I marveled at how someone who had had such a role in systematic violence and the deaths of 1.7 million people could so calmly state that he lacked regrets.
Get briefed on the story of the week, and developing stories to watch across the Asia-Pacific. With a soft-spoken, quiet voice, he said that no, he had no regrets at all. Nuon Chea’s wife watched with a look of pride on her face, proud that people still came to see her husband. As we sat at the simple wooden table, I spoke with Nuon Chea in French, our only common language. They were an elderly couple, and Nuon Chea was mainly bald, with a fuzz of white hair. David broke the ice by pulling out his wallet and showing pictures of his two small sons. Nuon Chea and his wife invited us to their table, and his wife served us her homemade soy milk as a beverage. Our driver offered to take us to Nuon Chea, and we took him up on his offer.ĭavid and I walked up the steps to Nuon Chea’s small teak home, raised several feet on stilts above the earth to protect against floods, and surrounded by jungle. The young man that David and I had hired as our driver for our roadtrip from Phnom Penh to Pailin and back turned out to be a relative of Khieu Samphan.
With Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photographer David Longstreath, I visited Pailin on the occasion of Cambodia’s parliamentary elections to report on how the Khmer Rouge octogenarian old guard, who now lived there, handled democracy. As a graduate student at Princeton University, I was in Cambodia on a summer fellowship, reporting for the Associated Press. In 2003, I conducted a rare interview with Nuon Chea at his home in Pailin, a remote jungle village of Cambodia. Known as Brother Number Two, at age 92, he is the oldest surviving senior member of the Khmer Rouge and now one of those held responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million people in Cambodia – a fifth of the population – from execution, overwork, disease, and famine from 1975-1979, in the regime’s violent campaign for an agrarian utopia. His conviction came along with the conviction of one other Khmer Rouge leader: Khieu Samphan, age 87. Nuon Chea was convicted of genocide in a tribunal in Phnom Penh last month for his role as Pol Pot’s deputy in Cambodia.
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