed Funcinpec members and launched a coup that unseated its rival. Ta Mok, always secretive about Khmer Rouge finances, funneled millions of dollars to Funcinpec and provided ammunition and weapons to help its fight against the CPP. Nuon Chea met one of the Funcinpec leaders, Nhiek Bhun Chhay, at the border town of O’Smach after Funcinpec was defeated in 1997. Chhay came to ask the Khmer Rouge for money, armed forces, and weapons. In the meantime, stress from the internal fighting and his escape had left Pol Pot seriously ill, and he often needed oxygen to help him breathe. Nuon Chea said Ta Mok treated Pol Pot badly during his detainment, giving him porridge but little else to eat. But the worst was yet to come. Ta Mok announced that Pol Pot would be tried for the murder of Son Sen and his family. Nuon Chea was not told beforehand of the trial, held in July 1997, and said he would have tried to stop it if he had known. He questioned the benefit of the trial, saying if Ta Mok wanted a public event, he should have just asked Pol Pot to apologize to the people. “I did not join the trial organized by Ta Mok and I was not invited to listen to it,” Nuon Chea said. “Even if I had been called, I wouldn’t have gone. Other leaders didn’t go as well. What Ta Mok did to Pol Pot was difficult to see and not right. I am not biased in support of Pol Pot but I’m talking about what is right and fair.” In pictures and stories shown to the world by journalist Nate Thayer, Pol Pot wore a haunted,

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vacant expression as he was denounced by his own cadre. A shock of white hair reflected the toll the years of being a revolutionary had taken on him. Khem Them, Ta Mok’s top military commander at the time, said later that they wanted to invite more reporters to show the world what Pol Pot had done, but they didn’t know how to contact other media. Pol Pot lived his last days as a broken man, with only his twelve-­year-­old daughter bringing him relief. According to Khem Them, after the trial, Ta Mok and his lieutenants developed a plan to take Pol Pot to a Thai refugee camp and hand him to the United Nations to face an international court. Before Pol Pot was to be sent off, Ta Mok asked one of his men to buy black hair dye so that no one would recognize Pol Pot at the refugee camp. He was to be taken on the morning of April 16, 1998, but he died the night before. His wife told Ta Mok and the other leaders of Pol Pot’s death around midnight on April 15. “We were suspicious of his death. We couldn’t believe he had died suddenly because he had good medicine and his health was good,” Khem Them said. “So we were all disappointed with his death. If he were alive, he would have been useful to use as a negotiating chip with the Cambodian government.” Nuon Chea had not seen his old friend for many months and was saddened to hear of his death. Ta Mok came to see Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan the morning after Pol Pot’s death, asking if they wanted to see his body. Nuon Chea went, but some of the other leaders declined for fear of being criticized by Ta Mok for being biased toward Pol Pot. When Nuon Chea approached the body of his comrade, Mea Son and Pol Pot’s daughter were already there, crying. They checked his abdomen to make sure it was really he and saw the scar from an operation he had had in the 1980s in China for intestinal cancer. Soon afterward, Pol Pot’s body was placed on top of a pile of tires and burned. The sight horrified Nuon Chea: seeing the leader of the movement he had devoted his life to be treated in such a degrading way in death. “What was the use of what Ta Mok did, burning Pol Pot on a pile of tires?” he wondered. “Ta Mok was cruel. When Pol Pot died, they should have put him to rest according to Cambodian tradition because he was the representative of the movement. But instead, Ta Mok said Pol Pot’s value did not even equal a pile of cow feces. ‘At least cow feces are used to make fertilizer,’ Ta Mok said. But I was very sad about his death since we worked together for a long time and brought victory to the people.” Unlike many other former Khmer Rouge leaders, Nuon Chea is reluctant to blame Pol Pot for the havoc wreaked during his rule. “It’s hard to say

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whether Pol Pot is to blame because the situation at the time obligated us to act in certain ways because we wanted to protect the country and wanted it to prosper,” Nuon Chea said. “The three years were very difficult and we cannot lay all the fault on Pol Pot because it was not only he who did right and wrong. Pol Pot had made some mistakes and everyone is right and wrong. There were some things lacking and mistakes but there was no intention to do this.” Nuon Chea seemed to have conflicting thoughts about his relationship with Pol Pot, alternately brushing off and then emphasizing the closeness the two shared. Nuon Chea is often described as Pol Pot’s shadow and alter ego. “They just called him and me Brother Number One and Two,” he said. “It was easier to call us that than by our real names.” He went on to say that those who describe Pol Pot as the right arm and Nuon Chea as the left are foreigners who didn’t understand their relationship. He also dismissed talk that he was Pol Pot’s subordinate, preferring to see their titles as just that, and not reflecting the degree of their influence. “I was not the right arm or the left arm of Pol Pot,” Nuon Chea said. “We were equal. Pol Pot did not serve me and I did not serve him. We both served the way of the party.” But Nuon Chea also often stressed that Pol Pot had a great deal of confidence in him, enough that Nuon Chea was charged with negotiating with the Vietnamese. He talks about that confidence with a sense of pride, that Pol Pot trusted him and him alone to do the Khmer Rouge’s most important work. They often traveled to Vietnam together or Pol Pot sent Nuon Chea on his own. “One big thing was he handed over the work of communicating and negotiating with the Vietnamese to me so he was confident in me,” Nuon Chea said. “If he was not confident in me, he would not have allowed me to do this work because it was very important.” During their years in power, the two were nearly inseparable, spending much more time with each other than they did with their families or other leaders. Before any new initiatives were presented, Pol Pot and Nuon Chea always discussed them together to hammer out the ideas and make sure they agreed on every point. Nuon Chea often described Pol Pot as being gentle, without any penchant for aggressive or brutal behavior. He cited only one instance in which Pol Pot actually displayed violence. Pol Pot had sent his nephew, So Hong, to deliver a letter to Nuon Chea, and he returned late. So Hong often acted as Pol Pot’s messenger, and his deliveries were sensitive and secretive. “I beat my nephew because he did not come back home for a long time,” Pol Pot told Nuon Chea. “I hit him a few times because I was so angry. I asked my nephew why he

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was gone so long, and he said someone had asked him to buy a lottery ticket for him. Later, I pitied my nephew. That was the first time I beat somebody. I never beat any children or my brothers. If there was any problem, I always just talked about it.” In their personalities, Nuon Chea and Pol Pot seemed to be a perfect match because their approaches complemented each other. Pol Pot played the good cop and Nuon Chea was the bad cop. While Nuon Chea often interrupted people, Pol Pot would always wait until the person had finished speaking before talking. If Pol Pot promised to do something, he did it and he expected punctuality. He was known to like small children and offered them bananas or other fruit that he always had for them. “The way Pol Pot led is different from me,” Nuon Chea said. “When the people were evacuated from their house and they were just moved behind their homes, I wondered why they were even moved at all. But Pol Pot did not react quickly and solved it gradually. We had the same idea but the way or the process of handling it is different. When Pol Pot saw somebody drinking wine, he did not blame them. He said, ‘Drink it, but drink moderately and not in an unhealthy way.’ For me, I said, ‘Comrade, don’t drink wine otherwise it will affect your health or affect the people because you are the cadre and people will look down on you.’ I said this in front of those people, but Pol Pot always talked in a diplomatic way.” As the purges went on and distrust of colleagues grew during the Khmer Rouge rule, Nuon Chea retained his faith in Pol Pot. But he acknowledged one major subject on which they disagreed, the choosing of the cadre. Because of Pol Pot’s timid nature, he had an immediate admiration for anyone who could fight, who was brave on the battlefield. For Nuon Chea, courageous soldiers did not always translate into moral leaders. “Pol Pot made mistakes in choosing cadre,” Nuon Chea said. “He chose cadre who were brave and strong at fighting in the battlefield. Even if they were free thinkers, he chose them if they were strong at fighting. I gave him some ideas for selecting cadre. I said to him the selection must be done based on reality of class. He chose fighters, but they were not disciplined and raped people’s daughters. Some leaders drank during our secret work, but when we liberated Cambodia he still chose some of them because they were in the struggle. I was not satisfied with them, but Pol Pot wanted them, so I just agreed.” Although Nuon Chea stressed unity between him and Pol Pot, he also added, “During the Khmer Rouge rule, I was not faithful to Pol Pot but I thought in a reasonable way. When he was right, I supported him and when he was wrong, I did not support him.”

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Ultimately, Nuon Chea said he still considers Pol Pot a friend and compatriot, descriptions that very few would use nowadays. He remained close to Pol Pot’s second wife, although he did not attend her later wedding to another Khmer Rouge cadre, Tep Kunnal. “I had no objection to Pol Pot when we were working together,” Nuon Chea said. “What we were thinking is to serve the people and give people enough to eat.” Nuon Chea said he still considers Pol Pot e “a good man,” and maintained that Brother Number One deserves to be treated as someone who sacrificed himself for his nation. “Pol Pot wanted people to live in peace and prosperity. He worked to serve the people, not his personal power. I never saw Pol Pot being cruel.” Now, with Pol Pot dead and thousands of cadre lost to defections, the remaining forces asked Ta Mok how the movement would carry on. Ta Mok laid out a policy to take people’s possessions and force people to pay the Khmer Rouge. Both Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan were shocked by this, and wondered how the movement could survive by stealing. “The people supported us because they were oppressed, but if we oppressed them, how could they support us?” Nuon Chea said. “The Khmer Rouge would have become robbers and that is not a movement.” Still Nuon Chea stayed to organize the soldiers and prevent them from rioting and turning into bandits, which he said would have happened under Ta Mok’s direction. Nuon Chea began having secret conversations with Khieu Samphan about their future. The two pretended to go for walks because Ta Mok constantly watched Nuon Chea, suspicious of what he might do next. Ta Mok even attended the Thai language classes Nuon Chea taught to some Khmer Rouge soldiers. In one of these private walks with his old friend, Nuon Chea asked Khieu Samphan if they should defect. Khieu Samphan simply nodded his head, Yes. After nearly fifty years as a revolutionary, Nuon Chea would end his struggle. “We decided it was hopeless and we could not continue,” he said. “Ta Mok was the one who destroyed the Khmer Rouge at the end.” Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, pretending to go on a walk again, left for Thailand, where Nuon Chea’s family was staying in a refugee camp. But they lost their way and lost sight of each other in the jungle. Nuon Chea ended up in a minefield. But then he saw Khieu Samphan again, at the same time that Ta Mok’s soldiers found them. “Grandpa, please go back and I guarantee we will protect you,” a solider pleaded with Nuon Chea, but he declined repeatedly. The soldiers went back and told Ta Mok that Nuon Chea refused to return. Ta Mok told his men to let them go. Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan jumped onto a Thai military vehicle and

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headed to Thailand and then to Pailin. On December 25, 1998, Nuon Chea arrived in Pailin and notified the government that he and Khieu Samphan were defecting. The two men who had survived the purges and never given up on the dream of a Khmer Rouge victory finally admitted defeat. A helicopter was sent to pick them up to take them to the capital for a meeting with Prime Minister Hun Sen. It was Nuon Chea’s first visit to Phnom Penh in 20 years. He stayed at the Royal Phnom Penh Hotel and was treated like a celebrity. Hun Sen called Nuon Chea uncle and said he heard the old Khmer Rouge leader was good at delivering Buddhist sermons. At dinner, Hun Sen joked that during the Khmer Rouge rule he was ordered to marry a much older woman. Nuon Chea just smiled and hardly spoke, allowing Khieu Samphan to do the talking. Ieng Sary and his wife also attended, along with some of the former cadre who had worked with him so many years ago, like Defense Minister Tea Banh, Finance Minister Keat Chhon, and parliamentarian Matt Ly, one of Nuon Chea’s deputies. Hun Sen’s wife gave the wives of Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan silk scarves. Later they were taken to the seaside town of Sihanoukville and the temples in Siem Reap. As a reward for defecting, they were allowed to live their last years in peace and seclusion in Pailin. There Nuon Chea found an unfamiliar world. He was used to the organization providing everything for him. In the new world, he learned, the government didn’t provide him with rations. He had to make a living on his own. “To change my life to this new one was difficult because I hadn’t lived in this world in decades,” he said. “I was used to having difficulties during the resistance but that was related to our struggle and leading cadre. The difficulties were not about making money or finding food.” As Nuon Chea tried to figure out how to live his new life as a normal, private citizen, the remnants of the Khmer Rouge forces under Ta Mok fought on against the government. The Cambodian military was closing in on them near the Thai in the Choam area of Anlong Veng. Ta Mok knew that the days of his men were numbered. He held a meeting with commanders to discuss the movement’s future. Afterward, he sent Khem Ngon to Phnom Penh to negotiate. He presented Defense Minister Tea Banh with a request from Ta Mok, who asked if his men could join the Cambodian military in roles similar to those held in the Khmer Rouge. Prime Minister Hun Sen spoke with Khem Them and another Khmer Rouge representative for 30 minutes. “Hun Sen said he welcomed the end of the war and thanked us for national reconciliation,” Khem Them said. “But we did not ask him to write a letter as evidence.

