Death of former Khmer Rouge leader 'Brother Number Two' Nuon Chea

By Dr. Myint Zan

It was apparently the ancient Greek dramatist Menander who stated that “whom the god loves dies young.” The death of the former Khmer Rouge leader “Brother Number Two” Nuon Chea at the ripe old age of 93 arguably indicates that in the case of those whom the good “gods” do not love they are reluctant, for quite a long time indeed, to bring them into their midst or even to consign them to Hades (the ancient Greek “home of the dead”).

This piece is not to rehash the facts already narrated in the obituaries of the person who more than allegedly but actually played a major role in at least indirectly causing the deaths of up to 1.7 million (out of an estimated population of around 7 million in the mid- to late 1970s) Cambodians.

After years of preparation and trial and about 40 years after the crimes that he had committed the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia found Nuon Chea guilty, in 2014, of crimes against humanity and, in 2018, of the crime of genocide.

From the many reports of his death, during the trial, Brother Number Two was not only unrepentant (that would be too much to expect, one supposes, of most though perhaps not all mass murderers especially politically motivated ones) but was quite arrogant, defiant and rude in his behavior in court.

A New York Times obituary stated that his “defense” partly read out by his lawyer consists of 500 pages with 4,000 footnotes. This narration reminded the writer of former Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha who apparently wrote about 4,000 pages of his “memoirs” when he was the dictator of Albania from 1944 to his death in 1985.

Of course, the 500-page document was written mainly by Nuon Chea's lawyer(s) but still this writer makes the association of ideas to another dictator Hoxha (who declared Albania to be an atheistic state in 1967) and who died in power (unlike Nuon Chea).

Still Nuon Chea, who died “peacefully” or at least in comfort, lived considerably longer than Hoxha. Bad as Hoxha's crimes were they were not, at least arguably, as bad as those committed by the late Nuon Chea, Pol Pot and Khieu Samphan. Pol Pot, “Brother Number One,” died in April 1998 and former Khmer Rouge President Dr. Khieu Samphan, now 88 years old was, like Nuon Chea, convicted of both crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide in 2014 and 2018, respectively.

Indeed Khieu Samphan's full name and title would be “Dr. Khieu Samphan.” He did earn his doctorate in economics at the University of Paris in 1959. The title of his doctoral thesis in English translation is “Underdevelopment in Cambodia.” It was translated into English by Laura Summers in 1976 when Samphan was president of Democratic Kampuchea.

Likewise, though not French-trained like Samphan and Saloth Sar (original name of Pol Pot: unlike Samphan, Saloth Sar did not obtain any degree or diploma from France where he studied from 1949 to 1953), Nuon Chea did study law at the Thamassat University in Thailand.

It is indeed ironic that the Khmer Rouge regime was at least nominally headed by a doctorate holder from a prestigious university (Khieu Samphan), and the more secretive Nuon Chea who had studied law in a foreign university would, during the Khmer Rouge years from April 1975 to January 1979, allegedly kill many if not most educated persons, persons with university degrees including law degrees, persons who can speak foreign languages and (so some of the reports stated) even those who wore spectacles!

A brief juxtaposition was made between Nuon Chea and Enver Hoxha who might not have met with each other. A quick search on the web revealed the late king/prince (and dare I say it) wily, opportunistic, egotistical Norodom Sihanouk did meet Hoxha in Tirana, Albania, a few times in the 1970s when he was fully cooperating with the Khmer Rouge whom Sihanouk had persecuted in the 1960s.

In contrast, from 1970 to 1975, the Khmer Rouge and Sihanouk were allies “in their struggle against U.S. imperialism and the Lon Nol clique” (Lon Nol was the leader of the right-wing coup which overthrew Sihanouk in March 1970).

Perhaps less-well-known than the People's Republic of Albania-Democratic Kampuchea relations during the time the Khmer Rouge was in power in Cambodia was the then relations between the governments (shall we say regimes) of the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma and Democratic Kampuchea.

Indeed President (and former General) Ne Win was the first-ever head of state to visit “Democratic Kampuchea” from Nov. 26 to 29 in 1977. Though Ne Win was met at Phnom Penh airport by President Khieu Samphan and feted at dinners, it is not known with certainty whether or not Ne Win had met either Pol Pot or Nuon Chea.

