Top Female Official in Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge Regime Dies

Ieng Thirith was one of the most powerful women in the brutal regime

Ieng Thirith, pictured at the U.N.-backed tribunal in Cambodia in 2010, died aged 83 years old. Photo: Associated Press

Wall Street Journal | 23 August 2015

Ieng Thirith, one of the most powerful women in Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge government who was accused of helping plan and carry out the regime’s genocidal policies in the 1970s, died Saturday. She was 83. 

She and her late husband, Ieng Sary, were among four senior Khmer Rouge leaders indicted in 2010 by a United Nations-backed tribunal for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. She was freed in 2012 without a verdict after being deemed mentally unfit to stand trial due to severe dementia.

Her son, Ieng Vuth, said she had been suffering from dementia, heart troubles and other health problems, according to the Associated Press. 

Mrs. Ieng Thirith, served as social-affairs minister when the Khmer Rouge—under the tyrannical Pol Pot, her brother-in-law—governed Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. During that period at least 1.7 million people, a fifth of the country’s population at the time, died of starvation, disease, overwork or execution during the ultra-Marxist movement’s failed agrarian revolution.

Mrs. Ieng Thirith, and the three other defendants denied the charges when their trial began in 2011 [T2P: Eccc the Clown established in mid-2006, negotiations for its establishment 10 years earlier]. Only two of them, both in their 80s, are still on trial: Nuon Chea, the Khmer Rouge’s chief ideologue and second-in-command, and Khieu Samphan, the regime’s nominal head of state.

Her husband died in March 2013, before a verdict could be reached. 

The premature end to their cases angered many survivors of the Khmer Rouge’s rule, who say the couple effectively escaped punishment for masterminding one of the worst genocides in the 20th century.

The death of Mrs. Ieng Thirith could lead to more calls to expedite proceedings against Messrs. Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan. Both men have suffered bouts of ill health in recent years, prompting fears that the only senior Khmer Rouge leaders still alive could also die before a full accounting of their crimes is completed.

The U.N.-backed tribunal in August 2014 sentenced Messrs. Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan were sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity—directing murder, political persecution and other inhumane acts related to the mass eviction of city-dwellers and executions of enemy soldiers.

Both men have appealed against their convictions, which trial monitors say covered only a small portion of the Khmer Rouge’s crimes. They also face further charges related to genocide—considered the regime’s worst atrocity—in the second phase of their trial, which had been split into at least two parts to make the process more manageable.

Born March 10, 1932, as Khieu Thirith in Phnom Penh, the future Mrs. Ieng Thirith was the youngest of five children. Her father was a provincial judge. She attended the elite Lycée Sisowath in the Cambodian capital before departing for further studies in France in 1952, together with one of her sisters, Khieu Ponnary.

In Paris, the sisters became influenced by Communism, joining their future husbands and other Cambodian students in a Marxist-Leninist study circle that formed the core of what would become the radical Khmer Rouge movement.

Ms. Khieu Thirith, who studied Shakespeare at the Sorbonne, received a degree in English literature. She married Mr. Ieng Sary in 1953, adopted his family name and went on to have four children—three daughters and a son. Ms. Khieu Ponnary, who studied Khmer linguistics, married Pol Pot in 1956.

Mrs. Ieng Thirith returned to Cambodia in 1957 to work as a professor before fleeing to the jungle with her husband and other Khmer Rouge cadres in 1965 to escape government repression.

The Khmer Rouge seized power in April 1975, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and sought to create an agricultural utopia. The group killed many educated citizens and forced urban residents to relocate to rural collectives, many of which failed.

Prosecutors said Mrs. Ieng Thirith was named as social-affairs minister in early 1976, though she claimed to be just a “simple member” of the Khmer Rouge.

“Ieng Thirith was an influential party member who wielded nationwide power as the regime’s social affairs minister,” said Youk Chhang, executive director of the nonprofit Documentation Center of Cambodia, which researches the Khmer Rouge era. “She was personally and directly involved in denying Cambodians even the most basic of health care during the regime’s years in power.”

After their defeat by Vietnamese forces in 1979, the Khmer Rouge retreated into the jungle where they fought a long guerrilla war, controlling a large swath of northwestern Cambodia.

In 1996, Mrs. Ieng Thirith and her husband became the first of the movement’s inner circle to surrender, taking with them thousands of fighters in a move that hastened the Khmer Rouge’s final collapse. Pol Pot, who remarried after divorcing Ms. Khieu Ponnary, died in 1998, having never been captured.

The Iengs lived quietly in Phnom Penh until their arrest in 2007, alongside Messrs. Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, to face charges at the U.N.-backed tribunal.