PROFILE: Who are the four Khmer Rouge leaders facing trial?

Jun 24, 2011
By Robert Carmichael
DPA

Phnom Penh - On Monday the UN-backed tribunal will open its trial of the four surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge movement. The accused face an array of charges including genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and murder. The four deny all charges.

The end of the Cold War sparked the beginning of the end of the Khmer Rouge movement. It finally collapsed in 1999, by which time all four defendants had defected to the government in Phnom Penh. Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died in 1998 after being put under house arrest by his own movement the previous year.

NUON CHEA

The frail 84-year-old with his trademark sunglasses is considered the movement's chief ideologue. Nuon Chea, whose real name is Long Bunruot, was born in Battambang province in western Cambodia in 1926, and studied law in Thailand. He is the only one of the four defendants who did not study in France.

Known as Brother Number Two, Nuon Chea was appointed Deputy Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) in 1960. He was a member of the CPK's Standing Committee, the body that exercised effective power, and reportedly presided over meetings in Pol Pot's absence. He was also on the party's Central Committee.

A number of witnesses have said Nuon Chea was on the Military Committee, which oversaw military and security matters - including torture and execution centres such as S-21, the prison in Phnom Penh that formed the centrepiece of the tribunal's first case. Nuon Chea has denied being on the committee.

Nuon Chea handed himself in to Phnom Penh authorities in 1998 and was granted permission to live in his house in a clearing on the Thai-Cambodian border. In a television interview he said the Khmer Rouge 'didn't kill many; we killed only the bad people, not the good.' He was arrested in September 2007.

KHIEU SAMPHAN

Khieu Samphan was born in 1931 in Svay Rieng province near the border with Vietnam. In 1955 he was granted a scholarship to study in France, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on economics.

While in Paris he joined the Marxist-Leninist Circle, the group of young Cambodian communists from which many of the senior Khmer Rouge leaders later came. The group, which included co-defendant Ieng Thirith and Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, was reportedly founded by Ieng Sary, another co-defendant.

Khieu Samphan was in and out of government during the 1960s while the country's leader, Prince Sihanouk, alternatively co-opted and repressed popular leftists. After a rural uprising in western Cambodia in 1967, which was brutally put down, Khieu Samphan joined the other members of the CPK in the maquis.

Khieu Samphan was a member of the Central Committee and attended a number of Standing Committee meetings, although he has denied being a member of that more powerful body. In April 1976 he was appointed Head of State, a position he claims lacked real power.

In 1998, Khieu Samphan turned himself in and was allowed to live in a house on the Thai-Cambodian border in the same compound as Nuon Chea. He was arrested in November 2007.

IENG SARY

As foreign minister, Ieng Sary was the international face of the Khmer Rouge. He was a member of both the Standing Committee and the Central Committee of the CPK.

Ieng Sary was born in southern Vietnam in 1925. In 1951 he went to study in France and while there joined the French Communist Party. He is thought to have founded the Marxist-Leninist Circle.

By the late 1950s Ieng Sary had returned home with his wife Ieng Thirith. He worked in Phnom Penh teaching history, but went into hiding in 1963 after appearing on a government list of known leftists. By the early 1970s he was living in China working for the CPK. He returned to Cambodia in 1975.

After the regime collapsed in 1979, Ieng Sary was sentenced to death in absentia by the Vietnamese-installed government that replaced the Khmer Rouge. That tribunal, which was widely dismissed as a political show trial, saw Ieng Sary convicted of genocide. Charged with the same crime at the UN-backed tribunal, Ieng Sary is thought to be the only person to have been charged twice for genocide.

In 1996 Ieng Sary defected to the government in Phnom Penh with thousands of followers, a move that preempted the collapse of the Khmer Rouge. In return he received a royal pardon for his 1979 conviction, and was granted an amnesty from prosecution in line with the terms of a 1994 law that banned the Khmer Rouge. He was arrested by the UN-backed tribunal in November 2007.

IENG THIRITH

The daughter of a judge and the sister-in-law of Pol Pot, Ieng Thirith studied Shakespeare in Paris, becoming the first Cambodian to gain a degree in English literature.

She was born in 1932 in Battambang province, western Cambodia. In the early 1970s she ran the Khmer Rouge's radio station based in Hanoi, Vietnam. After the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975 she was appointed Minister of Social Affairs, but was not a member of the Standing Committee or the Central Committee.

She was arrested in November 2007. Previous courtroom appearances have seen Ieng Thirith engage in bizarre outbursts, including one in February 2009 where she threatened that those who accused her of murder would 'be cursed to the seventh circle of hell.'

She had reportedly engaged in 70 similar tirades at the detention centre in Phnom Penh where she is held with the other defendants.