Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge leader Nuon Chea dies at 93

Nuon Chea, a senior individual from Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime which prompted the passing of more than 1.7 million individuals, died on Sunday at 93 years old.

Known as “Brother Number Two,” Nuon Chea was the right-hand man and brother-in-law of famous Khmer Rouge tyrant Pol Pot and a key ideologist all through the regime’s reign of dread from 1975 to 1979.

Nuon Chea passed on in hospital, as indicated by the Extraordinary Chambers in The Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). The United Nations-backed tribunal court was formed in 2006 to prosecute Khmer Rouge figures for supposed infringement of international law during the Cambodian genocide.

In 2018, right around four decades after from the breakdown of Pol Pot’s overbearing communist regime, the international court decided that the Khmer Rouge committed genocide. Nuon Chea, who was arrested in 2007, was discovered liable “of genocide, crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.” He was sentenced to life in prison.

He was at that point serving a life sentence in Cambodia after being discovered blameworthy of wrongdoings against humanity in 2014.

Nuon Chea was convicted close by Khieu Samphan, or “Brother Number Four” – they were two of the most senior leaders of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime to be prosecuted for the genocide.

The pair were likewise discovered blameworthy of homicide, extermination, expulsion, subjugation, imprisonment, torment, oppression on political, religious and racial grounds, and other inhumane acts.

About a quarter of Cambodia’s populace – at any rate 1.7 million individuals – are believed to have died during that period, from forced labor, starvation and execution.

During its time in power, the Khmer Rouge regime endeavored to make an absolutely agrarian culture through heartless social designing strategies.

In 2001, Cambodia’s National Assembly casted a ballot to make a purely agrarian society of those related to the regime.

In any case, for some, the convictions that have followed have done little to heal wounds left by the Khmer Rouge.

“No action can assuage the anguish, sadness and regret that haunts the survivors to this day,” former Khmer Rouge prisoner Youk Chhang wrote for CNN in 2014. “Over 35 years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, we still see the effects from this period in almost every facet of Cambodian society.”

Nuon Chea was born in 1926. After the breakdown in 1979 of Democratic Kampuchea, as Cambodia was known, he remained a leading Khmer Rouge figure as the movement worked as a rebel guerrilla force in the nation’s west.

He gave up in 1998, striking a deal with the government that enabled him to live as a free man close to the Thai border until his arrest in 2007, as indicated by the ECCC.

In his final statement to the court, Nuon Chea conceded he carried “moral responsibility” for events during the period, yet additionally asserted his blamelessness.