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This was our mistake.” They didn’t realize that as part of the end of the Khmer Rouge, their one-­legged leader would be arrested. More than a week later, Ta Mok was asked to go to Phnom Penh to meet Hun Sen. He knew he would be detained once he entered the capital. Ta Mok surrendered to the government for the sake of his people and the nation, Khem Them said. He cited a speech Ta Mok gave before he turned himself in, saying he would go to jail to end the war and have peace. The one­legged butcher was arrested in March 1999 and was charged with genocide. When Nuon Chea heard the news of Ta Mok’s arrest, he pitied his old friend. But he said Ta Mok was the one who brought about the Khmer Rouge demise. If he hadn’t split the movement and arrested Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge still had a chance for survival, despite the defections of thousands of others under Ieng Sary. “If we were united, we could have been strong again,” Nuon Chea said. “I always thought about unity so we could be strong enough to fight the enemy. The enemy was still out there. But we were finished.”

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10. The Rebuilding When I first met Nuon Chea, I did not know if he was bad or good. I tried to get to know him and investigate his character every time I talked with him —­Sambath

While infighting plagued the Khmer Rouge, Sambath and Cambodia were given a new life. After several years of studying and regaining a sense of normalcy, Sambath followed in his uncle’s footsteps and in 1988 took an exam to become a health worker for the American Refugee Committee. Working for the ARC, he received weekly rations of rice and canned fish, a luxury for him. He sold some of his food to buy books and pay for private English classes. Through his work as a health care assistant, Sambath began dreaming of becoming a doctor. “That was my first job and the beginning of my life,” Sambath said. “It was the job that led me to every other success I have had.” Peace in Cambodia derailed Sambath’s plan to become a doctor. In January 1989, Vietnamese forces withdrew from Cambodia. Two years later, Cambodia signed the Paris Peace Accords, which ended the fighting between Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge, and other forces. Under the Paris Accords, refugees were to be repatriated, and Sambath returned to his native province of Battambang, ending his work in health care. The Khmer Rouge no longer ruled Sambath’s life, but when he arrived back in Battambang to live with his uncle he found he could not escape his past. His grandfather told him that the Khmer Rouge cadre who had married his mother in 1975—­his stepfather—­wanted to see him. Sambath refused. “He is the man who killed my mother and my whole family got separated later because we had no mother,” he said. “He is the man who destroyed my family and made me an orphan.” With his new language skills, Sambath found a job teaching English, but another opportunity soon presented itself. In March 1992, the UN Transitional

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Authority in Cambodia arrived, and Sambath found a job as an interpreter for the UN civilian police unit. With the help of the United Nations, Cambodia held its first free elections in decades. After UNTAC left the following year, Sambath moved to Phnom Penh to work at various international organizations. Still, he felt restless. Sambath married and had a son. But he never discussed his past with his wife, and the deaths of his father, mother, and brother were never mentioned among the siblings. Despite the silence, Sambath still questioned his past and was at a loss to explain the Khmer Rouge period. In 1995, while reading the English-­language Cambodia Today, he saw an ad seeking a reporter with English skills. Sambath told a friend, who applied. Sambath took him to the newspaper office, but when they arrived his friend said he wouldn’t take the test unless Sambath did as well. Sambath took the test but explained to the newspaper staff he was only there for his friend. Sambath passed the exam, while his friend did not. An editor told Sambath he would receive a monthly salary of $90 plus fuel costs. He asked for one day to decide. At home he discussed the offer with his wife and wondered how he could feed his family on $90 a month when he was currently making $300. But the newspaper job would improve his English skills. He took the job. To supplement his income, he spent almost his entire savings from his time working at the United Nations and other international organizations. Sambath could speak English, but he knew nothing of journalism. He rarely read local newspapers or paid attention to the news. But he had seen Western journalists during his time at the refugee camp and he admired their bravery and hard work. On his first day, he attended the opening of a pagoda at which Prime Minister Hun Sen spoke. When he returned to the office and sat down to write a story, he didn’t know where to begin. He had never been taught how to put together a news article. He simply translated everything that was said during the ceremony and passed it on to another reporter, who laughed at him. The reporter didn’t tell him how to fix the story. When Sambath returned home, he told his wife he was going to quit his new job. His wife told him he should stay. For a year, Sambath struggled to learn what it meant to be a journalist and how to write a proper newspaper article. With no one to teach him, Sambath often told his wife he planned to quit. His wife always told him to persevere. Although the work was difficult, he was still fascinated by it. He grew up in a small farming town, lost his parents during the Khmer Rouge regime, and learned English at a refugee camp.

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He never thought he would have the opportunity to regularly see leaders of his country and see his name in print on top of stories he had written. Progress came slowly. After a year, a fellow reporter and Sambath attended a ceremony hosted by Hun Sen and Prince Norodom Ranariddh. When the event was over, they returned to the office and his friend wrote three stories from the day, while Sambath struggled to write one. When he asked his friend how he got three stories from one event, his friend explained how to recognize different angles for separate stories. The secrets of writing a newspaper story began to come clear to Sambath. He developed sources and wrote stories about the military and politics. “My friends like to remind me and mock me now about how I started off as a reporter,” he says. “It’s very funny and sad to think of that past. But we were working for democracy, freedom of the press and gathering news so people can learn about what was going on in our country.” He had found his voice and a way to answer his questions about his country. He worked for Cambodia Today for two years until the paper went into bankruptcy and shut down. He worked for other newspapers, as a researcher for Japanese NHK television in 1998, and as an assistant for BBC radio. In 2000, Sambath joined the Cambodia Daily Although he tried to forget the past, Sambath constantly wondered what had happened during the Khmer Rouge regime, why his fellow Cambodians killed so many of his own people, including his parents and brother. The lingering and most pressing enigma, the reason for the Killing Fields, remained unanswered. Sambath knew that only the top surviving leaders held the key. In media reports, the rare instances when surviving Khmer Rouge leaders gave interviews, they always denied knowing about the killings and deflected responsibility. But his work as a journalist would eventually lead him to the resolution he had so long sought. After several visits to the former Khmer Rouge stronghold area of Pailin to work on other stories, Sambath met two of Nuon Chea’s longtime aides who promised to arrange a meeting with Brother Number Two. That day came in June 2001. Sambath was ecstatic, believing light would finally be shed on that dark period of his life and Cambodia’s history. The first time Sambath met Nuon Chea, the former Khmer Rouge leader asked him the one question Sambath was dreading to answer. “What happened to your family during those years?” Nuon Chea asked, referring to the time the Khmer Rouge were in power. “How were you treated at that time?” “I was too young to remember that time,” Sambath said diplomatically.

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He also lied and told Nuon Chea his parents had died in the 1980s, after the Khmer Rouge rule, from illnesses. Nuon Chea never asked Sambath again about his personal experiences during the years the Khmer Rouge were in power. And for several years Sambath never mentioned his family. He would wait until the time was right, when he and Nuon Chea were close as any siblings could be.

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11. The Homecoming I do not seek revenge against you. We are all old now. Please do good things in the future. —­Nuon Chea’s aunt Deng Chhoeng to Nuon Chea

A convoy of vehicles carrying dozens of government bodyguards snaked through Wat Koh village and parked in front of a modest-­looking home in early 1999. Residents of the farming community, always open to distractions from manual labor, came to see what the commotion was about. Some wondered why a high-­ranking government official would visit their small town. Others thought it must be a general. A guard opened a car door and the guest of honor stepped out. Attendants rushed to steady him. Some of the guest’s relatives gasped when they saw how frail and weak he had become. Leaning on a cane, he walked slowly toward the crowd. As he recognized some of the faces before him, tears welled in his eyes. His first visit in decades, Nuon Chea had come home. The Khmer Rouge were no more, and the people Nuon Chea most wanted to see in his first days out of isolation were his family, still living in his hometown in Battambang province. He did not tell his relatives the exact day he would arrive, but they made preparations anyway, scurrying to cook enough food for the odd family reunion. From the airport in Battambang town, government security forces escorted him to the home of his handicapped sister, Lao Reuth, who had lived in their childhood home since she was born. When villagers realized it was Nuon Chea, word raced through the village. Many crowded into Lao Reuth’s home to hear what Brother Number Two had to say for himself after all these years. Nuon Chea has long had a ghostly presence in his family, but this was especially true after the Khmer Rouge were ousted by the Vietnamese in 1979. Most relatives treated him as the skeleton in their closet, not to be spoken of to outsiders or even among themselves. “It’s the one subject we did not talk about,” said Nuon Chea’s cousin Hout Panha, whose father, brother, and

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sister died during the Khmer Rouge years. The specter of what he had done was always there, represented by absent family members and heartwrenching memories. Nuon Chea’s mother, Deng Peanh, rarely mentioned his name after the fall of Democratic Kampuchea. One of the few times came when Nuon Chea’s sister Lao Poun broke down crying and crawled to her mother’s feet, cursing her brother. “My husband and children were killed because of him,” she said. Deng Peanh stopped her, saying, “If you want revenge against him, and are angry at him, then you are cursing his mother.” Nuon Chea, who was later told about the exchange, said he understood that his mother reacted that way because she didn’t know what to do, divided between her daughter and son. When his mother died in 1981, her thoughts about her once cherished eldest son died with her. Nuon Chea’s younger brother, Lao Bun Long, a customs official who died in 1998, also never spoke of Brother Number Two. It was as if Nuon Chea never existed. “My mother never said anything about Nuon Chea,”Lao Poun said. “She kept her feelings in her heart. I think only the old people in our family talked about him in secret.” But Poun was not content to keep quiet. She often told relatives that she would stab Nuon Chea the next time she saw him. Her husband, a government soldier, was killed by the Khmer Rouge when the communist forces took over Phnom Penh. Three sons died later of illnesses and lack of medicine. “Living was very bad during the Khmer Rouge years and we never had enough food,” Lao Poun said. “I knew many people who were killed. One of my sons was arrested but he was later released. I was very happy when the Vietnamese came.” Nuon Chea’s aunt and Hout Panha’s mother, Deng Chhoeng, often talked about getting revenge against Nuon Chea. Her husband, Sieu Heng, and son were among the first to be killed in Wat Koh after the Khmer Rouge took power. Sieu Heng was one of the early leaders of the communist movement, and he and Nuon Chea worked together in the waning days of the French colonial era and the early days of Cambodia’s independence. At the request of his wife, Sieu Heng defected to the government in the mid-­1950s, becoming a major in the Cambodian army. When the Khmer Rouge began to take over portions of Cambodia in the early 1970s, Sieu Heng told her to leave him and take the children to Thailand. But she didn’t go because she didn’t want to leave her husband. She thought the Khmer Rouge had forgiven him for his defection. But for his betrayal the punishment was swift and final. Sieu Heng was

