Khieu Samphan - Biography

Biography

Samphan was born in Svay Rieng Province to Khieu Long, who served as a judge under the French Colonial government and his wife Por Kong. Samphan was of Khmer-Chinese extraction, having inherited his Chinese heritage from his maternal grandfather. When Samphan was a young boy, Khieu Long was found guilty of corruption and sentenced to imprisonment, leaving Samphan's mother to take up a living selling fruits and vegetables in Kampong Cham Province where he grew up. Nevertheless, Samphan managed to earn a seat at the Lycee Sisowath and was able to travel to France to pursue his University studies in Economics.

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 faithfulness 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.