Khieu Samphan: intellectual turned KR emissary

Wednesday November 21, 2007
By SETH MEIXNER
AFP

Phnom Penh - Khieu Samphan has never denied the bloodletting suffered under the Khmer Rouge, but the former head of state of Cambodia's radical communist government of the late 1970s has never admitted to a role in the regime's excesses. Instead, he has styled himself as an intellectual and nationalist who, until long afterwards, knew little of the devastation that was wrought during the Khmer Rouge's nearly four years in power.

He continues to deny that the regime intentionally committed mass murder.

''There was no policy of starving the people. There was no policy of mass killings,'' he wrote in his new book, Reflection on Cambodian History from Ancient Times to the Era of Democratic Kampuchea, published just days before his arrest on Monday.

Judges formally detained and charged Khieu Samphan with war crimes and crimes against humanity late Monday after nearly 10 hours of talks with his lawyers.

Khieu Samphan is the last of five top leaders currently under investigation by Cambodia's UN-backed genocide court to be detained.

Like most Khmer Rouge leaders at the height of the regime's power in the late 1970s, Khieu Samphan was a shadowy figure, his identity cloaked by the secrecy of the movement's inner circles.

But as the Khmer Rouge struggled for power in the civil war that followed their 1979 ouster, he became the regime's most visible public figure as it sought, and was to some extent granted, international credibility.

Throughout the 1980s he held positions as prime minister of the communist's government-in-exile and president of the party, and was promoted by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and other countries as a moderate voice of the regime.

A key player in peace talks in the early 1990s, Khieu Samphan remained the Khmer Rouge's most visible figure until defecting from the then-dying movement in 1998 with Nuon Chea, the regime's second most senior cadre who was arrested in September.

Believed to have been born in 1931 in southeastern Cambodia, Khieu Samphan is highly-educated, graduating from university in France, where he rose to prominence in leftist circles and became a Cambodian student leader.

His doctoral thesis, completed at the University of Paris in 1959, promoted national economic self-sufficiency and independence, and would resonate with the Khmer Rouge's own policies 16 years later.

Before turning communist guerrilla, though, Khieu Samphan returned to join Cambodia's economic and social renaissance of the 1960s as an academic and journalist.

In the confused politics of the time, he was both condemned and elevated by the country's leader, then-Prince Norodom Sihanouk.

As editor of a leftist newspaper at odds with the government, Khieu Samphan was imprisoned in 1960 after Sihanouk branded him an ''oppositionist''.

But he was later elected to parliament and served as Sihanouk's commerce minister in 1962-63.

Three years later he went underground for good after again becoming a target for his left-leaning politics, remaining with future Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot in the jungle.

Following Sihanouk's ouster in a 1970 coup, he rose through the ranks of the communist hierarchy that emerged as the Khmer Rouge's Democratic Kampuchea administration after the guerrillas seized the country in 1975.

During the regime years Khieu Samphan was appointed head of state as well as to more powerful positions within the party and government.

It was in these roles that genocide researchers say he would have had to have been aware as one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century unfolded.

Up to two million people died of starvation and overwork, or were executed as the communist regime emptied Cambodia's cities, exiling millions to vast collective farms in a bid to forge an agrarian utopia. The Khmer Rouge also abolished money, religion and schools before being overthrown in 1979.

Khieu Samphan was head of state of murderous Khmer Rouge

By KER MUNTHIT
Associated Press Writer

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - Khieu Samphan, arrested Monday by Cambodia's U.N.-backed genocide tribunal, was an intellectual who served as the head of state of the murderous Khmer Rouge movement in the late 1970s.

He became the fifth suspect detained by the tribunal.

The tribunal is seeking accountability for atrocities during the Khmer Rouge regime's 1975-79 rule that led to the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people from starvation, disease, overwork and execution.

Khieu Samphan has repeatedly denied responsibility for any atrocities. In a book published last week, he defended many of the policies of the ultra-communists although he has admitted that some killings took place.

Born July 27, 1931, the son of a provincial judge, Khieu Samphan won a government scholarship to study in Paris in the early 1950s. There he joined a Marxist circle of Cambodian students who formed the nucleus of what later became the Khmer Rouge.

After returning from Paris in the late 1950s he helped create the left-leaning French-language newspaper, l'Observateur. He also established his reputation as an honest intellectual and attracted a following among students at home.

His activities and popularity, however, alienated then-head of state Prince Norodom Sihanouk, whose police stripped and beat him on the streets of the capital in July 1960 before detaining him for a month in August.

Khieu Samphan fled into the jungle to join Cambodian communists in 1967 to escape the government's stepped-up crackdown on the leftists.

In his 2004 memoir, he claimed that he was merely a "shell" for the Khmer Rouge, despite his title as the head of state he received a year after the group took power on April 17, 1975.

He said he had nothing to do with its radical policies to evict people from cities, abolish money and replace private ownership with communal cooperatives across the country.

The secretive Khmer Rouge regime was overthrown from power in January 1979 by a Vietnamese invasion.

Khieu Samphan re-emerged as its chief representative while the guerrillas conducted diplomatic and military campaigns to oust the Vietnamese occupation army and its satellite regime led by Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge soldier who is currently Cambodia's prime minister.

In late 1991, Khieu Samphan returned to the Cambodian capital as the chief Khmer Rouge representative under the Paris peace accord. He was met by a government-organized mob that almost lynched him. He and his entourage were rescued in an armored personnel carrier that drove them to the airport from where a plane flew them to Thailand, Cambodia's neighbor the Khmer Rouge used as an exit door to the outside world for nearly two decades.

The Khmer Rouge boycotted the 1993 U.N.-supervised election and resumed fighting a small scale guerrilla war.

Khieu Samphan retained his high profile through the group's clandestine radio broadcasts until the movement collapsed in 1999.

Until his arrest, he had lived in Pailin, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold in northwest Cambodia, and spent some of his time tending ducks in his backyard.

He claimed he was awaken to the reality of his regime's brutality only after watching a 2003 documentary about the Khmer Rouge S-21 prison, where as many as 16,000 people are believed to have passed through its gates before being taken for execution. Only about a dozen are thought to have survived.

"When I saw the film, it was hard for me to deny (the killings). There's no more doubt left," Khieu Samphan said in an interview with The Associated Press at the time.

"Everything has to go the trial's way now, and there's no other way," he said. "But I also want the public to understand about me, too. I was not involved in any killings," he said at the time.