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sleeping in a hammock on the morning the Khmer Rouge came for him. A car arrived in front of his home and a man the family knew as Mr. Peang, who lived down the street, and a few Khmer Rouge soldiers got out of the vehicle. Mr. Peang woke Sieu Heng and told him the Khmer Rouge were taking him to get medical treatment for health problems he had since a stroke in the 1960s. When Sieu Heng’s youngest daughter, Hout Panha, saw the Khmer Rouge soldiers, she ran to the back of her home to get her mother. Deng Chhoeng arrived in time to see her husband and one of her sons about to get into the vehicle. “Where are you going?” Deng Chhoeng asked her husband. “The Khmer Rouge are taking me to get cured,” he said. The Khmer Rouge soldiers told her not to worry about him. “Why are they taking our son?” she asked. “He’ll take care of me,” Sieu Heng said. The two climbed into the car. She knew she would never see them again. A neighbor later told her she had been lucky: the Khmer Rouge Northwest zone leader, Rhos Nhim, who had also worked with Sieu Heng when he was a communist, usually killed the whole family. Soon after the Khmer Rouge took away Sieu Heng and his son, one of Deng Chhoeng’s daughters died of an illness when the Khmer Rouge forced her to leave Phnom Penh and walk to Battambang, more than 100 miles away. Deng Chhoeng’s hatred of Nuon Chea festered for years. “I blamed Nuon Chea for what had happened and I was very angry at him,” she said. When Nuon Chea came to Wat Koh after his defection, all the family members agreed to meet him except for Deng Chhoeng, one of the oldest surviving members of the family. Her fury still fresh, she stayed in her own home, next door to Nuon Chea’s sister’s. But Nuon Chea was insistent on seeing her, and sent one of his nephews to bring her over. She decided it was time to face her nephew. More than 40 relatives of Nuon Chea died during the Khmer Rouge rule from illness, starvation, or execution. His hometown also suffered devastating losses. Many pilots serving in the government Air Force lived in Wat Koh, and most of them were killed during the Khmer Rouge years. Although the villagers knew Deng Chhoeng and her family were relatives of Nuon Chea, nobody sought revenge against them. After the Khmer Rouge were ousted, the villagers remained friendly with Nuon Chea’s family because his mother always helped her neighbors and gave them rice. And when Nuon Chea’s mother died, most villagers went to her funeral. “All the people knew she

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was Nuon Chea’s mother, but most people were not angry at her because they knew it was not her fault,” said neighbor Sok Yun, who has lived all her life across the street from Nuon Chea’s family’s home. But all Nuon Chea’s relatives blamed him for what had happened and cursed his name. The surviving members of the family—­sisters, cousins, nieces, and nephews—­had waited years for this moment, to confront the man who shared their blood, their history, their heritage. Relatives living in the United States and elsewhere outside Cambodia flew in for the meeting. And now the moment of truth had come. The dozens of relatives and villagers sat in a circle, facing the frail grandfather who was responsible for so much death, for so much heartache in their family and the families of millions of other Cambodians. They looked at him with desperate anticipation, waiting for him to tell them something that would explain the unexplainable. Their heads were swimming with questions, but no one knew where to begin. It was awkward for them, welcoming a man accused of genocide, accused of killing their husbands and sons. Still, he was part of the family. They started with polite pleasantries, asking about his health. Nuon Chea asked how everybody was doing. He told Hout Panha she looked like her father. They caught up on the family news he had missed, children who had been born, relatives who moved overseas. After a brief, tense silence, the questions began. “Why?” they asked, “Why were the Khmer Rouge so cruel and why did they kill people?” “I didn’t know about the killings and I did not order them,” he told them. “I know there were many killings. But it was not only I who was leading the country. There were many leaders. I just got reports about good things. The other leaders did not report about the killings.” “Look at the skulls at the Killing Fields,” Hout Panha said, referring to the display at Choeung Ek. “Many were killed.” Nuon Chea nodded. As the exchange went on, Deng Chhoeng watched her nephew and thought how strange it was to think of him as old. She recalled the last time she had talked to him when he was a young man just starting out in the communist movement. He had been the pride and joy of her older sister. His involvement in leftist activities had been a constant source of heartache and regret, and his mother could never reconcile the man he became with the quiet, earnest, dutiful boy he had been. Hanging on Nuon Chea’s bedroom wall is a slightly blurred photo, the only surviving picture of him as a young boy. The toddler in the front right corner of the black and white photograph

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sits on a tricycle. The focal point of the picture is the man in the black suit in the center, the local teacher surrounded by the village children. But eyes are drawn to the boy, the only child in the group who seems oblivious to the occasion. The others pose with solemn, grave faces. But the boy on the tricycle looks as if he is about to ride away. His hair is neatly combed and his suspenders give him the appearance of a little man. He has the look of a pampered child, which he was. Whenever Nuon Chea shows the picture to a guest, he laughs fondly. Memories of his childhood with his family are the only recollections that do not bring pain or stress. The same was true for his mother, Deng Chhoeng, and other relatives. Nuon Chea’s relationship with his mother was the only family tie he tried to maintain as a Khmer Rouge leader. He visited her twice during his years in power. Deng Peanh lived with her paralyzed daughter Lao Reuth, her son Lao Bun Long, and two nephews. During one of the visits, his mother cried and asked him to find his younger sister, Lao Poun. “I told my mother, ‘How can I find her?’” Nuon Chea said. “Let her live like other people because that is the political principle. I told her that if we just think about our relatives, then what about the other people? So everybody should be equal.” Unbeknownst to Nuon Chea, his sister Poun was sent to Kandal province after the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh, and then moved to Kompong Chhnang province and Pursat. Like other Cambodians, she was forced to do hard manual labor. His mother also asked Nuon Chea’s wife to take one of the nephews to live with them in Phnom Penh, but Nuon Chea’s wife declined. Nuon Chea’s family members were forced to work long hours during the Khmer Rouge years, like everyone else. His brother Lao Bun Long, who died in 1998, transported and foraged for vegetables during the Khmer Rouge rule. “I thought about my family during the Khmer Rouge years and I was worried about my sister,” Nuon Chea said. “But I thought every place had rice to eat, so if she was good, she would have enough to eat. But I suspected her husband died because he was a government soldier.” His mother was treated better than other villagers, as the local leaders knew she was Nuon Chea’s mother. She received dry fish and extra rice rations. Hun Chhun Ly, who was once the family doctor and lived near Wat Koh during the Khmer Rouge rule, said Nuon Chea’s mother gave people the extra rice she received from the local cadre. The people in Wat Koh often had enough rice to eat and received one and a half cans of milk a day. Still, they were vulnerable to the punishment that could befall those accused of making a mistake, and their connection to Nuon Chea was of no help in

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those moments. Long Moeng, Nuon Chea’s cousin who also lived in Wat Koh during the Khmer Rouge years, hid her connection to Brother Number Two. “Some people asked me if I was Nuon Chea’s relative and I said no because I was worried something would happen to me,” she said. “People forced me to feed hens and told me I had to make them produce two eggs a day. But that was very crazy because a hen can just produce one egg a day. I told them I could not do it and then they threatened me. I was always worried I would be arrested or killed.” The spectacle of vehicles and bodyguards that came with Nuon Chea’s two visits to his mother during the Khmer Rouge years mirrored the scene in his hometown after his defection. Nuon Chea was surprised to see how much had changed since his last visit, more than two decades earlier. Pastoral stretches of grass and fields and been replaced with new homes and more people. The modernization of his hometown disappointed him. He thought back to the serenity and lush landscape of the past. “It was quiet then but the village looked beautiful because it was not dusty and there were no cars and motorbikes,” he said. “Everything in the past reflected Cambodian tradition. I really loved it. But now it has disappeared and it’s too crowded and dusty. The new generation likes this but I don’t like it.” As Nuon Chea sat in his sister’s home, in this town he no longer recognized, surrounded by family and former neighbors, he started asking his own questions. He wanted to know which relatives had been killed or died, and which were still alive. The relatives assembled around him gave him the grim tally. Some of the villagers, unable to hold in their loss, also told Nuon Chea about their relatives who had died. Questions about the murders, the hunger and the overwork, poured forth. “Where were you sent after the Khmer Rouge victory?” Nuon Chea asked his sister Lao Poun. “I was forced to leave Phnom Penh. All the men had to stay while the women were evacuated,” she said. Lao Poun told him how far she walked when she was evacuated from the capital. She told him about the death of her husband and children and about her backbreaking work planting rice without getting enough rest. She sobbed as she told him about her eldest son, who had stolen rice from the fields. Khmer Rouge cadre poured gasoline on him and burned him alive. “Why did some people have enough food and rice and other places had no rice and they only ate porridge?” Poun asked when she regained her composure.

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“That was not Angka that did that,” Nuon Chea told her. “Angka wanted all the people to have enough food. And we just got reports that people had enough rice. But some cadre betrayed Angka.” Nuon Chea did not elaborate. Throughout the meeting, Nuon Chea repeated his claims that he did not know about the killings and declined to give further details. It was infuriating to his relatives, but they did not press him for more information. They knew they would probably never hear the full explanation. His relatives realized then that with all the lost years between them, they no longer knew the man before them. When he joined the independence movement he disappeared from their lives. He changed names many times and hid from them. Even his mother was kept at a distance. Lao Poun did not know her older brother was a Khmer Rouge leader until after the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia. He had become a stranger to them years before he became Brother Number Two. Finally, Nuon Chea’s aunt, Deng Chhoeng, decided to speak. “Did you know about Sieu Heng’s arrest?” Deng Chhoeng asked. She had been yearning to ask this question for decades and thought she would never hear the answer. “I didn’t know about it until after it happened,” Nuon Chea said. “I did not order the killing.” “If they only killed my husband, that would have been acceptable because he was accused of betrayal,” Deng Chhoeng said. “But the Khmer Rouge should not have killed my son. He knew nothing and I loved him.” Nuon Chea put his hands together in a prayer position and moved his hands up and down, extending from his chest, the traditional Cambodian way of apologizing for a grave wrong. Tears trickled down his face. “I would like to apologize to you about his death,” he told his aunt. Deng Chhoeng began crying as well, and she accepted his apology. She did not believe Nuon Chea’s claims that he knew nothing about the order to execute her husband, but arguing with her nephew would not bring back her husband or her children. The moment represented closure for her. “I do not seek revenge against you,” she said. “We are all old now. Please do good things in the future.” Deng Chhoeng’s response set the example for his relatives and they reacted in the same way. They would not seek revenge. Still, Nuon Chea did not ask for forgiveness from Poun or any other family members, and they did not expect him to. “Before Nuon Chea came, everybody was angry at him and they were going to blame him for everything that happened,” his cousin Hout Panha said. “But when he came, we pitied him because he was old.”

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For the rest of the three-­day visit, nobody referred to the years Nuon Chea was in power. Everyone was acutely aware of what wasn’t explained, what wasn’t answered. But it was now a closed subject. “If we talked more and more about it, we would be angry at him again so it was better to talk about other things,” Poun said. Instead, they caught up on more news of relatives. Nuon Chea also visited Lao Bun Long’s grave in the backyard. His brother had become Christian, so he was buried instead of cremated in the Buddhist tradition. Nuon Chea then lit incense to pay respect to his parents. It may seem impossible that they forgave Nuon Chea so easily for all the sorrow he had brought to their lives and their country. But they were tired, exhausted from feelings of revenge and hatred. And when they saw him as the weak old man before them, it seemed right to let it all go. Nothing could bring back the scores of loved ones lost. Still, the relatives wanted answers and hoped to get them from another source, a trial. “Now he’s old, so let him survive, but I want him to say in court what happened,” Hout Panha said. Lao Poun said that now that she has gotten to know Nuon Chea again, she believes he is a gentle person. But she admits that she doesn’t know what kind of person he was in the past. “He is my brother and my blood,” she said. “But I don’t know if he’s guilty.” Soy Sovann, a longtime neighbor of Nuon Chea’s family, also hopes to hear some answers before Nuon Chea dies. He remembered thinking Nuon Chea would turn out to be one of the locals who was going to find success in the big city and make his village proud. “He was a top leader,” Soy Sovann said. “So why did he let the killing happen? He got a higher education, so he should have known more, known better than other people. He should have protected the people.”

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12. The Understanding Sambath couldn’t focus. His mind wandered. He couldn’t shake the feeling of melancholy. He kept thinking about him, how he was doing, if he was taking his medicine, whether he was getting enough to eat. Three months had passed since Nuon Chea’s arrest and imprisonment to await trial for crimes against humanity. Sambath held Brother Number Two responsible for what had happened during the Khmer Rouge regime, which killed his father and brother and caused his mother’s death. But he had spent countless hours with Nuon Chea, and they knew each other better than they knew their family members. “It is the first time in my life I have felt this kind of sadness,” Sambath said. “I have talked to him more than I talked to my brothers or sisters. We are very close to each other. Nuon Chea respects me very much because he sees I am neutral and unbiased. I only care about learning the truth. When he went to prison, I felt sad for months and could not work well during this time.” Sambath knew his colleagues would be shocked to learn his sentiments toward the top surviving Khmer Rouge leader. Other Cambodian journalists had told Sambath that if they had the chance to interview Nuon Chea, they would take that opportunity to stab him. The ones who said they would not physically harm him said they at least hoped Nuon Chea would die soon. But Sambath wanted only to know what happened during the Khmer Rouge regime. Why had so many of his fellow Cambodians died? Why had his family been ruined? The questions had haunted him for decades, and Nuon Chea was the only one who had all the answers. It took time for Nuon Chea to trust Sambath enough to give him the answers he sought. In the first year of interviews, Nuon Chea gave predictable responses. He said he did not know anything, that everything was up to Pol Pot, a response offered by other Khmer Rouge leaders. But Nuon Chea began to see that Sambath was being true to his word. The visits were kept secret and nothing was published because Nuon Chea wanted it saved for the book. Sambath napped in Nuon Chea’s home, they ate meals together, and he sometimes stayed overnight as a guest. As they became friends, Nuon Chea began asking Sambath about his thoughts on a Khmer Rouge tribunal.

