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Anne Hyland

Khieu Samphan was lying on his sickbed when the police finally arrived.
The former Khmer Rouge head of state, who was recuperating from a stroke, knew this day would eventually come, even if he privately hoped it never would.
When the officers arrived at Phnom Penh's Calmet Hospital on Monday and charged him with war crimes and crimes against humanity, he was not surprised.
The 76-year-old  was arrested and transferred from his hospital bed to a detention cell on the site where Cambodia's UN-backed tribunal is  preparing to bring Khmer Rouge leaders to justice.
Khieu Samphan has spent most of the past 30 years denying responsibility  for the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians during the Khmer Rouge's reign of madness  from 1975 to  1979.
He even asked Cambodians to put the past behind them.
'Let bygones be bygones, is the best solution for our country, because it is the only way to reach national reconciliation,' he said in 1998, after which he lived  free in one of  his many homes across the country.
The Khmer Rouge was a guerrilla operation, of which Khieu Samphan was the public face. It toppled the US-backed government of Lon Nol  on April 17, 1975.
It had recruited many Cambodians to its ranks with the promise that victory would liberate the country from colonialism, imperialism and, most importantly, the feudal structure that allowed wealth to be concentrated in the hands of a few.
A left-wing intellectual armed with a doctorate in economics and a reputation for incorruptibility, Khieu Samphan gave a speech 10 days after the Khmer Rouge gained control of Cambodia, broadcast by the propaganda mouthpiece Phnom Penh Radio: '... the important winners are the people', he said.
In reality, the people of Cambodia would be the biggest losers, dying from overwork, disease, starvation or execution, as the Khmer Rouge pursued its ultra-Maoist ideology.
The Khmer Rouge experimented by trying to create a self-sufficient agrarian society, whereby the majority of Cambodians - the population then numbered about eight million - were forced to build and work collective farms. The country's educated elite, who were not considered part of the Khmer Rouge's peasant-driven revolution, fled or were exterminated.
It was another of the incomprehensible decisions of the  regime's  leaders, many of whom themselves were part of the educated and privileged classes. Khieu Samphan, the son of a judge, studied at one of Cambodia's better high schools and was fortunate enough to later study at the prestigious Sorbonne  in Paris, where he gained his PhD.
He was a year below Pol Pot at secondary school. Pol Pot, whose real name was Saloth Sar,  emerged as the driving force behind the Khmer Rouge nightmare. He died in 1998 before any attempts were made to bring him to justice.
One school vacation, Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot decided to take the college theatre troupe on tour to raise money to travel to the temples of Angkor. Khieu Samphan played a girl dancer, while Pol Pot raised and lowered the curtain. When they had raised enough money they rented a bus and set off for a month.
'Every couple of miles a tyre would burst, and each time that happened, we would all clap and shout for joy!' Khieu Samphan told writer Philip Short  in his book Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare,  'because that meant we could get out and explore the villages. The village girls  received us warmly because, for them, college boys like us were really something else!'
It was at university in Paris that Khieu Samphan developed his interest in communism. He would become a prominent member of the  Marxist Circle of Khmer students in Paris, which had been established by Ieng Sary. Ieng Sary later became deputy prime minister and foreign minister during the Khmer Rouge period.
Members of the Marxist Circle, who also included Pol Pot, did as the group's name suggested and studied Marxist texts. The gatherings also held sessions  where members analysed their shortcomings and those of their comrades.
Many of the ideas and interpretations formulated from the meetings would later be introduced with tragic repercussions in Cambodia.  Slogans in the Khmer Rouge political sessions often talked of how the organisation would  exceed the communist ideals of Lenin and Mao and build a glorious future. Philip Short writes that Khieu Samphan became so dedicated to the idea of communism in Cambodia that he ended  a relationship with a French girl he had fallen in love with. He had supposedly decided that his personal happiness should take a backseat to his goal of social justice in his own nation.
When Khieu Samphan finished his thesis in 1959, it made the case for Cambodia to operate as a self-sufficient state. It argued that Cambodia's international integration had ruined the Cambodian economy. It provided the foundation  for the Khmer Rogue state's economic policy of self-reliance.
Upon his return from France, Khieu Samphan held a teaching position at the University of Phnom Penh and set up a French-language bi-weekly newspaper called L'Observateur  that was short-lived because of its criticism of the government. He also taught maths at private schools on weekends, dressed in his peasant sandals.
In 1967, he fled into the jungle to escape a crackdown on leftists and joined the communist movement.
Described as a cold idealist, he was appointed head of state of the Khmer Rouge in 1976. However, Cambodian historians say he was part of the regime's top echelon from its inception.
Khieu Samphan earned a reputation as Pol Pot's most faithful lieutenant because of his rigid enforcement of the Khmer Rouge leader's requests.
In 1977, he  delivered an Orwellian-like speech about how the Cambodian people had 'become more enthusiastic and seeking in their struggle to build the country'. The reality again was very different to the propaganda. There were chronic food shortages across Cambodia and living conditions had seriously deteriorated.
Still, other revolutionary leaders were full of praise for the Khmer Rouge. Khieu Samphan received a personal message of congratulations from North Korean leader Kim Il-sung, who noted that although the Korean revolution advanced at the speed of a 'winged horse', the Cambodian one flew 'faster than the wind'.
When Vietnamese forces toppled the Khmer Rouge in 1979, Khieu Samphan and other senior Khmer Rouge leaders fled into the jungle, leaving behind evidence at prisons that documented torture and mass killings, while mass graves have been found across the country.
In 1998, Khieu Samphan surrendered to the government. He was never charged and resumed life as a private citizen.
Since then he has penned two books about the Khmer Rouge. His most recent work is  Reflection on Cambodian History up to the Era of Democratic Kampuchea,   released this month. In it, Khieu Samphan denies that the Khmer Rouge had a policy of starving people or ordered mass killings during its rule. But he adds that Pol Pot was responsible for all its policies, right or wrong.
It is not known if this will be the defence argument used by Khieu Samphan's French lawyer Jacques Verges, who  made his  name defending Venezuelan terrorist Illich Ramirez Sanchez,  better known as Carlos the Jackal, and the former Nazi leader Klaus Barbie.
But Khieu Samphan may never be held accountable for the atrocities if his health continues to deteriorate. Fears persist he may take to his grave the secrets of the Khmer Rouge before his trial begins in the middle of  next year.



Time to face history