Name	Pol Pot
Order	General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea
Term start	February 1963
Term end	1981 (party dissolved)
Predecessor	Tou Samouth
Successor	''None (party dissolved)''
Birth date	May 19, 1925
Birth place	Kampong Thom Province, French Indochina
Death date	April 15, 1998
Death place	Anlong Veng, Kingdom of Cambodia
Spouse	1) Khieu Ponnary (div.)2) Mea Son
Party	Communist Party of Kampuchea
Order2	Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea
Term start2	May 13, 1976
Term end2	September 27, 1976
Predecessor2	Khieu Samphan
Successor2	Nuon Chea
Term start3	October 25, 1976
Term end3	January 7, 1979
Predecessor3	Nuon Chea
Successor3	Pen Sovan}}

Saloth Sar (May 19, 1925 – April 15, 1998), better known as Pol Pot, (), was a Cambodian Chinese revolutionary who led the Khmer Rouge from 1963 until his death in 1998. From 1976 to 1979, he served as the Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea.

Pol Pot became leader of Cambodia in mid-1975. During his time in power he imposed a version of agrarian socialism, forcing urban dwellers to relocate to the countryside to work in collective farms and forced labor projects, toward a goal of "restarting civilization" in "Year Zero." The combined effects of forced labor, malnutrition, poor medical care and executions resulted in the deaths of approximately 21 percent of the Cambodian population. In all, an estimated 1,700,000–2,500,000 people died under his leadership.

In 1979 after the invasion of Cambodia by neighboring Vietnam in the Cambodian–Vietnamese War, he fled into the jungles of southwest Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge government collapsed. From 1979 to 1997 he and a remnant of the old Khmer Rouge operated from the border region of Cambodia and Thailand, where they clung to power, with nominal United Nations recognition as the rightful government of Cambodia.

He died in 1998 while under house arrest by the Ta Mok faction of the Khmer Rouge. Since his death, rumours that he was poisoned have persisted.

Biography

Early life (1925–61)

Saloth Sar was born on May 19, 1925—the eighth of nine children, and the second of three sons—of a moderately wealthy family of Chinese descent, in the small fishing village of Prek Sbauv, Kampong Thom Province in a Cambodia dominated by French colonialism. In 1935 he left Prek Sbauv to attend the École Miche, a Catholic school in Phnom Penh. As his sister Roeung was a concubine of King Sisowath Monivong, he often visited the royal palace.

In 1947, he gained admission to the exclusive Lycée Sisowath but was unsuccessful in his studies.

Paris

After switching to a technical school at Russey Keo, north of Phnom Penh, he qualified for a scholarship that allowed for technical study in France. He studied radio electronics at the EFR in Paris from 1949 to 1953. He also participated in an international labour brigade building roads in Zagreb in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1950. After the Soviet Union recognised the Viet Minh as the government of Vietnam in 1950, French Communists (PCF) took up the cause of Vietnam's independence. The PCF's anti-colonialism attracted many young Cambodians, including Saloth.

In 1951, he joined a communist cell in a secret organization known as the ''Cercle Marxiste'' (''"Marxist circle"'') which had taken control of the Khmer Student's Association (AER) that same year. Within a few months, Saloth also joined the PCF. Historian Philip Short has said that Saloth's poor academic record was a considerable advantage within the anti-intellectual PCF, who saw uneducated peasants as the true proletariat.

Return

As a result of failing his exams in three successive years, he was forced to return to Cambodia in January 1953. He was the first member of the ''Cercle Marxiste'' to return to Cambodia and was given the task of evaluating the various groups rebelling against the government. He recommended the Khmer Viet Minh, and in August 1954, Saloth, along with Rath Samoeun, travelled to the Viet Minh Eastern Zone headquarters in the village of Krabao in the Kampong Cham Province/Prey Veng Province in the border area of Cambodia.

Saloth and the others learned that the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP) was little more than a Vietnamese front organization. In 1954, the Cambodians at the Eastern Zone Headquarters split into two groups. Due to the Geneva peace accord of 1954 requirement that all Viet Minh forces and insurgents e expelled, one group followed the Vietnamese back to Vietnam as cadres Vietnam would use in a future war to liberate Cambodia. The other group, including Saloth, returned to Cambodia.

After Cambodian independence following the 1954 Geneva Conference, right and left wing parties struggled against each other for power in the new government. Khmer King Norodom Sihanouk played the parties against each other while using the police and army to suppress extreme political groups. Corrupt elections in 1955 led many leftists in Cambodia to abandon hope of taking power by legal means. The communist movement, while ideologically committed to guerrilla warfare in these circumstances, did not launch a rebellion because of the weakness of the party.

After his return to Phnom Penh, Saloth became the liaison between the above-ground parties of the left (Democrats and Pracheachon) and the underground communist movement. He married Khieu Ponnary on July 14, 1956. She returned to Lycée Sisowath but now as a teacher, while he taught French literature and history at Chamraon Vichea, a new private college.

The path to rebellion (1962–68)

In January 1962, the government of Cambodia rounded up most of the leadership of the far-left Pracheachon party ahead of parliamentary elections due in June. The newspapers and other publications of the party were also closed. This event effectively ended any above-ground political role for the communist movement in Cambodia. In July 1962, the Underground communist party secretary Tou Samouth was arrested and later killed while in custody. The arrests created a situation where Saloth could become the ''de facto'' deputy leader of the party. When Tou Samouth was murdered, Saloth became the acting leader of the communist party. At a party meeting attended by at most 18 people in 1963, he was elected Secretary of the central committee of the party. In March 1963, Saloth went into hiding after his name was published in a list of leftist suspects put together by the police for Norodom Sihanouk. He fled to the Vietnamese border region and made contact with Vietnamese units fighting against South Vietnam.

In early 1964, Saloth convinced the Vietnamese to help the Cambodian Communists set up their own base camp. The central committee of the party met later that year and issued a declaration calling for armed struggle. The declaration also emphasized the idea of "self-reliance" in the sense of extreme Cambodian nationalism. In the border camps, the ideology of the Khmer Rouge was gradually developed. The party, breaking with Marxism, declared that rural peasant farmers were the true working class proletarian and lifeblood of the revolution. This is, in some sense, explained by the fact that none of the central committee were in any sense "working class." All of them had grown up in a feudal peasant society.

After another wave of repression by Sihanouk in 1965, the Khmer Rouge movement under Saloth grew at a rapid rate. Many teachers and students were forced to leave the cities to the countryside to join the movement.

In April 1965, Saloth went to North Vietnam to gain approval for an uprising in Cambodia against the government. North Vietnam refused to support any uprising because of agreements being negotiated with the Cambodian government. Sihanouk promised to allow the Vietnamese to use Cambodian territory and Cambodian ports in their war against South Vietnam.

After returning to Cambodia in 1966, Saloth organized a party meeting where a number of important decisions were made. The party was officially but secretly renamed the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). Lower ranks of the party were not informed of the decision. It was also decided to establish command zones and prepare each region for an uprising against the government.

In early 1966 fighting broke out in the countryside between peasants and the government over the price paid for rice. Saloth's Khmer Rouge was caught by surprise by the uprisings and was unable to take any real advantage of them. But the government's refusal to find a peaceful solution to the problem created rural unrest that played into the hands of the Communist movement.

It was not until early 1967 that Saloth decided to launch a national uprising, even after North Vietnam refused to assist it in any real way. The uprising was launched on January 18, 1968 with a raid on an army base south of Battambang. The Battambang area had already seen two years of great peasant unrest. The attack was driven off by the army, but the Khmer Rouge had captured a number of weapons, which were then used to drive police forces out of Cambodian villages.

By the summer of 1968, Saloth began the transition from a party leader working with a collective leadership into the absolutist leader of the Khmer Rouge movement. Where before he had shared communal quarters with other leaders, he now had his own compound with a personal staff and a troop of guards. Outsiders were no longer allowed to approach him. Rather, people were summoned into his presence by his staff.

The path to power (1969–75)

The movement was estimated to consist of no more than 1500 regulars, but the core of the movement was supported by a number of villagers many times that size. While weapons were in short supply, the insurgency was still able to operate in twelve of nineteen districts of Cambodia. In the middle of 1969 Saloth called a party conference and decided on a change in propaganda strategy. Up to 1969, opposition to Sihanouk was at the center of their propaganda. But it was decided at the conference to shift the party's propaganda against the right-wing parties of Cambodia and their supposed pro-American attitudes. The party ceased making anti-Sihanouk public statements, but in private the party had not changed its view of him.

The road to power for Saloth and the Khmer Rouge was opened by the events of January 1970 in Cambodia. Sihanouk, while out of the country, ordered the government to stage anti-Vietnamese protests in the capital. The protesters quickly went out of control and wrecked the embassies of both North and South Vietnam. Sihanouk, who had ordered the protests, then denounced them from Paris and blamed unnamed individuals in Cambodia for them. These actions, along with intrigues by Sihanouk's followers in Cambodia, convinced the government that he should be removed as head of state. The National Assembly voted to remove Sihanouk from office. Afterward, the government closed Cambodia's ports to Vietnamese weapons traffic and demanded that the Vietnamese leave Cambodia.

The North Vietnamese reacted to the political changes in Cambodia by sending Premier Phạm Văn Đồng to meet Sihanouk in China and recruit him into an alliance with the Khmer Rouge. Saloth was also contacted by the Vietnamese who now offered him whatever resources he wanted for his insurgency against the Cambodian government. Saloth and Sihanouk were actually in Beijing at the same time but the Vietnamese and Chinese leaders never informed Sihanouk of the presence of Saloth or allowed the two men to meet. Shortly after, Sihanouk issued an appeal by radio to the people of Cambodia to rise up against the government and support the Khmer Rouge. In May 1970, Saloth finally returned to Cambodia and the pace of the insurgency greatly increased.

Earlier, on March 29, 1970, the Vietnamese had taken matters into their own hands and launched an offensive against the Cambodian army. A force of 40,000 Vietnamese quickly overran large parts of eastern Cambodia reaching to within of Phnom Penh before being pushed back. In these battles the Khmer Rouge and Saloth played a very small role.

In October 1970, Saloth issued a resolution in the name of the Central Committee. The resolution stated the principle of independence mastery which was a call for Cambodia to decide its own future independent of the influence of any other country. The resolution also included statements describing the betrayal of the Cambodian Communist movement in the 1950s by the Viet Minh. This was the first statement of the anti-Vietnamese/self sufficiency at all costs ideology that would be a part of the Pol Pot regime when it took power years later.

Through 1971, the Vietnamese (North Vietnamese and Viet Cong) did most of the fighting against the Cambodian government while Saloth and the Khmer Rouge functioned almost as auxiliaries to their forces. Saloth took advantage of the situation to gather in new recruits and to train them to a higher standard than previously was possible. Saloth also put resources of Khmer Rouge organizations into political education and indoctrination. While accepting anyone regardless of background into the Khmer Rouge army at this time, Saloth greatly increased the requirements for membership in the party. Students and so-called middle peasants were now rejected by the party. Those with clear peasant backgrounds were the preferred recruits for party membership. These restrictions were ironic in that most of the senior party leadership including Saloth came from student and middle peasant backgrounds. They also created an intellectual split between the educated old guard party members and the uneducated peasant new party members.

In early 1972, Saloth toured the insurgent/Vietnamese controlled areas in Cambodia. He saw a regular Khmer Rouge army of 35,000 men taking shape supported by around 100,000 irregulars. China was supplying five million dollars a year in weapons and Saloth had organized an independent revenue source for the party in the form of rubber plantations in eastern Cambodia using forced labour.

The Khmer Rouge also used the massive U.S bombings of villages in Eastern Cambodia, where over two million tons of bombs were dropped during Operation Menu, to aid in their recruitment of members.

After a central committee meeting in May 1972, the party under the direction of Saloth began to enforce new levels of discipline and conformity in areas under their control. Minorities such as the Chams were forced to conform to Cambodian styles of dress and appearance. These policies, such as forbidding the Chams from wearing jewelry, were soon extended to the whole population. A haphazard version of land reform was undertaken by Saloth. Its basis was that all land holdings should be of uniform size. The party also confiscated all private means of transportation at this time. The 1972 policies were aimed at reducing the peoples of the liberated areas to a sort of feudal peasant equality. These policies were generally favourable at the time to poor peasants and extremely unfavourable to refugees from towns who had fled to the countryside.

In 1972, the Vietnamese army forces began to withdraw from the fighting against the Cambodian government. Saloth issued a new set of decrees in May 1973 which started the process of reorganizing peasant villages into cooperatives where property was jointly owned and individual possessions banned.

Control of the countryside

The Khmer Rouge advanced during 1973. After they reached the edges of Phnom Penh, Saloth issued orders during the peak of the rainy season that the city be taken. The orders led to futile attacks and wasted lives among the Khmer Rouge army. By the middle of 1973, the Khmer Rouge under Saloth controlled almost two-thirds of the country and half the population. Vietnam realised that it no longer controlled the situation and began to treat Saloth as more of an equal leader than a junior partner.