There is a reason for Ne Win being the first head of state to visit Democratic Kampuchea. It is based on a strategy Ne Win adopted vis-a-vis Burma's northeastern neighbor China. Through maintaining friendly relations with the Khmer Rouge regime ― of which China was a major ally ― Ne Win had hoped that China would reduce its support of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) which was then fighting the Ne Win regime.

It seemed to work. The Chinese government almost contemporaneously (around the time of Ne Win's visiting Democratic Kampuchea) and with the re-assumption of power by Deng Xia Peng was not as supportive as before of the underground Communist Party of Burma which then had military and political bases in the China-Burma border areas and inside China itself.

There are at least two English biographies of Pol Pot ― one by David Chandler and another by Phillip Short. The writers were not aware of any full-length biography of Nuon Chea in English or English translation.

There is a full-length “political biography” of General Ne Win. “General Ne Win: A Political Biography” by Robert Taylor was published in June 2015.

In his very indulgent biography of Ne Win, Taylor wrote to the effect that during the mid- to late 1970s when news of the Khmer Rouge atrocities in Democratic Kampuchea became known inside Burma, quite a few people expressed their “gratefulness” if not gratitude to Ne Win and the Ne Win regime. The reason for these people feeling “much obliged” to Ne Win, according to Taylor, was that in Burma the Khmer Rouge-like Communists were not in power, thanks to Ne Win.

This writer was in Burma during the whole period of April 1975 to January 1979 when the Khmer Rouge were in full power. And he has not heard of any expression of thanks, so to speak, to the “Big Daddy” (in transliterated Burmese Aphay Gyian appellation given to the dictator by the sycophants and supposed admirers around him) for such “mercies.”

(In the dystopian novel “1984” first published in 1949, the author of the book George Orwell coined the term “Big Brother.” But even Orwell's “vision” was not dystopian enough to envisage a regime such as the Khmer Rouge which would abolish both money and religion as early as 1975 almost 10 years before 1984.

Orwell did not also envisage the hierarchy of “Brothers One and Two” in Cambodia which became apparent as early as the mid-1970s. The exact term “Big Daddy” referred to by some of Ne Win's underlings cannot also be discerned in “1984.”

The future dictator, Ne Win, was about 12 to 16 years old when Orwell worked as a British police officer in colonial Burma from 1922 to 1926) (It should be added that the appellation given to Ne Win as “Big Daddy or Big Father” is only by a select group of underlings of the dictator and not a formal, official designation accorded to Pol Pot and Nuon Chea, respectively, in the Khmer Rouge years in Cambodia.)

Comparatively Ne Win was (much?) less of a (ruthless), and let's be fair, a less cruel and indeed treacherous dictator than either Hoxha or indeed Pol Pot (his erstwhile cooperator Sihanouk had called him the “master of cruelty”). However Ne Win lived longer than Hoxha and Pol Pot. Hoxha died in office after being the “iron fist” (as a 2016 biography puts it) of Albania for 40 years.

Ne Win after formally ruling Burma for over 26 years continued to “guide,” in “retirement,” his erstwhile underlings in the military regimes of the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) and the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). Ne Win only had to spend about the last 10 months of his life supposedly under house arrest and a very comfortable one too.

To paraphrase, extend or revise the ancient Greek dramatist Menander “the gods” can be whimsical when they parcel out their rewards and punishments. The cruel, unrepentant, arrogant Nuon Chea might have “gotten” just a shade of his just desserts in that he was under house arrest in the last 11 plus years of his life.

Nuon Chea was tried and convicted with all the legal paraphernalia and protections being given to him. A few decades earlier he and his Khmer Rouge colleagues did not accord to their victims ― hundreds of thousands of their country men and women ― not even an iota of the protection and rights generously afforded to them as criminal defendants accused of the most serious crimes.

Admittedly or ostensibly the less cruel dictators were Enver Hoxha, and let's give not quite the “Devil” his due ― somewhat lesser dictator than Hoxha, Ne Win. Still, both Hoxha and Ne Win did not receive either their just or (for that matter unjust) desserts in their long lives for all or any misdeeds they had committed during their long rules.

Dr. Myint Zan is a former (retired) professor of law at Multimedia University, Malaysia. Contact him at myintzan@yahoo.com.au.