March 19, 2013
Ieng Sary.
IENG SARY
Former Khmer Rouge foreign minister
24-10-1925 — 14-3-2013
Former Khmer Rouge foreign minister
24-10-1925 — 14-3-2013
Ieng Sary, who has died aged 87, was a former Khmer Rouge
official whose defection from the Cambodian Maoist rebel group in 1996
led to its collapse, bringing an end to nearly two decades of conflict.
The Khmer Rouge came to power through a civil war that ousted
the American-backed regime of Lon Nol, and ruled Cambodia from 1975 to
1979. They aimed to transform the country into a pure socialist society.
They abolished money, private property, religion and traditional
culture. Cities were emptied, forcing urban residents to become rural
labourers, growing rice and building irrigation schemes.
In four years, between 1.7 million and 2.2 million people - a
quarter of the population - died in the ''killing fields'' from
starvation, disease, overwork, torture and mass execution.
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Ieng Sary and his wife, Ieng Thirith, were members of the
Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot's inner circle. They had all studied together
in Paris and were linked by ties of marriage - Ieng Thirith's sister,
Khieu Ponnary, was Pol Pot's first wife. Under Pol Pot's dictatorship,
Ieng Sary served as deputy prime minister in charge of foreign affairs
until 1979, when Vietnamese forces ousted the Khmer Rouge; a new
Hanoi-installed government sentenced the two men to death in absentia.
The Khmer Rouge retreated to the Thai border, where they
continued fighting for nearly two more decades. During these years Ieng
Sary was a crucial link between the organisation and China, a key source
of money and arms. Former colleagues later accused him of embezzling
millions of dollars from the illegal logging and gem mining operations
along the border with Thailand.
In 1996, however, with the group's fortunes on the wane, Ieng
Sary struck a peace deal with the Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen, and
days later led 3000 Khmer Rouge fighters out of the jungle. The move
was a catalyst for the movement's final disintegration in 1999 (Pol Pot
had died the previous year). It secured Ieng Sary a royal pardon from
King Norodom Sihanouk, a measure of credibility as a peacemaker, and a
comfortable life that he divided between an opulent villa in Phnom Penh
and another home in Pailin, north-western Cambodia.
Ieng Sary claimed that Pol Pot had been ''the sole and
supreme architect of the party's line, strategy and tactics'', and that
he (Ieng Sary) had been a secondary figure, excluded from decisions on
policy and executions. ''Do I have remorse? No,'' he said in 1996. ''I
have no regrets because this was not my responsibility.''
But campaigners fighting for justice soon found evidence that
Ieng Sary had been deeply involved in the bloody purges. In particular,
he was alleged to have persuaded hundreds of Cambodian intellectuals
and diplomats to return home from overseas to help rebuild their
country. The returnees were arrested and put in ''re-education camps''.
Most were executed.
Ieng Sary was also alleged to have publicly encouraged and
facilitated arrests and executions within his foreign ministry and
throughout Cambodia. Under his revolutionary alias ''Comrade Van'', he
was the recipient of many internal Khmer Rouge documents giving details
of tortures and mass executions: ''We are continuing to wipe out
remaining [internal enemies] gradually, no matter if they are opposed to
our revolution overtly or covertly,'' read one cable in 1978.
In 2007 Ieng Sary was arrested by a joint Cambodian-United
Nations tribunal, and put on trial for genocide, crimes against
humanity and breaches of the Geneva Convention. He died before any
verdict could be reached.
Ieng Sary was born Kim Trang in the Tra Ninh province of
southern Vietnam, to a Cambodian father and a Chinese mother. He first
met Pol Pot in the mid-1940s, when they were classmates at Phnom Penh's
elite Lycee Sisowath. Both won government scholarships to study in
France, where they joined the French Communist Party.
After returning to Cambodia in 1957, Ieng Sary taught history
at a school in Phnom Penh while engaging in clandestine militant
activities. In 1963, at a time when suspected communists were being
arrested, he and Pol Pot slipped out of the capital to start a guerrilla
movement in the countryside. In 1971 he moved to Beijing, where his
role was to co-ordinate the Cambodian resistance. When the Khmer Rouge
took power in 1975, Pol Pot was named prime minister and Ieng Sary his
deputy prime minister responsible for foreign affairs.
In this role, Ieng Sary publicly and repeatedly dismissed
reports of atrocities and mass killings. However, a chilling account of
life in the foreign ministry's camp in Phnom Penh, code-named B-1, was
later provided by Laurence Picq, a Frenchwoman who had married a Khmer
Rouge activist but later defected from the movement. In 1984 she wrote a
book in which she claimed that Ieng Sary ''saw conspiracies and
traitors everywhere. He led denunciation sessions that would turn into
collective hysteria. Young wives denounced their husbands without
evidence, children denounced their parents. All children of workers were
revisionists and members of the Soviet KGB. Anyone who had ever smoked
an American cigarette was CIA. Any person with nostalgia for a cafe
creme on the Boulevard St-Michel belonged to the French secret service.
Anyone with Chinese blood was an agent of Beijing or Taiwan.''
Since the UN-backed tribunal was established in 2006, only
one former Khmer Rouge official has been tried and convicted. The
remaining two defendants, both in their 80s, are Nuon Chea, the
movement's chief propagandist, and Khieu Samphan, the nominal head of
state of the Khmer Rouge.
The Khmer Rouge almost destroyed Cambodian Buddhism,
executing tens of thousands of monks and desecrating pagodas. Yet
towards the end of his life Ieng Sary claimed to be a believer, and his
family is reported to be planning to cremate his body in a Buddhist
ceremony.
''I am a gentle person. I believe in good deeds,'' he said.
Telegraph
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