In late 1973, Saloth made strategic decisions about the future of the war. His first decision was to cut the capital off from contact from outside supply and effectively put the city under siege. The second decision was to enforce tight command on people trying to leave the city through the Khmer Rouge lines. He also ordered a series of general purges. Former government officials, along with anyone with an education, were singled out in the purges. A set of new prisons was also constructed in Khmer Rouge run areas. The Cham minority attempted an uprising around this time against attempts to destroy their culture. While the uprising was quickly crushed, Saloth ordered that harsh physical torture be used against most of those involved in the revolt. As previously, Saloth tested out harsh new policies against the Cham minority before extending them to the general population of the country.

The Khmer Rouge also had a policy of evacuating urban areas to the countryside. When the Khmer Rouge took the town of Kratie in 1971, Saloth and other members of the party were shocked at how fast the liberated urban areas shook off socialism and went back to the old ways. Various ideas were tried to re-create the town in the image of the party, but nothing worked. In 1973, out of total frustration, Saloth decided that the only solution was to send the entire population of the town to the fields in the countryside. He wrote at the time "if the result of so many sacrifices was that the capitalists remain in control, what was the point of the revolution?". Shortly after, Saloth ordered the evacuation of the people of Kompong Cham for the same reasons. The Khmer Rouge then moved on in 1974 to evacuate the larger city of Oudong.

Internationally, Saloth and the Khmer Rouge were able to gain the recognition of 63 countries as the true government of Cambodia. A move was made at the UN to give the seat for Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge prevailed by three votes.

In September 1974, Saloth gathered the central committee of the party together. As the military campaign was moving toward a conclusion, Saloth decided to move the party toward implementing a socialist transformation of the country in the form of a series of decisions. The first one was, that after their victory, they would evacuate the main cities, moving the population to the countryside. The second was that they would cease to put money in circulation and quickly phase it out. The final decision was that the party would accept Saloth's first major purge. In 1974, Saloth had purged a top party official named Prasith. Prasith was taken out into a forest and shot without any chance to defend himself. His death was followed by a purge of cadres who, like Prasith, were ethnically Thai. Saloth offered as explanation that the class struggle had become acute required a strong stand against party enemies.

The Khmer Rouge were positioned for a final offensive against the government in January 1975. At the same time at a press event in Beijing, Sihanouk proudly announced Saloth's "death list" of enemies to kill after victory. The list, which originally contained seven names, expanded to 23, including all the senior government leaders along with the military and police leadership. The rivalry between Vietnam and Cambodia also came out into the open. North Vietnam, as the rival socialist country in Indochina, was determined to take Saigon before the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh. Shipments of weapons from China were delayed and in one instance the Cambodians were forced to sign a humiliating document thanking Vietnam for shipments of what were in fact Chinese weapons.

In September 1975, the government formed a Supreme National Council with new leadership, with the aim of negotiating a surrender to the Khmer Rouge. It was headed by Sak Sutsakhan who had studied in France with Saloth, and was cousin to the Khmer Rouge Deputy Secretary Nuon Chea. Saloth reacted to this by adding the names of everyone involved to his post-victory death list. Government resistance finally collapsed on September 17, 1975.

Leader of Kampuchea (1975–79)

The Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. As the leader of the Communist Party, Saloth Sar was the designated leader of the new regime. He took the name "brother number one" and declared his ''nom de guerre'' Pol Pot. This has generally supposed to derive from ''Politique potentielle,'' the French equivalent of a phrase supposedly coined for him by the Chinese leadership. An alternative version of the origin of Pol Pot's name is from Philip Short, who states that Saloth Sar announced that he was adopting the name in July 1970 and suspects that it is derived from pol: “the Pols were royal slaves, an aboriginal people,” and that “Pot” was simply a “euphonic monosyllable” that he liked.

A new constitution was adopted on January 5, 1976, officially altering the country's name to "Democratic Kampuchea." The newly established Representative Assembly held its first plenary meeting on April 11 – 13, electing a new government with Pol Pot as prime minister. His predecessor, Khieu Samphan was instead given the position of head of state as ''President of the State Presidium.'' Prince Sihanouk was given no role in the government and was placed under detention.

Immediately after the fall of Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge began to implement their concept of Year Zero and ordered the complete evacuation of Phnom Penh and all other recently captured major towns and cities. Those leaving were told that the evacuation was due to the threat of severe American bombing and it would last for no more than a few days.

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge had been evacuating captured urban areas for many years, but the evacuation of Phnom Penh was unique in scale. The first operations to evacuate urban areas occurred in 1968 in the Ratanakiri area and were aimed at moving people deeper into Khmer Rouge territory to better control them. From 1971–1973, the motivation changed. Pol Pot and the other senior leaders were frustrated that urban Cambodians were retaining old habits of trade and business. When all other methods had failed, evacuation to the countryside was adopted to solve the problem.

In 1976, people were reclassified as full-rights (base) people, candidates and depositees – so called because they included most of the new people who had been deposited from the cities into the communes. Depositees were marked for destruction. Their rations were reduced to two bowls of rice soup, or "p'baw" per day. This led to widespread starvation. "New people" were allegedly given no place in the elections taking place on March 20, 1976, despite the fact the constitution was said to have established universal suffrage for all Cambodians over age 18.

The Khmer Rouge leadership boasted over the state-controlled radio that only one or two million people were needed to build the new agrarian communist utopia. As for the others, as their proverb put it, "To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss."

Hundreds of thousands of the new people, and later the depositees, were taken out in shackles to dig their own mass graves. Then the Khmer Rouge soldiers beat them to death with iron bars and hoes or buried them alive. A Khmer Rouge extermination prison directive ordered, "Bullets are not to be wasted." These mass graves are often referred to as The Killing Fields.

The Khmer Rouge also classified by religion and ethnic group. They banned all religion and dispersed minority groups, forbidding them to speak their languages or to practice their customs. They especially targeted Buddhist monks, Muslims, Christians, Western-educated intellectuals, educated people in general, people who had contact with Western countries or with Vietnam, disabled people, and the ethnic Chinese, Laotians and Vietnamese. Some were put in the S-21 camp for interrogation involving torture in cases where a confession was useful to the government. Many others were summarily executed. Confessions forced at S-21 were extracted from prisoners through such methods as raising prisoners by their arms tied behind and dislocating shoulders, removing toenails with pliers, suffocating a prisoner repeatedly, and skinning a person while alive.

According to François Ponchaud's book ''Cambodia: Year Zero,'' "Ever since 1972 the guerrilla fighters had been sending all the inhabitants of the villages and towns they occupied into the forest to live and often burning their homes, so that they would have nothing to come back to." The Khmer Rouge refused offers of humanitarian aid, a decision that caused a humanitarian catastrophe: millions died of starvation and brutal government-inflicted overwork in the countryside. To the Khmer Rouge, outside aid went against their principle of national self-reliance.

Property became collective, and education was dispensed at communal schools. Children were raised on a communal basis. Even meals were prepared and eaten communally. Pol Pot's regime was extremely paranoid. Political dissent and opposition were not permitted. People were treated as opponents based on their appearance or background. Torture was widespread. Thousands of politicians and bureaucrats accused of association with previous governments were executed. Phnom Penh was turned into a ghost city, while people in the countryside were dying of starvation or illnesses or simply killed.

U.S. officials had predicted that more than one million people would be killed by the Khmer Rouge if they took power, and President Gerald Ford had warned of "an unbelievable horror story." Different estimates as to the number killed by the Khmer Rouge regime vary from 750,000 to over three million. Analysis of 20,000 mass grave sites by the DC-Cam Mapping Program and Yale University indicate at least 1,386,734 victims. Estimates of the total number of deaths resulting from Khmer Rouge policies, including disease and starvation, range from 1.7 to 2.5 million out of a population of around 8 million. Credible Western and Eastern sources put the death toll inflicted by the Khmer Rouge at 1.7 million. A specific source, such as a figure of 3 million deaths between 1975 and 1979, was given by the People's Republic of Kampuchea. François Ponchaud suggested 2.3 million, R.J. Rummel 2.4 million (counting democide in the civil wars), the Yale Cambodian Genocide Project 1.7 million, and Amnesty International 1.4 million. Demographer Marek Sliwinski concluded that at least 1.8 million were killed from 1975–9 on the basis of the total population decline, compared to roughly 40,000 killed by the U.S. bombing. Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a "most likely" figure of 2.2 million. After five years of researching some 20,000 grave sites, he concludes that, "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution." Execution is believed to have accounted for about 30–50 percent of the death toll. This would indicate 2.5 to 3 million deaths, but normal mortality over this period would have accounted for about 500,000 deaths — subtracting this from the total sum, we arrive at Etcheson's range for the number of "excess" deaths attributable to the Khmer Rouge regime. A U.N. investigation reported 2–3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed. Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion. By late 1979, U.N. and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to “the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,” who were saved by American and international aid after the Vietnamese invasion. It is estimated that at least half a million more were starved to death or slaughtered after the invasion from Vietnam.

Pol Pot aligned the country politically with the People's Republic of China and adopted an anti-Soviet line. This alignment was more political and practical than ideological. Vietnam was aligned with the Soviet Union so Cambodia aligned with the rival of the Soviet Union and Vietnam in Southeast Asia. China had been supplying the Khmer Rouge with weapons for years before they took power.

In December 1976, Pol Pot issued directives to the senior leadership to the effect that Vietnam was now an enemy. Defenses along the border were strengthened and unreliable deportees were moved deeper into Cambodia. Pol Pot's actions were in response to the Vietnamese Communist Party's fourth Congress which approved a resolution describing Vietnam's special relationship with Laos and Cambodia. It also talked of how Vietnam would forever be associated with the building and defense of the other two countries.

Conflict with Vietnam

In May 1975 a squad of Khmer Rouge soldiers raided and took Phu Quoc Island. By 1977, relations with Vietnam began to fall apart. There were small border clashes in January. Pol Pot tried to prevent border disputes by sending a team to Vietnam. The negotiations failed which resulted in even more border disputes. On April 30, the Cambodian army, backed by artillery, crossed over into Vietnam. In attempting to explain Pol Pot's behaviour, one region-watcher suggested that Cambodia was attempting to intimidate Vietnam, by irrational acts, into respecting or at least fearing Cambodia to the point they would leave the country alone. However, these actions only served to anger the Vietnamese people and government against the Khmer Rouge.

In May 1976, Vietnam sent its air force into Cambodia in a series of raids. In July, Vietnam forced a Treaty of Friendship on Laos which gave Vietnam almost total control over the country. In Cambodia, Khmer Rouge commanders in the Eastern Zone began to tell their men that war with Vietnam was inevitable and that once the war started their goal would be to recover parts of Vietnam (Khmer Krom) that were once part of Cambodia, who's people, they alleged, were struggling for independence from Vietnam. It is not clear whether these statements were the official policy of Pol Pot.

In September 1977, Cambodia launched division-scale raids over the border which once again left a trail of murder and destruction in villages. The Vietnamese claimed that around 1,000 people had been killed or injured. Three days after the raid, Pol Pot officially announced the existence of the formerly secret Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) and finally announced to the world that the country was a Communist state. In December, after having exhausted all other options, Vietnam sent 50,000 troops into Cambodia in what amounted to a short raid. The raid was meant to be secret. The Vietnamese withdrew after declaring they had achieved their goals, and the invasion was just a warning. Upon being threatened, the Vietnamese army promised to return with support from the Soviet Union. Pol Pot's actions made the operation much more visible than the Vietnamese had intended and created a situation in which Vietnam appeared weak.

After making one final attempt to negotiate a settlement with Cambodia, Vietnam decided that it had to prepare for a full war. Vietnam also tried to pressure Cambodia through China. However, China's refusal to pressure Cambodia and the flow of weapons from China into Cambodia were both signs that China also intended to act against Vietnam.

When Cambodian communists rebelled in the eastern zone in May 1978 Pol Pot’s armies were unable to crush them quickly. On May 10 his radio broadcast a call not only to ‘exterminate the 50 million Vietnamese’ but also to ‘purify the masses of the people’ of Cambodia. Of 1.5 million easterners, branded as ‘Khmer bodies with Vietnamese minds’, at least 100,000 were exterminated in six months. Later that year, in response to threats to its borders and the Vietnamese people, Vietnam attacked Cambodia to overthrow the Khmer Rouge, which Vietnam could justify on the basis of self-defense. The Cambodian army was defeated, the regime was toppled and Pol Pot fled to the Thai border area. In January 1979, Vietnam installed a new government under Heng Samrin, composed of Khmer Rouge who had fled to Vietnam to avoid the purges. Pol Pot eventually regrouped with his core supporters in the Thai border area where he received shelter and assistance. At different times during this period, he was located on both sides of the border. The military government of Thailand used the Khmer Rouge as a buffer force to keep the Vietnamese away from the border. The Thai military also made money from the shipment of weapons from China to the Khmer Rouge. Eventually Pol Pot was able to rebuild a small military force in the west of the country with the help of the People's Republic of China. The PRC also initiated the Sino-Vietnamese War around this time.

After the Khmer Rouge were driven from power by the Vietnamese in 1979, the United States and other powers refused to allow the Vietnamese-backed Cambodian government to take the seat of Cambodia at the United Nations. The seat, by default, remained in the hands of the Khmer Rouge. These countries considered that however negative allowing the Khmer Rouge to hold on to the seat was, recognising Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia was worse. Also, representatives of these countries argued that both claimants to the seat were Khmer Rouge governments, because Vietnam's Cambodian government was formed from ex-Khmer Rouge cadres.

