Nuon Chea in the court dock.By Luke Hunt
The Diplomat
December 9, 2011
Old hatreds die hard, and nowhere has this been more evident than at the trial of surviving Khmer Rouge leaders in Phnom Penh. It has been an historic week, with former ideologue Nuon Chea taking the stand while Former Foreign Minister Ieng Sary and one-time head of state Khieu Samphan watched on.
Nuon Chea attempted to portray himself as a noble Khmer. As a young man, he said he had developed a “passion for justice” after witnessing the harsh handling of Cambodian peasants by the Colonial French and rich landowners who “treated them as slaves,”
His resentment of the rich and French was surpassed only by the Vietnamese, who he insisted wanted only to swallow Cambodia like a python devouring a deer.
This was an important political precursor to the rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge who ruled Cambodia from April 1975 to January 1979.
6 comments:
I think there is a lot of truth in what he said. He needed to kill everyone he suspected as Viets or their sympathizers. He rather killed by mistake than to miss a single Youn. If he needed to kill more, even reducing the population to 1-2 million, he could have done it. It's the price we had to pay for. Hero or Villian?
Noun Chea ordered to kill all khmer people who have white skin...
1:06 PM
You want to say bright skin not white skin.
The dark skin were on the country side and the bright skin were from the city.
Hun Sen and Vietnam must responsible for 1.7 millions innocent khmer lives.
Question:
So the Khmer rouge killed the well educated people because of their bright skin/vietnamese ethnic/urban lifes and NOT because they were well educated?
1:06 PM
I think you meant fair skin. Bottom line is, he was cold- blooded and calculating. He targeted all Vietnamese and anyone except those he thought were too dumb. He could have ruled Combodia forever if he left Vietnam alone. Vietnam gave him a number of chances to make peace, and he mistaken that for Vietnam's weakness. He could have the whole Cambodia for himself and his Chinese faction. He screwed up with his fanatical idea of provoking Vietnam. The rest was history.
Post a Comment