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“Should I go to the court for the trial?” Nuon Chea asked him. “Yes, you should go because many Cambodians were killed and died during that time,” Sambath replied. “You have to go say everything and tell the truth so people can learn from it.” Nuon Chea was reluctant initially to go to court, convinced he would not get a fair hearing. But Sambath told him several times that people wanted to hear from him what really happened. Finally Nuon Chea agreed, even if it meant facing prison, though he did have other options. Periodically, military officers in other foreign countries, which Nuon Chea would not name, offered him refuge so he could avoid being taken into custody, as Duch and Ta Mok had been. But Nuon Chea always declined. Sambath told him to stay in Cambodia and continue his struggle in court. “If you leave the country and live in hiding, it is bad for you and the Democratic Kampuchea regime,” Sambath told him. “You would be blamed by the people. Whether people see it as bad or good when you talk about the truth, it is better than saying nothing.” Nuon Chea agreed. “I would rather stay in prison than be in hiding,” he told Sambath. “I would not leave my country and escape to somewhere else. This is a battle between me and the court. It is cowardly to stay in hiding. I have to stand up.” In addition to gaining insight into what had happened to his country under the Khmer Rouge regime, Sambath increasingly came to respect Nuon Chea. He admired Brother Number Two for not blaming Pol Pot as the others did. He took responsibility for the mistakes made during his time as a leader. Sambath also saw Nuon Chea as brave enough to talk about the killings, including the purges he had deemed necessary, while others pleaded ignorance or said the past should be left in the past. “He dared to say everything,” Sambath said. “His stance is clear and he did not try to hide himself to avoid prosecution.” In 2006, Sambath brought a close friend’s mother to see Nuon Chea so Brother Number Two could hear from one of the Khmer Rouge’s victims. He had heard about his relative’s hardships, but those were just one village’s stories. The elderly woman told Nuon Chea about her backbreaking labor and the relatives who had been killed, including some of her children. Nuon Chea cried. “I can’t believe it, that the situation was so bad,” he said. Over the years, Nuon Chea and Sambath often took breaks from documenting the Khmer Rouge to talk about their daily lives. When Sambath was dealing with dishonest workers and property owners for his farmland in

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Battambang, he discussed the problem with Nuon Chea and asked for his advice. Brother Number Two, speaking from experience, told him to beware of whom he trusted and whose words he chose to believe. Nuon Chea also talked about his ailments, his thoughts on world politics, and cadre who still came to see him to ask for money or other handouts. Sambath introduced him to the modern world, teaching him how to use a cell phone and a tape player. Sometimes Nuon Chea reminisced about the past and told Sambath he felt sad. “Even now that I’m old, I still miss what happened in the past and what I was doing in the movement. I miss the people who were killed and how we used to work together before the liberation. We worked together for many years and we were close.” Other times, he talked as if he were still living in the past, speaking of traitors and enemies. “Even though I am sorry about what happened to my relatives and other Cambodians, I know the reasons clearly and I have a stance on who is Cambodia’s enemy,” he said. “The point I want to make is we need to figure out clearly who is the enemy. This is a big problem and could be bigger in the future and dangerous to our future. Unless we see the whole line and not just one time period, we can’t make a good conclusion.” Nuon Chea also talked about his poor living conditions, and how other Khmer Rouge leaders, like Ieng Sary, lived like kings while he scraped by. “In the 1990s, I was given five million baht a week from gem stone sales. Sometimes I think I was stupid for not keeping it,” he said. “But I did what was right and now my children blame me and ask ‘Why didn’t I keep some of it?’ My son blames me and said he has nothing now. In my remaining life, I have tried to do good and not allow bad thoughts to get in.” Throughout these exchanges, however, Sambath never talked about his most personal topic: his family. Finally in 2007, Sambath decided it was the right time to tell Nuon Chea the truth. Sambath told Nuon Chea how his father had been beaten and killed and how his mother had been forced to marry a Khmer Rouge cadre. He talked about how his mother later died, and how his brother was killed in the purges in Battambang. He also talked about his life during Nuon Chea’s rule, when he cooked bugs for nourishment and had constant hunger pangs. As Nuon Chea listened to Sambath’s tale, which mirrored the stories of countless other Cambodians, tears welled in his eyes. “I’m very sorry to hear about this,” Nuon Chea said. “I’m very surprised. I thought your family had no problems during the Democratic Kampuchea regime because you and I have always been friendly and our work has gone smoothly. You never showed anger toward me.”

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Sambath apologized for lying about his family’s past and not telling Nuon Chea the truth earlier. “I should have told you when we first started interviewing you, but I was afraid you would suspect me of wanting revenge,” he said. “I had to keep it secret because our work to find out the truth was more important. I made a commitment that I would not allow my memories of my family to interfere with my work.” The friendship as they knew it ended in the fall of 2007. A few days before Nuon Chea was taken into custody on September 19, rumors started that the Khmer Rouge tribunal would summon Brother Number Two to Phnom Penh. Demining personnel had cleared an area around a casino near Nuon Chea’s home to provide a landing area for a helicopter that would transport him to the capital. When Sambath heard the news of the impending arrest, he immediately called Nuon Chea. “Please, don’t worry,” Nuon Chea said. “I have been ready to go to prison for many years now.” “I have to see you today because I feel like something is really going to happen,” Sambath said. “Please come,” Nuon Chea said. ”We can say this will be the last chat between you and me.” “Did you prepare your medicine and clothes in case you are brought to Phnom Penh?” Sambath asked. “Yes, I packed my medicine and clothes,” he said. “I had my clothes ironed so I will look presentable when I am in Phnom Penh.” Sambath told Nuon Chea he would see him soon, and got into a taxi for the long drive to Nuon Chea’s home. On the way, he thought about the more than 1,000 hours he had spent interviewing Nuon Chea over six years. He tried not to think about how their time together would be coming to an end. Nuon Chea and his wife greeted Sambath warmly when he arrived and Sambath asked again about Nuon Chea’s medicine. Brother Number Two said he had already packed his medicine and clothes. When Sambath saw the bags, he felt his heart drop, but he tried not to show it. He wanted Nuon Chea to be strong and have a high spirit. Nuon Chea told Sambath he had written a letter that said he had given permission to Sambath to publish information about his life. Sambath asked him for the letter before the authorities came for fear they might confiscate it. One of Nuon Chea’s longtime assistants told Nuon Chea he should flee to Malaysia or China to escape arrest. But Nuon Chea replied, “I won’t play this game.”

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Sambath saw five ironed shirts laid out, another sign of imminent departure. “Have you ever had them ironed before?” he asked “No, never,” Nuon Chea said. “Now I make myself look elegant so that I would not be looked down on. I asked my wife to have them ironed. What a life.” Sambath asked if many journalists had contacted him to ask about the rumor of his imminent arrest. Nuon Chea said only one reporter had called him. Everyone was unsure of when the arrest would take place. “But it is sure that they will come. We must dare to accept the truth,” Nuon Chea said. “We cannot avoid the fact. So what I should do is think about how to take advantage of the truth for the nation. This feeling calms me down. I prepared my self with medicine, clothes, a small amount of money and my spirit.” Sambath asked if he had any last words about his arrest. “What do you want to tell the people about it?” he asked. “I, for sure, will be called to trial. But I believe in the people, the spirit of nationalism,” Nuon Chea replied. “Though I will be convicted, the trial will not override the ideals of the people. What I wish to say to them is that they should unite to develop the nation.” They talked until 10 p.m. Nuon Chea asked Sambath to stay at his home. Sambath declined, and stayed in a hotel instead, but he called Nuon Chea early the next day, around 6:30 a.m. Nuon Chea told him there were already dozens of police and military police officers surrounding his home. He said he was fine. He had been up and waiting when they arrived at 6 a.m. Sambath tried to reach Nuon Chea’s home, but the authorities surrounding it stopped him. Sambath returned to his hotel and eventually made his way to the landing area for the helicopter. At Nuon Chea’s home, dozens of police and military officers descended on the area as neighbors crowded outside. “We came here to invite uncle to go with us,” one of the officers said. They did not mention the word “arrest” but later read the warrant against Nuon Chea. Authorities also searched his home, taking papers, pictures, and other items. Officers held Nuon Chea’s hand and led him to the vehicles waiting outside to take him to the helicopter landing area. Once inside the vehicle, Nuon Chea rolled down the window and yelled out, “Where is Lina? Come in the car.” Lina, one of his long-­time assistants, rushed to the car and climbed in the back seat. One officer called out to Nuon Chea’s wife, “Auntie, you can go tomorrow. You can go after you have prepared your belongings.” Nuon Chea’s

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wife didn’t respond and got ready to go to the landing area to say goodbye to her husband. Hundreds of people had gathered at the landing area to say goodbye to Nuon Chea and watch the spectacle. Sambath was in the crowd. He saw a few women crying. “Please grandpa, go to Phnom Penh safely and have a long life. I pity you because you lived here for a long time and never created any problem for us,” one woman said aloud. Sambath felt heartbroken when he heard this, realizing he and Nuon Chea would now have a wall between them. The days of visiting his old friend whenever he wanted were gone. “We wouldn’t have days and hours to talk to each other from that day forward,” Sambath said. A strong wind from the whirring helicopter rotors buffeted Nuon Chea as he walked across the landing area. Military police officers held his arms and lifted him into the helicopter. Nuon Chea’s wife had been holding back her tears but when her sister embraced her at the landing area, she began to sob and pray. “I prayed for him to have good strong health,” she said. “I prayed for Buddha, Buddhism, and Dharma to help him.” The helicopter climbed into the sky. Sambath went to Nuon Chea’s home and talked to his wife. “I feel as if I’m in the air,” she replied. “When he was here, I felt rather stable and this house felt warm.” Sambath felt the same way. He had known the arrest was imminent. Nuon Chea had prepared for it for years. Still, when the moment came, Sambath felt shocked and strangely empty to see his friend gone. After years of negotiations, setbacks, and delays, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed during the Period of Democratic Kampuchea was formally established in early 2006. In February 2009, the first trial to prosecute senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge began with the case of Duch, the former S-­21 prison chief. It marked the culmination of an effort that began in 1997, when the Cambodian government formally requested United Nations assistance in establishing a Khmer Rouge trial process. Nuon Chea’s trial is scheduled to begin in early 2010 as the second case considered by the court. According to the case information sheet on Nuon Chea, Brother Number Two “is alleged to have planned, instigated, ordered, directed, or otherwise aided and abetted in the commission of crimes against humanity (murder, torture, imprisonment, persecution, extermination,

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deportation, forcible transfer, enslavement and other inhumane acts) and grave breeches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.” Sambath saw Nuon Chea a few times while he was in prison because he was listed as his nephew on the prison visitor’s list. But soon the court authorities found out who Sambath really was and struck his name from the list of permitted visitors. Nuon Chea still managed to pass messages to Sambath through Ly Kimseang, Nuon Chea’s wife, saying he missed Sambath and worried about him. He also sent letters. Now the two wait to see each other again at his trial. When Sambath feels sad about Nuon Chea’s fate, he recalls the end of their last conversation in Brother Number Two’s home. “If we have a chance, we should work together in the future,” Nuon Chea said before he went to bed on his last night of freedom. “I wish it could happen,” Sambath said, smiling. “I thank you very much for the many years you worked with us and told us everything about the Democratic Kampuchea regime.” “I do not know if I will still be alive to see you again in the future because I am very old and sick,” Nuon Chea said. “I could be imprisoned for the rest of my life and die there.” “I will try to visit you in prison,” Sambath said. “If it is possible after the trial, I will talk to you in prison and I promise I will visit you frequently.” “My decision to tell you about Democratic Kampuchea is the right one,” Nuon Chea said. “You are not biased and you do not show favoritism toward anyone. You are not selfish and you always think about other people’s living conditions and difficulties. I chose the right person.”

