Top Female Official in Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge Regime Dies

Ieng Thirith, who served as minister for social affairs in the Khmer Rouge regime during the 1970s, had been accused of crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, genocide, homicide, torture and religious persecution.

Her husband Ieng Sary, former Khmer Rouge foreign minister, died in 2013, aged 87, before a verdict was delivered in his trial.

In the end she passed away in a former Khmer Rouge stronghold on the border with Thailand where many regime leaders settled after they were ousted by the Vietnamese.

Born the second daughter of a Cambodian judge on March 10, 1932, Ieng Thirith came from a relatively wealthy and privileged family and travelled to Paris to study.

“She was released under a regime of judicial supervision”. Her original name was Khieu Thirith.

“She was considered his superior in social standing, intellectual prowess and charm”, Ms. Becker wrote.

“It was the last happy affair Thirith remembered when all of her Cambodian friends could gather without argument”, wrote Ms. Becker, who interviewed Ieng Thirith in 1980. Her older sister, Khieu Ponnary, became Pol Pot’s first wife. Upon coming back to Cambodia in 1957, she worked as a professor and then founded a private English school.

The group’s leader, Pol Pot, died in 1998. She found what she described as “problems” and conditions that were “very queer”: underfed people of all ages working in the hot sun, often sick with malaria and diarrhea. But her conclusion did not blame the government. ‘We only packed a few of our clothes, ‘ she said. The case against her was suspended and she was freed in 2012. He said Buddhist funeral rites would be held at her family’s hometown of Pailin in northwestern Cambodia, with a cremation scheduled for Monday.

Led by “Brother Number One” Pol Pot, who died in 1998, the Khmer Rouge dismantled modern society and wiped out almost a quarter of the population through starvation, overwork and execution in a bid to create an agrarian utopia.