Nuon Chea arrested

Authorities arrested Nuon Chea today at his home in Pailin.

After being educated in neighboring Thailand, Nuon Chea returned to Cambodia in 1950 where he became involved in the struggle for independence from French rule and joined the Indochinese Communist Party. He rose up through the ranks to become a senior leader of the murderous Khmer Rouge rule in the 1970s.

His transformation into a leader of the brutal Khmer Rouge began in 1975, just about a month after it took power. Joined by his late boss Pol Pot, Nuon Chea addressed a meeting of the movement’s leaders from across the country in Phnom Penh, according to a document from the Documentation Center of Cambodia, an independent group gathering evidence of the Khmer Rouge atrocities.

Known as Brother No. 2, Nuon Chea allegedly laid out the Khmer Rouge “master plan,” which called for the abolition of money, religion, monks, and the expulsion of ethnic Vietnamese.

“All efforts toward executing the general political guideline came from Nuon Chea,” the document said. It added that the word “smash” used during the Khmer Rouge to mean the killing of its internal and external enemies also “came from Nuon Chea.”

Reuters and AFP give some background, as well as more on the arrest:

A shaking, frail old man being helped to dress by police officers. That was one woman’s last glimpse of Nuon Chea, a former Khmer Rouge leader who allegedly devised the regime’s brutal machinery of death.

Peering through the window of Nuon Chea’s house moments before he was led away by authorities Wednesday, Sok Sothera, a neighbour in this tiny jungle hamlet in northwest Cambodia, told AFP “he was shaking.”

“His legs looked like they would collapse,” said Sok Sothera, who a year ago moved next door into the house once belonging to another regime cadre, former head of state Khieu Samphan.

“Two policemen had to hold him up” as they walked him to a waiting pickup truck, she said.

UPDATE: Mydans files for the NYT, and points to the political sensitivities in which the ECCC is unfolding.

Describing the killing of eight Westerners who were seized by the Khmer Rouge, Duch said, “Nuon Chea ordered me to burn their bodies with tires and leave no bones.”

On another occasion, he said, “My prison was full. Nuon Chea ordered 300 soldiers arrested. He called to meet me and said, ‘Don’t bother to interrogate them – just kill them.’ And I did.”

And then two paragraphs later:

Mr. Nuon Chea surrendered to the government along with the movement’s former head of state, Khieu Samphan, and was treated by Prime Minister Hun Sen to a beach holiday and a visit to the ancient temples of Angkor.