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13. The Killing Fields When I die, I don’t want my name to be seen in a bad way. When I die, the worms will eat my meat so I don’t need the body but my reputation is very important. Some people say I am good and some people say I am a killer. I want people to know the truth. You must find the truth inside the truth. —­Nuon Chea

Through an airplane window, much of Cambodia seems deserted. For vast stretches there is little evidence that humans inhabit this place. It is a place still ruled by nature. Bright green rice paddies stretch to the horizon, with scattered pockets of banana, coconut, and mango trees breaking up the flat expanses. Grasslands give way to the thick carpets of jungle that cover the plains and mountainsides. The only lapses in the lush foliage are the rust-­colored dirt roads and milk-­and-­coffee rivers that slither through the countryside. But the serene landscape belies what is underneath, in the reddish brown earth, where worms and insects live. There lie millions of skulls, bones, and tattered clothes of the prematurely dead, buried in a time when the land took in more than a society’s usual offering, overly straining the rhythm of life. These are the makeshift burial grounds for the victims of the Khmer Rouge. In a country that is slightly smaller than Oklahoma, more than 20,000 mass graves containing the remains of more than a million victims have been discovered so far, according to research conducted by the Documentation Center of Cambodia. Preliminary evidence shows that many of those buried in the mass graves were killed; they did not die of natural causes. Some were considered to be enemies of the state. Others were murdered in revenge killings. And some were killed because they said the wrong thing, or looked the wrong way, or had the wrong job, or were related to the wrong person. Many of them died in agony. They received machete blows to the head or kicks in the ribs. Some were stabbed or shot. Others starved to death, their bodies dumped in dirt pits.

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Some of the women were raped before they were killed. When the remains were uncovered, some of the skulls still had blindfolds wrapped around their eye sockets or ropes binding their ankle or wrist bones. There are trees surrounding the mass graves that still bear dark burgundy stains where the heads of babies and small children were smashed while they were being swung upside down by their killers. Cambodia is a land of ghosts, where the souls of those killed remain with the living. Sometimes during heavy rains, human bones are unearthed in the dirt. There are plenty of skulls on display in Cambodia. At the Tuol Sleng museum, a gruesome map of the country made of human skulls and bones hung on a wall for many years. The rivers and lakes were painted blood red. Of the 14,000 people who entered Tuol Sleng when it was known as the S-­21 prison; only a handful survived. At the Choeung Ek Killing Fields just outside of Phnom Penh, a 35-­foot glass stupa holds more than 8,000 skulls collected from the surrounding mass graves. The skulls came from the bodies exhumed in 1980 from 86 pits. Another 43 graves in the area have not been disturbed. Surrounding the stupa are several pits that have been left uncovered. Partially hidden in the dirt are bone fragments and pieces of dirty, ragged clothing. A sign at the entrance of the Killing Fields provides a description of the Khmer Rouge. “They were trying hard to get rid of Khmer character and transform the soil and waters of Kampuchea into a sea of blood and tears . . . ​(Cambodia) became a desert of great destruction that overturned Kampuchean society and drove it back on the stone age.” Nuon Chea did not kill any of these people who died under his watch. He has never struck a man down with a fist, an ax, or a gun. He did not oversee the countless interrogations, and the inevitable torture that accompanied them. But as Brother Number Two he provided the intellectual reasoning, the political education that gave the Khmer Rouge its rationale for violence. From the beginning, it was always he and Pol Pot, deciding on the political principles of the party, reminiscing about their childhoods, discussing the executions of party leadership in secret. And even more than Pol Pot, the extremist policies of the Khmer Rouge, like eliminating money and banning markets, bear the fingerprints of Nuon Chea. “Our regime may have been destroyed because we walked too fast and the Great Leap Forward was very fast,” he told us. “We probably walked faster than the people wanted. They wanted to eat with their families, not in the cooperatives. We made mistakes, but what we had done is for the nation. I still love my nation.”

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As he spoke, sitting at a small table in his wooden house, a land mine exploded in the near distance. Land mines are still abundant in Cambodia, with thunderous booms brought on by demining activities or an unlucky farmer collecting wood in the forest. Remnants of the past are easy to find here. In a traffic circle on the way to Nuon Chea’s home, there is a colorfully painted communist statue of soldiers and proletariats standing together in solidarity. In a village near his home, tanks destroyed by the Khmer Rouge in the 1990s have become tourist attractions. And near the gate to his house, the twin barrels of a broken down anti-­aircraft gun lie half buried in the ground. In some ways Nuon Chea lived in a time warp. A modern world he was never a part of had long passed him by. He has never used a computer and doesn’t understand the Internet. Before he was arrested, he had been given a cell phone, the only phone he has ever owned, and he expressed shock at how useful it was. During his years with the Khmer Rouge, he used letters, messengers, and two-­way radios to communicate with other cadre. He still didn’t understand how to work his tape player. When he wanted to turn the music off, he unplugged it. As he sat at a wooden table, always with a centerpiece of a bowl of bananas or oranges to snack on, he searched his memory for revealing events to explain the madness of the past, reasons that would make outsiders understand his point of view. Sometimes he wore sunglasses, which looked bizarre on him given his grandfatherly bearing, because the bright light of the Cambodian sun hurts his eyes. He periodically massaged his arms and complained about the cold. Despite his physical ailments, his voice was still strong and never faltered when he spoke. As the surviving leader, he acknowledged to us that he bears the ultimate responsibility for the killings and the suffering. “I would like to accept all the mistakes that other people had made. I blame them but I am the leader. And I had mistakes, too, and so did Pol Pot. As politicians, we must accept responsibility for what happened during our regime,” he said. He still spoke with the authority of a revolutionary, with the conviction of one who fully believed what he was saying. As he talked about the killings, one of his grandsons, who had just turned three, walked unsteadily toward him. Nuon Chea put a slice of orange into his mouth and patted him on the back. As his grandson tottered away with a squeal, Nuon Chea continued. “But I am not a killer. Only those who wanted to destroy us and make problems for the Khmer Rouge were smashed. Those bad cadre and traitors killed our people

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and we killed only those who killed our people. Why should we keep them? If we did not smash the enemy, there would be no Cambodia today.” To understand the killings, Nuon Chea argued, the whole picture of the Khmer Rouge must be examined, as opposed to focusing on only the period that the ultra-­Maoists were in power. The Khmer Rouge tribunal plans to prosecute only the top leaders held responsible for what happened during the 1975–1979 Khmer Rouge regime. “If they ask me in court who killed the people, I will say I was in charge of the legislative body and education, so the killing was the problem of government administration, which was the responsibility of Pol Pot and Son Sen,” he said. “If they still ask, then I will tell them it started with (former U.S. secretary of state Henry) Kissinger. Don’t cut between the Cambodian and Vietnam wars because the U.S. connected the two. Cambodia had no problem with the U.S. but they bombed us and wanted . . .” Nuon Chea halted in mid-­sentence, his attention drawn to his cat, which was about to pounce on a gecko resting on the wall. He asked his wife to prevent the cat from killing the lizard. “Please don’t let him be eaten,” he told her. With the cat shooed away and the gecko safe, he continued. “The U.S. wanted to extend their territory and recruit Cambodian soldiers to attack Vietnam. So the trial coverage is unjust to us because they just take the middle of the body, not the whole body. There is a reason why 1975 happened. If there was no reason, there wouldn’t have been the killing. We also have to talk about 1979 and the Vietnamese invasion. Why are they focusing on just us? Because we lost. And this is not justice.” Other Khmer Rouge intellectuals have echoed Nuon Chea’s opinion. They insist that French colonialism, the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, and the Vietnamese invasion should also be included in a trial. Meanwhile, other countries that aided the Khmer Rouge, particularly China, could be dragged into the fray. “Thailand, China, Vietnam, North Korea and the U.S. were all involved in the Khmer Rouge,” Nuon Chea said. “If the trial happens, it will be a stream that grows into an ocean. The UN will also be involved because it accepted us as the legitimate government.” The intricacies of identifying the seeds of the Killing Fields also reflect the complexities of defining the soul, the essence of Nuon Chea himself. Brother Number Two cannot be understood by examining the Khmer Rouge period alone. As humans, we want to, or have to, see the villains of our world as one­dimensional characters, like the bad guys in cartoons. There can be nothing else to them except pure evil. How else are we to confront a devil who looks like

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us? But it’s never that simple. Nuon Chea’s years in power do not explain what happened to the boy who thought about being a teacher or a monk when he grew up. Those four years do not provide insight into the heart of the college student who dreamed of freeing his nation from the shackles of colonialism. Cambodia is just one of many countries in the world where mass graves have been unearthed. No inhabited continent has been immune to the plague of mass killing and violence that has riddled human history. The Cultural Revolution in China, the purges of Stalinist Soviet Union, “the disappeared” in Chile, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the gassing of the Kurds in Iraq, the machete blows in Rwanda. After each of these tragedies, we are left with only questions: How? Why? There is no tidy explanation that can sum up how it all came about. But one pattern is certain: violence produced more violence, brutalities multiplied, and the horror escalated. It is a universal and timeless trend. In A Rumor of War, Philip Caputo’s account of his experience in Vietnam, he describes U.S. soldiers’ brutalities in Vietnam in terms of their causes, saying “The evil was inherent not in the me­n­—­except in the sense that a devil dwells in us all—­but in the circumstances under which they had to live and fight. The conflict in Vietnam combined the two most bitter forms of warfare, civil war and revolution, to which was added the ferocity of jungle war. Twenty years of terrorism and fratricide had obliterated most reference points from the country’s moral map long before we arrived.” Of course in Cambodia’s case the Khmer Rouge themselves are ultimately to blame for the destruction of their nation. But they received help all along the way, even after the world knew about the genocide. It is often said that the United States secret bombing campaign and its backing of a coup instigated by Lon Nol contributed to the Khmer Rouge victory. As part of its war against Vietnamese communists, the United States dropped more than 500,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia from 1969 to 1973, more than three times the tonnage dropped on Japan during World War II. The bombing led many Cambodians to join the Khmer Rouge and hardened the resolve of the guerrillas. “Before 1975, there was an invasion by foreigners. So why did they accuse us of genocide? There were two wars; one was caused by foreign invaders and one done to protect the country. So which war was just?” Nuon Chea asked. “What I’m saying is not to protect myself. But I did not fight France, America, and Vietnam. They fought us and invaded our country. So don’t accuse me of being a war criminal. If we didn’t have these problems, we wouldn’t have the problem of the killings.”

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The United States supported the Khmer Rouge during the 1980s and 1990s, but since the late 1990s it has pushed for a tribunal. “If you think the Khmer Rouge are killers, why did you negotiate with us and why did you support us?” Nuon Chea asked. “So the bad changes to good and the good changes to bad, and it’s always changing.” Saddam Hussein could have asked the same question of the United States But unlike Saddam Hussein, who committed his first political assassination with his own hands at the age of twenty, Nuon Chea did not show a penchant for violence early on. In college, Nuon Chea was like a university student in the United States during the 1960s, protesting against injustices and speaking of equality and freedom. The twentieth century’s cruelest leaders have not been driven by a lust for power and greed, although some developed a cult of personality. Instead, they had ideological reasons that provided, in their minds, rationale for murder. “The human race needs to think more about killing,” former U.S. secretary of defense Robert McNamara says in the Errol Morris documentary, Fog of War. “How much evil must we do in order to do good?” Blinded by dogma and perceived threats, those who spread terror in the name of a higher calling create their own logic to justify their actions. And the power of believing one is right cannot be underestimated in what it can lead a person to do. So what is human nature’s capacity and potential to commit evil? Nuon Chea and others like him were shaped by more than just ideology. Their personalities and life experiences influenced their behavior and decision making. What were the forks in the road they faced and why did they make choices they made? Was it inevitable, something innate in their makeup, that they become killers? Is it as simple as nature versus nurture? For Hitler, historians have sometimes cited his childhood and his possible self-­hatred based on the fact that his grandfather may have been Jewish. These days, Osama bin Laden is described simply as a “madman.” But we rarely have the chance to hear the explanations from the killers themselves. For Nuon Chea, the movement he joined as a reflection of his patriotism is the most hated regime in Cambodian history. And although he takes morality as the basis of living a proper life, he knows he is seen as a monster. “Now all the blame is put on Democratic Kampuchea leaders. But we are not cruel. We are compatriots,” he said. “I am very sorry for people’s deaths during those years. But why would we kill our own people? We only thought about how to help the people, how to make rice and build the country. I don’t want them to respect us but respect justice and what is truth, right and wrong.”

