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

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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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 fathers 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 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.