Aftermath (1979–98)

The U.S. opposed the Vietnamese military occupation of Cambodia, and in the mid-1980s supported insurgents opposed to the regime of Heng Samrin, approving $5 million in aid to the Khmer People's National Liberation Front of former prime minister Son Sann and the pro-Sihanouk ANS in 1985. Regardless of this, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge remained the best-trained and most capable of the three insurgent groups who, despite sharply divergent ideologies, had formed the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK) alliance three years earlier. China continued to funnel extensive military aid to the Khmer Rouge, and critics of U.S. foreign policy claimed that the U.S. was indirectly sponsoring the Khmer Rouge due to U.S. assistance given the CGDK in keeping control of the United Nations "seat" of Cambodia. The U.S. refused to recognise the Cambodian government installed by the army of Vietnam or to recognise any Cambodian government operating while Cambodia was under the military occupation of Vietnam.

During this period, the Khmer Rouge was able to rebuild its military, now titled the "National Army of Democratic Kampuchea" (NADK), as well as its infamous ruling party, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), the sinister and shadowy ''"angkar"'', in the mountain area of Phnom Malai. By mid-1980s, with the cooperation of the West and China, the Khmer Rouge had grown to about 35 to 50 thousand troops and committed cadres.

Archives uncovered in Cambodia in 2009 have shed light on the deaths of several Western yachtsman, including 2 Australians and a New Zealander who were forced to confess under duress to being CIA operatives. The Australian yachtsman strayed into disputed waters, where they were captured by the Khmer Rouge and sent to Pol Pot's S-21 death camp. Later Australian foreign minister Andrew Peacock resigned in 1981 over his unease over the Fraser government’s recognition of Pol Pot’s regime under pressure from China.

Pol Pot lived in the Phnom Malai area, giving interviews in the early 1980s accusing all those who opposed him of being traitors and "puppets" of the Vietnamese until he disappeared from public view. In 1985, his "retirement" was announced, but he kept hiding somewhere close by, still pulling the Khmer Rouge strings of power.

Phnom Malai was the location where in 1981 Pol Pot made his famous declarations denying guilt for the brutalities of the organization he led: ::''[Pol Pot] said that he knows that many people in the country hate him and think he’s responsible for the killings. He said that he knows many people died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. He said he must accept responsibility because the line was too far to the left, and because he didn’t keep proper track of what was going on. He said he was like the master in a house he didn’t know what the kids were up to, and that he trusted people too much. For example, he allowed [one person] to take care of central committee business for him, [another person] to take care of intellectuals, and [a third person] to take care of political education.... These were the people to whom he felt very close, and he trusted them completely. Then in the end ... they made a mess of everything.... They would tell him things that were not true, that everything was fine, that this person or that was a traitor. In the end they were the real traitors. The major problem had been cadres formed by the Vietnamese.''

In December 1985, the Vietnamese launched a major offensive and overran most of the Khmer Rouge and other insurgent positions. The Khmer Rouge headquarters at Phnom Malai and its base near Pailin were completely destroyed; the Vietnamese attackers suffered substantial losses during the attack.

Pol Pot fled to Thailand where he lived for the next six years. His headquarters were a plantation villa near Trat. He was guarded by Thai Special Unit 838, though it has been argued that operatives of the Central Intelligence Agency had possibly engineered his assassination and replacement by an impostor.

Pol Pot officially resigned from the party in 1985 citing asthma as a contributing factor, but continued as the de facto Khmer Rouge leader and a dominant force within the anti-Vietnam alliance. He handed day to day power to Son Sen, his hand-picked successor. Opponents of the Khmer Rouge claimed that they were sometimes acting in an inhumane manner in territory controlled by the alliance but none of the forces fighting in Cambodia could be said to have clean hands.

In 1986, his new wife Mea Son gave birth to a daughter, Sitha, named after an experimental form of North Vietnamese cookery. Shortly after, Pol Pot moved to China for medical treatment for cancer of the face. He remained there until 1988.

In 1989, Vietnam withdrew from Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge established a new stronghold area in the west near the Thai border and Pol Pot relocated back into Cambodia from Thailand. Pol Pot refused to cooperate with the peace process, and kept fighting the new coalition government. The Khmer Rouge kept the government forces at bay until 1996, when troops started deserting. Several important Khmer Rouge leaders also defected. The government had a policy of making peace with Khmer Rouge individuals and groups after negotiations with the organization as a whole failed. In 1995 Pol Pot experienced a stroke that paralyzed the left side of his body.

Pol Pot ordered the execution of his life-long right-hand man Son Sen on June 10, 1997 for attempting to make a settlement with the government. Eleven members of his family were killed also, although Pol Pot later denied that he had ordered this. He then fled his northern stronghold, but was later arrested by Khmer Rouge military Chief Ta Mok on June 19, 1997.Pol Pot has not been seen in public since 1980, two years after his overthrow at the hands of an invading Vietnamese army. He was sentenced to death in absentia by a Phnom Penh court soon afterward. In July he was subjected to a show trial for the death of Son Sen and sentenced to lifelong house arrest.

Death

On the night of April 15, 1998, the Voice of America, of which Pol Pot was a devoted listener, announced that the Khmer Rouge had agreed to turn him over to an international tribunal. According to his wife, he died in his bed later in the night while waiting to be moved to another location. Ta Mok claimed that his death was due to heart failure. Despite government requests to inspect the body, it was cremated a few days later at Anlong Veng in the Khmer Rouge zone, raising strong suspicions that he committed suicide or was poisoned.

Analysis and perspectives

Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians. Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing. The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city.

On March 30, 2009, Kaing Guek Eav (also known by his ''nom de guerre'' Duch), Khmer Rouge commandant of Cambodia's Tuol Sleng prison and torture house, testified at the UN-backed Tribunal, that US policies in the 1970s contributed to the brutal regime's rise to power. "I think the Khmer Rouge would already have been demolished," he said of their status by 1970.

"But Mr. Kissinger (then Special Assistant to the President for Foreign Affairs and National Security Advisor) and Richard Nixon were quick [to back coup leader General Lon Nol], and then the Khmer Rouge noted the golden opportunity." "Because of this alliance, the Khmer Rouge were able to build up their power over the course of their 1970–75 war against the Lon Nol regime," Duch said.

This view has been disputed, with author John M. Del Vecchio asserting that the Communist forces had the American equivalent of four million armed and organized troops overrun two-thirds of the country prior to any American bombing, and with documents uncovered from the Soviet archives revealing that the North Vietnamese invasion of 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge following negotiations with Nuon Chea.

International support

Support from China

The Chinese government is regarded to have been the main international support for the Khmer Rouge and its leader Pol Pot. The Chinese provided financial and military support to the party. China's motivation is believed to have been due to their intense rivalry with Vietnam at the time, which coincided with Pol Pot's plans to regain the ancient lands of the kingdom, which were, and are currently, belonging to neighboring countries such as Vietnam.

Support from UN

During the Khmer Rouge regime, and a period of time directly after, the Khmer Rouge was recognised by UN as a legitimate government, and therefore held a seat at the UN. While many leaders at the UN attempted to appeal this, the majority allowed the Khmer Rouge (later titled "Democratic Republic of Kampuchea") to keep their seat for 15 years following the genocide.

See also

Khmer Rouge

Cambodian Civil War

First Indochina War

Vietnam War (Second Indochina War)

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

Enemies of the People (film)

References

Further reading

Denise Affonço: ''To The End Of Hell: One Woman's Struggle to Survive Cambodia's Khmer Rouge.'' (With Introductions by Jon Swain and David Chandler.) ISBN 978-0-9555729-5-1

David P. Chandler/Ben Kiernan/Chanthou Boua: ''Pol Pot plans the future: Confidential leadership documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976–1977''. Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. 1988. ISBN 0-938692-35-6

David P. Chandler: ''Brother Number One: A political biography of Pol Pot''. Westview Press, Boulder, Col. 1992. ISBN 0-8133-3510-8

Stephen Heder: ''Pol Pot and Khieu Samphan''. Clayton, Victoria: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, 1991. ISBN 0-7326-0272-6

Ben Kiernan: "Social Cohesion in Revolutionary Cambodia," Australian Outlook, December 1976

Ben Kiernan: "Vietnam and the Governments and People of Kampuchea", Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (October–December 1979)

Ben Kiernan: ''The Pol Pot regime: Race, power and genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge'', 1975–79. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press 1997. ISBN 0-300-06113-7

Ben Kiernan: ''How Pol Pot came to power: A history of Cambodian communism, 1930–1975''. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press 2004. ISBN 0-300-10262-3

Ponchaud, François. Cambodia: Year Zero. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978

Vickery, Michael. Cambodia: 1975–1982. Boston: South End Press, 1984

Pescali, Piergiorgio. Indocina. Bologna: Emil, 2010

External links

A meeting with Pol Pot Elizabeth Becker of ''The New York Times''

Interview with P. Short, UCLA International Institute

Biography of comrade Pol Pot, secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. A pamphlet published by Democratic Kampucheas foreign ministry

Long live the 17th anniversary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea : speech

Cambodian Genocide: material compiled by Dr Stuart D Stein

Cambodian Genocide Program, 1994–2008

Cambodia Tribunal Monitor

Nate Thayer's Interview with Pol Pot on YouTube, Part 1

Nate Thayer's Interview with Pol Pot on YouTube, Part 2

State Violence in Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1979) and Retribution (1979–2004)

Diary From Darkness

{{S-ttl|title = Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea |years = 1976–1980}} |- {{S-ttl|title = Director of the Higher Institute of National Defence |years = 1985–1997}} |- {{S-ttl|title = Secretary of the Kampuchean Communist Party |years = 1963–1981}} |- {{S-ttl|title = General Secretary of the Party of Democratic Kampuchea |years = 1981–1985}} |- {{S-ttl|title = Supreme Commander of the National Army of Democratic Kampuchea |years = 1980–1985}} |-

Category:1925 births Category:1998 deaths Category:Anti-intellectualists Category:Cambodian atheists Category:Cambodian communists Category:Cambodian revolutionaries Category:Cambodian people of Chinese descent Category:Cancer survivors Category:Cold War leaders Category:Communist Party of Kampuchea politicians Category:Communist rulers Category:Guerrillas Category:Leaders who took power by coup Category:Maoist theorists Category:People from Kampong Thom Province Category:People of the Vietnam War Category:Prime Ministers of Cambodia

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Name	Saddam Hussein
Native name	صدام حسين
Office	5th President of Iraq
Term start	16 July 1979
Term end	9 April 2003
Primeminister
Predecessor	Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr
Successor	Jay Garner*
Office2	Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council
Term start2	16 July 1979
Term end2	9 April 2003
Predecessor2	Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr
Successor2	Post abolished
Office3	Secretary General of the Regional Command (Iraqi Ba'ath-cell)
1blankname3	National Secretary
1namedata3	Michel Aflaq (until 1989)Himself
Term start3	16 July 1979
Term end3	13 December 2003 (''de facto'', 30 December 2006, ''de jure'')
Predecessor3	Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr
Successor3	Izzat Ibrahim ad-Douri
Office4	Prime Minister of Iraq
Term start4	29 May 1994
Term end4	9 April 2003
Predecessor4	Ahmad Husayn Khudayir as-Samarrai
Successor4	Mohammad Bahr al-Ulloum**
Term start5	16 July 1979
Term end5	23 March 1991
Predecessor5	Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr
Successor5	Sa'dun Hammadi
Birth name	Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti
Birth date	April 28, 1937
Birth place	Al-Awja, Iraq
Death date	December 30, 2006
Death place	Kadhimiya, Iraq
Party	Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party (1957–1966)Baghdad-based Ba'ath Party (1966–2006) (NPF)
Spouse	Sajida Talfah, Samira Shahbandar
Children	Uday, Qusay, Raghad, Rana, Hala
Religion	Sunni Islam
Footnotes	*As administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq.**As Acting President of the Governing Council of Iraq. }}

Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti (Arabic: ''''; 28 April 1937 – 30 December 2006) was the fifth President of Iraq, serving in this capacity from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003. A leading member of the revolutionary Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, and later, the Baghdad-based Ba'ath Party and its regional organisation Ba'ath Party – Iraq Region, which espoused ba'athism, a mix of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, Saddam played a key role in the 1968 coup, later referred to as the 17 July Revolution, that brought the party to long-term power of Iraq.

As vice president under the ailing General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, and at a time when many groups were considered capable of overthrowing the government, Saddam created security forces through which he tightly controlled conflict between the government and the armed forces. In the early 1970s, Saddam nationalized oil and other industries. The state-owned banks were put under his control, leaving the system eventually insolvent mostly due to the Iran–Iraq War, the Gulf War and UN sanctions. Through the 1970s, Saddam cemented his authority over the apparatuses of government as oil money helped Iraq's economy to grow at a rapid pace. Positions of power in the country were filled with Sunnis, a minority that made up only a fifth of the population.

