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'I Knew Nothing'; Pol Pot thought of me as a patriot, but intellectual--in other words, incapable of heading the revolution.(Khieu Samphan, Cambodia's president during the Khmer Rouge reign)(Interview)(Excerpt)
Byline: Stéphanie Giry
After a decade of stop-and-start negotiations, a United Nations-sponsored tribunal has finally begun to investigate the handful of Khmer Rouge leaders who are still alive in Cambodia. Prosecutors hope to bring them to trial for crimes against humanity, among other charges, next year. But many Cambodians are skeptical that justice will be done before the elderly former guerrillas die off. Most of the Khmer Rouge leaders continue to deny any knowledge of or responsibility for the estimated 1.5 million deaths that occurred between 1975 and 1979, when their forces emptied out Phnom Penh and radically reorganized the countryside. Khieu Samphan, Cambodia's president during the Khmer Rouge reign, recently spoke about his role with Stephanie Giry. Excerpts:
Giry: How did you become affiliated with the Khmer Rouge?
Khieu: In the 1960s, after editing a progressive paper, I became a congressman and, briefly, junior minister of Commerce. I supported Prince [Norodom] Sihanouk, who advocated Cambodia's neutrality between the United States and Vietnam. But in 1967, after I was accused of instigating a large peasant riot, I was forced to go into hiding in the countryside. The Khmer Rouge were already active there, mobilizing and organizing the peasantry. The movement seemed like the only path toward social progress.
Your Ph.D. thesis, written in 1959, advocated the democratic collectivization of the Cambodian countryside. What was its relationship to the policies of the Khmer Rouge?
No relationship. It was a very academic, unrealizable thesis. [Khmer Rouge leader] Pol Pot thought of me as a patriotic intellectual. A patriot, but intellectual--in other words, incapable of heading the revolution. When I told him in 1975 that evacuating Phnom Penh would alienate the people from the party, he compared me to Gorky, who, distressed by the famine in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, kept questioning Lenin.
What did you think of the many people who were dying of starvation in the countryside?
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Source: HighBeam Research, 'I Knew Nothing'; Pol Pot thought of me as a patriot, but...