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165

Nuon Chea also knows that he will die without achieving his goals of eliminating poverty. “I regret that I am old and will not see the prosperity of Cambodia in the future,” he said. “The people are still suffering.” It has been said that he seems cold, strict, and unrepentant for the suffering he has caused. When he left the Khmer Rouge movement and defected to the government in 1998, his comments outraged many for their callousness. “Actually, we are very sorry not only for the lives of the people of Cambodia, but also for the lives of all animals that suffered because of the war,” he said at that time. But in private he does show sorrow and grief. And the past still haunts him, the way it still troubles many Cambodians. Even eating one of his favorite dishes, prahok or fermented fish paste, brings up memories that make him feel melancholy and nauseous. He often ate prahok when he was hiding in the forest. “My struggle has taken up more than a half century. It’s been both bitter and sweet. I accept this,” he said. “But when I am reminded of the past, I feel sad and horrible in my heart. I feel deep distress because of the many people and comrades in arms who died.” Outwardly, however, he quickly recovers and smiles. “I am still struggling. It is not over yet. I am still doing what I can to help the nation, as a simple citizen. But now I am using a pen. Now telling my story is the continuation of my struggle. “I do not want people to curse me after I die,” he said. “If they want to blame me, I want them to do it while I’m still alive. The court could not try my heart but my heart already tried me. So don’t accuse me of being cruel. The court could only imprison my body but not my heart. Even if the court says I am not guilty, I already tried myself and have remorse because I gave up my self to serve my nation and the people since I was young but it was not fruitful. I think the court is a hot battlefield for me. I have to struggle with the court to find justice for Cambodia, the victims and the Khmer Rouge.” For Sambath, his six-­year effort to find out how his country turned into the Killing Fields and why he became an orphan has brought him a sense of justice. And more important, he has made peace with his past and the questions that have haunted him have now been answered. “After learning from Nuon Chea, it made me calm,” he said. “I understand why people had no freedom and were forced to work hard. I know why so many innocent people were killed. I do not blame only Nuon Chea but all the top Khmer Rouge leaders. They should have done better for our country.” He understands why some people want to see Nuon Chea put to death or want to kill him themselves. But he said his talks with Brother Number Two

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also reaffirmed in his mind that repeating the wrongs of the past was not the way to make a better future. “Revenge and hatred are big mistakes that caused many innocent people to be killed,” Sambath said. “That’s why finding out the truth and understanding are better. I let go of my feelings to find out the truth for the Cambodian people and the victims. Now I understand everything and my search is over.”

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Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin, 1977. Becker, Elizabeth. When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution. New York: Public Affairs, 1986. Bergen, Peter L. The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader. New York: Free Press, 2006. Bizot, François. The Gate. New York: Knopf, 2000. Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992. Caputo, Philip. A Rumor of War. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1977. Center for Social Development. The Khmer Rouge and National Reconciliation: Opinions from the Cambodians. Phnom Penh: the Center, 2001. Chanda, Nayan. Brother Enemy. New York: Collier, 1986. Chandler, David P. Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999. _____. Voices from S-­21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison. Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2000. Chandler, David P., Ben Kiernan, and Chanthou Boua. Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976–1977. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University South East Asia Studies, 1988. Charny, Israel W. How Can We Commit the Unthinkable? Genocide: The Human Cancer. New York: Hearst Books, 1982. Chirot, Daniel. Modern Tyrants. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994. Chorover, Stephan L. From Genesis to Genocide: The Meaning of Human Nature and the Power of Behavior Control. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1979. Coughlin, Con. Saddam: The Secret Life. London: Macmillan, 2002. Dallaire, Romeo. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2003. Duiker, William J. Ho Chi Minh: A Life. New York: Hyperion, 2000. Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Vintage, 1997.

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Gourevitch, Philip. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Isaacson, Walter. Kissinger: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Kiernan, Ben. How Pol Pot Came to Power. London: Verso, 1985. _____. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, a nd Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979. Bangkok: Silkworm Books, 1997. Maguire, Peter. Law and War: An American Story. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Orizio, Riccardo. Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators. New York: Walker, 2002. Picq, Laurence. Beyond the Horizon: Five Years with the Khmer Rouge. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989. Ponchaud, François. Cambodia: Year Zero. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978. Power, Samantha. “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Perennial, 2003. Rosenbaum, Ron. Explaining Hitler. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999. Shawcross, William. Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002. Short, Philip. Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare. New York: Henry Holt, 2004. Staub, Ervin. The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Vickery, Michael. Cambodia: 1975–1982. Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 1984. Waller, James. Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Zhisui, Li. The Private Life of Chairman Mao. New York: Random House, 1984.

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Index

Adulyadej, Bhumibol, 6 American Refugee Committee (ARC), 123, 140 “Angka” (the Organization), 3, 17, 93, 96, 100, 150 Angkor Empire (fourteenth century), 51 Anlong Veng, 129–31, 138 Ban Yen, 92 Battambang province: and early armed struggle by Khmer Rouge, 13–14; and French Indochina, 19; Nuon Chea’s home in, 18–19, 51, 144; and Rhos Nhim, 105; Sambath’s family home in, 9, 140; Wat Koh village, 19, 144–51; World War II and Thai rule, 22, 25 BBC Radio, 142 Becker, Elizabeth, 119–20 bin Laden, Osama, 4, 164 Bosnia, ethnic cleansing in, 163 Buddhism, 41–43 Caldwell, Malcolm, 119–20 Cambodia Daily, 83, 142 Cambodian Communist Party: birth date of, 63, 71–72; creating a political platform, 60–62; culture of fear and suspicion in, 83–84, 87–98; early partnership of Pol Pot and Nuon Chea in rebuilding, 59–61, 114; early years of communist movement and Vietnamese supervision, 51–54; founding congress of Workers Party of Kampuchea (1960), 63–64; and Geneva agreements (1954), 58; under Sihanouk/after National Assembly elections (1955), 58–60; Sihanouk’s attempts to eliminate, 60, 64, 65–66, 90, 114; and split of ICP (1951), 52–54, 63, 71–72; and Vietnamese, 52–54,

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63–65, 71–72. See also Khmer Issaraks; Khmer Rouge regime (early) Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), 129, 133 Cambodia Today, 141 Cambodia under French colonial rule, 19–22, 26, 27, 28; and Battambang province, 19; Cambodians’ anger about, 20, 21–22; Cambodian teachers during, 21–22; nationalist political upheavals of 1920s and 1930s, 20; nineteenth-century treaties, 19; post-World War II anticolonial movements/armed resistance against, 27, 28; Sihanouk’s declaration of independence, 56, 114; taxation, 19, 20; Vichy regime, 22, 26; and Vietnamese civil servants, 19–20; World War II era, 22, 24–26 Caputo, Philip, 163 ceasefire agreements, 72–73 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 36, 67, 103, 111–12, 119 Chan Samorn, 59 Chan Savuth, 106 Chiang Kai Shek, 26 Chiel Chhoeun, 106–7 children and the Khmer Rouge regime, 40–41, 44, 46 Chile, “the disappeared” in, 163 China: aid/support for Khmer Rouge, 68, 75, 125; aid to Vietnam, 68; communists, 26, 28, 61; Cultural Revolution, 49, 61, 97, 163; discouraging the Khmer Rouge’s plans for armed struggle (1968), 65–66; establishment of communist People’s Republic, 28; Gang of Four, 49, 97; Great Leap Forward, 49, 62; invasion of northern Vietnam and final days of Khmer Rouge regime, 125; Khmer Rouge money printed in, 17; and Lon Nol government, 68;

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170

Index

China (Continued) Pol Pot’s trips to introduce Cambodian Communist Party platform, 65; postWorld War II civil war, 26; and Sihanouk, 64, 65, 68 Choeung Ek Killing Fields, 160 Chou Chet, 112–13 Choun Prasit, 117–18 city people, 33–34 communist party, Cambodian. See Cambodian Communist Party Communist Party of Kampuchea, 17 cooperative system and Khmer Rouge regime, 33–35, 37–38, 47–48, 76–78; animosity of city and country people, 33–34; and children, 40–41, 44, 46; food/rice shortages and starvation, 44–45, 47–48, 76–78, 149–50; gap between top leadership and lower-level zone leaders, 77–78; influx of city people after evacuation of cities, 33–34; labor/work requirements, 46, 76–78; leaders and kitchen cleaning duties, 37–38; and “new” (April 17) people/“old” people, 34, 98 country people/farmers, 33–34, 37–39, 62 Democratic Kampuchea People’s Representative Assembly, 34–35 Democratic Party in Cambodia, 26, 28, 58 Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), 26 Deng Chhoeng, 87, 145–46, 147–48, 150 Deng Peanh (mother of Nuon Chea): death of, 145–47; and Nuon Chea’s marriage ceremony, 41, 86–87; Nuon Chea’s visits during Khmer Rouge years, 40, 78, 86, 148–49; Nuon Chea’s close relationship with, 18, 148–49 Deng Xiaoping, 97, 125 Dien Bien Phu assault (1954), 57 Documentation Center of Cambodia, 159 Doeun (head of Office 870), 111–12 Duch (Kaing Guek Eav): accused of being traitor, 119; on final days of regime, 120; on internal purges of senior cadre, 103; and Pol Pot’s quest for modernization, 49; and S-21 interrogations/confessions, 82–83, 85, 110–11, 117–18; as S-21 prison chief, 3, 82–83, 85, 117–20; tribunal testimony (2009), 3, 98, 103, 118, 157 Dudman, Richard, 119–20 Dulles, John Foster, 58

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Duong (local Khmer Rouge leader), 11 Eastern Zone: importance of, 39, 114–15; and plot to overthrow Pol Pot, 104; Pol Pot’s fears of assassination attempts in, 98; and population evacuated from cities, 15–16; and So Phim, 39, 113–16; traitors and betrayals in, 104, 111, 114–15 evacuation of the cities, 15–16, 33–34, 149 family and Khmer Rouge regime, 39–41 First Indochina war (1946), 26, 52 Fog of War (documentary film), 164 food shortages and starvation, 44, 45, 47–48, 76–78, 149–50 “Four-Year Plan for Socialism in All Fields,” 76 Franco-Thai war (1940-41), 22 Free Thai (Thai Serei) movement, 24 French Indochina: colonial rule of Cambodia, 19–22, 26–28, 56; and nationalist political upheavals of 1920s and 1930s, 20; nineteenth-century treaties and Cambodia, 19; post-World War II anticolonial movements/armed resistance against, 27, 28; Sihanouk declaration of independence, 56, 114; Vichy government, 22, 26; Vietnamese assault at Dien Bien Phu (1954), 57; Vietnamese wars on, 22, 26, 52, 57; World War II-era independence movements, 22 Funcinpec party, 129, 133 Gang of Four (China), 49, 97 Geneva conferences (1954), 57–58 Great Leap Forward, 49, 62, 85 Gulf of Tonkin resolution (1964), 64 Heng Samrin, 115–16, 119, 124 Hitler, Adolf, 5, 164 Ho Chi Minh: assault on French at Dien Bien Phu, 57; and Cambodian communist delegation studying in Vietnam, 56; and establishment of Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), 26; and First Indochina war (1946), 26; founding of ICP, 20, 52; meeting with Pol Pot (1965), 65; and World War II-era independence movement, 22 Ho Chi Minh trail, 62, 64, 65 Hout Panha, 144–47, 150–51

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Index

Hou Youn, 96 Hun Chhun Ly, 148 Hu Nim, 111 Hun Sen, 115–16, 124, 138–39, 141–42 ICP. See Indochinese Communist Party Ieng Sary, 59, 120, 138, 154; defection, 130– 31; family, 39, 40; and founding congress of Workers Party of Kampuchea, 63; as intellectual, 37; and Khmer Rouge plans to evacuate cities, 15; and Khmer Rouge tribunal, 3; money-earning after 1991 peace agreement, 129; and new Khmer Rouge leaders after Vietnam invasion, 127; role in Khmer Rouge government, 35, 96; and self-criticism sessions, 36 Ieu Koeuss, 28 Indochinese Communist Party (ICP): and First Indochina War with France, 52; Ho Chi Minh and founding, 20, 52; and resistance/liberation from France, 28; split (1951), 52–54, 63, 71–72 industrial development and modernization plans, 48–50, 74–78, 110 intellectuals and the Khmer Rouge regime, 35, 37, 38–39 In Thoeun, 100–101, 104 Iraqi Kurds, 163 Issaraks. See Khmer Issaraks Japan, 22, 24, 26 Japanese NHK television, 142 Jiang Qing, 97 Kaing Guek Eav, 3. See also Duch Kampuchea Krom, 51 Keat Chhon, 138 Kent State University, National Guard shootings at (1969), 92 Keo Meas, 104 Ke Pauk, 3, 69–70, 101, 119 KGB, 36, 103, 119 Khem Ngon, 138 Khem Them, 134, 135 Khieu Ponnary (wife of Pol Pot), 39–40, 93, 126 Khieu Samphan: accused as traitor, 82–83; defection, 137–38; escape from Cambodia, 132; and final days of regime, 132, 137–38; as intellectual, 37; and Khmer Rouge secret plans to evacuate cities, 15; and