Saddam suppressed several movements, particularly Shi'a and Kurdish movements seeking to overthrow the government or gain independence, respectively. Saddam maintained power during the Iran–Iraq War of 1980 through 1988. In 1990 he invaded and looted Kuwait. An international coalition came to free Kuwait in the Gulf War of 1991, but did not end Saddam's rule. Whereas some venerated him for his aggressive stance against Israel, including firing missiles at Israeli targets, he was widely condemned for the brutality of his dictatorship.

In March 2003, a coalition of countries led by the U.S. and U.K. invaded Iraq to depose Saddam, after U.S. President George W. Bush accused him of possessing weapons of mass destruction and having ties to al-Qaeda. Saddam's Ba'ath party was disbanded and the nation made a transition to a democratic system. Following his capture on 13 December 2003 (in Operation Red Dawn), the trial of Saddam took place under the Iraqi interim government. On 5 November 2006, he was convicted of charges related to the 1982 killing of 148 Iraqi Shi'ites and was sentenced to death by hanging. The execution of Saddam Hussein was carried out on 30 December 2006.

Youth

Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was born in the town of Al-Awja, 13 km (8 mi) from the Iraqi town of Tikrit, to a family of shepherds from the al-Begat tribal group, a sub-group of the Al-Bu Nasir (البو ناصر) tribe. His mother, Subha Tulfah al-Mussallat, named her newborn son ''Saddam'', which in Arabic means "One who confronts"; he is always referred to by this personal name, which may be followed by the patronymic and other elements. He never knew his father, Hussein 'Abid al-Majid, who disappeared six months before Saddam was born. Shortly afterward, Saddam's 13-year-old brother died of cancer. The infant Saddam was sent to the family of his maternal uncle Khairallah Talfah until he was three.

His mother remarried, and Saddam gained three half-brothers through this marriage. His stepfather, Ibrahim al-Hassan, treated Saddam harshly after his return. At about age 10, Saddam fled the family and returned to live in Baghdad with his uncle Kharaillah Tulfah. Tulfah, the father of Saddam's future wife, was a devout Sunni Muslim and a veteran from the 1941 Anglo-Iraqi War between Iraqi nationalists and the United Kingdom, which remained a major colonial power in the region. Later in his life relatives from his native Tikrit became some of his closest advisors and supporters. Under the guidance of his uncle he attended a nationalistic high school in Baghdad. After secondary school Saddam studied at an Iraqi law school for three years, dropping out in 1957 at the age of 20 to join the revolutionary pan-Arab Ba'ath Party, of which his uncle was a supporter. During this time, Saddam apparently supported himself as a secondary school teacher.

Revolutionary sentiment was characteristic of the era in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. In Iraq progressives and socialists assailed traditional political elites (colonial era bureaucrats and landowners, wealthy merchants and tribal chiefs, monarchists). Moreover, the pan-Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt profoundly influenced young Ba'athists like Saddam. The rise of Nasser foreshadowed a wave of revolutions throughout the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s, with the collapse of the monarchies of Iraq, Egypt, and Libya. Nasser inspired nationalists throughout the Middle East by fighting the British and the French during the Suez Crisis of 1956, modernizing Egypt, and uniting the Arab world politically.

In 1958, a year after Saddam had joined the Ba'ath party, army officers led by General Abd al-Karim Qasim overthrew Faisal II of Iraq. The Ba'athists opposed the new government, and in 1959 Saddam was involved in the unsuccessful United States-backed plot to assassinate Qasim.

Rise to power

Army officers with ties to the Ba'ath Party overthrew Qasim in a coup in 1963. Ba'athist leaders were appointed to the cabinet and Abdul Salam Arif became president. Arif dismissed and arrested the Ba'athist leaders later that year. Saddam returned to Iraq, but was imprisoned in 1964. Just prior to his imprisonment and until 1968, Saddam held the position of Assistant Secretary of the Regional Command - he was elected to the Regional Command as the story goes with help from Michel Aflaq, the founder of ba'athist thought. He escaped from prison in 1967 and quickly became a leading member of the party. In 1968, Saddam participated in a bloodless coup led by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr that overthrew Abdul Rahman Arif. Al-Bakr was named president and Saddam was named his deputy, and deputy chairman of the Ba'athist Revolutionary Command Council. According to biographers, Saddam never forgot the tensions within the first Ba'athist government, which formed the basis for his measures to promote Ba'ath party unity as well as his resolve to maintain power and programs to ensure social stability.

Iraq was a strategic buffer state for the United States against the Soviet Union, and Saddam was often seen as an anti-Soviet leader in the 1960s and 1970s. Some even suggested that John F. Kennedy's administration supported the Ba'ath party's takeover. Although Saddam was al-Bakr's deputy, he was a strong behind-the-scenes party politician. Al-Bakr was the older and more prestigious of the two, but by 1969 Saddam Hussein clearly had become the moving force behind the party.

Political program

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, formally the al-Bakr's second-in-command, Saddam built a reputation as a progressive, effective politician. At this time, Saddam moved up the ranks in the new government by aiding attempts to strengthen and unify the Ba'ath party and taking a leading role in addressing the country's major domestic problems and expanding the party's following.

After the Ba'athists took power in 1968, Saddam focused on attaining stability in a nation riddled with profound tensions. Long before Saddam, Iraq had been split along social, ethnic, religious, and economic fault lines: Sunni versus Shi'ite, Arab versus Kurd, tribal chief versus urban merchant, nomad versus peasant. Stable rule in a country rife with factionalism required both massive repression and the improvement of living standards.

With the help of increasing oil revenues, Saddam diversified the largely oil-based Iraqi economy. Saddam implemented a national infrastructure campaign that made great progress in building roads, promoting mining, and developing other industries. The campaign helped Iraq's energy industries. Electricity was brought to nearly every city in Iraq, and many outlying areas.

Before the 1970s, most of Iraq's people lived in the countryside and roughly two-thirds were peasants. This number would decrease quickly during the 1970s as global oil prices helped revenues to rise from less than a half billion dollars to tens of billions of dollars and the country invested into industrial expansion.

Saddam was lucky for the revenue. The Economist described the sentiments, stating that "Much as Adolf Hitler won early praise for galvanising German industry, ending mass unemployment and building autobahns, Saddam earned admiration abroad for his deeds. He had a good instinct for what the "Arab street" demanded, following the decline in Egyptian leadership brought about by the trauma of Israel's six-day victory in the 1967 war, the death of the pan-Arabist hero, Gamal Abdul Nasser, in 1970, and the "traitorous" drive by his successor, Anwar Sadat, to sue for peace with the Jewish state. Saddam's self-aggrandising propaganda, with himself posing as the defender of Arabism against Jewish or Persian intruders, was heavy-handed, but consistent as a drumbeat. It helped, of course, that his mukhabarat (secret police) put dozens of Arab news editors, writers and artists on the payroll."

In 1972 Saddam started developing his chemical weapons program. In 1973 he signed a 15-year Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union.

Saddam focused on fostering loyalty to the Ba'athists in the rural areas. After nationalizing foreign oil interests, Saddam supervised the modernization of the countryside, mechanizing agriculture on a large scale, and distributing land to peasant farmers. The Ba'athists established farm cooperatives and the government also doubled expenditures for agricultural development in 1974–1975. Saddam's welfare programs were part of a combination of "carrot and stick" tactics to enhance support for Saddam. The state-owned banks were put under his thumb. Lending was based on cronyism

Development went forward at such a fevered pitch that two million people from other Arab countries and even Yugoslavia worked in Iraq to meet the growing demand for labor.

Succession

In 1976, Saddam rose to the position of general in the Iraqi armed forces, and rapidly became the strongman of the government. As the ailing, elderly al-Bakr became unable to execute his duties, Saddam took on an increasingly prominent role as the face of the government both internally and externally. He soon became the architect of Iraq's foreign policy and represented the nation in all diplomatic situations. He was the ''de facto'' leader of Iraq some years before he formally came to power in 1979. He slowly began to consolidate his power over Iraq's government and the Ba'ath party. Relationships with fellow party members were carefully cultivated, and Saddam soon accumulated a powerful circle of support within the party.

In 1979 al-Bakr started to make treaties with Syria, also under Ba'athist leadership, that would lead to unification between the two countries. Syrian President Hafez al-Assad would become deputy leader in a union, and this would drive Saddam to obscurity. Saddam acted to secure his grip on power. He forced the ailing al-Bakr to resign on 16 July 1979, and formally assumed the presidency.

Shortly afterwards, he convened an assembly of Ba'ath party leaders on 22 July 1979. During the assembly, which he ordered videotaped (viewable via this reference), Saddam claimed to have found a fifth column within the Ba'ath Party and directed Muhyi Abdel-Hussein to read out a confession and the names of 68 alleged co-conspirators. These members were labelled "disloyal" and were removed from the room one by one and taken into custody. After the list was read, Saddam congratulated those still seated in the room for their past and future loyalty. The 68 people arrested at the meeting were subsequently tried together and found guilty of treason. 22 were sentenced to execution. Other high-ranking members of the party formed the firing squad. By 1 August 1979, hundreds of high-ranking Ba'ath party members had been executed.

Genocidal campaign against Kurds

The Al-Anfal Campaign was a genocidal campaign against the Kurdish people (and many others) in Iraqi Kurdistan led by the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and headed by Ali Hassan al-Majid. The campaign takes its name from Surat al-Anfal in the Qur'an, which was used as a code name by the former Iraqi Ba'athist regime for a series of attacks against the ''peshmerga'' rebels and the mostly Kurdish civilian population of rural Northern Iraq, conducted between 1986 and 1989 culminating in 1988. This campaign also targeted Shabaks and Yazidis, Assyrians, Turkoman people and Mandeans and many villages belonging to these ethnic groups were also destroyed. Some reports cite Saddam Hussein's army as being responsible for 200,000 civilian deaths.

Political repression

Saddam was notable for terror against his own people. ''The Economist'' described Saddam as "one of the last of the 20th century's great dictators, but not the least in terms of egotism, or cruelty, or morbid will to power".

''The New York Times'' described in its obituary how Saddam "murdered as many as a million of his people, many with poison gas. He tortured, maimed and imprisoned countless more. His unprovoked invasion of Iran is estimated to have left another million people dead. His seizure of Kuwait threw the Middle East into crisis. More insidious, arguably, was the psychological damage he inflicted on his own land. Hussein created a nation of informants — friends on friends, circles within circles — making an entire population complicit in his rule". Others have estimated 800,000 deaths caused by Saddam not counting the Iran-Iraq war. Estimates as to the number of Iraqis executed by Saddam's regime vary from 300–500,000 to over 600,000, estimates as to the number of Kurds he massacred vary from 70,000 to 300,000, and estimates as to the number killed in the put-down of the 1991 rebellion vary from 60,000 to 200,000. Estimates for the number of dead in the Iran-Iraq war range upwards from 300,000.

Iraqi society is divided along lines of language, religion and ethnicity; Saddam's government rested on the support of the 20% minority of Sunnis. The Ba'ath Party was increasingly concerned about potential Shi'a Islamist influence following the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The Kurds of northern Iraq (who are Sunni, but not Arabs) were also permanently hostile to the Ba'athist party's pan-Arabism. To maintain power Saddam tended either to provide them with benefits so as to co-opt them into the regime, or to take repressive measures against them. The major instruments for accomplishing this control were the paramilitary and police organizations. Beginning in 1974, Taha Yassin Ramadan (himself a Kurd Ba'athist), a close associate of Saddam, commanded the People's Army, which was responsible for internal security. As the Ba'ath Party's paramilitary, the People's Army acted as a counterweight against any coup attempts by the regular armed forces. In addition to the People's Army, the Department of General Intelligence (Mukhabarat) was the most notorious arm of the state security system, feared for its use of torture and assassination. It was commanded by Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam's younger half-brother. Since 1982, foreign observers believed that this department operated both at home and abroad in their mission to seek out and eliminate Saddam's perceived opponents.

The Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International issued regular reports of widespread imprisonment and torture.

Personality cult

As a sign of his consolidation of power, Saddam's personality cult pervaded Iraqi society. He had thousands of portraits, posters, statues and murals erected in his honor all over Iraq. His face could be seen on the sides of office buildings, schools, airports, and shops, as well as on Iraqi currency. Saddam's personality cult reflected his efforts to appeal to the various elements in Iraqi society. A clotheshorse, he appeared in the costumes of the Bedouin, the traditional clothes of the Iraqi peasant (which he essentially wore during his childhood), and even Kurdish clothing, but also appeared in Western suits customed by his favorite tailor, projecting the image of an urbane and modern leader. Sometimes he would also be portrayed as a devout Muslim, wearing full headdress and robe, praying toward Mecca.

He also conducted two show elections, in 1995 and in 2002. In the 1995 referendum, conducted on October 15, he reportedly received 99.96% of the votes in a 99.47% turnout, getting only 3052 negative votes among an electorate of 8.4 million. In the October 15, 2002 referendum he officially achieved 100% of approval votes and 100% turnout, as the electoral commission reported the next day that every one of the 11,445,638 eligible voters cast a "Yes" vote for the president.

He erected statues around the country, which Iraqis toppled after his fall.

