DPA
Phnom Penh – Nuon Chea, the most senior living Khmer Rouge cadre and the man regarded as its chief ideologue, on Monday blamed neighbouring Vietnam for the huge death toll during his government’s rule of Cambodia between 1975 and 1979.
‘(The crimes) did not originate from the Khmer resistance, and I want people to understand that it was not the Cambodian people who were responsible,’ the 85-year-old defendant told the United Nations-backed war crimes court. ‘Everything was under the control of Vietnam, from its Hanoi headquarters.’
He was speaking as the court convened to hear the start of evidence in its case against the three octogenarian leaders of the ultra-Maoist movement, which is blamed for up to 2.2 million deaths.
Nuon Chea, who was born in 1926 while Cambodia was still under French colonial rule, said France’s ‘mistreatment of Cambodian people’ and similar abuses by rich Cambodians against the poor had motivated him to join the resistance.
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