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171

Khmer Rouge tribunal, 3; and Paris peace accords (1991), 127; role in Khmer Rouge government, 35, 96; and self-criticism sessions, 36, 37 Khmer Issaraks: creation of, 22; early Thai supporters, 26, 27; and Geneva agreement (1954), 58; pro-communist faction, 27, 52, 56; and Sihanouk’s rule of Cambodia, 27, 59–60; study of guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, 56 Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party (KPRP), 53–54 Khmer Rouge regime: and Buddhism, 41–43; and children, 40–41, 44, 46; cooperative system, 33–35, 37–38, 47–48, 76–78; and country people/farmers, 33–34, 37–39, 62; division of people into categories, 34, 98; and family, 39–41; food/rice shortages and starvation, 44–45, 47–48, 76–78, 149–50; gap between top leadership and zone leaders, 77–78; and intellectuals, 35, 37, 38–39; labor/work requirements, 46, 76–78; lasting effects on Cambodia society, 3, 159–60; mass killings by foot soldiers in countryside, 98–102; self-criticism sessions, 35–37, 128; zone leaders, 15–16, 77–78. See also Khmer Rouge regime (early); Khmer Rouge regime (original goals and intentions for new Cambodian society); Khmer Rouge regime (paranoia about betrayal, enemies, and traitors); Khmer Rouge regime (final days) Khmer Rouge regime (early): armed struggle (1968), 13–14, 65–66; and ceasefire agreements, 72–73; and China, 49, 62, 65–66, 75; collectivization in agriculture and industry, 76; competition with Vietnam, 47, 48–50, 74–78; creating political platform, 60–62; culture of fear and suspicion, 83–84, 87–98; decision to make rural farmers/laborers core members, 62; evacuation of cities, 15–16, 33–34, 149; façade government, 34–35, 96; Geneva Conferences and VietnameseCambodian relationship, 57–58; industrial development and modernization plans, 48–50, 74–78, 110; internal divisions and treachery, 94–95; leaders’ lack of experience, 50–51; and Lon Nol, 14–15, 66–67, 71; and nationalist revolution, 61–

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172

Index

Khmer Rouge regime (Continued) 62; Nuon Chea’s revolutionary education in Vietnam, 54–57; organizational plans for government ministries, 71; publication of party history and mission (1972), 71; rebuilding Cambodian Communist Party, 59–61, 114; relationship with Vietnamese communists during Vietnam War, 68–71; and Sihanouk’s crackdown on communists, 60, 64–66, 90, 114; Sihanouk’s late alliance with, 68, 93, 96; and split of ICP (1951), 52–54, 63, 71–72; and U.S. bombing campaigns in Cambodia, 66–67, 73, 92, 162, 163; victory and push to capital (1975), 13–16, 33–34, 48, 50, 73–74, 94–95; and the Vietnam factor, 47–78.; and Workers Party of Kampuchea, 63–64. See also Vietnam/Vietnamese communists Khmer Rouge regime (original goals and intentions for new Cambodian society), 16–17, 43, 160; and Buddhism/religion, 41–43; changes to native language, 32–33; and competition with Vietnam, 47–50, 74–78; and country people/farmers, 33–34, 37–39, 62; elimination of class and poverty, 17, 165; elimination of money, markets, and private property, 17; erasure of history, 16–17; “Four-Year Plan” for collectivization in agriculture and industry, 76; and Great Leap Forward, 49, 62, 85; industrial development and modernization plans, 48–50, 74–78, 110; new nation of “Democratic Kampuchea,” 17; oil reserves and mining, 75; rice production, 74–75; society based on purity and morality, 16–17, 32, 43; state-run markets, 17 Khmer Rouge regime (paranoia about betrayal, enemies, and traitors), 2–3, 5, 81, 82–120; and arrest of Gang of Four in China (1976), 97; culture of fear and suspicion in communist movement, 83–84, 87–98; and defection/betrayal by Sieu Heng, 63, 87–88, 105–6, 145–46, 150; divisions between the “old” and the “new” in countryside, 98; early S-39 system to detect spies/traitors, 94; enemies accused of overworking and starving population, 76–78, 98–99, 102, 149–50, 161–62; and final days of regime, 120; and Lon Nol persecutions/arrests of communists, 88–93; mass killings by

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foot soldiers in countryside, 98–102; mistakes, 116–20, 161; murder of foreign correspondent Caldwell, 119–20; Nuon Chea’s secrecy and paranoia, 55, 85–89, 91, 95–96; paranoia and aliases, 86, 92, 95; plot to overthrow Pol Pot, 104–6, 112–13; Pol Pot’s paranoia, 38–39, 94–96, 98; postvictory, 94–98; purging of Khmer Rouge leaders, 82–83, 85, 102–16; Sambath Thet’s brother Thet Vorn, 79–81; and seizure of U.S. container ship/rescue mission by U.S. forces at Koh Tang Island (1975), 97; and self-criticism sessions, 36; and Sihanouk’s Phnom Penh, 88–92, 106; and S-21 prison interrogation center, 3, 82–85, 94, 102–5, 110–12, 115, 117–19, 120; and U.S. bombing campaigns, 92, 93, 163; Vietnamese spies in embassy, 110 Khmer Rouge regime (final days), 124–39; Vietnamese invasion and ousting from Phnom Penh (January 1979), 3, 121, 124, 162; attempts at regrouping/transition, 124–27; joining forces with Son Sann and Sihanouk, 125; Chinese support, 125; coalition government of royalist Funcinpec party and CPP, 129, 133; reintroduction of money and capitalist activities, 128–29; final meeting of Nuon Chea and Pol Pot, 132; murder of Son Sen and his family, 131–33; and 1993 elections, 128, 129, 141; and 1991 Paris Peace Accords, 127–29; and Paris Peace Accords (1991), 127, 140; Pol Pot’s resignation/choice of Son Sen as successor, 127, 130; Pol Pot’s attempted escape/arrest, 132–34; Pol Pot’s last days and death (1998), 134; and Sambath Thet’s story, 121–23; Son Sen’s leadership, 127, 130–31; Ta Mok as final leader, 133, 137–39; Ta Mok’s surrender and arrest, 139; Vietnam’s withdrawal (1989), 127, 140; UN Transitional Authority, 141; worsening internal problems and beginning of end (1996), 130–31 Khmer Rouge tribunal, 162; Duch’s testimony, 3, 98, 103, 118, 157; first defendants to appear, 3, 157; formal establishment (2006), 157; Nuon Chea awaiting trial, 2, 3, 157–58, 165–66; Nuon Chea’s 2007 arrest, 155–57 Khmer Serey, 60, 110 Khoy Thoun, 70, 102, 107–12

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Index

Kim Il Sung, 7 Kissinger, Henry, 72, 73, 162 Kompong Cham province, 72, 73, 101, 107–9, 126 Kompong Chhnang province, 13, 41, 148 Kompong Speu province, 77, 88, 112 Kompong Thom province, 40, 69–70, 73, 101 land mines, 161 Lao Bun Long (brother of Nuon Chea), 30, 145, 148, 151 Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, 53 Lao Poun (sister of Nuon Chea), 15, 18, 23, 145, 149–51 Lao Reuth, 144, 148 Laos: communist revolts of 1920s and 1930s, 20; communist struggle against royal government (1960), 62–63; Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, 53; and Nuon Chea’s 1953 secret trip to Vietnam, 55–56; resistance against French rule (1950s), 28 League for the Independence of Vietnam, 22. See also Vietminh Le Duc Tho, 73 Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (Lenin), 61 Lenin, Vladimir, 61 Lin Biao, 97 Liu Shaoqi, 61 Long Moeng, 149 Long Norin, 103 Lon Nol: Khmer Rouge victory and ousting of Lon Nol soldiers, 13–16, 100–101; offensive Chenla II against Vietnamese, 71; ousting of Sihanouk in U.S.-backed coup (1970), 10, 14, 67–68, 93; persecution of communists, 60, 66, 88–93; as Sihanouk’s henchman, 60, 64, 66–67; and torture/ interrogation methods, 85–86; U.S. aid and military support for, 48 Lon Non, 15, 31 Ly Kimseng (wife of Nuon Chea), 41, 158; and Nuon Chea’s arrest to stand trial, 156–57; and paranoia, 89, 95–96 Ma Mong, 41, 92 Mao Say, 111 Mao Zedong, 26, 49, 61, 62, 97 Matt Ly, 138 McNamara, Robert, 164

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173

Mea Son (Pol Pot’s second wife), 126, 134, 137 Mey Mann, 1 Milosevic, Slobodan, 4 modernization and industrial development plans, 48–50, 74–78, 110 money and markets, 17, 29–30, 128–29 Mon Nim, 119 Morris, Errol, 164 Nagaravatta (Khmer-language newspaper), 20 National Assembly elections in Cambodia (1955), 58–59 nationalist political upheavals in Southeast Asia: post-World War II anticolonial resistance, 26–27, 28; of 1920s and 1930s, 20; World War II era, 26–27 National United Front of Kampuchea (FUNK), 93 Neak Loeung (town), 93 “new” people (April 17 people), 34, 98 Nay Saran, 103–4 Ngo Dien Diem, 64 Nguyen Van Linh, 63, 65–66, 69, 70–71, 72, 74, 108 Nhiek Bhun Chhay, 133 Nop Bophan, 88 Norodom, King, 19 Northern Zone, 107, 111 North Korea, 7 Northwest Zone: killings by foot soldiers, 99–100; and plot to overthrow Pol Pot and other leaders, 104; population evacuated from cities, 15–16 Nuon Chea, 4–5, 6–8, 128–30, 144–51, 152–58, 159–66; addressing motivations for Khmer Rouge killings and human evil, 2–4, 161–65; aliases, 22, 28, 86, 92; arrest to stand trial (2007), 2, 155–57; awaiting trial before Khmer Rouge tribunal, 2–3, 157–58, 165–66; blame of cadre in countryside, 98–99, 102, 149–50, 161–62; childhood, 20–21; children of, 33, 40, 89; civil servant jobs, 25–26, 28–30; early education, 21, 22–23; early life in Battambang province, 18–19, 51; early research on communism and Cambodian society, 61–62; family members’ blame/ confrontation regarding deaths, 144–51; family members’ evacuation of Phnom Penh, 15, 149; family members’ labor

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174

Index

Nuon Chea (Continued) during Khmer Rouge years, 39, 40, 148–49; father’s death, 27; final days of the regime and defection by, 137–38; and French colonial rule, 20–22, 28; and mother (Deng Peanh), 18, 40, 41, 78, 86–87, 145–49; law school, 28–29; living as private citizen in Pailin, 1–2, 6–7, 138–39; meetings/interviews with Sambath Thet, 6, 142–43, 152–58, 165; as monk novice, 22–23, 42–43; opinions on money and material goods, 29–30; and other demonized figures from twentieth century, 4–5, 164; political awakening in Thailand, 22–29; political role in Khmer Rouge government, 34–35, 96, 160; and Pol Pot, 59–61, 134–37; postwar homecoming to Battambang, 144–51; pre-Khmer Rouge years, 18–30; return to Cambodia (1950) to work with Communists, 29–30, 52; revolutionary education in Vietnam (1953), 54–57; siblings, 20–21; and So Phim, 113–16; suspiciousness, paranoia, secrecy, 7, 55, 83–89, 91, 95–96, 154; and Thai Communist Party, 25, 27–28, 29, 55; at Thammasat University, 23–27, 55; wife, 39, 41, 86–87, 89, 95–96, 156–57 oil reserves and mining, 75 “old” people, 34, 98 O’Russei market (Phnom Penh), 91 Pailin: Khmer Rouge stronghold in, 130, 138, 142; Nuon Chea’s life as private citizen, 1–2, 6–7, 138–39 paranoia and suspicion. See Khmer Rouge regime (paranoia about betrayal, enemies, and traitors) Paris Peace Accords: (1973), 73, 93: (1991), 127 Party of Democratic Kampuchea, 128 Pat Vey, 98 Pham Hung, 72–73 Pham Van Dong, 56 Phibul Songkhran, 24, 25, 26 Phlek Phoeum, 111 Pochentong Airport (Phnom Penh), 14, 71, 74, 109 Pol Pot: aliases and hidden identity, 17, 94–96; choice of Son Sen as successor, 127, 130; early life, 30–32, 38–39, 42–43, 51–52;