Foreign affairs

Iraq's relations with the Arab world have been extremely varied. Relations between Iraq and Egypt violently ruptured in 1977, when the two nations broke relations with each other following Iraq's criticism of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's peace initiatives with Israel. In 1978, Baghdad hosted an Arab League summit that condemned and ostracized Egypt for accepting the Camp David accords. However, Egypt's strong material and diplomatic support for Iraq in the war with Iran led to warmer relations and numerous contacts between senior officials, despite the continued absence of ambassadorial-level representation. Since 1983, Iraq has repeatedly called for restoration of Egypt's "natural role" among Arab countries.

Saddam developed a reputation for liking expensive goods, such as his diamond-coated Rolex wristwatch, and sent copies of them to his friends around the world. To his ally Kenneth Kaunda Saddam once sent a Boeing 747 full of presents — rugs, televisions, ornaments. Kaunda sent back his own personal magician.

Saddam had close relationship with Russian intelligence agent Yevgeny Primakov and apparently Primakov helped Saddam to stay in power in 1991.

Saddam's only visit to a Western country took place in September 1975 when he met with his friend, Prime Minister Jacques Chirac in Paris, France.

Several Iraqi leaders, Lebanese arms merchant Sarkis Soghanalian and others have told that Saddam financed Chirac's party. In 1991 Saddam threatened to expose those who had taken largasse from him: "From Mr. Chirac to Mr. Chevènement, politicians and economic leaders were in open competition to spend time with us and flatter us. We have now grasped the reality of the situation. If the trickery continues, we will be forced to unmask them, all of them, before the French public." France armed Saddam and it was Iraq's largest trade partner throughout Saddam's rule. Seized documents show how French officials and businessmen close to Chirac, including Charles Pasqua, his former interior minister, personally benefitted from the deals with Saddam.

Because that Saddam Hussein rarely left Iraq, Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam's aides, traveled abroad extensively and represented Iraq at many diplomatic meetings. In foreign affairs, Saddam sought to have Iraq play a leading role in the Middle East. Iraq signed an aid pact with the Soviet Union in 1972, and arms were sent along with several thousand advisers. However, the 1978 crackdown on Iraqi Communists and a shift of trade toward the West strained Iraqi relations with the Soviet Union; Iraq then took on a more Western orientation until the Gulf War in 1991.

After the oil crisis of 1973, France had changed to a more pro-Arab policy and was accordingly rewarded by Saddam with closer ties. He made a state visit to France in 1975, cementing close ties with some French business and ruling political circles. In 1975 Saddam negotiated an accord with Iran that contained Iraqi concessions on border disputes. In return, Iran agreed to stop supporting opposition Kurds in Iraq. Saddam led Arab opposition to the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel (1979).

Saddam initiated Iraq's nuclear enrichment project in the 1980s, with French assistance. The first Iraqi nuclear reactor was named by the French "Osirak". Osirak was destroyed on 7 June 1981 by an Israeli air strike (Operation Opera).

Nearly from its founding as a modern state in 1920, Iraq has had to deal with Kurdish separatists in the northern part of the country. Saddam did negotiate an agreement in 1970 with separatist Kurdish leaders, giving them autonomy, but the agreement broke down. The result was brutal fighting between the government and Kurdish groups and even Iraqi bombing of Kurdish villages in Iran, which caused Iraqi relations with Iran to deteriorate. However, after Saddam had negotiated the 1975 treaty with Iran, the Shah withdrew support for the Kurds, who suffered a total defeat.

Iran–Iraq War

In early 1979, Iran's Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution, thus giving way to an Islamic republic led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. The influence of revolutionary Shi'ite Islam grew apace in the region, particularly in countries with large Shi'ite populations, especially Iraq. Saddam feared that radical Islamic ideas — hostile to his secular rule — were rapidly spreading inside his country among the majority Shi'ite population.

There had also been bitter enmity between Saddam and Khomeini since the 1970s. Khomeini, having been exiled from Iran in 1964, took up residence in Iraq, at the Shi'ite holy city of An Najaf. There he involved himself with Iraqi Shi'ites and developed a strong, worldwide religious and political following against the Iranian Government, whom Saddam tolerated. However, when Khomeini began to urge the Shi'ites there to overthrow Saddam and under pressure from the Shah, who had agreed to a rapprochement between Iraq and Iran in 1975, Saddam agreed to expel Khomeini in 1978 to France. However this turned out to be an imminent failure and a political catalyst, for Khomeini had access to more media connections and also collaborated with a much larger Iranian community under his support whom he used to his advantage.

After Khomeini gained power, skirmishes between Iraq and revolutionary Iran occurred for ten months over the sovereignty of the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway, which divides the two countries. During this period, Saddam Hussein publicly maintained that it was in Iraq's interest not to engage with Iran, and that it was in the interests of both nations to maintain peaceful relations. However, in a private meeting with Salah Omar Al-Ali, Iraq's permanent ambassador to the United Nations, he revealed that he intended to invade and occupy a large part of Iran within months. Later (probably to appeal for support from the United States and most Western nations), he would make toppling the Islamic government one of his intentions as well. Iraq invaded Iran, first attacking Mehrabad Airport of Tehran and then entering the oil-rich Iranian land of Khuzestan, which also has a sizable Arab minority, on 22 September 1980 and declared it a new province of Iraq. With the support of the Arab states, the United States, and Europe, and heavily financed by the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, Saddam Hussein had become "the defender of the Arab world" against a revolutionary Iran. The only exception was The Soviet Union, who initially refused to supply Iraq on the basis of Neutrality in the conflict, although in his memoirs, Mikhail Gorbachev claimed that Leonid Brezhnev refused to aid Saddam over infuriation of Saddam's treatment of Iraqi Communists. Consequently, many viewed Iraq as "an agent of the civilized world". The blatant disregard of international law and violations of international borders were ignored. Instead Iraq received economic and military support from its allies, who conveniently overlooked Saddam's use of chemical warfare against the Kurds and the Iranians and Iraq's efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

In the first days of the war, there was heavy ground fighting around strategic ports as Iraq launched an attack on Khuzestan. After making some initial gains, Iraq's troops began to suffer losses from human wave attacks by Iran. By 1982, Iraq was on the defensive and looking for ways to end the war.

At this point, Saddam asked his ministers for candid advice. Health Minister Dr. Riyadh Ibrahim suggested that Saddam temporarily step down to promote peace negotiations. Initially, Saddam Hussein appeared to take in this opinion as part of his cabinet democracy. A few weeks later, Dr. Ibrahim was sacked when held responsible for a fatal incident in an Iraqi hospital where a patient died from intravenous administration of the wrong concentration of potassium supplement.

Dr. Ibrahim was arrested a few days after he started his new life as a sacked Minister. He was known to have publicly declared before that arrest that he was "glad that he got away alive." Pieces of Ibrahim's dismembered body were delivered to his wife the next day.

Iraq quickly found itself bogged down in one of the longest and most destructive wars of attrition of the 20th century. During the war, Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian forces fighting on the southern front and Kurdish separatists who were attempting to open up a northern front in Iraq with the help of Iran. These chemical weapons were developed by Iraq from materials and technology supplied primarily by West German companies as well as the Reagan administration of the United States which also supplied Iraq with "satellite photos showing Iranian deployments" and advised Hussein to bomb civilian targets in Tehran and other Iranian cities. France sold 25 billion dollars worth arms to Saddam.

Saddam reached out to other Arab governments for cash and political support during the war, particularly after Iraq's oil industry severely suffered at the hands of the Iranian navy in the Persian Gulf. Iraq successfully gained some military and financial aid, as well as diplomatic and moral support, from the Soviet Union, China, France, and the United States, which together feared the prospects of the expansion of revolutionary Iran's influence in the region. The Iranians, demanding that the international community should force Iraq to pay war reparations to Iran, refused any suggestions for a cease-fire. Despite several calls for a ceasefire by the United Nations Security Council, hostilities continued until 20 August 1988.

On 16 March 1988, the Kurdish town of Halabja was attacked with a mix of mustard gas and nerve agents, killing 5,000 civilians, and maiming, disfiguring, or seriously debilitating 10,000 more. (''see Halabja poison gas attack'') The attack occurred in conjunction with the 1988 al-Anfal campaign designed to reassert central control of the mostly Kurdish population of areas of northern Iraq and defeat the Kurdish peshmerga rebel forces. The United States now maintains that Saddam ordered the attack to terrorize the Kurdish population in northern Iraq, but Saddam's regime claimed at the time that Iran was responsible for the attack which some including the U.S. supported until several years later. (See also Halabja poison gas attack.)

The bloody eight-year war ended in a stalemate. There were hundreds of thousands of casualties with estimates of up to one million dead. Neither side had achieved what they had originally desired and at the borders were left nearly unchanged. The southern, oil rich and prosperous Khuzestan and Basra area (the main focus of the war, and the primary source of their economies) were almost completely destroyed and were left at the pre 1979 border, while Iran managed to make some small gains on its borders in the Northern Kurdish area. Both economies, previously healthy and expanding, were left in ruins.

Saddam borrowed tens of billions of dollars from other Arab states and a few billions from elsewhere during the 1980s to fight Iran, mainly to prevent the expansion of Shiite radicalism. However, this had proven to completely backfire both on Iraq and on the part of the Arab states, for Khomeini was widely perceived as a hero for managing to defend Iran and maintain the war with little foreign support against the heavily backed Iraq and only managed to boost Islamic radicalism not only within the Arab states, but within Iraq itself, creating new tensions between the Sunni Ba'ath Party and the majority Shiite population. Faced with rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure and internal resistance, Saddam desperately sought out cash once again, this time for postwar reconstruction.

Tensions with Kuwait

The end of the war with Iran served to deepen latent tensions between Iraq and its wealthy neighbor Kuwait. Saddam urged the Kuwaitis to forgive the Iraqi debt accumulated in the war, some $30 billion, but they refused.

Saddam pushed oil-exporting countries to raise oil prices by cutting back production; Kuwait refused, however. In addition to refusing the request, Kuwait spearheaded the opposition in OPEC to the cuts that Saddam had requested. Kuwait was pumping large amounts of oil, and thus keeping prices low, when Iraq needed to sell high-priced oil from its wells to pay off a huge debt.

Saddam had always argued that Kuwait was historically an integral part of Iraq, and that Kuwait had only come into being through the maneuverings of British imperialism; this echoed a belief that Iraqi nationalists had voiced for the past 50 years. This belief was one of the few articles of faith uniting the political scene in a nation rife with sharp social, ethnic, religious, and ideological divides. Saddam's Iraq became "the third-largest recipient of U.S. assistance".

U.S. ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie met with Saddam in an emergency meeting on 25 July 1990, where the Iraqi leader stated his intention to ''give negotiations only... one more brief chance'' before forcing Iraq's claims on Kuwait. U.S. officials attempted to maintain a conciliatory line with Iraq, indicating that while George H. W. Bush and James Baker did not want force used, they would not take any position on the Iraq–Kuwait boundary dispute and did not want to become involved. Whatever Glaspie did or did not say in her interview with Saddam, the Iraqis assumed that the United States had invested too much in building relations with Iraq over the 1980s to sacrifice them for Kuwait. Later, Iraq and Kuwait met for a final negotiation session, which failed. Saddam then sent his troops into Kuwait. As tensions between Washington and Saddam began to escalate, the Soviet Union, under Mikhail Gorbachev, strengthened its military relationship with the Iraqi leader, providing him military advisers, arms and aid.

Gulf War

On 2 August 1990, Saddam invaded Kuwait, initially claiming assistance to "Kuwaiti revolutionaries," thus sparking an international crisis. On 4 August an Iraqi-backed "Provisional Government of Free Kuwait" was proclaimed, but a total lack of legitimacy and support for it led to an 8 August announcement of a "merger" of the two countries. On 28 August Kuwait formally became the 19th Governorate of Iraq. Just two years after the 1988 Iraq and Iran truce, "Saddam Hussein did what his Gulf patrons had earlier paid him to prevent." Having removed the threat of Iranian fundamentalism he "overran Kuwait and confronted his Gulf neighbors in the name of Arab nationalism and Islam."

When later asked why he invaded Kuwait, Saddam first claimed that it was because Kuwait was rightfully Iraq's 19th province and then said "When I get something into my head I act. That's just the way I am." After Saddam's seizure of Kuwait in August 1990, a UN coalition led by the United States drove Iraq's troops from Kuwait in February 1991. The ability for Saddam Hussein to pursue such military aggression was from a "military machine paid for in large part by the tens of billions of dollars Kuwait and the Gulf states had poured into Iraq and the weapons and technology provided by the Soviet Union, Germany, and France."

Shortly before he invaded Kuwait, he shipped 100 new Mercedes 200 Series cars to top editors in Egypt and Jordan. Two days before the first attacks, Saddam reportedly offered Egypt's Hosni Mubarak 50 million dollars in cash, "ostensibly for grain".

U.S. President George H. W. Bush responded cautiously for the first several days. On one hand, Kuwait, prior to this point, had been a virulent enemy of Israel and was the Persian Gulf monarchy that had had the most friendly relations with the Soviets. On the other hand, Washington foreign policymakers, along with Middle East experts, military critics, and firms heavily invested in the region, were extremely concerned with stability in this region. The invasion immediately triggered fears that the world's price of oil, and therefore control of the world economy, was at stake. Britain profited heavily from billions of dollars of Kuwaiti investments and bank deposits. Bush was perhaps swayed while meeting with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who happened to be in the U.S. at the time.

Co-operation between the United States and the Soviet Union made possible the passage of resolutions in the United Nations Security Council giving Iraq a deadline to leave Kuwait and approving the use of force if Saddam did not comply with the timetable. U.S. officials feared Iraqi retaliation against oil-rich Saudi Arabia, since the 1940s a close ally of Washington, for the Saudis' opposition to the invasion of Kuwait. Accordingly, the U.S. and a group of allies, including countries as diverse as Egypt, Syria and Czechoslovakia, deployed a massive amount of troops along the Saudi border with Kuwait and Iraq in order to encircle the Iraqi army, the largest in the Middle East.

Saddam's officers looted Kuwait, stripping even the marble from its palaces to move it to Saddam's own palace.

During the period of negotiations and threats following the invasion, Saddam focused renewed attention on the Palestinian problem by promising to withdraw his forces from Kuwait if Israel would relinquish the occupied territories in the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip. Saddam's proposal further split the Arab world, pitting U.S.- and Western-supported Arab states against the Palestinians. The allies ultimately rejected any linkage between the Kuwait crisis and Palestinian issues.

Saddam ignored the Security Council deadline. Backed by the Security Council, a U.S.-led coalition launched round-the-clock missile and aerial attacks on Iraq, beginning 16 January 1991. Israel, though subjected to attack by Iraqi missiles, refrained from retaliating in order not to provoke Arab states into leaving the coalition. A ground force consisting largely of U.S. and British armoured and infantry divisions ejected Saddam's army from Kuwait in February 1991 and occupied the southern portion of Iraq as far as the Euphrates.

On 6 March 1991, Bush announced:

In the end, the over-manned and under-equipped Iraqi army proved unable to compete on the battlefield with the highly mobile coalition land forces and their overpowering air support. Some 175,000 Iraqis were taken prisoner and casualties were estimated at over 85,000. As part of the cease-fire agreement, Iraq agreed to scrap all poison gas and germ weapons and allow UN observers to inspect the sites. UN trade sanctions would remain in effect until Iraq complied with all terms. Saddam publicly claimed victory at the end of the war.

Postwar period

Iraq's ethnic and religious divisions, together with the brutality of the conflict that this had engendered, laid the groundwork for postwar rebellions. In the aftermath of the fighting, social and ethnic unrest among Shi'ite Muslims, Kurds, and dissident military units threatened the stability of Saddam's government. Uprisings erupted in the Kurdish north and Shi'a southern and central parts of Iraq, but were ruthlessly repressed.

The United States, which had urged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam, did nothing to assist the rebellions. The Iranians, despite the widespread Shi'ite rebellions, had no interest in provoking another war, while Turkey opposed any prospect of Kurdish independence, and the Saudis and other conservative Arab states feared an Iran-style Shi'ite revolution. Saddam, having survived the immediate crisis in the wake of defeat, was left firmly in control of Iraq, although the country never recovered either economically or militarily from the Gulf War. Saddam routinely cited his survival as "proof" that Iraq had in fact won the war against the U.S. This message earned Saddam a great deal of popularity in many sectors of the Arab world. John Esposito, however, claims that "Arabs and Muslims were pulled in two directions. That they rallied not so much to Saddam Hussein as to the bipolar nature of the confrontation (the West versus the Arab Muslim world) and the issues that Saddam proclaimed: Arab unity, self-sufficiency, and social justice." As a result, Saddam Hussein appealed to many people for the same reasons that attracted more and more followers to Islamic revivalism and also for the same reasons that fueled anti-Western feelings. "As one U.S. Muslim observer noted: People forgot about Saddam's record and concentrated on America ... Saddam Hussein might be wrong, but it is not America who should correct him." A shift was, therefore, clearly visible among many Islamic movements in the post war period "from an initial Islamic ideological rejection of Saddam Hussein, the secular persecutor of Islamic movements, and his invasion of Kuwait to a more populist Arab nationalist, anti-imperialist support for Saddam (or more precisely those issues he represented or championed) and the condemnation of foreign intervention and occupation."

Saddam, therefore, increasingly portrayed himself as a devout Muslim, in an effort to co-opt the conservative religious segments of society. Some elements of Sharia law were re-introduced, and the ritual phrase "Allahu Akbar" ("God is great"), in Saddam's handwriting, was added to the national flag. Saddam also commissioned the production of a "Blood Qur'an", written using 27 litres of his own blood, to thank God for saving him from various dangers and conspiracies.

Relations between the United States and Iraq remained tense following the Gulf War. The U.S. launched a missile attack aimed at Iraq's intelligence headquarters in Baghdad 26 June 1993, citing evidence of repeated Iraqi violations of the "no fly zones" imposed after the Gulf War and for incursions into Kuwait.

The United Nations sanctions placed upon Iraq when it invaded Kuwait were not lifted, blocking Iraqi oil exports. This caused immense hardship in Iraq and virtually destroyed the Iraqi economy and state infrastructure. Only smuggling across the Syrian border, and humanitarian aid ameliorated the humanitarian crisis. On 9 December 1996 the UN allowed Saddam's government to begin selling limited amounts of oil for food and medicine. Limited amounts of income from the United Nations started flowing into Iraq through the United Nations Oil for Food program.

U.S. officials continued to accuse Saddam of violating the terms of the Gulf War's cease fire, by developing weapons of mass destruction and other banned weaponry, and violating the UN-imposed sanctions. Also during the 1990s, President Bill Clinton maintained sanctions and ordered air strikes in the "Iraqi no-fly zones" (Operation Desert Fox), in the hope that Saddam would be overthrown by political enemies inside Iraq. Western charges of Iraqi resistance to UN access to suspected weapons were the pretext for crises between 1997 and 1998, culminating in intensive U.S. and British missile strikes on Iraq, 16–19 December 1998. After two years of intermittent activity, U.S. and British warplanes struck harder at sites near Baghdad in February 2001.

Saddam's support base of Tikriti tribesmen, family members, and other supporters was divided after the war, and in the following years, contributing to the government's increasingly repressive and arbitrary nature. Domestic repression inside Iraq grew worse, and Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay Hussein, became increasingly powerful and carried out a private reign of terror.

Iraqi co-operation with UN weapons inspection teams was intermittent throughout the 1990s.

Saddam continued involvement in politics abroad. Video tapes retrieved after show his intelligence chiefs meeting with Arab journalists, including a meeting with the former managing director of Al-Jazeera, Mohammed Jassem al-Ali, in 2000. In the video Saddam's son Uday advised al-Ali about hires in Al-Jazeera: "During your last visit here along with your colleagues we talked about a number of issues, and it does appear that you indeed were listening to what I was saying since changes took place and new faces came on board such as that lad, Mansour." He was later sacked by Al-Jazeera.

In 2002 Austrian prosecutors investigated Saddam government's transactions with Fritz Edlinger that possibly violated Austrian money laundering and embargo regulations. Fritz Edlinger, president of the ''General Secretary of the Society for Austro-Arab relations'' (GÖAB) and a former member of Socialist International's Middle East Committee, was an outspoken supporter of Saddam Hussein. In 2005 an Austrian journalist revealed that Fritz Edlinger's GÖAB had received $100,000 from an Iraqi front company as well as donations from Austrian companies soliciting business in Iraq.

In 2002, a resolution sponsored by the European Union was adopted by the Commission for Human Rights, which stated that there had been no improvement in the human rights crisis in Iraq. The statement condemned President Saddam Hussein's government for its "systematic, widespread and extremely grave violations of human rights and international humanitarian law". The resolution demanded that Iraq immediately put an end to its "summary and arbitrary executions ... the use of rape as a political tool and all enforced and involuntary disappearances".

Oil vouchers

In the United Nations Oil-for-Food Programme, Saddam was supposed to trade oil for food. In practice, the program benefitted political parties, politicians, journalists, companies, and individuals around the world.

The Russian state was the largest beneficiary.

Invasion of Iraq in 2003

The international community, especially the U.S., continued to view Saddam as a bellicose tyrant who was a threat to the stability of the region. After the September 11 attacks, Vladimir Putin began to tell the United States that Iraq was preparing terrorist attacks against the United States. In his January 2002 state of the union address to Congress, President George W. Bush spoke of an "axis of evil" consisting of Iran, North Korea, and Iraq. Moreover, Bush announced that he would possibly take action to topple the Iraqi government, because of the threat of its weapons of mass destruction. Bush stated that "The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade ... Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror." Saddam Hussein claimed that he falsely led the world to believe Iraq possessed nuclear weapons in order to appear strong against Iran. With war looming on 24 February 2003, Saddam Hussein took part in an interview with CBS News reporter Dan Rather. Talking for more than three hours, he expressed a wish to have a live televised debate with George W. Bush, which was declined. It was his first interview with a U.S. reporter in over a decade. CBS aired the taped interview later that week.

The Iraqi government and military collapsed within three weeks of the beginning of the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq on 20 March. By the beginning of April, U.S.-led forces occupied much of Iraq. The resistance of the much-weakened Iraqi Army either crumbled or shifted to guerrilla tactics, and it appeared that Saddam had lost control of Iraq. He was last seen in a video which purported to show him in the Baghdad suburbs surrounded by supporters. When Baghdad fell to U.S-led forces on 9 April, marked symbolically by the toppling of his statue by iconoclasts, Saddam was nowhere to be found.

Incarceration and trial

Capture and incarceration

In April 2003, Saddam's whereabouts remained in question during the weeks following the fall of Baghdad and the conclusion of the major fighting of the war. Various sightings of Saddam were reported in the weeks following the war, but none was authenticated. At various times Saddam released audio tapes promoting popular resistance to his ousting.

Saddam was placed at the top of the U.S. list of "most-wanted Iraqis". In July 2003, his sons Uday and Qusay and 14-year-old grandson Mustapha were killed in a three-hour gunfight with U.S. forces.

On 13 December 2003, Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. forces at a farmhouse in ad-Dawr near Tikrit in a hole in Operation Red Dawn. Following his capture on 13 December Saddam was transported to a U.S. base near Tikrit, and later taken to the U.S. base near Baghdad. The day after his capture he was reportedly visited by longtime opponents such as Ahmed Chalabi.

On 14 December 2003, U.S. administrator in Iraq L. Paul Bremer confirmed that Saddam Hussein had indeed been captured at a farmhouse in ad-Dawr near Tikrit. Bremer presented video footage of Saddam in custody.

Saddam was shown with a full beard and hair longer than his familiar appearance. He was described by U.S. officials as being in good health. Bremer reported plans to put Saddam on trial, but claimed that the details of such a trial had not yet been determined. Iraqis and Americans who spoke with Saddam after his capture generally reported that he remained self-assured, describing himself as a "firm, but just leader."

British tabloid newspaper ''The Sun'' posted a picture of Saddam wearing white briefs on the front cover of a newspaper. Other photographs inside the paper show Saddam washing his trousers, shuffling, and sleeping. The United States Government stated that it considers the release of the pictures a violation of the Geneva Convention, and that it would investigate the photographs. During this period Hussein was interrogated by FBI agent George Piro.

The guards at the Baghdad detention facility called their prisoner "Vic," and let him plant a little garden near his cell. The nickname and the garden are among the details about the former Iraqi leader that emerged during a 27 March 2008 tour of prison of the Baghdad cell where Saddam slept, bathed, and kept a journal in the final days before his execution.

Trial

On 30 June 2004, Saddam Hussein, held in custody by U.S. forces at the U.S. base "Camp Cropper", along with 11 other senior Ba'athist leaders, were handed over legally (though not physically) to the interim Iraqi government to stand trial for crimes against humanity and other offences.

A few weeks later, he was charged by the Iraqi Special Tribunal with crimes committed against residents of Dujail in 1982, following a failed assassination attempt against him. Specific charges included the murder of 148 people, torture of women and children and the illegal arrest of 399 others. Among the many challenges of the trial were: Saddam and his lawyers' contesting the court's authority and maintaining that he was still the President of Iraq.

The assassinations and attempts on the lives of several of Saddam's lawyers.

The replacement of the chief presiding judge, midway through the trial.

On 5 November 2006, Saddam Hussein was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death by hanging. Saddam's half brother, Barzan Ibrahim, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, head of Iraq's Revolutionary Court in 1982, were convicted of similar charges. The verdict and sentencing were both appealed, but subsequently affirmed by Iraq's Supreme Court of Appeals. On 30 December 2006, Saddam was hanged.

Execution

Saddam was hanged on the first day of Eid ul-Adha, 30 December 2006, despite his wish to be shot (which he felt would be more dignified). The execution was carried out at Camp Justice, an Iraqi army base in Kadhimiya, a neighborhood of northeast Baghdad.

The execution was videotaped on a mobile phone and his captors could be heard insulting Saddam. The video was leaked to electronic media and posted on the Internet within hours, becoming the subject of global controversy. It was later claimed by the head guard at the tomb where his body remains that Saddam's body was stabbed six times after the execution.

Not long before the execution, Saddam's lawyers released his last letter. The following includes several excerpts:

A second unofficial video, apparently showing Saddam's body on a trolley, emerged several days later. It sparked speculation that the execution was carried out incorrectly as Saddam Hussein had a gaping hole in his neck.