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European travels and Paris studies, 31–32, 38–39, 54; fears of assassination, 98; and final days of regime, 126–27, 129, 132–34; first wife, 39–40, 93, 126; friendship with Lon Non, 31; and Ho Chi Minh, 65; as intellectual, 38–39; last days and death (1998), 1, 134; as monk novice, 31, 42–43; mother and father, 39; and Nuon Chea, 59– 61, 134–37; paranoia, 38–39, 94–96, 98; plot to overthrow, 104–6, 112–13; reconsidering his personal life and second marriage, 126; resentment of Vietnamese, 51–52, 64–65, 70; and self-criticism sessions, 36; as soccer fan, 42, 51; trial for murder of Son Sen and his family, 133–34; trips to China, 65; trips to North Vietnam, 64–65; worries and confidence problems, 50–51 Pracheachon Party, 58, 88 Preah Vihear province, 47, 99 Prey Russey village (Battambang province), 9 Pridi Banomyong Pridi, 24, 25, 26 Prom Prein, 101 Psar Doeum Tkao (Phnom Penh), 91 purity and morality, 16–17, 32, 43 Pursat province, 100–101, 104, 108 Ranarridh, Prince Norodom, 133, 142 Ratanakkiri province, Khmer Rouge jungle hideout in, 90, 92–93, 107 religion, Khmer Rouge policy on, 41–43 The Resistance Will Win (Truong Chinh), 61 Rhos Nhim, 78, 102, 105–7, 146 Roum Vong Phan, 28 Royal Government of National Union of Kampuchea, 93 A Rumor of War (Caputo), 163 Rwandan genocide, 163 Saddam Hussein, 4, 5, 86, 164 Sak Sutsakhan, 30 Sambath Thet: brother Thet Vorn, 79–81; and Cambodia’s transition to peace, 140–43; father’s murder, 9–12, 154; interrupted schooling/education, 44, 121–22; leaving Cambodia for Thai border, 122–23; living with his grandparents, 45–46, 121; meetings and interviews with Nuon Chea, 6, 142–43, 152–58, 165; mother, 9, 11–12, 45, 154; newspaper/journalism career, 141–42; on revenge, 5–6, 8, 12, 123, 155,

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Index

165–66; story of his family in Khmer Rouge years, 5–6, 9–12, 44–46, 121–23, 142–43, 154–55; and Vietnamese ousting of Khmer Rouge (1979), 121–23 Sangkum Reastr Niyum (Popular Socialist Community), 58–59 self-criticism sessions, 35–37, 128 Siem Reap province, 109; cooperatives, 77; and 1977 rebellion, 85; temples of Angkor Empire, 51; World War II and Thai rule, 22 Sieu Heng, 28, 53, 59, 145–46; defection/ betrayal by, 63, 87–88, 105–6, 145, 150 Sihanouk, Norodom: attempted elimination of Cambodian communists, 60, 64–66, 90, 114; children’s deaths under Khmer Rouge regime, 96; declaration of independence from France, 56–57, 114; and French colonial Vichy government, 22, 26; Lon Nol and U.S.-backed coup ousting (1970), 10, 14, 67–68, 93; and Lon Nol (as henchman), 60, 64, 66–67; National Assembly elections (1955), 58–59; and North Vietnamese, 60, 64–66, 69; postcoup alliance with Khmer Rouge, 14, 68, 93, 96; post-Vietnamese invasion alliance with Khmer Rouge, 125–26; and postWorld War II Cambodian communists, 26, 27; and relations with U.S., 60, 64, 67; resignation as puppet leader, 96 Sin Song, 127 So Hong, 135–36 Sok Pheap, 130 Sok Yun, 18, 147 Song Ngoc Thanh, 60, 67 Son Ngoc Minh, 56 Son Sann, 125 Son Sen, 13, 35; accused as traitor, 127, 131–32; arrest of So Phim in Eastern Zone, 116; and founding congress of the Workers Party of Kampuchea, 63; and internal purges of Khmer Rouge senior cadre, 103; murder of, 131–33; and Paris Peace Accords (1991), 127; as Pol Pot’s successor, 127, 130–31; and S-21, 85, 117–19; and self-criticism sessions, 37; wife of, 39 So Phim, 113–16; and borrowed Vietnamese ammunition for final attack on Phnom Penh, 74; as Eastern Zone leader, 39, 113– 16; and plot to overthrow Pol Pot, 104, 106, 112–13; and self-criticism sessions, 37

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175

Southeast Asian Treaty Organization, 60 Southwest Zone, 99, 115 Soy Sovann, 22, 151 S-21 prison interrogation center: and Duch (prison chief), 3, 82–83, 85, 110–11, 117– 20; and final days of Khmer Rouge regime, 120; interrogations/confessions, 82–85, 94, 102–5, 110–12, 115, 117–19; as Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, 84, 160 SS Mayaguez (U.S. container ship), 97 S-39 system, 94 Stalin, Josef, 55, 61, 163 Suy Vieth, 101 Ta Mok, 130–32; accuses Duch as traitor, 119; arrest and trial of Pol Pot, 132–33; and clashes between Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge, 70; disagreements with Chou Chet, 112; family’s arrest, 91; as final leader of Khmer Rouge, 133, 137–39; and gap between intellectuals and farmers, 36; and murder of Son Sen and family, 132–34; and new leaders in Khmer Rouge after Vietnam invasion, 127; and Pol Pot’s last days and death, 134; and self-criticism sessions, 36; and So Phim, 115; surrender and arrest, 139 Tea Banh, 138 Tep Kunnal, 137 Tep Paoch, 101–2 Tet Offensive (1968), 65, 72 Thai Communist Party, 25, 27–28, 29, 55 Thai Democratic Youth Association, 25, 27 Thailand: and Cambodia’s anticolonial resistance against French, 27; at end of World War II, 25; nationalist political upheaval of 1920s and 1930s, 20; Nuon Chea and Thai communists, 25, 27–29, 55; Nuon Chea as monk novice in, 22–23, 42–43; Nuon Chea’s university years and political awakening in, 23–29, 55; as renewed ally of Cambodia post-1979 invasion, 126; World War II-era alliance with Japan, 24; World War II-era Allied bombings of, 24 Thammasat University (Thailand), 24–27, 55 Thayer, Nate, 133–34 Thet Vorn (brother of Sambath Thet), 79–81 Tito, Josep Broz, 31 Tou Samouth, 39, 59, 62, 87, 88, 90; disappearance/kidnapping, 90–91, 106

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Index

tribunal. See Khmer Rouge tribunal Truong Chinh, 56, 61 Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, 84, 160 United Issarak Front, 28 United Nations Border Relief Organization, 123 United Nations peacekeeping mission, 127 United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), 140–41 United States: aid to Cambodia, 48, 49–50, 58–60, 64, 125–26; aid to Vietnam, 49–50, 58–59, 62–63; bombing campaigns in Cambodia, 66–67, 73, 92–93, 162, 163; Cold War anticommunism, 125–26, 164; Gulf of Tonkin resolution and aerial raids against North Vietnamese, 64; and Khmer Rouge, 97, 125–26, 164; Khmer Rouge seizure of SS Mayaguez and rescue mission on Koh Tang island (1975), 97; Kissinger and ceasefire agreements, 72; and Lon Nol’s government, 48, 163; and Sihanouk, 60, 64; and Tet Offensive (1968), 65 University of Moral Science and Politics (Thailand), 23. See also Thammasat University Vichy government, 22, 26 Vietminh: and Geneva agreement (1954), 58; Ho Chi Minh and World War IIera independence movement, 22; and Indochinese Communist Party, 52 Vietnamese Workers’ party, 53, 56 Vietnam/Vietnamese communists: ammunition lent to Khmer Rouge, 74; and Cambodian Communist Party, 52–54, 63–65, 71–72; ceasefire agreements, 72–73; China’s invasion of North Vietnam, 125; and communist revolts of 1920s and 1930s, 20; delicate relationship with Cambodian communists during Vietnam War, 68–71, 108; discouragement of Khmer Rouge’s armed struggle (1968), 65–66; and early Cambodian anticolonial resistance against French, 27, 29; and early Cambodian communists, 47–78; embassy in Cambodia and spies, 110; and Geneva agreement (1954), 57–58; Gulf of Tonkin resolution and U.S. aerial raids, 64; Ho Chi Minh and establishment of Democratic Republic, 26;

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Ho Chi Minh and the ICP, 20, 52; Ho Chi Minh and World War II-era independence movement, 22; invasion and ousting of Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh (January 1979), 3, 121, 124, 162; Khmer Rouge’s competition with, 47–50, 74–78; Khmer Rouge targeting of Vietnamese living in Cambodia, 71, 108; Nuon Chea’s revolutionary education in, 54–57; Paris Peace Accords (1991), 127, 140; Pol Pot’s trips to North Vietnam, 64–65; Sihanouk’s relationship with, 60, 64–66, 69; and split of ICP (1951), 52–54, 63, 71–72; Tet Offensive (1968), 65, 72; and U.S. bombing campaigns in Cambodia, 66–67, 73, 92, 162, 163; war on French, 26, 52, 57; withdrawal from Cambodia (1989), 127, 140. See also Ho Chi Minh Vietnam War: Caputo’s account of U.S. soldiers’ brutalities, 163; ceasefire agreements, 72–73; delicate relationship between Cambodian communists/ Vietnamese communists, 68–71; Gulf of Tonkin resolution and U.S. aerial raids against North Vietnamese, 64; Tet Offensive (1968), 65, 72; U.S. bombing campaigns in Cambodia, 66–67, 73, 92–93, 162–63 Voeurng Thet (brother of Sambath Thet), 11 Vo Nguyen Giap, 56, 112 Vorn Vet, 96, 102, 106, 118 Wat Benchamabophit (Thailand), 23 Wat Koh village (Battambang Province), 19, 144–51 Western Zone, 112 When the War Was Over (Becker), 120 Workers Party of Kampuchea, 63–64. See also Cambodian Communist Party World War II, 22, 24–26, 24–27; French Vichy government, 22, 26; postwar anticolonial movements, 26–27, 28 Y Chhien, 130 Year Zero, 16, 121 Yorth (local Khmer Rouge leader), 11 Youn Yat, 131 Yugoslavia, 38–39 Zhou Enlai, 96

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Acknowledgments

When we started this project, we didn’t know where it was headed. But from the beginning it was a story we were both passionate about and committed to telling. In that effort, we logged countless hours of traveling to remote areas of Cambodia, contributed our own money to fund the project and worked to make sure we told this story in the way we thought it should be told, even when people told us we were wrong. Sambath in particular gave up time with his family and put his life at risk to tell this story. But we couldn’t have written this book without the support of numerous people. We would like to thank the U.S. Institute of Peace, which gave us a grant in support of research for the book. The organization’s funding assisted greatly in our efforts since we worked independently on the project. We would also like to thank Dr. Gregory Stanton, founder and president of Genocide Watch, who generously offered to be our grant administrator. We would also like to thank Lath Lina and Sao Phoeung for helping us connect with Nuon Chea, in addition to Savin, Chhoun and Chan for helping us to talk to other sources. We also thank Nuon Chea’s family for being generous hosts in our numerous visits to their homes. Our first agent, Bob Lescher, believed in the project and offered useful critiques that made the book what it is today. We are also grateful to our editor, Peter Agree, whose encouragement and guidance were instrumental. Gina would also like to thank the Wall Street Journal staff for their support, and in particular, Joseph White, Chip Cummins and Nik Deogun. She would also to thank her parents, Song and John Chon, and her brother, Jin Chon, for putting up with her crazy life. She is also grateful to Brian Mockenhaupt, who went on the Cambodian adventure with her. This book would not be possible without his support, careful editing and constructive criticisms. She is forever thankful for his love and encouragement.

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Acknowledgments

Sambath would like to thank his family for his support, including his mother and father, who didn’t have the chance to grow old with their family, and his children, who he hopes will learn from this book to create a better future for Cambodia.

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