Saddam was buried at his birthplace of Al-Awja in Tikrit, Iraq, 3 km (2 mi) from his sons Uday and Qusay Hussein, on 31 December 2006.

Marriage and family relationships

Saddam married his first wife and cousin Sajida Talfah (or Tulfah/Tilfah) in 1958 in an arranged marriage. Sajida is the daughter of Khairallah Talfah, Saddam's uncle and mentor. Their marriage was arranged for Hussein at age five when Sajida was seven. They were married in Egypt during his exile. The couple had five children. The Jordanian royal family refused to hand her over. :*Rana Hussein (born c. 1969), is Saddam's second daughter. She, like her sister, fled to Jordan and has stood up for her father's rights. She was married to Saddam Kamel and has had four children from this marriage. :*Hala Hussein (born c. 1972), is Saddam's third and youngest daughter. Very little information is known about her. Her father arranged for her to marry General Kamal Mustafa Abdallah Sultan al-Tikriti in 1998. She fled with her children and sisters to Jordan. Saddam married his second wife, Samira Shahbandar,

Wafa el-Mullah al-Howeish is rumoured to have married Saddam as his fourth wife in 2002. There is no firm evidence for this marriage. Wafa is the daughter of Abdul Tawab el-Mullah Howeish, a former minister of military industry in Iraq and Saddam's last deputy Prime Minister.

In August 1995, Raghad and her husband Hussein Kamel al-Majid and Rana and her husband, Saddam Kamel al-Majid, defected to Jordan, taking their children with them. They returned to Iraq when they received assurances that Saddam would pardon them. Within three days of their return in February 1996, both of the Kamel brothers were attacked and killed in a gunfight with other clan members who considered them traitors.

In August 2003, Saddam's daughters Raghad and Rana received sanctuary in Amman, Jordan, where they are currently staying with their nine children. That month, they spoke with CNN and the Arab satellite station Al-Arabiya in Amman. When asked about her father, Raghad told CNN, "He was a very good father, loving, has a big heart." Asked if she wanted to give a message to her father, she said: "I love you and I miss you." Her sister Rana also remarked, "He had so many feelings and he was very tender with all of us."

List of government and party positions held

Head of Iraqi Intelligence Service (1963)

Vice President of the Republic of Iraq (1968–1979)

President of the Republic of Iraq (1979–2003)

Prime Minister of the Republic of Iraq (1979–1991 and 1994–2003)

Head of the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council (1979–2003)

Secretary of the Regional Command (1979–2006)

Secretary General of the National Command (1989–2006)

Assistant Secretary of the Regional Command (1966–1979)

Assistant Secretary General of the National Command (1979–1989)

See also

Al-Anfal Campaign

Ayad Rahim, Iraqi-American journalist who reports on Middle East affairs

Baghdad International Airport (formerly Saddam International Airport)

Gulf war

Human rights in Saddam's Iraq

Iran–Iraq War

Iraqi biological weapons program

Interrogation of Saddam Hussein

Most-wanted Iraqi playing cards, a deck of playing cards featuring Saddam Hussein as the ace of spades

Operation Rockingham

Saddam Beach, a fishing village in India named after Saddam Hussein, in an act of solidarity during the 1991 Gulf War

Saddam Hussein – United States relations

Special Activities Division

Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda

Saddam Hussein Nagar, Sri Lanka

Saddam Hussein (South Park) — A fictionalized version of Saddam in South Park

House of Saddam

Saddam Hussein's novels

''Saddam: The Secret Life'' (book)

Trial of Saddam Hussein

Popular opinion in the US on the invasion of Iraq

War in Iraq

References

Further reading

Al-Ani, Dr. Abdul-Haq. ''The Trial of Saddam Hussein''. ISBN 978-0-932863-58-4. Clarity Press. 2008.

Balaghi, Shiva. ''Saddam Hussein: A Biography''. ISBN 978-0-313-33077-3. Greenwich Press. 2008.

Coughlin, Con. ''Saddam: His Rise and Fall''. ISBN 978-0-06-050543-1. Harper Perennial. 2005.

Karsh, Efraim and Inari Rautsi. ''Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography''. ISBN 978-0-8021-3978-8. Grove Press. 2002.

MacKey, Sandra. ''The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein''. ISBN 978-0-393-32428-0. W. W. Norton & Company. 2003.

Makiya, Kanan. ''Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq'' (Updated Edition). ISBN 978-0-520-21439-2. University of California Press. 1998.

Newton, Michael A. and Michael P. Scharf. ''Enemy of the State: The Trial and Execution of Saddam Hussein''. ISBN 978-0-312-38556-9. St. Martin's Press. 2008.

External links

Saddam Hussein Information

Saddam Hussein Profile by BBC News

Saddam Hussein: 1937–2006 — slideshow by ''The First Post''

The Saddam Hussein Sourcebook (National Security Archive at The George Washington University)

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Category:1937 births Category:2006 deaths Category:21st-century executions by Iraq Category:Arab nationalist heads of state Category:Arabic novelists Category:Cairo University alumni Category:Cold War leaders Category:Executed presidents Category:Filmed executions Category:Filmed executions in Iraq Category:Iraqi people convicted of crimes against humanity Category:Iraqi Sunni Muslims Category:Iraqi writers Category:Saddam Hussein family Category:Most-wanted Iraqi playing cards Category:Attempted assassination survivors Category:People executed by hanging Category:People from Tikrit Category:Presidents of Iraq Category:Prime Ministers of Iraq * Category:Ba'ath Party (Iraq) politicians

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Ieng Sary (, born October 24, 1924, Loeung Va, Tra Vinh) was a powerful figure in the Khmer Rouge. He was the Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Democratic Kampuchea from 1975 to 1979 and held several senior positions in the Khmer Rouge until his defection to the government in 1996.

Early years

Of Khmer ancestry on his father's side, and Chinese ancestry on his mother's, Ieng Sary was born in Chau Thanh, Tra Vinh province, southern Vietnam. Sary changed his name from the Vietnamese Kim Trang when he joined the Khmer Rouge. He is the brother-in-law by marriage, of the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot (real name: Saloth Sar). Sary and Saloth Sar studied at Phnom Penh's Lycée Sisowath where their future wives, the sisters Khieu Thirith and Khieu Ponnary also studied. Before leaving Cambodia to study in Paris, Sary was engaged to Khieu Thirith.

Sary and Saloth Sar also studied together in Paris. Whilst there, Sary rented an apartment in the Latin Quarter, a hotbed of student radicalism. He and Saloth Sar met with French communist intellectuals, and formed their own cell of Cambodian communists.

Sary and Khieu Thirith married in the town hall of Paris' 15th arrondissement the summer of 1951 and Thirith took her husband's name, becoming Ieng Thirith.

Midlife

After returning to Cambodia, he was inducted into the Central Committee of the Workers Party of Kampuchea in September 1960.

After the fall of the Khmer Republic on 17 April 1975, Sary made personal appeals to expatriates (the well-educated Cambodians who had survived the prison death camps, and had afterwards moved abroad and others who wanted to come back to Cambodia homeland) to help rebuild Cambodia. However upon returning to Cambodia, they were arrested on arrival, and thrown into brutal detention centres. Together with Pol Pot, Ieng Sary was sentenced to death in absentia after the Khmer Rouge had been overthrown in 1979.

The then Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk officially pardoned Ieng Sary in 1996. He was the founder of the Democratic National Union Movement, a split from the Cambodian National Unity Party.

Arrest and Trial

Ieng Sary, reportedly living in "an opulent Phnom Penh villa surrounded by security guards and barbed wire" was arrested on November 12, 2007 in Phnom Penh on an arrest warrant from the Cambodia Tribunal for war crimes and crimes against humanity. His wife, Ieng Thirith, was also arrested for crimes against humanity.

On 16 December 2009, the tribunal officially charged him with genocide for his involvement with the subjugation and murder of Vietnamese and Muslim minorities in Cambodia.

References

External links

http://www.seasite.niu.edu/khmer/Ledgerwood/biographies.htm

Cambodia Tribunal Monitor

Category:1924 births Category:Living people Category:People from Tra Vinh Province Category:Cambodian communists Category:Cambodian people of Chinese descent Category:Hoa people Category:People indicted by the Cambodia Tribunal Category:Cambodian prisoners and detainees Category:Prisoners and detainees of Cambodia Category:Communist Party of Kampuchea politicians Category:Government ministers of Cambodia

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Name	Kang Kek Iew
Birth date	November 17, 1942
Birth place	Kampong Chen, Kampong Thom Province, French Indochina
Death date
Other names	Comrade D[e]uchHang Pin
Known for	Director of the S-21 prison camp
Religious views	Christian
Nationality	Cambodian
Years active	1975–1979 }}

Kang Kek Iew or Kaing Kek Iev, also romanized as Kaing Guek Eav (), ''nom de guerre'' Comrade Duch or Deuch (មិត្តឌុច); or Hang Pin, (born 17 November 1942) is a former leader in the Khmer Rouge communist movement, which ruled Democratic Kampuchea from 1975 to 1979. He is best known for heading the Khmer Rouge special branch and running the infamous Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison camp in Phnom Penh. The first Khmer Rouge leader to be tried by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the crimes of the regime, he was convicted of crimes against humanity, murder, and torture for his role in the Cambodian Holocaust and sentenced to 35 years' imprisonment.

Early years

Kang Kek Iew was born in Choyaot village, Kampong Chen subdistrict, Kampong Thom Province, and is of Chinese-Khmer ancestry. A star pupil in his school, he passed his ''Brevet d'Etudes Secondaire de Première'' in 1961 at the age of nineteen. He finished the first half of his Baccalaureate in 1962 at the Lycée Suravarman II in the town of Siem Reap. The same year he was offered a place in the prestigious Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh where he completed his Baccalaureate in mathematics, scoring second in the entire country.

Induction into the Khmer Rouge

In 1964, Kek Iew began studying for his teaching certificate in Mathematics, a subject he loved, at the ''Institut de Pédagogie''. The Institute was a cradle of activism under the directorship of Son Sen who was later to emerge as the Defence Minister of the Khmer Rouge and Duch's immediate superior.

On August 28, 1966, Kek Iew got his teaching certificate and was posted to a lycée in Skoun, a small town in Kampong Cham Province. He was a good teacher, remembered as earnest and committed by his pupils. He joined the Communist Party of Kampuchea in 1967. Following the arrest of three of his students, he fled to the Khmer Rouge base in Chamkar Leu District where he was accepted as a full member of the Communist Party of Kampuchea.

A few months later, he was arrested and tortured at the Prey Sar prison by Norodom Sihanouk's police for engaging in communist activities. He was held without trial for the next two years. In 1970, when he was released following the amnesty granted to political prisoners by Lon Nol, he joined the Khmer Rouge rebels in the Cardamom Mountains bordering Thailand.

In the maquis

Communist groups in France's former colonies in Indochina borrowed the French World War II expression 'maquis' when referring to their resistance movements in the jungles.

In the zone under the control of the Khmer Rouge, Kek Iew took on his ''nom de guerre'' Comrade Duch (IPA:[dojc]) and became a prison commandant. He was appointed the head of Special Security by his immediate superior Vorn Vet. In the forests of Amleang, Thpong District, Duch set up his first prison, code-named 'M-13'. Two years later, he also established a second prison 'M-99' in nearby Aoral District.

Assisted by his two deputies, Comrade Chan and Comrade Pon, Duch began perfecting his interrogation techniques and the purging of perceived enemies from the Khmer Rouge ranks. Prisoners at these camps, mostly from the ranks of the Khmer Rouge, were routinely starved and tortured to extract real and made-up confessions. Few prisoners left the camps alive.

While in the maquis, Duch married Chhim Sophal, aka Rom, a dressmaker from a nearby village.

Leading the Santebal and Tuol Sleng

After the Khmer Rouge victory in April 1975 Duch and his men set up prisons throughout the capital including the infamous Tuol Sleng prison. Duch's request for a transfer in May 1975 to the Industrial Sector of government was denied. The Tuol Sleng prison camp was initially headed by In Lon aka Comrade Nath with Duch acting as deputy. Subsequently, In Lon was transferred and Duch promoted to be the Director. By May 1976 all the prisons in Phnom Penh were consolidated and relocated to Tuol Sleng. Prisons like Tuol Sleng were created to cleanse the ranks of the Khmer Rouge of suspected enemies of the revolution.

Duch ordered the execution of prisoners after their interrogation was completed. For example, on a list containing the names of 17 prisoners (eight teenagers and nine children), he wrote the order “Smash them to pieces.” On a longer list of detainees, his annotation reads “smash: 115; keep: 44 persons.” The text below this annotation reads “Comrade Duch proposed to Angkar; Angkar agreed.” On a list of 20 female detainees, Duch wrote annotations for each of them, ordering: “take away for execution,” “keep for interrogation” or “medical experiment". At least 100 detainees died after having their blood drawn for transfusions for wounded soldiers. Surgical operations were also performed on detainees in order to train medical staff.

Duch impressed his superiors with his work and was appointed the head of Democratic Kampuchea's dreaded "special branch" – the Santebal.

As the party purges increased towards the end of the Democratic Kampuchea period, more and more people were brought to Duch, including many former colleagues including his predecessor at Tuol Sleng, In Lon. Throughout this period Duch built up a large archive of prison records, mug shots and extracted "confessions".

On 7 January 1979, Duch was amongst the last Khmer Rouge cadres to flee Phnom Penh after it fell to the Vietnamese army. Though he was unable to destroy much of the prison's extensive documents, he saw to the execution of several surviving prisoners before he fled the city.

After the fall

Duch reached the border with Thailand in May 1979. Details of his whereabouts at this time were sketchy. It is believed that he went to the forests of Samlaut where he was reunited with his family. Here Duch was demoted by Brother Number Two, Nuon Chea, for having failed to destroy the documents at Tuol Sleng. At the border, he learned to speak Thai and taught himself English. He later taught English and mathematics at a refugee camp in Borai just inside Thailand.

In June 1986, Duch was sent to China to teach as a Khmer language expert at Beijing's Foreign Language Institute. He returned to the Thai-Cambodian border a year later and changed his name to Hang Pin. He worked as a senior bureaucrat just inside the Cambodian border at Pol Pot's secretariat at Camp 505. Shortly after the Paris agreement in October 1991, he moved with his family to a small isolated village called Phkoam close to the Thai border where he bought some land and began teaching in the local school. He was known as a good teacher, but one with a fiery temper.

In 1995, following an attack on his home that killed his wife, Duch sold all his possessions, secured a transfer to Svay Chek College, and moved there with his children. Shortly after his wife's murder, Duch began attending the prayer meetings of the Golden West Cambodian Christian Church held in Battambang by Christopher LaPel, an evangelical Khmer-American. Duch was baptized by LaPel and eventually became a lay pastor. LaPel was later to observe that although he did not know Duch's real identify at the time, there were clues. For example, before his conversion, Duch had said to Lapel that he had done a lot of bad things in his life. Later, Duch was to say, "I don’t know if my brothers and sisters can forgive the sins I've committed against the people".

Discovery

Close to his identity being discovered, Duch accepted a transfer to Samlaut as Director of Education. When fighting broke out in 1996 following the split of the Khmer Rouge and the coup to oust Prince Rannaridh in 1997, he fled with his family to the Ban Ma Muang camp just inside Thailand. At the camp, he worked for the American Refugee Committee as the Community Health Supervisor. In late 1998, he returned to Cambodia when fighting subsided. He settled in the village of Andao Hep in Rattanak Mondul and worked closely with World Vision International, the Christian relief agency.

The photojournalist Nic Dunlop tracked down Duch to Samlaut. In 1999, Nate Thayer, who had previously interviewed Pol Pot and Ta Mok, and Dunlop interviewed Duch for the Far Eastern Economic Review. Duch surrendered to the authorities in Phnom Penh following the publication of his interview.

Trial

On 31 July 2007, Duch was formally charged with crimes against humanity and detained by Cambodia's United Nations-backed Cambodia Tribunal. Duch, represented by Cambodian lawyer Kar Savuth and French lawyer Francois Roux, appealed against his provisional detention by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia based on the more than eight years he spent without trial in Cambodian military detention. The appeal was unsuccessful and on 14 August 2008, the tribunal issued its indictment after completing their investigation of Duch.

In February 2008, as part of the judicial process, Duch was taken to the scene of his crimes. He reportedly collapsed in tears after stating, "I ask for your forgiveness – I know that you cannot forgive me, but I ask you to leave me the hope that you might."

On 16 February 2009, the UN supervised trial of Duch began at a Phnom Penh court. Duch was prosecuted by international co-prosecutors William Smith and Anees Ahmed and was charged with "personally overseeing the systematic torture of more than 15,000 prisoners". The presiding judge of the case was Nil Nonn. Duch was tried by a panel of five judges — three Cambodian, one French and one New Zealander — according to a 2003 pact between Cambodia and the United Nations establishing the tribunal.

On 30 March 2009, Duch testified that US policies in the 1970s contributed to the brutal regime's rise to power. "I think the Khmer Rouge would already have been demolished," he said of their status by 1970. "But Mr Kissinger (then US secretary of state) and Richard Nixon were quick [to back coup leader Gen Lon Nol], and then the Khmer Rouge noted the golden opportunity." "Because of this alliance, the Khmer Rouge were able to build up their power over the course of their 1970–75 war against the Lon Nol regime", Duch said.

On 31 March 2009, Duch, in a statement in front of the Cambodia tribunal, accepted responsibility for torturing and executing thousands of inmates, expressed "heartfelt sorrow" for his crimes and vowed to cooperate fully with the tribunal.

Duch surprised the tribunal on 27 November 2009 with a plea to be released. In his final statement before the tribunal he acknowledged his involvement in Khmer Rouge-era crimes, including the execution of more than 12,000 Tuol Sleng prisoners, but said they were committed by a "criminal party". Duch also noted that he had served more than 10 years in detention, and stressed that he had been fully cooperative with the tribunal. There were also conflicting closing arguments from Duch's defense team. His Cambodian lawyer, Kar Savuth demanded his client’s acquittal and release, while his international counterpart, François Roux pressed judges to hand down a lenient sentence.

At the conclusion of the trial, prosecutors asked that Duch be given 40 years in prison if convicted. On 26 July 2010, Duch was found guilty of crimes against humanity, torture, and murder; he was sentenced to 35 years' imprisonment, with a pre-trial detention credit of 11 years being applied to his sentence and an additional controversial five year deduction because his period of pre-trial detention exceeded the maximum allowed under Cambodian law. If he serves his entire sentence in prison, he will be released in 2029 at age 87.

See also

Democratic Kampuchea

The Killing Fields

Tuol Sleng

Chum Mey

Vann Nath

Enemies of the People (film)

References

External links

Judgement of the Trial Chamber of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia

François Bizot – a (French) former prisoner of Duch's">"My Savior, Their Killer" New York Times Op-Ed by François Bizot – a (French) former prisoner of Duch's

1999 BBC article on Duch's capture

A short review of Nic Dunlop's book about Duch – The Lost Executioner

Case information at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia

IT Conversations: Nic Dunlop Podcast interview of Nic Dunlop, Photojournalist, discussing how he found Kang Kek Iew

Experience: I tracked down a man who killed 14,000 people Nic Dunlop talks about tracking down Duch

The Killer and the Pastor Time magazine article about Duch's conversion to Christianity

Category:1942 births Category:Living people Category:People from Kampong Thom Province Category:Cambodian criminals Category:Cambodian evangelicals Category:Cambodian people of Chinese descent Category:Converts to Christianity Category:People convicted by the Cambodia Tribunal Category:People convicted of crimes against humanity Category:Cambodian people convicted of murder Category:People convicted of murder by Cambodia Category:Communist Party of Kampuchea politicians

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Name	Khieu Samphan
|order	President of the State Presidium of Democratic Kampuchea
Term start	April 11, 1976
Term end	January 7, 1979
Predecessor	Norodom Sihanouk
Successor	Heng Samrin
Birth date	July 27, 1931
Birth place	French Indochina
Party	Khmer Rouge
Order2	Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia) (acting)
Term start2	April 4, 1976
Term end2	April 14, 1976
Predecessor2	Samdech Penn Nouth
Successor2	Pol Pot }}

Khieu Samphan (, born July 27, 1931) was the president of the state presidium of Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia) from 1976 until 1979. As such, he served as Cambodia's head of state and was one of the most powerful officials in the Khmer Rouge movement, though Pol Pot was the group's true political leader and held the most extensive power. Samphan is of Chinese-Khmer ancestry.

Biography

Samphan was born in Svay Rieng Province and was educated at the ''Lycee Sisowath''; he came from a relatively privileged background, being the son of a judge.

A prominent member of the circle of leftist Khmer intellectuals studying in Paris in the 1950s, Khieu Samphan studied economics and politics there. His successful 1959 doctoral thesis, "Cambodia's Economy and Industrial Development" advocated national self-reliance and generally sided with dependency theorists in blaming the wealthy, industrialized states for the poverty of the Third World. He was one of the founders of the Khmer Students' Association (KSA), out of which would grow the left-wing revolutionary movements that would so alter Cambodian history in the 1970s, most notably the Khmer Rouge. Once the KSA was shuttered by French authorities in 1956, he founded yet another student organization, the Khmer Students' Union.

Returning from Paris with his doctorate in 1959, Khieu held a faculty position at the University of Phnom Penh and started ''L'Observateur'', a French-language leftist publication that was viewed with hostility by the government. His first important conflict with the anti-Communist Cambodian government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk came the following year, when ''L'Observateur'' was banned and Samphan was arrested, forced to undress and photographed in public.

Despite this humiliation, Samphan was invited to join Sihanouk's Sangkum, a 'national movement' that operated as the single political party within Cambodia. After Sihanouk's swing leftward in 1963, Samphan's economic theories were put into practice in an extensive nationalisation programme. Samphan stood as a Sangkum deputy in the 1966 elections, in which the rightist elements of the party, led by Lon Nol, gained an overwhelming victory; he then became a member of a 'Counter-Government' created by Sihanouk to keep the rightists under control.

In 1967 the Samlaut Uprising, a rebellion of rural peasantry in Battambang Province, led to a severe crackdown on the leftists. Samphan, who had called on the government to moderate its actions towards the demonstrators, was threatened by Sihanouk with arrest and execution, and fled Phnom Penh to join his former colleagues in the ''maquis''. At the time, he was widely rumoured to have been murdered by Sihanouk's security forces.

After the coup of 1970 overthrew the government of Sihanouk, the Khmer Communists, including Khieu Samphan, joined forces with the now-deposed Head of State in establishing an anti-government coalition known as the ''Gouvernement Royal d'Union Nationale du Kampuchéa'' (GRUNK). In this alliance with his former enemies, Samphan served as deputy prime minister, minister of defense, and commander-in-chief of GRUNK military forces. (However, Pol Pot exercised real control over the latter.) In fact, Samphan's appointment to these posts and residence inside the country were instrumental in allowing GRUNK to maintain that it was not just a government-in-exile.

During the years of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979), Samphan remained near the top of the movement, assuming the post of president of the central presidium in 1976. His faithfullness to Pol Pot meant that he survived the purges in the later years of the Khmer Rouge rule. His roles within the party suggest he was well entrenched in the upper echelons of the CPK, and a leading figure in the ruling elite.

After the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia and subsequent fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, Samphan led a rebel government which was accorded a level of international recognition until 1982. In 1985 he officially succeeded Pol Pot as leader of the Khmer Rouge, and served in this position until he surrendered to the Cambodian government in 1998. In 1982 he was appointed Vice President in charge of foreign affairs of the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea and from 1991 to 1993 he served in the Supreme National Council as Khmer Rouge representative. From 1993 his influence mainly vanished, with the real power still resided in Pol Pot's hands, who was Director of the Higher Institute of National Defence. In 1998 Khieu and former Pol Pot's deputy Nuon Chea surrendered to Hun Sen.

Arrest

On November 13, 2007, Samphan reportedly suffered a stroke. This occurred one day after the former Khmer Rouge Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ieng Sary and his wife were arrested for war crimes committed while they were in power. At about the same time, a book by Samphan, ''Reflection on Cambodian History Up to the Era of Democratic Kampuchea'', was published; in the book, he wrote that he had worked for social justice and the defense of national sovereignty, while attributing responsibility for all of the group's policies to Pol Pot.

According to Samphan, under the Khmer Rouge "there was no policy of starving people. Nor was there any direction set out for carrying out mass killings", and "there was always close consideration of the people's well-being." He acknowledged the use of coercion to produce food due to shortages. Samphan also strongly criticized the current government in the book, blaming it for corruption and social ills.

The historian Ben Kiernan stated that Samphan's protestations (such as the fact that he regarded the collectivisation of agriculture as a "surprise", and his expressions of sympathy for his "friend" Hu Nim, a fellow member of the CPK hierarchy tortured and killed at Tuol Sleng) betrayed the fundamental "moral cowardice" of a man mesmerised by power but lacking any nerve.

After he left a Phnom Penh hospital where he was treated following his stroke, Samphan was arrested by the Cambodia Tribunal and charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes.

In April 2008 former Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan made his first appearance at Cambodia's genocide tribunal. His lawyer, Jacques Vergès, is using the defense that while he has never denied that many people in Cambodia were killed, but both he and Verges insist that, as head of state, he was never directly responsible.

References

Library of Congress, Federal Research Division, Country Studies: Cambodia

{{s-ttl |title = Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea |years = 1976}} |- {{s-ttl |title = President of the State Presidium of Democratic Kampuchea |years = 1976 – 1979}} |- {{s-ttl |title = Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea |years = 1980 – 1982}} |- {{s-ttl |title = Foreign Minister of Democratic Kampuchea |years = 1982 – 1991}} |- {{s-ttl |title = General Secretary of the Party of Democratic Kampuchea |years = 1985 – 1998}} |-

Related external links

Cambodia Tribunal Monitor

''Cambodia's Economy and Industrial Development'' Khieu Samphan's 1959 doctoral thesis.

Category:1931 births Category:Living people Category:People from Svay Rieng Province Category:Cambodian people of Chinese descent Category:Cambodian communists Category:People indicted by the Cambodia Tribunal Category:Cambodian prisoners and detainees Category:Prisoners and detainees of Cambodia Category:Communist Party of Kampuchea politicians

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